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Oct. 23, 2023 - Uncensored - Piers Morgan
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Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Raw Footage and Rising Anti-Semitism 00:10:33
Live from New York, this is Piers Morgan uncensored.
Well, good evening from New York City and welcome to Piers Morgan Uncensored.
Whichever way you look at it, the world suddenly seems a much more dangerous place.
And in the days and weeks to come, it's only going to get worse.
Israel stands on the brink of all-out war on two fronts.
More than half a million reservists and personnel are about to hammer Hamas in the west and defend the country potentially from Hezbollah in the north.
Two different terrorist groups in two different territories, both backed by Iran, a sworn enemy of the West.
Iran doesn't believe Israel has a right to exist.
It wants to encircle the country with paramilitary groups and ultimately dominate the region.
Like all pariah states, it profits from chaos.
And so far, on that scale, it's winning.
Israel's massive strides towards peace with the Arab world are suddenly on ice.
But the whole region is red hot again.
And no matter how much people want to make this a simple story of good versus evil, of power and revenge, the fact is the stakes couldn't be higher or the situation more complicated.
We're in a battle for our lives.
A battle for our home.
This is not an exaggeration.
This is the war.
It's a do or die.
They need to die.
We are now in a double battle.
One battle is a battle to hold action here and on the other side to win there.
An absolute victory that will erase Hamas.
Well, on that, Netanyahu may be right.
This could be an existential threat to Israel and the conflict could sow chaos across the world.
That's why it's a complete shambles, frankly, that the United States currently has no speaker of its house and no easy way of approving either military support for Israel nor aid for Gaza.
Both are needed urgently.
The Republicans need to get a grip.
The deaths of so many Palestinians, including hundreds of women and children, since the Hamas terror attacks, their course are heartbreaking.
And with any ground invasion, it's going to get exponentially worse.
Hamas will inevitably use civilians as human shields in Gaza.
It's already firing rockets from the cover of schools and mosques and UN buildings.
The potential for deadly mistakes is massive.
Every tragedy will stoke anger and resentment already.
It's boiling over on our streets.
Reports of anti-Semitism are soaring across the world.
I've been struck by a number of Jewish people I know in London and New York who say they simply don't feel safe.
This weekend saw more pro-Palestinian protests in many major cities.
Ignorant campus protesters again condemned Israel but stayed silent about the atrocities of Hamas.
In Brooklyn, here in New York, people tore down posters of Israelis kidnapped by terrorists and demanded settlers go back home.
Well, in London, crowds of segregated rallies called for jihad.
What is the solution to liberate people in the concentration camp of Palestine?
Jihad!
What is the solution?
Fight in the way of Allah, those who fight you.
The Zionist entity has a military.
They have a police force.
They have a judiciary.
They have an empiricist, an army fighting, killing, massacring our people.
Islam says jihad, peace of deliberate, that the Muslim armies move to rescue the people of Palestine.
That is the solution.
That's it!
Well, the Met Police says that word has different meanings and it's found no evidence of an offense.
But what is a Jewish Londoner living in that neighborhood supposed to think?
On a London Underground train, the driver did this.
And keep all those people in your friends.
Have a good day.
Again, imagine being a Jewish passenger on that train.
Today the Israeli government showed foreign journalists the unedited footage of the terror attacks committed by Hamas on October the 7th.
Because the instinct, incredibly, of many people has been to just deny they ever happened, although they were wildly exaggerated.
Is that really what this has come to?
Every war makes the world a more dangerous place, but that shouldn't apply to ordinary Jewish people trying to go to work and go to school, none of whom has any control over what Israel does next.
They're no more responsible than the Palestinian civilians caught up in this onslaught by Hamas.
One thing we should all be able to agree on is that the innocent people in Gaza running out of food and water, living in constant fear for their lives, they've done nothing either to deserve the hell they're currently in.
The whole point of terrorism is to fuel hatred, division, and disorder.
And right now, that's exactly what the terrorists are doing.
Well, first tonight, the Israeli Defense Forces showed 100 journalists in Tel Aviv.
What they say is unedited footage of the Hamas terror attacks to counter a spade of denials.
One of those in attendance was Jotam Confino, a Spanish journalist working in Israel.
Well, Jotam, thank you very much indeed for joining me.
Tell me about what happened today.
A hundred journalists, including you, were taken to see unedited raw footage of these terror attacks on October the 7th.
What did you see?
First of all, good evening, Piers.
And I just wanted to say, first of all, that I'm Danish.
And I also want to, of course, explain what it is that we it's all right.
I want to say what is it that we saw today.
I think the best way to describe it really is ISIS on steroids.
The atrocities that we already know happened and that we've already seen evidence of by listening to eyewitnesses, seeing the scenes were now shown to us on a screening.
45 minutes of unraw material, GoPro cameras from Hamas terrorists, surveillance photo from Kibbutzim, from small villages, all of it really, really showing exactly what happened.
I'm not sure how graphic I can be, Piers, because I would like to explain what I saw, but I don't want to, you know, scare you.
I think you should just tell me what you saw.
Honestly, we're called uncensored for a reason.
I don't think this should be censored.
Absolutely, and I absolutely agree.
So, first of all, I saw a Hamas terrorist throwing a hand grenade into a bomb shelter where a man, a father with his two sons, were high.
He was hiding there.
Then the father was killed instantly.
The two children ran out, disillusioned, blood all over, running back to their homes, screaming for their dad.
The youngest boy, who was roughly seven, couldn't see anything.
He said, I can't see.
And in the meanwhile, the terrorist who threw the grenade went casually into the home, opened the fridge, took out a bottle of water and drank it and offered the kids some water as if nothing had happened.
That was just one scene.
We also saw, of course, the beheadings.
We saw an Israeli soldier lying on the ground, beheaded, and terrorists around him screaming Al Akbar and cheering.
We saw Hamas terrorists on the streets systematically assassinating people in their cars, executing them very, very close in close range.
We saw pictures of a burned child, burned beyond recognition.
All you could see was it is a very small person.
We saw a picture of a dead baby with blood on it.
We saw, I don't even know, I had to leave after 35 minutes because eventually I had seen enough.
I knew that this had happened, but because of the severe backlash, especially on social media, by people who refuse to believe that this has taken place despite the overwhelming evidence, I felt like I had to go there to see it so I can tell people that I, with my own eyes, saw it.
So if they don't believe the eyewitness that I spoke to, then they can believe me because I'm a journalist and I hope they still believe in what it is that I'm saying.
I mean, I've seen other reports from other journalists that are utterly horrific.
Also, that many journalists were reduced to tears watching it.
It was so repellent to watch and so horrific.
It is extraordinary, isn't it, Jotam, that we're now in a place of misconflict, fueled, I think, by disinformation on social media, where people are either ignorantly blind to what has happened or deliberately blind to what's happened.
It's such a good question, and I think that it's absolutely outrageous that journalists are now turned into forensics.
They have to watch the most horrific scenes that you can possibly imagine, in addition to speaking to eyewitnesses, in addition to being on the scene, seeing houses burned, shattered with RPG rockets thrown into them, blood on the floor.
That is apparently not enough.
You have to go now and see it.
I'm simply appalled that we've gotten to the point that one of the most covered wars of the 21st century, along with the Ukraine war, that we've gotten to a point that we as journalists have to sit there and watch 45 minutes of onslaught, it's simply indescribable.
But again, people refuse to believe it.
And I think we're going to make a small difference.
I'm not sure that we're going to convince everybody about what happened here.
No, I mean, I saw your tweets about this.
They were appalling, but incredibly detailed.
And immediately I saw the reaction from people who were already skeptical and they hadn't changed their mind at all.
They just thought it was all propaganda, which is incredibly dispiriting.
Jotam Kofina, thank you very much indeed for joining me.
I appreciate it.
Well, welcome back to Piers Organized Censored Live from New York City.
I'm joined now by the former New Jersey Governor and Republican presidential candidate, Chris Christie.
Governor Christie, great to have you back on the program.
I wonder if you could just start by giving me your reaction to the fact that 100 journalists were taken into a room and played unedited raw footage of these terror attacks on October the 7th because so many people fueled by social media are simply refusing to accept what happened happened.
Israel's Three Strategic Priorities 00:03:35
Look, Piers, I think it's a testimony as to what I've been talking about for the past few weeks.
The rise of anti-Semitism, both here in the United States and around the world, is palpable.
It's been palpable for some time and it's increasing.
And we need to be speaking out against that.
There is no other reason to be needing to show this video except for people's disbelief based upon anti-Semitic views and anti-Semitic propaganda that has been put out there not only across social media, but being put out in many of America's colleges and universities.
And this is disgraceful and it is dangerous.
I mean, it's just to me beyond doubt that what happened on October the 7th was one of the most horrendous terror attacks of modern times.
And if you can't bring yourself to express outrage over it, there's something wrong with you.
But the question now is, what is a proportionate response by Israel?
And I'm not sure what the answer to that is other than already within two weeks, nearly three, four times as many Palestinian, mainly civilians, have lost their lives in retaliation strikes by Israel.
That number is likely to massively increase if there is a grand invasion.
Is this proportionate, do you think?
Look, Piers, I think the Israeli defense forces and their government should have three priorities here.
Priority number one is a retaliatory response against Hamas that severely degrades, if not eliminates, their capability of striking against Israel again.
Number two should be getting the hostages out, as many of you as them as you can, both American and Israeli hostages that are being held now by Hamas.
And then third is to try to have the response be seen as something by the rest of the world as setting the stage for conversations with the rest of the Arab world about how this type of conduct doesn't create a peaceful situation.
In fact, causes great, great harm to everyone in the region and begin those talks again.
And I think those should be the three priorities, an appropriate retaliation, the return of the hostages, and setting the stage for the next round of conversations with Arab countries who don't want to see this type of violence perpetrated against anyone in the Mideast again.
I mean, there are a lot of experts who have long memories from Iraq and Afghanistan, the response, of course, mainly by the United States with the British and others to the terror attacks on 9-11, who believe that if we don't learn the lessons from what happened there, 20 years of mayhem pretty much coming out of our response, that if Israel does go in with a full-blown grand invasion,
then it could lead to a far more serious situation than even the one we have in front of us now.
Well, Piers, look, Israel has an absolute right to protect both its safety and its territorial integrity.
And the only way to protect that safety and territorial integrity is to degrade the capability of Hamas to do what they did on October 7th again.
And the Israeli defense forces are going to have to make the judgment about what type of ground force is necessary to protect the safety and territorial integrity of Israel.
Netanyahu on Collective Punishment 00:14:56
But that's got to be their goal and mission.
Nothing more, nothing less.
You're running for president.
Donald Trump is still the front runner.
Many people think extraordinarily, given he's facing nearly 100 criminal charges.
There's no doubt.
If you look at Trump's record as president in his first term, as somebody pointed out today, I think on social media, Iran was hemmed in by sanctions, China by a trade war.
Russia hadn't invaded Ukraine.
Afghanistan hadn't fallen to the Taliban.
Now, you see a lot of turmoil.
Trump never went to war anywhere.
Were we a more peaceful world with Donald Trump as President of the United States than we are now?
Well, Piers, I think that's a superficial analysis of the situation.
I mean, the fact is that he said he was pulling out of Afghanistan and that if he had gotten a second term, that's exactly what he would have done.
Secondly, he set up the circumstances to give Russia the green light to go into Ukraine in two ways.
One, by his constant public coddling and kissing of Vladimir Putin.
And two, by not giving the Ukrainians the weapons they needed.
And in fact, for a period of time, blackmailing the Ukrainian government and President Zelensky in return for getting dirt on Joe Biden for his re-election campaign.
That hardly set the type of posture that would make the Russians think they should not be going in there.
And as far as China is concerned, his quote-unquote trade war, this is a guy who said he got the greatest trade agreements ever with China.
And meantime, just in the agricultural space, China hasn't done 25% of what they said they would do and committed to in those trade wars.
So the idea that when he calls President Xi brilliant and straight out of central casting, that that somehow deterred the Chinese, I think is a joke.
He also called Hezbollah very smart.
What was your response to that?
That he's very stupid and selfish.
And not only did he call Hezbollah smart, but he also then went and gave a broad-sided attack against Prime Minister Netanyahu while he's in the midst of defending his country in an existential conflict with Hamas.
And he did it because Netanyahu had the temerity to be sane and call Joe Biden when it was clear that he had been legally elected the president of the United States.
And that's something that Trump will never forgive.
And so what he does is rewrite history about the Soleimani operation and other things, because in the end, all Donald Trump cares about is that you say he actually won the election in 2020.
And if you didn't say that or you took actions that contradicted that, then you're his enemy.
So now he's attacking Netanyahu in the midst of a war.
He's calling Hezbollah very smart.
It's because he's very stupid and childish.
I want to play you, Governor.
This is a clip of Benjamin Netanyahu from an interview I did with him a few months ago before all this happened, in which we talked specifically, actually, at one stage, about this concept of collective punishment.
Let's take a look.
There have been 88 Palestinians and 15 Israelis killed so far this year.
It's the highest rate of deaths in two decades.
Many are saying that a lot of this is down to incendiary rhetoric from some of your right-wing members of your government.
And they particularly cite Bezalel Smoshrich.
In any case, they're part of my government, but they're part of my government, and I decide policy.
Did you distance yourself from comments like that?
There are many comments that you can...
Anybody called for the Palestinian town of Owara to be wiped out?
Of course not.
Of course, that's totally unacceptable.
We don't believe in collective punishment.
I go after the terrorists.
I go after those who support the terrorists.
But I don't believe in collective punishment.
Now, many people think what we're seeing now, Governor Christie, is collective punishment, that thousands of completely innocent Palestinians are getting killed as Israel tries to go after Hamas, who, of course, embed themselves amongst the civilian population.
Like I said earlier, that number's only going to increase exponentially if there's a ground invasion.
It's hard to see this as anything other than an attack on Palestinians in general, because you can't be selective, can you, in the way that is being currently implemented by Israel?
Well, the people who say that, Piers, I think, believe that Hamas should be rewarded for being sneaky.
Hamas should be rewarded for doing a sneak attack on Israel, killing 1,400 civilians, and then going back and hiding themselves among civilians and thinking that by using them as human shields, they're going to prevent Israel from taking any retaliation.
I'm sorry.
I don't agree with that.
I think Israel has to take the retaliation.
And if Hamas decides to embed themselves with civilians, then those civilians' complaint is against the government they elected, not against the state of Israel.
Should Benjamin Netanyahu stay as prime minister, notwithstanding there's a war now, the vast majority of Israelis in the polls I've seen think he is responsible for what happened.
He always said that protecting Israel and defending Israel was his number one priority.
This has been the biggest failure of Israeli defense that we've seen in modern times.
Should he remain in office?
Look, that's up to the Israeli parliament and what they do in terms of a vote of confidence or no confidence in their government.
But I would say this: that I think it's very, very dangerous to be changing governments in the midst of an existential war.
There's going to be plenty of time, Piers, for there to be an after-action report about why Israeli intelligence and other intelligence agencies failed if they did, and clearly it seems they did, to detect what Hamas was planning and how they were going to execute it.
And it may be that Prime Minister Netanyahu has to pay a political price for that failure, but I don't think the time to do it is now.
Israel is facing a threat to their very existence, to their territorial integrity.
That needs to be dealt with first.
And any political issues that Prime Minister Netanyahu has to deal with because of failings that may have occurred on his watch, well, then he can deal with those after this problem is put down.
Governor Chris Christie, always great to have you on the program.
Thank you very much indeed.
Welcome back to Uncensored Live from New York City.
Pro-Palestinian protests since the Hamas terror attacks October the 7th.
I've highlighted a chasm between progressives and the Jewish community.
Marches this weekend for his criticism and police inquiries for pro-Hamas chants and banners.
Students of major universities, including Harvard, were accused of anti-Semitism for a public letter claiming Israel was entirely responsible.
Climate activist Greta Thunberg posted and deleted the picture pledging unequivocal support for Gaza.
It's all led some commentators to ask why progressives and the left seem to stand by all minorities, except it appears, Jewish people.
Want to join me now to discuss this?
This is found in the world's most influential progressive online channel, The Young Turks, a Democratic Presidential Hopeful.
And that's Jenk Ugar.
Jenk, great to have you on the program.
Thank you very much indeed for joining me.
I'll be following your tweets with interest this week.
You've been getting increasingly angry.
I think it'd be fair to say.
You said, I'm now enormously frustrated by U.S. and Israeli governments' barbaric acts in Gaza.
I will not be shy in sharing that opinion on Piers Morgan's show today.
Why are you so frustrated?
Yeah.
Well, honestly, I didn't expect the framing that you put on this segment and it's framing like that, that's disgusting.
So I don't see what this has anything to do with anti-Semitism.
I formed Young Turks in TYT with two Jewish friends who are some of my friends growing up.
We've known each other and been brothers for over 40 years now.
So I think what Hamas did is disgusting.
I cry for those Israeli innocent civilians.
But do I see you guys crying for Palestinians?
I mean, Chris Christie was just on here treating it like it's no big deal because what, Palestinian lives don't matter?
I think the real bigotry here is saying that Palestinians, we can kill three times as many of them already.
And this is the appetizer.
Netanyahu and his barbaric government have not even started the entree of murder and death and mayhem they're about to do.
And that's somehow okay, killing three times as many Palestinian civilians, let alone the occupation, which is bigotry by definition.
We say that everyone in the world can defend themselves, can have their own state, can have sovereignty, except the Palestinians.
And the reasoning behind that is the Palestinians are what?
They're what?
The idea is that they are savages and that Muslims are too violent and cannot control themselves.
So they must be occupied for 56 brutal, disgusting years.
So I've had enough of the bigotry against Muslims and Palestinians, and I need you to speak out against that instead of covering every outrageous, atrocious action of the right-wing government of Israel and going, oh, it's anti-Semitism.
No, and there is global anti-Semitism.
There's anti-Semitism here in this country.
Two synagogues were shot up, Pittsburgh and in Southern California.
We fight against that all the time.
But then whenever Israel is criticized, people go, oh, no, it's anti-Semitism.
No, there's real anti-Semitism.
And instead of that, instead of attacking that, all you guys ever do is hide behind the veil of anti-Semitism.
Do you know why Palestinians might not like Israelis?
Because they've been distressed for 56 straight years.
I hear you.
I hear you.
And let me respond.
A, I'm not you guys.
I don't think I fit into any neat fit on this issue at all.
B, I've actually covered this story, I think, more fairly than most people.
I've had many pro-Palestinian voices I've given a huge platform for.
They've been getting enormous audiences from Basim Youssef to others.
And I've done that quite deliberately because I think these voices are important to be heard, including yours.
I certainly wasn't accusing you, by the way, or your organization of anti-Semitism.
I just think I have found it, as somebody who's always identified as liberal myself, I have found it very dispiriting to see people who call themselves liberals, whose instant response, it seemed to me, to one of the worst terror attacks we've ever seen was to immediately side with the place where these attacks have been launched from.
Now, I don't tar all Palestinians with the brush of being Hamas at all.
And in fact, the sooner Hamas are out of there, the better for the Palestinian people and the world.
But I just think the only human response you can have is, as you did, by the way, to your credit, is it was disgusting what happened on October the 7th.
Now, the question then becomes, what is a proportionate response by Israel?
Not just to the terror attacks of October the 7th, but obviously there is now a huge ongoing escalation in what has been, as you rightly say, a 56-year war, effectively, in varying degrees over that period.
And that's where I think I'm struggling to see how ground invasion by Israel, with all that that would entail, particularly mass deaths of Palestinian civilians, how that is going to do anything for any peaceful resolution to this.
I think it will have the opposite effect.
Yes.
So let's take it one at a time.
First of all, as you rightly point out, on Young Turks, we covered the atrocious actions of Hamas right from the get-go, and we condemned it as fully as anyone can possibly condemn it.
Because not only are they killing those poor, innocent Israelis that didn't do anything, those little babies and the grandmothers, it's disgusting what they did.
But on top of that, they're ruining the Palestinian cause.
They've burned the moral high ground to cinders.
And then on top of that, they smear all people of Muslim background like myself.
And then it leashes this, unleashes this bigotry of anti-Muslim bigotry throughout the world that I'm sick of.
So screw Hamas and their barbarism, okay?
Now, in terms of a proper reaction, yes, you need to get those hostages out.
So now let's look at what I'm going to suggest what to actually do.
I'm going to be constructive.
But first, let's look at the unconstructive solution that Israel had.
Dropping bombs on residential buildings.
50 ambulances have been hit.
10 out of 25 hospitals don't operate anymore.
The incubators are about to run out of energy.
There's 45 babies that might die today.
The parents I just read on CNN are writing the names of the kids on their calves, on their legs, so that if they are killed in a bombing and they're mutilated, they could find their bodies.
Imagine writing the name of your child on their legs so that you could find them in the rubble after Israel or any government drops a bomb on them.
And I need the West to understand something.
Bombs kill people.
And do you know how they kill people?
They incinerate them alive or their heads explode.
So what happened in Israel was a disaster and disgusting.
But you have to be equally honest and equally outraged at the immorality of incinerating babies and grandmothers and aunts and uncles, which is what we're doing right now.
America cannot be sending aid for death and destruction.
Enough of our occupation.
End it today.
End it today.
It's monstrous.
Okay, I'm going to ask you to ask.
Jake, let me ask you this.
A, I completely understand your passion and your anger.
I completely get this.
I, like you, want to see some resolution at the end of this horror that we're witnessing.
How do you get rid of Hamas if you don't do it the way Israel are currently doing it?
How do you actually eradicate what has become a nihilistic ISIS-style terror group, who've quite deliberately, in my estimation, committed an outrage of such appalling scale that they knew that this would goad Israel into this kind of response.
Ending Occupation vs. Minimizing Casualties 00:03:12
So why they did that, what is motivating it, who might be putting them up to it, who's helped them prepare for this, these are all questions we don't know the answers to yet.
But it seems to me that Israel could, if it's not careful, be being lured into a massive trap here.
And I hope that is not the case.
But I'm curious, how do you get rid of Hamas if you don't do it the way Israel is currently doing it, albeit with horrific collateral damage in the face of thousands of innocent Palestinians being caught up in the bombing?
Yeah.
So let me give you short-term answer, long-term answer.
And a lot of people are not going to like these, but these are realistic ways that you minimize, minimize civilian casualties.
You do what America did with the Osama bin Laden raid.
We didn't go drop a nuke on Pakistan.
We didn't go destroy 6,000 residential buildings in the middle of Pakistan.
We sent in special forces.
Is it more dangerous to the special forces?
Of course.
That's the point of special forces.
Try to find the hostages.
Does it look like Israel's trying to find the hostages?
If I have a family member that's a hostage, I'm disgusted by what Netyahoo's doing now.
How do you know they're not in the buildings you're dropping bombs on?
How do you know they're not in the tunnels you're dropping bombs on?
How do you know they're not in the hospitals you're dropping bombs on?
So if you want the hostages rescued, every rational human being can agree.
This is not the way to do it.
This is the way to do death and destruction for the sake of death and destruction.
It's collective punishment.
It's genocide against Palestinians.
And the world has to speak out.
So my way is not pleasant either.
It involves a lot of folks dying on both sides.
I understand that.
Those are super hard choices.
But go find Hamas.
Go find the hostages.
Go rescue them instead of wantingly, indiscriminately killing after killing.
And let's be honest, when you drop a bomb and a kid's head explodes and a grandmother is incinerated, that is terrorism.
Killing three times as many civilians as Hamas is terrorism.
And it is the same if it is done by a government.
Send in as many special forces as you got.
Should send look, send in whatever you got to actually do the job at hand, instead of what you're, what Netanyahu is doing, which is to to kill these people.
To what?
Send a message and think about how unrealistic that is and think about why his chance, his method, has a zero percent chance of working.
How are the Palestinians supposed to rise up against Hamas?
How would they prove they're against Hamas?
Hamas ended all elections.
Hamas ended democracy.
So how are the Palestinians supposed to cry, uncle?
They're already crying, uncle, but it's never enough for the bloodthirsty Netanyahu.
No, more death of Palestinians, more babies killed.
That's what his answer is.
And it's this, and the United States of America, I'm running for president here.
There's no way in the world I would allow this, sending $105 billion.
And it doesn't even go to Israel, Ukraine, or Taiwan.
It goes to the defense contractors that bribe these greedy American politicians and then get most of that money.
Scrutinizing Defense Contractors 00:12:08
And so the long-term answer is 1967 borders and the biggest walls you've ever seen in your entire life.
And no one's allowed to cross to either side.
But the Palestinians get their state.
It is unconscionable for them not to get their state.
And if you're a moral person, of course you believe that the Palestinians are not the only people in the world that cannot govern themselves.
If you say that, you are being, by definition, bigoted and a racist.
We have to have a two-state solution immediately, immediately.
If 56 years of occupation and brutalizing these people is not enough, is 57 years going to be enough?
Is 156 years going to be enough?
I'm asking Israel not out of hate, out of love.
So many of my friends that I grew up with are Jewish.
This is not good for them.
This is not good for anybody.
Please look into your hearts, look, and be the moral people that I know you can be.
I've been to Passover dinners where you pray for your oppressors.
Now, it breaks my heart, but I got to tell you, you got to pray for those you are oppressing.
And to say that you are not oppressing the Palestinians after brutalizing them for 56 long years, you're kidding yourself.
And as a friend and an ally, I'm trying to get you to wake up and snap out of this trance.
You cannot keep doing this.
It is ruining your moral fiber.
Jenk Yuga, thank you very much indeed for joining me.
I greatly appreciate it.
I'm sorry it was your first appearance on this program under these circumstances, but I hope it won't be your last.
I think you're an important voice in this, and I do appreciate you coming on the show.
Thank you very much.
Welcome back to Petersburg and I'm censored live from New York City.
I'm joined now by my New York Pack, the former U.S. Navy SEAL, the man who killed Osama bin Laden, Rob O'Neill, the founder of the brand new Media UK, Dan Abrams, and the former Conservative MP, Louise Mentor Stella Pack, if ever there was one.
Dan, I watched you having a pretty intense debate actually with Jenk Yugar last week before he came here.
He's passionate, he's angry.
I get it.
He's well-informed.
He's articulate.
And he's frustrated by what he sees as a double standard.
It's your response to what you just heard.
So I think that you can take some of what he's saying and saying he can make fair points about Palestinian civilians, right?
Concerns, legitimate concerns for how far Israel goes, how careful Israel is.
Israel ought to be watched carefully.
Israel ought to be scrutinized carefully.
But what he's not doing is talking about the instances where Israel, let's say, has to bomb in a civilian area because that's where Hamas is firing from, right?
That's the difference, is he talks about, well, you know, it's like finding Osama bin Laden.
It's not.
There was Afghanistan first, right?
It didn't just out of nowhere start with, oh, let's just go find Osama bin Laden.
Oh, you know what?
Yeah, it'll take a little work.
Some special forces will go in there.
That was a Herculean task to find Osama bin Laden and credit to the people who were ultimately able to achieve it.
But it's not just like, oh, you could send in some special forces and go find them.
Is he right about the concern about hostages?
Sure.
Yeah.
There's a real concern that hostages are going to potentially end up getting killed here.
But big picture, Israel is trying to avoid civilian casualties.
Why do I say that?
Because it's bad for them.
It's bad for their image.
It's bad for international support.
You can say they're not careful enough, but the idea that it's all indiscriminate and they're just going to go and bomb all these different places and not care about it, it doesn't even make sense.
But what is proportionate?
I mean, I'm wrestling with this.
Morally, I'm wrestling with this because I have a lot of people on the Palestinian side.
There's a lot of Arabs around the world who bombard me with what they perceive to be the West's double standard on this.
How can you say it's proportionate?
Say within two weeks, four, 5,000 Palestinians have already been killed, and it will likely massively increase with a ground invasion.
What is proportionate to the deaths of 1,500 people?
Yeah, so I don't know the answer.
There is no answer.
That's not the way war works, right?
You don't say, well, X number of people were killed, and as a result, that means X number allowed on the other side.
It depends what the other side is doing.
The facts matter.
What's happening on the ground is relevant.
It's relevant that Hamas is intentionally trying to prevent the Palestinian people from leaving.
Why?
Because they want human shields.
They want civilians to die.
It's good for their political cause for civilians to die.
It's the reason they won't let 500 Americans, Palestinian Americans, who are in the area leave.
Why?
They want human shields.
And that's the difference.
So when you ask the question, which is a fair question, about what's proportionate, it depends on each and every bomb that goes on.
Let me bring it up.
There's no one better to ask about that comparison with Osama bin Laden.
You're the guy that shot and killed Osama bin Laden.
That was in a special ops operation with Navy SEAL Team 6, obviously.
But as Dan rightly said, it followed a massive war in Afghanistan for many years.
Joe Biden's already warned, let's not make the same mistakes we made after 9-11.
Rushing into countries, having urban warfare, which ends up perhaps creating more problems than we had to start with.
You look at Iraq and you think, well, that led to ISIS, which led to all sorts of hell for two decades.
What is your take on where we are now with this?
Well, Dan was right.
It took 10 years after 9-11 to do the mission to get bin Laden.
I mean, they found bin Laden probably before that, but then just to get the target package, how we're going to get there, what we're going to do.
We're always trying to limit the amount of civilian casualties there as well, but it takes a long time.
It's not as simple as let's just send special forces like it's a video game.
That doesn't happen at all.
Plus, Hamas is committing the war crimes right now by strapping people to the missiles that they're going to launch.
They want the human seals, like Dan was saying.
That's what they're doing.
And the hardest part of a hostage rescue is finding out where they are.
I'm one of the few people that have been on a hostage rescue that worked.
We knew where Captain Phillips was.
We don't know where they're keeping them.
They have 300 miles of caves.
They're 100 feet deep.
You have to find all that out before you go in there, and they're going to be booby-trapped.
We know the stuff's going to blow up, but it's not that simple.
Is what Israel's doing now, is this proportionate, do you think, to what happened?
I mean, obviously, we were all horrified by what happened on October the 7th.
It was horrific.
As people have pointed out, proportionally, it was like 10 times 9-11 in terms of the death toll of Israelis.
But people around the world are getting very jittery about the scale of Israel's response, and they realize this is just the warm-up to what could be a massive ground invasion.
They're playing into Hamas's hand.
They want the pictures of the people getting killed that they put in front of the intel places that they have and the weapons that they have because they know the world's going to play with Hamas on this and they're doing it on purpose.
But if Hamas wants Israel to overreact as people see it like this, what's the bigger plan here for Hamas?
Well, do what they do.
Just tell the media and let them report from Hamas.
So, Master's going to tell them what they want to do.
And a lot of the media right now, they don't need the truth.
They just need to be first, reporting what it is that's bad.
I mean, you know, there are good people everywhere.
This is Moses' game.
I mean, if you want to take out the leadership of Moss, you probably have to go to like Oman or a Qatar, stuff like that.
That's where the leadership is.
Louise, I mean, I think the media role of this is fascinating.
We saw immediately in the aftermath of this hospital getting bombed the other day.
The mainstream media from the BBC in the UK to the New York Times here rushing to say pretty well, this was an Israel airstrike.
It now looks increasingly likely, not definitive, but increasingly likely it wasn't.
It was almost certainly a group inside Gaza who were firing at Israel.
Yeah, I think it's as definitive as you can get.
President Biden said he has this exquisite intelligence from the Department of Defense.
But as you rightly say, these aren't influencers and bloggers.
These are supposedly blue-chip news organizations that we are supposed to trust.
CNN, the BBC, the New York Times.
And what happens?
They just want to be first.
So if anything, I think the bias is entirely in the other direction.
All we had was the fig leaf of the Palestinian Health Authority, which is, by the way, entirely controlled by Hamas, says this.
That's not good enough.
It's better to wait, to let the facts emerge.
For example, all they needed to do with a hospital was just wait until the sun came up.
Then they would have seen that, as a matter of fact, it wasn't bombed or healed.
I mean, media is a fantastic site.
I look at it all the time when you come to the UK, obviously.
The fog of war has come to the media now in a way we've never seen.
I mean, the amount of disinformation, fake videos, edited clips, so on, that is everywhere.
It's so hard to get to meditation.
But this is why Louise's point is important, which is that means the obligation on the top end media entities is even higher, right?
Because of everything that's out there.
I mean, even look at the numbers that are cited, right?
X number of Palestinians.
Where's that coming from?
From the Palestinian Health Ministry.
From Hamas.
Right, from Hamas, that combines, even if you take their numbers at face value, people who die with people who are killed, etc.
Now, again, getting into the minutia of the numbers, I don't think it's particularly useful.
But there is way too much treatment in the United States media, and I think to some degree in the British media, of treating Hamas like an equal partner when it comes to gathering information.
Well, the Palestinian Health Ministry said.
I mean, it seems to me, I've got to say, most people I talk to, Rob, think Hamas should go, right?
That they have become, because of this unbelievably red line crossing terror attack, on October the 7th, it's simply unthinkable they continue to rule the roost in Gaza.
The question becomes, how do you get rid of them?
From a military perspective, is it the smart play by Israel to go in as a ground invasion?
Or is it the smarter play to have a load of people like you, special forces, highly trained, going in and picking them off in smaller groups?
Well, I mean, the unfortunate truth is if you want to get to the end game and cutting off the head of the snake, as they say, it's in Iran.
And so you need to get rid of the funding from there, because Iran's proven they don't even care if it's Hamas Hezbollah.
But that escalates it into a political system.
I know it does.
It's terrible, too.
And that's the leader.
It's clearly in Gaza.
If you were trying to get rid of the people.
Well, you need to crush Hamas, no doubt about it.
What's the best way to do that?
I mean, the best way is if it didn't start in the first place, but there's been a war there since biblical times.
The best way to get rid of it in the long term is to stop teaching kids to hate each other.
That's the first way.
The second way is you have to go in there and hit them as hard as you can and basically wipe Hamas out.
Unfortunately.
In a ground invasion.
Yeah, it has to happen.
I mean, they've tried it before.
Hamas right now is not interested in the two-state solution.
No, no, they're interested in killing as many Jewish people as they can possibly be.
Unfortunately, the innocent lights are getting lost.
There's got to be a better way around it, but right now it's bombs and bullets.
I mean, the politics of this can't be ignored.
I mean, Netanyahu is incredibly unpopular amongst Israelis.
Most of them hold him accountable for this stratospheric failure of security and defense by the country.
Should he keep his job?
Will he keep his job?
Absolutely not.
Most people in America don't know that Benjamin Netanyahu sent half a billion dollars of aid, of which 50% is estimated to have gone to Hamas.
Now, it's not an anti-Israeli propaganda.
That came from Haarez, the Israeli newspaper.
They said, look at this alliance that B.B. Netanyahu is going to be aware of.
He was happy to have Hamas in charge because it created division amongst the Palestinians, and now it's come back to haunt him.
I think his position is untenable.
I completely agree with you, and the reporting is that the military leaders in Israel want to see him gone.
Obviously, he didn't cut off those babies' heads, but he is in charge of the defense of Israel, and he was so concentrating on the Supreme Court that he allowed this to happen.
Dan, what does victory look like for Israel here?
You know, look, it's not going to look like what we're hearing from Israeli leaders, right?
It's not going to be the end of Hamas.
Hamas isn't going to end as a result of this.
Victory, from my perspective, would be a good number of Hamas leaders killed, a good number of the hostages rescued.
Who Wins This War 00:00:38
Honestly, I don't know how else to quantify it.
I agree.
There's not a number I can put on any of that, but if you can get a good number on each of those, then that's to some degree a victory.
But there's no way that this is going to end in a perfect.
I don't think there are winners here.
And it's only going to be scale of loss.
Thank you to all of you.
What a fascinating conversation.
It's such a difficult situation, isn't it?
And I just don't see any simple way through this.
The sadness is, of course, this a time when the region had appeared more stable than it had been for a long time.
And that's one of the great...
Yeah, of course.
Great to see you.
Thank you very much indeed.
I appreciate it.
That's it from me.
Whatever you're up to.
Keep it uncensored.
Good night.
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