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Nov. 8, 2023 - Uncensored - Piers Morgan
47:16
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Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Freedom of Speech Risks 00:04:43
Tonight at Piers Morgan on Censor, police say this weekend's controversial pro-Palestine march in London will go ahead.
Douglas Murray is one of the most influential and scathing commentators on the Israeli side of this impassioned debate.
Tonight he joins me from the Gaza border, but our conversation was dramatically interrupted.
The comparison between Hamas and the Nazis is insufficient.
And I sorry, there's an incoming.
Incoming.
From the news building in London, this is Piers Morgan Uncensored.
Good evening, London.
Welcome to Piers Morgan on Censor.
Saturday is Armistice Day and Veterans Day in the United States.
Every year on the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month, there is silence.
It's a moment for mournful reflection and for gratitude to the many millions of people who sacrificed their lives in the First World War and wars since.
This year, war is on all of our minds and with bitter irony, it's putting Palestinian supporters on a collision course with many British people.
Tens of thousands of pro-Palestine protesters will march through London on Armistice Day.
The Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak, says that's unacceptable.
The Israeli President on this show yesterday joined calls for the march to be banned.
It's atrocious and hypocritic and I call upon all decent human beings to object to the march and ban it because the symbol of that day is a symbol of victory and it's a symbol of doing good because when you fight evil sometimes you have to fight.
You have to fight evil in order to uproot evil.
Well I'll be honest now.
My initial instinct about this march was to agree that it should be banned.
November the 11th is a sacred and emotional day.
There's plenty of evidence that some of the people joining these protests have no respect for our traditions or our values.
Yes, it's a minority, but some have called for jihad, some have defaced on monuments, some have chanted for the total eradication of Israel.
The idea this could happen on a weekend of remembrance and respect is frankly sickening and it risks bringing tensions to the boil.
But so does the incendiary rhetoric from people like our Home Secretary.
We've seen now tens of thousands of people take to the streets following the massacre of Jewish people, the single largest loss of Jewish life since the Holocaust, chanting for the erasure of Israel from the map.
To my mind, there's only one way to describe those marches.
They are hate marches.
You see, I don't think they are hate marches.
I think many of the people taking part believe they're marching for peace, for an armistice.
There are some there, clearly, who are hateful.
But we already have laws against violence, against inciting hatred, and against supporting terrorists.
Anyone who shows up with those things in mind should be swiftly arrested and the police must do more to do their police work.
But should the ugly behaviour of a minority, and I believe it is a minority, mean we just throw away our hard-fought rights to free speech?
This is what Lord Nicholas Soames, the grandson of Sir Winston Churchill, said yesterday.
A lot of people died during the war to assert freedom.
I think it must be allowed to go ahead.
It's nowhere near the cenotaph.
It's in the afternoon, it's afternoon.
And most of those people, 90% of those people, are not there to make trouble.
They're there to express a deeply held view.
It really made me think, especially coming from the grandson of Winston Churchill, the man who saved this country from the Nazis.
And of course, hearing it from Lord Soames reminded me of the words of his grandfather, which in fact take pride of place on my dressing room wall here in the studio of Piers Morgan Uncensored.
Some people's idea of free speech is that they are free to say what they like, but if anyone says anything back, that is an outrage.
It's Mr. Churchill.
And that's really the point here.
If the people calling for a ban on this march actually agree with the protesters, they wouldn't have a problem with it.
But freedom of speech works both ways.
Mr. Churchill fought in the First World War and led us to victory in the second.
The many millions who died were fighting for the free world we now live in and the freedom of speech and expression that we live by.
So I respect the rights of Palestinian supporters to march peacefully on Armistice Day.
Double Standards in Free Speech 00:15:14
I just hope they return that favor and respect the people who died so that they can.
Well, first tonight, author Douglas Murray has been one of Israel's most passionate and scathing supporters since this war began.
He's now traveled as a reporter to the Gaza border from where I spoke to him earlier tonight in what turned out to be a very dramatic interview.
Well, I'm joined now by Douglas Murray, who's on the Gaza border.
Douglas, let me ask you first of all, why have you felt the need to go there?
Well, I've covered every Israeli conflict since the 2006 Lebanon war.
I've covered lots of other conflicts as well.
And this one is obviously an incredibly important conflict.
It's one that is going to be crucial, not just for Israel, but for the region.
And I like to see these things firsthand, as you know, Piers.
I do.
And I've read your stuff for many years about these kind of conflicts.
Let me ask you, what's your feeling on the ground there?
I know you've been with some of the IDF.
What is your feeling about the motivation for this war from the Israeli side?
Is it revenge?
Is it something different?
What are you picking up?
Well, it's not revenge.
I mean, I think the most obvious thing is I spent part of today at the kibbutz of near Oz.
This is a kibbutz right down the road from here by the Gaza border, where there are about 400 residents.
80 of them were kidnapped on the 7th of October, and another 30 to 40 were murdered.
And we went through, I went through the remains of their houses, saw all the blood-spattered walls, and went through the charred remains of that village, that community.
That was just one of the massacre sites.
I went earlier past the massacre site of what you'll remember is that there was a music festival also near the Gaza border, which was taking place where so many hundreds of young people were having a rave and then were massacred, raped, mutilated, and again kidnapped and taken through the border into Gaza.
So you see the remnants of that appalling day everywhere around here.
It's very hard to find a family anywhere in Israel.
It hasn't been directly or very closely related to the atrocities of that day.
1,400 civilians slaughtered in one day and thousands more injured is the sort of thing that will have an effect on any society.
It would be roughly comparative to, say, 20,000 people being killed in our own country.
So it's a massive thing.
It's a massive blow in Israel.
The whole nation has felt it.
And of course, people know that there needs to be an answer to this.
And I think that's, well, you can hear behind me as I'm speaking some of that answer, the crump of artillery shells and missiles from the air, it seems.
And you can see some of that rising over the border behind me.
You've talked about proportionality in this conflict being absurd.
I've talked a lot about what is proportionate.
I struggle to think of what a proportionate response is to the barbarism of those terror attacks.
There is a view, and maybe you share this view, but there is a view, I think Ben Shapiro said this to me when I interviewed him, that there should be no limit on the response that Israel has.
It's not about proportion.
It's not about you kill one of us, we kill one of you.
This is about a war specifically designed to eliminate Hamas, and they will do what it takes.
Yes.
Well, I mean, remember that one of the heads of Hamas said only a few days ago, from the comfort of his foreign residents, because remember, the heads of Hamas don't live among their peoples.
They've been made billionaires by taking in international aid for years now.
But one of the heads of Hamas said the other day, we will keep doing October the 7th again and again and again.
So there's a realization in Israel, I think, that this is just unlivable.
You can't have a situation where you have a neighbor who, well, won the election in 2006 after Israel withdrew from the Gaza, promptly killed their fellow Palestinians, the Fatar members in the Gaza, threw them off buildings and shot them in the back.
So Hamas has been ruling Gaza for all the last one and a half decades.
It has spent all the international aid money and much more that has come into it on its own infrastructure of terror tunnels, its infrastructure of rockets and other munitions to throw at Israel.
And then, of course, in enriching its leaders.
The place you see behind me could be Singapore by now.
And there's a reason it isn't.
And it's the leadership of Hamas.
And so, you know, I think that it is something that people have to realize that this is not a situation which is sustainable for Israel.
And yes, the Israeli government is going to be doing whatever it needs to do to fulfill its objective of ridding the Gaza of Hamas.
How easy or difficult a job that is is another question, but it's something that is going on as we speak.
But in terms of the moral quandary which I've been feeling, and it's not about Israel wanting to eliminate Hamas, I completely agree with that mission statement.
And certainly there's no chance of any peace when you have a terror group in charge of Gaza in the way that they've now completely established themselves to be, with no limits and just a desire to eradicate Israel and as many Jewish people as they can kill.
So let's part that to one side.
I concur with the mission statement.
But it is incredibly difficult, just on a human level, to see, because we know the civilian population in Gaza is half children, to see the sheer numbers of kids who are being killed by the Israeli onslaught that's come back against Hamas.
What do you feel about that?
On a human level, what should we all be feeling about?
The first thing is, the first thing is, should those deaths really be attributed to the Israeli side?
We saw the other day the BBC and other media reported that the people who were lying dead on the street on one of the main routes through Gaza was alleged to be a massacre carried out by Israelis.
It turned out wasn't the case at all.
It was Hamas massacring Palestinians fleeing south as the Israelis had recommended they do.
So the question in a way that you ask, I would say there's an answer to, which is who exactly is responsible for these deaths?
If you do, as Hamaz does, decide to build bunkers and put rockets on them and then put hospitals on top of them, who exactly is responsible for that?
Is it the Israelis in their response?
Or is it Hamas for doing that?
If you do decide, as Hamaz has done, to use all of these billions of dollars of international aid to build tunnels where you can hide, among other things, the kidnapped Israelis, who's responsible for the strikes that happen as a result and any civilian deaths?
Is it the Israelis or is it Hamas who has been holding the Palestinian peoples of the Gaza hostage for the last 15 years and more?
Again, I repeat this point.
You know, a lot of what has been said about this seems to suggest that Hamas has no responsibility for this.
You know, if you went into your neighbour's house, ransacked it, raped your neighbours, killed some of them, took others into captivity, and then somebody said, That's not on.
I'm going to do something in retaliation to that.
You would bear the costs of that.
You'd bear the price for that.
The Israelis have the right to respond to such an atrocity.
And I'm rather surprised, or at least I'm not surprised in a way.
I'm disappointed as ever by the number of commentators in the UK and elsewhere who seem to always use times like this to say things like, we've got to, you know, this is a time for judicious voices.
This is a time for calm and much more.
I do always wonder if those people would say the same or feel the same if it was a bit closer to their own home.
You know, if it wasn't a kibbutz down the road, like the one I was in earlier that had been attacked, but village after village in the south of England, I don't think we'd be hearing those same voices.
I think there's a very particular standard that the Israelis are held to.
I think it's an unfair standard.
It's an unequal standard.
It's an intolerable standard for the Israelis.
But when people say, you know, you've just got to sort of live with this, the Israelis quite rightly will be saying, well, we don't see quite why we do.
The comparison between Hamas and the Nazis is insufficient.
And I sorry, there's an incoming.
Incoming.
What about this issue around the pro-Palestinian marches and specifically the one planned for Armas to stay here in London on Saturday?
Do you think it should go ahead?
Well, my own view is that it shouldn't, and it shouldn't because it's not because it should be banned, but because it's a grotesque insult to the British people.
It's a deliberately provocative day to choose for such a march.
It's a deliberately provocative march.
As the Telegraph showed just yesterday, around half of the organizers of the march are themselves linked with Hamas, which isn't at all surprising.
We have Hamas commanders after all who live in London very safely, often on welfare.
And so, yes, I think it's an intolerable march.
It's an intolerable provocation to the British public and the British government and the British police, by the way, who Saturday after Saturday have been made to put up with unbelievable taunting and abuse from the marchers.
It's clearly, it's very clear by now, Piers, that what is happening is that every week the crowds are pushing and seeing if they can push the police further and further, harder and harder and be more and more provocative.
And they're managing to do that.
But this is culminating this weekend.
And here's the thing: I don't think, and I certainly read and hear that large numbers of the British public are just not going to put up with this.
The march is not diverted away from Whitehall, but let me pick you up on that, because it's interesting, because you, like me, have been a very vocal and passionate defender of free speech.
And we know that that includes that you have to accept that other people you may vehemently disagree with have a right to free speech.
You know, Christopher Hitchin, someone like you and I both have.
This isn't.
No, I'm going to come to my question, but Christopher Hitchens said the only thing that should be upheld at all costs and without qualification is the right of free expression.
Because if that goes, then so do all of the claims of right as well.
Now, what was interesting to me, I've been on a bit of a journey this week about what I really think about this.
And Nicholas Soames actually said something that really made me sit up and take notice and change my mind about it, actually.
Because he's Churchill's grandson.
He's a Conservative.
And he said strongly yesterday that he thinks the march should be allowed to go ahead because the very freedoms that the people on Armistice Day who we honor, who gave their lives in the wars, they did so to preserve the freedoms of people like those marchers, the ones who are not being violent, the ones who are not showing pro-Hamas stuff.
I'm not sure about that.
Do they have a right to protest?
Well, we'll try to single those two things out for a second.
First of all, I don't regard Nicholas Soames as a sort of hereditary inheritor of the mantle of Churchill just because he happens to be his grandson.
Besides what you quoted from Christopher earlier, he would never have said that that right extended to supporting terror groups.
I mean, we're in a total quandary in the UK, as you know, and it's a despicable quandary to be in.
We host them as leaders.
We have a deputy prime minister, former deputy prime minister of Iran living in Harrow.
We've been at the center of allowing these people to be in our country and indeed to plot terror from our country for years.
So it's always a bit rich to hear the British, I think, lecturing others about being an unsound part of the international security community.
As for the actual marches, look, I'm afraid that the rules on this are very, very clear.
You are not allowed to glorify terror or call for terror on the streets of Britain.
And that existed before the 2006 Terrorism Act banned glorification.
And it certainly exists now.
If you stand on the streets of London calling for jihad, you are calling for terror.
And that is actually a place where free speech is at its limit and is no longer permissible.
It's the same with, for instance, calls for intifada on the London tubes.
Remember, we had a touch of intifada on the London tubes a few years ago.
So again, calling for intifada is something that you're not allowed to do in the UK.
Okay, but that was calling for murder.
You're not allowed to...
Let me finish one other case.
You're not allowed to stand on the streets of London and call for the murder of Jews or any other minority.
No.
And yet people have been getting away with this.
And are the police arresting people?
No.
No, they're not.
The police last week said we're outnumbered.
Right.
So that is a key point.
The police have said, Met Commissioner Samart Rowley said, the laws created by Parliament are clear.
There is no absolute power to ban protest.
Therefore, there will be a protest this weekend.
But the laws are also there to stop people brazenly supporting terrorism.
So if people were to use a pro-Hamas banner or chant pro-Hamas a sentiment, that would be against the current law of this country.
And the police should take action.
That's a different issue.
It is.
It is, but it's not being police.
It's not being policed.
I understand.
So on that, I can agree with you.
The police need to enforce existing laws.
However, there will be a lot of laws.
They're not going to because they're outnumbered.
No, no, but they're outnumbered.
You and I can agree that that's wrong, but that shouldn't mitigate the right policy.
Well, don't you think that matters?
Hang on, don't you think that matters?
No, it does matter.
That means that we have a rule of law, but it's not able to be policed.
What's the point of having a law if you can't police it?
Well, I agree with you, but I also think that there are a large number of those protesters who genuinely are, in their eyes, protesting for peace, and they're pro-Palestinian, and they have a view in the way that we're talking about...
Well, I disagree with that.
I disagree with that.
And I'll tell you one reason why.
The crowds in question are 100 times larger than the number of people who came out when hundreds of thousands of people were being killed in Yemen.
They are 100 times larger than the number of people who came out when Bash al-Assad killed hundreds of thousands of people in Syria.
Seems to me that the people in question only care if one side in the particular conflict happens to involve the Israelis.
But they're allowed to.
But they're allowed to.
So I don't...
Well, they're allowed to, absolutely.
And we can make judgments about them.
But I would not presume by any means that what you're talking about are pro-peace people.
They're anti-Israeli.
That's it.
Well, but they're allowed to be anti-Israeli.
Hamas Embedding Among Civilians 00:15:35
I think that's the point.
They're not.
Sure, they're allowed to be as anti-in that case, I suppose we have to allow people to be anti-other nations as well.
I mean, Britain was founded at the same year.
Sorry, Israel, sorry, was founded in the same year within the year of Pakistan.
Maybe we should allow large protests of hundreds of thousands of people to go around the streets of London protesting that Pakistan doesn't have a right to exist or right to defend itself.
I don't think it's a good precedent.
Hang on.
I don't think you have a right to say that Israel doesn't exist.
If you want the extermination of all people in Israel, that is a criminal offence.
However, if you are literally, as I said...
Well, it doesn't seem to be a criminal offence, Piers.
It doesn't seem to be a crime.
But you and I can agree on that.
I'm not disagreeing with you.
We're clearly in a position where they're not policing the law.
No, I understand.
Otherwise, we wouldn't have all of these videos of people inciting violence on the streets.
But Douglas, you and I can agree that the police need to enforce existing law.
There's no dispute between us on that, and they should be doing that a lot more.
But we also, I think, have to surely look at the people who are genuinely there in a non-violent manner, of which there are many.
These are massive protests.
I think back to the protests, for example, against Donald Trump when he came to London, against America, because he was the president.
We allowed that to happen.
I didn't necessarily agree with them, but we allowed them to happen.
I remember Madonna saying we should blow up the White House, a woman's march in Washington.
That happened, and people accepted that.
Well, here's a very important point on that, Piers.
Madonna almost certainly, so far as I know, has no military capability behind her.
So when Madonna says, I'd like to blow up the White House, it's a piece of stupid rhetoric from a pop star.
When you've just had the largest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust and you have Hamas supporters and others marching through London calling for it to happen again, that does matter because there is a capability.
So there is a difference, isn't there?
Well, there is, but I don't think that all of these protesters are pro-Hamas.
And the difference is that you have a large artillery behind it.
Yeah, but you don't honestly think they're all pro-Hamas, these people.
Well, I think that anyone who, for instance, chants things like from the river to the sea is, in fact, or is criminally ignorant.
Oh, well, they are.
I mean, there's masses of videos of them marching past Westminster Abbey last week saying exactly that.
Yeah, but they're not all.
They're marching past the Sasha Winston Churchill.
I've watched the videos, and there are lots of people who are chanting and some who aren't.
Well, here's a challenge.
Okay, well, here's a challenge, Piers.
If you decided to go on some kind of march, and in week one, you discovered that you had the BNP along your side calling, for instance, for the murder of all black people.
Would you not wonder whether or not you should go on week two?
And would you not drop out by about week three?
I'd have thought so.
I would.
That's a good question.
And yes, I would, but that doesn't actually well.
You can say that you have a view.
Your own opinion is they shouldn't be marching alongside these other people.
However, they are still entitled in a free democratic country like ours.
And look, I don't have absolute opinions on this.
I just think it's a really interesting test of how far free speech goes.
And I do feel like the interesting test, if I can say so, Piers, is there are limits to this, in fact.
You are not allowed to glorify the murder of people on the streets of Britain.
You are not allowed to be a member of a prescribed terrorist group in Britain.
But I return to the point I made at the start.
We allow it.
I repeat, we have Hamas commanders living in the UK who take welfare in the UK and use it to commit terror.
Why are they not locked up?
Because we have laws that we don't pursue.
We have criminal charges that we don't use.
The person in particular I'm thinking of, Mohamed Sawalha, got British citizenship.
You're meant to sign a form saying you're a person of good character to become a British citizen.
Can you say that somebody who was a former military commander of Hamas in the West Bank is, quote, a person of good character?
I'd say not.
So again, like the police, like many other people, the border control in the UK doesn't enforce the law, doesn't care to do so.
And I repeat, there is a serious problem with this in the UK.
Israel, as you can see tonight, can look after itself.
I wonder if Britain can say the same.
Yeah, listen, I understand that point.
You've also said it will have to be countered if the march goes ahead, because the British public shouldn't have to put up with it.
But what does that mean in reality?
You're not endorsing people to go confront them, are you?
No, no, not at all.
I would suggest that if the Cenotaph, for instance, comes under attack, there should be a peaceful ring of people around the Cenotaph to protect it, as with other monuments.
And I think that that's what many people will do.
I hope they do so peacefully.
But as this goes on and as the provocations grow and grow, I'm afraid, I'm very, very afraid from what's going to happen this weekend coming in the UK.
Personally, I think it's safer in Israel these days than it is in central London, certainly for Jews.
Let's talk, given you're over there right now.
What concerns me about what Israel is doing is not their efforts to get rid of Hamas, but because of the particular nature of Hamas embedding themselves amongst civilian populations with the masses amounts of civilian casualties that will inevitably come and that figure will grow and grow and grow.
Are we not, as Barack Obama warned, are we not creating here just an opportunity for far greater radicalization of all those young Palestinians who watched their loved ones get killed?
Why would we imagine that at the end of all this they're going to want to do anything other than to become a new version of Hamas in wanting to exact revenge for what happened to their families?
Well, two things.
One is if you just follow the logic of what Barack Obama said, then you just shouldn't do anything if you're Israel.
You should be attacked and just sit back and say, great, we'll wait for the next one.
But the second and more important thing is your question supposes that there is a sort of peaceful Palestinian population in the Gaza who would love a two-state solution and then a few bad apples in Hamas.
I think that's not true.
Why is it that when one of the victims of the music festival, a poor young German Jewish girl who it seems was raped and then brutally murdered and taken into the Gaza naked, why was it that you can find, and anyone can find this online, a crowd of ordinary Gazans, it wasn't a Hamas, it wasn't a Hamas rally, ordinary Gazans spitting on her body, hitting her body, mutilating her body further as it went down the street.
Does that strike you, Piers, as a placid population of peacenick types who are just desperately waiting for a two-state solution to be put back on the table for the millionth time in the last 70-something years?
It doesn't seem like that to me.
No, but there are over 2 million people in Gaza, and there weren't 2 million people in that video clip.
There were a few hundred.
So I don't like to make...
Yeah, a few hundred at random.
A few hundred at random.
And did you see anyone in it saying, hey, guys, stop.
We're not meant to mutilate the bodies of girls or rape them in public.
No, I didn't see that.
But then what you're really articulating, correct me if I'm wrong here, but isn't what you're articulating really an endorsement of collective punishment where you assume they're all guilty.
No.
And if they don't stand up to Hamas, they're also guilty.
And that's where people have a problem.
I think the moral line here, which is if you hold all the Gazans equally responsible, then is that not collective punishment, which is illegal?
Well, first of all, first of all, there is some responsibility for people in the Gaza.
If you elect Hamas and they kill Fatar and then they remain in power for all of the years afterwards, I'm afraid that there is some responsibility of the people in that situation.
You know, when the Germans had Adolf Hitler come to power and voted for him, we in Britain took the view that the German people were responsible in some way.
So I'm not for collective punishment per se, but nor am I for this idea that there is something unique going on in the Israeli Gaza context that we in Britain couldn't understand.
Actually, there is one unique thing.
In our own history, there is very similar things.
But there is one unique thing, which is that the population of Gaza is pretty unique in that nearly half of the population are children.
That is a unique situation.
No, I'll tell you what's unique about the population of Gaza.
It's the only population in the world where people routinely claim Israelis are committing genocide, but which has a population boom all of the time.
I mean, that strikes me as being quite an interesting thing about the Gaza.
But as for the moral currency, I want to make a very, very important point, if I can say so on this, which is, you know, people quite often abuse history and they say things all the time.
I mean, about the only thing anyone from history knows is about the Nazis.
Here's something I can tell you with absolute certainty, Piers.
Having not just seen some of the results of what Hamaz did on the ground here in Israel a few weeks ago, but having watched the videos of the unedited footage, which I was one of the journalists sadly allowed to see the other day, I can tell you one thing.
The comparison between Hamaz and the Nazis is insufficient.
And I, sorry, there's an incoming.
Get safe, Douglas.
Come, come.
Are you OK, Douglas?
It came from the other direction, so.
Okay, anyhow, we're okay.
Are you okay?
Let's just.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's fine.
Sorry, it was a rocket coming.
It looked like it was just going to land on us here.
Which way was that rocket coming from?
Is it coming from Gaza or from Israel?
Yes, it seemed to be coming from Gaza.
Yeah, it's fine.
It's okay.
It's been happening all day.
Let me just make a point of the message.
Before, Douglas, Atman, how does that make you feel?
What just happened there?
I mean, I'm a little used to it.
I was in Ukraine last year and was in Kherson and Odessa and Nikolaev and when the Russians were shelling it, so I'm a little used to it.
But if I can just finish this point, you know, this, so there's a lot of banging going on, but anyway, we'll keep going.
Well, if you need to stop, Douglas, we understand.
No, no, don't worry.
If we need to stop, I'll run to the shelter, I assure you.
The thing that struck me, you know, Piers, about seeing the 7th of October footage was that even the Nazis were actually ashamed of what they did.
You know, SS battalions who spent their days shooting Jews in the back of the head and pushing them into trenches had to get very, very drunk in the evening to forget what they had done.
The Nazi high command famously had to sort of get around the problem of soldier morale because the soldiers knew this wasn't exactly what their lives were meant to look like either.
I tell you one very big difference.
If you look at the footage, the raw footage, and I really hope people don't on a wider scale have to view what I viewed the other day.
If they see it, they will see something that is at least as barbaric as what the Nazis did.
But here's the difference.
They did it with glee.
They were deeply proud.
You see people trying to, you know, taking the head off a young Israeli man with a shovel and then calling their parents back in Gaza and telling them, father, father, I've killed two Jews with my ten Jews with my own hands.
Get mother on the phone.
I want to tell her how great a job her son has done.
You know, I come back to this thing.
I'm not exaggerating this.
It's very, very interesting and people need to realize.
You had this situation with the Nazis where they also were a genocidal anti-Semitic organization.
But they tried to cover their crimes up.
Hamas are actually proud of them.
And they've said they will do them until the whole world is clear of Jews.
So I suggest we take that seriously.
And I think that Israel is taking it seriously.
I hope they continue to take it seriously.
But I think the world should take it seriously.
And that includes Britain.
And when I hear British journalists, British commentators and British politicians lecturing the Israelis on what they should do, I think, I'm sorry, this shows a failing in our country.
It shows that we in Britain cannot enforce our laws.
We don't even enforce our borders in Britain.
It's us that is the weak link in the international security chain on this, not Israel.
Douglas, how does this war end?
Netanyahu said yesterday that he sees at the end of this Gaza falling under Israel occupation for an indefinite period.
Now, there are many people in Israel who absolutely want Netanyahu out and hold him accountable for what happened on October the 7th in terms of the failing of defense and security.
He's deeply unpopular now amongst his own people.
But this whole idea that you somehow reconcile this 75-year conflict, which has blown up into warfare time and time again by Israel ending up as a completely occupying force, that seems to me utterly untenable.
Well, I think that, I mean, look, it's too early to tell.
I would just say this, and I've said this before, but Israel is one of the only countries in the world that's never allowed to win a conflict.
It has been left with this question of the Palestinians in the West Bank, the question of the Palestinians in Gaza.
It's been left with this for years.
And by the way, I say left with it because remember, the Jordanians could solve the problem in the West Bank immediately by taking the Palestinians therein or taking some kind of control.
They don't want to.
The Egyptians, I have friends who were born in Gaza when it was owned by the Egyptians, run by the Egyptians.
The Egyptians could solve the Gaza problem tomorrow by allowing the Gazans into Egypt or taking control of the Gaza themselves.
Nobody wants the Palestinians people.
And there's this endless, endless mistake that is being made.
And it has been made all my lifetime, certainly, which is that there's this unsolved problem, but it is the job of the Israelis to solve it.
What is happening behind me is a demonstration of the fact that it is an insoluble problem that the Israelis keep being told to solve.
Gaza, ever since the Israelis left it in 2005, could have become Singapore.
It could have become a thriving place.
But Hamas didn't want that.
They wanted to turn it into a place, instead of building upwards, they built downwards.
Instead of building great buildings, they built great tunnels.
This is a tragedy for the Palestinian peoples, but it's one that has been brought on them by groups like Hamas who do not want a settlement in this war.
Douglas Murray, so powerful to talk to you there on the Gaza border.
Gaza Could Have Been Singapore 00:07:17
And I'm glad that you came through what was a pretty scary moment in the middle of that interview.
And I appreciate you coming back and continuing the interview as if nothing had happened.
Quite remarkable to witness, I have to say, from the safety of my London studio.
But I do appreciate it and stay safe out there.
Will do.
Very good to see you, Piers.
Thanks, Douglas.
Welcome back to Piers Morgan on censor.
Political fallout from the Israel war is sowing division on both sides of the Atlantic here in the UK.
Labour MP Imran Hussein has quit the shadow cabinet because his leader Sakir Starmer, quite possibly our next Prime Minister, won't back a ceasefire.
Democrats in the US are turning on President Biden over his support for Israel.
Republicans, meanwhile, are divided on how far the US should go to back its ally and whether funding should be tied to its aid for Ukraine.
To discuss all this, I'm joined by Republican Senator Ram Paul, author of the new book, Deception, The Great COVID Cover-Up.
Senator, great two, speak to you again.
It's been a while.
Great to see you, Pierce, and I'm glad you're uncensored now.
I guess we can say anything we want, right?
You can absolutely say whatever you want, and you will not be edited, Senators.
Are you far away?
I want to start.
We've just been discussing on the show with Douglas Murray these protests and in particular a mass protest plan for London on Saturday on Armistice Day, Veterans Day, of course, in America.
And a huge debate has erupted about whether this march should be banned.
It's now been decided by the Metropolitan Police.
It will go ahead.
The organizers have said they won't go near the cenotaph.
The Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak, has said he's very against this march, but he also understands that free speech means that they're entitled to do it, even if we find it distasteful.
What do you think of this?
You know, I think the answer to despicable speech or speech you disagree with is more speech.
I think combating ugly things with better ideas and with useful arguments is much better than banning speech.
Now, there are some parameters, though.
I mean, you can't in the United States, you can't say we're going to go shoot up a school or we're going to blow up a military base.
There are things you can't say.
But for the most part, if you're going to stand up and say, we think the Palestinians are deprived and in despair and we think it's Israelis' fault, one, that's not anti-Semitism.
That's a political point of view.
It's a point of view I disagree with, but I would never want to censor it because that's not the kind of country I want to live in.
And I already have complaints in my own country about censoring speech with regard to the ideas that I put forward in my book.
Right.
I'm going to come to that because you're right.
I mean, I think a lot of censorship went on during the COVID pandemic.
And I'm not entirely blameless myself, actually, in terms of the way I conducted that debate early on.
Let me talk to you first about Israel and this war with Hamas.
A lot of debate, again, about where the line is in terms of proportionality.
Do you think there is a line in terms of Israel's response?
I'm afraid you froze up there.
If we could repeat the question for you, please.
My apologies.
I'll ask you again.
Let me start by asking you about Israel and this war with Hamas.
A lot of debate raging about what is a proportionate response by Israel.
Many people saying on the Israeli side, they don't think there should be any proportion to the response.
They should do whatever it takes to get rid of Hamas.
Where do you sit on this debate?
You know, I was horrified to see the kids at the concert killed.
I have three boys that have all gone to music concerts in the U.S.
And I can't imagine people showing up in jeeps with automatic weapons and just mowing down innocent, unarmed people, going house to house, killing women, children, mothers, fathers.
So just the horror of the senseless violence that came from Hamas.
I think there's a difference also in that Hamas targeted civilians.
Now, there is some question of the civilians who do die and will die in Gaza.
What are the repercussions of that?
I don't fault Israel for saying we've got to wipe out this menace, Hamas, and we can't live this way with them killing our civilians.
I don't in any way condemn that.
But there is a point at which the incidental or accidental killing of civilians in the incursion into Gaza will backfire.
This has been the same thing that I've pointed out throughout the world.
When we drone some goat herder in Africa, do we get rid of terrorism or do we make all of his family angry enough to become terrorists themselves?
So there is that.
I also think that someone has to be saying over and over again, what would come with peace?
What would come with the Palestinians choosing to absolve and to denounce violence and to recognize Israel?
What kind of prosperity would come from that?
I don't think we say that enough because I think in saying that, there may well be some Palestinians somewhere that are listening in Gaza or the West Bank that say, I want to be that leader that brings peace to my community and prosperity to Gaza by renouncing violence.
But I don't think we say enough what would come, the good things that would come by renouncing violence.
Yeah, I mean, Prime Minister Netanyahu has now come out and said that he sees Israel indefinitely occupying Gaza at the end of this war.
But that seems to me to be probably the very worst thing he should be saying if he wants to bring Palestinians to a place of any hope at the end of this.
Yeah, you know, Israel has to decide what they have to decide for their own security.
But there is a downside to an occupation.
There's a downside to remaining there because the question is how much of the Palestinian people in Gaza are with Hamas and how much are not?
Will a long-term occupation convince more people who are not yet aligned with Hamas to become aligned with Hamas?
All these questions have to be sorted through.
And none of this is to say they can't and shouldn't defend themselves, but there are actions and reactions.
You know, for every action, there's a reaction.
And so you have to think these things through.
And I think while that's going on, still someone needs to be dangling the carrot of, you know, if they were to renounce violence in Gaza, think of all the Gulf sheikhdoms around them, Saudi Arabia and all the very wealthy countries that could help them, but they've been prevented from helping them because the worry is that there'll be missiles and bombs and they shoot missiles into Israel.
If that could stop and there could be a legitimate authority in Gaza, you know, I think the possibility for prosperity way, you know, unimaginably beyond where we are now and to get rid of the despair and poverty would be something that maybe we can find reasonable people that that will appeal to.
There's a lot of debate over here and indeed everywhere outside of America about your presidential race.
You've not endorsed any of the Republican candidates yet.
You've seen a number of them.
You know, people outside of America are looking at America and going, is this really the best you can do?
Scientists Fear Death Wish 00:03:36
A rematch of Trump Biden, one guy in his 80s who can barely string a sentence together, another one facing 100 criminal indictments.
It's like, is that it?
What do you say to that?
Well, you know, I haven't endorsed yet because I haven't decided yet whether I'm going to run or not.
You know, I ran in 2016.
Maybe I should throw my hat in.
I don't think it's going that great for everybody else.
And nobody seems to be coming forward.
Trump still seems to be getting more votes than all the rest combined.
So maybe they need somebody new in the race.
That's kidding for the most part.
I do think that the race of Biden versus Trump, there are a lot of people who think they'd like another choice.
But right now, I think that's what the choices will be.
And who do you think will win if it is Trump Biden?
Well, I think the extraordinary thing is the more that they've indicted Trump and the more that these prosecutions are seen as persecutions and is seen as where they go back and change the law because statute of limitations expired years ago and they changed the law just to prosecute him.
It's done by political DAs who are campaigning on the fact that they're going after Trump.
It's only brought his numbers up.
And there was a poll recently that had Trump ahead in five battleground states.
So I think that it's difficult to imagine Trump winning, but it's also difficult to imagine anything more unfair they could do to him.
And also how pitiful the performance of Biden has been and how frail and detached that he looks in doing his job that it worries people that he's still able and has enough vim and vigor to actually be the president.
Right.
Let's turn to your book, Deception, The Great COVID Cover-Up.
This is all about, of course, the coronavirus pandemic.
At the heart of your book, you believe there was a great deception, not just on the American people, but actually on the world.
There's probably never been more actual factual data to show a deception in this case than any other.
We have a treasure trove of hundreds and hundreds of private emails where Anthony Fauci and the scientists around him say, my goodness, the virus looks manipulated.
My goodness, we know they're doing gain of function research in that lab.
And yet publicly, they were saying the opposite.
It became so bad that it actually intersects with the question of censorship.
For over a year and a half, Facebook took down any mention that the virus might have come from the lab.
In public, Anthony Fauci said, how dare you?
The NIH has never, ever funded gain of function research in Wuhan.
But it turns out in private, he readily was acknowledging that, yes, they had funded it.
And yes, it did look like the most likely explanation was that it came from the lab.
Meanwhile, the public journals that he commissioned, the scientists that were on his payroll to write these articles were saying, no way, you're crazy or it's a conspiracy theory if you believe this.
But I would say now that it's sort of evenly split in the scientific community, if not trending in the direction of believing that the evidence indicates that it came from the lab.
Are we any better prepared as a world for another pandemic, do you think?
No, because the best thing we can do is prevention.
Once the pandemic comes out, I don't think anything that we did short of the vaccine altered the course of the disease.
And in some ways, since the vaccine didn't stop transmission, I think it helped reduce death in the targeted population, but didn't reduce transmission.
But as far as prevention, we could quit creating these super viruses.
Think about it.
There are scientists who say, well, Ebola, it's really deadly to study it.
Prevention Over Super Viruses 00:00:48
Why don't we see if we can make it aerosolized and transmittable through the air?
There are scientists that believe that that's sort of a death wish.
That's sort of a gamble with civilization.
Ebola kills 50% of the people, but it's transmitted more like AIDS through bodily fluids.
And so it's not as contagious as going through the air.
What world would we want the tax dollars, the government tax dollars, to be going towards trying to aerosolize a virus that is deadly?
Well, Senator Paul, you ask a lot of questions like that in your book, as you have done indeed, as a senator in the last few years.
And it's been very impressive to watch.
You'd make a great investigative journalist.
So if you ever want a new job, come and join Piers Morgan on Sassid.
But for now, thank you for coming on the show, and I really appreciate it.
Thank you.
That's it from me.
Whatever you're up to, keep it uncensored.
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