Piers Morgan Uncensored examines the UK's failed Rwanda plan and Suella Braverman's resignation before shifting to Gaza, where Mark Regev defends Al-Shifa operations against Owen Jones's genocide allegations. The episode critiques campus culture, citing Harvard's low free speech scores and UCLA's "from the river to the sea" signs as evidence of radicalization via TikTok. Ultimately, the discussion argues that universities have abandoned civilized debate for censorship regimes that silence conservatives while pandering to fringe ideologies, replacing dialogue with attempts to destroy opposing viewpoints. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Rwanda Ruling Unlawful00:11:47
Well tonight on Piers Morgan on censor the UK's plan to send asylum seekers to Rwanda is ruled unlawful by the Supreme Court unanimously.
PM Rishi Sunak says he still hasn't given up.
Is it time though to forget this fiasco and take the migrant crisis seriously?
We'll debate.
Israeli forces enter the biggest hospital in Gaza claiming it's a terrorist command centre.
Hamas calls that a war crime.
I'll talk live to Mark Regev.
Labour faces a wave of resignations over its leaders refusing to call for a ceasefire in Gaza.
As tempests flare over anti-Semitism, a pro-Palestine protest and that Jeremy Corbyn interview, I'm joined with his uncensored debut by left-wing firebrand, his words not mine, Owen Jones.
Live from the news building in London, this is Piers Morgan uncensored.
Good evening from London.
Welcome to Piers Morgan Uncensored.
The government's plan to send asylum seekers to Rwanda was the headline grabbing centrepiece of its plan to fix Britain's migrant crisis.
Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has made stopping the small boats crossing the channel one of his five pledges to the British people, the test by which he wants to be measured at the next election.
Well, Saxuela Braverman even said it was her dream to see migrants deported to Rwanda.
Now, like the Monty Python parrot sketch, the government says that dream is just resting.
Well, bad news.
This parrot is no more.
It has ceased to be.
It's expired and gone to meet its makeup.
This is a late parrot.
It's a stiff.
Bereft of life.
It rests in peace.
Couldn't it put it better myself, Kleasy?
The Rwanda plan is as dead as Suella Braverman's career as Home Secretary.
And it's time for the government to move on.
The bottom line with this is it was never going to work.
I said that at the time, I've said it throughout.
And I'm saying it again when the Supreme Court has also basically agreed.
Tens of thousands of people are crossing the Channel illegally every year.
When they get here, they enter a broken and chaotic system beset by chronic, unforgivably large backlogs.
Sending a tiny handful of people to Rwanda at vast public expense was never either practical or a humane solution.
Now the Supreme Court has reiterated that it's illegal.
Genuine asylum seekers would face the serious risk of ending up back in the country they escaped from.
So far the government has given £140 million of our money to Rwanda in exchange for precisely nothing.
So it's all an embarrassing fiasco for Rishi Sunak, his government and the country.
And the only person benefiting from all that is Sakir Starmer.
His Rwanda scheme, cooked up with his national security threat home secretary, has blown up.
He was told over and over again that this would happen, that it wouldn't work and it was just the latest Tory gimmick.
But he bet everything on it.
And now he's totally exposed.
The central pillar of his government has crumbled beneath him.
Does he want...
Well, plenty of people are lining up to argue that this is some kind of affront to democracy.
Newspaper columnist, I think that's what he is now, Boris Johnson, called it a legal blockade on Rwanda, which is obviously absurd.
Now some Conservatives are clamouring for the UK to exit the European Convention on Human Rights or just ignore the Supreme Court altogether.
Yes, Lee Anderson, who's at the moment the deputy chairman of the Conservative Party, the Party of Law and Order, called on the Prime Minister to brazenly break the law and put planes in the air now.
That's exactly the kind of careless, brainless, and heartless thinking that got us into this mess.
But you can see more of that on GB News when Mr. Anderson has a show.
The UK does have a migrant crisis.
The numbers speak for themselves.
Rwanda, though, is always a distraction, not a solution.
Now it's time for the government to put its time and money into finding an actual solution that works.
Well, with me in the studios, talk to Vis International Editor, Isabel Oakshot, Associate Editor of Mirror, Kevin Maguire, and talk-to-v contributor Esther Kraku.
Welcome to all of you.
All right, Isabel.
It's dead as dead as a doornail.
It's pushing up the daisies.
It's an ex-parrot, this deal.
It is a complete ex-parrot.
It should never have been a parrot in the first place.
I mean, gimmicks would work if it's a symbolic thing that you can actually make happen.
But it was blindingly obvious from the start that there were never going to be a lot of deportations to Rwanda.
You didn't need to go through this agonizing and incredibly expensive and time-wasting process to tell us that.
And, you know, hats off to Rishi Sunai for attempting to make it look like he had a plan, you know, that he was seizing the initiative, that he was not to be deterred by this Supreme Court because big wows were going to come up with some emergency legislation, which will then itself be challenged again and again.
Well, they haven't got time.
I mean, Esther, here's the point.
There's a ticking clock, right?
He's only got a year till he has to call an election.
They're never going to get what they need to do to even get this back on the table in time.
So this is dead for this government anyway.
What do you make of this?
I mean, the problem is, at the root of this, is a real problem.
You know, the small boats issue is not something that is a small problem.
It's something that enrages the British public, that tens of thousands of people come in here illegally, brought here by unscrupulous, greedy smugglers who don't care if the people they bring over live or die.
It's a humanitarian crisis in that regard.
It's a ridiculous farce that our country's border is so transparently porous, they keep wanting to pour in.
And at the root of it is a system that just doesn't work.
30,000 people on the asylum backlog.
Why can't we just do the basics?
It's waiting.
Just a little bit of a turn.
It's 130,000 plus.
130,000.
130,000 people on the waiting list, right?
I mean, this is ridiculous for a country like ours.
Well, of course, but the question is, what exactly is the government supposed to do about that?
You can't turn them back.
I mean, you actually can't.
They're not doing it.
That's the point.
This is the issue here.
This is an existential crisis for the Conservative Party because it goes against every principle.
It goes against law and order.
It goes against fairness and meritocracy.
At the end of the day, the amount of money we spend on these book crossings is more than the budget for homelessness in the UK.
You two are both conservatives, right?
You identify as conservatives.
And yet you're both instinctively very hostile about this.
Well, because the answer is simple.
They aren't so simple.
Turn them away.
Refuse their asylum.
Okay, I'm not going to say that.
I'm not hostile to the Rwanda.
We're hostile to the situation because at the end of the day, these people are not genuine asylum seekers.
They're mostly able-bodied men, economic migrants, the people, our asylum systems, should be prioritising women and children who are at higher risk of sexual abuse and violence, sexual-based violence, are at the bottom of the list.
The number of people crossing in boats is 30,000 this year.
Last year, it was 45,000.
So it's coming down.
That's partly because the government's spending half a billion pounds with the French to stop the salines.
But the government's own figures.
The owner owns the government.
The government's own figures showed that Rwanda was going to cost £169,000 per head, which is £63,000 more than allowing people to stay here.
And that's before them to stay here.
If you allow them to work.
Isabel's right.
The reason for the falling number is mainly young male economic migrants from Albania.
But they're not going to...
Well, we've done a deal with the Albanian government and they're not coming.
But it pays, yes.
But there is the answer.
You do the deals with the government.
You stop the sailors.
Now, when people don't make it, when do people get it right away?
If that has worked so effectively, my question for Rishi Sunak is, well, go and do more deals like that.
Exactly.
And if the French should be obstinate, as they are, they don't want this problem on their hands, then you've got to try and do a deal that they will explain.
And the majority of the people...
But we've already sent them tens of millions.
I mean, enormous amounts of money, which have achieved the outcome.
The majority of people who do get here on boats are granted the right to stay because they're a liberal region.
Because they have legal rights.
The government is trying to use the channel as a motion.
Do you know part of these migrants or Indian students coming from Serbia because Serbia has a visa-free waiver with Indians?
They are not genuine asylum seekers.
No, let's contextualize it.
Since 2018, the population of Solihull have crossed the channel.
That's not right.
That is a silent state.
We can all agree it's wrong.
And clearly, if 15,000 fewer people are coming because of the Albanian economic migrants coming over, then that clearly is a problem as well.
But there will definitely be some legitimate asylum seekers and refugees, which, by the way, have come from countries that we bomb.
So we have a moral duty to take care of.
Well, we went there.
They went there.
They come here.
It's a backhanded compliment.
They want to come here, start a new life, work and pay.
You know who we have.
A moral duty to the women and children that they're leaving behind.
If they're in such a desperate situation, we can all agree it's an absolute horror story, right?
I'm not against it on principle, by the way, because I think that if we were actually able to do it, it would stop the flow of migrants.
I'm against it because it was flawed from the start, because we were never going to get it.
How would you fix it?
We would never get it.
I've made you Home Secretary tomorrow.
We've had six in six years, so let's assume your numbers are.
I would be working with the Ministry of Defence to turn back the boats.
Whatever the legal niceties, I would be turning back the boats.
It's been done in other countries.
Actually, Belgium is doing it.
And once you start turning them back, they will stop coming.
Right, because I remember Prittipatel said this.
The Royal Navy was, and the Royal Navy was deployed.
Royal Navy sailors are going to try and use their boat to push back a dinghy.
No, and they'll capsize it and people will die.
The Australian Germans have done this.
They deploy them.
The Australians have done this.
And we've consulted them.
Why can't we just do it?
The Australians, those boats are huge boats.
That doesn't make a difference.
It's a water-to-being bag.
If you tried to do the Australian system here, it would be ruled, quite rightly, unlawful.
Now, the Rwanda deal, it was a country, a country needs to be done.
It was cruel, it was unworkable, it was expensive, it's immoral.
It's the Australian thing.
It worked brilliantly.
There are no more boats going on.
Do you know what happens in those camps that they send them?
The levels of suicide and ill health.
Is that really?
That's on the people's own.
That's really what you want.
Is it excuse me?
Where are your humanities?
Suicides are on the ground.
There is the people hardly smuggling these individuals and taking money from them, not the governments, but defending their borders.
I'm sorry.
That's what a country means.
A country has borders.
By not having safe and legal routes.
There are safe people.
I mean, they're key on the bottom.
You are a business manager for the people smugglers.
You are sending people smugglers by turning them away.
The majority of people, once they cross in those boats, are given a legal right to go.
That doesn't mean they should be.
Exactly.
It means our system is broken if you've actually looked at the criteria by which their cases have judged.
They are ludicrous.
I think we could do ourselves a massive favor if we just started by processing the people faster.
I mean, the first thing I would do if I was James Cleverley is massively increase the number of people processing these applications.
Shifa Hospital Debate00:12:14
So at the very least you get that number right down.
They should be turned around within a week.
Yeah, exactly.
What's the point of processing?
They're just letting more people in.
They allowed the backlog to go over 170,000.
They are now putting more resources in it.
It's come down to 130,000.
But all this money we're spending at the moment on Rwanda, 150 million, put that into a more processing.
Yeah, unfortunately, it appears we've paid.
Do you do that?
No, I know.
They're not going to give it to you.
But we're going to keep spending money on Miss Folly, right?
Well, which is madness.
But do you know the difference between the EU acceptance rates for asylum seekers in the UK?
37% versus 77%.
There's a reason why when they're in the safe country of France, they choose to risk coming here.
Let me ask you this.
Isabel, how damaging...
I mean, it's been a fascinating week for Rishi Sinai.
He has to sack his home secretary, which I think was the right thing to do.
I think she defied his authority, and you can't have that as Prime Minister.
And she did it brazenly.
Then he woke up this morning to quite good news, right?
That he'd hit one of his five pledges.
Inflation has halved.
It's come down.
Well, it's come down.
But it's still going up.
Let's just remember a list of things.
But it's come down.
It's going up everywhere.
But it's come down a lot faster than was predicted.
That's a tick in his pledge box.
And yet he couldn't even celebrate that before this happened.
So it's been a turbulent week for him.
I think it's catastrophic, actually.
I think this is absolutely, as I said, this is existential.
I got the email, Dear Isabel, have you checked out our promises from the Chancellor saying, you know, great news, inflation is halved.
Yeah, I've checked out your promises.
One of the main ones was that you were going to stop the boats and you have abjectly failed to do that.
Well, they are.
I interviewed Rishi Sina.
He didn't say completely stop.
He said he would stop this.
Yeah, she had stopped the boats.
That was the slogan, but they have stopped a lot of the boats.
I mean, that's enough.
If you looked at the TNCs, it was he was going to pass legislation to stop.
It's not going to fall.
But he gave the impression he was going to stop the boats.
There's no government.
If Labour come in, they will not completely stop the boats.
Because even if you allow the people who are entitled to seek asylum in the UK to come through safe and legal routes, those who aren't finalizing does Rishi moving more to the centre-right and abandoning people like Swala Bravman on the more extremity of the right, is that going to be better for him at the election?
No, because what matters is him actually acting instead of moving whichever way he wants.
At the end of the day, he has acted.
No, not really, though, because he hasn't stopped working.
But inasmuch as I agree with a lot of Swala Bravman in what she said, I think she's a very unskilled, untalented politician.
I think she's very callous.
I think every time she was regressing.
Exactly.
She said something that made my skin crawl.
But the thing is, she's not homeless.
She's an amateur.
Well, the thing is...
They brought it on themselves, these people.
It's a lifestyle choice.
She was way out of her depth, and the government is better without her.
You know what?
It's what happened because she may be jobless, but that's a lifestyle choice.
Let's get her a tent.
Exactly.
Wouldn't that be ironic?
Thank you to my back.
Good to see you all.
And since the next is Israeli Defence Forces continue their raid at the Al-Shifa hospital in Gaza.
I'll be joined by a senior advisor to Prime Minister Netanyahu, Mark Regan.
I'll come back to Piers Morgan.
I said, my interview with Jeremy Corbing, which I repeatedly asked him 15 times or more, actually, if he believed Hamas is a terror group, made it to Prime Minister's questions today.
Prime Minister Rishi Sunak even said this while criticising Sakir Starmer.
But he talks about apologising.
He talks about the former member not being a Labour MP now.
Yes, he wasn't a Labour MP when he declined 15 different times to say that Hamas was a terrorist organisation this week, which is shameful.
But he was a Labour MP.
Indeed, the Honourable Gentleman served with him.
He told the country he would make a great prime minister.
At that point, he described Hamas of friends.
Does he want to apologise for that now?
Not a bad question.
Well, let's just have a little replay of Jeremy Corbyn's inability to answer two simple questions.
Are they a terror group?
Piers, can you say it?
Piers, can we have a discussion?
Can you say it?
Can we have a discussion?
Can you call them a terror group?
Can you call them a terror group?
Is it possible to have a rational discussion?
Are you prepared to call Hamas a terror group?
Is it possible to have a rational discussion?
You can't.
Is it possible?
Come on, answer that.
You can't, can you?
You answer it.
No, it's my show.
You answer my question.
Well, I'm going to be joined in a moment by the socialist commentator Owen Jones, making his eagerly awaited debut on Piers Morgan Uncensored.
But first of all, I'm going to go to Mark Regev, who's the senior advisor to Israel's Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, and a former ambassador to the United Kingdom.
Mr. Regev, thank you very much indeed for joining me.
I want to ask you specifically about the al-Shifa hospital and what is actually happening there, because the IDF have said they've gone in and they have proven that this was being used as a command center by Hamas.
Hamas say, no, they haven't.
This is actually what's been going on there as a war crime, a deliberate attack on a hospital.
I've got to say that so far, the evidence that the IDF has published in terms of videos and pictures and so on, I don't think it's overly compelling.
It doesn't look like to me like a command center.
It looks to me like a hospital which has got uniforms and some military hardware and some firearms and so on.
But it doesn't look to me like the central hub for Hamas in Gaza.
So patients, we'll be providing more information as it becomes available.
Not all the information we have at the moment we can make public, and I can understand why you want to see it.
But let's be clear, it's not just the government of Israel that says Hamas has a command and control and its military network underneath the hospital.
The US government said it two days ago, the Pentagon and the White House.
And the truth is that the people who live there in the region, in the city of Gaza, the Palestinians themselves there, it's the worst kept secret that Hamas has.
Everybody knows that Hamas has a military structure under the hospital.
I mean, the reason it's so important is, as you know, Article 19 of the Geneva Convention, which is what governs the way warfare is conducted, says the protection to which civilian hospitals are entitled shall not cease unless they're used to commit outside the humanitarian duties acts harmful to the enemy.
Protection may, however, cease only after due warning has been given, naming in all appropriate cases a reasonable time limit and after such warning has remained unheeded.
So is your position that Israel has meticulously stuck by the letter of that article of the Geneva Convention in relation to the al-Shifa hospital?
100%.
100%.
We've given adequate warning.
We've urged civilians to leave the area.
We've done so, I think three and a half weeks ago, we started asking civilians to leave.
And the truth is, Beers, the overwhelming majority of civilians have left.
Some 1 million people have left that area of northern Gaza, have heeded our advice, moved south out of harm's way, because we didn't want to see them caught up in the crossfire between the Israeli Defense Forces and the terrorists of Hamas.
What do you say to somebody like me who has spent six weeks now debating this, who believes October the 7th was one of the worst terror attacks of modern times?
That Israel absolutely has not only a right to defend itself, but a fundamental duty to its people to protect them, particularly given the Hamas spokesman last week said, we're going to try and do this again and again and again.
That is an existential threat to Israel.
I get that.
I believe Hamas has to be removed.
It cannot be removed peacefully.
Has to be removed militarily, in my estimation.
But the question then becomes: how much of the civilian casualties that we're seeing becomes too much, not just for Israel and any moral line that you may have here, but for the wider international community, which is already, as we're seeing in England today, there's been a big vote in parliament, many people resigning from the labor shadow bench because of what's going on and wanting a ceasefire.
What do you say to people like me that believe that you are right in principle, but that the execution of what is happening in Gaza is getting so bad that it borders on unjustified?
So, the first thing I would argue is it's crucial that we get rid of Hamas.
We saw the sort of violence Hamas is capable of inflicting upon innocent civilians.
You yourself just said the October 7th was horrific and brutal, and it's clear that we cannot tolerate the continued existence of this terror enclave on our southern frontier.
Israeli parents should not have to live in fear of terrorists crossing the border in the middle of the night and murdering their children.
So, getting rid of the Hamas is the aim.
Now, if it was possible to send a letter to the Secretary General of the United Nations and say, please demilitarize Gaza and get rid of Hamas, I'd like to do it that way to be easier for everyone.
But that's just not a realistic option.
We have to send our troops in and we have to dismantle through a military conflict the Hamas's military machine.
There's no alternative.
If you have another alternative, I'm happy to hear it.
Now, we've made maximum efforts to reduce the numbers of civilian casualties.
We really have tried.
It's very difficult because Hamas has embedded itself, as we see with the hospital, inside civilian structures.
It uses Gaza's civilians as a human shield.
Nonetheless, because of our warnings, some one million northern Gazans have fled the northern Gaza Strip, moved to the south, which is safer than the north.
And we are still making a maximum effort today to distinguish between those civilians who've remained, who are not our target, and the Hamas terrorists.
But Piers, you've been around.
You know that there hasn't been a war in modern history where civilians haven't been caught up in crossfire.
No, no, no, no, that is true.
Here's what I would say to that.
Here's what I would say.
I heard Jeremy Bowen, the BBC's Middle East editor today, saying he hasn't seen devastation of the kind that's happened in Gaza, which he's now witnessed, since Aleppo after the Russians had been in.
And that was apocalyptic.
And I guess my question for you is: yeah, you've persuaded a million Gazans to head south.
What are they coming back to?
Everything that they had is being disintegrated.
It's just being vaporized.
There's nothing left for these people to come back to, is there?
I agree.
And it's clear that when this is over, Gaza will have to become demilitarized, de-radicalized, and rebuilt.
And ultimately, though I know it's very difficult for the civilian population of Gaza who are going through what is a traumatic experience, they're going through a war.
It's not easy, I understand that.
But ultimately, when this is over, it will be better for them too.
What has 16 years of Hamas rule brought the people of Gaza?
Bloodshed, suffering, impoverishment?
Hamas has nothing to show for its time in government except for those bad things.
The people of Gaza also deserve better than the current dictatorial terrorist regime that has ruled them.
I mean, a final question I would have for you is simply this: is that Gaza has an extremely high percentage of population are children.
These scenes of thousands of kids and babies being killed on an hourly basis are obviously horrific.
How do you know that what you're doing with this war is not just instinctively to me creating, as many people fear, Elon Musk touched on this and others, just radicalizing a whole new generation of people who've seen their young brothers, sisters and so on killed in this offensive.
Do you not worry that you're just creating a whole new problem down the line of a newly radicalized Gaza?
Genocide and Collective Punishment00:10:53
Could I offer, with your permission, a counter-argument?
And that is exactly the opposite will happen.
That the people of Gaza will see that the path of violence and terrorism and brutality, that is Hamas, will be totally discredited.
It'll be discredited.
They'll understand that the path of extremism hurts them more than it hurts us, that it's a dead end.
And that that will create space once we've defeated Hamas and its whole ideology has been discredited.
That'll create space for more moderate and pragmatic voices to fill the void.
And that's good for the future.
Mark Regev, I hope you're right.
Thank you for joining me.
I appreciate it.
Thanks for having me.
Well, on Saturday next tonight, socialist commentator and outspoken man of the left, Owen Jones joins me live in the studio for his uncensored debut.
He's been listening intently to that last interview.
I'm sure he'll have some strong views.
We'll find out after the break.
Join me now as the socialist commentator, Owen Jones.
Owen, if you're sitting there patiently, your response to Mark Regev.
A grotesque inversion of reality.
I mean, the thing about Israeli spokesperson like that is if I was told the sky was blue, I'd go out the window and check just to be sure.
What did he say this wrong?
For one thing, talking about the hospital being used as a terror base.
Now, let's just bear in mind that Israel's spokespeople have a long track record of lying through their back teeth.
When they shot in the head, for example, Shireen Abu Akli, they said for months and months and months it was Palestinian gunmen.
It wasn't.
They shot her in the head.
James Miller, a brilliant British documentary work filmmaker, shot dead 2002 by the Israelis.
Years later, of course, you wouldn't believe Hamas and their version of events either, would you?
Well, that's why I depend on what aid agencies of the United Nations are saying on the ground, which is that collective punishment is being unleashed against the Palestinian people.
I mean, look, we can see already the evidence they've been unveiling for what they said was a terror hub, including showing CDs and a computer.
What they've done to that hospital is firstly, because they cut off energy in a total siege, which they justified by saying they were fighting human animals, which should be considered genocidal rhetoric, has been condemned as such.
Well, it should certainly be condemned, and they should not have the ability, Israel, to cut off water power because it's a good thing.
That is collective punishment.
Well, just agree.
Can we agree?
Under Article 33, that's against the law.
It's a war crime.
Can we agree?
I think we should have some consensus.
I would argue you're heading towards collective punishment when you do that.
You're not heading towards collective punishment when you cut off energy or water to the insights of any population.
To play devil's advocate and to give their side of it, which I've heard repeatedly, take the issue of fuel.
They want to try and get fuel in the Israelis, as they've said, to the hospitals, to the humanitarian side of this.
But they know that Hamas are taking that fuel and using it for their military.
The hospital authorities, who should listen to, have rebutted those accusations.
What's happened here is babies right now are gasping for breath and suffocating.
We've had several nurses and patients shot dead.
In fact, this whole hospital has been described by medical staff as a mortuary.
But you don't know.
When a hospital, just quickly, when a hospital becomes a mass grave, when dozens of decomposing bodies have to be buried in a mass grave in a hospital, we're talking what you said, can I just quote something you said about Putin?
And I think this is very wise.
You said in March 2022, I'm seeing a genocidal monster killing women and babies in maternity hospitals as you sit back and let them do it.
Why was it so disgraceful?
But you were right.
You were right to...
Here's the difference.
Why when you see this hospital, is there not the same fury?
Let me explain.
Because the two are, in my opinion, morally very different.
In one case, Vladimir Putin's illegal invasion of Ukraine, he was committing war crimes, having illegally invaded the...
Wait a second, let me finish.
Having invaded a sovereign democratic country.
Here, it was Israel that was invaded by a vast number of terrorists who murdered over 1,500 innocent men, women, children.
They kidnapped 240 people, including babies, children, Holocaust of those.
So my point is, morally, there is a massive difference.
Hold on.
Morally, it's a massive difference.
Now, the question of the hospital, the question of the hospitals is this to me.
They have so far produced some evidence of Hamas operating inside the hospital.
For me, so far, as a journalist trying to be fair and impartial, I don't think, as you've heard me say to Mark Reggae, I don't think I've seen enough evidence here, which says to me this was a sprawling.
But there is a moral difference between what Putin's doing in Ukraine and what Israel's doing to defend itself against Hamas.
Isn't there?
Hold on.
Isn't there?
No, absolutely.
No, sorry, this is the difference, okay, if you want to talk about that or trying to separate them.
For a Ukrainian ordinary civilian being killed or an ordinary Palestinian child being killed.
Both equally ordinary.
None of them did anything wrong.
Do you agree on that, don't you?
Yes, we absolutely agree.
Yes, we do.
Now, when you repeatedly denounce Putin for his genocidal behavior in Ukraine, do you stand by that?
Do you think that's a genocide?
Absolutely.
Well, it doesn't matter what the basis for what the opposite is.
Of course it does.
No, it does.
No, no, no.
Pierce, in terms of what actually is happening, we can talk about the massacre, the obscene massacre of a thousand people.
What Israel's doing in the middle of the massive mission is Pierce.
Concentration of the Spirit.
Let's talk about genocide.
Let's talk about genocide.
Why is it?
Let me tell you the difference between genocide.
Let me put something to you, and you come back at me and tell me if I'm wrong.
Hamas, from its charter onwards, and from the spokesman said last week, is dedicated to the eradication of Israel and killing as many Jews as it can possibly kill.
That is the purest definition of genocide intent that you will ever see.
And they executed it on October the 7th as best they could.
Now, what Israel's doing in response, and they've been very firm about this, and the international courts will rule that they're not.
These are very long questions.
They're not.
I'm answering a point and I'm putting one to you, right?
In my estimation, they are qualitatively different.
What Hamas is, what is publicly, what is it doing is genocide.
What Israel's doing is not genocide.
There's a difference between what Israel, you could say both Israel and Hamas have engaged in genocidal and murderous rhetoric.
No, no, I'll give you an example.
No, you can't.
Benjamin Netanyahu, you can't.
Why can't it?
Is it uncensored or not?
Let me quote what the Israeli authorities have said.
Benjamin Netanyahu, when he quoted Amalek, the scriptures, what does Amalek say?
He quotes Amalek when they attacked the Israelites.
And what God told the Israelites to do was to destroy every, kill every man, woman, child, and livestock.
If I would put it to you, an Islamist leader was quoting a similarly genocidal passage from the Quran, you would not, I would say, hesitate.
No, no, what we haven't just, no, but you haven't.
I'm going to respond just quickly.
Israeli officials said that Gaza will end up being a city of tents with no building standing.
That they are attacking for damage, not for accuracy.
The agricultural minister Avidipti, he said we are rolling out a new nakba.
A nakba is the mass expulsion, 700,000 Palestinians in 1948.
This is why hundreds of genocide scholars, people who are actually, unlike QRI, experts in the field of genocide studies, fear that a genocide is taking place.
The difference between Israel and Hamas is Hamas does not have the capacity to wipe out Israel.
Israel is wiping Gaza off the map.
But that's the point.
But that note.
You've actually exposed the weakness in your argument.
Israel does have the ability to kill everyone in Gaza tomorrow, and they're not doing it.
Well, hang on.
What they're doing, and it's indisputable, they are issuing a number of warnings repeatedly to people to go south, wait, and stay out of northern Gaza, right?
And then they're pulverizing it with airstrikes, and now they've gone in on the ground and they're waging battle with Hamas fighters, terrorists, right?
No, hang on, hang on.
So my point is this.
Israel could, if they wanted to, kill everyone in Gaza.
They've decided not to do that.
Genocide is where you want to kill everyone.
Sorry, sorry.
Your definition of genocide, because in Ukraine, Vladimir Putin hasn't killed every last Ukrainian.
That's simply not happened.
No, no, no.
No, he hasn't.
Nor has he stated his intention to do so.
And nor as brutal and actually, sorry, Vladimir Putin, to be killed.
Absolutely by illegally invading a sovereign country and indiscriminately bombing anything in front of him.
Indiscriminately bombing.
He's waging a sovereign genocide.
Wow.
Indiscriminate bombing.
Gaza.
More than two Hiroshima bombs worth have been dropped on East London in the space of five weeks.
Okay, let me ask you two.
No, you've said Ukraine.
No, I'm going to have to put this to you.
Okay.
15,000 people have now been killed now by the Israelis estimate in Gaza.
One in every 200 people in Gaza have now been killed.
If you were to adjust for population in Ukraine, that would be 300,000 Ukrainian civilians.
300,000, there's been a terrible death toll.
It's estimated by the UN.
10,000 civilians have been killed since February last year.
In the space of five weeks, a country with a much, much smaller population has had a much higher debt, has had a death toll higher officially than that in Ukraine.
So how can it be?
How can it be that you call that genocide, but when you have nearly half the entire civilian death toll of the Bosnian war in a country which is twice the size in terms of population, why isn't that genocide this?
Well, I've just answered your question by saying if Israel wanted to commit genocide, they would simply vaporize.
So would Russia.
They would vaporize.
So Russia, they would nuke Ukraine.
Russia wants to take over Ukraine.
Yes, and they want to take over Gaza.
And it will kill any number of Ukrainians, men, women, and children in that process.
The death rate in Gaza is much higher.
Hang on higher.
The only reason it hasn't is that actually Ukraine has a large military supported by countries like the United States and is putting out a fight.
Russia has nuclear weapons.
And by the way, Ukraine gave theirs up.
Russia has an armed force.
Let me ask you.
No, no, you've got to accept this.
Hang on.
No, no.
I'm going to tell you.
There's a far lower death rate in Ukraine.
As abominable as you haven't explained why.
Yes, I have.
Let me face it.
Israel have made it clear.
You didn't hear me.
Israel have made it clear that Ukraine intend to occupy Gaza permanently.
Which they should not be allowed to do.
And what did they do?
We're going to agree on that.
What did the Israeli ministry leaped intelligently?
What did the intelligence go?
Sorry, it's my interview of you.
I know, but not your interview of me.
Well, I think he helped me.
Let me answer you.
Let me answer you.
Well, let me ask you two questions, which I asked Jeremy Corbyn.
Sure.
He's off the table.
Roots of Radicalization00:05:32
Do you believe Hamas is a terror group?
Yes, if you engage in violence against civilian population, that's terrorism.
Don't do supplementaries.
Let me just ask you this.
Second question, which I asked him, and she couldn't answer.
Should Hamas remain in power?
If I could wave a magic wand, then no.
Obviously, there'd be an independent...
No, let me finish.
There'd be an independent Palestine, free of Israeli rule, with a secular democratic movement in power.
I agree with you.
When you courageously stood against the Iraq war, and you were courageous to do so.
What was the argument put against you?
That you wanted to keep Saddam Hussein in power even though he gassed his own people, the Kurds, and committed genocide, many would argue, that he had invaded his neighbor and that he had massacred the Shia when they rose up in 1991.
Now, your argument against that was that what could happen next would be far, far worse.
And you were right.
That wasn't my argument.
Well, that is...
But that is the argument.
Did you want to keep Saddam Hussein in power?
I'll tell you what my argument was.
I know what it was.
I was the editor of the paper that waged a campaign.
Did you want to remain in power?
I did not believe that they had produced any evidence that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.
I thought he had nothing to do with 9-11.
Therefore, we were waging a completely irrelevant war, which I thought would stir up absolute hell in the Middle East.
And you know what?
I was right.
And actually, most of the architects of that war now concede they were wrong.
It was a horror story from start to finish.
But what it did do is spark the rise of ISIS.
And what the world did with ISIS was say, this crosses a moral line.
We have to get rid of them.
And we went after ISIS in places like Iraq and Syria and other countries.
And in bombing the hell out of ISIS, a lot of civilians were not.
You just skipped a lot of very important history.
Wait a minute.
No, no, that's not what happened.
Well, that is what happened.
No, that's not what happened.
One of the consequences of the Iraq war was that ISIS became a very powerful, for a short period of time, global terror force committing atrocity.
Can I just correct you?
But in wiping out ISIS pretty effectively, we also killed a lot of civilians.
No, what actually happened?
What's the moral difference between that and what Israel's doing?
You just revised history.
We were told that al-Qaeda was perhaps in league with Saddam Hussein.
That was one of the justifications of invading.
What actually happened after the invasion was that it became a playground for al-Qaeda, who you've missed out, I've noticed.
No, And what's talking about?
We know about al-Qaeda.
I'm talking about ISIS.
What happened, for example, is Fallujah, the city of Fallujah in Iraq.
The Americans went in and they massacred people protests against their rule.
And many of those Sunni populations ended up driven into the arms of Al-Qaeda.
A brutal counterinsurgency program then resulted in resulting in mass slaughter of innocent Sunni civilians.
And from that fury and anger, something even worse than al-Qaeda emerged.
Just as... ISIS.
Yes.
Do you agree?
No, I'm saying that that's exactly what we're doing.
I didn't give every detail of the journey.
No, Out of the Iraq.
You've misunderstood.
You've misunderstood.
They engaged in a brutal counter-insurgency offensive against al-Qaeda and that caused something worse to emerge.
Just as in Afghanistan, just as Afghanistan, we had two decades of occupation.
Let me, listen, we're running out of time.
Two decades of occupation, and the Taliban emerged stronger than ever.
The same applies to both what happened in Iraq and Afghanistan.
It seems to me.
Because if you brutalize a population, you will turn them into terrorists.
Stop talking.
Or extremists.
Let's drive them to their arms.
You make a lot of good points.
I agree with a lot of things you say, right?
Always have done, actually.
I find the way you say them, as you do with me, quite annoying.
But that's fine.
You're allowed to, and we're uncensored.
Come back.
I want to end, if I can, with some kind of...
Look, we've agreed.
Hamas is a terror group.
We've agreed they have to go.
How do we actually get peace here?
Well, firstly, we have to deal with the underlying causes of what's driven the Palestinian people in the case of Gaza into the hands of Hamas, which is starting in 1948, the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian population in the Nakba was 700,000 driven from their homes, murderously, I might add.
And hundreds of thousands of Jews were driven from their homes before.
Not in Palestine.
Well, they were driven away from Arab countries.
Hold on.
They were driven away from Arab countries.
Yeah, from Palestine.
Jonathan Friedland wrote a very good piece about this.
You know what?
If you go into his...
There's just cause on both.
The Palestinians were driven from their homes, 700,000 of them.
And then we had the illegal settlements of colonization, including in the West Bank, where completely unremarked.
And I've already condemned legal settlements and as well as as Amnesty International, as Human Rights Watch and Betzalem describe it, the Israeli human rights organization, a system of apartheid.
But if you keep brutalizing the Palestinian people, ridding them of their freedom, and you end up now in Gaza with parents picking up the burned, dismembered remnants of their children, there will never be peace.
I agree.
What I would say to that is that on the Arab side, they have had multiple opportunities to do a peace deal, not least in 2000 with Arafat.
And he walked away.
What happened there?
Go on.
What were the concessions?
Well, the truth is, Bill Clinton, who helped, wait a minute, who helped forge peace in Northern Ireland brilliantly with Tony Blair and with the others involved there, that actually Arafat, they had peace in their grasp.
And as Bill Clinton said to him, I'm going to end up being a failure because of you and working on that.
Yeah, well, and that revision of history, again, not just for you of this program, but by Bill Clinton, because they demanded, for example, night land swaps for a ratio to run out of time.
Come back again.
I'd love to see you.
No, seriously, this conflict's not going away.
No, Sabbath.
It's going to continue raging the war.
I think you're an important voice in this.
We should keep talking about it.
Okay, we'll chat.
Good to see you.
See you.
Free Speech on Campuses00:06:15
Uncensored next tonight.
Conservative activist Charlie Kirk joins me live for his take on what we've just been discussing and on the state of universities.
How have they got so nuts?
I'll ask Charlie after the break.
Welcome back to Uncensored.
Now, tomorrow, another remarkable debate between two influential characters with vehemently opposing viewpoints, Rabbi Shmooli and Muhammad Hijab.
Well, here's a preview discussing a two-state solution.
If two-state solution is a Hamas state wanting to eviscerate Israel, he doesn't believe in it.
But he doesn't believe in a two-state solution.
He believes in a final solution.
No, I'm not really scared.
You don't believe in a two-state solution.
I'm going to believe in the final solution.
I'll ask you in the way.
When you speak about Jews from the final solution, it scares Jews.
I think it's fair to say it's probably the most ferocious debate we've ever had on Piers Morgan Uncensored, and that will be the show tomorrow night for the hour.
It's the kind of debate we need to be having, but you have to see how close we get to any kind of peace or agreement.
Well, for now, Conservative commentator Charlie Kirk says universities have become islands of totalitarianism in his new book.
It's called Bacoli's Scam, How America's Universities Are Bankrupting and Brainwashing Away the Future of America's Youth.
And Charlie Kirk joins me.
Charlie, good to see you.
This Israel-Palestine war and the debate that's raging around it, such passionate views on both sides.
Have we lost the ability to have civilized debate?
Probably.
I mean, on these campuses, it doesn't give you a lot of hope.
I'll tell you, I was just at UCLA last week, and many of the Palestinian forces are, they have signs that say from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free, which is basically coded language for the abolition of the state of Israel.
But look, part of why I wrote the book, The College Scam, is that we are seeing the erosion of Western values of free speech and dialogue and hearing the other side.
I have visited over 150 campuses in the last five years.
I'm not afraid of different ideas and to invite that kind of dialogue and discourse.
I think this Israel-Palestine issue is just the latest example in a variety of different ideas and topics where we see the most radical and fringe ideologies come out of these university campuses.
I mean, at Harvard University, which is considered to be the best school in America, 31 student organizations right after the terrible massacre against the Jewish people on Yom Kippur came out in favor of the Hamas activity.
In fact, some professors even said it was justified.
And another Ivy League professor said that it was a wonderful day and celebrated it.
So some of the most vile and disgusting ideas that we've seen come to the surface in the last month have a point of origination on college campuses, which is why I wrote the book, The College Scam.
And what's so extraordinary about that is the very same people who've been behaving in this way, effectively supporting a terror group, have gone out of their way to de-platform and shame and cancel anyone who, mainly on the right, it has to be on the conservative side, who've deviated from their worldview.
So free speech to them seems a very complex issue.
No, that's right.
And look, I mean, we have to be disciplined in how we advocate for dialogue and free speech.
And when I go to these college campuses, it's come very clear, and you see this now manifesting in some of the larger censorship regime that is taking over the West, that if a young student finds disagreement with a conservative or somebody on the right, they don't just find the ideas objectionable.
Some, in fact, a majority by a recent Pew poll, want to use force to try to silence and stifle and even censor those differing ideas.
Yeah, which is the complete antithesis of what going to universities should be about.
I mean, Harvard, that you referenced earlier, just came bottom on a study of free speech at American universities.
Bottom.
Almost registered zero, I think, or below zero.
In other words, it's the complete opposite of a home of free speech.
And yet you would hope and expect that someone like Harvard would be a place for all opinions to be discussed and debated and challenged.
But it appears to be the complete opposite, unless you're out there supporting Hamas.
Yes, that's right.
Well, it's been kind of ironic, Pierce, which for the last decade I've been arguing for free speech, arguing that conservatives should have a voice on campus.
And it's met with at best groans or opposition.
And now Students for Justice of Palestine and the pro-Hamas groups are the ones saying that we want to have full free speech, we want to have rights to speak publicly, we want to have our guests on campus, which again, I'm a free speech guy, so have at it.
But the administration has been very quick to pander to every possible demand of the most radical groups possible on campus when we conservatives have been asking for kind of equal and fair treatment over the last 10 years.
And it's worse than even the free speech debate, Pierce.
It's that these Jew hatred ideas find a philosophical and intellectual foundation at so many of these institutions.
I also think if you look at things like TikTok, for example, which obviously originates from China, which may have all sorts of vested interests, and kids, I think, under 21, it's their main news source.
And if you ask young people of their view of this war, for example, they skew massively pro-Palestinian because they've been bombarded all day long with very short, often woefully ill-informed takes on the war on TikTok.
And that's their only reference point.
No, that's exactly right.
And I would say that your dialogue recently with Douglas Murray was one of the most powerful that I've heard recently.
And if every young person could hear, you know, the conversation you had with Douglas Murray, I think they would have a different opinion.
But they look at almost everything through oppressor-oppressed dynamics.
And that is the kind of framing that is unfortunately pushed forward at many of these universities.
You know, in a way, what we've tried to do on this show since the war started is give a platform to both sides, if at all sides.
There are people with other views too, not just Douglas, but also people on the pro-Palestinian side and stuff.
And it's important to have that.
Breaking Oppressor Framing00:00:43
But I've got an interview tomorrow night.
It was a debate really between two people, Rabbi Shmooly and Mohamed Hijab.
And it just descended into one of the most ridiculous kind of punch-ups I've ever been involved with.
And that's the sadness of this.
Because you don't get anywhere, really, when you're just trying to kill each other, metaphorically or verbally.
I don't know if you can hear me there, Charlie, but don't worry.
We've run out of time.
We've run out of time.
The good news is you and I have just had a very civilized conversation, and I hope we can have it again.
Charlie Kurt, thank you very much indeed for joining me.