Piers Morgan moderates a heated debate between Dennis Prager and Reza Aslan regarding the Israel-Hamas conflict, U.S. foreign policy, and cultural divides. Prager attributes all Palestinian deaths to Hamas, comparing them to Nazis, while Aslan argues that ignoring legitimate grievances fuels terrorism and criticizes Netanyahu for blocking a two-state solution. They clash over Trump, with Aslan defending his 2019 "white nationalist" label and Prager accusing the left of destroying Western civilization through gender ideology and hormone blockers. Ultimately, both accuse each other of hypocrisy, suggesting their rhetorical battles threaten societal cohesion. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Gaza vs Northern Ireland00:14:47
This debate I'm joined by Prague U founder Dennis Prager and the author of a kid's book about Israel and Palestine.
Reza Aslan.
You don't know what you're talking about.
To morally conflate the two is a dick.
All right, I'll explain it.
I'm sorry.
I'm sorry.
You know this, Cheers.
Okay, good.
You're on.
That's what he said.
Roll the tape.
He said Palestinians.
This is a gigantic lie.
Good, I got you to admit it.
Your tweet was successful.
I mean, come on.
You're spouting ridiculous notions.
If you support a racist, you are a racist.
What is the end game?
What happens after the end of the war?
Jews do not kill innocent Palestinians and become heroes in Israel.
You need to go back and study your history, Mr. Prager.
Don't tell me what I should study.
Donald Trump is a racist, sexist, lecherous, fascist, sociopath, and pathological liar.
Are you really saying that 80 million Americans are white nationalist terrorism?
The West wishes to destroy Western civilization.
When this conversation's over, I'm going to continue my process of destroying Western civilization as you know it.
Russia and Iran have had a few key things in common.
They've stoked wars roiling Europe and the Middle East.
They're both sworn enemies of the West and they both found kinship with the rising power of China.
Some analysts are calling it a new axis of evil posing a grave threat to Western democracy.
Others claim that the threat is actually posed by a big blonde American in a red hat.
So who's right?
And how do we restore order to a world on fire?
This debate I'm joined by Prague U founder Dennis Prager and the author of a kid's book about Israel and Palestine, Reza Aslan, who's been debating these issues with me, well, for quite a long time.
Comes from these, out of these conflicts, it's more strengthened every time.
They want their children to be martyred so they could carry them out, show them to the international media.
It's a double war crime.
That's a ridiculous and cynical way of talking about what's going on here.
Why should Israel have to put up with just endless rockets being fired?
Israel is targeting as best they can only terrorists.
Now, the terrorists...
They killed a whole family of terrorists.
It is the government of Gaza.
It's not going anywhere no matter what anybody wants to do about it.
And the writer and scholar of religions, Reza Aslan, joins me now, along with Dennis Prager, host of the Dennis Prager show.
Well, Reza, great to see you again.
I got to say, it made me chuckle looking at that clip.
That's 12 years ago, nearly at CNN, end of 2012.
We could have had that conversation last week.
I mean, it's like time has stood still.
Even Alan Dershowitz looks pretty similar to the guy I've been debating with the last few months.
But also quite fascinating, isn't it?
That the debate around Israel and Hamas and security and the rest of it.
That's been raging a long, long time.
October the 7th didn't come in a vacuum.
Yeah, first of all, thanks for showing everybody how young I used to look.
I appreciate it.
And me, and me.
And you're right.
I mean, that's a conversation that we're still having.
In fact, I would go so far as to say that we are further away from any hope of a peaceful two-state solution than we were 12 years ago when we had that conversation.
It seems as though this cycle of violence that we are trapped in with Israel and Palestine is one that, if anything, is just getting worse and worse.
And we're becoming more and more inured to it.
We have thousands of deaths on both sides right now.
No end in sight to this conflict.
And just as in 2012, we have a U.S. government that seems to be kind of treading water.
We're having a very difficult time as the most powerful nation on earth, a nation that provides billions of dollars in military aid to Israel every year, actually dictating what we think is best for not just Israelis themselves, but for the wider region and for our own national security.
It is, frankly, a kind of a depressing thing when you think about it in the long term.
Dennis, we spoke last in January.
You said then genocide has been raped like the word racism has been raped.
Every decent term has been newted of its meaning by people on the left.
A lot more people are now using the word genocide about what is happening in Gaza.
Have you moved your position at all in relation to the proportionality of Israel's response?
The term has been denuded of its real meaning, as have so many others.
I just want to reflect, and I know Reza Aslan knows a good deal about this.
When Pakistan was formed, there had never been a Pakistan, whereas there have been two Israels prior to this.
This is the third Israel in that area.
The only independent states that ever existed in that area were Jewish states.
And the creation of Pakistan, which had never existed, resulted in 7 million refugees and over 1 million dead people.
There were about 10,000 Arabs that died when Israel was created, 10,000 versus 1 million.
Nobody gives a hoot about what happened there.
Nobody cares about the hundreds of thousands murdered when Bangladesh was formed out of Pakistan itself.
The reason people are using the term genocide is because it's Israel and there is a universal hatred on the left, not among liberals, not among conservatives, on the left, against Israel.
That is the reason the term has been denuded.
And this is a very bad precedent to set because people will no longer take the term seriously, just as they no longer take the term racism seriously.
Right.
And you sort of articulated that when we spoke in January, but my question was specifically whether your view of what's happening at the moment, whether what Israel is doing has now crossed the line.
You know, you've got the United States president, you've got Chuck Schumer, you've got others intimating they think this is enough and that Israel needs to stop just pounding the hell out of Gaza and killing people.
Chuck Schumer asked for Israel to have elections.
So the first thing to be said is I don't know when America has ever asked a democracy to change its government.
It may have, but I don't recall it in my lifetime.
Secondly, the opposition in Israel, the leftist opposition or liberal opposition, depending on the term you wish, has said, has announced, if we are in power, we will prosecute the war just as Netanyahu did.
And they loathe Netanyahu.
Right, but I'm asking what you think.
Yes, no, they have.
I attribute every death of a Palestinian to Hamas, just as I attribute every death of a German in World War II to the Nazis.
So you have no problem with the scale of what you're doing.
I have a problem, to be honest.
I have a problem even as a Jew.
And even though the Nazis created the Holocaust, I have a problem with all the civilian deaths in Germany.
Yes, and every decent human has a problem with the death of people who are not in the way of combat and even in the way of combat.
But it could end tomorrow, literally tomorrow.
Hamas resigns like Hitler and his henchmen resigned.
There will be peace.
And if they announce we accept the Jewish state, there will be peace.
There is no example in the modern world of a free country wanting war and a police state wanting peace.
Okay, Reza, you've been sort of laughing, I think, ironically about this.
First of all, what are you finding comical about that?
First of all, let's quickly fix Mr. Prager's history here.
Pakistan didn't just arise.
There was a partition of South Asia and a war between India and Pakistan that led to all those deaths on both sides.
And of course, our focus in the United States currently is on what's happening in Israel, not because I think we are signaling out Israel as opposed to other places in which horrific human rights violations are taking place, but very specifically because I and Mr. Prager and every American is paying for Israel's war in Gaza.
I am buying the bombs and the bullets that have thus far killed conservatively 30,000 Palestinian non-combatants in Gaza.
Nobody is pretending that Hamas is not responsible for this conflict.
The murder of 1,200 innocent Israelis was unconscionable.
But let's not pretend that Hamas is in charge of something that they could resign like the Palestinian authority could resign.
There is no government currently in Gaza.
Hamas is a non-state terror organization that is currently under siege and running for its life.
But even the Israeli military has come out and publicly contradicted Prime Minister Netanyahu to say that this idea that the goal of this conflict is to destroy Hamas is absurd.
You cannot just kill off Hamas.
Hamas breeds its fuel is the grievance, the very legitimate grievance of the Palestinian people.
Could you not have said addressing those grievances?
But Reza, just to jump in there, to Dennis's point, could you not have used that argument about the Nazis?
Could you not have said, look, you can kill as many as you want, but you won't kill the ideology.
And yet, the ideology...
The Nazis were the government.
The Nazis were the government of Germany.
Hamas is the government of Palestine.
They're not even the government of Gaza anymore.
There is no government in Gaza.
You know this.
I realize the reality.
I keep saying this all the time.
There was an election in 2006.
You're absolutely right.
There was an election in 2006, and Hamas won that election, and they were the government.
That was 18 years ago.
The idea that they are still the political entity, the bureaucratic entity in Gaza is absurd.
They're a non-state entity, a terror organization.
They unquestionably must be rooted out.
But everyone knows that you defeat terrorism not just through a military way, but through political ways.
You have to address the grievances that fuels terrorism.
And Netanyahu has not just said he has no intention of doing so.
He has repeatedly stated what we've always known about him for the last 16 years, which is that he will never allow any kind of political state to exist in the Palestinian territories.
And until something like that is on the table, I don't see why Hamas has any reason to discontinue its grotesque resistance.
Dennis, I mean, that's an interesting point because my problem about all this from the start has been, what is the end game?
What happens after the end of the war?
Most Israelis support the war, but they also, the vast majority, want Netanyahu gone when it's over.
They blame him for what happened on October the 7th.
And there's no doubt, the more we've unearthed about all this, that Netanyahu tacitly went along with Hamas having power because it suited him to have the two Palestinian groups, Palestinian Authority and Hamas, split in two.
He thought that was better for Israel's security.
It was proven to be a woefully ill-judged assessment.
And he helped fund them through Qatar and was happy for that to happen.
So Netanyahu has, I think, he's run his course, hasn't he?
I mean, whatever you think of the war and its validity, and you're right.
I think most Israelis, whoever was in power right now, would want to finish it.
But isn't Netanyahu done?
He may well be.
I don't know why that's germane to the discussion.
The larger macro discussion is that we have as clear a situation of good and evil as exists on earth today, as it existed in World War II.
The Nazi analogy, I have never used, and I've lived a long life.
I have never called any one or any group Nazi.
The only distinction I could find between Hamas and the Nazis is that Hamas publicized its butchery and the Nazis hit it.
That is literally the only difference I could find.
Both have announced that they desire to murder every Jew in their area.
For Hitler, it was Europe.
For Hamas, it is Israel.
And both go about it.
All the rockets that are sent over Israel are meant to murder as many Israelis as possible.
If Israel happens to have a way of stopping it.
But if Hamas had its way, already tens of thousands or millions of Israelis would be dead.
I don't understand why this is a debate.
Well, I take that back.
I do understand.
And that's why I use the Pakistan example.
How about this?
60,000, 60,000 Christians have been murdered by Muslims in West Africa.
I don't charge you or anyone because this is universal.
Have you had a show on it?
And it's not your fault.
No one cares because it's Muslims who killed those black Christians, not Jews.
Yeah, I mean, Reza, there's no doubt there has been a double standard applied to many conflicts around the world, where many seem to get no attention, others seem to get perhaps too much attention.
There's no consistency, certainly, to that.
I mean, coming back to your point about how this gets navigated through to any kind of settlement, is it too far past that point?
I mean, when I look at the comparison, say, with Northern Ireland, the difference there was you weren't seeing vast swathes of Northern Ireland destroyed in the way that Gaza has been basically razed to the ground in large sections of it.
There is nowhere for these people to go back home, for example, in the north of Gaza.
It's all pretty much flattened.
The Need for Political Solutions00:07:18
I just wonder whether you see this idea of a political solution.
We saw it with Northern Ireland, but they didn't have that to deal with.
Again.
Again, let's be clear.
It is absolutely true that tens of thousands of Christians have been murdered by Muslims in parts of sub-Saharan Africa.
It's true that tens of thousands of Muslims have been murdered by Buddhists in Myanmar.
There are horrible human rights violations taking place all across the world.
In one of them, we as a country are helping the human rights violations take place by arming the group that is actually slaughtering the innocent civilians.
That's why we pay attention to it.
Not because we're anti-Israel or because we're anti-Jewish.
We pay attention to it because we are intimately involved in it.
To this point of what comes next.
Look, I wish I could sit here and say that there is still a hope for a two-state solution, that there is a hope that we will have the political will both here in the United States and in Israel and Palestine to sit down together and figure out a way to have a safe and secure Israel live alongside an independent Palestinian state.
But Netanyahu has deliberately spent the last two decades making sure that that could never ever happen by swallowing up as much of the future Palestine as he possibly can.
As I often say, you can't negotiate about how to split a pizza when one side is eating the pizza.
So we are locked in this kind of no man's land right now.
The reason I wrote this kid's book for Israel and Palestine was not to present a solution to the conflict, but to say that there is a lesson to be learned in this conflict, and it's a lesson that I think we could learn in this conversation ourselves: that unless we are able to put aside our own biases and our own prejudices and to look at the argument of the other side,
to recognize that there are two absolutely legitimate national narratives here in this conflict, and that they both require servicing, that we have to have the empathy to understand that both sides have caused great harm and great suffering, and that until we can put that aside and move forward together, there will never be any hope for peace.
And this is something, by the way, that every Israeli and every Palestinian wants, regardless of their political affiliations or their religious affiliations.
All the people themselves want is to have human dignity and safety and security.
But our political leaders, both in the Palestinian side and the Israeli side, and here in the United States, frankly, on both the Republican and Democratic side, are so focused on how this conflict can serve their own needs that they've completely lost track of what the goal is.
And the goal is two peoples living side by side in dignity and in safety.
Dennis, can you actually argue with that point?
I mean, that seems to me a completely reasonable assessment.
Yes, I do argue with that point.
It's a completely reasonable assessment, isn't it?
No, it's not an accurate assessment.
It's a dream assessment.
It's Twilight Zone.
If the Palestinians really wanted peace with the Jewish state, they would have had it in 1948 and four other times after 1948.
Netanyahu or no Netanyahu, if Israelis and the Prime Minister.
You need to go back and study your history, Mr. Prager.
No, no, no.
I did study my history.
I was a fellow at the Middle East Institute at Columbia University and studied Russian and Arabic and Health.
So then you know what I should say.
So then you know Resolution 181.
Let me finish.
They rejected every peace offer's offer.
And Clinton said to Arafat, you blew it.
An offer was made at Camp David, and the Palestinians preferred to kill Israelis in buses and restaurants and bar mitzvahs than to have peace.
The day the Palestinians say a Jewish state is legitimate, there will be peace.
You live in a fantasy world, my friend.
Let me.
Do you see how Mr. Prager constantly says the Palestinians, the Palestinians, the Palestinians?
Have I said the Israelis, the Israelis, the Israelis?
This is the problem: Mr. Prager and those like him cannot stop dehumanizing Palestinians, six million Palestinians, by claiming them all as terrorists.
It is absolutely that Hamas is a terrorist.
He didn't say.
He didn't say that.
Palestinians chose.
I'm sorry.
I'm sorry.
The Palestinians chose to kill innocent Israelis.
That's what he said.
Roll the tape.
Well, Hamas are deliberately.
Hang on, hang on.
Hamas.
Hamas are deliberate rhetoric, Piers.
Well, Hamas are deliberate rhetoric.
No, no, Reza, Hamas are indisputably Palestinians.
Heroes of the West, and so are they are the biggest heroes in the West Bank.
Jews do not kill Israel.
So then we will discuss a moral distinction between Israel and its enemies.
That is true.
Are there wonderful Palestinians and despicable Israelis?
Of course.
But to morally conflate the two is a sin, is a moral grievance.
Thank you for very much for making a distinction between despicable Palestinians and regular Palestinians now, which you did not do before.
No one is saying that the price of Israel is not...
Even in the United States, you said America supports Israel who are slaughtering.
We do support Israel.
Our government supports Israel.
That's exactly right.
With billions of dollars in military aid with no conditions in violation of American law that forbids us from giving military aid when we don't know whether they're going to be used to violate human rights or not.
We ignore that law in order to give Israel $3 to $5 billion of aid.
And the difference between the way that you're speaking about it is that I'm not talking about the price tag terrorists, the Israeli price tag terrorists, who slaughter Palestinian women and children.
I don't say Israel slaughters Palestinian children.
Israelis do that.
Rhetoric matters.
And again, we could have this conversation about history.
We could talk about UN 181 if you want to and why the Palestinians refused it.
They made up two-thirds of the population and were given half of the land.
We can talk about 242 if you want to, but what does that do for now?
Stop looking to the past to try to fix the problem of the present.
The problem of the present is pretty clearly defined as it is right now.
And we can't even continue this conversation until we just stop the wanton slaughter.
Yes, the problem of the present is that most Palestinians support the group called Hamas that wishes to kill every Jew in Israel.
That is the problem.
And if they change their minds, there will be peace.
I don't know why that is a complex issue for you.
Well, because it's false.
That's why.
Defining Terror Supporters00:04:45
Because you're just spouting it.
Yes, you're spouting ridiculous notions that 6 million Palestinians support the slaughter of Israel.
What the 6 million Palestinians support is opposition to an illegal occupation that has made life for all Palestinians, regardless of whether they live in Gaza or the West Bank or in Israel.
A dehumanistic expansion.
Okay, look, let me just pivot slightly, which is you mentioned rhetoric, Reza.
And in 2019, you tweeted this about Donald Trump, who's now, of course, a Republican nominee again to be president.
The president's a white nationalist terror leader.
His supporters, all of them, are by definition white nationalist terror supporters.
The MAGA hat is a KKK hood, and his evil racist scourge must be eradicated from society.
I mean, on reflection, do you regret that tweet?
You know, first of all, let me say I regret every tweet I've ever made, which is why I've given up on Twitter for now 14 months.
Twitter is a cesspool, and I wish I had never been on it.
The tweet is a cesspool.
Your tweet was a cesspool.
Twitter is a cesspool as far as I'm concerned.
But let me just make one thing.
The president of the United States, The former president of the United States, Donald Trump, is demonstrably and objectively a racist, sexist, lecherist, fascist,
sociopath, and pathological liar who has dehumanized his political opponents, who's called his political opponents vermin, who has called immigrants, undocumented immigrants into this country not people, and who has literally quoted Hitler.
Hitler, Mr. Preger, literally quoted Hitler by talking about the poisoning of the blood of our nation.
His followers, his MAGA followers, have made it very clear, objectively so, that their loyalty is not to the Constitution or to the democracy of this country, but to you're calling effectively.
I mean, nearly 80 million people voted for Trump in 2020.
That was nearly 10 million more than voted for him in 2016.
So a lot of people in America vehemently disagree with you.
Are you really saying, as he said, a lot of reasons to vote for Donald?
Are you really saying that 80 million Americans are white nationalist terror supporters?
No, that's not what I'm saying.
I'm talking about the MAGA his mission.
You said his supporters all of a sudden...
You've asked me a question.
You've asked me...
Right.
His supporters answered.
I'm trying to answer it.
Okay, let me be accurate.
You said his supporters, all of them, are by definition white nationalist terror supporters.
I should have said his MAGA supporters.
We have a better term for it now than we did in 2019.
That's who I was referring to.
And that I 100% stand by.
If you support a racist, you are a racist.
You support racism.
If you support a fascist, you support fascism.
This is not complicated.
And on your using the rest of the world, I will come to very much.
I'll come to Dennis in one moment.
I'm just curious, Reza, because you really were very reactionary when you thought Dennis was basically calling Palestinians as a group, inferring that they were all to blame for what's happening over there.
And yet you were very quick to blame all Trump supporters and brandish them in the same way.
Is there an inconsistency there?
First of all, I'm not talking about Trump supporters as slaughtering innocent people, but I am making it very clear, and I don't apologize.
Well, you say white nationalist terror supporters.
Donald Trump.
Donald Trump is a white nationalist.
He is a supporter of white national terrorism, which is why he wants to completely forgive and pardon all of the J6 supporters who are in prison for insurrection and for violently attacking police officers.
He is repeatedly used rhetoric in order to support his followers very much agree with those viewpoints.
All right, let's let Dennis respond.
First of all, he's not a racist.
Okay, he's not a racist.
He's not a white nationalist.
He's not a racist.
He is not a racist.
He's not a white nationalist.
Western Civilization Under Attack00:02:03
That is correct.
He is not.
The charges are despicable.
The man was president for four years.
The country was way freer in terms of freedom of speech, the most important freedom of all, than under Joe Biden and the Democrats.
The man governed for four years.
Did America become fascist?
This is a gigantic lie, and that is the reason why we are going to be able to do that.
Let me ask you, Mr. Prager, if they're not going to be able to say that if President Biden called you vermin, how would you think about that?
What does it mean when you call your political opponents vermin?
Yes.
He didn't call all his political opponents vermin.
And by the way, he said Marxist, communist, the people on the left, vermin.
Explain that to me.
Explain that to me.
So fine.
I'll explain it.
The left wishes to destroy Western civilization, not liberals and not conservative.
No, we do.
The left, right?
We want to destroy Western civilization.
You're the one.
So let me ask you something.
That's my goal.
I'll just give you one little thing.
When this conversation's over, I'm going to continue my process of destroying Western civilization as you know it.
Do you believe that there are two sexes or more than two sexes?
I believe that gender is what a person wants it to be.
Okay, fine.
I believe that people have the ability to decide.
Okay, good.
Really?
How many genders are in the Bible?
How many genders are in the Bible?
What about the Bible?
How many genders are in the Bible?
Two.
And God created.
Male and female, he created them.
I'll quote it to you in Hebrew if you want.
Six.
You don't know what you're talking about.
There are two.
The Talmud is not the Bible.
The Talmud is there are six genders.
You're talking to an actual scholar of the Bible.
Yeah, I am a scholar of the Bible.
I have a five-volume commentary on the Torah out.
You should read it.
I'm sorry, go ahead.
How am I going to destroy Western civilization when I'm done here?
Keep going.
Okay, well, one of the ways is by denying that male and female are the only two sexes, giving children hormone blockers, which has now been stopped in Britain, by the way, and only Americans like you support.
Free Speech and Hate00:02:00
This is unbelievably destructive.
The idea that truth is relative to the individual, that there is no objective good and evil, that we do not get our rights from the supreme being.
These are all left-wing positions.
They are all antithetical.
That freedom of speech, 45% of young people, thanks to leftist teachers at college, do not believe in free speech for hate speech.
But that is exactly what free speech is for.
Speech you think is hate speech.
That is just destroying free speech, which is what the left is out to do and has done and has lied.
And these are the people who locked down schools against the conservatives who thought the lockdowns were completely destructive.
The record of the left is pure destruction.
All right.
Yeah, what you just described is the entire destruction of Western civilization.
That's the plan right there.
Give children an opportunity to actually be who they want to be.
Give gay people an opportunity to have human dignity.
What's funny is everything that you said with the generation.
It's exactly what people said.
Hey, if black people and white people get married, that's the end of civilization.
If we have gay people who are publicly gay, that's going to be the end of civilization.
We've been talking about the people.
I never said that, and nobody's impending end of civilization for a very long time.
No, you didn't say that now.
What you're saying now is exactly parallels to what the previous generation said.
We're not going to be gaslighted into this any longer.
Okay.
Look, what matter is that people have human dignity?
I don't think we're going to be allowed to express that dignity at all.
Gentlemen, I don't think we're going to see it.
Nobody is going to give them.
Gentlemen, we're not going to see the end of civilization in this debate.
We've run out of time, sadly.
But I appreciate you both joining me.
Thank you very much for a very spirited, passionate, and censored debate.