Latest / Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar / 8/28/26: Norm Finkelstein Returns to Discuss Gaza, Hasan Piker, New Book Gaza's Gravediggers

Transcript

8/28/26: Norm Finkelstein Returns to Discuss Gaza, Hasan Piker, New Book Gaza's Gravediggers · Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar

• 0:00
  Speaker 1: Hey guys, Sagar and Crystal here.
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  Speaker 2: Good morning, everybody, and happy Friday. We've got a special
• 0:34
  Speaker 2: edition of The Friday Show today because I'm joined not
• 0:37
  Speaker 2: only by the great Ryan Grimm, but by the world-renowned
• 0:41
  Speaker 2: Norm Finkelstein, who has a new book out that everyone
• 0:44
  Speaker 2: needs to check out called Gaza's Gravediggers, An Inquiry into
• 0:48
  Speaker 2: Corruption in High Places. And Norm, it's always a pleasure
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  Speaker 2: and an honor to have you.
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  Speaker 4: Well, you know what? It's always a pleasure to be
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  Speaker 4: your interlocutor. You're smart. you're serious, and you're competent. So
• 1:04
  Speaker 4: I was like that. And I always, whenever I meet
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  Speaker 4: a stranger and we get into conversation, at some point
• 1:13
  Speaker 4: it comes around, do you watch Crystal Bull on Breaking Points? Yeah.
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  Speaker 2: Well, that is... Very kind coming from you. High praise indeed.
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  Speaker 2: I never praise.
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  Speaker 4: I speak facts.
• 1:32
  Speaker 2: I have a lot that I want to get to
• 1:34
  Speaker 2: with you today. I want to dig into your book,
• 1:35
  Speaker 2: which I think is extremely important. I want to get
• 1:38
  Speaker 2: into a particular chapter in your book about the mass
• 1:42
  Speaker 2: rape allegations, probably the most controversial part of the book,
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  Speaker 2: although You have a way of courting controversy by stating facts,
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  Speaker 2: I would say, in general. But I wanted to start
• 1:52
  Speaker 2: by getting your reaction to something that's been in the
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  Speaker 2: news lately, which is that Hassan Piker has come under
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  Speaker 2: attack from the right, but also from a lot of,
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  Speaker 2: quote unquote, liberal Democrats for comments he made about the
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  Speaker 2: rise of anti-Semitism. And so let me just read his
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  Speaker 2: comments for you, Norm, and then get your reaction to
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  Speaker 2: the attacks on him and also the substance of the comments.
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  Speaker 2: So This is what sparked all of this outrage. He said, quote,
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  Speaker 2: If Jews in America keep putting this idea out there
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  Speaker 2: that they are singularly invested in Israel, eventually someone's going
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  Speaker 2: to come around and take action, not against the state
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  Speaker 2: of Israel, mind you, but against American Jews. I don't
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  Speaker 2: know how many different ways I can explain this. I
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  Speaker 2: don't know how people don't recognize how dangerous this predicament is,
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  Speaker 2: how dangerous this is for Jews. Your reaction to those
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  Speaker 2: comments and the outrage surrounding them?
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  Speaker 4: Well, first of all, a qualification, which is, I don't
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  Speaker 4: really know Hasan Piker as a podcaster. I don't watch
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  Speaker 4: podcasts with any kind of regularity, so it's no offense
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  Speaker 4: to him. That's not my mode of intellectual engagement and inquiry.
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  Speaker 4: Having said that, I think we should make some general
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  Speaker 4: remarks and then specific ones. As you become a bigger
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  Speaker 4: public figure, you're personal responsibility increases. The things you might
• 3:43
  Speaker 4: say in your room, in your house, or you might
• 3:46
  Speaker 4: say in a bar, you don't say in public. And
• 3:51
  Speaker 4: it's the same thing here. If you have an audience
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  Speaker 4: of 10, it's very different than if you have an
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  Speaker 4: audience of a million. That's because words can have an impact.
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  Speaker 4: I don't mean in the sense that a word is
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  Speaker 4: the equivalent of a physical blow. I mean in the
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  Speaker 4: sense that Words can have a political impact. They can
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  Speaker 4: determine the result of an election. And here, Abdul Syed's
• 4:21
  Speaker 4: election is at stake. And wrong words can put that
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  Speaker 4: election at risk. So let's make it clear. Legally, morally.
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  Speaker 4: Some might use the fancy word epistemologically. Of course, he
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  Speaker 4: has the right to say what he believes or even
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  Speaker 4: wants to say and doesn't believe that right is there.
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  Speaker 4: But politically, you have to weigh your words. You have
• 5:02
  Speaker 4: to be careful. As I gained a bigger and bigger audience,
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  Speaker 4: I won't say I didn't say what I believed. I
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  Speaker 4: did say what I believed, but I was more careful.
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  Speaker 4: I was more careful because I realized suddenly my words
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  Speaker 4: can have a political impact. After October 7th, many people
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  Speaker 4: were very curious how I would parse morally and factually
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  Speaker 4: what happened. And that was for me a very fraught
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  Speaker 4: moment trying to figure it out because my words now
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  Speaker 4: would politically count. So having now said that, the second qualification,
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  Speaker 4: I would like to enter a third. I was on
• 6:04
  Speaker 4: Hassan Parker's program. I have to say, I was positively impressed.
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  Speaker 4: He had done his homework. It was clear he read
• 6:17
  Speaker 4: the book. It was clear he had thought through what
• 6:22
  Speaker 4: would be the right questions to ask. And as you
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  Speaker 4: must know, most interviewers do not read anything beyond a
• 6:32
  Speaker 4: blurb for a book they're interviewing. So I thought, okay,
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  Speaker 4: the fellow, the young fellow, he's trying to be serious.
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  Speaker 4: And I respect that. He was trying to do his job,
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  Speaker 4: as you do. Okay? As to the remarks themselves, I
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  Speaker 4: find it a truism. If Israel calls itself the state
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  Speaker 4: of the Jewish people, if Jews do not repudiate that title,
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  Speaker 4: or what's a thousand times worse, embrace that title uncritically,
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  Speaker 4: then the reasonable, and we have to say reasonable, not irrational,
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  Speaker 4: the reasonable inference is that you, support the actions of
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  Speaker 4: the state of Israel. You accept that those actions represent you.
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  Speaker 4: Israel is calling itself the state of the Jewish people.
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  Speaker 4: You are embracing that title. Well, then you are embracing
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  Speaker 4: the genocide, that Israel is carrying out, allegedly in the
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  Speaker 4: name of the Jewish people. And that being the case,
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  Speaker 4: you can't be shocked if people react very angrily and
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  Speaker 4: more at what then naturally ensues. I just think that's obvious.
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  Speaker 4: Every country endures that. You know, in the 1950s, there
• 8:47
  Speaker 4: was a book written. It was either the 50s or
• 8:51
  Speaker 4: the early 60s. It was called The Ugly American. And
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  Speaker 4: it was about how if the United States carries out
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  Speaker 4: in a certain way, don't be shocked if the citizens
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  Speaker 4: are being held accountable for the actions of that state
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  Speaker 4: And Americans are regarded as ugly, the ugly Americans, the
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  Speaker 4: supporters of criminal actions by the state. We all understood
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  Speaker 4: that during the war in Vietnam, that a lot of
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  Speaker 4: people were going to feel a high degree of resentment
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  Speaker 4: against Americans until there was a large anti-war movement. which
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  Speaker 4: made clear there was a distinction between the citizens at
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  Speaker 4: the state. Didn't every German, grace yourself, for the last
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  Speaker 4: 80 years, hasn't every German had to bear the burden
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  Speaker 4: of of what happened during World War II? They still
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  Speaker 4: carry that burden 80 years later? So the idea that
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  Speaker 4: non-Jews will... feel a high degree of animus towards Jews
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  Speaker 4: if there isn't a clear rupture between American Jewish opinion
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  Speaker 4: and Israeli opinion and Israeli state opinion, but also happens
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  Speaker 4: to be Israeli society opinion, unless there is a clear
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  Speaker 4: rupture between American Jewish opinion and Israeli state and society opinion,
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  Speaker 4: then of course there are going to be dire repercussions
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  Speaker 4: when a state is carrying out a genocide. I want
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  Speaker 4: to add one caveat to that, and then we're done
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  Speaker 4: with the question. The caveat is, I feel that Hassan Piker,
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  Speaker 4: not from any malice, absolutely not, not from any malice,
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  Speaker 4: but maybe oversight or maybe myopia, I believe he left
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  Speaker 4: out a crucial point. The most recent polls show that
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  Speaker 4: between 30% and 40% of American Jews believe Israel's carrying
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  Speaker 4: out a genocide in Gaza. that rupture has occurred to
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  Speaker 4: a significant degree, and it's a very public rupture. You
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  Speaker 4: must remember, but some of your audiences, their memories are
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  Speaker 4: very short, you must remember the biggest mobilizations at the
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  Speaker 4: beginning of the Gaza Genocide the mobilization at Grand Central
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  Speaker 4: Station in New York, the mobilization at the Statue of Liberty,
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  Speaker 4: they were all initiated by Jews. It was Jewish organizations.
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  Speaker 4: It was Jewish Voices of Peace, the organization, I always
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  Speaker 4: get its name wrong, Not In My Name, or If
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  Speaker 4: Not Now, I can't recall. If Not Now. Those were
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  Speaker 4: all Jewish organizations. I happen to believe, and you know
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  Speaker 4: I don't have a jot of Jewish chauvinist blood in
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  Speaker 4: my body. It doesn't exist. All right, I don't want
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  Speaker 4: to say not a jot. I'm Jewish. I have to
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  Speaker 4: say the fact that 30 to 40% of American Jews
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  Speaker 4: are willing to acknowledge that Israel is committing a genocide
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  Speaker 4: when you bear in mind from... their early childhood, they're
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  Speaker 4: being brainwashed at home often, in synagogue, on high holy days,
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  Speaker 4: and so forth, that Israel is a critical, if not
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  Speaker 4: the critical element of their identity. That's what they carry around.
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  Speaker 4: When you're asked the question, What is the main thing
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  Speaker 4: that makes you Jewish? Very frequently, the answer to the
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  Speaker 4: question used to be support for the state of Israel.
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  Speaker 4: And that they managed to work themselves out of that
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  Speaker 4: bubble and say, well, facts are facts. They're committing a genocide.
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  Speaker 4: That's pretty impressive. Actually, I don't believe, I really doubt
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  Speaker 4: any other collective would be capable of that. If you
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  Speaker 4: were to ask Americans during the Vietnam, well, I don't know,
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  Speaker 4: I suppose it would be what stage in the Vietnam War.
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  Speaker 4: But even towards the end, I don't think a majority
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  Speaker 4: of Americans would have acknowledged that. that the U.S. is
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  Speaker 4: committing massive war crimes in Vietnam. I don't believe a
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  Speaker 4: majority would acknowledge. I could be wrong. I'm sure there
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  Speaker 4: are many polls. So I think it's an impressive fact.
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  Speaker 4: If you looked at the encampments in spring 2024, Jews
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  Speaker 4: are very prominent in those encampments. They were. That's just
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  Speaker 4: a fact. Yes. So I think that element was missed
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  Speaker 4: in Hassan Piker's remarks. And I suspect because I hope,
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  Speaker 4: and it's really a hope against hope, I hope he
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  Speaker 4: won't turn into a grandstander, which is one possible path
• 15:32
  Speaker 4: at the fork in the road. when you become a
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  Speaker 4: prominent personality, that's one possibility, one path, the fork in
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  Speaker 4: the road. And the other is, and I'm speaking for myself,
• 15:47
  Speaker 4: I don't believe it's self-praise, it's simply effect. And I'm serious.
• 15:57
  Speaker 4: I'm deadly, lethally serious. Every time I get an email,
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  Speaker 4: praising me, expressing homage to what I have done with
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  Speaker 4: my life. I honestly, I don't smile. I become very unhappy.
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  Speaker 4: Do you know why? I swear. Because it means I
• 16:24
  Speaker 4: have to work harder. I have to work harder. I
• 16:26
  Speaker 4: have to live up to the expectations. I have to
• 16:30
  Speaker 4: rise to the occasion. So it just means for me
• 16:36
  Speaker 4: more work, more work. Why am I answering emails? I've
• 16:40
  Speaker 4: got to read this. I've got to read that. So
• 16:43
  Speaker 4: that's the other fork in the road, the other possibility,
• 16:46
  Speaker 4: the other path. One is you become a grandstander. The
• 16:50
  Speaker 4: other is you become more and more serious about your
• 16:57
  Speaker 4: responsibility because now you are, as I began saying, this
• 17:03
  Speaker 4: answer to the question, now you're responsible to many more people.
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  Speaker 4: They now have high expectations for you.
• 17:14
  Speaker 5: And taking your answer in its entirety, I think you've
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  Speaker 5: also identified a real contradiction that he's going to have
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  Speaker 5: to grapple with in streaming eight to 10 hours a
• 17:25
  Speaker 5: day while also intervening at the highest level of politics.
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  Speaker 5: Because the point that you made, that 30 to 40%
• 17:36
  Speaker 5: of American Jews have denounced what Israel's doing, is a
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  Speaker 5: point that he makes probably on a daily basis. But
• 17:44
  Speaker 5: he didn't make it within the four corners of the
• 17:46
  Speaker 5: clip that his opponents used. And more to the point,
• 17:50
  Speaker 5: what we read you is what he actually said. They
• 17:53
  Speaker 5: mashed together kind of separate clips to make it even
• 17:56
  Speaker 5: kind of less charitable to him. So this new world
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  Speaker 5: where somebody who speaks eight, nine, ten hours a day
• 18:04
  Speaker 5: and has people paid to watch him and clip him
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  Speaker 5: to undermine him just presents a new dilemma in politics
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  Speaker 5: that hasn't quite existed before.
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  Speaker 4: There are two aspects to it. One is there's a
• 18:19
  Speaker 4: French expression, esprit de l'escalier, the spirit of the staircase.
• 18:24
  Speaker 4: And you know what it means? It means... You say something,
• 18:28
  Speaker 4: let's say, Crystal Ball, you're interviewing somebody, and you say something,
• 18:34
  Speaker 4: and then after the interview, you walk out, and you're
• 18:37
  Speaker 4: walking down the stairs, and you think, oh, why didn't
• 18:39
  Speaker 4: I say that? And why didn't I say that?
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  Speaker 2: That happens literally every interview I do, Norm.
• 18:48
  Speaker 4: Every time. You're walking down the stairs, oh, how did
• 18:52
  Speaker 4: I forget to say that? So he may have forgotten
• 18:55
  Speaker 4: to say it. So, um, that's one thing. And the
• 19:03
  Speaker 4: other is, um, it is true. I find it difficult
• 19:11
  Speaker 4: to take anybody seriously who streams 10 or 12 hours
• 19:16
  Speaker 4: a day. Where, where is the reading? Where is the preparation?
• 19:23
  Speaker 3: I asked him once that he's, and he's actually reading
• 19:25
  Speaker 3: right there.
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  Speaker 4: It's wild.
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  Speaker 3: It's a whole nother world. It's like, imagine if you
• 19:29
  Speaker 3: just streamed yourself reading.
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  Speaker 4: I should just, let me say two things. It was,
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  Speaker 4: first of all, the first thing I want to make
• 19:39
  Speaker 4: an acknowledgement. I make mistakes like that of leaving things out.
• 19:45
  Speaker 4: And I have a very close collaborator, friend, and comrade,
• 19:49
  Speaker 4: Jamie Slater. And he said to me on several occasions,
• 19:56
  Speaker 4: he said to me, Norman, I think you should remember
• 20:01
  Speaker 4: in the midst of denouncing American Jews for this and
• 20:05
  Speaker 4: that and the other, remember the fact of The achievements,
• 20:09
  Speaker 4: the things they did that in many ways vindicated American Jews.
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  Speaker 4: That's why I was careful to say it now that
• 20:17
  Speaker 4: I do. I'm more conscious of remembering to say that
• 20:24
  Speaker 4: because I was told, I believe more than one occasion
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  Speaker 4: by Jamie not to omit that. So I made that mistake.
• 20:39
  Speaker 2: Norm, I wanted to ask you a related question to
• 20:42
  Speaker 2: that because I've interviewed a few what you would call
• 20:46
  Speaker 2: liberal Zionists who have come out and said Jeremy Ben-Ami
• 20:52
  Speaker 2: of J Street being one of them, who's willing to
• 20:55
  Speaker 2: say it's a genocide, recognizes the war crimes, sees the
• 20:59
  Speaker 2: horrors that are being committed, but is still deeply committed
• 21:03
  Speaker 2: to an Israeli state and thinks that it is possible
• 21:08
  Speaker 2: to have a liberal democratic Jewish ethnostate. I wonder if
• 21:15
  Speaker 2: you could speak some to that mentality because it's something
• 21:17
  Speaker 2: that it's very hard for me having not grown up
• 21:21
  Speaker 2: in those Jewish institutions and with the teachings and the
• 21:24
  Speaker 2: culture surrounding that to understand how someone who can see
• 21:28
  Speaker 2: civil rights abuses so clearly on the domestic level still
• 21:33
  Speaker 2: holds on to this idealized notion that somehow Israel could
• 21:37
  Speaker 2: be very different from its current expression?
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  Speaker 4: I think there are... I listened to your interview with
• 21:51
  Speaker 4: the fellow... Was it with the fellow from J Street?
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  Speaker 3: Yeah, Jeremy.
• 21:56
  Speaker 4: What's his last name? Ben-Ami. Ben-Ami. I listened to the
• 22:00
  Speaker 4: interview and.
• 22:06
  Speaker 4: First of all, I don't believe it's politically useful now.
• 22:11
  Speaker 4: I'm not talking about ideologically or intellectually. I don't think
• 22:14
  Speaker 4: it's politically useful now to discuss final solutions to the
• 22:19
  Speaker 4: Israel-Palestine conflict. It's not on the drawing board. Karl Marx
• 22:26
  Speaker 4: famously said that he doesn't make recipes for the future.
• 22:32
  Speaker 4: You have to deal with the here and now. what's possible,
• 22:36
  Speaker 4: and where you can actually infect, effect, or inflect change
• 22:43
  Speaker 4: in the here and now, and also in the foreseeable future,
• 22:46
  Speaker 4: of course. There is no solution on the drawing board
• 22:51
  Speaker 4: right now. The Israeli government is off the charts, out
• 22:58
  Speaker 4: to lunch, over the cliff. And the Palestinian government Life
• 23:02
  Speaker 4: is completely disintegrated and atomized. There is no representative Palestinian institution,
• 23:08
  Speaker 4: and there's not anything near a representative Palestinian institution. So
• 23:14
  Speaker 4: how can you, in this context, talk about solutions? It
• 23:17
  Speaker 4: just seems, as Professor Chomsky would say, it sounds like
• 23:20
  Speaker 4: the subject of a graduate seminar. It doesn't have much context.
• 23:27
  Speaker 4: That's number one. Number two... even though I wrote my
• 23:31
  Speaker 4: doctoral dissertation on the subject of Zionism, and I have, therefore,
• 23:38
  Speaker 4: some material stake in it, not that the dissertation got
• 23:42
  Speaker 4: me very far professionally, I don't believe it's useful to
• 23:51
  Speaker 4: use terms like Zionism because there's no consensus on the
• 23:58
  Speaker 4: meaning of the term. It means so many different things
• 24:05
  Speaker 4: to so many different people, such that Noam Chomsky throughout
• 24:09
  Speaker 4: his life called himself a Zionist, and Benjamin Netanyahu called
• 24:15
  Speaker 4: himself a Zionist. And when you ask Professor Chomsky, he
• 24:20
  Speaker 4: would say, since I was five years old, I've been
• 24:24
  Speaker 4: a Zionist. I know when I was five years old,
• 24:27
  Speaker 4: I was learning how to tie my shoe. and zipper
• 24:31
  Speaker 4: my pants, but Professor Chomsky by five had already read
• 24:34
  Speaker 4: the whole corpus on Zionism and had resolved who was
• 24:38
  Speaker 4: a Zionist. So the term is too indeterminate, in my opinion,
• 24:46
  Speaker 4: to have any political utility. I do believe, and I'm
• 24:52
  Speaker 4: sure you're aware, I do believe that the terms or
• 24:56
  Speaker 4: the phrase Jewish supremacist does have a meaning, and it
• 25:00
  Speaker 4: does have a resonance. Everybody knows what white supremacy is.
• 25:08
  Speaker 4: So it's not hard to form a fairly concrete image
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  Speaker 4: of Jewish supremacy. And I think Jewish supremacy is the
• 25:19
  Speaker 4: core problem right now. Now, you could say historically the
• 25:22
  Speaker 4: problem was Zionism, and there's an argument there. I don't
• 25:25
  Speaker 4: want to get into it. But right now, the problem
• 25:27
  Speaker 4: is that Selim, the Israeli Information Center for Human Rights
• 25:31
  Speaker 4: and Occupied Territories, as it said a while ago now,
• 25:37
  Speaker 4: in the early, around the 2010-2011, it put out a
• 25:42
  Speaker 4: report and it said, because at that time there was
• 25:45
  Speaker 4: widespread debate as to whether Israel was an apartheid state.
• 25:50
  Speaker 4: And each of the major human rights organizations put out
• 25:53
  Speaker 4: a report Amnesty International put out a report saying it's
• 25:58
  Speaker 4: in its totality an apartheid state. Human Rights Watch put
• 26:03
  Speaker 4: out a report saying the occupied territories are an apartheid situation,
• 26:10
  Speaker 4: but Israel itself is more problematic. And then B'Tselem weighed in,
• 26:16
  Speaker 4: and the executive director of B'Tselem at that time was
• 26:20
  Speaker 4: a very impressive guy. His name was Haggai El-Ad. He
• 26:25
  Speaker 4: had his PhD in physics from Harvard. He was very
• 26:29
  Speaker 4: morally serious. And it was very striking to me that
• 26:34
  Speaker 4: the major human rights organizations published voluminous reports. The report
• 26:41
  Speaker 4: by Beth Sellum was just a few pages. It was
• 26:45
  Speaker 4: a skimpy report. But I think it captured the core
• 26:50
  Speaker 4: of the problem. As you know, in the natural sciences,
• 26:54
  Speaker 4: the more simple a proof, the more elegant it is.
• 27:00
  Speaker 4: If you can prove something in one page that another
• 27:04
  Speaker 4: person has proven in a hundred pages, your proof is
• 27:10
  Speaker 4: considered the more elegant, the more impressive one, which is,
• 27:15
  Speaker 4: of course, different in the humanities as the famous renegade
• 27:22
  Speaker 4: Christopher Hitchens Famously put it, his quip was, why say
• 27:28
  Speaker 4: in four words what you can say in 40? So
• 27:33
  Speaker 4: the standard in the humanities is just the reverse of
• 27:36
  Speaker 4: the one in the natural sciences. So going back to
• 27:40
  Speaker 4: Haggai el-Ad and the B'dad Selim report, I said it
• 27:43
  Speaker 4: was a skimpy report. And basically its essence, I think,
• 27:49
  Speaker 4: is this. It said, let's stop talking about occupied territories.
• 27:55
  Speaker 4: This one state, it extends from the Mediterranean to the Jordan.
• 28:00
  Speaker 4: It's been that way since 1967. Well, you do the math.
• 28:04
  Speaker 4: We're in 2012 or whatever it was at this point.
• 28:08
  Speaker 4: It's one state. And he said, the foundation of this
• 28:12
  Speaker 4: state is Jewish supremacy. That's the essence. It's a Jewish
• 28:18
  Speaker 4: supremacist state. So I would say, We should scrap the
• 28:26
  Speaker 4: term Zionism, which has no determinate meaning, especially before a
• 28:33
  Speaker 4: broad public. And that's who we're speaking to, hopefully, and
• 28:37
  Speaker 4: not ourselves, hopefully. And hopefully not posing and posturing for
• 28:42
  Speaker 4: the cameras, but wanting to effect concrete, meliorative change. I
• 28:52
  Speaker 4: think you should use that term. Now, having said that,
• 28:56
  Speaker 4: we return to your question. And the question essentially is this.
• 29:01
  Speaker 4: In theory, does a Jewish state, a state that calls
• 29:08
  Speaker 4: itself Jewish, does it necessarily have to be a Jewish
• 29:16
  Speaker 4: supremacist state? That's the essence of your question. Is it
• 29:22
  Speaker 4: possible for a state to be a Jewish state without
• 29:28
  Speaker 4: being a Jewish supremacist state? And your point of contention
• 29:36
  Speaker 4: with Jeremy Ben-Ami was that's not possible. That a Jewish state,
• 29:43
  Speaker 4: by definition, has to be a Jewish supremacist state. That's
• 29:50
  Speaker 4: your contention, in essence, if I'm not mistaken. And my
• 29:55
  Speaker 4: answer to that would be, and here I have to say,
• 29:59
  Speaker 4: Professor Chomsky convinced me on the point. It all depends
• 30:04
  Speaker 4: on how, and I'm not saying this out of deference
• 30:08
  Speaker 4: to him. I use the verb, he convinced me, he
• 30:14
  Speaker 4: persuaded me. It all depends on how, in what aspects
• 30:27
  Speaker 4: is the state Jewish? hypothetically, if it simply honored Jewish
• 30:34
  Speaker 4: holidays as the national holidays, if it had Hebrew as
• 30:42
  Speaker 4: the national language, even though at the time Hebrew and
• 30:46
  Speaker 4: Arabic were both national languages in Israel, I believe I'm
• 30:50
  Speaker 4: pretty certain on that. If, uh, So if you used
• 30:54
  Speaker 4: to see signs, they would be in Hebrew and Arabic.
• 30:57
  Speaker 4: But I could be, I don't want to stand on
• 31:01
  Speaker 4: that point, but that's my recollection. So if it's a
• 31:04
  Speaker 4: matter of holidays, national holidays, celebratory holidays, the Hebrew language,
• 31:18
  Speaker 4: you can say those are, oh, and also Saturday is
• 31:23
  Speaker 4: the day of, rather than a Friday or a Sunday,
• 31:27
  Speaker 4: things like that. You could say it's Jewishness is more
• 31:34
  Speaker 4: or less, more or less innocuous, more or less innocuous.
• 31:41
  Speaker 4: But when there's discrimination in every department of social life,
• 31:49
  Speaker 4: whether it's in housing, residence, jobs, if the army only
• 31:58
  Speaker 4: has Jews serving in it and all sorts of benefits
• 32:02
  Speaker 4: social benefits come from service in the army then obviously
• 32:07
  Speaker 4: it becomes much more problematic and then it reaches a
• 32:13
  Speaker 4: very high level of problematic when it it its objective,
• 32:24
  Speaker 4: its goal is to make a homogeneously Jewish state. Yeah.
• 32:31
  Speaker 4: Then it becomes obviously very problematic. Yes.
• 32:36
  Speaker 2: And that is my, just to pause you for a second,
• 32:39
  Speaker 2: that is my central contention of what most people, when
• 32:43
  Speaker 2: they say a Jewish state of Israel, what they intend
• 32:46
  Speaker 2: is that the majority population from a demographic perspective in
• 32:51
  Speaker 2: Israel would be Jewish. And you can, you know, feel
• 32:55
  Speaker 2: free to correct me if you think this is wrong,
• 32:57
  Speaker 2: but I think all of the discrimination, the apartheid, the
• 33:00
  Speaker 2: atrocities really flows out of that view of a quote-unquote
• 33:05
  Speaker 2: Jewish state. Because the moment that, you know, you open
• 33:09
  Speaker 2: up all possibilities of citizenship in an equal way to
• 33:13
  Speaker 2: the entire population from the river to the sea, then
• 33:16
  Speaker 2: you have a threat, an existential threat to that conception
• 33:20
  Speaker 2: of a Jewish nation.
• 33:22
  Speaker 4: Look, I never quarrel with facts. That's my creed only.
• 33:27
  Speaker 4: And there's no question that there's a very high degree
• 33:31
  Speaker 4: of plausibility in what you're saying. Because the moment you
• 33:39
  Speaker 4: say it's a Jewish state, it's the natural next step
• 33:45
  Speaker 4: is that Jews have to be in the majority. And
• 33:52
  Speaker 4: the next natural step from there is then non-Jews inexorably
• 33:59
  Speaker 4: pose a threat to your majority status. So since non-Jews
• 34:09
  Speaker 4: inexorably pose a threat to your majority status, and your
• 34:16
  Speaker 4: majority status is a keystone of a Jewish state, then
• 34:23
  Speaker 4: it follows that the best way to meet that threat
• 34:30
  Speaker 4: is to get rid of everybody who is not Jewish.
• 34:34
  Speaker 4: It's just built in. The Zionist view was we can
• 34:40
  Speaker 4: tolerate a 15 to 20% non-Jewish minority in our state.
• 34:48
  Speaker 4: That was ideally the state would be homogeneously Jew Jewish.
• 34:55
  Speaker 4: That was the ideal. Practically, they were willing to tolerate
• 35:02
  Speaker 4: a 15 to 20% non-Jewish minority. So here's the thing.
• 35:13
  Speaker 4: They expelled the PA about 80% of the population, uh,
• 35:20
  Speaker 4: in 1947 to 49. They got it down to about
• 35:25
  Speaker 4: 15 or 20% non-Jewish. And then lo and behold, by
• 35:31
  Speaker 4: the 1990s, it looked like Israel was slowly but surely
• 35:37
  Speaker 4: losing that Jewish majority. And what saved them You know
• 35:44
  Speaker 4: what saved them? It was the miracle of Russian Jewry,
• 35:48
  Speaker 4: of Soviet Jewry. About a million Russian, allegedly Jewish. In fact,
• 35:55
  Speaker 4: in the last stages, 40% were not Jewish, but they
• 35:59
  Speaker 4: called themselves Jewish. And Israel didn't care. Just as long
• 36:04
  Speaker 4: as you were publicly Jewish, they took them in to
• 36:09
  Speaker 4: rectify or to... preempt that potential growing Arab minority. And
• 36:19
  Speaker 4: now Israel is, we accept that Selim's statement that it's
• 36:26
  Speaker 4: one state, and I think it's correct statement. It's been
• 36:30
  Speaker 4: one state for a long time. That's why it should
• 36:33
  Speaker 4: never be said the occupied territories. That's incorrect. The essence
• 36:38
  Speaker 4: of an occupation under international law, its essence is very simple.
• 36:43
  Speaker 4: An occupation is temporary. That's what makes an occupation an occupation.
• 36:50
  Speaker 4: If it's permanent, it's become an annexation. If that permanence
• 37:03
  Speaker 4: was a result of illegal acts, it's an illegal annexation.
• 37:09
  Speaker 4: But it's not an occupation. And occupation, that's the whole problem.
• 37:14
  Speaker 4: Language is so loaded, in particular political language. I don't
• 37:21
  Speaker 4: want to get off on 10,000 digressions, but the biggest
• 37:27
  Speaker 4: myth of what happened in Gaza after 2023 was that
• 37:34
  Speaker 4: it was a war. There was no war in Gaza.
• 37:40
  Speaker 4: I just read the new.
• 37:44
  Speaker 4: Crisis group report. They were very scrupulous in describing it
• 37:51
  Speaker 4: as a war. They knew exactly what they were doing.
• 37:54
  Speaker 4: Very careful. There was the Hamas massacre on October 7th.
• 38:03
  Speaker 4: And then what ensued was a war. And they say
• 38:06
  Speaker 4: it over and over again. The moment you say that
• 38:10
  Speaker 4: Israel's won 95% of the propaganda war, it's propaganda war.
• 38:17
  Speaker 4: It wins it the moment you start describing it as
• 38:20
  Speaker 4: a war. In the same way, this is not an occupation.
• 38:26
  Speaker 4: Go look up any legal definition of occupation. Its essence
• 38:30
  Speaker 4: is it's temporary. It's an annexation. And it's also... as
• 38:36
  Speaker 4: the International Court of Justice said in July 2025, it's
• 38:40
  Speaker 4: an illegal annexation. An illegal. They call it an illegal occupation,
• 38:46
  Speaker 4: but it's an illegal annexation. So, that being said, let's
• 38:53
  Speaker 4: accept what B'Tselem has said. One state between the Mediterranean
• 38:59
  Speaker 4: and Jordan, and it's half and half. It's half Palestinian Arab,
• 39:05
  Speaker 4: half Israeli Jewish. And if Israel says it will only
• 39:11
  Speaker 4: tolerate a 15% to 20% minority in its Jewish state,
• 39:20
  Speaker 4: then expulsion is built into it. It's built into it.
• 39:25
  Speaker 4: Just like Benny Morris said in one of his rare
• 39:28
  Speaker 4: moments of lucidity, Benny Morris, he said that transfer, which
• 39:35
  Speaker 4: was the euphemism for expulsion, transfer was, and now I'm
• 39:40
  Speaker 4: quoting him. He doesn't like it when I quote him,
• 39:42
  Speaker 4: but I'll keep quoting him. He said, transfer is inbuilt
• 39:48
  Speaker 4: and inevitable, In Zionism, that's what he said. It's inbuilt
• 39:54
  Speaker 4: and inevitable in Zionism. There are two reasons. One is
• 39:59
  Speaker 4: the ideological reason, namely, how can you have a Jewish
• 40:03
  Speaker 4: state if you don't have a Jewish majority? That just
• 40:05
  Speaker 4: doesn't gel. But there's also a practical one. The Jews
• 40:11
  Speaker 4: owned virtually no land in Palestine. By 1947, they owned
• 40:16
  Speaker 4: about 17% of the land, 18%, 20%. How do you
• 40:21
  Speaker 4: build a Jewish state if you have no land on
• 40:23
  Speaker 4: which to build it? So, of course, he was correct
• 40:28
  Speaker 4: that it was inbuilt and inevitable. But as I said
• 40:31
  Speaker 4: to you, there's kind of a discrete question, and the
• 40:36
  Speaker 4: discrete question is, can you concede a Jewish state that's
• 40:42
  Speaker 4: not a Jewish supremacist state. And I would say that's
• 40:48
  Speaker 4: a slightly more gray question, though I acknowledge what you say.
• 40:54
  Speaker 4: You say that it's hard to conceive the notion of
• 40:58
  Speaker 4: a Jewish state without a Jewish majority. And if the
• 41:05
  Speaker 4: two are kind of inextricably intertwined, Doesn't that pose serious
• 41:16
  Speaker 4: questions about the status of the minority? Because the status
• 41:22
  Speaker 4: of the minority will be to forever be perceived as
• 41:28
  Speaker 4: what Israel calls a demographic threat. And your population growth
• 41:37
  Speaker 4: will always be carefully monitored. to make sure you don't
• 41:43
  Speaker 4: cross that threshold of threatening the Jewish majority. So I
• 41:50
  Speaker 4: recognize that's a problem. The other way to look at it,
• 41:57
  Speaker 4: and I'm not saying it's the answer. Take the case
• 42:07
  Speaker 4: of the UK. It calls itself an Anglican state. That's
• 42:14
  Speaker 4: its official title. The Anglican Church is the church of state.
• 42:19
  Speaker 4: It's an Anglican state. But if you asked most British
• 42:26
  Speaker 4: who are not Anglican, does the fact that the UK
• 42:31
  Speaker 4: defines itself as an Anglican state, is that for you
• 42:38
  Speaker 4: an oppressive burden, I think most Brits would say no.
• 42:47
  Speaker 4: They don't much care about it. It's there. It exists.
• 42:54
  Speaker 4: But to use my terminology, it's more at the benign
• 43:00
  Speaker 4: as it gets the malignant end of the spectrum. And
• 43:03
  Speaker 4: so that, you know, If that's what Jeremy Ben-Ami had
• 43:08
  Speaker 4: in mind, then I think it's tolerable, but I have
• 43:16
  Speaker 4: to have an infinitude of asterisks when I say that,
• 43:23
  Speaker 4: because there are so many qualifications, leaving aside that you
• 43:29
  Speaker 4: may be right. It might be inherently, intrinsically wrong. incompatible
• 43:36
  Speaker 4: Jewish state that is not a Jewish supremacist state.
• 43:40
  Speaker 5: And not to get bogged down in this because we
• 43:43
  Speaker 5: want to get to your book as soon as we can,
• 43:46
  Speaker 5: but it also makes me think of people's responses when
• 43:50
  Speaker 5: they say, well, Ireland is a Catholic country. Italy is
• 43:53
  Speaker 5: a Catholic country. At the same time, as you're seeing
• 43:57
  Speaker 5: more and more Muslim migration into those countries, you have
• 44:01
  Speaker 5: a surge of xenophobia and we don't know what the
• 44:05
  Speaker 5: shape of those countries will look like. We don't know
• 44:07
  Speaker 5: if the Catholic will maintain some apartheid controller.
• 44:12
  Speaker 3: Yeah.
• 44:13
  Speaker 4: You're totally correct. The only caveat I would enter to
• 44:19
  Speaker 4: that is it's unclear whether these states are reacting to
• 44:26
  Speaker 4: an influx of Muslims or they're reacting to a, uh,
• 44:33
  Speaker 4: a collapsing economy in which Muslims have been made the scapegoats.
• 44:39
  Speaker 4: In other words, in times of prosperity, it's quite possible
• 44:47
  Speaker 4: those populations would be much more welcoming, as was the
• 44:52
  Speaker 4: case in my own United States when there was obviously
• 44:56
  Speaker 4: massive immigration after World War II of 10,000 different varieties.
• 45:03
  Speaker 4: But we still embrace the idea. It took many forms,
• 45:08
  Speaker 4: but the one that just comes to mind was when
• 45:10
  Speaker 4: David Dinkins, Mayor Dinkins, described New York as the gorgeous mosaic.
• 45:18
  Speaker 4: And there was a certain pride in that. But when times,
• 45:23
  Speaker 4: you know, when the economic situation significantly deteriorates, people become
• 45:29
  Speaker 4: much less generous. I see it in my own life.
• 45:33
  Speaker 4: I went out to dinner with some people the other night,
• 45:36
  Speaker 4: one of whom was from, I can't remember, well, two
• 45:42
  Speaker 4: foreign countries, no point in naming them. And on the
• 45:45
  Speaker 4: immigrant question, they were very tough, even though they were immigrants. Well,
• 45:50
  Speaker 4: we came in legally, they're coming in illegally, my taxpayer money,
• 45:55
  Speaker 4: and so on and so forth. I think it's a
• 45:59
  Speaker 4: lack of generosity. not the born necessarily of xenophobia, but
• 46:07
  Speaker 4: the born of very hard times.
• 46:11
  Speaker 2: Let me actually, let me ask you this, Norm. So
• 46:14
  Speaker 2: I think, you know, we, one of the things that
• 46:17
  Speaker 2: we're all grappling with is we all watched what was
• 46:21
  Speaker 2: done in Gaza with our taxpayer dollars. It was not hidden.
• 46:25
  Speaker 2: It's often boasted about. In fact, an Israeli, you know,
• 46:29
  Speaker 2: top military commander just came out and bragged about, I would,
• 46:32
  Speaker 2: ordered the strike on the World Central Kitchen aid workers
• 46:35
  Speaker 2: all over again. I have no regrets. They're affiliated with Hamas.
• 46:38
  Speaker 2: Just to give one example of how brazen and how
• 46:41
  Speaker 2: proud they are of the atrocities that were committed.
• 46:43
  Speaker 4: Just one clarification, and I want to hear you. It
• 46:47
  Speaker 4: wasn't that it wasn't hidden. It was that it couldn't
• 46:51
  Speaker 4: be hidden. The Times during that first year, the New
• 46:55
  Speaker 4: York Times, it did everything it could to hide the
• 47:00
  Speaker 4: heartless in Gaza.
• 47:01
  Speaker 2: Well, and you're right. There was a distinction between what
• 47:05
  Speaker 2: the Israelis were saying and what their press was saying
• 47:10
  Speaker 2: and the attempt by Western, quote-unquote, liberal media outlets to
• 47:14
  Speaker 2: pretend that none of that was being said and it
• 47:16
  Speaker 2: wasn't being announced very publicly.
• 47:19
  Speaker 4: The Times was still saying after the end of the
• 47:22
  Speaker 4: first year, it was still saying that maybe Hamas had
• 47:26
  Speaker 4: a command and control center under al-Shifa hospitals. They wouldn't
• 47:30
  Speaker 4: let go. Oh, my gosh. They wouldn't let go.
• 47:33
  Speaker 2: Incredible.
• 47:34
  Speaker 4: And then, as you know, the rape, the Hamas rape hoax.
• 47:41
  Speaker 4: The thing is, I'm sort of a technophobe, but I
• 47:47
  Speaker 4: recognize the values of the technology. It was it couldn't
• 47:54
  Speaker 4: be hidden because of the web. Yeah. legacy media carried
• 47:59
  Speaker 4: on just as it always did during that first year.
• 48:03
  Speaker 4: And then they had to catch up with public opinion
• 48:05
  Speaker 4: because public opinion had been persuaded by what it saw
• 48:10
  Speaker 4: by folks like yourself, hearing folks like yourself on podcasts,
• 48:14
  Speaker 4: on Tik TOK and everything else. So we, we can't say, uh,
• 48:24
  Speaker 4: It wasn't hidden. It was hidden, but it was unsuccessful.
• 48:30
  Speaker 2: So your book tells part of the story of how
• 48:35
  Speaker 2: this was allowed to occur. And you focus not so
• 48:38
  Speaker 2: much on what did occur, which, as you said, they
• 48:41
  Speaker 2: were unable to hide. And you focus a lot on
• 48:44
  Speaker 2: the liberal institutions and the failures that allowed a genocide
• 48:49
  Speaker 2: to be carried out before all of our eyes. Talk
• 48:52
  Speaker 2: a little bit about your approach and also what you
• 48:54
  Speaker 2: see as some of those key failures as having been.
• 49:00
  Speaker 4: Well, let me begin with the obvious. The main perpetrator
• 49:05
  Speaker 4: of the genocide, obviously, was the state of Israel. Its
• 49:10
  Speaker 4: main enabler was the United States. That, I don't believe,
• 49:16
  Speaker 4: required any special expertise to demonstrate. It was in your face.
• 49:25
  Speaker 4: Though now they're trying to downplay the role of the U.S.
• 49:29
  Speaker 4: by saying they were helpless. You know, the David Kirkpatrick
• 49:32
  Speaker 4: article in the New Yorker magazine, they said, did everything
• 49:37
  Speaker 4: they could behind the scenes, which is, of course, completely ridiculous.
• 49:42
  Speaker 4: As the article said, 70% of the weapons were coming
• 49:47
  Speaker 4: from the United States. If you were so appalled by
• 49:50
  Speaker 4: what was happening, you just pulled the plug. So that,
• 49:56
  Speaker 4: it seems to me, didn't require any kind of argumentation
• 50:01
  Speaker 4: on my part. It was in your face. There was
• 50:07
  Speaker 4: the question of chronicling the horrors in Gaza. When I
• 50:12
  Speaker 4: wrote the book, Gaza and Inquest into its Martyrdom, nobody
• 50:18
  Speaker 4: had read the human rights reports I referred to. They
• 50:22
  Speaker 4: just collected dust, a handful of people. And I was writing,
• 50:26
  Speaker 4: as it were, I was writing for history. I was
• 50:29
  Speaker 4: writing for the ages. I said at the very end
• 50:32
  Speaker 4: of that book, I don't think anyone now is going
• 50:34
  Speaker 4: to read it. I didn't. I had a university press
• 50:39
  Speaker 4: put it out, and it was supposed to be a
• 50:42
  Speaker 4: scholarly book, which I thought maybe in 100 years somebody
• 50:46
  Speaker 4: will dust it off the cobwebs, the dust in the cobwebs,
• 50:50
  Speaker 4: and read what happened in Gaza. It was a record,
• 50:58
  Speaker 4: a historical record, a document, less than a book. This
• 51:04
  Speaker 4: time you didn't need it. First of all, everybody knows
• 51:07
  Speaker 4: what happened. You don't need a book to recall it
• 51:12
  Speaker 4: in detail. The general picture is pretty straightforward and is
• 51:17
  Speaker 4: out there. South Africa, it submitted a memorial to the
• 51:24
  Speaker 4: International Court of Justice. The memorial is basically your statement
• 51:29
  Speaker 4: for what's called the merit phase of the court's when
• 51:35
  Speaker 4: they decide whether or not a genocide is occurring. And
• 51:39
  Speaker 4: from what I've read, the memorial consists of 750 pages
• 51:45
  Speaker 4: plus 4,000 pages of documentation. Wow. Okay? So I said
• 51:51
  Speaker 4: to myself, I don't think you need me to do
• 51:54
  Speaker 4: this anymore. It's been done. So then, leaving those two
• 52:00
  Speaker 4: things out, there was one other possibility. which is if
• 52:04
  Speaker 4: I had impressive narrative power, a great story of Gaza,
• 52:14
  Speaker 4: what happened to Gaza. There was a great British, I
• 52:19
  Speaker 4: guess he was Irish, journalist named Robert Fisk. And he
• 52:26
  Speaker 4: wrote this book called Pity the Nation about what happened
• 52:29
  Speaker 4: during Israel's invasion of Lebanon in 1948. Excuse me, 1982.
• 52:36
  Speaker 4: And it was just breathtaking prose. It was prose that
• 52:41
  Speaker 4: was poetry. He had that narrative gift, the sweep, the language,
• 52:50
  Speaker 4: the evocation. He was in Lebanon during the Israeli invasion
• 52:55
  Speaker 4: in 1982. It's really a splendorous literary as well as
• 53:00
  Speaker 4: historical document. I don't possess that. I'm not trying to
• 53:08
  Speaker 4: play to false modesty. I have very powerful expository power.
• 53:21
  Speaker 3: We can't all be Robert Fisk.
• 53:23
  Speaker 4: Right. I can put together a logical argument and there
• 53:28
  Speaker 4: will be no wiggle room left at the end. I'm
• 53:31
  Speaker 4: pretty good at that, how to compose an impregnable logical argument.
• 53:37
  Speaker 4: So I couldn't do the narrative. And then I decide, well,
• 53:43
  Speaker 4: there is another area. Namely, it's those people who we
• 53:48
  Speaker 4: have higher expectations of. The UN. Not the New York Times,
• 53:55
  Speaker 4: not the Washington Post, God forbid, Atlantic Magazine, or the
• 54:00
  Speaker 4: New Yorker. But from officials in the UN, from human
• 54:06
  Speaker 4: rights organizations, we have higher expectations of them. And then
• 54:15
  Speaker 4: the question becomes whether they rose to the legitimate expectations
• 54:23
  Speaker 4: we had of them. And my opinion was, up until
• 54:29
  Speaker 4: November 2025, which maybe we'll get to, up until then,
• 54:35
  Speaker 4: I thought the UN record wasn't in general bad. The statements,
• 54:39
  Speaker 4: the statements now, I'm not talking about the actions, the
• 54:43
  Speaker 4: statements by Secretary General Gutierrez, Martin Griffiths, Philippe Lazzarini, the
• 54:51
  Speaker 4: head of UNRWA, they were Good. They were strong. They
• 54:56
  Speaker 4: were consistent. It was a pretty good showing. But there
• 55:06
  Speaker 4: were also areas where it was unacceptable. It was unacceptable.
• 55:11
  Speaker 4: And those are the places I look at it. I
• 55:16
  Speaker 4: look at how the human rights organizations acquitted themselves when
• 55:21
  Speaker 4: it came to the Hamas rape hoax. I look at
• 55:29
  Speaker 4: how the vice president of the International Court of Justice,
• 55:33
  Speaker 4: Julia Sabatindi, how she acquitted herself. How the president of
• 55:39
  Speaker 4: the ICJ at the time, Joan Donahue, how she acquitted herself.
• 55:47
  Speaker 4: And my goal was to enable, facilitate, or expedite a
• 55:57
  Speaker 4: house cleaning. These people had to be either censured or
• 56:01
  Speaker 4: ousted for how they carried on during the Gaza genocide.
• 56:06
  Speaker 4: By 2025, November, I added a requiem at the end
• 56:16
  Speaker 4: of the book after the UN Security Council passed Resolution
• 56:22
  Speaker 4: 2803 which gave the deed to Gaza. And here I'm
• 56:29
  Speaker 4: not engaging in hyperbole, which gave the deed of Gaza
• 56:36
  Speaker 4: to a retarded ape who happens at this moment to
• 56:43
  Speaker 4: occupy the Oval Office. And he in turn, he in turn,
• 56:52
  Speaker 4: delegate responsibility to a malignant twit named Jared Kushner, Steve Witkoff,
• 57:10
  Speaker 4: Tony Blair, the inspiration for the Vampire Diaries, Tony Blair,
• 57:19
  Speaker 4: and they in turn chose this vomitatious non-entity named Nikolai
• 57:32
  Speaker 4: Mladenov to execute all of their policies. And at that point,
• 57:42
  Speaker 4: I concluded, this was November 2025, that the UN had
• 57:50
  Speaker 4: turned into a rotting corpse. Hmm. It was no longer
• 57:54
  Speaker 4: an isolated case here. A Julia Sepinti, a Pramila Patton,
• 58:01
  Speaker 4: and others. A Joan Donahue. It was a rotting corpse.
• 58:10
  Speaker 4: And had I written that a few months later, I
• 58:15
  Speaker 4: would say that after the most brazen, flagrant, breach of
• 58:26
  Speaker 4: international law in the modern world namely the aggression by
• 58:34
  Speaker 4: Israel and the United States against Iran after that with
• 58:41
  Speaker 4: the UN Security Council staying absolutely silent on that aggression
• 58:49
  Speaker 4: it's a corpse It's a corpse. You could not even
• 58:57
  Speaker 4: condemn an aggression which didn't even bother to pretend it
• 59:07
  Speaker 4: was otherwise. Mm-hmm. in September 1939, when the Nazis invaded Poland,
• 59:18
  Speaker 4: they fabricated a border incident. The German troops got dressed
• 59:23
  Speaker 4: up in Polish... Polish... and fabricated a border incident. Because
• 59:33
  Speaker 4: even Hitler, even their Fuhrer understood, you have to pretend
• 59:39
  Speaker 4: that you're acting in self-defense. And self-defense has a very
• 59:46
  Speaker 4: specific meaning. Here I'm fast-forwarding to after World War II.
• 59:51
  Speaker 4: Article 51 says it has to be an armed attack.
• 59:58
  Speaker 4: In order to justify self-defense has to be an armed attack. Now,
• 1:00:04
  Speaker 4: there is some debate about whether an armed attack, which
• 1:00:14
  Speaker 4: has already been launched, that it's irreversible and inevitable, but
• 1:00:21
  Speaker 4: it hasn't yet, you know, let's say the planes haven't
• 1:00:23
  Speaker 4: yet reached the target. whether you're allowed to retaliate in
• 1:00:29
  Speaker 4: that instance, what's called a preemptive attack. The planes have
• 1:00:34
  Speaker 4: already been launched. The missiles have already been fired. Then
• 1:00:38
  Speaker 4: whether you have the legal option to preempt that attack
• 1:00:46
  Speaker 4: by firing your own missiles. Yeah, there's a gray area.
• 1:00:51
  Speaker 4: There was no gray area. when the Israel and the
• 1:00:55
  Speaker 4: United States attacked Iran, there wasn't, here's the deal, the
• 1:01:00
  Speaker 4: bottom line, there wasn't even a pretense of an armed
• 1:01:05
  Speaker 4: attack that they were responding to. It was, and I repeat,
• 1:01:10
  Speaker 4: the most brazen, flagrant act of aggression in the modern world,
• 1:01:16
  Speaker 4: and the Security Council did nothing. So, for me, Leaving
• 1:01:22
  Speaker 4: aside everything else, Iran has the right at this point
• 1:01:34
  Speaker 4: to do anything. Now, I want to underline they have
• 1:01:39
  Speaker 4: the right to do anything because there's no international law anymore.
• 1:01:45
  Speaker 4: There's no law regulating state behavior anymore. You, meaning the UN, you,
• 1:01:56
  Speaker 4: meaning the states in the world, you annulled international law.
• 1:02:03
  Speaker 4: You cancelled international law. You didn't respond to what's considered
• 1:02:12
  Speaker 4: the highest crime under international law, the crime of aggression.
• 1:02:19
  Speaker 4: You Let it pass. Well, then Iran has no obligations
• 1:02:26
  Speaker 4: any longer to abide by international law. If you say,
• 1:02:32
  Speaker 4: why are they targeting the Gulf states? Well, leaving aside
• 1:02:39
  Speaker 4: the nuances of that, why shouldn't they? There's no international law.
• 1:02:46
  Speaker 4: If for the sake of their survival, they're going to
• 1:02:50
  Speaker 4: target the Gulf states, what prevents them? International law? That's
• 1:02:58
  Speaker 4: not very credible anymore. So I'm not going to go
• 1:03:03
  Speaker 4: into the details of what's happened during the Iran war.
• 1:03:08
  Speaker 4: I'm just saying as a legal fact, international law died.
• 1:03:16
  Speaker 4: on November 17th, 2025, when the UN gave the deed
• 1:03:24
  Speaker 4: of Gaza to Donald Trump. I'm just going to read
• 1:03:30
  Speaker 4: to you for a half second from the International Crisis Group,
• 1:03:34
  Speaker 4: its most recent report. I'm quoting it now. Trump is
• 1:03:42
  Speaker 4: set to hold lifetime executive power over the board of
• 1:03:51
  Speaker 4: peace you know the the body that's lifetime a little
• 1:03:57
  Speaker 4: further down it says the trump administration's proposition is essentially
• 1:04:06
  Speaker 4: an open-ended open-ended U.S.-led protectorate in Gaza. He owns it.
• 1:04:21
  Speaker 4: And when that malignant twit, Jared Kushner, was asked about it,
• 1:04:31
  Speaker 4: he said, we are going to run Gaza like a
• 1:04:36
  Speaker 4: private company. Do you get it? Donald Trump is the
• 1:04:46
  Speaker 4: chairman of the board of Trump Inc. And now Gaza
• 1:04:54
  Speaker 4: is one more property in his portfolio. That's what the
• 1:05:01
  Speaker 4: UN Security Council did. And then it proceeded to stay silent.
• 1:05:11
  Speaker 4: in the face of the most brazen, flagrant breach of
• 1:05:16
  Speaker 4: international law. So it pronounced its own death sentence. It
• 1:05:28
  Speaker 4: pronounced its own death sentence. At this point, Iran has
• 1:05:34
  Speaker 4: no obligations whatsoever. to abide by international law. It can
• 1:05:42
  Speaker 4: target who it wants and what it wants for the
• 1:05:47
  Speaker 4: sake of its survival. You don't like that? Then look
• 1:05:52
  Speaker 4: in the mirror. You created that situation. So that's what
• 1:05:58
  Speaker 4: I resolved to do in the book. I started out
• 1:06:02
  Speaker 4: by trying to point to the pockets of corruption. In
• 1:06:09
  Speaker 4: the international political and human rights organizations. But by the end,
• 1:06:17
  Speaker 4: by 2025, I decided it wasn't pockets.
• 1:06:24
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 1:06:25
  Speaker 4: It's a fish rots from the head down. When the
• 1:06:33
  Speaker 4: UN Security Council did what it did, The whole place
• 1:06:41
  Speaker 4: now reeks. It stinks the high heaven of rot.
• 1:06:50
  Speaker 5: Your analysis of the UN's role in its interactions with
• 1:06:55
  Speaker 5: the kind of Israeli campaign that you describe in chapter
• 1:06:59
  Speaker 5: one to produce what your chapter title calls Rape Fantasies
• 1:07:04
  Speaker 5: had another chapter, so to speak, right after your book
• 1:07:08
  Speaker 5: went to the the printer.
• 1:07:10
  Speaker 3: When a.
• 1:07:12
  Speaker 5: New report came out, they called it the Civil Commission,
• 1:07:17
  Speaker 5: I guess in some type of effort to give it
• 1:07:20
  Speaker 5: a governmental gloss. And there's a real trap, and I'm
• 1:07:26
  Speaker 5: curious for how you went about strategically handling this. There's
• 1:07:30
  Speaker 5: a trap in this entire reporting project when it comes
• 1:07:34
  Speaker 5: to examining the allegations that Israel is making about October
• 1:07:38
  Speaker 5: 7th and Hamas' alleged use of systematic sexual violence that
• 1:07:45
  Speaker 5: you have to, in order to rebut it, you have
• 1:07:47
  Speaker 5: to repeat a lot of the allegations. You have to
• 1:07:51
  Speaker 5: get into a lot of things that nobody wants to
• 1:07:55
  Speaker 5: talk about. Nobody wants to think about. And you have
• 1:07:59
  Speaker 5: to identify connections between between all of the different players
• 1:08:04
  Speaker 5: that make you feel crazy. And so I'm curious how,
• 1:08:08
  Speaker 5: because so you have an essay in your subsect. So
• 1:08:12
  Speaker 5: what you did is after this commission report came out,
• 1:08:16
  Speaker 5: you read through it and you analyzed it. And so
• 1:08:19
  Speaker 5: I consider it sort of an addendum or appendix or
• 1:08:22
  Speaker 5: epilogue to your book itself. And hopefully in a paperback,
• 1:08:26
  Speaker 5: this maybe can be included. Um, so talk to us
• 1:08:29
  Speaker 5: a little bit about this, this project, the civil commission
• 1:08:33
  Speaker 5: project that was described as like the denouement of the,
• 1:08:37
  Speaker 5: of the entire project, um, that this for once and
• 1:08:40
  Speaker 5: for all, they're settling the question. And, and how did you,
• 1:08:44
  Speaker 5: how do you personally, politically, strategically, and as a writer,
• 1:08:47
  Speaker 5: you know, confront this without kind of losing your mind?
• 1:08:52
  Speaker 4: Well, there are a series of questions there and they're
• 1:08:54
  Speaker 4: all important questions. Number one, I knew that immediately as
• 1:08:59
  Speaker 4: to book came out, regardless of gravediggers, people were going
• 1:09:04
  Speaker 4: to say, but he didn't address the new report. And therefore,
• 1:09:11
  Speaker 4: it would undermine, undercut the all of my findings because
• 1:09:16
  Speaker 4: the findings would seem obviously inadequate in the face of
• 1:09:22
  Speaker 4: this nearly 300 page report. So even though I knew
• 1:09:29
  Speaker 4: it was going to be an arduous and agonizing task,
• 1:09:35
  Speaker 4: I felt it had to be done or else chapter
• 1:09:40
  Speaker 4: one of the book would be rendered obsolete. Number two,
• 1:09:48
  Speaker 4: it was 300 pages or nearly. And the immediate assumption
• 1:09:57
  Speaker 4: is if it's of that physical, sheer physical weight, there's
• 1:10:05
  Speaker 4: got to be something there. There's got to be something there.
• 1:10:11
  Speaker 4: I remember when I was a young man and I
• 1:10:14
  Speaker 4: read the book From Time Immemorial, which claimed that Palestine
• 1:10:20
  Speaker 4: was empty on the eve of Jewish colonization. And then
• 1:10:24
  Speaker 4: all these Arabs from neighboring countries sneaked into Palestine and
• 1:10:28
  Speaker 4: claimed to be indigenous to the land. And the book
• 1:10:31
  Speaker 4: was a national bestseller. And everybody said... It's got to
• 1:10:41
  Speaker 4: be true because Joan Peter is the alleged author. She
• 1:10:45
  Speaker 4: points out that the book has 1,857 endnotes. So, as
• 1:10:55
  Speaker 4: they say in law, prima facie, there seemed to be
• 1:10:59
  Speaker 4: a case that it couldn't all be made up. In
• 1:11:04
  Speaker 4: the case of From Time Immemorial, I was a young man.
• 1:11:07
  Speaker 4: I was still in graduate school. I discovered it was
• 1:11:12
  Speaker 4: all made up. And in the case of this report.
• 1:11:17
  Speaker 5: While you're talking, I'll let people kind of see the
• 1:11:20
  Speaker 5: actual physical product because it almost makes the case for
• 1:11:24
  Speaker 5: itself as you're talking. You'll see it's just a bunch
• 1:11:29
  Speaker 5: of quotes for the first like 30 pages from Hillary
• 1:11:32
  Speaker 5: Rodham Clinton.
• 1:11:32
  Speaker 4: If you scroll down further, you'll see that half the
• 1:11:37
  Speaker 4: pages are footnotes. half the pages are footnotes. And so
• 1:11:43
  Speaker 4: you have to scroll down considerably more because several, yeah.
• 1:11:48
  Speaker 4: We're still at nothing.
• 1:11:50
  Speaker 3: Like notice that there's still nothing.
• 1:11:53
  Speaker 4: Yeah, that's correct. Yeah, yeah. That's correct.
• 1:11:58
  Speaker 3: Still nothing. Still nothing.
• 1:11:59
  Speaker 4: We're not yet at the book. Yeah, we're not.
• 1:12:01
  Speaker 3: Still nothing.
• 1:12:03
  Speaker 4: Yeah, at the book. Yeah.
• 1:12:05
  Speaker 3: Now we're at the forward. We're 30 pages in. We're
• 1:12:08
  Speaker 3: at the forward.
• 1:12:09
  Speaker 4: Yeah.
• 1:12:10
  Speaker 3: More bios.
• 1:12:12
  Speaker 4: Totally correct.
• 1:12:14
  Speaker 3: More quotes. Summary.
• 1:12:18
  Speaker 4: I have to say, all this, all you're saying being
• 1:12:22
  Speaker 4: totally correct. Now go back. These are the footnotes. Go
• 1:12:31
  Speaker 4: to the next page. Just scroll down to next. Next.
• 1:12:37
  Speaker 4: You see the length of the footnote? So, Everybody, by
• 1:12:41
  Speaker 4: the way, listen closely, including me, sometimes known as the
• 1:12:47
  Speaker 4: world's leading forensic expert, which is a nice title, but
• 1:12:51
  Speaker 4: sort of like on the lines of the tallest building
• 1:12:53
  Speaker 4: in Wichita, Kansas. How many forensic experts are there? Even
• 1:12:59
  Speaker 4: I was daunted. I have to say, I'm going to
• 1:13:02
  Speaker 4: speak with complete candor. I wondered whether I was wrong.
• 1:13:09
  Speaker 4: I did. I'm not going to deny that. And the
• 1:13:13
  Speaker 4: book had already been published. And that would have been,
• 1:13:17
  Speaker 4: as you can imagine, a supreme humiliation and would have
• 1:13:21
  Speaker 4: totally discredited me for the remainder of my life if
• 1:13:27
  Speaker 4: I were wrong. And I did harbor that fear because,
• 1:13:34
  Speaker 4: as I said, of the sheer weight or bulk of
• 1:13:39
  Speaker 4: the report, and of what's called its scholarly apparatus, all
• 1:13:44
  Speaker 4: those footnotes.
• 1:13:47
  Speaker 2: We're at 70 pages, and now we're doing background and context,
• 1:13:50
  Speaker 2: by the way, for the record.
• 1:13:57
  Speaker 4: Okay. So then I had to read it. On my
• 1:14:04
  Speaker 4: first reading, I— was not as despondent, but I still
• 1:14:14
  Speaker 4: was concerned. It took me a second and then a
• 1:14:20
  Speaker 4: third reading to discover that in the immortal words of
• 1:14:26
  Speaker 4: Brianna Joy Gray, it was a nothing burger. It only had,
• 1:14:34
  Speaker 4: if you... If you have my text, do you have
• 1:14:41
  Speaker 4: my text?
• 1:14:42
  Speaker 2: Yes. I have your Substack essay.
• 1:14:46
  Speaker 4: Yeah. So if you go to it, scroll down a little.
• 1:14:51
  Speaker 4: You just keep scrolling. I'll tell you when to stop.
• 1:14:53
  Speaker 4: It's like five pages in. Here, just here. It's called...
• 1:14:59
  Speaker 4: I catalog... how many times each of their witnesses is mentioned.
• 1:15:08
  Speaker 4: So the Bibbous family, 13 times the same testimony. Talley Biner,
• 1:15:14
  Speaker 4: 10 times. Goldstein Almach, 26 times. They were just recycling
• 1:15:24
  Speaker 4: over and over and over. Oh, she, Dr. Kochav Elkayam Levy,
• 1:15:33
  Speaker 4: If you scroll down a little further, you see the
• 1:15:37
  Speaker 4: end notes. Just the end notes to my chart. This
• 1:15:42
  Speaker 4: is for each person how many times they're mentioned. Oh,
• 1:15:46
  Speaker 4: my goodness.
• 1:15:48
  Speaker 2: Now we know where all those long footnotes come from
• 1:15:50
  Speaker 2: because they're mentioned even more times in the footnotes.
• 1:15:54
  Speaker 4: Exactly. It was the classic Hitler technique. You keep repeating, repeating, repeating.
• 1:16:06
  Speaker 4: That's what Hitler said. If you scroll all the way
• 1:16:08
  Speaker 4: up to the top, his two classic techniques of propaganda,
• 1:16:14
  Speaker 4: he talks about it in Mein Kampf. Just scroll down
• 1:16:17
  Speaker 4: a little. Just here. So I quote Hitler, the most
• 1:16:21
  Speaker 4: brilliant propagandist technique will yield no success, unless one fundamental
• 1:16:30
  Speaker 4: principle is borne in mind constantly and with unflagging attention. It,
• 1:16:37
  Speaker 4: meaning propaganda, must confine itself to a few points and
• 1:16:43
  Speaker 4: repeat them over and over. And that's exactly what she did.
• 1:16:49
  Speaker 4: Just repeating it over and over. So, that having been said,
• 1:16:57
  Speaker 4: And there are many other things to be said about
• 1:17:01
  Speaker 4: the modus operandi of this report. And time won't allow
• 1:17:07
  Speaker 4: me to go into important details, but nonetheless, details. The
• 1:17:14
  Speaker 4: question is the big picture. Where do we end up?
• 1:17:20
  Speaker 4: So what we end up with is, as many of
• 1:17:24
  Speaker 4: your viewers will know, There was no forensic evidence of
• 1:17:30
  Speaker 4: sexual violence or rape by Hamas on October 7th. None exists. There,
• 1:17:36
  Speaker 4: Israel seemed to have what I would call a plausible,
• 1:17:40
  Speaker 4: but maybe not a dispositive, a definitive alibi. Its alibi
• 1:17:44
  Speaker 4: was Israel wasn't prepared for a massacre of this magnitude.
• 1:17:50
  Speaker 4: It had a finite number of forensic pathologists in the
• 1:17:54
  Speaker 4: state as a whole. and it had to process the
• 1:17:58
  Speaker 4: bodies rapidly for burial, Jewish ritual burial. I personally found that,
• 1:18:03
  Speaker 4: I'm not saying it's true, but I found it plausible.
• 1:18:07
  Speaker 4: But now we had, so we don't have forensic evidence.
• 1:18:12
  Speaker 4: Then we have two other possible kinds of evidence. One
• 1:18:18
  Speaker 4: is testimonial evidence, and the other is digital or photographic evidence.
• 1:18:26
  Speaker 4: Let me take them in reverse order, okay? Let's start
• 1:18:30
  Speaker 4: with the digital photographic evidence. The report states that it
• 1:18:37
  Speaker 4: has 10,000, 10,000 photographic and digital segment pieces of evidence
• 1:18:51
  Speaker 4: from October 7th. 10,000, what it says, 10,000 photographs and
• 1:18:59
  Speaker 4: digital segments from October 7th. Okay, that's our first piece
• 1:19:06
  Speaker 4: of evidence, our first fact. Fact number two, they said
• 1:19:11
  Speaker 4: it would take 1,800 hours to look, to examine all
• 1:19:21
  Speaker 4: of its digital and photographic evidence. For those of your
• 1:19:27
  Speaker 4: listeners who aren't able to rapidly calculate it, that would
• 1:19:33
  Speaker 4: mean if you, Ryan, or you, Crystal, if either of
• 1:19:39
  Speaker 4: you were to sit down in the room eight hours
• 1:19:43
  Speaker 4: a day, seven days a week, looking at all the
• 1:19:47
  Speaker 4: digital and forensic evidence, excuse me, digital and photographic evidence,
• 1:19:54
  Speaker 4: it would take you more than seven months. More than
• 1:20:00
  Speaker 4: seven months. We're talking about digital and photographic evidence from
• 1:20:08
  Speaker 4: a very finite parcel of land called the Gaza envelope.
• 1:20:16
  Speaker 4: We're talking about CCTV evidence, traffic camera evidence, body cam evidence,
• 1:20:28
  Speaker 4: dash cam evidence. We're talking about Hamas body cam evidence.
• 1:20:38
  Speaker 4: Hamas dash cam evidence. Because when the militants were killed,
• 1:20:43
  Speaker 4: their cameras were seized. Hamas GoPro evidence. Okay? A vast
• 1:20:53
  Speaker 4: accumulation of technological evidence. Also, not trivially, iPhone evidence. people
• 1:21:05
  Speaker 4: taking pictures as the massacre is unfolding. Okay? Now, what's
• 1:21:14
  Speaker 4: the bottom line? Listen, there isn't one photograph, one digital
• 1:21:25
  Speaker 4: segment of Hamas committing rape or sexual violence. Not one.
• 1:21:36
  Speaker 4: Not just of rape. There is not one photograph or
• 1:21:43
  Speaker 4: digital segment of Hamas committing rape, or what's the technical terminology,
• 1:21:54
  Speaker 4: or other forms of sexual violence. Now, that's very strange.
• 1:22:02
  Speaker 4: it becomes stranger still when you factor this into it.
• 1:22:09
  Speaker 4: The main conceit of this report, the main conceit, the
• 1:22:16
  Speaker 4: main thesis, if you're in graduate school, of this report
• 1:22:22
  Speaker 4: is that Hamas systematically and methodically committed rape and other
• 1:22:33
  Speaker 4: forms of sexual violence in order to terrorize, to shatter
• 1:22:40
  Speaker 4: the esprit of Israeli society. It was a psychological act
• 1:22:49
  Speaker 4: of terrorism. That's the core thesis of the report. Now
• 1:22:55
  Speaker 4: here's the thing. Hamas never posted any images of sexual
• 1:23:03
  Speaker 4: violence and rape. According to the report, they used the
• 1:23:14
  Speaker 4: sexual violence and rape as an act of psychological terror.
• 1:23:23
  Speaker 4: If that's what you're saying, and they didn't post any
• 1:23:27
  Speaker 4: of the images, would you say They purposely carried out
• 1:23:31
  Speaker 4: rape and sexual violence in order, this is what they're saying,
• 1:23:36
  Speaker 4: in order to terrorize Israeli society. Well, if that was
• 1:23:40
  Speaker 4: their objective, if that was their goal, then they would
• 1:23:48
  Speaker 4: have posted the images, right? You said that was their goal. Ms.
• 1:23:54
  Speaker 4: Kolchev Elkayim Levy. Sheryl Sandberg, the main endorser of the report.
• 1:24:06
  Speaker 4: Sheryl Sandberg, the former COO of Meta. Sheryl, if you
• 1:24:15
  Speaker 4: will excuse my familiarity. Sheryl. If that's the thesis of
• 1:24:25
  Speaker 4: the report... The Hamas purposely committed sexual violence and rape
• 1:24:37
  Speaker 4: in order to post it on the social media so
• 1:24:45
  Speaker 4: as to psychologically terrorize Israeli society. Cheryl, Ms. Kochev Elkayim Levy,
• 1:24:59
  Speaker 4: Why didn't they post any of the images? There's only
• 1:25:05
  Speaker 4: one possibility, judging from your logic. Crystal, Ryan, if they
• 1:25:13
  Speaker 4: didn't post any of the images and their goal was
• 1:25:16
  Speaker 4: to psychologically terrorize Israeli society with those images, then what's
• 1:25:20
  Speaker 4: the only possible conclusion? They didn't post any images because
• 1:25:27
  Speaker 4: there weren't any images. And if there weren't any images,
• 1:25:31
  Speaker 4: it's because it didn't happen. So as I point out
• 1:25:35
  Speaker 4: in what I wrote, the most compelling proof to date,
• 1:25:41
  Speaker 4: listen closely, Ms. Kochev Alkayem Levy, Sheryl Sandberg, another main endorser,
• 1:25:51
  Speaker 4: Rahm Emanuel. Listen closely. By your own logic, your report
• 1:26:00
  Speaker 4: is the most compelling evidence to date that Hamas did
• 1:26:05
  Speaker 4: not commit sexual violence and rape as a weapon of war.
• 1:26:13
  Speaker 4: In other words, if you read the report correctly, the
• 1:26:19
  Speaker 4: report is the most compelling proof that it didn't happen.
• 1:26:26
  Speaker 4: Which is, as you can imagine, And irony, I remember
• 1:26:30
  Speaker 4: my good friend Jamie Sternweiner, he said to me, I
• 1:26:34
  Speaker 4: mentioned him before, he said, why do you think they
• 1:26:39
  Speaker 4: did that? It was so stupid. First of all, most
• 1:26:44
  Speaker 4: of the reports to date said there were about 5,000 images,
• 1:26:52
  Speaker 4: images meaning photographs and digital evidence, They doubled it to 10,000.
• 1:27:01
  Speaker 4: So now you have a very high person to demonstrate
• 1:27:06
  Speaker 4: why you don't have any images of rape and sexual violence.
• 1:27:11
  Speaker 4: And then he said to me, Jamie, or he asked me,
• 1:27:14
  Speaker 4: he said, why do you think they made that thesis?
• 1:27:21
  Speaker 4: about Hamas did this in order to, they were purposely
• 1:27:24
  Speaker 4: posting these images in order to psychologically terrorize. Why do
• 1:27:27
  Speaker 4: you think they did that? It was so dumb. And
• 1:27:32
  Speaker 4: the answer, in my mind, with all due regard to Jamie,
• 1:27:35
  Speaker 4: the brilliant fellow, the answer is obvious. Number one, nobody
• 1:27:41
  Speaker 4: reads the reports. This report was just mind-numbingly dull. I
• 1:27:48
  Speaker 4: mean that. You know, there were moments at night when
• 1:27:51
  Speaker 4: I would say to myself, you know, Norm, you have
• 1:27:53
  Speaker 4: a finite number of years left. Is this the best,
• 1:27:57
  Speaker 4: most productive use of your time? Or even the most
• 1:28:00
  Speaker 4: joyful use of your time in the days that remain
• 1:28:04
  Speaker 4: to read this prep? So most people don't read it.
• 1:28:09
  Speaker 4: And number two, most people say 300 pages, there's got
• 1:28:14
  Speaker 4: to be something there. There's got to be something there.
• 1:28:20
  Speaker 4: You know, um, Rahm Emanuel says in the report that
• 1:28:26
  Speaker 4: the very beginning, he says, he has a blurb and
• 1:28:29
  Speaker 4: he says, for those of you, um, who don't believe
• 1:28:34
  Speaker 4: the Hamas did this, that, and the other, he says,
• 1:28:37
  Speaker 4: here's your summer reading. And I'm thinking to myself, Ram,
• 1:28:43
  Speaker 4: this is your summer reading. Because you didn't read it.
• 1:28:48
  Speaker 2: I was going to say, I wonder what percentage of
• 1:28:50
  Speaker 2: all of those many pages of blurbs of people actually
• 1:28:53
  Speaker 2: even bothered to read it.
• 1:28:55
  Speaker 4: Zero. Ryan Grimm said zero. Yeah, zero. So they just
• 1:28:59
  Speaker 4: figured they would get away with it. Yeah. That's what happened.
• 1:29:04
  Speaker 4: And that leaves us. So we have already, let's call
• 1:29:09
  Speaker 4: it two zeros. No forensic evidence. No digital or photographic evidence.
• 1:29:18
  Speaker 4: And then we come to the third possibility, eyewitness testimony,
• 1:29:22
  Speaker 4: or as they call it nowadays, eyewitness and earwitness testimony.
• 1:29:27
  Speaker 4: Earwitness is considered some credible form of evidence for some things,
• 1:29:30
  Speaker 4: I suppose. Here we have a problem. Let me start
• 1:29:35
  Speaker 4: with the preliminary, if you'll allow me. Sure. The preliminary is...
• 1:29:44
  Speaker 4: Israel is a very tightly knit society. There are multiple overlapping,
• 1:29:52
  Speaker 4: to use that idiotic woke word, intersectional loyalties in Israeli society.
• 1:29:58
  Speaker 4: There is the loyalty, you belong to the same nation state.
• 1:30:03
  Speaker 4: Everybody has what's called patriotism. You have the loyalty, in
• 1:30:08
  Speaker 4: the case of Israel, you're all part of the same family,
• 1:30:12
  Speaker 4: the Jewish family. The same Jewish blood runs through everybody
• 1:30:17
  Speaker 4: you know, because Arabs don't count. They don't exist. It's
• 1:30:23
  Speaker 4: what you call, to put it in the most basic terms,
• 1:30:26
  Speaker 4: the familial or blood loyalty. So we have the state
• 1:30:32
  Speaker 4: or patriotic loyalty. We have the familial and blood loyalty.
• 1:30:38
  Speaker 4: And then you have a third kind of loyalty, and
• 1:30:41
  Speaker 4: it's in Israel. It's the most pronounced loyalty. It's the
• 1:30:46
  Speaker 4: loyalty of having everybody served in the IDF. It's a
• 1:30:55
  Speaker 4: citizen army. It means everybody feels this intense loyalty to
• 1:31:06
  Speaker 4: the IDF. Why do I mention this? Because those compounding,
• 1:31:20
  Speaker 4: you can call it, those compounding loyalties, it's the midst
• 1:31:28
  Speaker 4: of a genocide in which the population overwhelmingly supports it.
• 1:31:36
  Speaker 4: All the polls show that. There's only about 5% of
• 1:31:41
  Speaker 4: Israeli Jews who thought Israel was using too much force
• 1:31:44
  Speaker 4: in Gaza, and that was for all three years. Only
• 1:31:47
  Speaker 4: about 5%. 40% thought Israel was not using enough force.
• 1:31:54
  Speaker 4: You know? And then you know all the polls about
• 1:31:57
  Speaker 4: if the IDF enters a city, should it kill everybody
• 1:32:01
  Speaker 4: in the city? There was the poll, are there any
• 1:32:05
  Speaker 4: innocents in Gaza? And all the polls. do not cast
• 1:32:10
  Speaker 4: Israel in the best light. Having said that, I believe
• 1:32:16
  Speaker 4: you shouldn't trust a word that Israel says. I'm sorry.
• 1:32:22
  Speaker 4: I recognize that's a high bar. I will then say
• 1:32:29
  Speaker 4: two things and then get more into the testimonial issue.
• 1:32:32
  Speaker 4: Number one, the standard used by human rights organizations is
• 1:32:37
  Speaker 4: Witness testimony, and there also has to be some digital evidence.
• 1:32:43
  Speaker 4: That's what makes the standard in human rights organizations is
• 1:32:48
  Speaker 4: reasonable grounds to believe. And in order for the report
• 1:32:52
  Speaker 4: to conclude reasonable grounds, it has to have both witness
• 1:32:58
  Speaker 4: testimony and some digital evidence. Given that we already know
• 1:33:05
  Speaker 4: there is no digital evidence, As a matter of fact,
• 1:33:09
  Speaker 4: Amnesty International stated, we haven't even heard anybody claim there
• 1:33:14
  Speaker 4: was digital evidence. That's what they said. Given that fact,
• 1:33:20
  Speaker 4: then the conclusion of every human rights organization per force is,
• 1:33:27
  Speaker 4: or had to be, there's no reasonable grounds to believe
• 1:33:32
  Speaker 4: rape and violence rape and other forms of sexual violence occurred.
• 1:33:38
  Speaker 4: That's by their own legal standard. That's their legal standard. Now,
• 1:33:44
  Speaker 4: the digital evidence doesn't have to be of an event
• 1:33:48
  Speaker 4: in particular. It could be, let's take an example. The
• 1:33:52
  Speaker 4: digital evidence could be, Israel photographs all of these Palestinian
• 1:33:59
  Speaker 4: Gazans who are undressed. You know, you remember the mass
• 1:34:04
  Speaker 4: scenes of them down to their boxer drawers and things
• 1:34:07
  Speaker 4: like that? So, if then a witness claims that he
• 1:34:13
  Speaker 4: or she had been forced to undress, the fact that
• 1:34:19
  Speaker 4: there was already some evidence that Israel imposed that humiliation—
• 1:34:26
  Speaker 4: That digital evidence can be used as confirmation of an
• 1:34:31
  Speaker 4: individual testimony, which may not have been in that particular picture.
• 1:34:36
  Speaker 4: Is that clear? Have I made myself clear?
• 1:34:39
  Speaker 2: You just need to.
• 1:34:41
  Speaker 4: Demonstrate that the testimony falls into a pattern, P-A-T-T-E-R-N, a
• 1:34:49
  Speaker 4: pattern that has been digitalized or photographed. But the individual
• 1:34:56
  Speaker 4: testimony doesn't have to be that picture and that photograph. Well,
• 1:35:00
  Speaker 4: they don't have that for sexual violence and rape. So
• 1:35:05
  Speaker 4: that's the conclusion they perforce should have reached. That's not
• 1:35:13
  Speaker 4: a conclusion they did reach, and we can get to that.
• 1:35:15
  Speaker 4: Let's get back to this report. So I said, I
• 1:35:20
  Speaker 4: wouldn't believe a word. And Israeli said, As a default
• 1:35:26
  Speaker 4: setting for the reasons I set out. Now, in the
• 1:35:34
  Speaker 4: case of this particular report, it uses what it calls
• 1:35:40
  Speaker 4: survivor-based inquiry. If you read the report, you know what
• 1:35:49
  Speaker 4: survivor-based inquiry means? You don't ask the... You don't ask
• 1:35:55
  Speaker 4: the alleged victims any questions. Now, this is literal. Any
• 1:36:01
  Speaker 4: questions that might hurt their feelings.
• 1:36:05
  Speaker 5: And they also said quite explicitly, as you discuss in
• 1:36:08
  Speaker 5: your paper, that they wanted to lead with a therapeutic approach,
• 1:36:16
  Speaker 5: which is understandable if that's the approach they want to take.
• 1:36:19
  Speaker 5: But they also separately say they took a legal and
• 1:36:22
  Speaker 5: academic approach, which is in complete contradiction because it doesn't
• 1:36:26
  Speaker 5: allow you to say, well, you said that you heard this,
• 1:36:31
  Speaker 5: but we looked at your cell phone data and it
• 1:36:34
  Speaker 5: looks like you weren't there at that time.
• 1:36:36
  Speaker 3: Can you maybe walk us through?
• 1:36:38
  Speaker 5: Because maybe you had a genuine misremembrance and it doesn't
• 1:36:42
  Speaker 5: go to the core of your testimony, but it's good
• 1:36:46
  Speaker 5: to probe it because maybe it does. Meanwhile, there's some
• 1:36:50
  Speaker 5: people in the report that you also flagged who have
• 1:36:53
  Speaker 5: been exposed even by Israeli government officials as having been
• 1:36:58
  Speaker 5: total fabulists and fraudsters, and they still wind up being
• 1:37:02
  Speaker 5: central players in the report. Yeah.
• 1:37:05
  Speaker 4: And they'd say that even if this approach... Compromises, namely
• 1:37:13
  Speaker 4: the therapeutic approach, compromises our factual findings. We put their
• 1:37:18
  Speaker 4: feelings first. It says it, literally. I don't know if
• 1:37:22
  Speaker 4: you find it. I italicized it when I was going
• 1:37:25
  Speaker 4: through that, what they said. Maybe you can find it
• 1:37:28
  Speaker 4: while I'm speaking. So effectively, what the commission, the civil
• 1:37:32
  Speaker 4: commission did was it acted as stenographers. It just rolled
• 1:37:39
  Speaker 4: down with whatever anyone said.
• 1:37:43
  Speaker 5: The physical and emotional well-being of the testifier is our
• 1:37:47
  Speaker 5: highest priority, even if it compromises our documentation efforts, unquote.
• 1:37:53
  Speaker 4: You have to laugh at that.
• 1:37:55
  Speaker 2: Amazing.
• 1:37:56
  Speaker 4: I wonder if you can read it one more time,
• 1:37:58
  Speaker 4: because I'd like the viewers to hear what she said.
• 1:38:01
  Speaker 5: The physical and emotional well-being of the testifier is our
• 1:38:05
  Speaker 5: highest priority, even if it compromises our documentation efforts.
• 1:38:10
  Speaker 4: You know, you have to ask yourself, is this gathering
• 1:38:15
  Speaker 4: evidence or is this group therapy? What's going on here?
• 1:38:23
  Speaker 5: They also said that the delicate triangle between therapy, documentation,
• 1:38:27
  Speaker 5: and justice requires constant balance.
• 1:38:30
  Speaker 4: Except then they could but i say if you're not
• 1:38:33
  Speaker 4: going to critically evaluate the testimony then you have yourself
• 1:38:40
  Speaker 4: upset the balance you put the balance on therapy and
• 1:38:45
  Speaker 4: not on documentation So now we have two problems. Number one,
• 1:38:52
  Speaker 4: in my opinion, and I know it's not going to
• 1:38:54
  Speaker 4: be a popular opinion. On the other hand, I'm not
• 1:38:57
  Speaker 4: here to be popular. It's just how I evaluate. I
• 1:39:01
  Speaker 4: don't think I think the default setting is not to
• 1:39:03
  Speaker 4: trust the word they say. Number two, there was no interrogation.
• 1:39:09
  Speaker 4: There was no fact finding. There was simply simply stenography.
• 1:39:14
  Speaker 4: It was a group therapy session. It wasn't. trying to
• 1:39:19
  Speaker 4: ferret out the truth. Even, okay, I'll grant, I'll grant.
• 1:39:25
  Speaker 4: Maybe you should be delicate. Maybe you should walk on eggshells. Okay,
• 1:39:31
  Speaker 4: I'll grant it if people are traumatized. But they didn't
• 1:39:35
  Speaker 4: do anything. They just sat down, put a microphone, and speak.
• 1:39:43
  Speaker 4: That was their documentation. She keeps saying, I archived this testimony.
• 1:39:52
  Speaker 4: I archived that testimony. You know, trying to put it
• 1:39:58
  Speaker 4: like Ryan said, they call it a civil commission, a
• 1:40:02
  Speaker 4: highfalutin body. Now they archived. I said, this is not archiving.
• 1:40:10
  Speaker 4: This is the equivalent of a hoarder collecting junk. I
• 1:40:15
  Speaker 4: have to keep saying to myself, I lived during the
• 1:40:19
  Speaker 4: war in Vietnam. The ground troops entered in March 1965.
• 1:40:26
  Speaker 4: About three years later, there were large, I'm not saying
• 1:40:31
  Speaker 4: a majority, but they were certainly significant. There were significant
• 1:40:35
  Speaker 4: organizations of Vietnam vets involved. who opposed the war and
• 1:40:40
  Speaker 4: publicly exposed the crimes committed. There was a famous organization,
• 1:40:45
  Speaker 4: actually one of the heads, I didn't particularly like him,
• 1:40:47
  Speaker 4: was John Kerry. It was called VVAW, Vietnam Veterans Against
• 1:40:51
  Speaker 4: the War. And then they gave what was called testimony,
• 1:40:55
  Speaker 4: I think it was called the Winter Soldier testimony, in
• 1:40:59
  Speaker 4: which they described the horrors that the U.S. was committing
• 1:41:02
  Speaker 4: in Vietnam. Is there anything remotely equivalent to that three
• 1:41:06
  Speaker 4: years after the Gaza genocide? maybe two or three people
• 1:41:10
  Speaker 4: who are quoted in Haaretz. So why should I trust
• 1:41:16
  Speaker 4: that testimony? But let's now get to the testimony, okay?
• 1:41:22
  Speaker 4: I'll now give you, in my opinion, the context, the
• 1:41:26
  Speaker 4: proper context. Let's now get to the actual testimony. So,
• 1:41:32
  Speaker 4: on the question of rape, one person, a male, is
• 1:41:40
  Speaker 4: said to have alleged that he was raped. That one person,
• 1:41:47
  Speaker 4: he goes by the name D period in the report.
• 1:41:52
  Speaker 4: That person, number one, he's completely discounted in Israel. If
• 1:41:59
  Speaker 4: you take the most comprehensive report that came out by Israel,
• 1:42:03
  Speaker 4: it's called the Dina report, D-I-N-A-H, the Dina report. On
• 1:42:07
  Speaker 4: October 7th, sexual violence on October 7th, they didn't even
• 1:42:12
  Speaker 4: mention him. Hear me?
• 1:42:15
  Speaker 3: Yeah.
• 1:42:15
  Speaker 4: They didn't even mention him. So, we have not one, listen,
• 1:42:24
  Speaker 4: not one survivor testimony of rape on October 7th. Not one. Now,
• 1:42:35
  Speaker 4: number two. Their key witness, my memory is her name
• 1:42:42
  Speaker 4: is Darren Komarev. I believe that's the name. Darren, K-O-M-A-R-O-B.
• 1:42:47
  Speaker 4: Darren Komarev. She's listed number one in the report. Okay?
• 1:42:53
  Speaker 4: She's their star witness, as it were. She's not an eyewitness.
• 1:42:59
  Speaker 4: She's an earwitness. Okay? Now, let's see more of the
• 1:43:06
  Speaker 4: details of this earwitness. She was in a caravan, which
• 1:43:12
  Speaker 4: had no windows or apertures to the outside world. She's
• 1:43:18
  Speaker 4: sitting in this caravan, and she says in her uninterrogated testimony,
• 1:43:27
  Speaker 4: she said, I heard three discreet rapes. I heard a
• 1:43:35
  Speaker 4: gang rape. Then I heard a second rape, and then
• 1:43:41
  Speaker 4: I heard a third rape, all going on simultaneously. I
• 1:43:48
  Speaker 4: admit I'm an older person, but I'm thinking to myself,
• 1:43:53
  Speaker 4: I'm sitting in my apartment. When I hear a buzzer,
• 1:43:57
  Speaker 4: I can never tell whether it's somebody at the door,
• 1:44:02
  Speaker 4: or because I live in a parkway, whether it's a
• 1:44:04
  Speaker 4: car passing outside. But she, the air witness, their star witness,
• 1:44:13
  Speaker 4: she managed to discern three discrete rapes going on outside
• 1:44:21
  Speaker 4: this cubicle in which she has self-isolated. And then she says,
• 1:44:32
  Speaker 4: in one of the rapes, the fellow... the woman was
• 1:44:40
  Speaker 4: shot in front of the fellow. I'm thinking to myself,
• 1:44:46
  Speaker 4: how does she know that? She was shot in front
• 1:44:49
  Speaker 4: of him. How would she know that? Then she says,
• 1:44:54
  Speaker 4: he was her boyfriend. Yes, I saw Crystal, her eyes.
• 1:45:06
  Speaker 4: She was his girlfriend. How would you know that from
• 1:45:11
  Speaker 4: inside your self-isolation in the cubicle? How would you know that?
• 1:45:18
  Speaker 4: I'm thinking to myself, and she says, I heard it here, here,
• 1:45:26
  Speaker 4: and here. And I'm thinking to myself, did she hear
• 1:45:32
  Speaker 4: the Boston Pops, the Vienna Boys Choir? and the Beatles reunion, here, here,
• 1:45:42
  Speaker 4: and here. It was just so ridiculous. And this is
• 1:45:49
  Speaker 4: your star witness?
• 1:45:53
  Speaker 3: Right, if that was one.
• 1:45:54
  Speaker 4: Oh, I should also add, in his testimony, the fellow
• 1:45:59
  Speaker 4: who claimed, you know, the one fellow, you read his
• 1:46:03
  Speaker 4: testimony in the report, he never said he was raped.
• 1:46:09
  Speaker 4: He himself, I quote the testimony in what I wrote,
• 1:46:15
  Speaker 4: he never said he was raped. Allow me now to
• 1:46:20
  Speaker 4: turn to the question of rape of the hostages. Okay?
• 1:46:28
  Speaker 4: Let's begin with the obvious. This is a perfect opportunity
• 1:46:32
  Speaker 4: to film your sexual violence, to post on Facebook. the
• 1:46:38
  Speaker 4: web so as to psychologically terrorize Israel's population. You have
• 1:46:42
  Speaker 4: them captive. And your objective is to commit sexual violence,
• 1:46:49
  Speaker 4: including rape, in order to psychologically terrorize Israeli society. You
• 1:46:53
  Speaker 4: have them captive. Here's the opportunity. Is there a single image?
• 1:46:59
  Speaker 4: Is there one? Is there even one? On the edges
• 1:47:07
  Speaker 4: of an image, there's nothing. What is the testimony? Well,
• 1:47:15
  Speaker 4: as you both probably know, and many of your listeners,
• 1:47:18
  Speaker 4: there's a testimony of the woman, Anat Shoshana. Okay? I
• 1:47:27
  Speaker 4: won't go into the details. I'll just state, if you
• 1:47:30
  Speaker 4: read her testimony, she never said she was raped. She
• 1:47:35
  Speaker 4: did not. She said, I suffered extreme sexual assault. Okay. What?
• 1:47:47
  Speaker 4: What was it? What happened? She never says. Even the
• 1:47:53
  Speaker 4: report is very careful not to say that she had
• 1:47:59
  Speaker 4: been raped. Now, somebody asks, well, what could it have been? Well,
• 1:48:07
  Speaker 4: rape requires, usually, as you know, there are a thousand
• 1:48:10
  Speaker 4: different definitions, but in general, it requires some act of penetration.
• 1:48:16
  Speaker 4: I don't know what happened. Maybe the guy said, to
• 1:48:20
  Speaker 4: touch his penis. Maybe. I don't know. But the bottom
• 1:48:27
  Speaker 4: line is, there's not a single witness who claimed that
• 1:48:32
  Speaker 4: they suffered sexual rape. Sexual violence is separate now. Right.
• 1:48:37
  Speaker 4: Not a single one. There is one witness who says
• 1:48:42
  Speaker 4: that he or she heard reports of sexual rape. Heard
• 1:48:50
  Speaker 4: reports of rape. Doesn't say it happened. There is one witness,
• 1:48:55
  Speaker 4: her name is Aviva Siegel, who claims that she saw
• 1:49:03
  Speaker 4: an act of fallatio, coerced fallatio. However, when she was
• 1:49:11
  Speaker 4: interviewed by Amnesty International, which bent over backwards to validate
• 1:49:20
  Speaker 4: the Israeli claim, she didn't say it. Now, let's turn
• 1:49:29
  Speaker 4: to the second tier. We looked at rape. What about
• 1:49:33
  Speaker 4: other forms of sexual violence? Now, there... We have all
• 1:49:39
  Speaker 4: of this strange evidence by witnesses. Remember, no digital evidence. Witnesses. So,
• 1:49:51
  Speaker 4: we know that the witnesses, they did take a lot
• 1:49:55
  Speaker 4: of digital, they did produce a lot of digital evidence
• 1:50:00
  Speaker 4: about what happened on October 7th. Took a lot of
• 1:50:03
  Speaker 4: pictures and so forth. I should say, These were witnesses
• 1:50:08
  Speaker 4: who were first responders. Okay. So now let's turn to
• 1:50:15
  Speaker 4: the question of sexual violence. One fellow says, he says,
• 1:50:21
  Speaker 4: I found a woman with her legs spread. I tried
• 1:50:26
  Speaker 4: to close her legs. I couldn't because her vagina was
• 1:50:32
  Speaker 4: stuffed with aluminum cans. Not single, singular, aluminum cans. Another says,
• 1:50:43
  Speaker 4: if you can quote it, Brian, all of these household
• 1:50:49
  Speaker 4: items were stuffed into a woman. The only thing they
• 1:50:58
  Speaker 4: left out was the kitchen sink, the toilet bowl, and
• 1:51:09
  Speaker 4: the corner gas station. Otherwise, everything was stuffed into women's vaginas.
• 1:51:17
  Speaker 4: I'm thinking to myself, why didn't you take a picture
• 1:51:22
  Speaker 4: of it? You were busy documenting. As you know, I presume,
• 1:51:31
  Speaker 4: there was one alleged picture of some physical objects thrust
• 1:51:38
  Speaker 4: into a woman's pelvic area. But the forensics pathologist who
• 1:51:46
  Speaker 4: examined it said you couldn't tell. There's only one picture.
• 1:51:53
  Speaker 4: Human Rights Watch looked at it. Several forensic pathologists. They
• 1:51:58
  Speaker 4: said you couldn't tell. But here you have this massive
• 1:52:05
  Speaker 4: sequence of the most graphic, grotesque, ghastly descriptions of sexual violence.
• 1:52:22
  Speaker 4: Not one did the first responder document Now, you may say, well,
• 1:52:29
  Speaker 4: first responders were too busy. There was so much killing,
• 1:52:32
  Speaker 4: so much death. Fair, that's a possibility. But there's a problem.
• 1:52:39
  Speaker 4: The report says that the first responders did take a
• 1:52:46
  Speaker 4: lot of pictures. Just like the report said, quote, we
• 1:52:54
  Speaker 4: have extensive digital evidence from Hamas cameras, then where are
• 1:53:05
  Speaker 4: the pictures of sexual violence? When you seize those cameras,
• 1:53:12
  Speaker 4: those GoPros, where are the pictures? He said it's extensive.
• 1:53:19
  Speaker 4: And now you have extensive evidence provided by first responders.
• 1:53:27
  Speaker 4: And they're seeing all of these ghastly, ghastly commissions perpetrating
• 1:53:36
  Speaker 4: of sexual violence. Not one picture. How the hell happened?
• 1:53:40
  Speaker 2: Well, and I think that is the, I mean, that
• 1:53:44
  Speaker 2: really is the crux of the thing. If the argument
• 1:53:47
  Speaker 2: is not there were possibly isolated incidents of rape or
• 1:53:53
  Speaker 2: sexual assault, the thesis, to your point, is this was
• 1:53:57
  Speaker 2: used as a weapon of war and of terror. And so,
• 1:54:02
  Speaker 2: you know, if you can't produce any forensic evidence, if
• 1:54:04
  Speaker 2: you can't produce any digital evidence, that really, I mean,
• 1:54:08
  Speaker 2: it really undercuts, destroys the idea that this was used
• 1:54:13
  Speaker 2: as a technique of terror because that's, you know, you
• 1:54:17
  Speaker 2: wouldn't then try to hide and try to make sure
• 1:54:19
  Speaker 2: there was no visual evidence of those acts if they
• 1:54:22
  Speaker 2: were committed en masse as a strategy on October 7th.
• 1:54:28
  Speaker 4: And the testimonial evidence is wacky.
• 1:54:31
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 1:54:31
  Speaker 4: It simply is.
• 1:54:33
  Speaker 2: And we know some of those first responders, like the
• 1:54:37
  Speaker 2: fabricated other later debunked hoaxes as well.
• 1:54:42
  Speaker 4: And she did not discount that evidence because she's constructing
• 1:54:47
  Speaker 4: a comprehensive archive.
• 1:54:49
  Speaker 1: Right.
• 1:54:50
  Speaker 4: So she won't discount it.
• 1:54:52
  Speaker 2: Well, Norm, thank you so much for spending so much
• 1:54:55
  Speaker 2: time with us today. And everybody should go and check
• 1:54:59
  Speaker 2: out the book, Gaza's Gravediggers. Take a look at the substack,
• 1:55:03
  Speaker 2: which goes into detail about this report and, you know,
• 1:55:08
  Speaker 2: case by case, the testimonials and what they said and
• 1:55:12
  Speaker 2: what you found. And it's always such an honor and
• 1:55:15
  Speaker 2: a pleasure to get to speak with you, Norm. All right, guys,
• 1:55:18
  Speaker 2: that's going to do it for us today. Nice to
• 1:55:22
  Speaker 2: be back from Spain. I left my daughter there. Felt
• 1:55:25
  Speaker 2: a little weird getting back on the plane without her,
• 1:55:27
  Speaker 2: but I kept close tabs on what you guys were
• 1:55:31
  Speaker 2: up to, Ryan. I was really wanting to jump in
• 1:55:34
  Speaker 2: on the whole Hasan Piker freakout. I was very much
• 1:55:37
  Speaker 2: missing the opportunity to weigh in on that one.
• 1:55:40
  Speaker 5: Yeah, we're on day... I just checked out Drudge Report.
• 1:55:43
  Speaker 5: He's the top story right now on the Drudge Report, which...
• 1:55:48
  Speaker 5: to this day still drives a lot of kind of
• 1:55:50
  Speaker 5: cable news and chatter kind of inside, inside Washington. Um,
• 1:55:56
  Speaker 5: in fact, let me see if it's still up there.
• 1:56:02
  Speaker 4: Yeah.
• 1:56:02
  Speaker 5: Here, let me just, just, just so people who don't
• 1:56:05
  Speaker 5: understand like what this judge report is like, if you're young.
• 1:56:08
  Speaker 3: You have no idea what this thing even is, but
• 1:56:09
  Speaker 3: it's extremely influential. It's still extremely influential.
• 1:56:12
  Speaker 2: Um, Yeah. At its peak, it was like insane the
• 1:56:17
  Speaker 2: amount of clicks and views you would get if you
• 1:56:19
  Speaker 2: ended up with a Drudge Report link. But it's still
• 1:56:22
  Speaker 2: all cable news producers.
• 1:56:23
  Speaker 3: Will look at this.
• 1:56:23
  Speaker 4: It still is.
• 1:56:24
  Speaker 5: The Gen X and Boomers get a lot of there.
• 1:56:25
  Speaker 5: And here's their top headline right now.
• 1:56:29
  Speaker 2: They make him look so cool in that photo.
• 1:56:31
  Speaker 3: They do. They picked a good one.
• 1:56:36
  Speaker 5: And Bret Baier rebutting the Don in an event.
• 1:56:39
  Speaker 4: Wow.
• 1:56:42
  Speaker 2: Amazing times we're living in.
• 1:56:43
  Speaker 1: It's wild. It's wild.
• 1:56:44
  Speaker 2: All right, guys. Well, we still have the month free
• 1:56:48
  Speaker 2: subscription going on, breakingpoints.com. Check out the newsletter, all that
• 1:56:52
  Speaker 2: good stuff. And we will be back to you on Monday.
• 1:56:55
  Speaker 2: See you then.