Latest / The Smart Cookies podcast / Prof. NORMAN FINKELSTEIN on Zionism, Israeli society, Gaza, Genocide, Kamala Harris and his debate with Destiny

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Prof. NORMAN FINKELSTEIN on Zionism, Israeli society, Gaza, Genocide, Kamala Harris and his debate with Destiny · The Smart Cookies podcast

• 0:00
  Not that my guest really needs an introduction, but Professor Norman Finkelstein is a political
• 0:08
  scientist and author who in 2020 was named the fifth most influential political scientist
• 0:14
  in the world.
• 0:15
  His primary fields of research are the politics of the Holocaust and the Israeli-Palestinian
• 0:20
  conflict.
• 0:21
  He's the author of many books such as the Holocaust Industry, I'll Burn That Bridge
• 0:26
  When I Get To It and Gaza, An Inquest Into Its Martyrdom.
• 0:30
  Professor Finkelstein, welcome.
• 0:31
  Thank you for having me.
• 0:34
  I wonder if you'll agree with me, but a lot of the media coverage about the horrific events
• 0:40
  in Gaza is packed with terms and concepts that I believe most people, myself included
• 0:45
  to be honest, are not really that well informed about.
• 0:49
  One such term is Zionism, which apparently means totally different things to different
• 0:54
  people, especially online where folks keep throwing the word around quite arbitrarily.
• 1:01
  I believe you wrote your doctoral dissertation on Zionism, so I thought we could maybe start
• 1:07
  here.
• 1:08
  So Professor Finkelstein, what is Zionism?
• 1:11
  Well, I have to preface my remarks by saying it doesn't really make any difference anymore
• 1:20
  what it was because its original meaning has been completely lost, in my opinion, and not
• 1:30
  so much the meaning but the reasoning behind the meaning.
• 1:35
  How do they work through this argument?
• 1:38
  Actually my doctoral dissertation was entitled From the Jewish Question to the Jewish State,
• 1:47
  an essay in the theory of Zionism.
• 1:50
  So the reason I began with the Jewish question is in order to understand what Zionism is,
• 1:57
  you have to understand what question it was trying, what political question it was trying
• 2:02
  to answer.
• 2:03
  And the political question it was trying to answer was anti-Semitism.
• 2:08
  From whence arises anti-Semitism and is a Jewish state the logical answer, response to anti-Semitism?
• 2:21
  At the time in that era, the 19th century, there were all sorts of approaches, if you
• 2:28
  might call it, that the Jews embraced.
• 2:32
  There were those who believed in the Enlightenment idea of achieving citizenship within your
• 2:39
  state, full citizenship, and that would resolve the Jewish question.
• 2:46
  That notion goes back to the French Revolution and the idea that you can create a state,
• 2:53
  a nation on the basis of citizenship.
• 2:58
  So there were those who fought for equal rights within a, what you might call, a bourgeois
• 3:04
  democratic state.
• 3:07
  And that idea at the end of the 19th century seemed not to be working because of outbreaks
• 3:16
  of anti-Semitism in Eastern Europe, but also in Western Europe and places like France,
• 3:22
  the Dreyfus affair, the French Jewish officer, Captain Dreyfus, who was very much an assimilated
• 3:34
  French Jew, who was accused of having been a spy for the Germans.
• 3:43
  The famous Jacuz affair.
• 3:44
  Yes, one that culminated with Emile Zola's Jacuz.
• 3:50
  Now there were those who believed that anti-Semitism was inherent in capitalism, the search for
• 3:59
  scapegoats and things like that of the capitalist system, and that the only answer would have
• 4:05
  to be a revolutionary transformation of society.
• 4:10
  And there were a lot of Jews who were wedded to that idea.
• 4:15
  Most of the Bolshevik leadership, with the partial exception of Lenin, it's now said
• 4:23
  was one quarter Jewish, but with the partial exception of Lenin and the full exception
• 4:30
  of Stalin, the entire Bolshevik leadership was Jewish.
• 4:34
  Trotsky, Kamenev, Zinoviev, Bukharin, they were all Jews.
• 4:41
  And obviously Jews played a salient role in the leading socialist organization of that
• 4:49
  era, namely the German Social Democratic Party, where many of its luminaries were Jewish,
• 4:59
  not most notably, one among many being Rosa Luxemburg.
• 5:05
  So there were those who believed the only way to answer the Jewish question is that
• 5:10
  you have to abolish capitalism and create a socialist society.
• 5:16
  Then there were those who believed that we need socialism, but we also need some form
• 5:20
  of Jewish autonomy, or cultural autonomy within a socialist state.
• 5:29
  And the most famous of those were, of course, the Bundists.
• 5:34
  And then there were the Zionists, which were a pretty trivial percentage of the Jewish
• 5:39
  movement, I think.
• 5:41
  I can't remember now, but it was a tiny, tiny portion of the Jewish community that
• 5:46
  embraced the idea of Zionism.
• 5:48
  The basic idea of Zionism was that every nation, every normal nation, had a state.
• 5:59
  The French people had the French state, the British people had the British state.
• 6:03
  Every normal nation had a state, and that Jews were an anomaly because they were a nation
• 6:10
  without a state.
• 6:12
  And it was the fact that the Jews didn't have a state that they could call their own that
• 6:17
  was allegedly the cause of anti-Semitism, because the belief was that any nation-state
• 6:26
  can tolerate a minority, but it has a limit before it can no longer tolerate it.
• 6:35
  The leading Zionist, after Herzl passed from the scene, Theodor Herzl, the leading Zionist
• 6:42
  was Chaim Weizmann.
• 6:45
  And Chaim Weizmann was, by profession, he was a chemist.
• 6:51
  And he compared the situation of minorities with a mixture, a mixture meaning you can
• 6:58
  pour in an alien substance and most of the time it dissolves in the test tube.
• 7:07
  But if you put too much of the alien substance into the test tube, it won't dissolve.
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  And he said that was the problem with Jews.
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  They were too large a minority within other nation-states, and being too large a minority,
• 7:23
  they couldn't dissolve, they couldn't assimilate into the nation-states around them.
• 7:30
  And if they couldn't assimilate, they would be conceived as an alien entity.
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  So in order to resolve the Jewish question, you have to create a Jewish state.
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  It didn't have to be 100% Jewish.
• 7:46
  Zionists believed that a nation-state could tolerate maybe a 10 to 15% minority or 10
• 7:54
  to 20% minority.
• 7:57
  So they didn't want a Simon pure Jewish state, but they wanted a state which was overwhelmingly
• 8:05
  Jewish and that they had to preserve that demographic balance, which is kind of what
• 8:11
  made the expulsion of the Arab population in 1947 inevitable because they had to rectify
• 8:21
  the demographic balance in order to create a Jewish state which was overwhelmingly Jewish
• 8:30
  in its demographic balance.
• 8:36
  So the basic idea of Zionism was that there was a limit to which non-Jewish societies
• 8:44
  could assimilate Jews.
• 8:47
  Jews were too large a minority, and they liked back then to use biological metaphors.
• 8:55
  Obviously, Weizmann used a chemical metaphor.
• 9:03
  Others used biological metaphors.
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  And they said the natural reaction of a human body, the human body to a foreign substance
• 9:12
  is to repel it, to reject it, to push it out.
• 9:17
  And in the same way, they said the natural substance of a body politic is to repel, to
• 9:25
  reject, to push out an alien substance.
• 9:29
  And Jews were, in their view, they were an alien nation.
• 9:34
  And so people like Jabotinsky, the right-wing Zionist, but certainly not unrepresentative
• 9:42
  of Zionist thinking, he said that anti-Semitism was normal.
• 9:49
  It was a normal reaction of a body politic to an alien presence in its midst.
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  And therefore, Jews have to normalize their condition by becoming what was normal, namely
• 10:05
  a nation state where Jews were overwhelmingly the majority.
• 10:11
  Following kind of this line, I was quite surprised then when during a recent discussion, I heard
• 10:16
  you say the following, I don't believe Zionism is the operative ideology in Israel today.
• 10:24
  You went on to make an interesting analogy with the Soviet Union between its early days
• 10:30
  when kind of ideology was driving the revolution, I believe, and the later period when the state
• 10:35
  became, I don't know, a self-sustaining machine and a real politic sort of took over.
• 10:41
  So if it's not ideology that's driving Israeli society in 2024, what would you say is then?
• 10:47
  That's a fair question.
• 10:51
  That's possibly possible, I over-spoke on that particular point.
• 10:56
  First of all, I think the overwhelming concerns of the Israeli state, they're geopolitical.
• 11:04
  Israel wants to dominate the region.
• 11:07
  It looks with trepidation at any possible, any regional challenge to its hegemony.
• 11:15
  And it's determined to maintain its, what it calls, its deterrence capability, that
• 11:25
  is its ability to terrorize the other powers in the region into submission.
• 11:32
  I don't believe that has anything very much to do with Zionism inherently.
• 11:39
  That is a geopolitical choice that Israel has made.
• 11:45
  There is the belief by Israelis, which does an element of truth to it, I suppose.
• 11:51
  There is the belief among Israelis that the Arab world will never accept a Jewish state,
• 11:57
  and that they will always be calculating how to enhance their power for, so to speak, the
• 12:08
  final showdown.
• 12:11
  Now that too, in my opinion, has very little to do with Zionism.
• 12:18
  That's a view of the world that we will never be accepted because we are actually an artificial
• 12:28
  entity.
• 12:30
  They don't believe in themselves as members of the Arab world or the Middle East.
• 12:34
  They don't believe in themselves as a, they can see themselves completely as Westerners.
• 12:40
  They want to be part of the EU.
• 12:41
  They want to be part of the EU trading bloc.
• 12:44
  Culturally, they know more about, say, upper, of the Upper East Side in New York than I
• 12:50
  even do.
• 12:51
  That's a fact.
• 12:52
  No, that's just a fact.
• 12:54
  They're completely culturally assimilated to the West.
• 12:57
  So they recognize they're an alien entity, and they make no effort to bridge that alienness
• 13:08
  because they have complete contempt for Arabs and for Muslims.
• 13:12
  They consider them to be, you know, the missing link.
• 13:16
  These are animals.
• 13:18
  They're brutish.
• 13:20
  That's why the language that came out after October 7 came so easily to the lips of the
• 13:25
  Israelis because that's what they've always believed, that these Arabs are backwards,
• 13:32
  stupid, and all the rest.
• 13:36
  So to some extent, in my opinion, it's a self-fulfilling prophecy.
• 13:43
  If you believe that you'll never be accepted and you carry on like you'll never be accepted,
• 13:50
  then you won't ever be accepted.
• 13:53
  It's not possible.
• 13:56
  So that, too, doesn't seem to me to have much to do with Zionism.
• 14:02
  It does have quite a lot to do with something which is an element in Zionism, which I don't
• 14:08
  dispute at all.
• 14:10
  There is Zionism evolved.
• 14:13
  It was an extremely Jewish chauvinist ideology.
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  It was Jews are better.
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  Now, that's common to Jewish culture in general.
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  The notion we might call the distorted notion of Jewish chosenness.
• 14:27
  Now, I understand if you go into the technical thing, chosenness did not mean that you were
• 14:32
  better.
• 14:33
  But guess what?
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  That's how most Jews interpret it.
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  The Jews are better.
• 14:38
  And there was the fact it wasn't just an ideological belief.
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  It was an ideological belief that was overdetermined, to use a famous expression by this French
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  Marxist, Althusser.
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  There was an ideological belief that was overdetermined by the phenomenal Jewish success in the secular
• 14:59
  world in the 20th century.
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  The fact that as Jews like to Kvel, Kvel is the Yiddish for bread, Jews like to Kvel,
• 15:08
  that they represent 0.00001% of the world's population, but they represent 20% of the
• 15:16
  Nobel laureates.
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  And their success in business, their success in the arts, their success in every secular
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  dilemma has been dazzling.
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  There's no question about that.
• 15:29
  And so that it's kind of inevitable.
• 15:32
  It goes to your head and produces this superiority.
• 15:39
  Jewish chosenness, not in the original religious sense, but this notion of Jews are better.
• 15:46
  And that has, I would say, as I said a moment ago, that became a part of Zionism, I think.
• 15:56
  It wasn't intrinsic to it, but it certainly wasn't hard.
• 16:02
  It was very easy for it to become part of the Zionist ideology.
• 16:08
  And this Jewish chosenness, this Jewish supremacy, yeah, that does have a lot to do with what's
• 16:15
  going on now.
• 16:16
  The complete contempt for Arabs and for Muslims, also, by the way, for everybody else.
• 16:26
  They may be able to communicate with Urban in Hungary, but they have complete contempt
• 16:35
  for these people.
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  They just think they're a carb.
• 16:38
  I mean, obviously, Arabs at the bottom, Arabs and Black people are at the bottom, but just
• 16:44
  above all the other non-Jews, maybe with a partial exception, the partial exception of
• 16:50
  Germans, where Jews have a kind of respect for the German mental capacity.
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  Germans of all people.
• 17:02
  Yeah, well, you know, the narcissism of small differences.
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  I remember with my parents, they had contempt for Poles, people who've polished the sin,
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  but they hated Germans.
• 17:19
  Now, they hated Germans, but they didn't look down on Germans.
• 17:23
  You see, it was different.
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  They would never say it like my parents would say, stupid Pole, stupid Pole, stupid Pole.
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  No Jew would ever say stupid German, but they would not.
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  So the Germans were the, I would say, the exception.
• 17:41
  Right now, obviously, the exception is becoming the Chinese.
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  Nobody would say a stupid Chinese.
• 17:47
  In any event, to get back to your original question, I think the major concerns of Israeli
• 17:56
  leadership is geopolitical, but I also believe that there is a large component of Jewish
• 18:07
  supremacy.
• 18:08
  Could you pinpoint the moment in Israel's history when this change, this tipping point,
• 18:14
  this tipping over happened from this ideological state to, like you were saying, the desire
• 18:20
  to dominate in a geopolitical sense?
• 18:22
  Well, the desire to dominate was always there.
• 18:25
  You know, David Ben-Gurion was absolutely convinced, the first prime minister of Israel,
• 18:30
  he was absolutely convinced the Arab world would never accept Israel.
• 18:33
  I mean, he was smart enough to realize it wasn't alien.
• 18:37
  It was in many ways an alien implant.
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  There was no Zionist who wanted to become Arab.
• 18:46
  That was not going to happen.
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  Ben-Gurion was this low-level Jewish supremacist, so he had complete contempt for the Arabs
• 19:02
  and never believed that they would also, in addition, they would accept a Jewish state.
• 19:09
  But he was a Zionist in the sense that he believed in Zionist ideology.
• 19:13
  He believed we needed to normalize the condition of Jews by creating a normal Jewish state
• 19:22
  and that Jews had no future in what was called the diaspora.
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  That diaspora for Jews offered no promise or prospect for the Jewish people.
• 19:35
  Obviously, for individual Jews here and there, yes, but for Jews as a people, no.
• 19:41
  And he was actually very disappointed.
• 19:43
  He expected there would be all the Jews in the world, sorry for those who were exterminated,
• 19:48
  they would flock to the Jewish state.
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  And he was surprised when, for example, the American Jews decided to stay put.
• 19:56
  There's been very, very little immigration of Jews from the United States to Israel.
• 20:02
  Let's go to the other side.
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  Last month, there was a much publicized debate on anti-Zionism in Canada between Douglas
• 20:09
  Murray and Mehdi Hassan and the side that claimed that anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism
• 20:15
  won the debate.
• 20:17
  I feel a bit silly asking this, but in light of this event, I also feel like I kind of
• 20:22
  have to.
• 20:23
  Why is anti-Zionism not anti-Semitism?
• 20:26
  No, it can be.
• 20:29
  Listen, fellow Zionism can be anti-Semitism.
• 20:35
  Right now, the European right, what you might call the neo-fascists, those who harken back
• 20:47
  in attitude and mentality and program to the fascist movements of the 1930s, they both
• 20:56
  revere Israel.
• 21:00
  And I also think they probably hate Jews, because for them, Israel is not a Jewish state.
• 21:06
  For them, Israel is a white supremacist state.
• 21:11
  They see it as a state which loathes the non-Jewish, excuse me, which loathes the non-Jewish minorities,
• 21:21
  Arabs, Muslims, which of course, that's a common sentiment in the European right, the
• 21:27
  whole issue of immigration, and they don't want black people from Africa, and they definitely
• 21:33
  don't want Muslims.
• 21:34
  Those are the two people.
• 21:36
  And Israel in that sense is a model, a paradigm.
• 21:41
  It's a white supremacist state where the white supremacists happen to be Jewish, but the
• 21:48
  Jewish part is very marginal.
• 21:51
  It's the fascist mentality, the Muslims, they hate the Muslims, like Israel.
• 22:00
  They hate Arabs, like Israel.
• 22:03
  They hate colored people, like Israel.
• 22:06
  Israel hates black people.
• 22:08
  So you could be a fellow Zionist and an anti-Semite.
• 22:14
  I don't think they like Jews.
• 22:16
  I don't think they're far right, be it in Hungary or in France.
• 22:21
  They like the Jews, but they like Zionism as they see Zionism.
• 22:26
  Zionism is a fascist model, a paradigm for them, at least its current incarnation.
• 22:36
  And in the same way, it's perfectly plausible that you're an anti-Zionist and an anti-Semite.
• 22:43
  I'm sure there's an event diagram.
• 22:45
  There are areas of overlap.
• 22:48
  I have no, there's nothing intrinsic about being anti-Zionist.
• 22:52
  First of all, as I said, the Zionism plays such a little role now.
• 22:59
  Who even reads these people?
• 23:02
  Who reads Herzl?
• 23:05
  The Zionist thinkers are so mediocre.
• 23:09
  There's nothing there.
• 23:10
  I remember I once, when I was writing my doctoral dissertation, I once said to Professor Chomsky,
• 23:20
  who was kind of my supervisor since my own technical supervisors basically were missing
• 23:27
  in action.
• 23:29
  And I once asked Professor Chomsky, I said, Professor Chomsky, do you believe that Zionism
• 23:36
  has intellectual depth and intellectual content?
• 23:43
  And he replied to me, Norman, let me begin from the beginning.
• 23:49
  In my opinion, none of the social studies have intellectual depth.
• 23:55
  Great.
• 23:56
  I studied social studies.
• 24:00
  But yeah, there's something to it to be fair.
• 24:04
  He just validates the fact that my whole life was pointless.
• 24:08
  How do you feel, you?
• 24:11
  Yeah, but like he said, there's no unfairness to the statement.
• 24:16
  You have to accept it.
• 24:17
  In any event, the Zionist thinkers were very thin.
• 24:22
  There was one who Chomsky liked, I think he had him in mind, Ahad Ha'am, who was smart,
• 24:30
  no question about it.
• 24:32
  But the others were.
• 24:33
  There was really nothing there.
• 24:37
  So nobody reads them.
• 24:40
  What's called anti-Zionism is anti-Israel, being anti-Israel.
• 24:46
  And then the question is whether being, so we can drop Zionism altogether.
• 24:51
  The question is whether being anti-Israel is intrinsically anti-Semitic.
• 24:56
  And my answer is there's areas of overlap, but there's obviously no intrinsic connection
• 25:04
  between the two.
• 25:05
  There can be in the real world.
• 25:07
  There are a lot of excellent reasons to hate Israel.
• 25:11
  Actually the last few days, I wouldn't want to tell you the thoughts passing through my
• 25:15
  head, but I'll tell you they're not very nice.
• 25:18
  And I have to really control myself because it's a lunatic state.
• 25:24
  And it's a lunatic state and it's bringing us closer, when I say us, I mean the whole
• 25:30
  world closer and closer to the precipice.
• 25:33
  And I don't know where it's going to end.
• 25:35
  So there are many reasons to hate Israel which have nothing to do with Jews.
• 25:40
  They are completely out of control.
• 25:42
  I think I got an email from my close friend, Sana Qasim, and she's my webmaster, really
• 25:51
  brilliant woman.
• 25:53
  And she said, and she's Palestinian, and she said the United Nations can't stop them, the
• 26:02
  International Court of Justice can't stop them, the Houthis in Hezbollah can't stop
• 26:08
  them, nothing can stop them.
• 26:09
  They're just on a lunatic rampage now, completely lunatics.
• 26:15
  So there are excellent reasons to be anti-Israel.
• 26:18
  They have nothing to do with Jews.
• 26:20
  Though, of course, there's always going to be a spillover because Israel describes itself
• 26:26
  as the nation state of the Jewish people.
• 26:30
  So from hating Israel to hating Jews is not a very big leap when you describe yourself
• 26:36
  as a nation state of the Jewish people.
• 26:39
  It's a fleece hop from one to the other.
• 26:43
  So there's going to be spillover.
• 26:46
  But in this spillover, we should at least, as a theoretical matter, as a practical matter,
• 26:51
  and Holly makes a difference, I agree, as a theoretical matter, we should be clear about
• 26:56
  why that happened, why the hatred of the Jews, because this nation state, which calls itself
• 27:04
  the nation state of the Jewish people, is completely lunatic.
• 27:08
  It's no different, I mean, as a matter of principle.
• 27:12
  People didn't hate Nazis during World War II.
• 27:16
  They hated Germans.
• 27:19
  They hated Germans.
• 27:20
  Well, the spillover was pretty easy because the Nazis were the head of a German government.
• 27:27
  But they didn't denounce Nazis.
• 27:31
  They denounced Germans, krauts, as they were called, or Teutonics.
• 27:39
  So and it was the same thing if you ever read the literature on the Japanese.
• 27:43
  We didn't deny it.
• 27:46
  We didn't denounce the emperor or the Japanese state.
• 27:53
  It was the Japanese people, the Nips, as they were called.
• 27:59
  So that kind of spillover is inevitable, I believe.
• 28:06
  And then it's very difficult to sort out anti-Israelism from anti-Semitism.
• 28:14
  I just watched one of your interviews that came out last week, and you said something
• 28:18
  that one won't hear on mainstream media, at least not very often.
• 28:23
  You said that Netanyahu is just a reflection and a representation of Israeli society.
• 28:28
  Now, the thing that we usually get is, oh, we just need to get rid of Netanyahu and his
• 28:34
  extremist government, and Israel will become normal again.
• 28:38
  Could you elaborate a bit more on why that's not the case at all?
• 28:42
  It's completely ridiculous.
• 28:43
  You know, it's like saying the Russian war in Ukraine is Putin's war.
• 28:50
  What do you like it or not?
• 28:52
  It's the whole entire Russian elite who regards a NATO state on its border as posing a threat
• 29:01
  to the security of Russia.
• 29:04
  It's not Putin's war.
• 29:07
  Can you show me somebody in the Russian leadership who opposes, who supports a NATO presence
• 29:15
  in Ukraine?
• 29:16
  Is there anybody?
• 29:17
  And the same thing.
• 29:19
  Is there anybody?
• 29:20
  You know, Israel is a parliamentary democracy, and tiny parties can have a big impact in
• 29:28
  tilting the coalition one way or the other.
• 29:32
  So if you disagree with Netanyahu, who's fundamentally disagreed with his policies of trying to make
• 29:39
  Gaza uninhabitable and also to restore Israel's deterrence capability against Hezbollah and
• 29:50
  Iran, if you really disagreed with those policies, you could form a party, get three seats in
• 29:57
  the Knesset and have an impact.
• 29:59
  Do you see anybody forming a party on that platform?
• 30:03
  Yeah, there are differences over which you should prioritize now, making Gaza uninhabitable
• 30:09
  or bringing back the hostages.
• 30:11
  And after you bring back the hostages, then you continue on the path of making Gaza uninhabitable.
• 30:17
  There are differences of, you know, they call it tactical differences, but there is no fundamental
• 30:26
  disagreement with Netanyahu, not only in the Israeli elite, but we have to be clear in
• 30:33
  the whole of Israeli society.
• 30:35
  Israeli society is completely lunatic.
• 30:37
  It is.
• 30:38
  It's the entire society is.
• 30:40
  If you look at the polls, only 4% of Israeli Jewish society believes Israel is using too
• 30:49
  much force in Gaza, 4%.
• 30:52
  And 40% think it's using too little force.
• 30:57
  That's a completely lunatic society.
• 30:59
  To try to impose or burden Prime Minister Netanyahu with all the sins of Israel is completely
• 31:07
  ridiculous.
• 31:08
  Netanyahu is Israel.
• 31:11
  He's an obnoxious Jewish supremacist.
• 31:15
  That's Israel.
• 31:16
  Obnoxious.
• 31:17
  He left out an important element, an obnoxious, narcissistic Jewish supremacist.
• 31:24
  Those are the three characteristics.
• 31:26
  That is Israel.
• 31:28
  Obnoxious beyond belief, narcissistic beyond calculation, and Jewish supremacist.
• 31:39
  That's Israel.
• 31:40
  When they vote, when they see Netanyahu, they see themselves.
• 31:44
  That's why they vote for him.
• 31:47
  On that note, Abby Martin, the American journalist, did a series of street interviews about six
• 31:53
  years ago, so well before October the 7th, where she was just walking around Jerusalem
• 31:58
  kind of asking random Israelis what they thought about the Palestinians.
• 32:03
  Anybody can watch the videos on YouTube.
• 32:05
  And I have to say, it's pretty terrifying to hear what people were willing to say publicly
• 32:10
  and on camera.
• 32:11
  Their answers kind of ranged from, we've got to kick them out of Palestine immediately
• 32:16
  to some people simply suggesting that Israel needs to carpet bomb the Palestinian territories.
• 32:24
  People didn't seem to find what they were saying problematic in the slightest.
• 32:29
  Again, we're not talking about post October 7th here.
• 32:32
  It's just quite startling.
• 32:35
  If you go back and read the literature, by even very respected figures, very respected
• 32:41
  figures in American culture during the conquest of the West, they talked about the Indians
• 32:48
  as being savages.
• 32:50
  They all did.
• 32:51
  It was just the lingua franca of American society.
• 32:56
  Everybody referred to them as savages.
• 32:57
  They have to be wiped out and so on and so forth.
• 33:02
  There's a decent book titled American Holocaust.
• 33:06
  And there's a very long chapter, a very dispiriting chapter on the attitudes of Americans towards
• 33:16
  the Native Americans, Euro-Americans towards the Native Americans.
• 33:20
  If you read stuff like the Theodore Roosevelt, the American president, if you saw the way
• 33:28
  he talked about Native Americans, it wasn't just Roosevelt.
• 33:32
  It was even people like Frank Baum, the author of The Wizard of Oz.
• 33:38
  It was everyone.
• 33:42
  Even to be perfectly candid about it, when I was growing up, I was an aficionado of cowboy
• 33:51
  and Indian movies.
• 33:54
  And I was always willing for the cowboys to kill, to burn, not just to kill, to incinerate
• 34:00
  the savages.
• 34:03
  And that was when it was already over and the Native population was already wiped out.
• 34:09
  But the residue, that feeling still carried over in our culture.
• 34:15
  Actually the first film to humanize Native Americans, the very first film, was I think
• 34:22
  1975, something around there.
• 34:24
  It was called Little Big Men and it started Dustin Hoffman.
• 34:28
  It was the first film that presented the Native Americans as being actually human beings.
• 34:34
  So I don't find that totally shocking among the Israelis that they consider they want
• 34:42
  to wipe out.
• 34:43
  I wanted to wipe out the Native Americans after they were already wiped out.
• 34:46
  What shocks me is the denial.
• 34:49
  Like yesterday, The New York Times had an article, or even yesterday or two days ago,
• 34:56
  the rioting at the prison where they're sodomizing prisoners.
• 35:02
  They called it a battle for Israel's soul.
• 35:08
  Come on guys.
• 35:11
  That's like a battle for Germany's soul in an SS barracks.
• 35:17
  It's completely divorced.
• 35:20
  They're still trying to project the images of an Israeli soul.
• 35:26
  Guys, that died a long time ago.
• 35:30
  When Israelis post videos of their euphoria and elation as they murder and torture Arabs
• 35:37
  on the social media, knowing full well they're not going to be ostracized, but quite the
• 35:42
  contrary they're going to be celebrated, there's very little soul left there.
• 35:49
  So that's enough already, as the Spanish would say bastante enough already, bastante bastante
• 35:56
  enough with the soul.
• 35:59
  It's all for The New York Times, the Upper East Side Jewish billionaire supremacists,
• 36:04
  because that's The New York Times' basic, it's its reader base, the Upper East Side.
• 36:11
  So they want to still continue, they know the Jews in the Upper East Side, the billionaire
• 36:17
  Jewish supremacists.
• 36:19
  They love to hear about the Jewish soul, the Israeli soul.
• 36:23
  I'm originally from Slovenia, so the Balkans, but I used to live in Berlin for nearly a
• 36:27
  decade.
• 36:28
  I didn't speak any German and I had extremely limited options when I arrived to the German
• 36:33
  capital.
• 36:34
  So I started guiding people to bars at night.
• 36:38
  I was what's known as a pop-crawl guide, not a very dignified profession.
• 36:42
  Most of my clients were Australians and Americans and English, but there was a fair share of
• 36:47
  Israelis, too.
• 36:48
  It was always a group of young guys who had just come from serving in the IDF.
• 36:52
  And they had to have been the most obnoxious.
• 36:59
  For some reason, they quite liked me.
• 37:01
  I don't know, perhaps because they knew I wasn't German, maybe, and as soon as they
• 37:05
  got a bit more relaxed around me, they would almost always say that they could feel that
• 37:10
  the Germans still wanted to kill them all.
• 37:12
  It was quite startling and it always shook me.
• 37:15
  In the Balkans, we grew up with plenty of horror stories that our grandparents told
• 37:21
  us and yet in all my time in Berlin, I never felt that any German wanted to harm me just
• 37:25
  because I'm a Slav or something.
• 37:27
  You've heard of narcissism.
• 37:28
  They have to want to kill us.
• 37:29
  They're always the center of everything.
• 37:30
  No, guys, actually the Germans don't give a flying fig about you.
• 37:43
  I do have to say that they seemed like they really believe in what they were saying.
• 37:47
  They just looked utterly paranoid, which got me thinking that maybe being forced into the
• 37:54
  army in your formative years and then pumped with paralyzing fear and told that anyone
• 38:00
  who's not Jewish wants to murder you is probably not ideal for your psyche.
• 38:05
  I wonder what your thoughts about the role of military indoctrination of young people
• 38:08
  in Israel are.
• 38:09
  There is a very real problem, first of all, that's part of the Jewish psyche.
• 38:14
  You have to remember.
• 38:15
  Did you ever see Woody Allen's Andy Hall?
• 38:18
  Yeah, of course.
• 38:20
  It's a classic.
• 38:21
  It's absolutely hilarious when they're walking down Central Park and somebody says to him,
• 38:28
  so what do you think?
• 38:29
  He said, what do you think?
• 38:32
  What do you think?
• 38:35
  I think everything anyone says to me here is true.
• 38:38
  That's it.
• 38:40
  The Goyim are always trying to oppress you.
• 38:45
  So that's part of the Jewish psyche.
• 38:47
  What is true in what you're saying is every Israeli is a war criminal in the literal sense.
• 38:56
  Every Israeli is a war criminal or six degrees removed from a war criminal because every
• 39:02
  Israeli, Israel has a citizen army.
• 39:04
  It's representative of the whole of the Israeli society, from the Orthodox.
• 39:10
  It's a wholly representative cross section of Israeli society.
• 39:13
  They all serve in the army and at some time they're committing a war crime.
• 39:17
  They're breaking into homes in the West Bank.
• 39:20
  They're ransacking homes, terrorizing children, humiliating Palestinians at the checkpoints
• 39:32
  or periodically they're bombing Gaza on one of their periodic murder sprees.
• 39:39
  Every Israeli is involved in the subjugation of a population which is literally half its
• 39:47
  size.
• 39:48
  There are about 15 million people living between the Jordan and the Mediterranean and half
• 39:59
  of them are not Arab and in order to subjugate them you need a very large human apparatus
• 40:07
  to perpetuate and perpetuate that subjugation of the Arab population in what B'Tselem, the
• 40:20
  Israeli human rights organization for the occupied territories, what they're called.
• 40:24
  It said from the river to the sea there's a Jewish supremacist state.
• 40:27
  I think that's an accurate description.
• 40:30
  Different degrees of Jewish supremacy.
• 40:34
  In the case of the Israel proper you could say the Arabs are second or third class citizens.
• 40:41
  In the case of the West Bank you could say the Arabs are subjected to an apartheid regime
• 40:46
  and the case of Gaza they're subjected to a genocidal assault.
• 40:54
  So it's different degrees of Jewish supremacy but it's a Jewish supremacist state.
• 41:01
  In order to maintain that Jewish supremacist state they don't have an isolated apparatus.
• 41:06
  Yes, they have a special forces but the special forces is integrated into a citizen army,
• 41:15
  every member of which is a war criminal or you could be six degrees separated.
• 41:25
  It could be your brother, it could be your sister, it could be your mother, it could
• 41:30
  be your father, it could be your son, it could be your daughter.
• 41:34
  So in that sense yes the army experience has morally tainted them because they feel a sense
• 41:45
  of there but for the grace of God go I, meaning I would be committing that war crime because
• 41:51
  they're all doing it.
• 41:53
  How do you, Gaza's no more, Gaza's gone.
• 42:00
  There's no Gaza anymore.
• 42:02
  How do you decimate a parcel of land, half of whom are children, how do you do it except
• 42:09
  by committing massive off the charts war crimes and who's doing it?
• 42:16
  It's not an isolated apparatus, it's the whole of Israeli society.
• 42:23
  Let's turn to the events in Gaza.
• 42:24
  Before I get a call from Piers Morgan asking me if I condemn the attacks on October the
• 42:29
  7th, I have to stress that there is no doubt in my mind that the events of that day were
• 42:34
  obviously harrowing and what made Hamas' attacks even more tragic was the fact that apparently
• 42:39
  a lot of civilians that got killed were actually sympathetic to the Palestinian cause.
• 42:43
  Nevertheless...
• 42:44
  I find that very implausible.
• 42:46
  I think we have to speak to facts as they are.
• 42:49
  Doesn't mean you deserve the fate that you suffered.
• 42:52
  With a lot of them sympathetic to Palestinians, no, sorry.
• 42:56
  You're living next door to a concentration camp.
• 42:59
  You know it is.
• 43:00
  You know everything.
• 43:01
  You know it's a sealed off parcel of land.
• 43:04
  You know a million children, a little more than a million children are trapped in there.
• 43:13
  You know all that.
• 43:15
  What did you do?
• 43:16
  I mean, what did you do?
• 43:18
  I'm not going to say I'm deader.
• 43:20
  I want to just...
• 43:21
  You know, I live in this city with all these homeless people and what do I do?
• 43:28
  I'll do something, I'll say, but not very much.
• 43:31
  But let's not do this, oh they're sympathetic to the Palestinians.
• 43:35
  The number of people sympathetic to the Palestinians, you can fit in my apartment and I can assure
• 43:39
  you that it's not a very big apartment.
• 43:42
  You have to be honest about those things.
• 43:45
  96% of Israelis believe Israel is using sufficient force or should be using more force in Gaza.
• 43:53
  Israeli Jews believe Israel is using sufficient force or should be using more force in Gaza.
• 44:01
  So here are things like a lot of them were set up, please stop.
• 44:05
  Yeah, those statistics that you quoted are horrifying.
• 44:09
  And I did want to say that nevertheless all major media outlets in the West are still
• 44:13
  pretending that the attack, as brutal as it was, happened in a vacuum and without any
• 44:18
  context whatsoever.
• 44:19
  It's a starting point usually of any debate.
• 44:22
  I suppose it just makes for more convenient framing.
• 44:25
  Now I believe you said that you attribute the motivations for the attack to utter desperation
• 44:30
  and a feeling of abandonment on their side.
• 44:34
  Can you talk a bit more about that?
• 44:36
  Well, already in 2004, head of Israel's National Security Council, Giyar Island, in March 2004,
• 44:47
  he described Gaza as, quote, a huge concentration camp.
• 44:50
  It was people sealed off, hermetically sealed off from the outside world.
• 44:56
  No one could go in, nobody can go out.
• 44:59
  Nothing can go in, nothing can go out without Israel's permission.
• 45:03
  And Israel imposed a brutal, illegal siege on Gaza.
• 45:11
  And a good part of it, I would say, obviously I don't have any proofs, but you would guess,
• 45:18
  based on circumstantial evidence, which I can't go through now, you would guess that
• 45:24
  probably three quarters of the young men who burst the gates of Gaza on October 7, they
• 45:31
  were born into Gaza.
• 45:32
  They were born into a concentration camp.
• 45:35
  I don't want to go through the circumstantial evidence because it wouldn't interest people,
• 45:41
  but my guess is most of them were unmarried because if they were married, they wouldn't
• 45:46
  have been selected for the mission because it was a suicide mission.
• 45:50
  And they knew they wouldn't come back.
• 45:53
  So they wouldn't, if they're married, they have children because children rapidly appear
• 45:57
  on the scene when you're married in Gaza.
• 46:00
  So they would have children and they would have a wife to support.
• 46:04
  And so they probably would not have volunteered for that mission when there were others who
• 46:09
  were younger, who weren't yet married and didn't yet have children, which means if they
• 46:16
  were younger, they were probably, you would guess, around 20 years of age.
• 46:20
  And as I said, Dior Island was describing Gaza in 2004, 20 years ago, as a huge concentration
• 46:27
  camp.
• 46:29
  So most of the young men, in my opinion, based on circumstantial evidence, were probably
• 46:37
  born into the concentration camp.
• 46:39
  And the only expectation was to languish and die there.
• 46:45
  There was no future.
• 46:46
  There was not even a present or a past.
• 46:50
  There was nothing.
• 46:51
  All they were left to do was, Gaza is about the length of a marathon, 26 miles.
• 46:57
  The width, five miles, is what I jog every day at the beach.
• 47:01
  That's the whole of Gaza.
• 47:02
  So all they had to do, because 60% of them were unemployed, young people were unemployed
• 47:09
  by October 7th.
• 47:11
  60% were unemployed.
• 47:13
  80% are living on government subsidies from UN agencies.
• 47:19
  So all they had to do was get up in the morning and pace the perimeter of Gaza.
• 47:23
  So they had left to do.
• 47:24
  They were never going to get married.
• 47:27
  You can't get married if you don't have a job in Gaza.
• 47:31
  That's not possible.
• 47:32
  So they had no past.
• 47:34
  They had no present.
• 47:35
  They had no future.
• 47:37
  And beyond that, a large number of them, they were for witness to Israel's high-tech killing
• 47:48
  sprees that are called operations in Israel, be it Operation Cast Lead in 2008-9, Operation
• 47:55
  Pillow of Defense 2010, Operation Protective Edge 2014, where Israel comes in to what are
• 48:05
  called mow the lawn.
• 48:08
  Mowing the lawn was, you take out your giant mower.
• 48:14
  Their rockets, their artillery, their bombs, and they take the mower with its blades and
• 48:22
  they crack the skulls of people.
• 48:24
  Most of them, or I should say half of them, are children.
• 48:29
  So they saw their relatives perish, being murdered by this killing machine.
• 48:36
  And they wanted like any normal person, whether for good or for bad, it's normal.
• 48:43
  They wanted exact revenge.
• 48:47
  And they did in October 7.
• 48:49
  Am I better?
• 48:50
  Forget it.
• 48:52
  The images we keep getting from Gaza are unlike anything I've ever seen in my life.
• 48:57
  And I've seen some pretty bad things.
• 48:59
  I've had to mute most social media accounts that are reporting from there because I literally
• 49:03
  could not sleep anymore.
• 49:05
  And yet the horror goes on.
• 49:07
  80% of all buildings, I believe, in Gaza have been razed to the ground, all major universities
• 49:11
  and hospitals blown to bits.
• 49:14
  Two weeks ago, the British medical journal, The Lancet, reported that the number of Palestinian
• 49:20
  casualties might actually be almost 200,000.
• 49:24
  I mean, if that's true, that's roughly 10% of the entire population in Gaza, I believe.
• 49:29
  I understand that that wasn't a good study.
• 49:30
  I just have to be honest about that.
• 49:33
  But my guess is that those numbers are completely plausible.
• 49:39
  If you consider the fact that Gaza is the most densely populated place on Earth, or
• 49:45
  one of the most densely populated places on Earth, and Israel has now dropped more ordinance
• 49:53
  on Gaza than was dropped in Hamburg, Dresden, and London combined during World War II, you
• 50:05
  have to assume that a huge portion of the population is gone.
• 50:14
  I wanted to ask, at the same time, even the IDF says that Hamas is nowhere near any kind
• 50:19
  of defeat, which was purportedly their goal at the beginning.
• 50:23
  When do you think this horrific campaign will stop?
• 50:26
  First of all, I trust the IDF about as much as I trust Goebbels during World War II.
• 50:33
  That isn't going to end, I think one aspect of it is pretty much over, namely turning
• 50:38
  Gaza into an uninhabitable, howling wilderness.
• 50:42
  I think that's pretty much over.
• 50:45
  First of all, it's had very little to do with Hamas so far.
• 50:48
  You follow, even on a superficial level, you follow the events.
• 50:55
  There are no battles in Gaza.
• 50:58
  Has anybody heard of a battle?
• 51:00
  You hear about a soldier being killed here, a soldier being killed there probably by a
• 51:05
  random shot by one Hamas fighter.
• 51:08
  There are no battles.
• 51:11
  Defeating Hamas to me is a meaningless concept.
• 51:13
  A large number have been killed, but that's because they've been killed like civilians
• 51:17
  have been killed in the indiscriminate bombing of Gaza.
• 51:21
  That's why Hamas fighters were killed.
• 51:25
  But because of actual warfare and battles, it's not true.
• 51:33
  So I don't think the issue is for Israel to claim a military victory, and they will claim
• 51:40
  it if they can kill Sinwar.
• 51:42
  If they can kill the head of the Yahuot Sinwar, they can kill the head of Hamas, military
• 51:50
  wing of Hamas, and they can claim military victory.
• 51:52
  But I don't believe it will be over then because Israel will not tolerate Hezbollah.
• 51:57
  They won't tolerate what Hezbollah has done since October 7.
• 52:03
  And so there's a new battle looming, and then there's another battle looming with Iran,
• 52:08
  or simultaneously.
• 52:10
  So we may still be closer to the beginning than to the end.
• 52:14
  And then we may go all over.
• 52:19
  Biden is a lunatic himself, a senile lunatic, a lunatic.
• 52:23
  And if Israel gets attacked, he may roll out the nuclear weapons.
• 52:30
  It's very grim.
• 52:35
  The only thing you can do is bury your head in the ground and just continue working on
• 52:39
  what you're working on and hope it'll have some meaning, because it may not, because
• 52:44
  it's out of our control.
• 52:46
  That's what my friend Saner said, nothing can stop them.
• 52:49
  They're a lunatic state on a rampage, complete lunatic state, and they're on a rampage.
• 52:59
  Last December, South Africa launched an attempt at the International Court of Justice to prove
• 53:04
  that Israel was committing genocide in Gaza.
• 53:07
  You've read the case.
• 53:08
  Why do you think it's convincing?
• 53:09
  Not a complicated case, in my point.
• 53:12
  It is complicated how you define genocide.
• 53:16
  And that's a legal, it has a legal and has a dictionary aspect to it.
• 53:24
  The legal aspect is built on what's called precedent.
• 53:28
  And how has the international community, be it the ICJ or the ICC, the International
• 53:35
  Court of Justice or the International Criminal Court, how in its jurisprudence, its precedent,
• 53:44
  how it's defined genocide.
• 53:47
  And that's a technical matter.
• 53:49
  We have an Oxford English Dictionary and its spinoffs.
• 53:53
  As a general matter, the attempt to destroy a people in whole or in part.
• 54:01
  And I think it's to my view, incontestable that since October 7th, Israel has embarked
• 54:11
  on a campaign to destroy the Palestinian component of, excuse me, the Gaza component of the Palestinian
• 54:25
  people.
• 54:26
  That to me is an incontestable fact.
• 54:30
  I think the evidence of Africa, a deuce in its application on December 29th, 2022 is
• 54:41
  overwhelming and irrefutable.
• 54:47
  I have read it not once, not twice.
• 54:49
  I've read it many times because I'm writing about it right now.
• 54:53
  In my opinion, there's no way reading this accumulation of data and eyewitness testimony
• 55:05
  without concluding that Israel has embarked on a campaign of destruction of the people
• 55:13
  of Gaza.
• 55:14
  I was born in Yugoslavia, a country that ended violently with the last genocide in Europe
• 55:20
  where 8,000 boys and men got massacred in Srebrenica.
• 55:24
  I know it's not only the number of victims that counts in the eyes of the ICJ, but it's
• 55:29
  also about intent.
• 55:30
  But still, we're talking about at least 40,000 dead Palestinians, most of whom, like you
• 55:35
  said, are women and children, right?
• 55:37
  The numbers, like you say, are an index of the horror.
• 55:42
  And they certainly play a significant role in evaluating what's happened.
• 55:47
  But it's also the details, the targeting of UN workers, targeting of journalists, targeting
• 55:58
  of humanitarian aid organizations, targeting of children, shooting them with one bullet
• 56:05
  to the head, children, the denial of humanitarian aid, systematic denial of humanitarian aid,
• 56:16
  the use of food as a weapon of war, or denial of food as a weapon of war.
• 56:25
  When you look at the horrifying details, I don't see how you can, you know, I always
• 56:32
  reserve in my mind an element of doubt.
• 56:35
  Is this genocide?
• 56:36
  Is this genocide?
• 56:37
  But then you start going through those, the data, and all the data comes from the work
• 56:46
  of the world's most eminent and respected human rights organizations.
• 56:49
  And you look at the sources for all of the information, where is it coming from?
• 56:56
  It's coming from the UN Commissioner, High Commissioner on Human Rights.
• 57:01
  You're getting it from Save the Children, UNICEF, UNESCO, Doctors Without Borders, Oxfam,
• 57:11
  UNCTAD, United Nations Conference on Trade and Development, World Bank, and it's all
• 57:20
  lying.
• 57:21
  Are they all making it up?
• 57:27
  Is there this vast conspiracy to mount this monumental hoax that this is not happening,
• 57:34
  that it's really not happening, it's all being faked?
• 57:38
  But if what all these organizations are reporting in concert is true, then this is the destruction
• 57:50
  of the people.
• 57:51
  You know, the title of Raoul Hilberg, the great historian in Nazi Holocaust, the title
• 58:01
  of his monumental work was called The Destruction of the European Jews.
• 58:06
  And this is the destruction of the people of Gaza.
• 58:10
  Kamala Harris just became the official nominee of the Democratic Party.
• 58:14
  If she ends up winning the presidential elections in November, do you think there's any chance
• 58:18
  that the American foreign policy vis-a-vis Israel will shift at all?
• 58:22
  There is no chance in the zero.
• 58:26
  Biden was brain dead for the last four years.
• 58:31
  So most of the policy was being made by Jake Sullivan, by Secretary of State Blinken.
• 58:40
  Yeah, Biden was an element, but he didn't have the mental capacity really to make lucid
• 58:49
  decisions.
• 58:52
  Kamala Harris is a moron.
• 58:54
  She's stupid.
• 58:57
  She has no competence for the job.
• 58:59
  It's a very funny thing that happened because Biden only selected her.
• 59:04
  He said, the reason I selected her is she's a black woman.
• 59:06
  They wanted to nail down the black woman vote.
• 59:10
  So they selected Kamala Harris.
• 59:11
  He was doing that all the time, Biden.
• 59:14
  In the case of Katanji Brown Jackson, who he nominated for the Supreme Court, she's
• 59:19
  very smart.
• 59:20
  So that wasn't what you would call an affirmative action choice.
• 59:24
  She's smart.
• 59:25
  She's a very smart black woman.
• 59:27
  Then he chose the black woman lesbian for his press secretary.
• 59:31
  She seems to be pretty stupid.
• 59:33
  And that was a choice.
• 59:36
  You want to nail down the black woman vote.
• 59:40
  So that's the only reason Kamala Harris was selected.
• 59:45
  She has no competence.
• 59:46
  She has no nothing.
• 59:48
  There's nothing there.
• 59:49
  She's a complete moron.
• 59:51
  And then what happened was it was kind of funny.
• 59:55
  So the Democrats want to get rid of Biden because he's a corpse.
• 59:59
  And he's an embarrassing corpse now because the totalitarian PR machine of the Democratic
• 1:00:06
  Party couldn't conceal it any longer.
• 1:00:08
  It was just out there, impossible to hide.
• 1:00:12
  They thought they could hide it and then get the election.
• 1:00:19
  And he'll just sit in the office eating jelly beans like Ronald Reagan and his advisors
• 1:00:29
  will do everything.
• 1:00:30
  So that's what they hoped for.
• 1:00:32
  But then it imploded after the debate with Trump.
• 1:00:37
  Disaster, disaster, disaster.
• 1:00:40
  So they're all saying Biden, he has to leave.
• 1:00:43
  Now Biden was so demented that he didn't know he was demented.
• 1:00:47
  That's what happens when you get demented.
• 1:00:49
  You don't know you're demented.
• 1:00:52
  So they had to force the guy out.
• 1:00:55
  So Biden, he is not even in his demented state.
• 1:00:59
  There are moments of the city and he came up with a very good idea.
• 1:01:03
  He says, Schumer, Pelosi, Obama, they want me out.
• 1:01:08
  All right, I'm going to leave.
• 1:01:10
  But you know what he said?
• 1:01:11
  I'm going to stick it to them.
• 1:01:12
  And you know how he stuck it to them?
• 1:01:15
  He said, I'm going to support Kamala Harris.
• 1:01:19
  So now he's thinking, you don't want me?
• 1:01:23
  You don't want me?
• 1:01:24
  You don't want me?
• 1:01:25
  Now you're stuck with her.
• 1:01:26
  And they didn't know what to do.
• 1:01:30
  Now they were stuck with Kamala Harris because he endorsed her.
• 1:01:34
  So what are they going to do?
• 1:01:35
  If you remember, the three people who most were working hardest behind the scenes to
• 1:01:39
  get rid of Biden were Schumer, Pelosi, and Obama.
• 1:01:45
  They were also the last three to endorse Kamala Harris.
• 1:01:48
  They were the last three.
• 1:01:50
  Obama was the very end.
• 1:01:51
  But even before that, it was hard to get Pelosi until they realized they're stuck.
• 1:01:57
  Because if they didn't endorse her, it would be, oh, you see how they treat black women?
• 1:02:04
  She should have been the person and they didn't support her.
• 1:02:08
  So and you know, she's intersectionally oppressed because she's a black, you know, all that
• 1:02:13
  crap.
• 1:02:14
  So they were stuck now with Kamala Harris and she's a complete incompetent.
• 1:02:22
  So she will just be another figurehead.
• 1:02:25
  And you can be sure she's going to nominate Blinken to Secretary of State and Jake Sullivan
• 1:02:32
  for nationalism because she doesn't know what she's doing.
• 1:02:34
  I'm not going to change anything.
• 1:02:37
  Who do you think was their candidate of Pelosi, Schumer, and Obama?
• 1:02:41
  I think probably they wanted an open convention and see who would.
• 1:02:45
  When open convention, let's be clear, the Democratic Party is a totalitarian party.
• 1:02:53
  And so there is no open anything.
• 1:02:56
  Everything is decided behind closed doors.
• 1:02:58
  Remember, Kamala Harris came in fourth in her own state in the 2020 primary.
• 1:03:03
  I mean, to come in fourth in your own state in the primary, you have to be just so terrible.
• 1:03:09
  I probably could have done better if I campaigned for 24 hours in California than Kamala Harris.
• 1:03:16
  Everything has to be decided behind closed doors.
• 1:03:18
  There can't be any popular input.
• 1:03:21
  That's not the way the Democratic Party works.
• 1:03:23
  Everything has to be decided behind closed doors.
• 1:03:26
  So when I say an open convention, they would take their five major picks and see who does
• 1:03:33
  the best.
• 1:03:34
  But it would only be five because we have to control everything.
• 1:03:40
  These are totalitarians.
• 1:03:41
  We have to control everything.
• 1:03:44
  Last question, professor.
• 1:03:45
  I realize this is probably not your favorite topic, but a couple of months ago, you famously
• 1:03:49
  debated the streamer Destiny on Lex Friedman's podcast and saying that you weren't particularly
• 1:03:55
  impressed with his performance is a bit of an understatement.
• 1:03:58
  Among other things you said to him, you're such a fantastic moron.
• 1:04:02
  It's terrifying.
• 1:04:03
  What do you think of the phenomena of online celebrities and famous streamers being propped
• 1:04:09
  up as experts in the public sphere these days?
• 1:04:13
  I think that's always been a phenomenon.
• 1:04:16
  That thing called Destiny, he's prominent in the public eye.
• 1:04:20
  He has a cult following, this weird cult following of white male losers, ages probably 17 to
• 1:04:28
  25 who spend their, who are confined to their parents' basements and they shuttle between
• 1:04:37
  video games and Pornhub.
• 1:04:40
  And in between shuttling back and forth, they stop to watch Destiny, who's their guru, really
• 1:04:48
  weird, creepy types.
• 1:04:51
  They're what you might call Destiny's dingleberries.
• 1:04:56
  And every once in a while he releases them to go on some website and say how he defeated
• 1:05:05
  me in debate and how brilliant he is.
• 1:05:09
  And they're a little cult, they probably really believe it.
• 1:05:13
  They have to believe it because it's their last hope.
• 1:05:16
  They have to believe that Destiny, who's one of their own, is a genius.
• 1:05:24
  If he's just the queen dingleberry, it's not very impressive.
• 1:05:33
  So but they've always been that type.
• 1:05:38
  Actually if you remember just before these online streamers came along, most of the news
• 1:05:46
  was being delivered by comedians or purported to be comedians.
• 1:05:51
  Who would people watch for the news?
• 1:05:53
  They watch John Stewart.
• 1:05:55
  Where does John Stewart know about anything?
• 1:05:58
  Or they watch Bill Maher.
• 1:06:00
  Where is Bill Maher?
• 1:06:02
  He has horn rim glasses and he thinks he's a genius.
• 1:06:04
  No, you're a moron wearing horn rim glasses.
• 1:06:07
  So that's sort of people with profound incompetence pretending to render judgment.
• 1:06:18
  But even you know, what distinguished that thing called Destiny from the others is, in
• 1:06:25
  my opinion, the complete lack of self-awareness.
• 1:06:29
  So for example, I publicly offered to debate Jordan Peterson.
• 1:06:37
  I offered to debate Ben Shapiro.
• 1:06:42
  Now they were at least self-aware enough to know, don't debate him because you're going
• 1:06:49
  to make a fool of yourself.
• 1:06:51
  They had enough, what you might know, Peterson was I think a Harvard professor in psychology
• 1:06:56
  in my memories, right?
• 1:06:57
  Ben Shapiro went to Harvard Law School.
• 1:07:00
  So they have some knowledge in what it means to possess knowledge and therefore don't debate
• 1:07:08
  him.
• 1:07:09
  They were supposed to debate the former prime minister of Israel, Ehud Omart at Oxford.
• 1:07:17
  And Oxford, they don't pay for your ticket to come over.
• 1:07:22
  So I said, look guys, I'll pay for my ticket, but please confirm with Omart that he's going
• 1:07:27
  to debate me because I'm not going to buy a ticket and then I have to, I lose the money.
• 1:07:32
  And they checked with him a second time.
• 1:07:34
  He agreed.
• 1:07:35
  And then he backed out.
• 1:07:37
  He probably watched some of my YouTube videos and thought, nah, I think I'll take a rain
• 1:07:43
  check on this one.
• 1:07:45
  The thing called destiny is he's such an imbecile that he doesn't even know how stupid he is.
• 1:07:57
  He thinks reading Wikipedia entries, which is what he said he did, reading five Wikipedia
• 1:08:03
  entries qualifies you to go in a room with three other people who've spent their entire
• 1:08:10
  lives devoted to studying the subject.
• 1:08:14
  So most people would have been prudent enough to say, I'll take a pass.
• 1:08:22
  I was later told that there was more to the story than I have stated so far.
• 1:08:33
  And I was told by very, I would call it an unimpeachable source that that thing called
• 1:08:41
  destiny was being handsomely, that's the word that was used, handsomely compensated by certain
• 1:08:50
  organizations and maybe because he's so stupid and so lacking in self-awareness, maybe he
• 1:08:59
  and the money, the temptations that come with the money, that he was willing to take the
• 1:09:07
  chance.
• 1:09:08
  And that's, I don't think that's a new thing.
• 1:09:15
  People pontificating about politics who have no knowledge, understanding, never having
• 1:09:21
  studied or participated in politics.
• 1:09:27
  His is just another level of degradation of the political process because it's a cult.
• 1:09:37
  It's a cult.
• 1:09:41
  Destiny is dingleberries.
• 1:09:43
  It's a cult.
• 1:09:45
  Mr. Finkelstein, thank you so much for taking the time.
• 1:09:47
  Thank you so much for listening.
• 1:09:48
  If you liked what you heard, please consider subscribing to Smart Cookies on YouTube.
• 1:09:54
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• 1:09:55
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• 1:09:58
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• 1:10:01
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• 1:10:06
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• 1:10:08
  Just type Smart Cookies podcast in there.
• 1:10:10
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• 1:10:11
  Last but not least, I have to thank the absolute legends that are my producers on this show,
• 1:10:18
  my existing patrons on Patreon, Ida, Mancian, Micheal Medved, Medinio, Gordon, Yurechuk,
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• 1:10:32
  Without you guys, this show wouldn't exist.
• 1:10:34
  So massive thanks.
• 1:10:37
  And yeah, see you in the next episode.
• 1:10:40
  Bye.