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Hope for the best, expect the worst Some drinks and pain Some die of thirst no way of knowing which way it's going Hope for the best, Expect the worst, hope for the best. Welcome to the Commentary Magazine daily podcast. Today is Tuesday, May 12, 2026. I am Jon Pot Horiz, the editor of Commentary magazine. With me, as always, executive Editor Abe Greenwald. Hi, Abe.
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B
Hi, Jon.
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Washington, Free Beacon editor Eliana Johnson. Hi, Eliana.
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C
Hi, John.
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And joining us today, Jewish News Syndicate columnist, editor and host, co host of the Israel Undiplomatic podcast, my sister, direct from Tel Aviv, Ruthie Bloom. Hi, Ruthie.
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D
Ta da. Hello.
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Hi. We're gonna go very fast into this because I wanna cite three pieces from the New York Times in the last 27 hours. I wanna preface this by saying that there was a moment a couple of years ago when I ended the Commentary monthly column we called Media Commentary, because I said, you know what? It's getting boring. We're just sort of citing the same. Liberals say this and liberals say that and liberals say the other thing. And Christine Rosen, who was doing it, moved on to do a sort of a more general social commentary column. Christine, unfortunately, has a doctor's appointment, can't be with us today. And clearly I'm going to have to revisit this decision or focus it even more closely because the issue is not the media, though the media are bad. The issue is the New York Times, the most important media organization in the world, just announced it got another 350,000 paying subscribers. It's up to about 14 million paying subscribers worldwide. That dwarfs, like, any number of a subscription service, I think, practically in terms of news gathering or print or whatever you might wanna call it anywhere in the world. So its importance is now growing and growing and growing. And here are the three articles that the New York Times published in the last 27 hours. I'm gonna start with the most recent one because it's the most dumbfounding. It's a piece called the 100 Best Restaurants in New York City by Legaya Michonne. Why am I citing this? There are 100 restaurants in this. This is all about ethnic food. Okay, so she is going all over New York City, Queens, weird neighborhoods in the Bronx, Staten island, deepest Brooklyn, Trinidadian and Tobagonian food, Ghanaian food, Sri Lankan food. There are 100 restaurants on this list. There is not one restaurant on this list that is Israeli, inflected or owned by an Israeli. There is one Jewy restaurant, that's Barney Greengrass on the Upper west side. Number 92. Otherwise, there is no Israeli restaurant. There are 100 Israeli restaurants in New York City. There are now four or five very serious high end Israeli dining experiences in New York City. There's Florentine, there's Mizanon, there's various others. The chef Eyal Sheini has four restaurants in New York City, including Fort Said, of which there is a branch in Tel Aviv which is one of the best restaurants in Israel, and it's actually one of the best restaurants in New York City. No Israeli restaurant. That cannot be the result of chance. It cannot be the result of chance. This is BDS being practiced by the New York Times food critic who published an article six years ago called the Rise of Palestinian Food. Legaya meshon, a 5,000 word article on the rise of Palestinian food and cultural appropriation and so on and so forth. So that's the third article that seems to be the lightest. But in some sense, if you actually think about it, it's a very serious matter that if you're doing all of this sorting by race and sorting by ethnicity, which this thing does like very clearly sets out to have enough Indian restaurants to let Telugu restaurants, you know, Tibetan restaurants, Ghanaian restaurants, Peruvian restaurants. There's not an Israeli food cart, there's not a hummus place, nothing. Okay, so that's number one. Number two, moving on the level of seriousness is the piece that reveals that Israel had a secret operation to win the Eurovision Song Contest that has been going on for decades now. The piece says no allegations that anything untoward happened. It's just very important to Israel to win the Eurovision Song Contest. So it spends a lot of money on it. It promotes, encourages people to make phone calls, whatever. Other nations do this too. It's hilarious because of course the Eurovision Song Contest is comic garbage. Everything that wins or doesn't win the Eurovision Song Contest is comic, Gar, like bad pop. And it's crazy. And so this is a very serious, hilarious, weird thing. But of course, it is an accusation being made against the Jewish state that dozens of other states participate in. But it is focused on an expose of Israel's effort to fix the Eurovision Song Contest that does not in fact say that Israel is fixing anything. But the implication is that Israel is acting in nefarious, secret, cabal ways
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to
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Godfather Marionette, like control pop culture in the world through its evil manipulation of the Eurovision Song.
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C
The implication is that this is news.
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Yeah, it was a big. It's a big story. Like, it's like 3,000 words. They had it at the top of their webpage.
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News you can use.
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Yes. So we have no Israeli food worth a Note in the 100 top restaurants in New York. And. And Israel's evil fixing of the garbage ludicrous song contest that Will Ferrell made a hilarious Netflix movie making fun of a couple of years ago. And now we get to the really serious thing, which is Nicholas Kristof, I believe, two time Pulitzer Prize winning columnist Nicholas Kristof writing a piece of. About the rape culture inside Israeli prisons and the systematic, supposedly systematic use of rape and torture, but rape of men, and mostly men, but some women, to degrade, defame, hurt. And he says he talked to 14 people. And so here is the evil that Israel is doing. And, and he concludes with a very central claim which is, yeah, I'm not even gonna quote him. Cause he doesn't deserve to be quoted. Yeah, a lot of Israeli women were raped on October 7, but the ongoing rape of Palestinians in Israeli prisons happens every single day. So it's not even that he is drawing a parallel between or doing a whataboutism where he's like, they raped Israel, now Israelis are raping them. It's Israel's worse. Cuz you know, Hamas only did it once, by the way. It didn't only do it once. Right. It did it systematically to the women who were in the, who were in the tunnels. No, no. So the New York Times has crossed. Look, we've been talking about how New York Times coverage of Israel is biased and bad and culturally it's gotten worse and worse. This last 24 hours marks a crossing of the Rubicon into Der Sturmer territory. And I do not say that lightly. I am not one to traffic in Nazi analogies unless I'm doing it for extreme, you know, in order, like for reductio ad absurdum purposes or whatever. I don't like them, I don't think it's real. But each of these has about it the quality of Nazi anti Semitic propaganda, accusations of secret Jewish kabbalistic control, the idea that a Jewish culture should be extirpated either through the sort of process of either ignoring it or actually destroying it. And now the accusation that Jews do to non Jews actually what non Jews do to Jews and to flip it around, to reverse it so that it's okay to do whatever you want to to Jews because Jews are monsters who systematically rape and defile and torture and mistreat poor non Jews. And if you need a lesson in what the big lie is and how it works and how it functions, we have it here in the Pages of a once Jewish owned, now deracinated, wildly successful, wildly important newspaper that really would make Goebbels and Stryker proud to know that they're in their company. And I say that that is a paper that is edited by a Jew named Joseph Kahn. It is owned by the Sulzberger family, which as I say, is barely Jewish anymore, but obviously has Jewish roots. And here they are publishing Nazi, anti, openly anti Semitic propaganda. Look, I've spent decades arguing that ideas matter and I really believe that sleep does too. I suffer from sleep apnea. And dealing with my sleep apnea has been one of the signal issues of my life. If you or someone you love suffers from mild sleep apnea or snoring, there's an FDA approved daytime therapy called Exciteosa available through Goodnightrx. And you need to hear about this. No masks, no equipment strapped to your face while you sleep. Just 20 minutes a day, strengthening the muscles that keep your airway open. And in clinical studies it cut apnea events nearly in half. Think of it as a workout for your tongue. Go to goodnightrx.com and use code pod at checkout for 25% off. That's goodnightrx.com code pod sleep better, so you can argue better.
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C
I think it's worth widening the aperture just a tiny bit. To note the New York Times Pulitzer Prize winning photographer, yes, Zaher Al Gora, who was awarded a prize for his documentation of the toll of Israel's war in Gaza. And if you go on his social media, he refers to uniformed Hamas and Islamic Jihad fighters as martyrs. He talks about the IDF soldiers as the occupation forces. He talks about Israel waging a war on Palestinian children and the children of Gaza. It is self evident that he is not a neutral journalist documenting this, but that he is in cahoots with Hamas. And when asked for comment, the New York Times will not say if they nominated him for this Pulitzer Prize. But this is in keeping with everything you have said up until now. And they are holding up his work as worthy of the highest award in journalism and the highest bodies, you know, the highest awards in journalism, the Pulitzer Prizes are giving this work the highest award there is to be given.
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Right? So Ruthie, in this Nicholas Kristof piece, I mean the allegation that is, in the piece, he says he talked to 14 people. He used two major NGO sources. The Med Europe, I don't have it in front of me.
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I think it's Med Europe.
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Yeah, yeah, Med Europe, Human Rights Monitor. And then, you know, a couple of NGOs inside Israel and Gaza that are, you know, human rights advocates, which is to say that they support all human rights except Jewish human rights. And he says, why would anybody. You know, I don't believe that any of the people that I spoke to lied to me because what possible motive could they have for lying to me about how they were treated and in these prisons? But two major accusations, one, of course, is that they were raped by dogs, that Israel is training dogs to rape humans. I will just report that several people I know who have been consulting dog trainers in response to this piece tell me that this is, as anyone who actually owns a dog will tell you, is a physical possibility. Somebody on social media site to achieve the anal penetration of a human anus through an object that is, you know, roughly five centimeters long, but they're being raped by dogs. And I think also tellingly, let me just find the quote here. Well, wait there. I mean, there are various other things that. Oh, oh, oh, teeth. Oh, yeah. After he was dumped into his cell, one of Kristof's people reports, he concluded that the spot where he had been raped had been used before, for he found other people's vomit, blood and broken teeth crushed into his skin. Now, why am I citing disgusting. I'm sorry, to cite something so disgusting like a scene out of a horror movie within a torture chamber. How hard would you have to grind somebody's face into a cement floor to have broken teeth that were just happened to be lying there, then get embedded and crushed into your skin? That is not logistically possible. First of all, a broken tooth would be left there on the floor. It's gonna somehow, you're gonna push his face down without like scraping it so bad that he ends up completely disfigured. The tooth is somehow gonna sort of meld into his skin. So that's just one of the 10,000 different lies that are being told here, John. Yes.
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The other thing I think is important is that Kristof did not speak to these people who were relaying these anecdotes for the first time. These people had been on the record in other journalistic organizations talking about their experience. And these anecdotes had changed in their. The details had changed over time, which I think is really important. And so this detail about the teeth first emerged with Kristof. One was in the Washington Post, one's in the New York Times. And that's indicative of a story that is not true, that's being embellished.
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Yes. So, first of all, let me talk about the timing of this Kristof piece of crap. It came apparently, or it seems to have come to head off at the pass, the release today of a massive race report on all the crimes that Hamas and other terrorists committed on October 7 and since October 7, all the rapes, the sexual violence, the, you know, the torture. But mainly it was focused on sexual violence against the men and the women in the tunnels and on October 7, and children in front of their parents and parents in front of their children, et cetera. Now, it was known that this report was coming out. So I'm very, you know, I believe that the New York Times wanted to head this off by presenting documentation of Israeli crimes, sexual crimes against Palestinian prisoners, that's one thing. And also it comes on the heels of the decision by the Knesset to impose the death penalty to UN terrorists. Okay. That's also no accident. And for example, you always have to look at the timing. The Eurovision piece that you mentioned also comes alongside several European countries saying, one, we're not going to sing this year if Israel is a participant. All of these things go hand in hand. But now let me get to an.
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I just want to mention that Israeli.
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I hate to believe.
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Ruthie. Ruthie. Let me just mention that anybody who is listening, who wants to read the report that Ruthie is talking about, which is released by the civil commission on October 7, crimes by Hamas against women and children can do so by going to civilc.org where the report has been made public today. It is a extraordinarily detailed factually based, incredibly. I don't know what you would describe it like authoritative summa of every single incident in incidents of the crimes and sexual abuse of women and children by Hamas since October 7th.
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And what's important about that report, and what's really important about that report, as opposed to Christoph's interview with 14 Liars, is that everything in this report has been documented by Hamas itself. The terrorists were proud on October 7th. They filmed everything. They were getting off on it. And Israel. There was a question about why the Israeli government didn't release that footage for everyone to see and only showed a bit of it to reporters and diplomats and everything. There was an argument over that. Okay, because it didn't want to. Government didn't want to hurt the families and didn't want it to turn into some kind of snuff film. Okay? But having said that, there is documentation of this not only from the hostages, from people on October 7, from witnesses, it's also documented in writing by Hamas. It's also, as I said, tons of videos. So this brings me to another video. And here I hate. Listen, I always hate to do this mea culpa business about Israel when anti Semitism is in the air, but in this case, I have to say the Netanyahu government is livid, absolutely livid about something that the deep state. I know it sounds like cliche, but I'll. I'll get to that in a moment. Did to contribute to this antisemitism. And it involves a video, a faked video, speaking, by the way, of the Pulitzer Prize photo.
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Okay, you gotta stop for a second to explain what you mean. So Israel has, like all governments, like all democratic governments, has a permanent bureaucracy, right, that works through whatever government is in power, not in power, and is employed civilly, has job protections and all of that. And a lot of people in that civil government, sort of like here, are political antagonists of the Netanyahu government, and a lot of them are people who did not like the conduct of the war, wanted the war to end so the hostages would come home, whatever. And so as the two and a half years of the war were proceeding, leaks about bad conduct or fights inside the military, about how bad the strategy was or how nobody cared about the hostage families and what they were claiming. All that stuff came from what Ruthie is now calling the deep state, which is a more loaded term. I would prefer not to use it here because it's a loaded ideological term. Now, I'm just saying in the United States, because it's what Trump refers To what he talks about then here I'll
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stress that in this case, it's not just a major bureaucracy and the left, it is a concerted effort on the part of the judicial system. Before the war, there was a huge, there were mass protests against the government's attempt to reform the judiciary. And why is that relevant? Because what I'm about to tell you has to do with a doctored video and in cahoots with the attorney general of the Israel Defense Forces, again, the attorneys general in almost every walk of life here, and the courts are in, I would say they're in a concerted effort to topple the Netanyahu government and have been all along. Now, as you mentioned, the Pulitzer Prize photo, now, it wasn't a doctored photo, it was a real photo. But what was doctored was the claim that this child was being starved by Israel when in fact he had a congenital disease. And we know that because in pictures zoomed out, you saw his mother and his brother were perfectly well fed and all that. So that was the lie there. But here I'm going to tell you about an actual doctored video and this. And since we can't go into the details, it's too, it's getting into the weeds. I will just say one thing. I have to preface this by saying it is a huge scandal in Israel. The Israeli government, in particular, ministers in charge of combating antisemitism and bds, say that this, I would say, cooperation between a left wing TV channel and the attorney general in the army were in cahoots to make it appear as though Israeli soldiers are raping Palestinian prisoners. The damage that it did, never mind that it's also, we've already proven that the video is fake, that it didn't happen. And there are many details proving that. But the damage, we are furious. We say, how can a major, our main TV channel, channel 12, left wing, and Guy Peleg, who's a reporter to whom it was leaked. The trouble is, it wasn't just a leaked video. It was a leaked fake video stitched together from different dates and you can't see anything. And Guy Peleg, this reporter, this broadcaster who is just horrific, he says, look, you can see that these soldiers are taking this terrorist behind. They don't call him a terrorist, they call him a Palestinian behind a kind of wall. And you can see that they're raping him. And then they said they're raping him with a sharp object or something like that. You cannot see anything. But in any case, it turns out as Ayala has. Journalists on Channel 11 proved that this was stitched together. So, as I said, calling it a leaked video is inaccurate because the video itself was fake. Now, this is why I say I hate to blame, you know, Israel for anti Semitism, but in this case, for months now, we have been fighting over these. These soldiers in a special unit charged with guarding those October 7th terrorists. They're some of the worst terrorists on the planet. They're very violent, they resist arrest and all that stuff. And these guys, their reputation was dragged through the mud, but also so was the whole state of Israel. So, as I say, the timing of the New York Times report is happening alongside that. And even though we've now established that those soldiers did not commit the crimes, in the worst case, they used excessive force, which, again, even that's not clear because the terrorist in question was biting them and kicking them when they were trying to restrain him. So, you know, then you and he, two months later, after never complaining about being raped until he made a deal with the Shin Bet, the security services, and he was allowed to go back to Gaza. That's it. He went to Gaza so he could.
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Hold on. Now the story. The story you're talking about gets even more interesting in a. In a sort of almost comic, novelistic, bizarre way, because no one knew who would leak this video. So it turned out the video was leaked by a woman named Yifat Tomar Yerushalmi, who, as you say, is the. Is the Attorney General of the idf, not the Attorney General of the State of Israel, but essentially the chief legal officer of the idf. And somehow she got her hands on.
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D
That's right. IDF Advocate General, Advocate General. Right.
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So nobody knows who leaked it. Somehow, she then terrified, because she's the one who leaked it, that she's gonna get caught, takes her phone and throws it into the Mediterranean.
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D
Hold on, hold on. Wait a minute. It's more interesting than that. Just one sec, John. She resigned over a different issue. A riot at the. She was accusing. Right wing activists are going into that prison where this. This event supposedly happened and didn't happen. Right wingers were going there to protest, and she got involved in that. She resigned. But that's not the interesting part with the phone. The interesting part is that she faked a suicide attempt, and in so doing, she disappeared. Her husband couldn't find her, nobody could find her. And then they found her car near the Mediterranean, on the edge, and then they thought she drowned herself. But what she had done, basically, she got herself wet, is she dumped her phone there and it took days and days before it turned up. People were searching for it, no one could find it because on her phone was clearly evidence, which by the way, still has not been investigated because the people doing the investigating are more on her side than on the government's side,
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on the soldier side.
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But she actually threw her phone into the water. And guess what? I have to say that iPhone or Apple should really use this as a commercial because after days in salt water on the floor bed of the Mediterranean, it turned on. People found it on the beach and it turned on. Is that amazing or not?
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Yeah, some woman walking by found it on the beach. Like that's literally. And then she was like, I'm so excited. I'm so excited because everybody's been talking about this missing phone. And then I just happened to find it while I was walking down the beach. So here you have. But I'm bringing this up only to suggest that you understand that there is a huge constituency inside Israel, inside the government of Israel, inside with NGOs in Israel and of course worldwide, to defame these people who have among the hardest jobs on the planet, which is to be the guards of the prisons in which mass murderers of Jews are being held. And they have two or three different responsibilities, like one of which is to guard them and make sure that those prisoners don't come and try to kill them and that they don't kill each other and that they're kept in order. Second is to prevent hot headed Israelis from storming the prisons and lynching the prisoners, which people want to do. And then third is maybe being part of an, you know, being part or involved in bringing them to and from interrogations and things like that. So this is incredibly hard duty and incredibly hard service. And like they are heroes for doing it because they don't have to do it. And they have been turned, they have been demonized for political purposes by the Israeli left and people who want to use the prison system as some sort of a weapon against the Netanyahu government. And this is now accelerating, as you can see, with the coming, with the election coming on. But just to get back to the dogs and the details in the story.
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Yeah,
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let's assume that this is hard duty. People are very upset. Stuff and stuff happens in prisons as it happens in every prison on every place on earth and we hear about it and it's terrible. And you shouldn't abuse people that you have excessive power over. Fine. Let's talk about what happened in Israeli prisons with Palestinian prisoners over the last 30 years. Prisoners are kept, they're dangerous, they're this, they're that. And then the politicians in Israel, including Bibi Netanyahu, negotiate for the release of these people who would just as soon kill any one of those guards as they would let them breathe if they had any opportunity to. And of course, the most famous or notorious prison release was that of Yahya Sinwar, released from an Israeli prison in 2012, then goes back to Gaza, builds the underground tunnel city and stages October 7th. Somebody who was so well treated in Israeli jails that he was taught fluent Hebrew and was treated successfully for his cancer, not obviously by the guards.
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D
A brain tumor. A brain tumor.
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A brain tumor. So he was cured rather than allowed to die. He was treated well. He himself, I believe, said that he was treated well. In fact, he had contempt for Israel for having treated him well. So there's no good answer here. And if you do this, you do it, you protect them, and then they go off and they stage. October 7th. So you can imagine how high the emotions run in the core of people who do this for a living about how it is that they're supposed to guard, protect these prisoners from each other, from the lynch mobs, from whatever. I'm happy to come talk to you again about quints. It's spring and for me that means it's time to take out my quince. Linen, clothing, pants, shirts, buy some new ones. The linen breathes. It is the most comfortable for the spring and summer months. It's handsome, it is attractive. And we're talking about stuff that costs 50 to 80% less than you'd find from similar brands because quince works directly with ethical factories, cuts out the middleman. You're getting pretty premium materials without the markup, so refresh your everyday with luxury you'll actually use. Head to quint.com commentary for free shipping on your order and 365 day returns now available in Canada too. That's Q-U-Y-N c e.com commentary for free shipping and 365 day returns. Quints.com commentary
- [38:15]
E
I started with one shop. No college degree, no big investors. It was just a willingness to work. Over time that one shop turned into a multi billion dollar business called Crash Champions. All the lessons I learned along the way came from the grind. And that's what my show Pod Crash is all about. We have real conversations with people who've built things the hard way. We talk to founders, athletes and blue collar leaders who kept going when things got tough. You'll hear stories of grit Leadership and growth, plus real world lessons you can take back to your team and your life tomorrow.
- [38:50]
A
When you get momentum, you step on the gas. That's how you get separation from everybody else. I was at Harvard Law School. I was, blah, blah, blah. I looked up, let me tell you something, there's kids in my neighborhood putting in sheetrock that are smarter than you. AI is going to disrupt a lot of stuff. It is never going to disrupt physical blue collar traits. And the guy just looked at me
- [39:08]
E
and he said, it's bloody impossible.
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A
So I asked him this question. I said, it's impossible.
- [39:13]
E
Unless that's Podcrash with me, Matt ebert watch on YouTube and listen wherever you get your podcasts.
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D
But mainly what I wanted to say is that this is how Israelis contribute to the lies about Israel in the world. And when they do it, and you say the New York Times is, you know, has all these subscribers. Well, in Israel, you're talking about journalists with a reputation, a well known reputation. I mean, even on Dan Senor's podcast, he mentions that channel regularly, et cetera. Amit Sehgal, who's a guest on his, is a channel 12, you know, broadcaster. You're not talking about some, some extremist leftist publication or station talking about the Israeli mainstream. And these are people who would rather slander and libel and arse soldiers and call them rapists and help people like Christophe than see Netanyahu as prime minister.
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A
Right, okay, so you have the problem in Israel of an activist political media. And then we have the problem here of the New York Times being the most important news outlet in the world that I say, I think has crossed yesterday, today, crossed a Rubicon. It had not yet crossed, quite ever crossed. It had done news stories, it had published bad op eds and all of this, it takes one of its star. It gives 4,000 words and a video to Christoph to promote this blood libel. It is a blood libel. Jews are using dogs to rape Palestinians. Ergo, you know, if they do that, what are you allowed to do to them? The Eurovision cabal story and then the fact that there are, you know, I don't know, 750,000 Israelis in New York City, and apparently not one of them runs a restaurant worthy of note in the list of the hundred best restaurants in New York City.
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B
Okay, so can I just say, for me, it's just me personally, the when the New York Times crossed the Rubicon was last year during the famine hoax. To me, that was when I had never seen anything like that. And I've seen a whole lot of awful journalism. I've never seen a concerted, unapologetic, baldly fake news campaign organized on a scale like that. And it wasn't only the New York Times, by the way, they were the lead. But in outlet after outlet after outlet, every homepage was topped with these images of children, Gazan children born with congenital health problems attached to a story about famine in Gaza, about an Israel organized famine. It was debunked in hours or so. I mean, you know, the free press did a ton of it. Other places did it, that all these photos were in fact, not of starving kids, but of sick kids. There was no retraction. There was no nothing. In fact, as Elian was discussing earlier, the Pulitzer Prize winning photographs. Pulitzer Prizes were awarded for such photographs. So to me, that was the crossing of the Rubicon. That was the end of anything resembling sanity.
- [43:31]
A
But here's what's important. I think that why I say this is qualitatively different because though nominally, we are talking about Israel here, right? Fixing the Eurovision Song Contest, training, you know, like using dogs to rape Palestinians and having. And being erased from the New York food scene. Take, take this. The elision between Israel and Jews is very potent. And the reason that I said that this is der Sturmer level is that these are the kinds of accusations that classic anti Semitic regimes levy against Jews before they start killing. This is how it works. Jews need to be penned up because they're too dangerous to be in common company with other people. Their businesses need to be seized or killed or taken away from them because they might poison you or they are, you know, or their materials are poisoned by their very presence and anything that they do to defend themselves or strengthen their own people or something like that, and is done in a way that is designed to cause egregious harm to non Jews and therefore they are worthy of suppression and then maybe worthy of a final solution. This is how it starts. And if you do it on all of these different fronts, where you have cultural, social, political, criminal charges being levied against the Jewish state for its treatment of non Jews, we are. That's the crossing. In other words, saying Israel misbehaved, Israel did this, Israel did that, that's one thing. But when you. The cross section fermentation of this set of attitudes, which has been suggested over the last couple. No, I mean, it's not like we haven't attacked the New York Times a thousand times before for its unequal coverage of Israel and its unjustness. We are getting into dangerous territory here. Just yesterday There was another riot in Brooklyn around a shul one week after a riot in front of a shul in Manhattan. You know, Jews are getting killed on the streets of New York, of cities in Washington, in, you know, a guy was just released with no punishment for having killed a 69 year old in Thousand Oaks in California three years ago during a demonstration. This is no joke. Jews are threatened, Jews are at risk. And the most important news source in the world is contributing to the atmosphere in which you're implicitly saying it is open season against Jews and Jews deserve it. And therefore, Eliana has done a really noble signature thing by hiring Ira Stowell, who was running a important newsletter on substack and his own called Smarter Times, where he actually was sort of focusing very heavily on the New York Times. He does a lot other stuff. He's talked about Harvard, all this. But this effort to create sort of is like a one man effort to correct and highlight the ways in which Jews are being systematically singled out, discriminated against, attacked, kept out of elite institutions. All of that very important work.
- [47:24]
C
I just want to note one other thing about this Kristof piece. There's another elision that's happening and that's between news and opinion. And it happens all the time. But this is actually a reported news piece that could never actually have been published in the news pages of the Times because there's no way to fact check the piece. And I think it's significant that it was published in the opinion section, but it is being treated as a piece of reporting and it is not actually going to stand up as a piece of reporting. It was published in the opinion section. It is a piece of opinion writing. And that paper is now laundering news reporting in its opinion section and presenting news reporting in its opinion section. But there's no fact checking going on here. There's no way to fact check this piece and there's a reason it was published in the opinion section.
- [48:28]
A
So a couple of things.
- [48:30]
C
Readers are not going to be able to make the distinction that I just make. Nobody's making that distinction. Kristof is not making that distinction. But those of us in the news business understand why this piece was published on the opinion pages.
- [48:46]
D
And by the way, by the way, you're absolutely right, Eliana, that readers don't really know the difference and all that. What's also important is why a newspaper like that would think it's okay even if this were just an op ed, okay, if it were just somebody, Joe Schmo saying the Jews do This, the Jews do that, and a blood libelist op ed. Is there no limit to, Is there no editor who could say, no, I don't think we're going to publish this op ed? It sounds like Candace Owens or something or whatever. No, no. So it's not merely that it's pretending to be an opinion piece, but not every opinion piece also is legitimate.
- [49:28]
A
Of course not. I mean, and that you publish an opinion piece using unverified gossip from sources that have a systematic history dating back 25 years of believing and advocating and working to promote the big lie. It is the Palestinian media strategy, both on the west bank and in Gaza and everywhere since the second intifada, to manufacture crimes, murders, things like that, that they video famous images of, you know, a man cradling his son who is dead. And then, you know, somebody is filming from elsewhere, the video is released and then the kid gets out of the father's arms and they wipe off the ketchup and he goes off like, this is not just Hollywood.
- [50:25]
D
That's the name they gave, right?
- [50:26]
A
Yeah, yeah. And of course the entire
- [50:31]
D
Landis, Richard Landis gave it the name Pallywood. Yeah, the Palestinians did it.
- [50:35]
A
And as Abe says, like, you know, these hoaxes that are created, the famine hoax and other hoaxes that then Israel and the people who defend Israel have to spend months sort of clearing the muck away for the effort of not only correcting the historical record, but also trying to clarify the picture for people of goodwill who have no reason to disbelieve what is being put before them. Because what do they know? They're not press critics and they're not following this granularly and all of that. And you want them to know it's not true. And of course, look, we know the effect. The effect has been this collapse of support for Israel over the last two and a half years in US public opinion as a result of the systematic effort to defame Israel's efforts to defend itself. You know, after an unprovoked attack by an enemy who inflicted 5000 casualties in six hours in a rampage, 1200 deaths and like 3500 injuries and 240 people taken hostage. And that happened in the full view of the entire world just two and a half years ago or whatever it was. Was it two and a half years ago? And yet here we are two and a half years later and the opinion of Israel in the United States has undergone a huge decline because this propaganda effort has been so successful. And Israel's war against Hamas and Hezbollah and Iran has itself been successful.
- [52:28]
D
But you know what? It's as I said about Israel and the Israeli media like Haaretz, which collaborates with every Nazi voice in the world, I would say that Jews, it's Jews and Israelis who help perpetuate this. These lies and propaganda, they are the most dangerous because the enemy says, you see, look, this guy is Israeli. Look at Omer Bartov, an Israeli, teaches at Brown. He says it's genocide that's being come. He's a genocide expert. Look at this one, look at that one. And Jews in America. And look, it's not us saying that, it's the Jews and it's Israelis themselves who are saying it at universities in Israel. So you know, it's very hard to combat enemies when your own people who are being vilified are helping. And it's worthy of note that as was the case in the Holocaust, on October 7, the victims of the worst victims, the greatest number of victims were people who are in the peace camp who used to help Gazans get medical attention, help them give them work, were all for a two state solution and helping them and helping them. But when it comes down to it, if you're a Jew, then you're fatar and it doesn't matter whether you're on their side or not.
- [54:01]
A
Absolutely. I think we're going to end it there because I don't know what more we can say except to wonder at this pass that we have gotten to. People are going to email me all day saying, okay, you've said all this. What are we supposed to do about it? What are we supposed to do about it? I don't have the foggiest idea what it is that we're supposed to do about it. All we can do, I think is continue to say what we say and don't let them, you know, don't go silent, open a mouth to the New York Times, write them letters, email them. You know, don't ignore it, don't let it, don't let it sit there and fester in your own soul. You know, go to the Israel Day parade. You know, like go serve as a shalia outside a synagogue. Do what, you know, some people would say, go get yourself some gun training because things are getting bad here. But however it is, you know, this is all intended and designed to make us feel powerless and make us feel threatened and make us feel as though we're on the losing side of history and we're not. And we have every reason to believe that we can use the power that we have the authority that we have and the truth to defend ourselves. So thanks. We'll be back soon.
- [55:43]
D
John, one thing. You might get emails from listeners saying the one thing you didn't mention, what are we supposed to do about that? Is move to Israel. I noticed.
- [55:54]
A
Well, according to you, it's not so much better there because of all of the, you know, it's in Channel 12 and everybody is so terrible there. What do we have to be here for?
- [56:05]
D
It's true, leftists will be leftists, but I still think you're safer here. But, you know, that's a different discussion.
- [56:14]
A
Okay. Well, anyway, that's where we are. So fight. We'll be back tomorrow. For Eliana Abe. And thank you again, Ruthie, for joining us. I'm John Pod. Horace. Keep the candle burning.