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A
I'm James Patterson. I write way too many books. Welcome to Hungry Dogs. The title comes from my maternal grandmother, Isabel Zelvis Morris. Nan used to always say, hungry dogs run faster, James. And I've been running fast ever since. Here's what will be coming your way soon, and this is a really terrific list. I think you'll hear from some incredible people like Stacey Abrams. Yay. BJ Novak.
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Yay.
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Kathy Bates, Dolly Parton, Josh Gad. And Pope Leo. Okay, maybe not Pope Leo, but who knows? Maybe he'll show up. Hungry dogs run faster. Thank you, Grandma, for turning me into a hopeless, obsessive, compulsive. Listen to Hungry Dogs with James Patterson. That'd be me on Apple, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. Thank you, thank you, thank you.
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Hope for the best, expect the worst.
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Some drink champagne Some die of thirst no way of knowing which way it's going Hope for the best Expect the.
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Worst Hope for the best welcome to.
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The Commentary Magazine Daily Podcast. Today is Tuesday, December 16, 2025. I am John Pod Horiz, the editor of Commentary Magazine. Please let me take a moment to ask you here at the time of giving at the end of the year to consider donating to commentary, Inc. The 501c3 nonprofit that produces this podcast, publishes Commentary magazine and puts out our website. We exist, we prosper, we thrive. We go from strength to strength owing to the support of people like you, our listeners, our readers, the people who believe in our mission and believe in the importance of the ideas that we try to generate and analyze, and the bad ideas that we seek to extirpate from public life. And if you believe our mission is important, if you believe that listening to this podcast is valuable, Please go to commentary.org donate and give and give generously. Your donation is fully tax deductible, and if you do that, you'll be able to continue hearing me and my colleagues here. Executive Editor A. Greenwald Hyabel Hi John. Senior Editor Seth Mandel Hi Seth.
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D
Hi John.
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Social Commentary Columnist Christine Rosen Hi Christine.
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E
Hi John.
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B
And we will be joined shortly by Commentary Contributing Editor Eli Lake, author of the lead article in the January 2026 issue of Commentary, now available at commentary.org his article is called the Palestine Firsters and was written, edited, and put through the process of public considerably before the events of the last couple of days. And by the last couple of days I mean not only Bondi beach, but an event that happened last night on a New York City subway when some enthusiastic members of the Chabad organization were who were singing Hanukkah songs, were set upon and attacked by others in a, in a subway car. As it happens, a couple of hours before this took place, I was on the Upper east side of New York on Lexington Avenue at 82nd street in front of a kosher pizza place. And there was a chabad truck. There was like a, like a pickup basically. And three guys were standing on the truck outside the pizza place with a lit up menorah, three of them cold, bitter cold, dancing, dancing together, singing Mao Tsur, one of the Hanukkah songs or the leading Hanukkah song, very spirited, full of good spirits. And my wife and I and our friends that we were with said, you see here they are refusing to give in to grief and to continue to show the flag here in New York City. And I said, well, let's see where this goes in two weeks when Zoran Mamdani is sworn into office. And then I wake up this morning to see the news of an attack on chabad niks on a subway car for doing exactly what they were doing there on Lexington Avenue at 7:45 or 8:30 at night last night. So I don't know. That's, that's, that's, that's the world that we are in. One other detail before we go on, just want to read from the New York Post just to give you a sense of how awful things are get are going to be. Not that I think people listening here would understand that. We would think that the Zoram Hamdani mayoralty is going to be awful. But Isabel Vincent and Craig McCarthy in the New York Post exclusive, Zoran Mamdani eyeing lawyer who defended Al Qaeda terrorist for top City hall job, that is. His name is Ramzi Qasem. Also a law professor at CUNY and a member of Mamdani's transition team for legal affairs, is the top candidate for chief counsel, the most important advisory role in the mayor's office. Not only did he defend Mahmoud Khalil, of course, now this notorious case of the guy that Marco Rubio announced needed to be thrown out of the United States for national security reasons and who has been released by court, but he defended Ahmed Al Darby, al Qaeda member who was convicted in 2017 of bombing the French oil tanker the Limburg off the coast of Yemen in 2002. A great long history, including the fact that when he was a student, he's a Syrian. Syrian born when he was a student at Columbia in 1999, he wrote an op ed for the Columbia Spectator objecting to the idea that a sandwich made with pita bread and Israeli salad was called an Israeli sandwich. Literally, he objected to this cultural appropriation of a sandwich.
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D
So I have, I have one observation, by the way, on this, which, real quick, which is just because I'm in Israel, my Twitter, when I open up my Twitter on my laptop, it gives me what's trending in Israel as opposed to what's trending in the United States. And I even took a screenshot of it this morning, but I logged on and it said trending in Israel, and then it said New York in Hebrew letters. And it reminded me of this ongoing conversation that we have on the podcast about how Israelis are worried about Americans. Despite October 7th happening there and the war happening there and Israel being in the longest war of its existence, there is this running thing of Israelis being like, are you guys okay over there in the United States? And that was like a pretty good example of it, that, you know, this attack on the subway was the top thing trending in Israel, at least on my feed, right?
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Let me just read the letter written by the guy who was going to be the number two advisor to Zoramdani from the Columbia Spectator of March 30, 1999, to the editor we are writing to voice the concern of the Muslim and Arab communities of Columbia University over the recent recent introduction of the Israeli Wrap as part of Wein Hall's Rapper Stand assortment. It is difficult to express what many of us feel when we see the foods that are familiar to us. Our parents and our ancestors labeled as Israeli. Tabbouleh and tahini are hardly Israeli foods. If that were the case, they would be no older than 50 years. And we can assure you that our grandmothers and their mothers before them have been preparing them for far longer than that. The words taboola and tahini are Arabic words, and the foods they denote have been part of our heritage for centuries. But one might as well label Chopin as California music simply because it is performed in San Francisco. We ask Columbia Dining Services to adopt the Appalachian Middle Eastern rap as a sensible compromise that is far more inclusive and truthful than Israeli rapid and then Israeli rap. Ramzi Qassem CC 99 and Diana Bushy, BC 00 and Dining Services has since changed the name of the rap to the Middle Eastern rap, says the Editor's Note. So our friend Noah Rothman wrote a book called the Rise of the New Puritans. There's a whole chapter about this idea of food appropriation. A lot of it, though he's pointing. You know, a lot of it is this game that Israelis can't claim tahina, which is a sesame paste, you're not allowed to because it's Arab in origin. By the way, just to let you know, Jews have been living in and around the Middle east for what, 1200, 3000 years. But in this case, we would say in Arab lands or, you know, dominated by Arabs since the 7th century AD and they've been eating Tikhina whole goddamn time. John. John, it's Eli Lake.
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Hi, Eli.
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ELI lake, contributing editor, welcome. Okay.
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Yes, Abe, I just want to point out we ran an article in 2020, July, August 2020, titled who's Afraid of Israeli Food by Gilead Eni that goes into all of this. It's a long running campaign to try to de Israelize Israeli food.
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B
Right.
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C
Anyway, I'm surprised this rap battle, pardon my pun, has not freed Palestine. Anyway, way to go, guys.
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B
You know what, And Eli, we do have you here, of course, to talk about your piece, the Palestine Firsters, eerily time, unfortunately, given the news of the last 24 to 48 hours. Let's go right to the Palestine Firsters. So what is the term? How did you derive the term the Palestine Firsters, where is it from and what is it that you intend to convey with the use of the term?
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C
Well, it came from it's an inversion of a slur, which is Israel Firsters, which was coined by pat Buchanan in 1990 in his deceptive attack on the first Gulf War, which liberated Kuwait from the clutches of Saddam Hussein. And if you go back to that, and this was what spurred Buckley to write his great essay and book on anti Semitism, I might add, after corresponding with his good friend Norman Podoritz, which was a great moment in many ways for the right. But what what Buchanan did was he focused on three prominent Jews who supported the American intervention to drive Iraq out of Kuwait and claimed that this was kind of the policy was being hijacked and America's national interests were subverted for Israel. Israel first has since become very popular on the left and the right. And so I came up with Palestine first year because at a certain point, if you just look at it from a real politic, you know, let's, let's get, you know, the kind of ideological elements out of it. The US Israel alliance has paid great dividends, especially since October 7th. And what I mean by that is that, you know, in this war, Iran's nuclear program, partly with the help of Trump's decision to kind of intervene after Israel had cleared away all of the air defenses and taken out, you know, the top wing of Iran's military and other sites. So Iran's nuclear program is something that has been a major national, US national security crisis in some ways for like 30 years. And the problem is not necessarily over forever, but it's certainly like it's set back. It's significantly degraded at this point. Hassan Nasrallah, who has the blood of countless Americans on his hands, not to mention Bashar al Assad, not to mention the Sinwar brothers, not to mention the Houthi leadership, which was obstructing, you know, commercial vessels in the Gulf. All of these things are in America's national interest. Those are American enemies. They were taken out by largely Israel in some cases, you could say Erdogan's support for Syrian rebels when it came to Assad. That is in America's interest. As I say, that's what America first policy looks like. The Palestine Firsters, and particularly Ben Rhodes, who wrote this piece a few weeks back for the New York Times, was chastising Joe Biden for not tacitly supporting a UN imposed ceasefire before any of those things had happened. So it begs the question, how are you understanding America's interest? Ben Rhodes, or for that matter, Tucker Carlson, who has just been absolutely deranged of late, calling Benjamin Netanyahu an enemy of Western civilization, How do you define it? And if your definition of America's national interest is that America should support the creation of a Palestinian state, in the case of many of America's allies, like Australia, sadly, and France, the creation of that, the recognition or the kind of symbolic recognition of that Palestinian state, even before the last hostages were returned, before Hamas had disarmed, before any of these kind of conditions, which would be in everyone's interest, including Palestinians. So how are you defining America's national interest? Because Israel first, you know, has taken on a life of its own. The Buchanan, the heirs of Buchanan, use it all the time now. And I asked the question, your alternative is to let Iran get a nuclear weapon. How does that advance America's interests? And the reason I say Palestine first is because the focus of this has been the only way to understand the war in Gaza is in terms of the humanitarian costs. And I acknowledge they are great for the people in Gaza. And without any kind of recognition that Hamas started the war, that they're tactics of not wearing uniforms, shooting and firing missiles from civilian areas, and literally using the entire civilian infrastructure of Gaza as a kind of shield to protect them, the, you know, the Terrorists who are hiding in the tunnels along with hostages. That to me is so out of whack with anything I would recognize as America's national interest. And I think it's one final point here. 30 years ago, 20 years ago even, there was a kind of realist argument for supporting a two state solution or the formation of a Palestinian state or America distancing itself from Israel. It's an old argument that goes back to Secretary of State Marshall, which is there are far more Arabs than there are Jews in the Middle east and we are not served by supporting a smaller state with less people over the wishes of a far, you know, the ethnic majority of the Middle East. So that made sense for decades. But what we've seen since the first Trump administration and the Abraham Accords is that now the heart of the Arab world, including I think hopefully we'll see the Saudis in a few years now maybe, but the Arab regimes are now wanting to normalize relations with Israel before there is a Palestinian state. So it makes even less sense. Give me the American hard boiled national interest. And if the only answer is too many civilians have died, to which I say, okay, well, if that's now how you understand all of our alliances, then I have a whole bunch of other things, but. So that's what I was really going for. That's why I call it the Palestine Firsters.
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Hey, John, here. Okay, no gift cards this year. I'll tell you why don't give a gift card as a present because you can give an aura frame. An aura frame. I got one sitting right in front of me. They're amazing. It's like having a high definition screen showing your life in photographs so easily downloaded from your photo app into the aura app. Showing you videos. Photos organized however you want to organize them from the moment that you have a digital photo. Go back 30, 40 years. If you have them scanned up to the present, you can figure out how much time each photo spends on the screen before it moves on to the next one. Unlimited numbers. You can actually preload the photos before it ships by downloading the app and they'll put it on there so that when you send it to your relative or to your loved one, the photos are there just when they plug it in. And you can personalize your gift by adding a message before it arrives. You can't wrap togetherness, but you can frame it and for a limited time save on the perfect gift by visiting auraframes.com that's a U R A frames.com to get $35 off Aura's best selling carver mat frames named number one by Wirecutter by using promo code Commentary at checkout. That's a U R A frames.com promo code commentary. This deal is exclusive to listeners and frames sell out fast, so order yours now to get it in time for the holidays. Support the show by mentioning us at checkout. Terms and conditions apply. It's very easy to do an ad for something when you're sitting as you're recording the ad wearing the product that you are supposed to endorse. And in my case that is a quince Mongolian cashmere sweater. That's what I am wearing at this moment. And at Quince you can pick one up for 50 bucks when you'd normally drop $200 or more on the same thing. Plus wool coats that actually hold up to daily wear and still look good. I myself have a quince puffer that I'm wearing over the sweater when I go out on these cold November days. By partnering directly with trusted factories that maintain high standards for craftsmanship and ethical practices, Quince cuts out the middleman and markups. That means premium quality at half the cost of other high end brands so you can give luxury pieces without the luxury price tag. So get your wardrobe sorted and your gift list handled with quints. Don't wait. Go to quints.com commentary for free shipping on your order and 365 day returns. Now available in Canada too. That's Q U I n c e.com Commentary Free shipping and 365 day returns. Quince.com Commentary.
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E
One of the great things about the piece is, which I had, I guess I'd sort of forgotten it, but I was glad to revisit it. Not glad, but happy to see you revisit. It was this intellectual history of how we got to the place we're in now. And you cite, you know, writers like John Mearsheimer and others who published these books some decades ago, arguing about the Israel lobby and and they're very particular bent, which is, as you say, another thing that's been resurrected in recent years, unfortunately. But you have great reminder there about how the dog whistles on the Democratic Party side about foreign policy have been going on for a while as well. And you Note that in 2022, before he was running for president, Barack Obama did this engaged in this sort of thing as well when he gave speeches and talked into Rich 20202002 sorry about Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz that he deliberately chose people who were what, undersecretaries at the Pentagon. Yeah, not, not Dick Cheney, not rums. He chose to mention the two Jewish people there. And that that was a deliberate choice and that that was a signal to a certain part of the party that we now know obviously is no longer being subtle about its understanding of, you know, neoconservatism.
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C
And for the way, the weird thing about it is that Wolfowitz himself, and this is like a little bit of deep sort of, this is a deep cut Wolfowitz delivers in 2003. He's one of the people pushing in the administration for the Bush policy, for the pathway to a two state solution. He delivers a speech at a Jewish rally at the Mall in Washington where he says Palestinians are people too. He's still very much in the Oslo. So it makes it all even more suspect. The Walton Mearsheimer paper was worse than the book. But it was basically trying to say the Israel lobby is to blame for the second Iraq war and that's false. Netanyahu as a private citizen lobbied for the Iraq war I think because ideologically he was, he was aligned with it, with the mission of taking out Saddam Hussein and trying to see if you could replace it with a democracy. And by the way, I would argue that, you know, I wrote this a few years ago for a commentary that that operation is more successful than a lot of people would claim, even though the war was pretty badly managed for the first few years. But the idea that the Israelis were pushing the Israelis wanted the United States to take a tough line on Iran. And the understanding before the second Gulf War was Saddam balanced Iran. And so getting rid of madness. Look, it's like insane.
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The madness of the Israel first claim and its factitiousness begins at the very beginning. Israel was not a major force in the war to dislodge Saddam Hussein from Kuwait. There was a 52 nation alliance run by the UN, led by the United States that sought to establish that the very simple rules of world order were one country can't come in and swallow up another with a factitious claim that it was a province of that country that had been wrested from it. Israel not only wasn't a participant in the war against Saddam Hussein, the United States forbade Israel from retaliating. When Saddam Hussein fired the first civilian missiles that had been fired at another country since the Vietnam War, as far as I am aware, the Scuds, Israel's defense posture, explicit defense posture, was you attack us, we retaliate. That was Israeli military doctrine that Yitzhak Shamir, the prime minister at the time had to suppress because he did not want to get crosswise of George Bush, H.W. bush and James Baker. So first Gulf War, the war that Israel started, according to Pat Buchanan, ended up creating the conditions under which Israel violated its own self defense posture in order to allow the United States a freer hand in doing what the United States wanted to do, but that Israel didn't care much about. That's 1991, 2003. I was in Israel. Nobody wanted the Iraq war. I mean, I talked to what Bibi wanted it, he didn't want it. He was playing some game. He was out of power.
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C
Right.
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B
And he testified, was the Prime Minister.
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E
Yeah.
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B
No one in power in Israel. Not the Mossad, not the Shin Bet, not the Prime Minister, not the Defense Minister, not the Foreign Minister, and not the entire Israeli intelligentsia were like, what are you going to war with Iraq for? They're not the bad guys. Iran's the bad guy. They're not. Iran is even worse on terrorism than Iraq. You're aiming at the wrong target. That was the Israeli position. And then you got this same thing, which is that we got lied into war to help Israel. According to Walt and Mearsheimer, it was the Israeli lobbies game. So not only was the is the Israel first argument unfair because America was pursuing its own national interests, it was a lie from the outset that these policies that were either not supported by Israel or were outright threatening to Israel's own national security, as was the case with the, with the demand that they not retaliate against Iraq's direct attack on them, that somehow this is all being done secretly to help the Jewish state, that is.
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C
And what are the intellectual roots of that for Buchanan? Because he's old enough and he also wrote a book about World War II. Who was blamed for trying to get America into a war with Hitler? Well, of course, it was the Jewish lobby. And that was a prominent theme of the propaganda of not only America first and Lindbergh, but that was the line from the American Bund. Father Coughlin.
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B
Father Coughlin. So in his book, in his memoir, right from the beginning, Pat Buchanan says his household was a Father Coghlan household. Coughlin, of course, a sort of social justice version of the 1930s of a social justice Catholic priest who became a radio star and started melding his progressivism with like out and out, outright anti Semitic blood libels.
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C
And also had armed, at one point, an armed wing, by the way, who beat up Jews and boycotted Jewish.
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B
That goes back. So you're dating back there nine decades to explain the origins of this. But we now get to the Palestine Firsters and this idea that again, as you say, had there not been. Had somehow Israel not forced. And the Jews forced Biden not to push Israel into a ceasefire in June 2024, even before Israel agreed to.
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C
Right.
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B
That Israel agreed to eight times. Right. And the Palestinians said no too.
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C
Right.
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B
So that's the other crazy number.
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D
Palestine first stuff is that they, they is. Is. How is. Is that they don't actually do anything that's good for Palestine. Right. Like if you were Palestine first, you would presumably be taking actions that would help Palestinians, but every single time they, they choose the opposite. And also their worldview stops them from even being able to recognize what those interests are. Right. They say, and Eli talks about this, you know, the Abraham Accords you mentioned in the article and how, you know, Ben Rhodes was, Rhodes was against that. And he talks about how, you know.
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C
They, they, by the way, that he would be against.
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D
They, they, they worked, you know, they helped Israel come to agreements with autocratic Arab states. Right. That's what Ben Rhodes said and ignored the Palestinians entirely. But the, the Abraham Accords. The immediately preceding controversy for the signing of the Abraham Accords was Israel's threat to annex parts of the West Bank. We don't know if the threat was empty or not, but there were threat. You know, they were discussing it and the UAE came in and said, well, all right, let's just ink these deals. You know, they've been in the works for a bit. It's not like that's when they started negotiating. These deals had been in the works. It made no sense to delay it. And the UAE saw an opportunity to get something for the Palestinians out of it. So the Abraham Accords, the very first thing that Abraham Accords did was stop the annexation of west bank territory or stop even the discussion of it in, in, in. In Israel, in the, in the Israeli government. So that was the first thing. The Abraham Accords started with a gesture at the Palestinians. Didn't ignore them. The other stuff is that, you know, they, there are all this protesting over ceasefires and stuff has all really been about keeping Hamas in power. And every time there's a ceasefire, Hamas goes around torturing and executing Palestinian civilians in and rivals in, you know, in broad daylight. Nobody stops them and nobody says anything. Even the, you know, even the statements that come from Britain or France or wherever, they're always these sort of general statements. You know, there shouldn't be any violence and everybody should be safe and blah, blah, Blah. There's no, like, hey, how are we going to stop Hamas from cannibalizing the entire Gaza Strip? And so Ben Rhodes has no answer to that. And all these Palestine Firsters have no answer to that. And the. And you know, we've seen time and again that the stories that keep confirming that they were on the road to adding Saudi Arabia to the Abraham Accords world, you know, they had these negotiations between the U.S. the Saudis and the Israelis, and they were actually getting somewhere. And Then Hamas launches October 7th to blow it up. So on the one hand, you've got the President of the United States trying to ink a deal that would at least make Israel promise to take moves toward a Palestinian state. And Hamas blows that up and they take Hamas's side.
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E
Well, that's one of the ironies. And you point this out in the piece, it's sort of an aside, but it really struck me is that for people like Ben Rhodes and the Palestine Palestinian Firsters, their entire worldview has to require absolute passivity on the part of the Palestinian people. But overlooking the agency of Hamas, as Seth says, they blow things up and it's as if, what can we do here? This also has to be Israel's fault. They invited this attack. But their mindset towards the Palestinian people who they claim to care about is actually quite colonialist. It's very old school. These passive people who have no choice to make in their future and who we just have to treat like helpless children. I found that really notable in terms of how you.
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C
Yeah, there's another historical echo, which is that after the Nebi Musa Riots of 1920, the British Mandate appoints the leader of those riots, Haj Amin Al Husseini, as the leader of the Palestinians. Haj Aminhal Husseini, by the way, is the.
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B
I mean, we know him as Grand Mufti. You may know him as the Grand Mufti.
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C
The Grand Mufti of Jerusalem.
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E
Yeah, AKA the Mufti.
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C
Well known for his enthusiasm for Adolf Hitler and the Nazis. But he's the originator of all of what we still hear. He is the guy who starts what I would call the Hundred Year Intifada. He described the flood of Al Aqsa way before hamas named its 2023 Pogrom Al Aqsa Flood. So all of, like his framing of this and his refusal to accept any kind of partition. He killed his rival Palestinian clan leaders in 1936, 1937, he had them assassinated. That we're thinking about trying to share the land. So all of this kind of Maximalism goes back a long way and it is a product of colonialism. Ironically, you are correct, Christine, that the Palestine First Jews do not realize that they are engaging in this kind of, well, I guess you could say the soft bigotry of low expectations in this respect. So.
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B
Abe, go ahead.
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F
I'm not sure that they don't realize. I mean, I think the point is.
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B
That.
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F
Whatever they perceive or don't perceive as being in the Palestinians interests, whatever they say they believe is in the Palestinians interest is what they wish to put above, as Eli points out, American interests in the region. And this means emboldening Hamas and all its assorted terrorist groups, terrorist groups which are enemies of the U.S. it means leaving Iran alone and it means, above all, restraining Israel every step of the way because what the Palestine Firsters really are are Israel obsessives. And it is about punishing Israel. Stop restraining Israel and the American relationship with it.
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C
And I would just add one other thing here. If you followed Ben Rhodes or Tucker Carlson's foreign policy in this regard, you would, by breaking the alliance with Israel, not only would you be breaking the alliance with the clear military hegemon now of the Middle east, but you would in many ways you would be inviting more war, which would probably drag America back into the region. So if you're trying to stop endless wars, I would take a note from somebody who I have been very critical of late, J.D. vance's speech to the execrable Quincy Institute. But in that speech, he describes how Israel is a good ally because it does defend itself. So one of the things you hear is Israel wanted Trump to attack Iran. And I'm not going to have my kids die. Nobody's kids died for Iran. Israel did the heavy lifting in that war, the ability flying our amazing B2 bomber stealth bombers and dropping bombs. I mean, that was a great thing. I think that Trump authorized it. But that's not the same as sending like 180,000 troops to Saudi Arabia on the eve of the first Gulf War. It's a totally different thing. The fact that you have a competent, ingenious military, regional intelligence, superpower as an ally is good. It means that we don't have to expend our blood and treasure to keep the peace in the region.
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B
A very important point here because you would believe, if you listen to John Mearsheimer in particular, you would believe that he represents the last gasp of a really old fashioned form of foreign policy realism, right? In which the balance of power in the Middle east tilts toward Arabs and not toward this small country of 9 million people that doesn't have oil and are being wrapped up in it is nonsensical because our interests all align with maintaining relations with the people who produce the life's blood of our, of our economy and the things that powers the engines of capitalism and all of that. And instead we're all bollocks up with this little semi socialist country that is alien and to the Middle east anyway. And the hell with it, right? So that is, that is where a lot of the Republican Party was until the late 80s with a 50 50. Why are we even bothering with Israel? I don't understand. This doesn't make any sense. Like, you know, our, our interests align with making sure the SAUDIS don't embargo us and raise oil prices five times over and throw us into the 1970s recession again. Now, as Eli points out, a realist framework says Israel has proved itself capable of without American action, regime change, the destruction of aggressive weapons that can cross thousands of miles with a potential nuclear tip on them, that and disrupting oil shipping from the Far east, disrupting shipping in general from the Far east to the West. And there is Israel fighting the war. And that is our national interest in 2025. The country that shows down Iran, which is a bad regional actor and is destabilizing to Iraq and to the Levant and is playing footsie with Russia and helping Russia against Ukraine and making alliances with China that are not healthy to us and they are the bulwark against Iran. And in any understanding, classical understanding of the pursuit of our national interest, they are helpful and the other nations are not. So if you're still going with that, then you're not a realist anymore. You are an ideologue, anti Zionist.
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C
Well, there's another reason why is making.
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B
You dislike Israel that does not comport with the idea that America needs to pursue its own national interests narrowly. Because that idea aligns you with Israel in 2025. It might not have in 1991. I'm not even gonna argue that point. Back in 1991, we had to make the case that, well, we had affinities with Israel because Israel is a country based on idea. We're a country based on idea. It's a democracy. It's helpful. We should align with the democracy of the Middle east. And there are a lot of people in America sympathetic to Israel and therefore it is the heart, it goes to the heart of what we care about as a people. But as a raw national interest question, that was a harder pull. There's Just no question about it, to 35 years ago. And it ain't a hard pull now. It's the opposite of a hard pull.
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D
And they're still taking people. Israel is ticking people off America's Most wanted list to this day, right? Every so often, somebody connected to Hezbollah, who has the blood of Americans on his hand, literally on the most wanted list, and Israel takes him out. So they're still, like, taking out. They're, you know, they're the ones carrying out, you know, revenge or whatever you want to call it. But the consequences for attacking America are carried out by Israel. How could you ask for a better friend that you don't even have to send your own goons to take, you know, To. To. To do an eye for an eye. Israel will just go ahead, you know, and take those guys out and clear out your FBI Most wanted list. How could there be a better deal than that?
- [41:36]
C
Well, I want to return for just a second to Mearsheimer, because it's worse than. He's not even being a good realist. Mearsheimer now says, and he said this recently on Interview, he said a couple times that October 7th is almost a false flag for him because he says that Israel killed the majority of people on that day with the intention of starting a war that is now bleeding into not just like, really toxic conspiracy theory, but that really is a kind of awful blood libel. And what's different between Mearsheimer and Candace Owens, Candace Owens has more viewers, is that Mearsheimer is still credentialed. He is still affiliated with the University of Chicago.
- [42:27]
E
He's providing intellectual infrastructure to the Candace Owens of the world. Actually. That is dangerous.
- [42:33]
C
And that. That really is, in my view, unforgivable. And there, the fact that he. I would love to kind of get him in a public session and confront him with that. I mean, this is, by the way, the same person who assured people after the first Russian invasion and annexation of Crimea that Putin had no designs on the rest of Ukraine. At what point do we kind of take away this man approaching his 80th birthday, his kind of academic credentials, and to say you have become a kind of crazy crank in your attic, like you are somebody who has sort of. I don't know, you should. I think he's forfeited his academic credentials by endorsing this kind of stuff.
- [43:28]
E
But I think. I mean, I would. I would call his approach to Russia a blind spot, but it has absolutely obliterated his ability to claim, as he has in the past, that he's a realist he completely has forgiven and overlooked Russia's actions in describing the war in Ukraine. And I do think it's connected to what you said earlier, which is that Russia and Iran and a little bit China are forming a kind of alliance that should worry every single American. And that Ben Rhodes, however foolish she is in many regards, should recognize as an alliance that poses a threat, and that Israel, as you said, is the bulwark against that threat.
- [44:04]
A
I'm James Patterson. I write way too many books. Welcome to Hungry Dogs. The title comes from my maternal grandmother, Isabel Zelvis Morris. Nan used to always say, hungry dogs run faster, James, And I've been running fast ever since. Here's what will be coming your way soon. And this is a really terrific list. I think you'll hear from some incredible people like Stacey Abrams. Yay. BJ Novak.
- [44:31]
B
Yay.
- [44:31]
A
Kathy Bates, Dolly Parton, Joss Gad. And Pope Leo. Okay, maybe not Pope Leo, but who knows? Maybe he'll show up. Hungry dogs run faster. Thank you, grandma, for turning me into a hopeless, obsessive, compulsive. Listen to Hungry Dogs with James Patterson. That'd be me on Apple, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. Thank you, thank you, thank you.
- [45:01]
D
I'm Oliver Darcy. And I'm John Passantino. We have spent years covering the inner workings of the news media, tech, politics, Hollywood, and power. Now through our nightly newsletter, status. And we're bringing that same reporting and sharp analysis to a new podcast, Powerlines. Every Friday, we're breaking down the biggest stories, shaping the industry, explaining why they matter, and saying the things most people are thinking but too timid to say out loud. No spin, no fluff. Just sharp analysis that isn't afraid to call it like it is.
- [45:31]
B
We also pull back the curtain via.
- [45:32]
D
Our exclusive reporting to take you behind the scenes. My understanding, having reported this, is that the Pentagon protested to CNN and tried to effectively exile the CNN producer. And when the moment calls for it, we've got some hot takes. I just think Brad Pitt, honestly, he kind of seems a little washed up.
- [45:52]
B
Oh, my God, that's. Power Lines presented by Status.
- [45:56]
D
Follow power lines and listen on Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music, or your favorite podcast podcast app.
- [46:08]
C
Yeah, I mean, in the Middle east at least. And Ukraine is the bulwark in Europe. Yeah, no, so I just. I just think Mearsheimer is now in an. He hasn't even go as far as his co author, Stephen Walt. I don't think Stephen Wall would like that.
- [46:22]
B
When I was in college, I went to the University of Chicago. Mearsheimer was not yet a professor at Chicago. I ran a magazine at Chicago and we published an article called the Nuclear Proliferators. And it was the first time I had heard of Mearsheimer. A graduate student named Ben Frankel wrote this, wrote this piece. And it was about how there was this crew of people in the world in political science, forward thinking, tough minded people who believed that the secret to world peace was to have as much nuclear proliferation as possible. That the policy of the United States and the Soviet Union, by the way, which was that no country other than the ones that had them at that point should ever get a nuclear weapon. Which has been the policy of the planet really, since then. Right. I mean, the. The last two entrants into the nuclear club were Israel and South Africa. And those. Israel's entry into the nuclear club was so controversial that Israel never formally acknowledged, reportedly, reportedly, Right. Has never officially acknowledged that it is a nuclear power.
- [47:41]
D
Allegedly.
- [47:43]
B
Mearsheimer was the leading figure in this idea. So if you think that he was, that was close to 50 years ago. So if you think that he wasn't always a crank, he was always a crank. His entry into the serious world of political analysis was the idea that the healthiest form of mutual assured destruction would be to allow countries all over the place to get nuclear weapons to protect themselves from other countries with nuclear weapons. And, you know, had such an idea come to fruition that nuclear bombs would have been flying between Iraq and Iran in 1987 and between, I don't know, you know, I mean, we. Who even knows Taiwan and China, even China is a nuclear power, Taiwan isn't. But let's say Taiwan gets a nuclear weapon or, you know, we see all of this stuff, this was his idea. So formatively, this guy who became famous for becoming this enemy of the Israel lobby, claiming that basically a cabal of Jews was gulling and hypnotizing American policymakers, particularly in the Congress, into following the dictates of this foreign power, this tiny little foreign power. If you didn't think that that repugnant blood libel, antisemitism that was, that, that, that, that just stank from every page of Mearsheimer and Walt's work was somehow a new thing for Mearsheimer, who is a noxious and dangerous thinker with horrible ideas, and he has been for five decades now.
- [49:37]
F
What has happened is, as with so many cranks, is that the culture and the moment has caught up with them. And so now they have found, you know, as octogenarians and whatever this huge Excuse me, new young audience who believes that they are the leading luminaries of foreign policy theory. We're talking about revisionist historians. All these guys, you have these 19 year olds running around quoting Mearsheimer now. So whether he's in his basement or his attic or whatever, he's thrilled because he finally feels the people have finally come around to my truth.
- [50:31]
B
Exactly. I want to just take a couple of minutes here at the end of the podcast to talk a little about Rob Reiner. I think the murder of Rob Reiner and his wife by his addict son is a larger story than people might think it is. Ordinarily people are sort of treating this as though it's time to pay tribute to the wonderful work that Rob Reiner has done. And he indeed did do absolutely wonderful work and had a period between 1984 and 1994 with a series of films in various genres that have no, you know, that have almost no equal. You know, a great romantic comedy, a great courtroom drama, a great psychological horror thriller, a great teen romance fairy tale, a great mockumentary, all of that like it's an amazing achievement. Right. But that's not the. And, and, and had he died a natural death, it would be a wonderful time to have sentimental recollections of what a wonderful career he had had. I want to talk a little about the nature of what happened to him and his wife because it goes to. There's a lot of confusion about what's going on in the Atlantic Ocean and with what we're doing with Venezuela and this very peculiar thing that happened last night with the White House declaring Fentanyl a weapon of mass destruction, which is an Orwellian way to refer. I mean, not everything is the same kind of problem. A weapon of mass destruction is a, is one thing and a drug that is voluntarily used by people is another. But this kid from the age of 15 became an addiction and this is in, we're getting a view in this celebrity murder of what the free or what the incredible ease with which people have access to mood altering and brain altering drugs can do. Because once somebody gets hooked, you know, this is a 17 year history that this, that this kid was in and out of rehab, in and out of facilities, seems to have been both a user of opiates and a user of stimulants in very equal measure. So determined not to go spend time in rehab that he would live on the streets rather than be, than agree to go to facilities. Or he would go and then he would run away and live on the Streets and, and his parents clearly did everything. Everything, including, like Reiner made a movie with him that, the, that the, that Nick wrote, you know, to talk about what it's like to be an addict and get over your addictions. And we talk about the fentanyl crisis and we talk. And everything always goes back to, oh, you know, this was Pfizer's fault, or was it's the fault of the Sackler family because they got people hooked on pain. They said it was okay for people to take pain medications, and then everything just went crazy and now everyone's on fentanyl and they were on black tar heroin and da, da, da. And this scourge of addiction and what it does to people's families and what happens to them for the rest of their lives when they have a kid who can't get over it or can't break free of the addiction. We're constantly coming up with blame for corporations or institutions or something like that, or the rehabs are mean, or the wilderness programs are terrible, or the facility of therapeutic places that kids are sent to try to get them, to wean them, to teach them agency. All this are terrible and all of that is wrong. You know, these are tragedies beset and befall people's lives and people struggle to find things to do. And when you start tortifying all of this and suing the programs out of existence that try to help people with dealing with these kinds of addictions and, and, and diseases and, and abuses like this war on the therapeutic wilderness programs or on therapeutic boarding schools or, or that sort of thing, I think is just another example of how we are constantly excusing away. We're always looking for targets, big targets, and not focusing on the horror that people go through individually. And what they mostly need is help with that and liberalizing drug laws and liberalizing marijuana laws and liberalizing the use of illegal stimulants and things like that, which is now before the Trump administration, there's all kinds of talk about reclassifying illegal drugs so that there could be research on it or this or that or the other thing. I am very. I look at this and I say, tell me. You want to tell me there are no gateway drugs. You want to tell me pot's not a gateway drug? I don't believe you. I don't believe that Nick Reiner's first experiment with the illegal substances that led inexorably to him murdering his two parents wasn't marijuana. That doesn't mean marijuana is 20 million people who smoke pot regularly are going to kill their parents. I'm just saying that, you know, we, we have, we're living in a world in which we are. We excuse away drug use and blame larger forces, including Trump, maybe. I mean, Venezuela is not responsible for Nick Reiner murdering his parents. That's an easy out. Venezuela responsible a lot of terrible things. I don't even know if I'm making any sense.
- [57:24]
E
I think what you're saying is correct in the sense that policy choices will never fully address a human tragedy. And that tragedy for any of us who've had friends or loved ones who've succumbed to addiction, who've tried and tried over and over again to kick whatever habit they have, and you see that they can't do it, that's a tragedy. It's a tragedy that actually, I think we had a different acceptance or resignation about as, as human beings for centuries. You know, there were opium dens where people would overdose all the time. You know, there was an entire group of romantic poets who, who, you know, succumbed to various addictions. Today, we want to have a solution.
- [58:03]
C
And we want to cope.
- [58:05]
E
Exactly. So I. And it is a tragedy. And there will always be people who can't beat that addiction, just as there are people who you can't really say you beat addiction. It's always there, lurking. And so I think understanding this as, as human beings rather than as a policy issue, there are still obviously policy choices. And I certainly agree with you about liberalizing marijuana laws. We now know, you know, the, the potency of marijuana now, particularly for young kids who start using it very early on and might have other underlying emotional dysregulation issues, can be quite powerfully bad and have a really long term impact on their mental health. Those things should always be taken under consideration. But you're right that the tragedy of this family, and not just the death of the parents parricide, is incredibly rare. It's very rare for children to murder their parents. But the ripple, the downstream effects for everyone else in that family, the sister, the other brother, the extended family, I mean, it is just a deeply human tragedy. And I think one takeaway is that it doesn't matter how much privilege or celebrity or money you enjoy, this kind of thing will always still find certain people. And I think that all we can do is have sympathy for his suffering, but obviously for the extended family suffering.
- [59:24]
F
I just want to make one side point here, but it's important. Fentanyl, while it's not a weapon of mass destruction, gets into the illegal supply chain and People die from it without knowing they're taking it. It's a slightly different. I mean, it's. Obviously it's a drug and it's related, but it presents a unique problem within this larger problem that we're talking about.
- [59:55]
B
We should say we don't know that he was a user for Fernanol.
- [59:58]
F
I know, I know, but it came up.
- [59:59]
B
Yeah. And fentanyl is not exactly a drug that would cause you to, you know, have hyper aggressive. I'm sorry, a fire alarm, you know, smoke detector, beepers going off. If you hear that in the background. I really, I think the point that.
- [60:15]
D
I was circling around does that. Does Being Charlie mentioned he made this.
- [60:21]
B
Movie called Being Charlie? I've never seen it. I don't believe it was released into.
- [60:25]
D
All of this and how they. They dealt with it.
- [60:28]
B
Yeah, I mean, I guess we're now all gonna watch it. It's from, it's from Reiner's fallow period and when his work was not what it had been. But I just wanted to say I was circling around this. But what I want to say is that there is a world of criticism. There's a show on now called Wayward. There's a whole world of criticism of efforts to save troubled teens from the consequences of their, you know, temporal lobes not being fully developed and getting themselves addicted to horrible drugs and actions. And there's a whole world of programs, wilderness therapy, therapeutic boarding schools, things like that, that attempt to teach them agency, to help them learn structured behavior and all of that. These programs, some of them have been bad, some of them have, like, their stories of over 30 years of, you know, abuse and all that, which is terrible, but on balance, they have been a godsend to people. And this attack on them, which is, you know, Paris Hilton has led. So just give you a sense of how wondrously serious seriously, that attack should be taken. These programs have been life saving for many people, and the people who are in them are dedicated professionals who are trying to save people from disaster and calamity and catastrophe. And our response is to sue the sacklers for OxyContin and to shut down the programs that actually are working to save people from the consequences of illicit drug use at times when their brains are plastic enough maybe to recover from and get over and develop new behaviors. And there is, as I say, there's an ideological war against these programs. And you can see, even though they're not all successful, and I assume that Nick Reiner went through a couple of them, so you can see that they didn't work for him. But they've worked for so many people I know. And they are, they are not, it is not. They are not deserving of this full on assault against them because we have so little other ways to deal with this problem. People do seem to weary of addiction. Addicts do seem to get over a day because they can't stand being addicts anymore. But for everyone like that, there are 10 who never get over it. And who are the walking wounded among us who never recover. And this is this one hopeful moment. If you can get grab somebody young and get them to relearn their behaviors and to overcome their the thing in them that makes this disease so what would you call, you know, so sinuous and insinuating and impossible to get over. That's a great thing. And I just think it's heartbreaking that it's under so much assault. So I think we'll leave it there. Palestine Firsters by Eli Lake January 2026 issue of Commentary, which also features Christine Rosen's hilarious piece largely focusing on, you know, huge, you know, like Supernova, star of Democratic Loudmouth 3 and liberal vileness Jennifer Welch.
- [64:12]
E
It's a little mean, I'll warn you, it's a little mean, but it was fun to write.
- [64:15]
B
Not as mean as what I just mean as. Anyway, it is a hilarious piece. It's called the Mean that. What is it called? The Middle Aged Mean Girls who've had it, I think. Anyway, also in the January 2026 issue of Commentary, available for you@comMENTARY.org back tomorrow.
- [64:33]
A
Thank you, Eli Lake.
- [64:34]
B
And for Seth, Christine and A.B. john Pothorotz, keep the candle burning.
- [64:48]
C
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