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The Joy Reid Show
Occupied Chicago + Israel v Gaza, 2 Years On | The Joy Reid Show LIVE! Oct 06, 2025
02:27:33
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- [00:21]
A
Well hello there. Hello there. Hello there. Happy Monday. Good evening everybody. Welcome to the Joy Reid Show. I want to pick up those listening and watching on YouTube. Welcome on substack on Spotify and hello to everyone in the chats. We love you guys in the chats on the stack and on YouTube. Especially big ups to our team TJRS members, especially those of you who participated in our Members Only chat on Friday, which was a lot of fun. We're going to do that again very soon. And we've also got special announcements coming up about the merch shop if that's opening soon. Like there's so many wonderful things that are happening and coming up but tonight we have got a power packed show so I want to get right into some headlines. I want you to first start by taking a look at this video and this that which you will see shortly. We're going to show it in just a moment. We're going to let There it is. This was the home of Diane Goodstein, a Democrat appointed circuit court judge and as you can see from that video, you can see it right wild right? That was her house. Her home erupted in flames on Saturday, sending three, three members of her family to the hospital, including her husband or former state senator. I want to read to you this story from the Guardian. Ms. Goodstein, 69, was walking her dogs at the time the blaze erupted at the three story home in the luxury gated community on Edisto beach in Coliton County. A spokesman for the South Carolina State Law Enforcement Division confirmed it was investigating a fire in the county. The investigation is active and ongoing. More information may be available, a SLED spokesperson told Fitz News News Now. Goodstein, who has served on the state judicial bench since 1989, in September issued a temporary injunction on the release of the state's voter files to the Trump administration led U.S. justice Department. Goodstein's ruling was later publicly criticized by an assistant attorney general for the Justice Department's so called civil rights decision. Har meet Dylan. You're going to hear that name a lot over the next several years. She's the anti civil rights head of the Civil Rights Division. The division has been at the forefront of efforts to acquire information including names, addresses, driver's license numbers and Social Security numbers of more than 3 million registered voters under an executive order targeting noncitizen voter registration, which is not a thing because it's not legal. The State Supreme Court of South Carolina later reversed Goodstein's decision and the cause of the blaze though is just not immediately known and reports that Goodstein had faced death threats prompted some to question whether the fire at the judge's home may be America's latest example of politically themed violence. It's just a total coincidence, I'm sure. This latest act of political violence comes on the heels of other judges who have received death threats. And the bomb threats at Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro's residence in April. And of course, the political assassination of Melissa Hortman, Minnesota's former House speaker, and her husband Mark. And the shooting that injured John Hoffman, a Democratic state senator in Minnesota and his wife Yvette, all by a rabid Trump supporter who had a hit list of 45 Democrats that he wanted to kill late last week. We've also seen the Trump regime ramp up the state sponsored violence against citizens throughout the country, including in Chicago. Watch this. This is some Chicago citizens running off an ICE agent. Now they were attempting to kidnap this man, this Latino man. You can hear him screaming for his life. They're attempting to kidnap him in broad daylight. And as you can see, people are going by, honking their horns and doing the most to try to make these ICE whatever agents. We think they're in plain clothes, they're in masks. This literally looks like a kidnapping in broad daylight. That doesn't look like federal agents, that doesn't look like law enforcement. That just looks like a bunch of guys who decided to walk out onto the street and try to kidnap a guy. He's screaming, are you the man? You may help me. There's one guy that's in some kind of uniform, but he's also got a mask on, right? Pretty crazy. Eventually he gets away and he, thank God, gets away. God bless those citizens in Chicago. There's also this truly wild story from over the weekend and I now want you to peep the difference in the way that the mainstream media outlets are reporting it. Okay? I want you to note this Newsweek headline. Here's the headline from Newsweek. ICE agents rappel from Blackhawk helicopters into Chicago for major raid. Here's a little bit of their story. Federal agents rappelled from a Blackhawk helicopter onto the rooftop of Chicago residential buildings, launching a sweeping immigration enforcement operation targeting suspected Trend Aragua gang members. According to News Nation, the right wing outlet News Nation, the operation led by ICE with support from the FBI and US Border Patrol was designed to apprehend high priority targets connected to the Venezuelan crime syndicate that US Authorities have accused of trafficking, violence and other cross border crimes. Now I want you to notice how Newsweek just eats whole, buying 100% the regime's narrative, which shouldn't surprise you because Newsweek, it's not the Newsweek you grew up with. It is currently under the control of the far right. According to the Southern Poverty Law center, they've been eaten by the right. Particularly given that the person who controls editorial at Newsweek is a right wing columnist and political activist named Josh Hammer. Google Josh Hammer. And now I want you to note an alternative version of the exact same story from another old school magazine, Time. Here's Times headline, quote, they say military style ICE raid on Chicago apartment building shows escalation in Trump's crackdown. That's an actually accurate headline. Here's their story. At around 1am on Tuesday morning, armed federal agents rappelled from helicopters onto the roof of a five story residential apartment in the South Shore of Chicago. The agents worked their way through the building, kicking down doors and throwing flashbang grenades. You didn't get that info from the other story. Rounding up adults and screaming children alike. Also missing from the other story, detaining them in zip ties and arresting dozens. According to witnesses and local reporting, the military style raid was part of a widening immigration crackdown by the Trump administration in the country's third largest city, dubbed Operation Midway Blitz, which has brought a dramatic increase in federal raids and arrests. Here's a little bit more of it, it says the raid has drawn outrage throughout Chicago and the state of Illinois, with rights groups and lawmakers claiming it represents a dramatic escal in tactics used by federal authorities in the pursuit of Trump's aggressive immigration crackdown. Illinois Governor J.B. pritzker accused the federal agents of separating children from their parents, zip tying their hands and detaining them in dark vans, big U Haul vans for hours. Videos of the raid show flashbang grenades erupting on the street, followed by residents of the building, children among them being led into a parking lot across the street. Photos of the aftermath show toys and shoes littering the apartment hallways that were left in the chaos as people were pulled from their beds at 1am by the operation that included FBI and Homeland Security. And it appears that all of this violence and humiliation may be for the purposes of making propaganda videos like ISIS style. I want you to take a look at this one. This is the post and the video from the Department of Homeland Security. I palpitated that name sounds very German, 1930s. This is the video they posted talking about Operation Midway Blitz. You see it there? It says DHA death. Law enforcement has made over 900 arrests during operation Midway Blitz, Illinois. To every criminal, illegal alien darkness is no longer your ally. We will find you. So they filmed the raid on the apartment and flipped that video into a propaganda video that would be worthy of ISIS and posted it on X Twitter, which is also where ISIS used to post its propaganda videos, which are always slick Hollywood looking videos like that. So they're trying to get people that are in their base to see that and think this is cool, when in fact what that was was little kids being dragged out of their homes at one o' clock in the morning and thrown into u haul van, separated from their parents. And I will note that local stories say that they kicked in doorways, left them unlocked and people got robbed. People are now missing, items they took. People have been cleaned out in that apartment building, which is not a high income apartment building. And Donald Trump is not even letting it go. He's continuing to do this drama, I guess, for the purposes of distracting the Epstein files or whatever, for whatever purpose. He's now gotten his favorite minion, Texas Governor Greg Abbott, who'll do whatever Donald Trump tells him to, to send hundreds of National Guard units into blue states to invade them and to invade these states that have refused to deploy their own guard against their own people. Per the Texas Tribune, President Donald Trump ordered the deployment of 400 members of the Texas National Guard to other states, including Oregon and Illinois, though by late Sunday night a federal judge temporarily blocked the mobilization of any state guards into Oregon. Illinois also sued on Monday to stop the deployment in its state, Governor J.B. pritzker calling it an occupation and Trump's invasion and ordered and called on Governor Greg Abbott to withdraw his troops. This is basically Southern troops invading the north, invading northern cities, Texas troops, Southern troops that their governors are willing to deploy into blue states like Chicago and Portland in order to create Donald Trump's neo Confederate drama and videos for his Homeland Security department Kristi Noem to put out. I also want to note that Today is the two year anniversary of the October 7th attacks and all the hell that it's brought into Gaza we're going to talk about in this show. Later on in the show, including the drama and the hell it's brought to the west bank and Gaza. We're going to talk with Daniel Levy in this hour. In the top of next hour, we're going to talk with Mehdi Hassan of Zateo News and also Dr. Norman Finkelstein. So we're going to talk about that too, because that's the other piece of violence we want to talk to today. But I want to now really quickly move on to our top story the violent MAGA right just won't quit. And one Arizona lawmaker is being condemned for making a direct, what seems like a violent threat against a sitting member of Congress. Republican State Representative John Gillette over the weekend tweeted at Washington State Congressman Pramila Jayapal. Washington, Washington State Congressman Pramila Jayapal, who has called for resistance against these ICE invasions and raids that are wreaking so much havoc by peacefully fighting back. But her call to peacefully fight back apparently didn't sit well with Gillette, who I will note, fully supported the January 6th insurrection. I want to look at you do him doing that while he's also being a thugged out racist basically toward Florida Congresswoman. Former Florida Congressman Val Demings defending literal elected, deriding the literal former elected sheriff and former congresswoman as a DEI hire while he attacked her for saying that January 6th was an insurrection. There he is, she says, a former law enforcement officer and member of the Fraternal Order of Police and the Police Benevolent Association. I am waiting for America's law enforcement unions to condemn the pardons of violent offenders in January by Trump who assaulted police officers on January 6th. Back the blue. And Representative John Gillette's response was maybe that many of the J6 political prisoners have been confined without being charged. Oh, since he doesn't like that, four years, no trial. We know your type. I'll bet your department's hated you. DEI strikes again. So he's a racist asshole on top of being a threatener. So let me now read you the tweet that he did against Congresswoman Jayapal. He said, until she tweeted that we need to fight back, peacefully protest. He said, until people like this, meaning Jayapal, that advocate for the overthrow of the American government, are tried, convicted and hanged, it will continue. Apparently, he didn't believe that about January 6th insurrectionists. Now, when confronted about the vileness of that tweet, he doubled down, claiming that Representative Jayapal supports Hamas and that by calling for protesters to be, quote, unquote, strike ready. She's the one who was calling for violence. And here he is doing that. When he's confronted, he's like, no, she's the one calling for violence. And his only correction, when he finally says, oh, you know what, let me do a correction, he said that he actually should have used the word firing squad instead of hanged. And Congresswoman, Premier Jayapal joins me now to respond. Congresswoman, hello.
- [12:31]
B
Hello, Joy. It's always good to see you, no matter the circumstance.
- [12:36]
A
And unfortunately, it's all I really Want you to just come on one time and we can just talk about fun things. But it's always something crazy.
- [12:45]
B
Partly because you cover the real news. You cover what is actually happening. And it's pretty crazy right now.
- [12:51]
A
It is. Respond to this. Congresswoman Gillette, who apparently believes insurrectionists should be hanged. He thinks you're an insurrectionist, but he also thinks January 6, insurrectionists are political prisoners and I guess should not be hanged. Your response to his threat against you?
- [13:08]
B
Well, look, I have, I put out a statement and I said, this is really dangerous. This is an elected official calling for another elected official to be hanged and to be hanged for non violently protesting what the administration is doing. My resistance lab trainings specifically are around nonviolent resistance. We spend a lot of time talking about Dr. King's six principles of nonviolence. We talk about what happened in the American South. We talk about what happened in Sudan, in places around the world, and how you can nonviolently fight back against authoritarians. And that is what he had, you know, that's what he flagged. And he specifically used the word strike ready, which anybody in the labor movement knows. I mean, the strikes are a peaceful form of protest and very legitimate form of. Of protest and how workers have won higher wages and better benefits over the years. And so he specifically called that out. But here's the thing, Joy. I think that this is a danger to all of us. I mean, elevating this threat for me to be executed is fairly rare for unfortunately, increasingly not so, but fairly rare for an elected official to call for another elected official to be executed. The reason I elevated it is because it all fits with, actually the way you were talking about what's happening with ICE raids. This is all part of essentially militarizing our communities, dehumanizing anybody that is trying to fight back and nonviolently fight back, and essentially dangerous for all of us in our constitutional protections of free speech and the right to protest. And so this is, I think, something that we can't just ignore. And it's why I haven't ignored it. In the resistance labs, we teach the principle of backfire. How do you make somebody's violent actions and rhetoric backfire against them using nonviolent protest? And so that's what we did in this case, and it has been backfiring on him. Thirty statewide groups in Arizona called for real accountability for him. And I think that it's important for us to connect this also with the eo, the executive order that Donald Trump signed just recently, where he declares Antifa a domestic terrorist organization.
- [15:44]
A
Okay.
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B
And he defines that domestic terrorism as anti capitalism, anti Christianity.
- [15:53]
A
Right. But not anti fascism. Because there is. I want to just reset and I don't mean to interrupt you, Congresswoman. I never usually interrupt a congresswoman, but there's no such thing. There is no organization called Antifa. There's no such thing. It's a made up thing. It's anti fascism.
- [16:08]
B
Anti fascism.
- [16:09]
A
Correct.
- [16:10]
B
And there is no single organization. But what this executive order does is it tries to make it an organization so that they can make it as broad as possible to go after foundations, nonprofit organizations, individuals who are actually trying to peacefully, nonviolently protest an authoritarian regime.
- [16:29]
A
Authoritarian actions, and protest against fascism, basically. So they're like, if you're against fascism, you're a terrorist.
- [16:36]
B
That's right. And, you know, we've seen this on the immigration front. We've seen this with. With targeting of the free speech of immigrants. We've seen it. And by the way, I sent, you know, that raid, which is so unbelievably horrific. I mean, the idea that everyone was pulled out of that building, adults and children separated, naked. There are reports that the kids were naked and zip tied together and that the ICE agents were actively saying, f these kids.
- [17:06]
A
Yeah.
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B
I mean, the violence that is being promoted when Kristi Noem lands on the top of the ICE processing center in Chicago when there are people rappelling down, when they are turning these. I think Donald Trump's tweet was something about, you know, the smell of deportations in the morning being so sweet. And what you pointed out about how these videos are. Basically they're trying to rewrite the story of where the violence is coming from. And they're trying to rewrite it so that people like me are seen as the violent ones and people like them are seen as saving the country.
- [17:46]
A
Yeah.
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B
The problem with that is that everybody sees what's happening. All those people in Chicago saw that raid, and we just had a shadow hearing that I held on immigration. We had US Citizens testifying about how their family members were picked up. Done nothing wrong.
- [18:07]
A
Right.
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B
And so I do think it is starting to backfire. But this. This threat against me has been. I had to make a choice about not being silent about it, and I decided to do that because I just think it's. We can't normalize it, Joy. We just can't.
- [18:22]
A
And I just want to point out what Jason was putting up earlier for those of you who are watching this either on TV or on Zoom or on Zoom, on YouTube or wherever you're watching it. He put up the various people who've condemned this, as you did mention, Congresswoman Jayapal, the Asian Pacific Caucus, the Progressive caucus which you used to chair, move on about a dozen, dozens of groups in here, Arizona. But I want to read you. He did double down and his double down was actually kind of wild. He doubled down into the Arizona Republic, which is azcentral.com and that we're going to put that up on the screen as well. He says, quote, he used a poor choice of words when he said on social media that you should be tried, convicted and hanged for what he described as advocating for the overthrow of the American government. And his quote was I should have said firing squad. That's what he told the Arizona Republic. Then he went on to. And by the way, I will note that the Arizona Republic notes that he recently also on X Twitter has called Muslims savages. He used a racial slur to compare Democrats to the Japanese in Pearl harbor and 911 terrorists. And then I wanna just read you the reaction of state Republicans to what was done to you. And this is from a senior, this is the House, the Ethics Committee chair. His name is Lupe Diaz. He's a Republican from Arizona. I'm sorry, which bite is that? This is going to be double down. Text to it's 826 a 26. And it says here he thinks, he's saying of Gillette that Gillette thinks that Democrats are tied too closely to communists, Muslims, undocumented immigrants and criminals. He says. But Lupe, mister, Mr. Diaz also blames the critics of Mr. Gillette for getting offended. And then he went on to say that you couldn't be offended by what was said because what he said would have referred to black people and you're not black. So therefore you shouldn't be able to be offended. I don't know how that makes any sense, but what do you have to say to that?
- [20:32]
B
It, it, it's, it's so offensive because.
- [20:36]
A
Hanging is only for black people. I think what he's getting at is if you say lynching, right, that lynching is for blacks and so you shouldn't be offended.
- [20:44]
B
Of course, nobody who is not black should be offended by blacks being hanged. That's, I mean the whole thing is, it's beyond me. And that kind of doubling down is, is also. This is part of the, this is part of the whole thing, right? They are trying to recharacterize and they're trying to say that you shouldn't be offended. By the word hanged if you're not black. Right. You know, this idea that somehow it should be okay for him to call for me to be hanged, as long as I'm not black, it's okay.
- [21:21]
A
Right.
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B
And, you know, and what does that say anyway?
- [21:25]
A
I mean, first of all, and I will say this, Congresswoman, I'm sorry to interrupt you, but you serve with a guy named Chip Roy who is from Texas and who once bragged and boasted that we need to bring back the lynching tree, essentially. So he used the term hanging in response to somebody, I guess, you know, that's who they used to lynch in Texas. Right. Were mainly black people, Mexicans, blacks, et cetera. But, you know, it wasn't just blacks who were lynched, but blacks were the overwhelming majority of lynchings. So when you have somebody like Mr. Gillette, I don't know, calling Mr. Gillette seems like it's a bit too respectful for what he deserves. Saying you should be hanged or face a firing squad. That means. He means you should be lynched. And so what he's saying is that he gets to say you can be lynched because you're not black, therefore you shouldn't take it that way. That's what his friend in Arizona said. That makes literally no sense. And it almost makes it worse.
- [22:16]
B
I don't know if it makes it worse. It's all awful. But it definitely. Yeah, I know what you mean by it almost makes it worse. I just think that the overwhelming nature of this is that not a single Republican has spoken out against this.
- [22:32]
A
Right.
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B
They're constantly trying to accuse us of. Oh, it's the left that are stoking political violence. But when you have an elected Republican member of the state legislature say this, and the Republican leader of the. Of, you know, in Arizona, the state legislature refuses to do anything about it. The ethics chair refuses to do anything about it. And as you noted, this guy has also said many other things prior to this. This elevated everything to a whole new level in terms of, you know, an actual call to execution. I just think that this is why I chose to speak out. And also when people say to me, well, what's the off ramp to this?
- [23:16]
A
Right.
- [23:17]
B
What is the off ramp to all of this call for violence? It is the people's movement rejecting these. And that's, I think, you know, maybe it's because I'm an organizer. Joy. I've never thought that people attack us when we're ineffective. They attack us when we're effective. Why did they attack you? Because you were Very effective. And you had a lot of people watching you and you still have a lot of people watching you. Why are they attacking the non violent resistance labs? Which by the way, our response is.
- [23:49]
A
We have a whole bunch of them.
- [23:51]
B
That we're still putting on. Sign up ResistanceLab US. We've trained 15,000 people in all 50 states. This is why they want to attack us. They don't want us to be successful. And they see us being successful at really helping to build and grow the nonviolent resistance movement, which is actually the only thing that can succeed when the checks and balances that are built into the Constitution fail, when the institutions are overtaken, whether it's Congress or the courts. And so it's so horrific, it's so racist, it's so violent. And as you point out, this is the guy that called for the pardon of all the January 6th. He doesn't think that's an insurrection. You know, Donald Trump is now saying he's going to invoke the Insurrection act in order to bring troops into, into blue states and blue cities. And again, it's such, I mean it's, it make it make sense because yeah, this is the same guy that incited an insurrection and then pardoned hundreds of insurrectionists who attacked law enforcement.
- [24:59]
A
Congresswoman Perungaipal. Well, hopefully we will have you back at a more auspicious occasion when it is a better thing. Resistance. Tell us where to get the resistance labs again.
- [25:08]
B
It's resistance lab us and our next one is actually on immigration and it's on October 19th. It's virtual sign up. We've had 15,000 people we love is hopeful. It is inspiring. It teaches people non violent resistance tactics and frameworks.
- [25:25]
A
Amen. We're going to put the link below so that everybody can sign up wherever you are. Thank you, Congresswoman Pramila. Jayapal, stay safe and we appreciate you. I will.
- [25:33]
B
Thank you so much, Troy.
- [25:34]
A
Thank you very much. I want to just read this again. This is a 26. Jason, if you just had it because. Sorry about that. I think I called for the wrong thing, but this is. I just want to read it to you guys. Using the term hang says the ethics chair in Arizona caused people. It's 826. Oh, okay. That's okay. Using the term hang. I'm just going to read it to y'.
- [25:50]
C
All.
- [25:51]
A
Caused people to unfairly target Gillette as a racist, said the ethics chair in Arizona. And he remains irritated at critics because Jayapal is not black and does not deserve to be offended by the hanging. Metaphor. So there we are. That's where we are in this moment in time. Thank you very much for tuning in. I want to really quickly. Let's pay some bills. Should we pay some bills, Jason? Let's pay some bills.
- [26:16]
D
Let's do it.
- [26:17]
A
Let's do it. Because tonight, the Joy Reid show is brought to you by Reproductive Freedom for All's podcast, My Body, My Pod. Reproductive freedom is under attack like never before. We are at a breaking point and the stakes are higher than ever. That's why you've got to check out My Body, My Pod, a new podcast with Minnie Timaraju, president and CEO of Reproductive Freedom for All and a leading voice in the fight for abortion rights and also a friend of the show. Through honest interviews and immersive storytelling, they are breaking through the noise to share what's really happening in the fight for reproductive freedom. Now, if you want to be a part of the nationwide fight for abortion rights, this show is for you as a listener. You'll get to hear from leaders and change makers who share wisdom from the front lines, stories of the challenges folks are enduring across the country, and a vision for the future that we're determined to win. The fight for reproductive freedom has never been more urgent and it's never been more important. Check out My Body, My Pod with mini Timaradju on YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts. All right. Now back to the show. Now, as I mentioned to you at the top, Tomorrow is the two year anniversary of the October 7th attacks in Southern Israel in which the militant group Hamas managed to scale the security wall between the narrow enclave and Israeli towns and villages and kill 1200 people, including some 300 military troops and police, and kidnap more than 200. Some 45 or so remain unaccounted for. The operation unleashed literal help from the Israelis, who to date have slaughtered more than 60, 60,000 Palestinians in Gaza, more than a third of whom are children, while accelerating the push by Jewish settlers to ethnically cleanse the west bank as well. And with aims on doing the same in Gaza to take up a case for genocide and apartheid against Israel, South Africa, and a furious reaction around the world. We're now seeing even most European nations in Canada recognizing the State of Palestine, 150 more than 150 nations so far, while Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is now officially considered a war criminal and a pariah in most capitals, with the distinct exception of the United States, where Donald Trump has hugged him even tighter. I want to show you a video of him welcoming this War criminal to the White House a little over a week ago. This is B2 for Jason, where he welcomed him in. And there he is pulling up to the White House, a guy who's a literal adjudicated war criminal pulling up to the White House for a very special meeting in the White House with the President of the United States. And that meeting was to push an ostensive peace deal which Trump has dispatched his longtime donor and cryptocurrency business partner, Steve Witkoff and his son in law, Jared Kushner, the guy, you know, who got the $2 billion from the Saudis to try to put together. There he is. Warm welcome. No problem. Because war criminal in the United States. All right, now I want to play you how Donald Trump described his own apparent role in this peace process. There it is, B3.
- [29:25]
E
To ensure the success of this effort, my plan calls for the creation of a new international oversight body, the Board of Peace. We call it the Board of Peace. Sort of a beautiful name, the Board of Peace, which will be headed. Not at my request, believe me, I'm very busy. But we have to make sure this works. The leaders of the Arab world and Israel and everybody involved asked me to do this. So it'll be headed by a gentleman known as President Donald J. Trump of the United States. That's what I want, is some extra work to do, but it's so important that I'm willing to do it and we'll do it right. And we're going to put leaders from other countries on and leaders that are very distinguished leaders. And we'll have a board. And one of the people that wants to be on the board is the UK Former Prime Minister Tony Blair.
- [30:23]
A
Oh, perfect.
- [30:24]
E
Very good man. And some others. And they'll be named over the next few days and it'll be quite the board working. Everybody wants to be on it now.
- [30:36]
A
Okay.
- [30:36]
E
I don't know if that had anything to do. They needed me and everybody else wanted to be on it. I guess they figure, well, he's a soft touch, he'll be easy to deal with.
- [30:44]
A
Uh huh.
- [30:45]
E
Working with the.
- [30:46]
A
That's enough. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So the Board of Peace. That sounds very promising, doesn't it? In his endless quest for Nobel Peace Prize, like the one Obama got, he's already supposedly cut a deal. And the White House even accidentally posted this is great. A Hamas statement apparently accepting it, passing an office coming from Trump himself. Awkward. Joining me now is Daniel Levy, President of the US Middle East Project. Daniel, setting aside the fact that apparently the White House is now tweeting out Hamas statements, which as a new one, what do you make of the Board of Peace featuring Tony Blair?
- [31:27]
F
Yeah, I wasn't asked to join it. Were you, Joy?
- [31:31]
A
I wasn't. For whatever reason, I'm not sure why. So everyone wants to join.
- [31:34]
F
Both feeling very left out. Look, I, I indeed, I think there are two things going on, because while I join you in the ridicule there, as you know and you've talked about, there is a genocide going on in Gaza. That's a case that's before the International Court of Justice. They've already put three provisional measures forward that Israel has ignored in order to prevent violations of the Genocide Convention. And so I would say the following. When the president of the country that has been essential in enabling that genocide puts forward a plan riddled with holes and ridiculously presented as it was, it is nonetheless something one needs to engage with as a possible de escalatory option. And that's why I think there's a part of this plan which is the ceasefire, the hostage prisoner exchange, the Israeli military withdrawal, and the massive ramping up of humanitarian access, which one has to test. Can that be implemented? There's another part to this plan which is to create some kind of bizarre 21st century colonial structure, as you've suggested, to govern Gaza, and that we're going to have peace for the first time in 3,000 years. There's nothing there to suggest that the plan doesn't even reference the West Bank. I mean, it is literally that negligent in terms of its irrelevance to future peace. But I still insist that that first part may give us something to work with.
- [33:24]
A
Right. And the thing is, I feel like Hamas, you know, they're sort of treated like they're these sort of, you know, scatological monsters that don't think and they don't use their brain. But they seem to have been had a pretty savvy response to it. They said, yeah, we'll take it. And they didn't say no. Right? They said, like they did in the previous offers, they said, yeah, we'll do it. And they praised lavishly Donald Trump, which you've got to do if you want him on your side. And that caused Donald Trump to do a thing. I'm gonna put B5 here. Donald Trump hears them say yes in general and says, bibi, take the deal. Why are you being so effing negative, apparently behind the scenes? And then he says to him, you need to take the deal. And he tries to talk Netanyahu into it saying, hey, this could be your opportunity for peace. You need to do it right. And there's a weird way in which Donald Trump's desperation for a Nobel Peace Prize and to say he ended a war means he's actually going to push Bibi Netanyahu in a way probably Biden wouldn't have. Right. Because there is, in the New York Times story, there's that little piece I noticed that the danger for Bibi Netanyahu is that if he takes the deal, it will thwart his right wing religious nutrition allies who want to recolonize Gaza. And that's the reason he's hesitating. What do you make of all of that?
- [34:41]
F
So a lot to unpack there. First of all, what happened was as seems to be, if one kind of chronologically unpacks the events of the last just over a week. There's the UN General assembly meeting in New York. Trump has a meeting with eight Arab and Muslim majority state leaders. They try to impress on him the necessity of getting this breakthrough. That has happened shortly after Israel bombed not only, of course, the Palestinian territories, which it does relentlessly, but the sixth sovereign state in the region through a missile strike. Except this one happens to be a place that Trump is rather fond of and where America's largest base in the region resides. That's Doha, the capital of Qatar. Trump had been there. He'd been on that first official visit to the Gulf. And it made those states feel, what was the point of doing all these deals and hosting this guy? And what is the value of, of our American security relationship if your attack dog in the region is now attacking us? And I think that genuinely got the goat of the White House. And it feels like this was the hubristic overreach of Netanyahu. So you have this meeting and then Trump presents this 20 point plan. Like we've said, extremely problematic. The Arab and Muslim majority states, the eight that were represented, came together. They presented revisions. Those revisions weren't accepted. But they then made the decision that we're not going to give up on driving this wedge between President Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu. And as you say, the Hamas response, and the truth of it is, we've discussed this in the past, Joy. There has been a consistency to the Hamas position and this time they were convinced to give an answer to which allowed the president to say, okay, we can move forward with this. I think what everyone understands is the gaps that need to be filled in the details, which apparently the parties are discussing now in Cairo that will determine the outcome of this, because Netanyahu came out of his White House meeting and actually immediately spoke against some of what was in that plan. He said, we're staying in Gaza, there'll never be a Palestinian state. And so you've got this tug of war. I think the reason to be genuinely concerned, there are many reasons, but one of them is, yes, this president, like his predecessor, can get frustrated at the Israeli Prime Minister. He can let an expletive loose, perhaps in addressing the Israeli Prime Minister. But when push comes to shove, will he actually sustain a standoff with that prime minister, given the proliferation of Israel whisperers in his circles, given the people he has around him, given what we know about the Israel lobby, the Christian evangelical dispensationalist Zionists who are very important to the Trump constituency. So although we see this war inside maga, although we see that he has lost his call with Netanyahu, is that sustainable? And Netanyahu is working damn hard, you can be assured, to give himself. And this directly ties into what you said about Netanyahu's coalition and can he sustain it if he does a ceasefire? Netanyahu wants to give himself maximum wiggle room to either avoid an agreement altogether or to make sure that once the hostages are back, Israel resumes its genocidal assault on Gaza, its troops stay in there, the humanitarian access is denied, and all of this comes to naught. That's the kind of tug of war, if you like, going on at the moment, as I understand it.
- [38:51]
A
Joy, right? I mean, the reality is Netanyahu, he is a survivor, right? He's been, you know, in charge of Israel for like almost 20 years. And he's survived multiple presidents who've wanted a two state solution. And he's found ways to throw, thwart them all. And he's made it very clear, you know, ever since the, you know, he first sort of burst on the scene as a young man, stopping a two state solution is his prime directive and his coalition. They not only don't want a two state solution, I don't think they care if it's an apartheid state. They want the Palestinians either all deported out, they want them gone, or they want them dead. Because they do want to recolonize every inch of what used to be the Mandate of Palestine, the, the British Mandate of Palestine. They want it all. And I think they've made that very clear. And Netanyahu has also the secondary, maybe not secondary, interest of staying out of prison. Because the minute the war stops, when the music stops, he has to face a trial. So there's no incentive on his side to do any kind of a deal at all. He just has to keep sticking and moving and making sure that somebody like Trump can't get his way. Right. Even though Trump seems to really, really want a deal.
- [39:57]
F
Right. And Netanyahu has been caught on camera making it clear that he finds, and he has described it this way, the US Is an easy thing to move. US Presidents are pretty easy to lead by the nose. And that was certainly the case even during these most atrocious moments of war crimes committed by Israel during the Biden administration. And I think, you know, we have to acknowledge, I think you touched on it, that for all the absurdity of the 20 point pan put forward by Donald Trump, it is no less ridiculous than what we saw from the previous administration. You now have some of these guys who were very senior officials in that administration, former Secretary of State Blinken, former National Security Adviser Sullivan and others saying, oh, now it might be the time that we should be considering arms sales to Israel. Do me a favor. You armed and enabled a genocide. So we have now a plan from Trump. It might at least bring an end to this. He seems to be more focused on this. And let's acknowledge one more thing. Unlike the Biden administration, they've actually got in the room with Hamas. How on earth were you supposed to get a deal if you didn't acknowledge that? So shame on their butt. And this is crucial. What you have described as Netanyahu's life project of preventing a two state solution has transitioned, as you said. And that transition matters because he has managed to carry Israeli society and the Israeli polity into this genocidal doom loop. So it's no longer about squeezing the Palestinians into ever smaller areas. It's no longer just about this Bantustanization. It is now the physical removal of the Palestinians. And that's where his coalition is at. That's what needs to be prevented. But he also has a broader project. And this is why I kind of insist that there is a real prospect, especially if there's a counter strategy of blowback, of being able to counter what he is doing. Because the project includes an attempt at regional domination and hegemony with American support that is going to be really hard for a small country to pull off. And that's why I think it's been so important that you've had this mobilization in the US hasn't really influenced policy so far there, but elsewhere around the world. You saw the flotilla just now, you saw the strikes In Italy in support of the flotilla in opposition to those arrested, you've seen that very reluctant European governments have been forced to begin to take serious measures moves. And that has unsettled Netanyahu. He actually came out and said, well, okay, we'll be super Sparta. We'll have an economic program of autarky, of self reliance that doesn't work for a country like Israel plugged into the global economy. So after the meeting with Trump, he turned around and said, we're not isolated now. Hamas is. It wasn't very compelling. But that's precisely what might shift the dial in Israel. If you see them belatedly held to account and no longer indulged with impunity, and if America is left carrying the can as the last defender of that impunity. And we know that this is also a moment when opinion is shifting in the US and not just on the Democrat side where that's already an entrenched and long running process, but inside MAGA world where there is this apparent debate between America first and Israel first. Unfortunately, there's still a huge prevalence of anti Palestinian racism, to be frank about it, in that camp. But nonetheless, you see these shifting dynamics and it's I think going to be harder for Israel to navigate that successfully as long as the momentum is maintained.
- [44:08]
B
Right.
- [44:09]
A
And I agree with you. You know, the US may be easy to move because there are just so many evangelicals here. And I think people need to understand that American Zionism is based really much more in people who consider themselves Christian than among Jewish people. You know, the polling shows right now there's a huge, you know, movement against Netanyahu among American Jews. This is Christian right wing Christians that are his base. But in Europe, which is more secular, you're seeing thousands of people come out and protest, as you said. You're seeing Greta Thunberg on that flotilla, the climate change activist getting arrested, apparently getting brutalized perhaps while she was detained by the idf. Being on those, those flotillas. You're seeing people from all over the world joining them. You are seeing the world isolating Israel. It really does remind me of what happened with South Africa during apartheid, that you're seeing the world coalesce with the United States standing alone. Same thing that happened against the apartheid South African government. So in the end, can Israel, can it survive in the way that it is attacking so many of its neighbors? And if it turns out that its only real friend is the United States?
- [45:15]
F
Right. And in 1979, I believe could have been 78 then South African Prime Minister P.W. botha made the famous adapt or die speech in response to the uprisings in Soweto and elsewhere in response to apartheid taking on new challenges. Now, the adaptations that he made were to try and make this look less unpleasant. The ANC at the time, the African National Congress, the party of Vanessa Mandela, was able to strategically and tactically bring the regime to its demise. And I mention that because the sense is that the Zionist project is reaching a similar moment of adapt or die, and that Netanyahu's adaptation strategy is to double down on maximalism and to go zero sum. Now, I don't think that's going to work for him. You have a society that, yes, has, has not generated opposition to what he is doing, but it doesn't have endless supplies of reservists, of economic resilience, of the ability to sustain, if it is to happen, genuine outside pressure. You know, it's becoming increasingly difficult for Israeli sporting teams to participate without people trying to prevent that. So it seems that this adaptation strategy, which leans into zero sum, is not going to work because it happens also at a moment where Israel is more dependent than ever on the United States. And yet Israel is a more controversial issue than ever before inside the American debate. And crucially, we are not living in a unipolar geopolitical moment. So American power is on the wane globally, I would argue. I would suggest Trump is accelerating that. Trump's moves pushed Indian leader Narendra Modi into the arms of Putin and President Xi of China. In the recent Shanghai Cooperation Organization summit in Tianjin, you're seeing leaders in the West Asia, Middle east region saying we should be hedging a bit more because you know, this isn't going so well with America. Just days after that strike in Doha, you saw the Saudi leadership reaching a deal with Pakistan on defense commitments. So Israel is ever more reliant on a country where it is becoming more of a subject of controversial discourse and on a US that can no longer carry that burden indefinitely globally. That, to me sounds like a recipe for hitting a wall. It's not yet something Israelis are convinced of, I have to acknowledge that. But, and this is the hardest bit, perhaps, Joy, if you had a Palestinian strategy that could work with that, that could tease out these vulnerabilities and offer a better future to Israeli Jews, because I'm not suggesting that we swap one zero sum outcome with another. You need to have something that says you are actually better off without this apartheid regime, just as Afrikaan over there.
- [48:59]
A
And the question of how that can happen. Does recognition, does massive recognition or broader recognition of the Palestinian state, you know, by European nations that would never do it before, by Canada, by the west, by Australia and Britain, does that help push the Palestinians toward a coordinated strategy? Because to your point, while there is, while there are two governance, two sources of governance that are conflicted with each other, such that Bibi Netanyahu has for decades exploited the existence of Hamas to isolate the west bank more moderate government. And he's done that to a T. He wanted Hamas to be there. Is there a world in which recognition brings the Palestinians together even amid all of their suffering, to be able to create that kind of a strategy?
- [49:49]
F
So if I had a one word answer, I'd go with no. Unfortunately, I think the intention behind recognition on the part of those Western allies of Israel and the US who have undertaken to recognize Palestinian statehood, the intention is basically for this to be a symbolic gesture which hopefully quietens domestic public opinion. Okay, so they've said, you know what, we're under a lot of pressure. People want to see us do more. Let's do recognition. Recognition doesn't really change anything very much. There are ways it can be used. It can be used in certain legal ways. It gives the state of Palestine greater legal standing. 150 countries have now recognized it. Adding a few more isn't going to make a lot of difference. But it helped them have standing at the International Criminal Court, for instance. But the attempt by those governments to say, can we park this issue now that we've done recognition is not being met with a resounding, yeah, you better believe it, by the people who are out on the streets demanding action. So those same people are turning around and saying, that state you just recognized, its land is being stolen, its people are being genocided. What's with that? Recognition hasn't changed anything. What are you going to do next? And that's where the signal, I would argue, is by virtue of being pushed, pressured into recognizing. It shows these governments are vulnerable to pressure. You've done recognition. Okay, what next? What about trade? What about arms? What about Israel's participation in international sport? And I think Europe and others do have potentially serious leverage. Not like the US but leverage that can really impact Israel's considerations. I call it the three T's, trade, tourism and tournaments. Israel's backyard is Europe. That's where its biggest trade partner is. That's where Israelis can travel visa free. And that's where it participates in international sport and singing contests, Eurovision, et cetera. Sorry. At the same time, on The Palestinian side, it's not creating the end of that division. And one of the interesting things that's worth pausing on is the Hamas response to the Trump plan had two elements to it. One was to say on the details of ceasefire, military withdrawal, prisoner exchange, access for humanitarian aid. We need to make sure that this is maximally plausible as a pathway to ending the suffering in Gaza, to actually getting the Israeli military out, the aid in, etc. That's what they're negotiating. But they also said that when it comes to this issue of governance in Gaza, something Hamas did not insist on before October 7, 2023, has not insisted on subsequently, and when it comes to the future dispensation, what will be the future for Palestine, Palestine, Israel, et cetera, they actually said that is not for us as one movement amongst many to respond to. This has to be a coordinated response of the Palestinian National Liberation Movement, of all the factions. And I think many Palestinians are waiting for that moment of Palestinian unity, of Palestinian political renewal, of reinserting representivity and strategy into the Palestinian political mix.
- [53:32]
A
It sounds like what you're saying is that the best sort of leverage that the world might have, because I think all of us have watched this genocide happen. It's devastating to watch it happen, even obviously more so for those going through it. And there's a feeling of helplessness as you watch these people starve to death and get bombed to death, and their schools and their universities just destroyed. I mean, they've all eliminated Gaza, they've made it disappear, which is what a lot of them want, a lot of the far right in Israel want. Are we looking at a world in which there needs to be a global divestment and sanctions movement, South Africa style, against Israel, and I would argue maybe against the United States too?
- [54:15]
F
I'd say one thing at a time. Look, it really is almost inconceivable that we're still looking at those pictures after two years, right? That we still see the level of cruelty to create this thing called the Gaza humanitarian so called foundation, where you're using aid as a weapon of war. People are having to go huge distances to then be shot and killed while they're trying to just receive a bit of basic subsistence that they can take back to their family. This level of destruction, the openly acknowledged genocidal and ethnic cleansing intent stated by Israeli leaders that we have watched, this has been too much for many of us. What does it tell us about the state of the world we live in, of international law, the credibility of those who claim to uphold the international legal system. And so that's a challenge for everyone. That's a challenge for the world. The courage of the people who directly confronted that on the Gaza Sumud flotillas, I think, is an example, a light for all of us. And yes, I do think that what you talked about, divestment, sanctions, boycotts, will be key. Not because, by the way, I believe you can sanction any state into absolute submission. And what's been done in other places where the level of suffering has not been justifiable, but in a state that still has an open public debate, in a state where the citizens have gotten so used to the idea that they can do anything with impunity. That is what has encouraged this extremism, that Israelis have seen a totally skewed incentive structure. Whatever we do to the Palestinians, we get investment, we get American money, we even get normalization with some states in the region. So this has been the worst pedagogical lesson to Israelis. No accountability. Do your worst. It will be okay. And so you need that impact on the daily lives of regular Israelis for them to see. They're not going to thank anyone, most of them, initially. But for them to see that there is a cost and a consequence, there is a different incentive structure. And I think that will be crucial. That is not going to be driven mostly from the top down. That will be from the bottom up. And if people Google what happened a cycle race in Spain a few weeks ago, Spain has its own. People have probably heard of the Tour de France. It has the Vuelta. The people of Madrid said, no, an Israeli team will not participate on our streets under these circumstances. And that reminds me of what happened in New Zealand during a South African. Their rugby team is called the Springboks. When they were on tour in New Zealand, it wasn't the rugby authorities who said, well, apartheid's terrible. We'll have to kick them out. No, they were dragged kicking and screaming by fans who said, we will not take this. And they didn't allow that tour to go ahead as normal. And so that is where eventually the leaders will catch up. But it's going to be driven by people, by the way, in the case of South Africa, who were the last ones to flip. Of course, it was America who still designated the AMC and Mandela terrorists. It was even after apartheid. That was the US and it will probably be the same this time around.
- [58:08]
A
Daniel Levy, it's an awful pleasure to be able to speak with you. Unfortunately, it is always in such awful circumstances, but you always are just so clear and you make everything so understandable. And I just so appreciate getting to actually having a nice lengthy conversation with you which we could not do in the old world. So thank you so much.
- [58:29]
F
Thank you, Joy. It's good to be with you here.
- [58:33]
A
Thank you so much. There it is. Daniel Levy, brilliant, brilliant person that we love talking with. It's a horrible topic, but it's something you have to think about. And I think we also have to start thinking about whether the United States at some point is going to be looked at by the world as such an authoritarian nightmare that sanctions and divestment might have to also be utilized against us. Well, thank you all for tuning in this first hour of the Joy Reid show. And we really also appreciate our wonderful sponsor. So you guys please support them as well in hour two. We've got a lot coming up. Mehdi Hassan is waiting in the wing. So you know what, Jason, let's go ahead and let's get started with hour two, hour two of the Joy Reach show. Hour one being brought to you by the Reproductive Freedom for All podcast, My Body, My Pod. But let's jump into hour two. As I mentioned at the top, tomorrow is the two year anniversary of the October 7th attacks in Southern Israel in which the militant group Hamas managed to scale the security wall between the narrow enclave in and Israeli towns and kill 1200 people, including some 300 military troops and police, and kidnap more than 200 people, about 45 or so of whom are still missing. And there has just been this furious reaction around the world, one that has left Israel incredibly isolated except for in the United States. I want to talk a little bit about how the military has covered it and you put that back up. Donald Trump has a message for Bibi Netanyahu and it is to stop bombing, stop bombing and accept his peace deal. He would very much like this deal to happen because he thinks it'll get him a Nobel Prize. Now, Hamas has said it agrees with the deal. They've sort of agreed to it. They've said they still want to be involved potentially in a future government. But Donald Trump, clearly fishing for that Nobel has dispatched people to observe this apparent mediation in Egypt in which the US Qatar and Turkey are going to observe this apparent attempt at getting a deal. This as Greta Thunberg and other flotilla participants were arrested, apparently potentially brutalized by the Israelis who are just trying to take food. Anyone trying to take food with it to Gaza is brutalized by the Israelis. Meanwhile, on this side of the world, a very, very, very pro Israel family of American oligarchs are taking control of a massive media empire to rival the Murdochs. David and Larry Ellison, the latter the billionaire behind Oracle Software and the former the son, the sometime successful movie company, the owner of the sometimes successful movie company Skydance, have taken control of Paramount, which means they control cbs, which means they control CBS News. And they have picked a very right wing columnist, an anti diversity substacker named Barry Weiss to lead editorial operations at CBS News. This as the Ellison prepare to possibly expand their empire to include Warner Brothers and maybe TikTok, potentially making both these very new and this very old media company starkly pro Trump, pro ice and pro right wing Israel. And joining me now to discuss all of this is Mehdi Hassan, my former colleague at what used to be called msnbc. I think it's called Ms. Now now. So we call it now. He's also the proprietor of the great and hugely successful Zateo News, which I would argue Mehdi is the one that's really worth 100 to $200 million. I don't know why you didn't get that bag. Mehdi, thanks for being here.
- [61:55]
D
Thank you, Joy. Billionaires don't like me. Joy, I think is the short, is the short story to that. I mean there's been so much ink spilled over the Bari Weiss Free Press purchase by Paramount, her becoming editor in chief of cbs. There's all the stuff about, you know, Wokeness and the New York Times and the New Media and the Free Press and it all comes down to one thing, the billionaire class like Barry Weiss and the pro Israel billionaire class like her even more. And that's why they're paying $150 million for an outlet that has, I think $15 million in revenue. So a 10x valuation which no one thinks is real. But you know, it's as I said earlier today in a conversation on Zoteo with my colleague Prem Taka, it's DEI for pro Israel people.
- [62:39]
A
It is, it is DEI for pros. Approved. It's a perfect way to describe it. I mean, both of us, you know, sort of operating now in this new media world. We're running new media businesses. It is difficult to figure out what the value of these businesses are. Right. It's sort of an amorphous concept. I mean your Zateo News is hugely successful. You guys have done documentaries, you've gotten, done live events, like you've done all the things that would lead one to believe, well, this is a very valuable media company. But there's no way that people are putting a mark or A pin on what the valuation of companies like yours is with her company. It feels like the 100 to 200 million dollars. We don't know which it is, is literally because she's ideologically aligned with this family who want media to be more pro Israel and more pro Trump. And that's what they're paying her for, right? They're not paying her because this company's really worth that. No.
- [63:24]
D
As David Ellison made it very clear why he likes Bari Weiss. We know that a lot of these people. Look at the people who are praising the appointment, the CEO of Shopify. Look at whose wedding she was at this year, Jeff Bezos. This is the circles that she moves in. Good luck to her. I mean, great. But, you know, some of us don't want to do that. If I wanted to do that, I'd have gone and been a Wall street banker and made my mother very happy. But that's not what we do, right? Some of us are in the journalism business. Funny that they're calling Free Press, this news organization that's been taken over by cbs. It's not a news organization. It's a collection of hot takes, some very awful takes. As a CBS insider told my colleague Prem Thakar in a piece he wrote for Zateo last night, which I urge people to check out, a lot of the pieces published at the Free Press would not be able to pass CBS editorial guidelines. Right? So that's the great irony is the editor in chief, and by the way, she's keeping both hats. Joy, have you noticed that she's going to be editor in chief of CBS News, but she'll also be editor of the Free Press. Now explain that to me. We were told for years by the right that the liberal media is all biased. You know, we need straight media, we need neutral media. So she's gonna run a partisan, highly ideological website which says there's no famine in Gaza. And at the same time, she's gonna run neutral down the middle. CBS News, which appeals to all Americans.
- [64:36]
C
That's bs.
- [64:38]
A
It to me, strikes me as rather insane that the Tiffany Network, if Walter Cronkite were alive, he'd be working for her. Right? I wonder if you've heard. You guys are great investigative journalism, journalistic outfit over there. Have heard from people inside CBS. I mean, 60 Minutes is housed there. This is one of the great news networks of all time. This is the Edward R. Murrow Network. If he were alive, you'd be working for her. What has been the reaction that you've heard internally at CBS News.
- [65:07]
D
So I've spoken to a few people. My colleague Prem spoke to half a dozen for a piece that we published last night. And a lot of them were worried about not just the pro Israel bias and the censorship, but just basic editorial standards. Like I said, she runs the Free Press, which has been called out multiple times for factual errors, for horrifically bad takes, as I say, as one CBS insider said, for pieces that would not meet CBS editorial guidelines. So that's a big problem, the editorial quality. What is her qualifications? We were told again and again by the right, it's all about meritocracy. Merit, merit, merit. Well, what is the merit here? Which TV newsroom has she run before? I'm not saying she's not very successful at what she's done. I'm not saying she's not a good writer, but she's never on a TV newsroom. She's from the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. Very junior positions in both papers. Yes, she found her own online platform on Subset, but so did I. Does that mean I get to go run, I don't know, ABC News tomorrow? No. Somebody offered me that. I said, what are you talking about? I don't know how to run ABC News and I've worked in TV for 10, 15 years. So the whole thing is clearly not about merit. It's clearly not about experience. It's clearly not about qualifications. It's about looking after one of your own. It's also about something even more dangerous on this. As we approach this anniversary of two years of genocide, they have lost the argument. The pro Israel centers lost the argument. They've lost the moral high ground if they ever had it. They've lost, you know, they've gained pariah status internationally. You had Daniel Levy pointing out to you what's happening in Spain and the Netherlands in the uk, but here in the US for the first time in my life, I'm seeing American public turn away from Israel and in favor of the Palestinians. A Pew poll earlier this year found 53% of Americans have a negative view of Israel. New York Times Siena poll last week found that for the first time since they started polling at the Times, more Americans say they lean towards the Palestinians than they do towards the Israelis. Now someone like David Ellison and his father, Larry Ellison, who's the biggest single private donor to Friends of the idf of any human being on the planet, they have seen that and they say, okay, our response to this is not to try and win the argument, not to try and get Israel to change what it's doing. We're going to control the information flows. We're going to make sure people don't see images of dead babies, which bothered Van Jones so much on Friday night. We're gonna.
- [67:08]
A
Oh, God, I'm sorry, I have to pause you there. Can we just play this for those who don't, who haven't seen it? You must see this. I posted on my social media. Mehdi has talked a lot about it.
- [67:16]
D
I have to play this because we.
- [67:18]
F
Had to fold everything into critical race.
- [67:19]
C
Theory and somehow the Middle east became part of.
- [67:25]
A
You know, I see it differently and I love this conversation because I think people, those of us who went to college, give a lot more credit to.
- [67:33]
C
College courses for how the world works than I do. This is not about critical race theory on college campus.
- [67:39]
A
This is about Iran. Iran and Qatar have come up with a disinformation campaign that they are running through TikTok and Instagram that is massive. If you are a young person, you open up your phone and all you see is dead Gaza baby. Dead Gaza baby. Dead Gaza baby, Diddy. Dead Gaza baby. Dead Gaza baby. That's basically your whole team.
- [68:03]
E
So that's not.
- [68:05]
A
That's not dei. That is a geopolitical. But the adversary that is. That is. That is deliberately trying to divide the west against itself.
- [68:12]
D
That view is not.
- [68:13]
A
Let's unpack this. First of all, I have to. I couldn't decide whether I was more disgusted by what Van Jones said. And by the way, he has apologized, saying he made to use some insensitive words. Insensitive words? Bruh, that's an understatement. You joked about dead Gaza babies, compared it with Diddy, got a big laugh out of the audience. Incredibly disturbing. Disturbing. They disturbed me almost as much as he did. Yes, but the idea that it's so normalized, that Palestinians aren't really fully human, that you can make fun of them being genocided, you can make fun of them being starved to death on purpose. Like, unpack that for me. And how it is that on a mainstream outlet like hbo, you can say that.
- [68:52]
D
Yeah. I mean, that in itself speaks volumes. If Van Jones had said that about any other people, if he'd said that about Israelis, we know his career would be over. No apology would cut it. It would be done. Republicans in particular would be baying for his blood and his career. No, you can't imagine saying dead Jewish baby. Dead Jewish baby. Dead Jewish baby, Diddy, Dead Jewish baby. And getting a laugh. And no apology would compensate for that. I would point out I'm glad he apologized. A lot of people do double down in these days. Although his apology had two huge problems in it. Number one, he referred to Gaza babies dying again as if it's a natural disaster. A hurricane killed these children. No, Israel killed these babies, not Gaza babies died. Gaza babies were killed in their hundreds. And I think that's a big problem, the refusal to ever assign agency to Israel. Number two, of course he doubled down on the fundamental lie in that clip, which is Iran and Qatar are running a propaganda campaign via TikTok algorithms. He offered zero evidence for that clip. I deal with a lot of pro Israel propagandists on a daily basis online, Joy. I spend my life arguing with these people. Sadly for my sins, even they. I have not seen this theory, this conspiracy theory that Van Jones offered on Friday night on hbo, like he works for cnn. CNN again have editorial guidelines. Would this meet those editorial guidelines? Zero evidence. He didn't say it in his apology. He didn't say it on air. Where is this evidence that TikTok is controlled by Iran and Qatar? What it is controlled by, what is going to be controlled by is the Ellison family that we were just talking about. They are taking over TikTok. So what Van Jones is doing is he's laying the groundwork for the Ellison family to come along, take over TikTok, with the help of Rupert Murdoch and of course Donald Trump. The White House has said the algorithm will be quote, retrained so that you won't have to see dead Gaza babies. And they'll justify it by saying, well, we are censoring this stuff, but it's to stop foreign influence, foreign adversaries. And this is the downside to. And liberals own this as much as conservatives because for a lot of the period, you know, in Donald Trump's first term, a lot of what should we say? Democratic Party flaws, failures. Hillary Clinton's shortcomings were always ascribed to Russia. Right. I'm not somebody who denies that Russia played a role in previous elections. I'm not someone who doesn't say that Russia supports Donald Trump. Clearly it does. But there became this knee jerk reaction on some parts of the liberal episode. Everything bad in America is foreigners fault. Nothing to do with America. We're innocent country. Blame those nasty foreigners dividing us. No, it's not Iran or Qatar or anything else. It's America backing Israel to kill those babies. Evangelona doesn't want to see babies, dead babies on his social media feed. Maybe he should ask his government to stop funding the killing of those Babies. And now we're going to see the full on information disinformation campaign from Ellison's and company. As I was saying earlier, public opinions turned against Israel. So Larry and David Ellison by CBS News buy TikTok. Apparently they're trying to buy Warner Brothers, which will give them CNN as well. And that's, that's what they're going to do. They're not going to try and win the argument. They're going to try and close down the argument.
- [71:46]
A
And this is the thing, this is the reason I'm so glad to have you on today because this two years, what he has really done and exposed is something that maybe was happening before that, I don't know. But what, what Israel has done in Gaza has forced even on the right, there is a huge debate between America first and Israel first People in the MAGA movement, right? There is a part of the MAGA movement that's turned to some of the most white people who you and I, we agree with them on nothing, but suddenly they agree with us. The position I've had since seventh grade on Palestine, right, Suddenly they're all pro Palestine and critical of Israel. I think for some other reasons. In some cases I think they're more.
- [72:22]
D
Anti Israel than they are pro Palestine.
- [72:24]
A
I think that might. Right. And maybe not even just anti Israel, but maybe anti the kind of people who are Israelis, you know what I'm saying? So I think that might be a part of it. But there is this thing that's happened that the mainstream media, I don't know if you agree with me on this, I think has done a horrible job of covering the October 7th and the aftermath because there is this lens in which Palestinians are don't exist. And so as you said, they die, they don't get killed by Israelis. It's very difficult for the, I think largely pro Israel media to have covered this at all. We at our old network, it felt incredibly dangerous to even present context around what was happening on October 5th. You really couldn't talk about what was happening before the October 7th attack. Why did it happen?
- [73:06]
D
The world began on October 7th.
- [73:08]
A
The world began. Give a grade to the way that the mainstream media versus things like TikTok where people have gotten the truth, the unexpurgated truth that people are mature enough to find apparently even if they're kids.
- [73:21]
D
I mean the grade is F minus, minus minus. It's been awful. I've been saying this for years. I said this while I was at MSNBC. Like the media failures on Palestine precede October 7th and only amplified after October 7th. Just one simple statistic. How many Palestinian guests appeared on the Sunday morning shows on Meet the Press and Face the Nation and all the rest of it, ABC, CNN, CBS, NBC. In the year after October 7th, how many Palestinian guests? Zero. Not a single Palestinian was platformed on the Sunday major shows in this country. Israeli generals appeared, Israeli politicians appeared, pro Israel members of Congress appeared, but not a single Palestinian. Now, that is a fundamental problem for a media that claims to be. We're just telling it how it is. We don't take a position on this. Well, you don't actually humanize Palestinians. You don't actually allow Palestinians to speak in their own voices. It's a huge problem. And it's amazing to me, Joy, that thanks to social media and sadly, thanks to the sheer level of this genocide, the horrific genocide, that even mainstream media misreporting, misinformation, bad journalism, hasn't prevented the news from getting through and hasn't prevented public opinion shifting. When I see 53% of Americans saying they have a negative view of Israel, I think to myself, what would that number be if we actually had fair media coverage? What would that, how high would that number be if Americans could actually see what their tax dollars are paying for? If they could actually see what we're seeing on Instagram or TikTok or on other sites of actual children beheaded in Gaza? Children were not beheaded on October 7, unlike as Joe Biden and Donald Trump are both falsely claimed, but they have been killed and decapitated in their dozens in Gaza. We've actually seen those images, but most Americans haven't. So I always wonder, like, I'm happy that public opinion is shifting, but if we actually had better media coverage in this country, that public opinion would be shifting much faster. But the media in this country, unfortunately has decided either a, to take Israel's side in a kind of racist way against these brown terrorist folks or worse. Joy, the people I actually have a much lower view of, I actually respect the ideologues a little bit because they have a point of view and they push it. The people I really don't have any time for and I've really lost respect for over the last two years.
- [75:28]
C
The people who just keep their heads.
- [75:29]
D
Down, people say, you know what, I don't want to comment on this. I'm going to lose followers on social media if I do. It's better I just don't talk about it. I can see everything that's happening, but it's not my issue. I'm going to talk about these stories and never mention Gaza on my show or in my op ed column or on my podcast. Those people really, they are the real enablers of this.
- [75:50]
A
Well, I mean, I think people have seen the results for people like you and me. I mean, if you took, if you exclude myself, you and a tiny number of people, Ayman Mohideen and Ali Velshi, if you made us disappear, if we went to another planet, and then go ahead and count how many Palestinian journalists were on any tv, regardless of whether it was Sunday or during the week, it would also probably be zero. Right? I mean, there were very few people who were willing to do these stories at all. And there was a huge risk, I mean, there's a literal risk of keeping your job. What do you make of what felt to me, and this is now maybe me using you as my therapist in this moment, there felt like a McCarthyism, at least for me, around this story, unlike anything that I personally have ever felt, other than covering 9 11, in which you literally felt that it was a risk to say anything true about Arabs or Muslims. Right. If you said anything. And by the way, or Christians, because Palestinians, a little town of Bethlehem, those are Palestinian Christians. I think a lot of people didn't even realize that places like Bethlehem were Palestinian towns. What do you make of the way that people in media seem to treat people who wanted to give a more full story?
- [77:08]
D
Yeah, it was very difficult. I mean, this is the problem. A lot of the guests who you want to get on who are Palestinian or Muslim or Arab American, a lot of them have all sorts of black marks against them that they don't even know about. There are people who don't know that they're being excluded from mainstream media. Maybe they took a position that's seen as unfashionable or provocative by the kind of anchors I mentioned earlier who just want to stay out of it. There's also a lot of ignorance, Joy. Right. There's a lot of people who don't know anything about this subject. So when it pops up, they'll just trust their producers, their researchers, their friends, management. That's a problem as well. You know, a lot of people, Americans, including top American journalists, are not well versed in the history of this conflict or in the way in which one side lobbies so successfully to get its narrative across. I remember being at MSNBC well before October 7th and doing a monologue on something west bank or Palestine related. This was on a Sunday night. My MSU show was on Sunday night. Monday morning, there was already a complaint from this group called Camera that already come into msnbc. And you're thinking with a full transcript of my model, which my team hadn't even done. So somebody had stayed up all night or someone sitting in Israel, they'd done it. Like, that's the resources. They throw this stuff. And people don't realize that media companies are under a lot of pressure. They're accused of being anti Semitic, they're accused of being unfair, accused of being biased, all sorts of stuff. Even though when we know the bias is really in the complete other direction. So there are a lot of pressures. A lot of young journalists up and coming are very worried about what they say or not say. I speak at a lot of events. A lot of young Arab American journalists, a lot of young Arab American students in journalism school, they're worried. They tell me like, we want to say stuff, but we're worried what will happen to our careers. Will we be able to get anywhere so that everyone knows. Anyone who tells you, anyone who tells you that there isn't a chilling effect on speech inside the media on the issue of Israel is lying to you. Everyone we know this. We've had these conversations in private and in public. That is a fact wherever you work. That's not an msnbc. That is a American and Western media issue. Only liars or fools would deny that. And I think what's good about social media and what's good about independent journalism and what we are doing now on platforms like Substack and elsewhere is that we don't have to look over our shoulders. We don't have to worry about camera. We don't have to worry about a C suite coming down on us. We don't have to worry about fake, weaponized accusations of anti Semitism simply because we report on Palestinian humanity or dead Gaza babies. And I think that is a transformation right now in our media landscape. I think people do appreciate that. The number of people I have met who have canceled their subscriptions to the New York Times or to whatever it is because of this issue, because they are so fed up with the demonization and dehumanization of one people abroad, of the censorship. This is a country that claims to hate censorship, and yet our media self censor on this subject all the time, every day. And for the past two years they have done that. I don't know when that will change or if it will change the mainstream. That is.
- [79:44]
A
Yeah, I know. I have had conversations with, you know, young, you know, Palestinian American and Arab American journalists who were actually Were shaking as talking to me and saying they just were afraid to speak. And this is at supposedly the most liberal of the networks and people are afraid. If you're on staff and you're especially a junior person, you know, you, you think it's too risky for you to even assert your own identity. This is not a good place for media to be. What do you make of what we're now seeing on the right? I want to talk a little bit about this sort of weird maga. Pro Palestinian, as you said, more anti Israel. What do you make of it? Tucker Carlson seems to have led it. He started it. There was a lot. There are a lot of conspiracy theories about Charlie Kirk maybe going in this direction. Some of it's around the Epstein files. There's lots of conspiracy theorizing about whether Epstein was an Israeli Mossad agent. All of that. What do you make of all of it?
- [80:31]
D
So I don't buy the Kirk stuff. I've not seen evidence that he was somehow switching on Israel. At best, he thought that they were doing a bad job in their messaging and he wanted to help them not be a pariah. Maybe he's smart enough to observe that there's no evidence that he was switching his position on Israel. He said some outrageous thing about Palestinians and about Muslims, Arabs. The day before he was murdered, brutally, inexcusably murdered, he tweeted that Islam is the sword that the left is using to slit the throat of America.
- [80:56]
A
That's right.
- [80:56]
D
That's the kind of rhetoric that we had from this guy who we're told was a modern day MLK who never abused anyone. So I don't care quote, by the way, we're not allowed to quote. You're not allowed to quote. You just have to praise him. Never ever quote him. So this is the problem with that view. I don't buy that. For a start, he also is a horrific clip of him on stage saying, well, Hamas throw gay people off tall buildings, but guess what? There are no tall buildings left in Gaza. And everyone cheers and laughs. So, you know, apparently the left is mocking his death. I haven't seen it, but he was happy to mock Palestinian deaths in front of a live audience.
- [81:26]
C
Wow.
- [81:27]
D
So. But on your broader point, it's a big issue. Wherever I go, people bring this up. I was in Dearborn, Michigan at the Arab Con. We were doing a live taping of our podcast, Bassem Youssef and I, audience questions were about this. People on the street asking me about this. I was in San Francisco at the weekend speaking at an event with Josh Paul, former State Department employee who resigned over Gaza. One of the first questions from the audience was about this. People are fascinated by what's happening on the right. I'm fascinated too. I mean, I enjoyed Tucker Carlson's dissection of Ted Cruz as much as anyone else. It was a great interview and I'm glad right wingers are now asking awkward questions of other right wingers. But my thing is I'm not on the right. So for me, I'm just. It's. For me, it's popcorn. There's two memes for me. One is the popcorn meme the Jon Stewart or is it Stephen Colbert? I don't remember popcorn meme. And the other meme is, you know, the one from Godzilla. Like, let them fight, right? If the right wingers want to fight about this, great. If Tucker and Marjorie Taylor Greene and Candace Owens want to drag some of their party away from this blind, pro Israel, pro liquid, pro ethnic cleansing stance, great. I'm all for it. But I'm. They're not my allies. Like, I've never, I've never gone down this road of, you know, my enemy's enemy is my friend. I just don't buy that. That's a very dangerous road. That's U.S. foreign policy at its worst. I don't adopt that position in my own personal life or politics. A lot of people say to me, well, we need to work together. No, no. They can work and do their stuff over there. I'll work over here and do my stuff. If the Palestinians benefit, great. But I can't bring myself to ally with people like Carlson and Owens and Greene because on every other issue, they are horrific still, right? I mean, I care about the Palestinians because I care about human rights and because I care about human rights, I also care about the rights of undocumented Latinos in Chicago and LA who are being rounded up on the streets. Not just undocumented green card holders, American citizens being pulled out of their apartments in the middle of the night, children naked, dragged into the streets, zip tied, that stuff. Owens supports, Carlson supports, MTG supports. So for me, it's a deal breaker. Like if you, you either value human equality and then we can work together or we can't. So I get it. I get why so many people on the left are so excited about this. But I would also point out this is still a minority. This is not the majority of the MAGA base. Like Donald Trump is still super pro Israel, as some of us warned he would be. He still appointed Mike Huckabee an evangelical, to be his ambassador to Israel, who is a deeply racist man, anti Palestinian, far right extremist in my view. So these are the kind of Marco Rubio neoconservative, hardcore pro. Look at the people around him. They're all hardcore pro Israel people. So let's not exaggerate what's going on on the right. Our people are breaking away. Are younger Republicans more anti Israel just like other younger Americans? Yes, and that's a good thing and I hope that continues. But these people pushing this stuff, as you pointed out as well, I don't know what their motives are. I'm a little suspicious. Worries me.
- [84:19]
A
It's a little. Yeah, it makes me nervous as well. And I'm with you on not being allies with them. You know, you talked about people who in the media don't really know this issue. And so they, you know, they sort of opine on it or they stay away from it. One journalist who decided to become more knowledgeable by actually traveling there is Ta Nehisi Coates, who we both know very well, our friend. And his treatment by mainstream media, including on CBS News Morning show, to me was very instructive. Right. Because there seems to be a fear, for whatever reason, among pro Israel hawks that if African Americans, who are the core of the civil rights movement and always have been a civil rights voice, if African Americans broadly change their view of Israel from what they learned in church to saying, oh no, this is a human rights abusing country and they, they start to side with South Africa, that that would actually be a seminal problem, a real problem for Israel. What do you make of that? Because his treatment, I think, has been horrific and the lack of defense of him by other journalists has been wild.
- [85:24]
D
So before I get to the substantive point, let me just make two quick points, just asides. Number one, you could argue that Tony decopol interview with Ta Nehisi Coates is why Bari Weiss is the editor in chief of CBS News today. It was the reaction internally at CBS to that from Shari or whatever her name was, Redstone, who was in charge. All the pro Israel folks who already ran CBS News prior to David Ellison were furious. That's when they began the internal investigations. That's when they had the whole frenzy. That's when the whole. Oh my God. So there is a. There is a kind of weird line, weirdly, from decopel and Ta Nehisi to Barry Weiss and David Eisen. Anyways, that's one thing. Number two, I would also point out Greta Thunberg was Just released today from her illegal detention by the Israelis. Something that I've raised and others raised. And Greta's a friend. She's a Zateo contributor. It's outrageous the way she was treated. She, the hero that she is, refuses to talk about herself. She's put out a very long video on Instagram only talking about Palestinians, even though we know that there are reports of her having been abused in custody. She's not talking about it. She's only centering Palestinian voices. But Greta, like Ta Nehisi, was a celebrity in Western liberal circles. Obama hosted her. Oprah hosted her, just like Ta Nehisi. But as soon as Greta Thunberg or Ta Nehisi Coates starts talking about Palestine, suddenly no one talks about them. Suddenly they're not invited to all the best parties. Suddenly no one's speaking up for them when they're being attacked, whether on CBS News or literally by Israeli soldiers. And I think that's an interesting point about. You want to talk about censorship. When even big names who you love on every other issue speak on this issue, suddenly they're cast out. They're seen as, you know, Persona non granada. They're trying to do it to Ms. Rachel, literally the world's most favorite children's star. She spoke of Gaza. Suddenly she's Hamas. So that's an interesting point. Now, on the substance of, of Ta Nehisi and black voters and black Americans in Israel, huge issue. I'm so glad you raised it. It is so clear that they're petrified of losing support from African Americans for multiple reasons, not just for the voting reasons in the Democratic Party, but for the moral arguments they think they have. You saw that with Ferguson. Do you remember during Ferguson, Palestinians were sending advice on how to resist tear gas activists in Ferguson. There were those alliances being made there in real time across boundaries. I think that's freaked a lot of people out on the pro Israel side. And they can't afford to lose, whether it's the Jim Clyburns of this world or Hakeem Jeffries, AKA aipak Shakur, to borrow a line from Charlemagne, Richie Torres, horrifically pro Israel guy who represents one of the poorest districts in the country, but tweets almost only about Israel. Every time I check. These people are prominent black American politicians who have been for years taken on trips to Israel and told that this is all about Van Jones. We just talked about. There's a clip of Van Jones doing the round since Friday. I don't know if you've seen it. Joy with the. I hadn't seen it before with Shmuli Botek, one of the most far right, anti Palestinian, racist, pro Israel rabbis. And they're hugging each other and he's saying he's a legend. No, you're a legend. No, you're a hero. No, you're a hero. Kind of sycophantically sucking up to each other. And there's a moment where Van Jones says, you know, for 100 years your people have had my back and we'll have your back. And that narrative, which is a true narrative, right? Jewish Americans and black Americans did stand side by side in the civil rights struggle, but Israel is not Jewish Americans. This is what people need to understand.
- [88:25]
A
Same things happen not to cut you, but not only did Israel not stand with African Americans, Israel stood on the side of white South Africans while African Americans were standing on the side of black South Africans.
- [88:36]
D
And Mandela ADL spied on anti apartheid figures. So yeah, the pro Israel community is not the same as the American Jewish community. I will quickly point out to your viewers. This week the Washington Post polled American Jews. 61% of American Jews say Israel is committing war crimes in Gaza. 39% of American Jews say it's a genocide in Gaza. So when people say it's anti Semitic to say the G word, 4 out of 10American Jews think it's a genocide. So American Jews have never been well represented by their kind of lobby groups and political community organizations who are hardcore pro Israel. And I think they're now worried, they are worried that young black Americans are peeling away on this issue just like young white Americans, young Republican Americans, young Jewish Americans. It isn't across the board generational change. And Ta Nehisi is a hugely influential voice in this. When he sat on stage with Nora Erakat and Rashid Khalidi and others on after October 7th and did that study group, that live study group on stage. That was a seminal moment in the kind of activist moment because he does bring an entirely different tradition. And by the way, I'll throw in one more thing. Pro Israel folks often like to say, well, Martin Luther MLK Jr. He was Dr. Martin Luther King was a Zionist, proud defender of Israel. They have a whole sheet of like quotes of him praising Israel. Bear in mind a couple of things. One is if you hear this, wanna remind viewers at home, if you get this propaganda from a friend of yours, a lot of that stuff was pre1967, right pre the occupation of the West Bank. Dr. King died a year after the 67 war so he never saw what happened in the West Bank. And his daughter Bernice King said after, stop using my father's name to justify this stuff. He would never have agreed with what's happening to the people in Gaza. Obviously this is a man who called out his own government over the Vietnam War and the brutality there. So there's a lot of cynical weaponization of this stuff of the civil rights struggle of mlk. And they've done very well with the black American politicians and Democratic Party. As I say, Torres is the worst example. But they're worried about losing others. Look what happened to Jamaal Bowman. Look what happened to Cori Bush. Black politicians who lost their primaries after AIPAC put I think What a combined $25 million into their two races.
- [90:36]
A
Yeah, this is the, the, it is one of the fights, I think for young people. This is their South Africa, regardless of their race or ethnicity or religion. This is young people, South African moment. And they are on one side of this issue, largely many. Hasan, you are great. Thank you so much. Everybody should be subscribing to Zateo News. Support this independent journalist because I love the work. I've always been a fan of yours. I can recall being in Phil Griffin's office saying, you're insane if you do not sign this man to a multimillion dollar contract. And then they finally brought you in.
- [91:06]
D
But you are million dollar contract.
- [91:08]
A
I wish.
- [91:09]
D
I know, but not on a multi. And you were one of the people who first gave me a chance to come on as a guest on cable tv. And so I appreciate the fact that you just don't, you just don't talk the talk. You walk the walk. You've platformed voices and may you continue doing so in the independent world.
- [91:23]
A
Thank you. It was totally self serving because I was trying to get you inside MSNBC so we didn't have to share you with any other network. Because when I tell you you are brilliant, my friend. Thank you so much. I appreciate you. Thank you very much. All right, y', all, so we are going to now get some much needed context to this. And by the way, by the way, before I get to our next guest, I have to tell y', all I have to post it on my social. I forgot to give it to Jason so he could post it on the show. But I will post it on my social. Maybe we'll also post it here as a short. Van Jones, back in the day before he got, I guess in line with apac, he put out a. It was almost like a rap with A like a rap track behind it where he talked about the fact that the Palestinians need to be treated fairly. He was actually on the other side of this issue at one point in his career. It's a thing that happens with folks when they suddenly get funded. You know, on the other side of it, he was in a completely different place on this issue. All right, I want to talk a little bit more about the context, the much needed context about the Israeli Hamas war. And we're waiting for our guests to come in. And while we wait on that, I want to talk to you guys about this issue that Mehdi and I were talking about, which is the fact that most people did not discuss on TV so that you could understand it, what was happening on October 5th in Gaza. Most people assume that Hamas is just this evil organization that for no reason whatsoever attacked the innocent Israeli state. And of course, the people who were attacked were innocent. The people at that, you know, concert, totally innocent teenagers and young people. Those people were completely innocent. People in the kibbutzes weren't doing anything necessary. 21 but the state of Israel was doing a thing to the Palestinian people, particularly the Palestinians in Gaza, who in large part were people who had already been displaced from inside what is today Israel, from towns that were part of Palestine. They were part of the mandate of Palestine. They were expelled to Gaza and then effectively locked in. People called it the largest open air prison. Yes, it has a beach. It has beachfront property. But if Palestinian children or fishermen went too far out into the water, they could be shot dead by Israeli snipers. In fact, that happened when journalist Amon Moyadin was literally reporting from the beaches of Gaza. He watched three children get firebombed to death from a ship, an IDF ship in. So they didn't even have the opportunity to use the beach in the place they were told is the only place they could live if they had family members in the west bank, which is physically separated from Gaza, they couldn't go to the west bank without a pass. It was very much like the old pass system in South Africa. People in Gaza could not go to work inside of Israel without permission from the Israeli government. And it was very difficult to get that kind of permission to. There is in Israel apartheid that has already been adjudicated by the International Court of Justice, the International Criminal Court, the icj. Because for put aside Gaza, where people are effectively locked in behind a literal wall. You talk about build the wall. There's a wall. That is what Hamas scaled, right? Those Hamas militants scaled that wall and they went over because for a generation, people who in some cases had only known Gaza, were trapped in that narrow strip, like smaller than Manhattan or something, where they were never allowed to leave, where the food they ate was determined by the Israeli government, what they could eat, what clothes could be brought in, where they could travel, they couldn't go on vacation and leave. They can't leave. You're trapped in this place where you can see the sea, but you can't go in the sea. Think about enslaved people who could see the ocean, who could see the water in Florida or in Louisiana, where you can see it, but you can't go to it, because you are literally trapped to within a certain small, narrow distance from the shore, or you'll get killed. And they couldn't work, they couldn't earn money. You have all of these people who were unable to take care of themselves financially, unable to see their relatives if they have a relative in another part of what Israel is occupying, and then go to the west bank, where you've had a systematic theft of people's land for generation after generation after generation, where you had a farm for a hundred years, and suddenly somebody from Cleveland shows up and says, you know, I. I've got a 2,000-year-old lease on your property. Get out. Okay, well, what is your proof? How are you saying that this farm I've had for 20, 30 generations that's been in my family, that I'm literally holding the lease to, is yours because you have the right religion and I have the wrong religion. And in some cases for Palestinians, the wrong religion is Christian. Bethlehem is a Christian, a largely Christian Palestinian town. And people who've lived in the region forever have been both Jewish, Christian and Muslim, a mix of people that have always lived there. But then European Jews came over. European Jewish people started coming over in the 30s, 40s and the 1930s and 40s, largely, and then today, and they get preferential treatment over the people who are already there and they're taking people's land. So you had a lot of. Of anger and tension that was going on, in addition to outrages in East Jerusalem, what they call Arab East Jerusalem, which is a part of Jerusalem that is supposed to be the capital of Palestine, if they ever get their state. You had all these provocations where settlers, Jewish settlers, extremists, religious extremists, were in a provocative way, going into the holy places of. Of Muslims and sort of showing off that they could. They could abrogate that holy territory and doing it very deliberately. And the last Thing I'll do before I bring in our guest is you actually had Bibi Netanyahu himself, who for years and years and years favored Hamas governing Gaza because he believed that it would keep the Palestinians permanently divided. You heard Daniel Levy say that they remain divided because you had some people who were Hamas because they felt that the Palestinian Authority, which is what it was inherited from the plo, the Palestinian Liberation Organization, were corrupt and ineffectual, and the Hamas people are the ones who actually fight, so they went with them. You had this schism after George W. Bush essentially ordered Palestinians to have elections in 2005 or 6, I think it was 2005, he ordered them to have elections, and Hamas won in Gaza and the Palestinian Authority won in the West Bank. So he had divided government. That was great for Bibi Netanyahu because he could make sure that they would never unite in order to claim the state that they declared in 1988. And so you had all these provocations. The last one I will throw in before I bring in our guest is that you had Bibi Netanyahu find out. Apparently, his government was told a year before the Oct. 7 attacks, according to reporting by Haaretz, that the Hamas militants were planning a breakout, that they had a plan to launch a breakout military attack on Israel. And it was detailed in very specific detail a year earlier, and they ignored it, such that on the day of the attack, according to Haaretz, much of the military that should have been defending those people at that, those young people at the concert and defending the kibbutzim, those people were hundreds of miles away. They were off in the west bank doing other things, and they were just left completely unprotected. And then it took, like, nine hours for them to respond. Why did that happen? They just weren't there to divide, to respond. And according to the reporting by Haaretz, when they finally did respond, they used helicopter gunships and in some cases killed their own people. So some of those deaths were actually attributable to the Israeli action itself. None of that has been adjudicated. And so what you have is a pressure cooker that Bibi Netanyahu turned up to the highest temperature on purpose because he doesn't want there to ever be a Palestinian state. And he will do anything to both prevent that. His whole life plan has been about preventing that. And he also wants to stay out of jail because he has a corruption charge. He and his wife are both poised to go on trial for corruption. And as long as the war is happening, he can't go on trial. So he has these two competing interests to stay out of jail and to keep Palestinians divided so that they never get a state. And so he himself should bear some of the blame for what happened in October 7th. But we weren't allowed to talk about that in mainstream media. Let me bring in somebody who actually can explain a lot of this context. It's very important thing that we need when we talk about the January 6th. I'm sorry, I say January 6th. The other insurrection when we talk about the October 7th attacks is Professor Norman Finkelstein is a political scientist and activist whose academic specialties are the Holocaust and the Israeli Palestinian conflict. And I also just discovered today, and I believe it is accurate, you can confirm it shares my birthday. So December 8th is, I think, both of our birthdays. So happy pre birthday to the two of us. Thank you for being here, Professor Finkelstein.
- [100:22]
C
Thank you for having me.
- [100:23]
A
And is December 8th in fact your birthday? Is that accurate news? Is that fake news or real news?
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C
The more important point is December 7th is Noam Chomsky's birthday.
- [100:35]
A
Amen to that. Amen to that. We are in great company. Well, I want you to correct anything that I have said about the context of what was happening on October 5th in Gaza. What was the situation, as you understand it in occupied Gaza before the October 7th attacks?
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C
Well, actually, I listened closely to your remarks and I think they were accurate. I would just add to what you had to say, that as you pointed out, Gaza became Gaza basically in 1948. It became a distinct entity after about 300,000 Palestinians living in Israel were expelled during the first Arab Israeli war. They ended up in Gaza. And so Gaza's population is overwhelmingly a refugee population. As he points to pointed out, roughly 80% of Gaza today comprises refugees and descendants of refugees. Under international law, a descendant of a refugee, assuming they have not been restored to their place where they live, a descendant also counts as a refugee. So Gaza's population, an AQ October 6 was 80% refugees. Secondly, half of Gaza's population is a child population. Gaza has a very large child population. The figure is usually put at about 48%. So when you hear stories about starvation, famine and so forth, you have to bear in mind that half the victims of that situation are children. The second context, as I think you correctly put, was the conditions in Gaza. Now you will be surprised to learn, I think, that already in 1948, when Gaza was under Egyptian administration, already in 1948, whenever outsiders came to Gaza, they all walked away with the same impression. Now, I'm not saying whether the words are technically correct or not. I'm right now simply conveying the impression. Every single observer coming out of Gaza after having visited it or worked there said the same thing. Gaza is a huge concentration camp. That's what Elm Burns, the first senior UN official in Gaza during the 1950s. That's what he said. As you know, Gaza came under Israeli control in 1967. That two months later, that was the June 67 war. Two months later, the father of Al Gore, the father of Al Gore, he was also a senator, as you probably know, he went to visit Gaza. This is July 1967. He then spoke before Congress. How did he describe Gaza? He said Gaza is, quote, a huge concentration camp on the sand. That's how he described it. You Fast forward to 2004. 2004, there's a conversation between the head of Israel's National Security Council. His name is Gior Island. He's speaking with some American officials. How does he describe Gaza? He describes Gaza. This, this is 2004, as a huge concentration camp. Those are his works. Now, everything I've said so far was before Israel imposed the medieval blockade of Gaza. The blockade is imposed in 2006, January 2006. And as you correctly point out, nobody could go in. Nobody could go out. Israel decides what goes in, what goes out. You weren't. Israel wouldn't allow chocolate to enter Gaza. It wouldn't allow baby chicks to enter Gaza. It wouldn't allow potato chips into Gaza. It put, is. It put the people of Gaza on what was called back then a humanitarian plus diet. A humanitarian plus diet is the euphemism for a starvation. Excuse me, a humanitarian. Excuse me, I was mistaken. They put Gaza on a humanitarian minimum diet. A humanitarian minimum diet. A humanitarian minimum diet is the euphemism for a starvation plus diet. And they were very clear about their reasons. As you pointed out, Hamas won the election in 2006, the election that was ordered by George Bush Jr. It was called promote democracy promotion. And Jimmy Carter, the former president, he was in the occupied territories at the time. He pronounced the elections completely honest and fair. Hamas won the elections not because it wanted to destroy the state of Israel, not because it wanted to commit jihad. The reason was very simple. The Palestinian Authority was hopelessly corrupt and Hamas ran on a reform platform. And Hamas had been known because of its management of religious institutions and civic institutions. It was known to be honest at that point in time. So people said, reform honest. Guys, let's try it. Well, they tried it and then this brutal medieval blockade was imposed on Gaza with that starvation plus diet. The purpose being, as they said, there was no dispute they wanted to put Gaza's economy on the precipice so that the people would revolt and overthrow the Gaza government. So that part you all got right. I filled in some details. But there was one part that you left out. There were some allusions to it. When you talked about the three, the three children who were killed going out into the sea, Israel, in addition to this concentration camp with a medieval blockade, it periodically conducted what it called operations in Gaza. They called it, more euphemistically they called it a kind of very sick expression when you consider Gaza's 1/2 children. They called it mowing the lawn. Now if you have the image of mowing the lawn, it's the blades of a mower cracking the skulls of children. There was Operation protective edge in 2008. 9, 350 children killed, 6,000 homes destroyed. Operation. Excuse me, I'm talking too fast for me. 2008, 9, Operation Cast Lead. 350 children killed, 6,000 homes destroyed. 2014, Operation Protective Edge. 550 children killed, 18,000 homes destroyed. Now let me put that in some context. When Operation Protect if edge ended in 2014, Peter Maurer, M A U R E R, he was the head of the International Committee of the Red Cross and his job basically was to tour war zones. He comes out of Gaza in 2014 and he says, and now I'm quoting him, I have never seen destruction of the magnitude that I saw in Gossip after Protective Edge. Why do I mention that? Operation cast lead, 2008, 9, 350 children killed. 6,000 homes destroyed. Estimates are about 600,000 tons of rubble are left behind. Operation Protective Edge, which for Peter Moorer was unprecedented, unprecedented in its destructiveness. 18,000 homes destroyed. 550 children killed. About 2 million 2.5 million tons of rubble. Peter Moorer, I've never seen destruction like that in my entire career.
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A
Career.
- [110:06]
C
What do we have now? Not 350 children killed, not 550 children killed. We have approximately 20,000 children killed, not 6,000 homes destroyed, not 18,000 homes destroyed. Now we have roughly 250,000 homes destroyed. Operation Cast Lead. 600,000 tons of rubble. Operation Protective Edge, 2.5 million tons of rubble. Do you know what we have now? 50 million tons of rubble. That's what's been done to Gaza. That's just really skimming the surface. But I don't want to go on too long. I Want to give you a chance to ask me the kinds of questions you think that are of interest to you and that would be of interest to your viewers.
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A
No, I mean, I'm so glad that you gave me that context, because it really does set up what I did want to ask because this kind of destruction does not feel like a response to an attack. It feels like what it has been adjudicated to be, which is genocide. That, that. For BIBI Netanyahu, the October 7 attacks were probably his greatest opportunity. Because what they've done to the point you just made is they have leveled Gaza. They have eliminated almost all of the hospitals, they've eliminated most of the homes, they've eliminated all the universities, they've eliminated all of the museums, such as they were. They've gotten rid of the theaters, they've gotten rid of the culture. They've effectively turned Gaza into a demolition dump. And so by doing that, at least this is what some of the far right Israelis that are around Netanyahu are saying. This is a great opportunity to bring their settlers back in, kick the rest of the Palestinians out, offer them voluntary deportation, and have. The land isn't at the end of the day, this war not about retaliation, really, even against Hamas, it is about taking the land. Right.
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C
I would say it's. I would like to be precise about the language, not to say disagree with you, just to try to gain precision. I think that Israel had a Palestinian problem. Between the Jordan river and the Mediterranean Sea, the population is about 50% Palestinian Arab, 50% Israeli Jewish, roughly. In fact, it might be at this point, slightly higher number of Arabs or Palestinians than Jews living there. That's obviously not a formula for stability. As you know, President Lincoln famously said, a house divide cannot long last. And this was literally divided 50, 50 in the most literal sense of the word. And so this Palestine problem has been, has endured as a political problem for Israel. Now, the obvious solution to that problem, given that Israel wants to preserve itself as a Jewish, a stable Jewish state, the obvious solution is expel the non Jewish population. The problem is, under current international law and more broadly, international public opinion, international political institutions, expulsion is not considered a acceptable form of solving a political problem like that. There was a period in time when it was acceptable. That's why the United States became the United States.
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A
That's right, yeah.
- [114:30]
C
Motion was considered an acceptable modus operandi for trying to preserve the ethnic character of your state. So this Arab problem has, as they call it, the Arab problem loomed for Israel. And periodically, in order to address the Gaza component of the Arab problem. They would mow the lawn. They would mow the lawn in Gaza to remind the natives who are in charge and to remind the natives to keep their heads low come October 7, 1967. Excuse me, October 7, 2023. You know the cliche that every crisis is also an opportunity?
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A
That's right.
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C
Now it was a crisis for Israel. Sure, people can argue. I've read everything there is to read in the subject of October 7th, and in my opinion, it's clear roughly 1200 people were killed. Of those 1200, 400 were combatants, 800 were civilians, and overwhelmingly it was done by Hamas. I think the record so far, things might come out later, which will cause me to reconsider. But so far as I've read the record, I think those numbers are accurate. And you could imagine that for Israel, for any country, 800 people, 1200 persons killed altogether, 800 civilians. It comes as a shock.
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A
It's like 9 11.
- [116:16]
C
Exactly. Because I'm glad you said that. Just like 9 11. If you look at the record of 9 11, which I have studied, there were some salty tears shed by Mr. Bush, Mr. Cheney, Mr. Rumsfeld. But you know what? That lasted about five minutes. And then they were rubbing their hands, the palms of the hands, in anticipation. What can we extract from this? That's right. What can we extract? And they looked at the globe. They were trying to figure out which countries to attack. And they decide first in Afghanistan, you might remember, because it's forgotten now when they decide on Iraq. Iraq was supposed to be the first step.
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A
That's right.
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C
Then Syria, then Iran. They were going to max out on 9 11. And you know what? Israel decided it's going to max out on October 7th. And the first order of business was to solve once and for all the Gaza question. And solving the Gaza question effectively meant expelling the indigenous. Expelling the population of Gaza.
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A
Yeah.
- [117:42]
C
However, even as they wanted to expel the population of Gaza, they were using genocidal mean means to accomplish two things. To quote, unquote, persuade the Gazans to leave. That was half the job. The other half is they have to persuade the international community to take them in. So they resolved to use genocidal means in order to solve once and for all the Gaza question. That's only part of the story. Without going into too many details, there was a large element, a large element of pure revenge.
- [118:45]
A
The.
- [118:47]
C
Genocide has a strategic goal to clear out the people from Gaza. But sometimes genocides are committed from strictly and narrowly vengeful motives. When Mr. Netanyahu, Prime Minister Netanyahu, when he kept saying, he said it on two occasions. Remember what Amalek did to you? If you read the biblical story, it's not about a strategic goal.
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A
Right.
- [119:26]
C
It's about revenge. We kill every man, woman, child and livestock as an act of pure, unadulted, unadulterated revenge.
- [119:45]
A
Yeah.
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C
And there is, we have to say, a large element of that. In other words, there's a non utilitarian aspect to this genocide and I think one of the misnomers, and here I would slightly disagree with you, though we're obviously on the same page. Everybody likes to say it's about the far right, it's about Netanyahu. That's not true. I'm not saying this gleefully, but I'm saying it factually. This is not. The genocide in Gaza is not a state project, it's a national project. That's very different if you look at a large amount of data. Allow me just a few examples.
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A
Sure.
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C
A few months ago, a question was put to the Jewish Israelis. Jewish Israelis, do you support a genocide in Gaza? The answer was 50% said yes, 47%. Now you might say, well, what do they mean by genocide? Well, actually, the question was very precisely worded. Allow me to convey it to your listeners. The question was, when the Israeli Defense Forces, the idf, when they enter a city, should they kill everyone in the city? That was the question. Should they kill everyone the city? 47% said yes.
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A
Wow.
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C
About a month later, a question was put to all Israelis. Are there any innocents in Gaza? Is anyone in Gaza innocent? Of all Israelis, 62% said no. If you factor out the none Jewish Israelis, it comes to 75% said no, there are no innocents in Gaza. Even the opposition leader in Israel, the Jewish opposition leader in the Knesset, he said, and I'm quoting him, our soldiers are killing children in Gaza as a hobby. As a hobby. Now, he came under ferocious attack for saying that. He doubled down and then finally, as you can imagine, he took it back. But you have to wonder, if it weren't true, why would he have said that? That's a very ugly thing to say unless he had strong grounds for believing it. In fact, if you look at the testimonies of the doctors, the foreign doctors who've gone to serve in Gaza, they have found repeatedly, a pattern, repeatedly, that the Israeli snipers and soldiers are targeting children in their heads and in their skulls. Excuse me, in their skulls and in their chests. Targeting. There's no other shrapnel. In the child's body. It's not like from an explosion that they got hit. It's just a bullet wound to the skull and a bullet wound to the chest. In fact, the most recent UN Report, which came out about two weeks ago, the report, the commission shared by Navi Pillay, she said, or the report said, Navi Pillay is the former human rights chief for the UN and she sat on the genocide commission for Rwanda. She said, when the report said they're targeting. I'm using their word, not mine. They're targeting toddlers. They're targeting toddlers. And when you add to that, as the UN Report pointed out, there have been no serious investigations and convictions for these atrocities, which is to say they have the green light to commit them. They have the green light first because you have to remember what Amalek did to you. You're going to kill every man, woman and child. Mr. Netanyahu gave them the green light. You have President Herzog. He said, there are no innocents in Gaza. That's what he said. He said, stop with this nonsense of innocent civilians. There are no innocent civilians in Gaza. So now you have the green light from the President of the State of Israel. And then you have the order given not to allow any food, water, fuel or electricity in Gaza. Well, if ever there were a recipe for genocide, that. Excuse me, if ever there were a recipe for genocide, that I think would be it. So when you have genocidal orders, you have total impunity for those committing genocidal acts. And what's most important, you have a population already geared up to commit genocide. Half the population says, kill everybody in the city. 75% say, there are no innocents in Gaza. And guess what? That's the population that's now in Gaza. Right?
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A
Well, the population with those views is. Who make up the idf? It's the ordinary. Ordinary Jewish citizens.
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C
Exactly. Because it's a citizen army.
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A
Right.
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C
And a citizen army means the army's representatives of the population. It's a random selection of a genocidal population. So then you can't be surprised if a random selection of the population that's genocidal is now in Gaza and it's armed and it knows it can commit its genocide with impunity because there are no prosecutions, there are no investigations. Can you really say with any more credibility than the character in Casablanca? I'm shocked. I'm shocked. No, you're not shocked. You're not shocked. You're doing what you were two things. What you were ordered to do what you were expected to do. But there's a third point, what you wanted to do. You wanted to commit genocide in Gaza. And that's why I say you can't stop at the order given or the expectations of the Prime Minister or what's called the far right. No, it is not a state project, it's a national project. Now people don't want to hear that. Mr. Bernie Sanders, who I supported him in both of his primary campaigns, I think he's a decent person. Unfortunately, the first couple of months of the Gaza genocide, he was terrible, awful, totally unacceptable. He did change. Whether he changed because of more information, whether he changed because public opinion enabled to him to change, whichever it is. There was one point where I think he was seriously, throughout up until today, seriously misleading. He kept saying, the problem is Netanyahu. It's Netanyahu, you know, to personalize it. It, to personalize it as if to exempt everyone else. No, I am not happy to say it. And believe me, believe me when I say in the immortal words of Oprah Winfrey, I find it very hard to wrap my mind around people targeting children. Yeah, it's very hard to wrap your mind about it. The UN report describes a toddler in its mother's arms who was targeted by the Israeli combatants. That's just very hard. Yeah, you know, if you allow me, I'm just going to make a slight digression and then you can drag me back. So your alma mater, Harvard, Harvard puts out a report on alleged antisemitism at Harvard University. The report runs to 314 pages. It's very detailed and I read the report twice, very closely. And the truth be told, there was very little to zero evidence of antisemitism as a normal average person or a dictionary would construe the term. So then you wonder how did you manage to fill 314 pages if the evidence is thin to non existent? So now I'll explain to you how they do it. They have their own definition of antisemitism. They say, for the purposes of this report, we're going to define antisemitism as whenever Jewish and especially Israeli Jewish students feel excluded in the class, in extracurricular activities and in social life. If they feel excluded, their feelings, they feel excluded. For the purposes of this report, they say, we consider that to be anti Semitism. Now you might be thinking, well, that seems to be a reasonable definition. I mean, it's not the dictionary definition of antisemitism, but that seems to be a reasonable definition. But here is My. Here is my reservation, my qualification. Those Israeli students who are at Harvard, many of them are coming straight from Gaza. They're child killers. That's a fact. Everyone in Gaza. Everyone in Gaza is implicated in that genocide. Not just if you shoot children in the head and if you block food from entering Gaza, if you prevent water from entering Gaza. They've been preventing. I'm not a parent. You are. The special baby formula that some children need, they're preventing it. And the UN report says they're killing children who need that formula. Everybody, Everybody in Gaza is a cog in the wheel of that killing machine. I repeat, everybody who served, has served in Gaza is a cog in the machine of that killing, of that genocide in Gaza. Now, Harvard says it's very politically correct. It says we have to be inclusive at Harvard. We have to be pluralistic at Harvard. Those are the two words they keep using, inclusiveness and pluralism. What they're trying to do is to normalize genocide. They want the Harvard community to treat child killers as just another item on your resume. I did volunteer work in the food kitchen. I helped starving children in Africa. And what did you do? Oh, I killed children. I targeted children in their skull and chest gray. Let's all be inclusive and pluralistic. I personally think, and I've had an argument with my good friend Cornel west on the question, and also a person who I admire a great deal, Nadine Strossen, the former president of the aclu. I was on a panel with them. That's a bridge too far for me. I am not going to be inclusive in my lifetime. And should I have an afterlife, I am not going to be inclusive of concentration camp guards. They exterminated my parents, family, and they tortured and tormented them to the last breath of their life. And if I'm not going to be inclusive of concentration camp guards, even 50 years later, I won't be inclusive. You know what that's called? It's called respect for the dead. It's called respect for the dead. To be inclusive of these monsters is a desecration of the dead. So I don't accept Harvard's command that we have to be inclusive of these child killers, these child starvers, murderers, these professional murderers. No, that's a bridge too far for me.
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A
Professor. I'm sorry. No, go ahead.
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C
No, I'm done.
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A
Well, I. I just wanted to thank you. I have. We have gone a little bit over time, but it was really important for me to hear everything that you had to say. And you as you. I. I Was going to talk about this with you. You are the child, the son of Holocaust survivors. So you know what you speak, you do study the Holocaust as well as studying what's happening in this region. I'm going to let you go with my deepest thanks. I would love for you to come back. I want to have more time to sit with you because I think you're just so knowledgeable. And I just want to thank you for just being so open, honest, and keeping it real. Thank you so much. Professor, backstage, real quick so we can get a rest. Thank you. Keep your camera on. We're going to ask you to hang on just for a second. We're going to put you backstage so we can make sure that we upload this content. Thank you so much, sir. Thank you. There you have it. Professor Norman Finkelstein. He is one of the most knowledgeable voices on the region. And again, he's speaking as somebody who is son of Holocaust survivors. And wow, that was deep. He took it there. He went there, especially with Harvard University. I will note that when I was at Harvard, Harvard has a Hillel Club, which gives Jewish students a safe environment, a club of their very own. There is no such club for African Americans, for indigenous people, for any other group. So Harvard, I think, goes out of its way to be very, very inclusive when it comes to Jewish students. So I, I really, genuinely do not understand why Harvard would go there. But there you have it. A lot of people in the chat saying, you learned so much. So did I. This was worth going overtime for because he is just so knowledgeable and brilliant and we really, really, really appreciate, you know, having him on the show. I want to also note that I left this out of my conversation with Mehdi Hassan. More than 200 journalists have been killed in Gaza. It's the deadliest war for journalists in the history of tracking the number of journalists killed in international conflict. It's literally the deadliest war. And what you're seeing is the IDF seemingly deliberately targeting journalists to try to silence what Professor Finkelstein was talking about, this genocide, which is real. And people can love Israel as much as they want, but you can't really run from the truth. This is a nation some of whose, Some of whose population are the children of people who experience genocide in Europe. And now there is no way around the fact that their, their sons, daughters, their, Their, Their, Their. Their progeny are now committing genocide against the Palestinian people. And I'm glad that Professor Finkelstein also pointed out that's how America was born. If we had cameras and people had cell phones to show the way that the Cherokee and the Nez Perce and the Sioux were wiped off their land. It would look exactly the same. When people want your land, they will do anything to get it. When they want you to go away so that they can have their. Their dream of a nation of their liking and with their population on it, they'll do anything. And they'll often use religion as the justification. That is what happened in this country. It is the way that the indigenous people here were wiped almost out, completely wiped off the face of the earth. So that religious people from Europe who are claiming that God said they could have it, could take, take it. And when they wanted to take it, they wanted it not to share with the indigenous, but to replace them. They wanted those indigenous people gone. And they largely got them gone because they had bigger guns and they had more power. And what you have in this region, in what was the Palestinian Mandate, where I want to note, there were always Jewish people, there were the Mizrahi who were local, you know, people who are from the region, who are from Morocco and from Iran and from that area, they were already there. But it is European who called themselves at the time colonists in the 1920s, 30s and 40s who arrived and decided that it wasn't enough to live among the Palestinian Arabs. They were going to replace them and move them out and take over very much the way America was born. They just decided that we had the guns, we have the European training. We come from a nation of immense power, from Europe, and now this land is ours. And they have systematically removed Palestinians from their homes, their farms, moved many of them into Gaza, and now they want them out of Gaza too, and out of the West Bank. We didn't get to talk a lot about the west bank, but the ferocity of the settler movement, many of whom come from the United States, from Russia, from Poland, from Europe, all over Europe, but also from the United States who are going in there with big guns and pointing them at farmers and taking their land too. And so this October 7th horror that happened to those poor students who were hanging out at a concert and those poor people living on that kibbutz, and they were genuinely very much menaced and harmed, and 1200 people killed, including 800 civilians, that happened. It was a 911 style catastrophe for Israelis. But the reaction to it, the genocide that's been a reaction to it, is unjustifiable. There is no justification for killing 20,000 children and 60,000 people totally and wiping out their universities and their memories and their homes. And in some cases posting on TikTok and laughing about it as you're doing it, which is a thing that Professor Finkelstein was talking about, putting the record yourself on social media of the depravity of what you're doing. And in many cases, these are young people who are out there killing other young people and children. This is horrific. And the government of Israel is responsible for it. That is why Bibi Netanyahu is a war criminal. And you're not allowed to say it on most mainstream media. You're not allowed to see it or know about it. You really, in many cases only can see it on social media. But if the Ellisons have their way, you won't see it on social media either. Because what you are seeing is this content being throttled off of social media so you can't see it. There's good luck seeing it almost anywhere. When they finally have gotten rid of all the journalists and killed the witnesses, it'll go silent. And then it really will be like what happened to the indigenous people here. It'll be done in silence. And that is the worst of crimes. I want to thank you all for tuning into this very long. We did an extra long special edition of the Joy Reid Show. I will absolutely invite Jeffrey Sachs. Those of you who are in the chat saying invite Jeffrey Sachs, absolutely will be inviting Jeffrey Sachs on. Definitely one of the people that I've been looking to put on. And that is the reality. Somebody pointing out here that Central park was a black community. It absolutely was. It was Seneca Village. And when folks decided they wanted that, they wiped them out as well. And when people want what you have, they want your land, they want your. The property you're on. And they have more power than you and they have bigger guns than you, it generally only goes one way. And the way this is going for the people of Palestine, what's left of it, because most of it has been taken by settlers anyway. Little Bantu stands left of what they have left for their own nation, which they were promised by the un. There was a Palestinian mandate and it was supposed to be divided. And this was Europe saying, imposing on the native Arab population, you're going to give half your land up. And they said, okay. And then they. It's kind of lost it all. There was a whole war thing that happened. There's a lot of story to it, but you can look it up. We're going to keep on covering this issue because it has to be covered. No one should be allowed to, to die and, and be starved to death and, and killed in silence. If we're not witnesses, then the dirt and the devilry will still happen and the horror will still happen. You just won't see it. And I think there are a lot of people who would just prefer you not see it. I'm glad Van Jones apologized for it. But the fact that people joke about the genocide that's happening in that region is horrible. I also want to note that there is also a genocide going on in Sudan, which we absolutely have to talk about. And what's going on the Democratic Republic of Congo. And we're going to bring all of those stories to you because we are determined to make sure that we do international news, which American media does generally not do. So we're going to talk about those things all. As Joy Seekers Project says, expose it all. We're going to expose it all. And in the meantime, please hit like and subscribe. We so appreciate all of you being here tonight. We'll see you on the next. And by the way, on Wednesday, we're going to talk about that Chicago raid. We're going to get deep into it. Make sure you come back on Wednesday because we're going to get deep into that Chicago raid and what they're doing in Illinois, this operation against the state of Illinois, the state of Oregon, all of that stuff. We're going to get into that, too, because this president is waging war on us. Okay? Somebody told me during the election that the choice, you know, as somebody they know, I'm very much, you know, in favor of the Palestinian cause. But they said it's Gaza here or Gaza there. Gaza there or Gaza here, you know, and that, you know, this, this instinct to remove people that are ethnically different from you and have the land be free of them. That instinct exists here, too, even to this day of really wanting fewer brown folks and being willing to do almost anything to get rid of them. Beware, because that always whips back on everyone. That's not just going to be limited to the brown people, black folks who are saying, this isn't your problem. Call your friends in Chicago, because it's your problem now. They're coming here to your community, to even safe cities, safe or not, they don't care. They're coming for black people, brown people, Asian people, anyone that isn't like them ethnically, who doesn't speak the language they say they should speak, who's not the religion they say they should be. They're coming for everybody. This is, this is white Christian nationalism. This is Project 2025. This is what they intended to do, and they're doing it. And it's ugly. But also what's happening in Palestine, in Gaza, ugly. Super ugly. All right, that's it. I'm stop. I'm gonna stop. Y' all have a wonderful rest of your evening, and we will see you like and subscribe and share. Don't forget to do that. We'll see you on the next Enjoy, Read, show, okay?