B (5:19)
Well, the latter. Second is what I understand. The Europeans who are always terrified of any violence in the Middle east because they have unassimilated, unacculturated, unintegrated minorities ranging from 8 to 16% depending on the country. And they whatever happens, a hiccup in the Middle east they feel is a body blow in their own streets because they don't know what to do with their insane open borders policies. I was on Piers Morgan yesterday, Jack, and there was a radical Palestinian activist and he went on and on about genocide and I think everybody misses October 7th. On October 7th, there was no Israelis, no Jews in Gaza. They had been gone for 20 years and they had left the infrastructure there. And of course we know what happened to the hothouse industry and the whole thing. They ransacked it. As soon as they had control, they had an election that the Bush administration pushed. That was the last election they ever had. And in that election, the only opposition was the Palestinian Authority. They threw people off rooftops. So they liquidated the opposition. And then over the next 20 years, the dupes and naives in the United States, but especially in Europe, gave them both directly and via the United nations relief organizations on refuge. They gave them billions of dollars. And what did they do with that money? Did they make a Dubai? No, they built a multi billion dollar subterranean torture labyrinth and hostage labyrinth. And then they began to wage war on Israel and they became the recipients of Iranian money. But as I said, On October 7, there was no violence. They had their own country, they had their own elected government. Their chief rival was actually the Palestinian Authority on the West Bank. They were on cool relations. And the Egyptians and the Jordanians were scared of Hamas because their chief patron was Iran. And they were one of three satellites, the Houthis themselves and Hezbollah. And there were about 15 to 20,000 day laborers who were going into Israel right across the border and making double or triple what they could make in Gaza. So everybody was talking about a normalization. I wasn't. I think our listeners weren't, because they know the nature of Hamas, but that kibbutz culture down by Gaza was the most liberal of all of the culture, I guess you would call it the rural culture in Israel. So what I'm getting at is if Hamas wanted a complacent, a compliant, a partner in peace, you could have asked for nobody more so than, than left wing kibbutz people right across the border who were, somebody was working in their fields and they were injured, they would take them to the er. They, it was considered a model. Even the Netanyahu government was saying that at least with Hamas, you know what they, what they're like and they're, they hate you and you can, you can, you know, deter them or deal. So there was peace after October 7th. How could you, when they butchered 1200 people? They have a movie coming out, I guess it's on Netflix. And then again they have a documentary and I've seen some of the trailers, but you know, beheading, torturing, and let's just dispel the, the idea that this was Done without the consent of the Gazan people, because we have people maybe 5 to 600. When they heard that the flimsy, I want to accentuate that flimsy border wall was destroyed, they flocked in to rape, kill, murder, loot Israelis several miles into Israel. And then when they were afraid the IDF would finally and belatedly come and they all fled back through the holes in the fence, they were treated as conquering heroes, returning heroes. And any hostages they had, they, Hamas had to protect them from, from their own people because they thought they were prized and valuable and they would prove to be valuable. But the Gazan people, who now we are told had nothing to do with this. They were all behind it. They were trying to kill or assault the hostages before they went subterranean. So my point is, take away October 7th and they wouldn't have any Israelis in Gaza. And it's sort of like they started it. And anybody who knew Israel and the history of Israel and the thin margin of error that it has to survive would know they were not going to tolerate that. And so I'm sorry, but I know a lot of people are very angry about Gaza and everything. But my final thought, Jack, is if you have an enemy who is just murdered, raped, butchered, tortured people, necrophilia, beheading, you name it, every medieval conception possible of horror was perpetuated. And then they go back and they dig themselves into a hole, as I said, kind of like the labyrinth of the Minotaur way down in there. And the only openings are of three types. They're under moss, they're under skulls, and they're under hospitals. Then you tell me how you're going to bring them to account. When I was in Iraq, twice during the Iraq war, I went, I flew over the first time, Fallujah, and then I went on ground to some of these cities where the US Marines had to go route out ISIS and Sons of Sodom. And they looked like a moonscape. They really did. And anytime you have an urban population and there's terrorists in them, much less under the ground, somebody who criticizing Israel should just tell me what they were supposed to do. Because the left never tells us that. They're just supposed to say, oh, okay, we were there in your country 20 years ago because of terrorism. And after the 67 and 73 war, yeah, nobody wanted Gaza, so we were occupiers. And you settler colonials, okay, and then you butchered all of us when we left and gave you back the country. And you had your election, you had your billion dollars of aid. And so you butchered us, so we'll just call it even. That's what they thought. I don't think so. It's like Pearl Harbor. It's like saying, well, you dropped the bomb on Hiroshima and they only killed 2,500 people at Pearl Harbor. No, they started a world war and they were ready to kill a million more Americans if we invaded. And I guess they sowed the wind and reaped the whirlwind, so to speak, in biblical terms, but I'm pretty adamant about that. I think that Israel could have done this, they could have done that, they could have done that. But I don't believe anything Hamas says, any of the figures that they cite, any of the incidents that they relate. I don't believe anything. And after listening yesterday to a Palestinian apologist scream and yell, I'm even more jaded. And that's. That's sort of what I feel. So the point is that if by the standards that the British have used, that standards that the Turks have used, if you. If you look at what had happened in Azerbaijan and the recent ethnic cleansing of Armenians, if you look at the US military, what they had to go through in Iraq and Afghanistan, if you look at any counterinsurgency effort, I think most scholars who have looked at Gaza, the civilian death rate versus the rate of terrorists killed is not inordinate. If anything, it's less. Surely in the Ukraine, Russian war, we are not telling the Ukrainians to text people on the receiving end of a missile or drone going into Russia. And we are not saying to the Ukrainians, you have to have a ceasefire. We're not saying to the Ukrainians, you have to have a coalition government. We're not saying to the Ukrainians that we're going to suspend military aid to you unless you do this and this and this, we are doing that to the Israelis. So I don't know how to put it otherwise, but it's been two years. And final assessment is, if we had this conversation on October 7th, it was pretty bleak after what they had done, killing and murdering these innocents. And Iran was on the edge of getting a bomb. We were told that the invincible Hezbollah was on the march and that Hasad was solid as a rock, he's a Russian tributary. Nobody knew what to do with the Houthis. We were told that Hamas itself had eight or nine thousand rockets. We were told that between Iran, the Hezbollah, the Houthis, and. And Hamas, that they would blanket the skies of Israel with 200,000 missiles, rockets and drones and now, two years later, for the foreseeable future, there is no Iranian bomb. It's been humiliated. Tehran has. It has no air defenses. The US And Israel went at their leisure through it. Hezbollah has been, I don't know, decimated. That's an underestimate. It's more than 1 in 10 of their ranks, maybe 4 out of 10, their leadership has been liquidated. If there is no more Syria, Assad dynasty, it's over with after more than a half a century. It's maybe a mess in Syria, but it's not the Assad's. If you look at Hamas, I think they've killed the Israelis, have killed the top seven or eight, even the billionaire class, some of them in Qatar. And the Houthis, every time they send a rocket, they lose a port facility or a power plant. And I think they're starting to get the message. It's a stupid thing to go tit for tat with Israel. And the United States government is decidedly on Israel's side. And because of all that, the deterioration in the ability of Israel's enemies to fight back, there may be peace. It'll be peace that Hamas has a choice between either surviving and maybe facing exile or rejecting the peace terms and allowing Israel to go down the list. That list is in the hundreds and they have the names of all of these people. And I'm sure if there is no peace, they're going to bring every single one who was anyway responsible, culpable for October 7th to account. And that's about it. Jack?