Bad Hasbara - The World's Most Moral Podcast - 176: He's The DJ I'm The Rabbi, with Rabbi David Mivasair

Episode Date: January 28, 2026

Matt and Daniel are joined by Rabbi David Mivasair to read the day’s events right-to-left with a man who knows from Torah. They cover deadly phones, coordinated state terror messaging, and journey east of Gondor into Mordor to poke at the eye of Ungar-Sargon.Please donate to Connecting Gaza: https://www.connectinggaza.org/New Bad Hasbara Merch: https://estoymerchandise.com/collections/bad-hasbara-podcastSubscribe to the Patreon https://www.patreon.com/badhasbaraWhat’s The Spin playlist: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/50JoIqCvlxL3QSNj2BsdURSkad Skasbarska playlist: http://bit.ly/skadskasbarskaSubscribe/listen to Bad Hasbara wherever you get your podcasts.Spotify https://spoti.fi/3HgpxDmApple Podcasts https://apple.co/4kizajtSupport this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/bad-hasbara/donationsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Hey, everybody and welcome to Bad Hasbara. World's Most Moral Podcast once again. That's right. Back again. Back again. My name is Matt Lebe. I will be your most moral co-hosts for this podcast. For at least one more episode, my name is Daniel Matt. I haven't changed it as of yet. Melling some change. He's on an episode to episode contract. You know, like every episode he has to re-up. We got to meet up with a lawyers and discuss whether or not he wants to do the next one, just over and over and over again. I'm under no, I feel no compulsion to have a long-term, stable identity either. Who I am is subject to change.

That's how I feel about myself, too. Yeah, exactly. Enjoy the me you see before you. The current incarnations of us. That's right. That's right. And you can see various different versions of us depending on what podcasts we're on. Sometimes I'm on this podcast where I am very serious and sometimes,

I am on a TV rewatch podcast where I am disgusting. Sometimes I'm both. But anyways, thank you so much for being here, guys. Give us five stars in a review wherever that is possible. And also shout out to producer Adam Levin on the ones and twos, keeping us honest with the lower thirds, kaironning it up. Subscribe on YouTube, all the podcast apps.

I said that already. Get yourself a shirt. bad as barra.com you can get yourself a bad has barra shirt that has the it's not the logo on it but it has a USB stick this is bad as bar the the world's most moral podcast because as we all know Israel has given so much to the planet I mean not just ways not just USB sticks not just Israeli salad but also this podcast and we thank you from the bottom of our hearts for giving us this podcast. Today's episode is brought to you by Connecting Gaza.

Connecting Gaza is a global network of compassionate individuals united in support of Palestinian families in Gaza as they endure genocide. Through direct funding, they provide life-saving access to food, clean water, shelter, medical care, and other essentials. You can give your money right now, now by going to connect connecting gaza.org click the link either in the description or type it in c-o-n-n-n-e-t-t-t-t-i-g-a-g-a-a-org do it now they need the money more than we do we're going to hear some more about that we are we are in just a bit that's right from from our guests and yeah and if you do have the means to do uh both a donation to connecting Gaza and to something else,

why don't you go to patreon.com slash bad as barra and get an extra episode of this podcast every week. I mean, remember the first one? How about another one? That's how we do it. Double. Double your dose of Matt and Daniel and Adam. And if you're pressed for time, listen to both episodes at once. queue up the main episode on YouTube on your laptop. And meanwhile, put one earphone in, listen to the Patreon episode and you can just you know it's like speed reading you know that's right you they actually harmonize they harmonize together you know like the uh flaming lips war album i feel like that's a correct reference didn't they have an album that should you had to play all the records all at the same time and they all harmonized probably i didn't just sounds like sounds like

something they would do yeah i didn't just invent that that would be crazy though if that no one has ever done that and i just invented that just now in which case i own that idea no one else do it. I won't either though. Daniel, speaking of records all playing at the same time, what's the spin? Relatively brief segment today. Just first of all, a bonus spin from last time movie soundtracks. I forgot this one, Juice, featuring Tupac. I don't think he's actually on the soundtrack. He was in it, but, you know, Eric B. That's hilarious. No, the Ledge. Big Daddy Can. I might be wrong about that, but I don't see his name on here. Yeah, great soundtrack. Okay, we just lost

Sly Dunbar, great reggae drummer, percussionist. I didn't know. ubiquitous figure in popularizing reggae music. So here are some albums he's been involved with. Peter Tosh, Equal Rights. He played on here. Have you ever heard of Sly and Robbie, Matt, like the Sly and Robbie remix? So him and Robbie Shakespeare, the bass player were a team. And they produced a lot and they did a lot of remixes. Anyway, that's who he was. So yeah, he plays on this album, Peter Tosh, where Peter Tosh says, I don't want no peace. I want equal rights and justice. I like that. Yeah, he was the, he was the based member of the Whalers. I like that. I like that. He was a little bit more lib friendly. Oh,

I like, you know, Bob Marley always, from what I gathered, he was sort of the Paul McCartney of the you know. Yeah, yeah. He just wants to sing songs about puppets playing. Little birds saying everything's going to be okay. Little birds playing in underwater places. Are you playing a Bob Riley record in the background? That was an uncanny impression.

That's, what can I say? I'm really good at impressions of musicians that I love. This is an album by reggae great Horace Andy from later in his life. Sly and Robbie play on it as well. Horace Andy's great. I first heard him on a massive attack record. Grace Jones, nightclubbing, produced, I believe, by Slan Robbie,

or they play on it. Look at this. Look at this face. She was badass. Look at that. She's so fucking cool. Slide Dunbar plays percussion on this Rolling Stones album from the 80s undercover.

Not a great album, but a couple of great songs. He also played on Mick Jagger's solo album. She's The Boss, which I used to have I sold because it sucked. Damn, that's crazy that you sold an album. I sell records to make room for other records.

Okay, I guess that does make sense. Yeah, yeah, you got to keep quality control up, you know? Sure. And then a couple of records that aren't featuring him or even about him, but they have the name Sly. Sly and the Family Stone is a riot going on. That's the Sly that I know. And the aforementioned Massive Attack, the album Protection, has a song called Sly,

which for all I know is a tribute to him, but I don't know that. Okay. So great record, though, massive attack. Straunch Palestine advocates, the British group. Yes, I know. It's been exciting to see. I follow them on Twitter. And I always love me some British musicians for Palestine. There's something about it that just, well, I guess it's because it's more, I don't want to use the word ubiquitous, because it clearly isn't ubiquitous anywhere in the West.

But more prevalent. in the UK, you just see it so much more often. That's why you see the entire cast of Game of Thrones is all like pro-Palestine. And of course, they're all British or some sort of European. And then of course, if you're an American, and, you know, like, not for nothing,

but you don't really hear much about Palestine from Peter Dinklage. He's the one American on that show. He's just like, nothing. You'd hope he would. You would hope. I got Brian Eno up there in the corner as well. He's cool to.

He's cool too. He organized the Wembley concert for Palestine. Anyway, that, my friend, is the answer to your direct question. What is the spin? That's the spin, maybe. Now we know what the spin is. Before we introduce our guest, we have some personal news on this podcast that, well, we'll start off. Maybe before you subscribe to Patreon, hear us out on this one.

You're just buyer like just as a consumer you have the right to know you have the right to know you know everyone should should know and I honestly think I think you'll all be very excited about this news. I think so just the main news here is that that Barry Weiss plans to tell staff today that she's adding new podcasters and writers as CBS contributors including some from the free press like the conservative historian. Nile Ferguson. Yeah, what a peculiar way to spell that. And popular science podcasters Andrew Huberman and Peter Atia. And we have, of course,

Yeah, we have some great, great news. We are moving to CBS. That's right. They bought our podcast pitch. Now, we changed it. They just, yeah, they had a few notes. And we were, you know, look, we're collaborative, we're open.

we are not so precious that we say, oh, we created this podcast and we know what it is. No, yeah. And Barry. Well, we get to keep most of the idea intact. Completely intact. The orange branding. That's right. Even Netanyahu as part of the logo.

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yeah, I'm going to be baking Republican bagels. That's right. So Adam would be doing that. The only difference is that's the spin is only going to be Matisjahoo. That's right. That's right.

And because we are starting a CBS podcast called Good Hezbarah. It's the same podcast except for, you know, when we tell the stories. And we're telling the same stories that we do every week. We'll cover the same things. We're reporting the same news. But after we've reported it, we'll say, and that's true and good. And then move on to the next story. So our commentary.

What A-Lone said? Yeah. I'll have what he's had. And I'm pointing to a masked gunman from the IDF. You know, so same podcast. Obviously, I know some of you are disappointed because, you know, this whole podcast is like about being anti-genocide. But to me, I look at this and I go like, well, everyone deserves a chance to hear the news that they want to hear. You know what I mean?

everyone deserves a chance to sell out and make some money that's what I say life is about growth I mean anyone who stayed like that's what we said

at the beginning I wasn't even connecting the two but like this this obligation we feel to stay our true selves you know this construct of like Oh your heart

be who you are whatever What does that mean really You know? Yeah for me Materially what does it mean you know But go ahead for you

In our case, so far materially, it's meant 50.1,000 subscribers on YouTube. That's right. Would there be something so terribly wrong if we had, you know, 500.1? Yeah. No, that would be a good thing. That's good for everybody, you guys. You guys, that's good for everybody. And also, you know, Barry Weiss, here's the thing about her.

I used to think she was terrible. But then she gave me money. And I was like, what? maybe she is kind of cool after all. That's crazy. Yeah, there was this moment. I remember distinctly. It was when the check cleared.

Yes. That it just kind of, she just a different light. It was weird how, I just like, I don't think they're really connected, but I had the same thing where all of the sudden I was just like,

wait a second, maybe I got this wrong, you know? Well, I remember that we were, we were on a beach together in Cabo and we clinked daquiry glasses. That's right. That's right. And we just, there was this something passed between us and it was just this knowledge that nothing

would ever be the same again and however it was before, fuck that, it's worth forgetting because... That's right. So shout out to CBS out here acquiring podcasts, including good Hasbara, the world's most moral podcast, wink, wink. And

we, look, we get to keep the subheading. The sub-tides. of the show stays the same. It's still the world's most moral podcast, except for... Unironically. Unironically. And, you know, to quote an album

by the Dilliger Escape Plan featuring Mike Patton, irony is a dead scene. We're looking forward to some goddamn sincerity on this channel. That's right. That's right. Yeah, so that's all great news. I got to say

to put this bit to rest I saw a, there's a new category of the Golden Globes called Best Podcast. And I think what won it was like an Amy Polar podcast that she probably just started. That's just her interviewing her famous friends. As if society wasn't polarized enough. Right. Right. And, you know, you start seeing more and more of the streaming services, doing podcasts and stuff like that.

And all I could think to myself is like, you know, I'm just so glad that we've chosen such a, I don't know, a path to stardom. There's nothing that says you will have a flourishing Hollywood career than doing an anti-Israel podcast. So shout out to all of you out there who have podcast hopes and dreams. Remember, all you have to do is sell Sherry's. Berries, that underwear company, and your soul. All right, with that being said, it is time to introduce our wonderful guest. We were talking about connecting Gaza, and now we are connecting you with somebody who is involved with that very charity.

He is a Canadian activist rabbi and a member. What's it up with all the Canadians on this show recently? I mean, I think it's like, I think it's because you are Canadian and there's some sort of, sort of like Canadian brotherhood thing going on. I don't know. As an American, I just sit back and watch. It's an outreach program to help Canadians get through the winter months.

Oh, I love that. He is a member of independent Jewish voices. Ladies and gentlemen and everyone else, welcome to the podcast, Rabbi David Mivisar. What? Oh. Did he freeze? Oh, there he is.

There he is. He's here. Hi. Hi, can you hear us? Uh-oh. Right at the moment of connection. Internet connection problems. Oh, no.

He was crystal clear backstage. I know. It's, you know, as soon as he came up, then it starts recording his audio and video. All right, here we go. He's back. He's back. All right. Hey.

Hi. Hi. Hi. How are you doing? I'm so glad to be here. Great to have you. Thank God. So happy to have you. Yeah. Yeah. You're in the middle of thanking God. Thank God for what? For how I am.

Which actually, you were talking earlier about a stable ID and a stable identity of yourself and made me think about what God says in the Torah. Moses says to God, Moses says to God, when they ask me, who should I tell them, told me all this? And God's answer was, Ehiya, Asher, Ejia, which is hard to translate, but it means, I will be what I will be.

I am becoming what I am. So it's not I am that I am, it's not I am that I am. It's I will be what I will be. I always hear it translated in the present tense. That's a little simplistic. That's Popeye. Right, right. You're thinking about having a stable identity or not having a stable identity.

That's like God had the same thought. You know, Rabbi, one of my earliest memories of you, because I knew you when I was a kid or a teenager in Vancouver, you were the rabbi of Orshalom where my sister had her bat mitzvah. and you know, you were friends with my parents. And I'm going to ask you about those times because I'm curious to know your political development since then because I remember you somewhat differently

than your current political identity now, not so opposed, but at a different spot as I was, you know? That's right. But one of my earliest memories is I'm almost certain this was you. And if it was, if it was Daniel Siegel, I apologize, but I'm almost certain it was you. we were at some dinner, or maybe it's a story my mom told, and something happened, and I don't know who it was. It might have been my dad for all I know who said, God damn it.

And under your breath, very gently, you said, God bless it. Oh, I love that. Which? Does it sound like you? Does that sound like you? I don't know. I don't think so. Okay.

You know what? You know what? I remember other things your dad said that had major impact on the trajectory of my politics. Talk to us about that. Yeah. Yeah. So I don't know how much people know. Gabor Matae.

Of course, he's a very well-known person. He would, he challenged me and criticized me. I want to say privately. say privately, very appropriately, individually, you know, would talk to me about things where he thought I was, I wasn't doing... He didn't call you out on TikTok? He didn't call me out in front of anybody except myself. And there's a, and at the time, he didn't change my mind. I'll fill in some details, you know? Yeah. Years later, I realized God was right. And one of those things was This was in the time frame that you would remember.

I don't know if you were in town at the time. But I wanted to build relationships with Palestinians. And it was not easy to do in the position I was in at those times. And I kind of broadened my horizons and said, you know, I'll build relationships with Muslims. At least that's something. It's like moving in the right direction. And I was working on that. And Gabor came to me and said, you know, what's the point?

The people you really should be talking to are the other Jews. You know, you need to talk to the other Jews and move this community. And at the time, I just resisted that. It's not what I wanted to do. I didn't even think it was really very possible. So I pursued what I thought was it. But later, I realized, you know, he's actually exactly right. And, you know, I think that that may be a kind of underlying premise of your,

your podcast, you know, who... Well, we, we are talking to everybody, but we are putting intra-Jewish... I mean, look, 30, 35 years have elapsed since then, of course, and we're in a different situation, and the many needles have moved.

And so, you know, there's a time and place to everything, you know, to everything there's a season, and I think we're living in this season of a time of more candor, more, you know, less giving of a fuck and more bold urgency.

And so part of what we're doing is we're having some of those intra-Jewish conversations in plain view of everybody. Not only, we also talk to plenty of Muslims, Christians, and unaffiliateds on the podcast, but we're doing the thing we were always told not to do, and many minority groups are told not to do, which is don't air your dirty laundry in public.

Well, we're not the ones airing it. We're trying to apply some stain remover to it and to help people feel more sane in this situation. Matt, were you going to say something there? Well, I was going to say that one, I think the advice that Gabor gave you, or I don't know how, is it Gabbar or Gabor? I like both.

Neither is true, but keep going. I call it Gabor. Gabor is right. Gabor is right. I can't tell the difference between all three of those pronunciations. He once got mail addressed to Gerber, which I like very much. I like that. That would make you the Gerber baby.

I'm the Gerber baby, yeah. You can be the Gerber mate. That's right, the Gerber mate. Yeah, I think it's really important advice. It's actually something that I hear a lot and agree with from a lot of people, which is the work inside of the community seems to be the it's the one place, at least in our Jewish institutions where it seems to have been completely abandoned. Like people, it's a lot of Jews in the diaspora speaking outside of the community and

with each other, but abandoning the institutions completely. You probably represent one of the rare exceptions that, you know, of this in that you are, from what I know, still someone within a Jewish institution, at least the very least, are you still affiliated with your temple or synagogue or no? Okay. He's an itinerant nomadic rabbi. He's a desert rabbi. Actually, Matt, what you just said is that we've abandoned in these institutions. And I think that's partially true. I think more the truth is that they've kicked us out.

They don't want us. And I, you know, I'm speaking to you right now from Hamilton, Ontario. Where I live, I moved to Hamilton from Vancouver seven years ago. I know from insiders that when the CEO of the Jewish Federation of Hamilton learned that I was coming here, he had an emergency meeting. to talk about this emergency that this radical anti-Semitic hate person is moving to their city

and what can they do about it and about two years ago every person employed by any institution in the Jewish community in Hamilton signed a letter that was sent to city council, the police department, the school board, the libraries, the park department,

basically putting me in Kherem, meaning don't talk with him. He supports terrorism. He supports violence. He hates the Jews. Never even saying that I'm a rabbi. I think it just clued in for me that Kherom and

Haram are the same word. Yeah, I was just, I was saying, the Arabic word. Yeah, yeah. Also another word that's related to those word, harem. Because those women, those women were haram. Oh, I didn't know that. Look at this.

Yeah, yeah. But that's amazing. I mean, let me, let me, let me, please. I just want to repeat the point that I saw y'all like nodding. Like, it's not that we abandon. We've been, we have been made persona non grata. And for me, that goes all the way back. I remember when I was in high school, I was the president of the temple youth group in Baltimore at Oab Shalom Temple.

And there was things at that time that I thought in the late 1960s, that the Jewish Federation didn't want to hear, didn't want to set out loud and marginalized. And even, I'll say another couple things because whatever. Please do. So when I left Vancouver after being there for 23 years, I at that time was the longest serving synagogue rabbi in this city. I can say Phil Bregman had left by that time.

He retired, right? I was never once in 23 years, even though I was the rabbi of a synagogue there, invited to speak at a federation function. I was never invited to teach a course. The Federation never referred a reporter to talk to me, right? And part of what was going on for me for many years at that time when Gabor had that conversation with me, I was trying to keep a place at the table. meaning when the rabbinic association of Vancouver had a meeting, I had a place in the meeting, right? And I was there.

So I could like speak into that space. And there was a moment, there was a pivotal moment when I realized it's not worth it, that I was self-censoring maybe 90% of what I knew to be true and not saying it out loud with the idea that, by doing that at least the 10% I was going to say would get heard. It's a certain moment. It's kind of analogous logic to the Israeli soldiers who reason, well,

but if I refuse to serve in the territories, someone more right-wing and racist than maybe better, better me than the alternative. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So anyway, you know, you're kind of leading into asking it, you said, Daniel, like how I've changed from when you know me, Right, because you're talking about, you said you were self-censoring 90% of the things you knew.

One of the interesting things about you, you know, in contradiction, contradistinction, I think, to Rabbi Bregman, who was my bar mitzvah rabbi, and most of the other rabbis of Vancouver at the time, you'd lived in Israel. You'd raised your daughters in Israel, yeah? At least part of the time. No, yeah, well, yeah, actually, no, no, by the time you knew me, yes, my son was born there. Yeah. Which means that we were living there when he was born. That's how that happens. Yeah.

And then... Not always. There's a thing where people fly in order to have a sob. And then we were there again. We were there again and we were there again. I lived there for four years in my life and I've been there many more time. So you know of what you, you knew of what you didn't speak. Yeah.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So what was that, where were you at back then? What were you willing to say? What were you not willing to say? Yeah. And how did that pivotal moment change you from then? You know, I can remember when I was the rabbi of Orshalom, very delicately, carefully, bringing speakers from Israel. It would be like a Jewish Israeli and an Arab Israeli working on the same project, like very good projects.

There's one called hand-in-hand schools. They call it bilingual. education where Palestinian children and Jewish children are in the same classroom with a Palestinian teacher and a Jewish teacher. And I knew these people because I lived there. And I thought this is what needs to be. Like this is pretty, I could say like revolutionary. It's actually evolutionary, although it's actually completely blocked and not going anywhere. I can say that 30 years later. But just talk to the board of the synagogue. Would you like to have those people come and speak in our synagogue? Oh yes, that would be really

wonderful. You know, so we did. And it was just step by step. And this is the hippie synagogue of Vancouver. Or Shalom was the rad-a-tide-leftist, you know, the ones who sent their kids to the leftist summer camp that I went to. Right. Exactly. It's the one that was like really out on the margin. I would say in all of Canada, of course, that's where Vancouver is actually. literally on the edge of Canada. All the people of my generation that wanted to get away from their parents moved to Vancouver. And then they had kids, right? But anyway, no, that's, so that was like, just tip, tipto, try to make, put little ideas in people's minds.

And if I went too far, I would get kicked out, which is what did happen. So tell me about that. What was the line? Where was too far? too far for me to keep playing that game. Or that got you kicked out? No, that got you kicked out. You know, you say you talked to the board.

That was cumulative. You know, so here's the thing that I feel like I've learned from that experience. I think to, in most synagogues, I think the greatest impetus is to maintain what's called Shalombite. And Shalombite, you know, it means peace in the house. Like, we're all getting along. Everybody's getting along with each other. Like, nobody's upsetting anybody. You know, we can all come on Shabbat morning and we can sing and we can pray.

It's like, you can't, that's so insane to me. You can't say, hey, you know, let's not discuss religion at the dinner table. If the dinner table is the house of worship already. That's how it is. That's how it is. And of course, the most, the most, the most, the most, the most, reactionary or conservative members of any congregation or family or group will dictate the terms of peace.

Right, of course. You don't get to say, hey, I can't have peace inside me when we're not talking about this. You got it. Not only that, but it does get talked about. A certain band on the spectrum, that's allowed, but beyond that, not allowed, because that's not, ooh, people will be up there.

Did Or Shalom say the prayer for Israeli soldiers on Saturdays? I know the Temple Shalom did. Not that. Right, right. But also to even bring that up as a question, to challenge that at Temple Shalom, it would make so much trouble. So just, Matt, you called me into his office once to tell me that your father's a great man. He helps great many people, but he's out of his mind on Israel. And you shouldn't listen to a thing he says.

Wow. And I moved into Rabbi Bregman's home the next day. Check me in. Did he adopt you? What was he thinking? Little orphaned Danny. So, you know, Matt, I'll just go back to some of the dynamic that I wasn't enough aware of is that there were people who were in tension with what I was doing.

Like I just said, I could go to the board and say, hey, how about having these speakers from Israel? But kind of sub-Rosa, they knew that was a critique of Israel. They didn't even want that set, but they couldn't say that they didn't want that set, right? And ironically, what happened is I went on a sabbatical to where, to Israel. I was in Israel, like, for a year, and when I was away on sabbatical, people replaced that board. And even though there was still two years left in my contract, they decided to end it. Wow. And it was all very, very quiet because nobody wants to.

upset anybody. Sure. Right. So one of the things I feel like I learned from that, I mean, seriously, to survive in public office where you run in an election, I think in the U.S., if you win 50% plus one, you win the election. In Canada, sometimes you can win the election with 35%. Right.

You still win that election. You can be the MP with 35% of the vote. To stay in a position as a rabbi of his. synagogue I think probably 80% of the people at Orshalom were really proud of what we were doing. They were like, whoa, they really identified with it. They wanted their synagogue to be doing that. But there was probably 5% of the people. It was like a burr under their saddle and they could like never, never accept it.

But also the environment was they couldn't say that. It couldn't be any discussion about that. And at a certain moment, there was like a, almost like a coup. Yeah. I mean, I don't want to use the other C word cabal, but does, I mean, if you're doing a cabal, just say you're doing a cabal. Yeah, yeah. Just to ask you, inside Canadian baseball or I guess hockey question about,

you were talking about elected leadership, what do you make of Avi Lewis's campaign? You know, we had Eve Engler on the show who has been unceremoniously denied access to those debates and I don't I don't like to see that but uh avi lewis who's Naomi Klein's husband is carrying uh what's left of the torch of Palestinian solidarity and seems to be standing a strong chance to win what do you what do you make of that well really important thing to say is anyone who's a Canadian citizen who wants to vote for Avi Lewis or anyone else in that contest needs to register as a member of the NDP by tomorrow it costs 10 bucks to join right It depends which province you're in.

In Ontario, you can do it for five, which is what I did. And by the way, tomorrow is today. Tomorrow is today. You know what? I was going to say that. I learned if I say tomorrow, that has no reference points in reality. But if I say Wednesday, January 28th, if you want to vote, I have to say this, seriously, Avi or any of the others, they're all good. That's something wonderful about the NDP.

the five who they led into the race are all good, and Eve Engler is also good, but we can't vote for him, and maybe by the time we can vote, be Anka Mugienyi will also be a candidate, maybe not. But what do I think of Avi? Before I got on the show with you, and when I get off the show with you, I am working on his campaign.

And you might know, this will be of interest maybe to Canadians. I was supporting Eve so much. as a speaker at Eve rallies. You know, I got up in front of crowds and, like, you know, speak for Eve. I want Eve's ideas and his analysis and his knowledge and he's so sharp and so clear. And his critique goes beyond what anybody says. And I think it's quite correct.

And we need it in the discourse. But I have to say I would never vote for him to be leader of the party. I don't know if he could like, he's not a leader. leader. He's just not a leader. He's not like a cooperative work together guy to get things done. Avi is very, very affable and charismatic in the ways that, you know, you see someone like Zoran. His politics are overall very good in a breath of fresh air. But what makes him, what makes him who he is, what makes him effective and what put him there is, you know, you see his videos alerting New Yorkers to the storm we just had. and they just make you want to comply. They make you want to take part.

They make you want to include yourself in the community that is going through all this together. So I think Avi has some of that going for them. For me, I'll just say it's like right now, it's like the greatest hope for change in Canadian politics. If we can get Avi as a leader of the NDP, that'll change the NDP. And then that will have a ripple effect

and it'll change other things. So, yeah, thanks for the question. Of course. Do you want to tell us a little bit about connecting guys? You know, I want to put in a plug for that amazing synagogue where you and I first met each other. Avi Lewis's mother-in-law is an active member of that synagogue. Bonnie Klein. Bonnie Klein, right?

So I got to know Bonnie Klein in the very same context where I got to know Ray and Gabor Monti. And it was an amazing collection of people. I was so blessed and so fortunate to have eight years of my life as the rabbi that synagogue. And there was a lot of learning, you know, learning about real life with real people. And I was just saying, for example, as a rabbi, if you have 80% of the synagogue liking you, but 5%, like, oh, can't stand you, depending who that 5% is, you might not last there. You know, that's very different from being, say, the governor of a state or the premier of a province. As long as you get in there, you can hold on to power until the next election, right? It doesn't sound like a fun position to be in.

Before we pivot to the news of the day, news of the week, can you tell us a little more about the charity that we featured at the top, Connecting Gaza? I really want to do that. That's why I'm there, actually. Great. Connecting Gaza, it's actually just what Matt said in the beginning. It's a group of people.

There's over a hundred of us who are actively involved in it, who are directly supporting families in Gaza in two ways. So one way is very important is sending them money. They need money to buy the most essential, basic things, food, warm clothes, even things like firewood, so they can cook anything. Lately, tents, you know, they need money to do that, and we raise money. think we have raised over a million dollars by now and sent it. Wow.

The other way we support them that's really important is direct personal relationships. So the way we do this is each person there who's in a family has a what's up group with a bunch of us. There could be six, eight, ten, even 15 of us who are in a what's up group with them. And we write back and forth and even call each other, send pictures, send videos. We know their kids' names. We know their living situation. We know what they did before everything was destroyed. And this all came from a particular guy whose name is Rizek Abdujewad El Dremle,

who reached out to me about seven years ago on Facebook, because I would post stuff on Facebook about Palestine, and he's in Gaza. He's a photojournalist. He has three kids. And he just wrote to me. And he's like, hi.

You know, like, how are you? And I thought, cool, I'll just write with this guy in Gaza. I'll have like a life experience of writing to a guy in Gaza. And we wrote back and forth for a few months. Very interesting guy, really philosophical. One of the things I remember talking about is like, just like accident of,

birth, you know. I was born in America, in a middle-class Jewish family, never deprived of anything. I know I'm going to university. I will have a career. My life is like cool and fine, you know, not to say I never had any problems. That was my life. He was born in Gaza as a Palestinian. His life has never been fine, ever. He's never had a day of freedom. He's never had a day of having enough of anything. Anyway, lots of interesting conversation. And then at one day, he wrote to me,

and he said, brother, I'm so embarrassed to say this, but I wonder if you can help me. I can't feed my children. And I'm like, of course I'll help you. So I sent him $50. I was like, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you.

And then a few weeks later, I was like, I'm so embarrassed, but I can't feed my children again. Can you help me again? I'm like, okay, send you another $50. And that continued. And then I started thinking this is like actually no way to do this. Let me really help him. So I posted on Facebook, can anybody help me help this guy? And then people started helping me.

And then he's like, oh, well, I have this friend who he's so poor. he doesn't even have a phone, you know, and he's got three kids. Can you help him? And that's how this started about six years ago, just completely, organically, one person to another person, completely ad hoc, building kind of a network that people today call it mutual aid. But it's not, it's not mutual in the sense anybody's helping me, except they're helping me like in my nashama. that I feel like, whoa, you know, I am actually helping people in this whole thing. Like, you know, I've been helping people in Gaza. You might remember May 2021, Israel attacked and bombed and smashed high-rise buildings,

killed over 2,000 people. I've been in touch with people there all through that time. And so this grew out of that. And part of what's part of what is going on for me, I want to say two more things, and then I'll stop. I know I'm talking a long time. That's great. But, you know, actually three Jewish guys talking here,

and I know where Gabor was born and what circumstances he was born in, and just anybody doesn't know he was born in Hungary during the Holocaust, where at the end of the Holocaust, I have met in my life many Jewish people older than me who aren't here anymore in this world, who survived. The Holocaust, maybe their entire families were wiped out. They survived because someone helped them.

We call those people Khashidei Umo to Alam, the righteous among the nations of the world. And it could have been like a Polish woman walking down the street in her town, and there's a big wall, and there's a ghetto behind the wall, and she just takes a loaf of bread and throws a loaf of bread over the wall. And somebody got to eat that day and didn't die a starvation. right or somebody passes off a baby and they take the baby and they just hide the baby and pass the baby on and I might have met that baby later in life after they grew up and I was younger you know

so I I consciously think that everything millions of us are doing has not stopped one bullet or one bomb everything we're doing hasn't stopped Israel from what it's doing very analogously to nobody could stop the Nazi war machine. The Nazis did that for years, even though massive armies were fighting them, bombing them, tanks. Nobody could stop them. But all that time, there were just people on the ground that helped other people. Not enough of them.

Not all of the help in the end actually helped, or they might have sustained them for a couple of days and they all got killed. But there were people who helped people while the massive atrocity was going on. And I think that is what we can do. Every single thing that we do in connecting Gaza has direct impact. Like I did last night, if I sent $100 to Mesa, who's a young woman with three children, with no husband, living in a tent for two years,

she gets $100 and she can buy some food for her children. We did it. We did it. That did that. Right? And then the other thing I want to say is I know that after the camps were liberated, they found scrawled on the wall, you know, like, if only someone knew, you know, I'm trapped in Auschwitz or in Treblinka or Medanek.

if only someone new. And we provide that. Those people in those tents, in those storms, they write to us and they tell us what's going on day by day in their lives. And we can't fix it, you know, but at least we can, there was this. Well, may I just say something about that? There was this trauma expert.

I want to quote a famous guy. your father who said something about empathic witnessing. That's his language. Empathic witnessing. If that's as much as we can do, then let's do that. Yeah, for sure. So that's connecting Gaza. And we're open to people to join us.

The more people that join us, the more people we can take care of. Excellent. So that's connectinggaza.org, yes? the last thing I want to say to close the chapter on this segment and then we'll move on is just what makes this situation well so many things make it you know the modern version of of the horrors you're you're you're alluding to from the 40s but I mean talk about if only someone new everybody knows that's the thing only people like you and your organization and in our various

attenuated, indirect way, I guess, us and whoever else is actually doing something about it. I mean, we're the ones who are acting on that knowledge. And we're living in a time where knowing is not enough. It turns out that if they only knew isn't sufficient. It's got to be if only they're they allowed their hearts to open. And what I like about what you're doing is you combine the charitable giving, you know, we all, at Hebrew, school came home with Sadaka boxes. And of course, the quarters we put in there went to plant, you know, invasive species in Palestine and kick Palestinians off their land. But we thought we were doing something good, you know. But charity in general, it's a good thing. But it's often done

at a remove where I can stay in the position of the powerful, where it's my virtue that's being, you know, the bank account of my feeling good about myself is being increased. That's the dividend end on my investment, as opposed to a model where to help someone is to know them and to connect with them and to commune with them and to make yourself implicated in their well-being in a deeper way. And so there's something about that that has more protein, I think, morally speaking and ethically speaking and in terms of the Nashama factor, which is Hebrew for soul. Yeah.

Well, thank you for letting us know about connecting Gaza. and we have a link in our show description that people can click on and donate right now connecting gaza.org. So please, you, I mean, if that pitch doesn't do it for you, I don't know what will. But you mentioned, you alluded to,

oh, I'm sorry, go ahead. Just before you move on. Please. I want to say to anybody listening, if you can't give one penny, but your heart is open and you want to relate to people and just give them attention

and care and support and a little bit get to know them. You don't have to give any money. You know what I'm saying? Just get in touch with us. Take a little bit, but we will introduce you and we will put you together together with

other people. You won't be on your own, but you'll be part of a group of people who are caring. I just want to say like a few months ago, Rabbi Kat Zavis of the Beitikun Synagogue in Oakland, California, before Rocha Shana, thought this would be a really good project for her synagogue. She talked about it on Rocha Shana on Yom Kippur, and maybe 10 people from Beitikun Synagogue in Oakland, California, joined our project.

Amazing. Yeah. I mean, and we do, it's funny, as this podcast has gone along, I've noticed that the amount of listeners that we have that are active members of their synagogue, you know, has, I mean, it's, I wouldn't say it's a larger percentage than those who are disaffected Jews who no longer go to synagogue, but it's still a surprisingly, a shockingly large number. So, I mean, you know, if you are still someone who has kept all their connections within their Jewish religious institutions

please consider this consider this project consider it something that you can do and hey for everyone out there for a hefty donation to connecting Gaza me and Matt will fly to your scenario and we'll do an alia we'll do a constantly

absolutely that's right the same talet talus that's right baby I want to throw in one say before we started connecting Gaza basically it was just me and a bunch of people was all going through my personal bank account and on my Facebook page and everything. I woke up one morning, seriously.

I woke up, had a little notification on my phone. This was with GoFundMe, which I advised everyone do not deal with GoFundMe. But there's notification that it was a $25,000 donation to my GoFundMe account. I'm like, oh, that's got to be. That's fake. That's not real. Go back to sleep. And after I woke up, I thought, maybe I better like check it.

you know and like and it was it was um kairi irving wow kairi irving just gave 25 000 holy holy shout out to kairi yes yeah how quickly was he sent to an adel reeducation camp after that may well no no no no you're they're going after that's not a joke that's actually not a joke so he's still kairi irving is still doing a lot of good in the world yeah with the resources that he's been able to mobilize. Yeah. He's amazing. Yeah, he really is.

He's someone who, you know, one of the few NBA players who you see wearing Kaffia, wearing shirts, you know, supporting Palestine publicly. You know, he, and he's also gotten in some trouble for it. I mean, you know, he's gotten backlash for it. But yeah. We got to stand up and do what we can do. You know, like, we all need to find. find our own safety zone or zone of comfort, but we've got to push it.

Yeah, that's amazing. We need to find our lane, take the rock to the hoop. That's right, baby. You know, get those, get whatever baskets we can. Yeah. The lob is up there. It's just time for you to grab and throw it down, baby. So we'll lob that link out again for everyone to dunk it, connecting gaza.org.

Shout out to Kyrie. Shout out to Kyrie. I love that. You know, because for a while there, you know, like Kyrie's, one of the issues he had was that he was too online. So at one point he was looking at the flat earth stuff and thinking it might be possible. But then, you know, obviously he was like, no, okay, that's all stupid. But I love that he's still stayed an independent thinker. And he is someone who is supporting Palestine.

So he is not a flat earth and he is pro-Palestine. Just want to put that out there. You said a few things in that pitch, Rabbi David, that, as you probably know, offended me. You're an offensive person. One of the things you did was you mentioned the Holocaust. That's your problem. Not mine. Yeah, well, I'm going to make it your problem.

I'm about to make it the world's problem. because we are going to talk about the connections between the Holocaust and anything else and how that is absolutely forbidden. It's verboten. It's verboten to connect the Holocaust. Do you stop connecting your own suffering, what I am doing to you, to what your descendants will do to Palestinians? Yes. The only time you can connect anything to the Holocaust,

is when something bad happens to Israel. In that case, fair game. So, we're going to be doing our much-loved section, Bad Ice Barra. All right. All right. So, yeah, a lot of ICE news, obviously, this week, and we need to talk about it.

Last week in Minneapolis, ice murdered another citizen in front of everyone. an ICU nurse who worked at the VA in Minneapolis. He was shot, I believe, 10 times. There's multiple videos of this murder that you can see. His name was Alex Pready, and you see him being wrestled to the ground and swarmed by several officers, one of whom grabbed his legally licensed sidearm,

which he kept in his waistband. You see them take away the firearm and then shoot him, 10 times while he is on the ground. We've all seen the video. We all know what I'm talking about here. When this happened, much like in the case of Renee Good, the American Hasbara machine

started ramping up and a narrative was spun. And I want to show you a video of both Christy Noem, the Secretary of Homeland Security, and what's his name? the bovine, bovino. Bovino, yeah.

Yeah. Bovino growth hormone. Yeah, bovino growth hormone. Both, here's their statement about this, not long after it happened, just in case you want to see any connections between Israeli Hezbara and American Hezbara. Here we go. An individual. An individual approached U.S. Border Patrol officers.

with a nine millimeter semi-automatic handgun. The officers attempted to disarm this individual, but the armed suspect reacted violently. Resisted, fearing for his life and the lives and safety of fellow officers. An agent fired defensive shots. Medics were on the scene immediately. Delivered medical aid to the subject, but the subject was pronounced dead at the scene.

This looks like a situation where an individual arrived at the scene to inflict maximum damage. where an individual wanted to do maximum damage and massacre law enforcement. Remember, you talked about our shows harmonizing when you play them side by side? Yeah, it's the same thing with anyone in the Trump administration doing a press conference.

Yeah, that's called Lying in Lockstep. That's right. Harmonize, something like that. Yeah, not only did they claim that he was brandishing a weapon and that all of the shots were defensive, even though we've all seen the videos, the multiple videos of him on the ground

when he is executed by ICE agent. They've also doubled down on it and called him a domestic terrorist, which is really kind of shocking. Okay, I do want to play one thing that happened on Saturday. This is at FEMA at a press conference there. Watch.

The White House has labeled the man who was killed in Minnesota as a domestic terrorist. Is that something you have? agree with and have you seen any evidence to back up that point? When you perpetuate violence against a government because of ideological reasons and for reasons to resist and perpetuate violence, that is the definition of domestic terrorism. This individual who came with weapons and ammunition to stop a law enforcement operation of federal law enforcement officers committed an act of domestic terrorist. So, I mean, you've got him being labeled a domestic terrorist. You've got

synchronized PR statements about the danger that this person posed immediately after we all see, he posed absolutely no danger. And of course, outrage everywhere about this incident. Everyone is seeing it. And unless you work for the administration or you are a maga partisan, everyone pretty much knows what they just saw. And I want to talk about that a little because I think it's important and it's relevant to what this podcast is about. This type of Hasbara is something that we have seen before. It is all very familiar. Everything that we've seen in Gaza,

everything that we see in the West Bank, and all of those who excuse it for Palestinians, we see them now doing the same thing but for the home front. And it's, I don't know how you guys feel about this, but when I see this, all I can think to myself is, well, they've trained us for two years. The mainstream media in general has trained us to expect an excuse that will make us feel better about what we just witnessed, about the clear power dynamic,

the difference between the parties and going, well, if they shot these people, there's probably a good reason for it. Yeah, it's true. And honestly, anyone who takes offense, well, you know, look, are American lives worth more than Palestinian lives? Are you a racist?

No, actually, American lives are worth, you know, as little as Palestinian. Palestinian lives. You know, like, you know, that the same, it turns out that we're all the wretched of the earth and deserve what's coming to us if we dare to stand up against powerful forces who have decided that their aims justify, you know, militarized brutality. Yeah. So, so there. I saw, I saw that Libby Davies posted, Libby Davies, for people I don't know, is from Vancouver and is a great leftist activist, a member of parliament for 20 years, but then retired.

She's very close to my age. And she wrote that her mother-in-law in her 90s wrote, My Blue Eyes Will No Longer Protect Me. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, and that's the interesting thing about it is, is the connections there as to like, when for the past two years, we have seen this type of Hezbara being, you know, broadcast all over, this type of immediate statement from the military or gunman in question,

telling you the excuses for why it needs to happen. These justifications aren't just done for like the courts, right? It's not just to serve a legal justification. for later when they eventually find themselves in some sort of hot water legally. It's actually also for the people who are watching at home so they can have something to hold on to not only like ignore what's happening, but to actively support what's happening. And part of that is also a little bit of self-soothing because you go like, okay, well, if I just, I don't, you know, drive a car near an ice agent.

if I just, you know, certainly don't have a weapon, then I'll be okay. If I'm not a Palestinian, you know, then I'm fine. And then you see more and more, anything will be excused. Everything will be excused. There is no limit to what way they're going to spin your death if you were killed by an ice agent. And that, to me, there's just so much spiritual connection and literal connection to what you see in Gaza and the way. Bank. The label of domestic terrorists is there very specifically not just to give you a legal excuse to dispossess someone of both their life and also their rights, but also for the people watching at home to go like, well, that guy's a terrorist. That guy is subhuman. That guy deserves to die, has less rights. You can say, well, what about the Second Amendment? As soon as he's called the domestic terrorist, he goes, he has no rights. He has no amendments. I am different. And, you know, you see a lot of the mainstream media sort of the liberal side of the mainstream media being rightfully outraged by this.

You see Dana Bash interviewing Bovino and saying like, hey, that's not what happened. Yet for two plus years, and to this day, they continue to make these exact same excuses for Palestinian deaths. And that to me, I say... And the New York Times still hasn't retracted their fabrications about mass rapes. They haven't retracted the screams without words. And now to try to stand on some alleged principle of, hey, we need to hold people in power accountable when they lie and run cover for a state-sanctioned murder, it rings pretty hollow. I mean, you showed two clips from government officials.

Bovino apparently is being put out to pasture in California. So that's some kind of victory. Well, you know, bovines love to be going out to pasture. But we do have a clip from someone who at least tries to style herself as nonpartisan. Yes. You know, and as we move into the sort of more center of things, we start to see, we start to see flashes of other kinds of Hasbara, the more st. Demonious, yeah, hypocritical. Just before we move on, I want just something occurring to me is that this is not a new

playbook. You know, I came of age at a time when Martin Luther King was called an outside agitator. He was called a terrorist, right? The mainstream of American society was trying to maintain its dominance, used that label, an outside agitator. And then I can think other things before my time. Labor organizers were called terrorists. You know, there was times the National Guard was brought in to put down strikes, and they actually would shoot dead workers who were on strike. When I was in high school, the National Guard shot dead students at Ohio State.

Right? So the idea that people who don't accept their subjugation are terrorists, it's been around a long time. Yeah. Yeah. And it's, you know, it is. I mean, even like the story of Jesus. Right. Sure.

Yeah. Or Isaiah. You know, Jeremiah. These, you know, just the power structure is there. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, and prophecy has never been profitable.

Yeah, that's true. But I mean, yeah, I think you're right. And it's funny to see people in any way shocked, but it's not a shock at this point to see people buying into this, to the point where, you know, now people have been, I don't know, they've been programmed to be able to justify the unjustifiable for so long that now they can look at a video and say like, well, what I'm seeing with my eyes is a lie. And if it's not a lie, there's a good reason for it.

And, you know, people can look at videos of Alex Prattie and Renee Good being killed and say, I see it differently now. But, I mean, just a quick example before I play the Batia video, here's one example of the type of ridiculous Hasbara that we've seen. for from ice or for the sake of ice. Here's a guy on Newsmax. I want to show you something else. Put that picture down. Just real quick, right? Put it away, if you don't mind, and take me full.

I want to show you something. Does that look like a gun? I think it does a little bit. It's a phone. It's black like most phones. That's crazy stuff. Okay. Not only is that a ridiculous.

thing to do on live TV. But he really hit the, like, the way he called that phone black. Black. Felt racist. I don't know what it was. Well, he learned it from his daddy, who was a former NYPD police commissioner. That's right. That's right.

But, yeah, I mean, this is the kind of stuff that, you know, we cover on this podcast all the time when it comes from Israel, when it comes from our mainstream media defending Israel. And you see this now for ICE. And obviously now it's become more of a partisan thing. Now people, you know, liberals are looking at this and going like, well, that's ridiculous. And of course we say, yeah, it's been ridiculous for a while. It's the fact that it's happening to us now, you know, I don't care when you get woke on what is happening.

But I will point out that like now it's two years of this shit happening. Yeah. And you owe us some woke back pay. Yeah, exactly. But here is Batya Unger Saragon. Batya, whose first name means daughter of God. Yeah, yeah. And the middle two names, no idea what they, no idea what they mean, but they sound great.

This is Batya talking about the same videos that we have all seen. And the right see these killings. in very different ways. You have the left-wing narrative, which is that these two people, Renee Good and Alex Preti, did nothing wrong that they were out there defending innocent people in a completely nonviolent way

and were murdered for standing up for the vulnerable. And then you have the right-wing version of it, exemplified by the administration, which is that these two people were domestic terrorists, who had come out in order to do violence. And I think that the truth of the matter, Natasha, is somewhere right in the middle. Obviously, both Renee Good and Alex Pretti

believed that they were doing the right thing that they were standing up for vulnerable, innocent people when in fact what they were doing was impeding law enforcement trying to detain violent criminals. And in the case of Alex Pretti specifically, what you saw was the gun, get taken away from him and then the president alluded to the specific gun that it was the

SIGP 320 perhaps possibly discharged and then the officers there thought that they were being attacked and they shot him just like in the case of Renee Good where she actually did strike the ice officer with her car and of course when it comes to whether a just a shooting is justified or not the question at stake is whether the law enforcement officer thought that their life was in danger and I think In both of these cases, you can see that that was very reasonable interpretation. Now, that's... I'm sorry, but I... I got to say, that was some pretty good slander.

Yes, it was. I mean, when you see something like this, all I can think of is this is the exact same type of middle ground Hezbara that has been the non-partisan standard for the main. media when it comes to crimes that are going on in the West Bank and crimes that are going on in Gaza. She almost has at this point, like she is the standard. She is consistently going for the truth lies somewhere in the middle where the dehumanization is still allowed of these individuals while simultaneously me feeling empathy for them. even as sub-humans, I feel empathy towards their stupidity that they allowed themselves to be

murdered. And she's smoothing all these lies, these slanders, these calumnies, while rocking a big ass Mug and David. And with the words Lemaan Shamo, I think, in Hebrew behind her, what does that mean? What is that? Rabbi? For God's sake. Literally for the sake of God. For fun sake. Have that in your consciousness. Wow. Yeah.

That is real. I like it. Was it a book behind her or was it just like a... It was like a little... A little plaque. A little plaque with the huge. She's getting heckled by her own plaque. For God's sake, Batya.

What are we doing here? It is... You're pointing out the fallacy of her saying. the truth is somewhere in the middle. Sometimes the truth is not in the middle. The truth is at one end. And they're constructing another end. Right.

So that's exactly right. So that the middle moves away from what's actually true. Yes. You know, and I'll just give, just in terms of my evolution that you kind of asked about half an hour ago or something. I used to think in terms of like, oh, the Jews and Israel and the Palestinians,

they're each guilty, they're each troubling each other. They're each contributing to the violence. And sometime, maybe 15 or 20 years ago, some Palestinian said to me, it all started because the Jews came and took our land. Yes. And I'm like, no, no, no, that's not true. No, no, that didn't happen that way. Yeah. But after, like, it kind of rattled around in my brain maybe for 10 years until it's like, oh, well, actually that is exactly what did happen.

Yes. Right? That's exactly what happened. And the more I learn about the actual real history, you know, from reading books like the ethnic cleansing of Palestine by Ilan Papei or state of terror by Suarez, the more, I realize it's even worse than I ever knew. You know, so this idea that, you know, if the truth is in the middle, it's like, no, actually, the truth happens to be on one end.

Yes. You know, the rest of that stuff's not true. You're so right about that. And I think that is the perfect way of putting it because you see that here in this case where she has, because the White House has constructed this narrative, this ridiculous Hasbara of, oh, he is a domestic terrorist who was there to do maximum carnage. Because you have, you've created that narrative and being an official, you've made it the official narrative of this. the government of the United States, Batia then gets to be the person who goes like, the truth is somewhere in the middle

because the White House's truth is so ridiculous. Yeah, her self-appointed job is to explain to the White House why some people disagree with them and to explain to the people who disagree with the White House why they deserve to die. And you see this, I think, in almost in a different way, but the exact same way, when it comes to Israel, Palestine, discussions, especially with people who, you know, were like the younger version of yourself,

but you see it in terms of timeline. So when you talk about, when you talk to a Palestinian who tells you about the Nakhban 48, you talk to anyone else who is a staunch defender of Israel. What they will do is send you a list of pogroms that happened in Arab states between the year 1100 and 1938 and so for them they are constructing the exact same thing they're saying no

this all started here when you know with the founding of the religion of Islam and their treatment of the Jews and they'll just give you like random events that they will say this justifies the napak it's the same

it's the same exact a mechanism you're talking about there, which is I just, I find that so fascinating. It's needing that counter-narrative to exist. The thing that I always heard probably for 50 years was when the state of Israel was declared on the night of May 14th, 1948, immediately five Arab armies came to strangle the baby Jewish state in its cradle. And they never talk about the preceding year when marauding Jewish gangs, like literally organized terrorist gangs, just like destroyed Palestinian villages. Right.

In my... Going down a list of villages that they had compiled over several years. Yes. Yeah. So this is a kind of thing that I first was exposed to by reading the ethnic cleansing of Palestine by Ilan Pape. Until then, I'll just tell you, I went to the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. I took courses in the history of Zionism.

I had courses in political science, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I read many, many, many books. I lived there for years. I can say, I knew, for example, the Dear Yassine Massacre took place in April, 1948. I knew the bombing of the King David Hotel where Jewish terror gangs killed like 90 people. That took place way before. I had these facts in my mind, but never put it together like cognitive dissonance. There's something you want to believe and the facts contradict it.

And if you're so attached to that belief, the facts don't enter into it, you know? It's never the facts. It's the ligaments that connect them to your critical thinking skills and your moral sense. Look, we probably need to move on because the truth may not live in the middle, but you know what lives in the middle ads ads midroll ads live in the middle do we know what they are not yet will they be good who knows if it's ice if it's ice if it's ice don't join put your fingers in your ears that's right um although i do think we got rid of the ice ads i think we figured out a way to do that or spotify did or i don't know but stick around don't do an ice and we'll be right back and we're

back this bad as barra the world's most moral podcast here with rabbi david mibas there how you doing, David? So good. I'm really glad to be here with you all. David, my Hebrew is just good enough for me to recognize that Mveser is probably a verb. What does it mean? It's actually a verbal noun. It's a noun made from a verb. So it actually, it literally means a person who brings good news, like a bearer of glad tidings. Oh, I love that. I wish I was that. I would love to bring good news. I made it up. So if you want to be it, bad. enough, just like we were saying before about a stable identity.

Yeah. You don't have to have a stable identity. You don't want to be Matt Lieb anymore? I mean, you could even be Rabbi David Mvasserer if you want. Okay. You know what? I was born into a family named Fleischman. I grew up David Fleischman.

That was my name. I was close to 40 years old. Part of my Jewish development and even what we could today call Zionist was thinking like, why do I have a German name? Fleshment. That's right. My family lived in Germany. They got that name.

But how, like what? Do I want a German name? You know? No, I want a real Jewish name, a Hebrew name. You know, I've always been so, I don't know, I guess, sympathetic to that because, you know, because it makes total sense. You know what I hate? I hate that the choosing to drop your, you know, German or your Ukraine. your pale of settlement, you know, last name that was forced upon you.

Or Hungarian. Yeah, or Hungarian. And choosing your own Hebrew name out of pride. I love that that's been fucking ruined by the state of Israel. Like, it's like it just ruins it. Oh, anyways, but yours is a beautiful one. And I love it. Israeli should choose last name.

like, would this be correct, Mikhavish to Occupy or to, you know, like verbal nouns that reflect what Israelis actually do. Yeah. Yeah. But yes, we,

to continue on sort of ice-related and sort of not, Governor Tim Walls made a statement at a press conference about the, you know, ICE takeover and murder. that is happening in his state.

And he made this statement that has been really taken in many directions. But let's play the clip. Allow our children to go back to school. We have got children in Minnesota hiding in their houses afraid to go outside. Many of us grew up reading that story of Anne Frank. Somebody's going to write that children's story about Minnesota. So he compared what is going on in Minnesota with ICE kidnapping kids to Anne Frank. First of all, how dare he?

How dare he? Second of all, what? Third of all, what does Batia have to say about this? Batia just as you know before the break, spent some time explaining how somewhere in the middle lies the truth of whether or not these two domestic terrorists deserve to die. And now she is going to tell us about her thoughts about Anne Frank and comparing that to ICE kidnappings. And she does it on her very own show,

which I did not know she had her own show on, I guess this is Newsmax. Isn't it called Batya exclamation mark? It's called Batya. And behind her is just, it's on News Nation. Like her background is just her name over and over, But her name yelled. Yeah.

Bata. It just looks like they're going, no, no, no, sh, quiet. So this is her statement regarding this comparison that Governor Wilson. Last in the analogy is the fact that the Gestapo was arresting German citizens, of course,

who the Nazis decided were no longer worthy of rights due to their ethnicity, not people who committed a crime entering Germany illegally and then more crimes once they were inside. Let's be clear. When they call ICE the Gestapo, they're calling Americans Nazis. After all, ICE carrying out mass deportations is what the majority voted for.

I'm sorry, but this doesn't make them racist. It makes them patriots. Okay. There's so much going on in that clip. It is, it's not even done. Hold on. To allow people to stay who came illegally is to massively incentivize such a flagrant abuse of our laws. And contrary to the mythology,

on the left, you can't just ask people politely to leave the greatest country on earth and think that they will, especially the hardened criminals among them. So I love the strategy then, which is to do extrajudicial murder and kidnappings and make it not the greatest country on earth. That's a lot of fun. That's one way to incentivize it. The other is the, I want to dissect this idea of this being very different. from what happened to Anne Frank

in that the the Germans were doing this to Jews who were citizens. First of all, the idea that the Jews were citizens and therefore seen by everyone

as insiders is ridiculous. I don't believe that they were citizens. By that point, there had been certain laws passed. Right. And that's if we're just talking about German, When the Holocaust against the Jewish people happened all over Europe, they were, there was no, the idea that it was like, oh, you know, there were all, wait, so the Hungarian Jews were all German citizens? The Polish Jews were all, like, citizens of the country.

And Frank was, that distinction is a paperwork distinction. Yeah, she was living in Amsterdam. Right. And she was living in Amsterdam. Amsterdam. So she also, German Jews had their citizenship revoked. Yes, they did. The same way Trump and allies are talking about revoking citizenship of Americans. So it was legal what the Nazis did. Birthright. Legal is what the people that make the law say is legal. Right. Anyway. Yeah. I want to put in one factoid. Please. The majority did not vote for this. Yeah. Yeah. The majority of popular votes did not go to Trump. Trump did not win a majority of popular votes. Let's just put it there.

Well, did he win popular vote, though, for this election? He may have actually won the popular vote for the first time ever in this election. I could be wrong, though. We can look that up. I know that he. I know that he didn't research it. I've read it. Yeah.

I know that he didn't in 2016, famously. He did not. But even if they, even if they did. And yes, I do. believe that like a bunch of his supporters still now support this happening. But I would say for the most part, let's say it was, let's say it was all of them. Let's say he was every single one and he won the majority of votes and whatnot. The idea that because they voted for it in a democratic election, it automatically makes it

patriotic and therefore not racist is completely incoherent. Well, it's the same, it's the same logic applied to Jews. Did you know that 93% of Jews are Zionists? So how can you call Zionism racism? Right. Well, because it's quite possible for large groups of people to fall under the sway of racist ideologies and justify all kinds of horrors. Yeah, that does nothing to change the fact that it is racist.

and also patriotic being like, that's patriotic as opposed to what the Nazis who were not patriotic and racist. They were some of the most patriotic people in European history. That was the whole thing. They were nationalists.

They also took power by elections. Yes, exactly. With the fascists in Italy. Yes, it's just the most incoherent possible point she could make being like people voted for this, therefore it is not racist. And more to the point, the idea that you can't learn from the Holocaust when there's such a,

there's such a specific, you know, literal tie in here. When you look at this and you compare the two, it'd be one thing if you're comparing it to like, oh, you know, I mean, people are stupid with their comparisons to the Holocaust. because everyone does it and sometimes you do it just for funzies. Sometimes I do it to win an argument about, you know, whether I have to put the dishes away. Oh, right, or who's paying the bill? I'll bust it out. I'll bust it out at the drop of a hat.

100%. He always likes to bring it up every time we're arguing over a bill. I'm just like, can you do it this time? And he says, haven't we suffered enough? And listen, there's a thousand different ways in which people can use it and it be like, okay, what are we doing? In this case, we are talking about a one-to-one comparison when it comes to the kidnapping of children to the point where children are hiding in their homes. The schools are closed because ICE agents are going in there and separating families and kidnapping children.

What more do you want from an analogy than that, you know? Well, we are speaking today, in fact, we're recording this on, it turns out. I logged in today to find out that today is International Holocaust Selective Remembrance Day. Selective remembrance and drawing no conclusions whatsoever day. That's right. And learning nothing from the Holocaust. And I didn't realize that there was a Holocaust Remembrance Day in January. How many of these do we need?

Yomashoa is in the spring or summer or something like that. But I guess that's the Israeli version, which is in the lead up to the, you know, the stations of the cross and the rapture of Independence Day, Nakpa Day. But, yeah, I think the selective Holocaust Remembrance Museum put out a statement as Well, they did. About what conclusions we should and should not draw. Right. They tweeted this at Holocaust Museum.

This is a U.S. Holocaust Museum. I believe in D.C. Let's see. It says, Anne Frank was targeted and murdered solely because she was Jewish. Leaders making false equivalencies to her experience for political purposes is never acceptable. Despite tensions in Minneapolis, exploiting the Holocaust. I love, despite tensions. in Minneapolis is doing a lot of heavy lifting.

I know everyone's a little bit steamed, but exploiting the Holocaust is deeply offensive, especially as anti-Semitism surges. I can't feel anything other than dread and low-key depression when I see how much institutions like the Holocaust Museum have been completely captured. either right-wing MAGA people or just straight-up Zionists, like looking at the Holocaust and saying it is actually offensive and illegal to use this

as a means of comparing any other trauma to anything else. Yep. I want to say... I don't think it was captured. I think that was the purpose of it from the outset. I think you're right. Naomi Klein said much the same thing on our show. The U.S. National Holocaust Museum was built on the mall in Washington, D.C., before the Smithsonian Museum of the American Holocaust.

Wow. Yeah. Well, that was the priority. You know, this idea that thou shalt not compare, thou shalt not draw conclusions. I've said for a couple of years that we should have our Holocaust education license revoked. I'm sorry, you don't get to teach you about the Holocaust anymore until some things radically. change in the world. Some power gets radically redistributed. But I do think, on the other hand, that quote-unquote exploiting, which is to say

drawing genuine lessons from it, and analogies and extrapolations and all that should be encouraged. And I want to plug a show that I think is transferring to off-Broadway in the next several months, I believe, is a show called Slam Frank, the Musical, which I've now seen twice. And it's this absolutely outrageous parody, not of the Holocaust, but of everything from I, of Hamilton, of identity politics, of woke identitarianism, of all kinds of things, very, very big-hearted, but very sharp in which Anita Frank is a Latinx immigrant from Germany living in Amsterdam who's had to sacrifice her Latino,

Latina identity and her abuela is trying to remind her to remember who you are and all of this kind of stuff. And she's having to, you know, there's a song where they're like outside they're fighting a war, but inside this attic we're fighting expectations, you know, like, he's got a non-binary friend in there. Her dad is neurodivergent and won't stop talking about it. Anyway, and actually the show, I don't want to give it away. I was sitting there gritting my teeth thinking they're not going to do it.

They're not going to go there. They're not going to mention the analogy that should be made. They're not going to talk about Palestine. I'm not going to say anything here. There is a pivot that is quite incredible, one of the most incredible things I've seen in the theater. But to me, that's what's needed. Art that dares to say, okay, fuck you. Your sacred cow is no longer sacred.

We're going to draw the conclusions that are freest, associative, artistic, chaotic minds like artists have always done. We're going to have the Batesim, the Cajonis, the balls, the chutzpah to say what we shouldn't say. So Tim Walts is way, you know, he's too polite about it, actually. Yeah, that's lightweight. But I'm glad he said it. It's lightweight.

It's lightweight. It's, it's, it's an analogy that is easy, easily made because it's so obvious. and the way in which people like Batya use this sort of identity and the U.S. Holocaust Museum does this all the time as well, this very specific identity and framing where you are not allowed to say that I am the arbiter of who gets to say what when it comes to the Holocaust. I mean, I'm at Holocaust or whatever, you know, on Twitter. And just seeing how learning lessons from the Holocaust at this point is considered anti-Semitic or offensive,

applying the lessons of the Holocaust, the idea that citizenship was taken away from Jews during the Holocaust as part of the process of solidifying their outsider status, that their status is not being one of us, one of the people. Being internal threats. Internal threats to society. And saying to everyone, it's actually really hurts my feelings when you make this comparison is it's as disgusting as it is pathetic. It to me is the most pathetic, slimy, whiny way of, trying to, I don't know, trying to dictate what the discourse is allowed to be. I look at this and I go,

like, you don't, so you don't care about holocausts or fascism. You care about dictating the terms of which things are deemed important enough to be made into a comparison. Along the lines of your own supremacy that you want to uphold. Rabbi David, do you want to have the last word on this topic? Well, you just said it's slimy and whiny. It's very effective. Yeah. That's probably why you're so upset about it because it's, it reaches and persuades people. You're just jealous, Matt.

You wish you could have, you wish you could, you could lay trips like that. That wasn't my point. You know, the thing I was going to say is you two doing this podcast is a way to counter that, right? You're talking about it, you're putting it out there, people watch you, listen to you, and you're doing what you can as you to create a different understanding of things.

It's so important. And another thing, you know, I don't know what about is getting paid for what she's doing. I know what you're getting paid. Another thing I remember, Gabor Daniel's father saying a couple times is how he underwent

a transition when he was a very young, maybe teenager or early 20s during the Vietnam War. And he said everything they said was a lie. If you grow up, not knowing that, and all you know is what you hear through the mainstream culture, it's so hard to break out of it. And I think, I just remember Gobur saying he figured out everything they're telling him is a lie. and ever since then, not trusting and looking for like, really? Like, really? Let me tell you something.

The same analysis and logic when it comes to challenging power structures did not apply in our home. The first system gets replicated. Yes, exactly. So we need to be on our toes. We need to be really thinking what's true. And then like you two are doing, like trying to contribute into the general kind of, kind of consciousness and discourse of what's going on. I'm just so grateful that you're doing that.

Thank you for joining us in this very irreverent context to do so. Yeah. We really appreciate a reverend like yourself joining us in our irreverent podcast. A reberant. I'm doing my best. I'm doing my best, Daniel. I'm doing my best. You're doing all right.

Speaking of rabbis, we're going to end with one more. thing. This is Rabbi Hayim Richmond. This video spread recently. I think it's from like October of 2023. I'm not sure. But this is a conversation that

this rabbi, who I've never heard of, maybe Daniel, you know, Rabbi Chaim Richmond. I think he's in the West Bank. I think he's a settler, Rabbi. Okay. So just, you know, when we talk about the sort of nature

of Jewish exceptionalism as we see it, you know, as we see it propagandized by people like Batya, you know, you'll see it with this like liberal Western flair to it. And then you see people like Rabbi Chaim Richmond, who is doing a version of that in the most ham-fisted hilarious way. Well, not quite ham, but pastrami-fisted. Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. I'm sorry.

Excuse me. Yeah. By the way, any anti-Semites or anti-Semite curious people who are, you're not, you're listening right now. We don't mind if you listen to the podcast, but maybe tune out the rest of the episode, okay? We don't need you seeing this. Right.

Yeah. This is like one of those clips that are always like, maybe we should keep this one sort of inter-community. This laundry is really dirty. Well, no, I actually do think this is an interesting clip for everyone to see. And it's great to play it with an actual rabbi. Yeah. I think that people don't really understand the mentality that we're dealing with.

I think they don't really understand. who, if you can call them people who they really are, whether you like Jews, you don't like Jews. So he's talking about Palestinians right there, just in case you were wondering if you could call them people who that is, he's referring to. That's who he's referring to. Why would they ever, why would they ever not like Jews? It's just deeply pathological.

I can't. It's actually like the devil is inhabiting them. Why would they not like Jews? Well, they clearly, why are you setting your sights so low, liking them? Wait to see what he has to say. He has a much, he has a much more elevated bar for people to meet. Yeah. Or whether you like Jews, you don't like Jews, you think Zionists are evil banding around these tired expressions, you have to understand what's going on here in Israel is going to, I've always said this, but now it's clearer than ever that it will determine the fate of all humanity. I don't disagree with that.

I mean, I don't disagree. You say you don't disagree with that? Well, to the extent that Israel has a nuclear arsenal and it's connected to U.S. Empire and what the IDF gets away with in Gaza has massive implications for the international order and all kinds of stuff, you know. I also think the fate of our humanity

as in like our ability to feel and be human. He doesn't believe in that humanity. No, he doesn't believe in that. This is determining the fate of a lot of people I know humanity who at this point, I'm like, do you have any feelings of empathy for people other than yourself? Of all humanity. And you know what else, Jim? I just want to say this to our Christian friends, you know, just to call it as it is and say it straight out, you know.

You guys are worshipping one Jew. That's a mistake. You should be worshipping every single one of us. You guys are worshiping one Jew. That's a mistake. You should be worshipping every single one of us. Because we all die for your sins every single day. And that's exactly what's going on here.

We're all God's first point. And we're dying for your sins right now. Because the Jewish people in the land of Israel are the bulwark against the orcs. Fuck it. Okay. The orcs are coming not to a theater near you, but to your home. Okay, you do look like a dwarf. First of all.

So you do look like you are in, around the minds of Morier. And You shall not Passover. So that's the rabbi, the good rabbi, Chaim Richman,

who is there. So worshipable. He's got such a worshipable face. Oh, I've always, you know, I love to worship rich men, so why not Rabbi Chaheim Richman? The orcs are coming to your home.

Just relate that to ice. I know. The or the orks are coming to your home. Yeah. Yeah. Or the Zionist Uruk Urukhae. Yes. My fighting orcs.

Yes. I mean. Fighting Uruk high. But to tell, first of all, I think it is hilarious to tell our Christian friends, the mistake you're making with Jesus is you don't think we're all Jesus.

You should treat us all. like Jesus and worship us. And the reason he's saying that, and I think, you know, what does get lost in that clip is what he's saying is that we are all dying for the sins of Christians and for the sins of the world. What he's saying is we are the frontline soldiers against the battle between good and evil, and we're destroying the non-human Palestinians and we need to kill them. and we're doing it for you.

And it's our soldiers who are dying for the sake of you out there, Christians of the West, which is such a funny way of looking at it, especially given that he is a settler in the West Bank. He has chosen this. He said they're coming to, they'll come to your house.

These orcs are coming. Motherfucker, it's actually not your house. It's not your home. You settled in the middle. Here's what's even crazy about that. Izzingard. He's in the middle. of Eisengard and he's going, why are all these orcs after me?

They were born there. They were created there by the Dark Lord Sauron after he, you know, touched the Palantir and Sauron got in his head and he's like, you know what? Maybe I got to team up with him. I'm sorry. There goes the Mordor. There goes the neighborhood.

But what's even crazier about that? The Dark Lord Ungersar, the eye of Sargon. What's even crazier about that, and even more guttingly ironic, who's dying for the sins of Christians? Sure. Think about it for one second. Who dies every day for the sins of what Christianity has done to Jews, for example, for the 2,000 years of of hardship, adversity, persecution, and brutality ranging on a spectrum in exile. It's the Palestinians.

That's right. They're like Jesus was Palestinian, you know, a Palestinian Jew. They're the Jesus of our time, if there is anyone. Yeah, because they're taking on the guilt for global. or Western anti-Semitism. They are now just, we have transferred that guilt onto Arabs of all stripes, Muslims of all stripes, but very specifically Palestinians.

They're the ones who now, we, you know, you look at the way in which they're spoken about, and it is just so clearly that not only are they taking on the guilt of European anti-Semitism, but they are also taking on the role of the Jews in the Middle East. The Palestinian is the Jews. They are the Jews. You know, we call them by another label,

but they are accused of the same libeles that Jews were accused of while they were in Europe, you know, during medieval times. I mean, the Middle Ages, blood libels sound a lot like the libels we see every day about Palestinians on the news. So it's... I also like how he's instructing Christians to break the Second Commandment. You should have some false idols. Yeah. Make some graven images of us.

Well, right. You guys can do it. It doesn't matter because you guys are wrong, believing in Christ and stuff. But while you're being wrong, continue being wrong by also believing in me. So anyways, Rabbi Day. David, when you saw that clip, did you think to yourself, man, I really miss, you know, speaking at a synagogue and telling people to do stuff like this. Sue him for rabbinic malpractice. No, it's terrible. It needs to be overthrown. I agree. I agree. I just wish I knew a way to do that outside of podcast. Well, you do what you do. You know what I mean? You have your way of doing it. And you are doing it.

that. And I also think this system is going to, it's like losing body mass. People are deserting it. And that's actually making it more and more tight and brittle. Yes. Right? It's driving itself crazy. It's painting itself into a smaller

and smaller corner drawing. The wagons plighter. And I don't think it can go on. It all, it all does seem like a bloated carcass. Well, in truth, you're speaking, you're speaking the premise and the impetus for this podcast.

Why do we call it bad Hasbara? Because it's rotting. Go for it. I mean, really, it's great that you're doing this. You're reaching a lot of people. You're reaching a lot of people, and that has an impact. Well, you know, every one of us, I'll just, I'll sound like I'm given a sermon, but please.

Every one of us has a skill set and a background and knowledge and things that we do that we can use to contribute. I'm going to put in a plug. This thing of connecting Gaza, where we're supporting families in Gaza very directly, individually, that just came out of stuff that I was doing. And it's like a thing came out of that, right? You're doing a podcast.

Somebody else could be writing music. Somebody else could be doing photography. Other people are lobbying government. So there's like what, you know, I just would say to anybody, just kind of be yourself, think what you can do, and like put that in the service of the greater good. And you don't have to be anybody other than just exactly who you are.

Well, I thank you so much for coming on the podcast and telling us about Connecting Gaza. And thank you for talking to us about all this stuff. Really appreciate it. Everyone, once again, click that link in the bio. It is money well spent. If you have anything, Connectinggaza.org. and thank you to all of you out there listening and watching

Patreon.com slash badasbara badasbara at gmail.com for all your questions, comments, and concerns. All right, everyone. Thanks again for listening. Until next time, from the river to the sea. Jesus is Lord, what about me? Jumping jacks was us, push-ups was us, Godmaga, us, all karate us, taking Molly us.

Michael Jackson, us, endless friends success.