Bad Hasbara - The World's Most Moral Podcast - Bad Hasbara 41: Only Murders In The Zoom, with Ryan Grim and Jeremy Scahill

Episode Date: July 25, 2024

Matt and Daniel visit with Ryan Grim and Jeremy Scahill (late of the Intercept, now repping Drop Site) to talk the truth of 10/7, Biden's history with Israel, and Hamas' preferred video conference vendor.For independent news on politics and war visit Jeremy and Ryan's new home at Drop Site: https://www.dropsitenews.com/ SEE MATT DO STAND UP AT THE SAN FRANCISCO PUNCHLINE JULY 24-27. Matt will be featuring for the hilarious Helen Hong! Buy tickets here.Will you be in Chicago during the Democratic National Convention? So will I! Me and my wife Francesca Fiorentini have a couple of live shows we are doing! On Monday and Tuesday August 19 and 20, Francesca and I will be doing shows at Lincoln Lodge in Chicago. Monday will be a live Bitchuation Room Podcast with me and some other great guests, and Tuesday will be a live stand up show with us and some friends.August 19th Live Podcast Tickets August 20th Live Stand Up TicketsSupport this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/bad-hasbara/donationsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Hello, hot bitch, We invented the terry tomato And weighs USB drives and the iron d'all Israeli salad, oozy stents, and javas orange crows Micro chips is us iPhone cameras us Taco salads us Pothalas us

Olive Garden us White foster us Zabrahamas As far as us Welcome to Bad Hasbara. By far the world's most moral podcast. That's right. We are your most moral hosts in the world.

My name is Matt Lieb. And mine is Daniel Matte. And we are so stoked. It's so good to be back, man. Yeah. It's so good to be back. So good to have all of you here. I think we're getting our little co-hosting rhythm, rhythm going, you know,

bit by bit every week figuring it out yeah you know what's crazy about this podcast is um that we're at the point now where we uh get people critiquing us telling us like how we should host our own show which is like at the first time you know at first i was like uh you know well that's nice look how big we are and then uh and then i looked at our numbers and i'm like we're not nearly big enough for any of you hogs to be complaining you know what I mean? If you want to for every complaint you have to

introduce 10 new people to this podcast this is a pyramid scheme and you're on you're all on the bottom of the pyramids so pull your weight move those bricks get that mortar going. Yeah exactly like eat the slop enjoy the slop but don't go

up to the pig farmer and be like hey I kind of feel like the way you guys do slop is It's a little bit interruptee. Well, maybe you should wipe your mouth first. Slight suggestion. Listen, we of course love all of you. And, you know, you know, of course, that we need you.

But also, maybe shut up a little bit. Just five stars in review on all of the apps. You are the only kosher picture. Piggies writes Adam Levin, our producer, shout out. I'm currently in Liverpool, England, so I want to cue the harpsichord from Piggies by Beatles. But speaking of that, it was just one of George Harrison's finest little novelty in numbers. You know who else loved it? Who did?

Charles Manson. Did he really? Yeah, that's like half of his thing, you know, when he killed the, kill the pigs is he listened to that piggy's song, yeah. he never told me that yeah in their life there's something lacking what they needs a damn good whacking and then he killed like celebrities wow yeah dang i'm surprised tarentino didn't put that in the soundtrack of once upon a time of hollywood yeah we should ban music music's bad uh so i was invited to speak at um a palaver fool liver for palestine liverpool for palestine you know the Palestinians don't have the word P in their language.

So how can they be a real people? Exactly. And it's actually pronounced liver fool. No, and so I gave a talk at this rally, and it brought a few things home for me. Number one, I had a number of people come up to me and be like, most moral, most moral. Oh, the podcast, I love it. I can't really do a scouse accent. But it was just so wonderful to hear that people here are watching the podcast and listening

to the podcast. There was an older woman who seemed like a very mild. manored mother, grandmother, I was surprised. She just didn't fit my image of who listens to this podcast. I said, you don't find it too irreverent. She said, well, you sometimes say some things. What I'm just, how can they say that? But it's really therapeutic.

So that was great. But I also realized something in giving my speech. I'm like, wow, it is much easier for me to sit behind a microphone with a buddy and be snide and snarky and make puns and Ghostbuster reference. than it is, and to make fun of horrible Israeli propaganda about horrible Israeli crimes, than it is to face a crowd of earnest, sincere activists and marchers who've been putting their bodies in the line every single Sunday since this started 10 months, who were really looking for some sustenance and some fire and so whatever. And I just didn't really know what to say. And I think it went

okay but I just I'm not I'm not slagging myself off as they would say here but more just to say that there are very different roles people can play in this whole thing and what we're doing is one and what people are doing out there on the street in in the more earnest and sincere spaces of activism is it just hats off to no that's way better to listen we we understand the difference boots on the ground makes more of a difference than, you know, two idiots on a microphone talking shit. And then... Boots on the ground versus Bants, bants on the screen.

Exactly. But, yeah, no, talking in front of a live group of people is definitely a... It's a whole different animal than just talking to your homie on the screen. Speaking of talking in front of a live group of people, come to the San Francisco punchline starting this Wednesday, July 20... Well, this is coming out on Thursday, but if you're a patron, you're listening to it now. July 24th through July 27th, I'm going to be at the Punch Line in San Francisco with Helen Hong, a hilarious comedian. Please come out to that. And of course, Monday and Tuesday, August 19th and 20th in Chicago during the DNC, Francesca Furentini, my wife and I will be doing shows at the Lincoln Lodge.

Monday and Tuesday, one will be a live bituation expat has barra. the other will be a live stand-up show. Please come to that. Ticket, link, and bio. Okay. Let's introduce our guests. We got some great guests today. Plural.

Yeah, this is the first time I think we've ever had like two guests and both of us at the same time. So I'm very excited about this. So we can't gang up on anyone today. Today we've met our match. That's right. That's right. Today we're all best friends.

And our guests today are investigative. reporters who recently started a new venture called now am i do i have this right the drop site is that i would say drops drop site news is what is drop site news as opposed to the like i put the the the then front of it like it's a like an emo ban from 2008 the i think you also might be taking that from the the phrasing of their former home but we'll speak about that that's true i always like a the you know i put thuds in front of stuff but uh they are amazing investigative journalists. We read their stuff all the time, and they've been really doing some of the most incredible work, I mean, for years and years, but I mean, most recently, in the last nine months or so, with this Gaza kerfuffle, as the liberal Zionists will call it. Ladies and gentlemen and everyone else, welcome to the pod, Jeremy Scahill and Ryan Grimm. We call it the Ryan Grim.

The Ryan Grim. How are you guys? How is things? Everyone in a different location? Things are good. Yeah, I'm in D.C. Just refreshing the subscriber numbers to make sure we're going to survive as an entity. And we're happy.

Oh, yeah? We're very happy. We're going to make it. Thank God. Now, how, how, how, what percentage of your DMs right now is Glenn Greenwald just blowing up both of your phones being like, ha-ha, I told you so. Being like, I told you guys should have done this years ago. No, Glenn is just glad that we, we finally followed him out the door, I think. Yeah.

He understands everybody's got to do it at their own pace. But you guys are still affiliated with the intercept, right? You're still, you're still, you're still doing the intercepted podcast. Yeah. they let us continue doing the podcast and let us keep the podcast audiences and we're keeping the names and yeah they're going to run the transcript on the site and they're they give us a little grant um nice beautiful to uh kick the podcasts off to like to you know to help produce them sick i love it i love it well i've been you know reading you guys for a while and uh watching interviews with you guys and when i reached out I was surprised You guys wanted to do this You guys do great shows

You guys go on like Hassan show You guys go on Democracy Now And now you're here on Bad Hasbara During chop chopo trap house I mean I I mean as I told you Matt When you when you

When you slid into my DMs I did You know During this past You know nine plus months I think so many important voices Have have emerged on the scene

I mean, I know your voice predates, you know, the past nine plus months, but I think, you know, it's, it really emphasizes the way in which the media landscape has shifted. I mean, when we were on Hassan's show recently, we were, we were talking about this. I mean, these huge cable news organizations and large, you know, powerful newspapers, they're, they're losing their, their monopoly, you know, they're losing their grip. on controlling the methods for disseminating information or what voices get heard. And I see what you guys are doing as being a really exciting project that is emerged from a really horrid, dark, you know, U.S.-fueled, funded, underwritten genocide. But also the fact that, you know, I think a lot of people feel like they don't give them themselves permission to laugh during dark times or they think like,

I can't find humor in this, but, you know, the vicious ones win if we lose our sense of humor, our sense of humanity. And, you know, I give you guys major credit for finding ways to thread that needle because it's vital. And it is part of the kind of exciting new media landscape that I think has really covered this genocide in a much more serious way than most establishment news organizations. Well, I appreciate that. I mean, you know, I agree with you that, you know, people don't seem to feel comfortable laughing during a genocide. And I agree that that also lets the bad guys win. You know, if you can't, if you can't laugh at a monster like BB Netanyahu or Itmar Ben Gavir, then, then what are we doing here? Especially since you're apparently allowed to laugh at, literally every other political figure in the world except for any Israeli political figure. It's also the cliche that laughter is the best medicine, you know, they say that I think usually that's meant to talk about its effect on trauma, you know, releasing trauma and cleansing oneself out. It's also, I think, good for sanity because the premise of this show and, you know, you both

do such a great job of exposing where politicians just try to mess with our heads. But Hasbara has become a sciop, or at least in fact, it always was. It means explanation. But the depths to which or the levels to which it's risen in terms of the absurdity and the theatricality of it, it's become campy. It's become this just incredibly performative thing that if you don't, laugh at it, it'll drive you insane. And I think that's what it's designed to do. So that's what I think we're trying to do here, give people the permission to laugh at a transparent

farce. Yeah. Something that's so outlandish and farcical that it's, it seems like a crime to not make fun of it. Like, you can't expect people to not say anything when they just, you know, deal in lies with every single thing that they say. So, you know. So with that in mind, Ryan, tell us a joke. Joke. Oh, man, I got nothing. Well, I got a BB Netanyahu soundboard, so let's get going. I want you to come.

All right. This is a very important newsday for you guys to come on this podcast. Yes. And so I appreciate you doing it because yesterday, the President of the United States. Oh, hello Hello The president of the United States decided not to run for re-election

Now, I don't know about you guys But this is very disappointing He was clearly the best man for the job Certainly the funniest Certainly the funniest He beat Trump in 2020 You know, he was going to do it again easily You know

He just needed to give a few more speeches work out some of the kinks in his rhetorical style. Remember whose name goes to whose face. Find a few more stairs than climb them. Yeah. But let's get into this. What exactly does this mean, you know, if we're going to talk electoral politics for the next few months,

months. Are we looking at a Kamala Harris nomination here, or could it be, is it anyone's game? I mean, nobody else is running. Obama and Pelosi and others have said, look, we need to have an open convention. We need to have an open process. And there's going to be an open process where the delegates are not bound to vote for anybody, but it doesn't look like anybody's going to have the courage to take on Kamala. Yeah. just kind of hilarious content. Yeah, it is kind of wild. Everyone's like, no, I don't want to mess with that.

It's juggernaut. Yeah, the political juggernaut that is Kamala Harris, someone who had, I mean, the amount of money she had rolling in, I think, early in 2020, and then dropping out maybe a month after a debate in which she was called out for a question that she should have expected from the beginning from Tulsi Gabbard. Like, you know, it does.

feel a little worrying. Without having garnered a single delegate. Right. Yeah. And wouldn't it make her the first president in history to never have won a single delegate in a primary? Other than, yeah. Go ahead, Ryan.

Ryan is our resident in store, and he may know the actual fact of that matter. I mean, look, I think it's pretty clear that the, you know, that the momentum is on Harris's side. And if you, I mean, if you just think of it, I'm not like an insider or basis. guy with politics, but just as somebody who follows the news, I mean, the optics for the within the Democratic Party for removing Harris and saying, oh, we're going to like make Josh Sapiro, you know, the governor of Pennsylvania, the nominee or Gavin Newsom, that would have caused a kind of nuclear explosion within the Democratic Party, you know, especially after, you know,

after Biden announced Kamala Harris as his running made in the way that he did and sort of setting up this possibility that a black woman could become president of the United States. I think just based on the current mindset of the Democratic Party, it would be a problematic move. It's not to say that there weren't serious discussions of how they could circumvent that. It just seems like the most likely scenario now is that Harris takes over at the top of the ticket. And I did a piece that came out on Monday looking at Harris's track record on, Israel. And one of the things that, you know, as you start digging into the timeline of Harris's career as vice president, and particularly over the past nine and a half months, she staked out a

position, whether this was just her natural perspective or what she actually believed about the war in Gaza or there was more of a calculation behind it, Harris very early on, the people around her started leaking to news organizations inside the Beltway that Harris was a, concerned about the public posture that the administration was taking. Not so much the policy, the genocidal policy, but the way it was being presented and was emphasizing that the administration needs to project more empathy for the suffering of the Palestinians, that Biden needs to be tougher on Netanyahu. I mean, Harris's people started pushing this really early on in November, December, and then...

Sort of a kinder, gentler, blank check. Right. Yeah. I mean, as far as I can tell, it wasn't like we need to stop giving them 2,000-pound bombs or, you know, we need to tell them there's a red line if you, you know, if you hit, you know, another tent encampment and mass burn children to death, then it's over. But it was more that the way it was being presented was problematic. And I think that by, you know, by New Year's or early January, you started to have a sense of mini panic setting in. among the political operatives that were responsible for running the re-election campaign. And so by February March, you then have a kind of new doctrine that takes hold where you start to see, you know, Anthony Blinken, you know, who has never met in his Israeli missile strike that he wasn't just like in love with, start to try to, you know, it's like, it's like Joe Bluth from arrest development, the tears just aren't coming, you know, he's like trying to force himself to like, you know, shed a tear.

And then the, you know, the Baghdad Bob of the Biden administration, you know, John Kirby, and then that Matt Miller, who Ryan is constantly, you know, saber rattling with. You know, these guys. Caitlin Johnstone calls him Count Smircula. Yeah. Right. So they try to muster up like this kind of like, oh, we're so upset about what's happening to the Palestinians who are being killed with our bombs.

But Harris herself then becomes the most senior administration. official after that brief truce where there was the exchange of captives in November to start bringing up the issue of like a ceasefire. Now, like you guys, Ryan and I follow the minutia of this stuff. She wasn't saying permanent ceasefire. She was not calling for an end of the war. It was caveated and couched and had all kinds of conditions. But I think from their perspective, what was happening there is that they were putting Harris forward or Harris was asserting herself and saying, let's see if we can reset the narrative while not resetting or ending the policy. And then when they start to see poll numbers coming out of, you know,

Michigan and elsewhere, as Biden had to go through the kind of symbolic process of the coronation, you know, the process leading up to the coronation, I think they were taken aback by the uncommitted movement. I think they recognized then that there was an open revolt happening on college campuses. People like to talk about, well, Arab Americans, you know, have probably with Biden, it went way beyond Arab Americans. And there's, there's something that I think is also deeply dishonest about that framing. I think a lot of good people, regardless of their ethnic or religious orientation, watched this in horror, you know, and said, I can't support this. And the last thing I'll say is, you know, the issue with Joe Biden's mental acuity, you know,

really the Gaza war was about the worst possible stage that that Biden could have found himself on because, you know, it's one thing if he's like lost and can't find which way to get off the stage, you know, or he's, you know, forgetting the name of someone, you know, that he's related to. But when he's also having these moments in defending his genocidal policy, it somehow makes it even more villainous. There was nothing endearing about. it. And so I think all of these things kind of combined, but I do think that it's possible. This is just, you know, a guess on my part, that Harris and her people realized fairly early on that she was going to need to stake out a position that at least sounded different from that which was being

expressed from Biden. Yeah. I actually remember that speech she gave that people started sharing about wanting a ceasefire. And everyone shared it as Kamala Harris calls for a ceasefire. Such a VEB moment. Yeah. And she didn't quite finish her sentence before people started cheering. And then right after the cheers were the rest of the caveats. And we want an immediate ceasefire if every single member of Hamas commits suicide.

But before they do it, they sing Merry Christmas. It's like, oh, oh, that's a condition. And the Palestinian people send a thank-you card. Cardboard would be preferred. Digital, we can negotiate. Yeah. Emails a jib-jab. For making the desert bloom.

That's right. Shib-Jab. Exactly. We understand technology is about 20 years behind. Yeah. So I guessed it on my brother's useful idiot show today, filling in for Katie Helper, and we were reacting to the news yesterday.

And Aaron made, I thought, a really good point that, which had occurred to me as well, which was that when Lyndon B. Johnson pulled out in 1968, which is another Chicago DNC year, notably, it's going to be another non-caotic Chicago DNC. I'm very excited to be there during the DNC. It's going to be fun. Yeah, I'm jealous. You know, there was also a very controversial foreign policy going on, but in that case, there was actually a popular, I mean, I guess in this case there was popular tumult too on college campuses, but it's not, that's not the story of why he's dropping out. He's dropping out because the elites of the party have found he's just crossed the rubicon of

senility and he's just an inappropriate steward of, he's an inappropriate standard bearer. So you have this context where there's grounds to have. the guy stepped down because of a disastrous foreign policy but back then it was actually a mass movement it was there was mobilization there was there was a sense that the country was in an upper and i guess you could say well it was american soldiers dying over in vietnam and this is this is different but you know i wish that when i mean and then you have people like rachel maddo talking about what a decent decent man this man is just the decency the goodness uh ryan when you see that you know what what goes through your head in the descriptions of this guy well i mean there's

interpersonal decency and then there's you know what he's overseeing as president those are different things he he has gone through personal tragedy you know he's also known as like a world-class jerk like with an extremely short temper now if he was like a great president who care like i i don't I don't, I don't, I don't actually care that much when they say that a politician is, like, rude to their staff. Like, I'm sorry, like, that's unfortunate for the staff and they shouldn't be rude to them. I also voted for Clobbuchar in 2020. Yeah, exactly. But if Clobuchar's, I don't give a shit.

If it's going to get us Medicare for all, throw every stapler in the office. None of this would have happened if the cloblob had taken control of Washington. If the club blob had been here, club blob could have stopped the war. But what isn't fair is to be the stapler thrower and then also to have everybody running around talking about what a decent person you are. And that's before you get to what he's done over the last eight months with regard to Gaza. Setting aside his pretty bad foreign policy record even relative to other Democrats. The only war he ever voted against as far as Jeremy knows his whole record went through it was the Gulf War. and then he immediately was like, well, I'll never go, you know, damn it, that went well.

We'll make that mistake again. We like, we came, we saw, we conquered, lit, lit everybody up on that highway of death. And as George H.W. Bush's approval rating goes to 90. And he's like, I will never, ever, ever, ever be on the other side of a war. We'll never be against a war ever again. Yeah. Damn. And every subsequent war wasn't as short.

That's too bad for him. on the on the on the issue of of decency and you know that people are saying oh he's heroic and he's selfless and you combine that then with the the common trope that you hear from blue maga people which is oh you think trump would have been would be better on gaza yes and you know i mean think just on a basic intellectual level think about what is being said there this is a way of trying to excuse a scorched earth, genocidal war to exterminate the Palestinians of Gaza, not just with American weapons, but with American diplomatic, legal, political, financial support orchestrated by a man, Joe Biden, who since 1973 has proclaimed himself a dedicated Zionist, who has repeatedly

defended and enabled Israel when it's at its most brutal, who shocked even- And encouraged it to be more brutal. You're about to say. You're about to say. I mean, one of the great devastating stories about Joe Biden's career on Israel happened in 1982 when Biden is, you know, he's in the Senate for nine years. Menachem Begin, who was then the prime minister of Israel, is prosecuting the brutal war in the invasion of Lebanon.

He comes to Washington, D.C. at a time when U.S. senators from both parties actually were asking, difficult questions of the Israelis. It's not that they weren't fawning over Israel, but, you know, there is a whole line of inquiry here that has to do with how did the Reagan administration actually view this. Reagan was militantly pro-Israel. But on this issue of civilian deaths, there was an interrogation of Monachin Began. And Began tells this story of how one senator stands up in that meeting and starts talking about how he would also kill women and children if his country was being threatened with invasion by, I think he even said, by Canada. And Menachim Began, you know, goes back to Israel and he tells this story to the Israeli press and he says, you know, I told this senator, no, no, this is against our values.

If you're shocking Menachem Began, a war criminal who was a leader of the Ergoan militia, if you're shocking Menachem Began with your advocacy for killing women and children, something is fundamentally wrong with you. And so, you know, I think of this, this, you know, little girl who got her jaw blown off when I hear about Joe Biden being, you know, decent. And she's still alive to this day. Her family is doing a GoFundMe campaign to try to get reconstructive surgery for her. They're talking about how Kamala Harris raised $49 million when she announced she was running for president. And I saw that right under a post of this girl's family trying to raise money to put her jaw back together, which was almost certainly blown apart with a munition that Joe Biden gave to the Israelis. Don't come to me with anything about Joe Biden's decency.

And I'm sorry, he may be a confused grandpa looking for the man. mashed potatoes right now. But that, but Joe Biden has 50 years of this stuff, 50 years of it. So, you know, it's, it's, I think Ryan made the key point. I'm sure that George Bush is really kind to his, you know, his children, you know, and, you know, I'm sure there's a lot of politicians that are good family people or whatever junk people want to talk about. That's worth nothing. That's worth nothing in the, in the moral universe of American foreign policy. All that matters is what are your policies? And what do they do to, to, to, to, to hear you. human beings on this earth. Matt, the one thing I wanted to ask Ryan that I actually think is

interesting about this issue of why Biden made this decision. I think Daniel generally, like your analysis is correct, but Ryan has sort of convinced me that part of the reason, and this was based on Ryan talking to some top Biden donors, and I think this is a really interesting backstory, that Biden actually, and correct me if I'm wrong here, Ryan, Biden believed that all of these party elites were not really reading the point. correctly and didn't actually have their fingers on the pulse of how voters viewed Biden. And it seemed like once they started looking at these numbers on Sunday coming out of Michigan and elsewhere that showed, you know, 7% advantage for Trump in Michigan that the writing was

on the wall. But that part of it, I think, is really interesting that Biden legitimately didn't believe that Obama and company were right about this. Right. Yeah. He's still justifiably bitter. about 2016, where he was talked out of running and told Hillary is the better candidate. And we all know, we all know how that went. And, you know, he thinks he's the only one that can beat Trump. I think it's more likely to, it's more accurate to say that Hillary is probably the only one that would lose, that could lose to Trump. Right.

Yeah. Either way, he's right that he probably wins that race. Now, can he win a three-way primary with Bernie in? I don't know. because a lot of Bernie's support were actually Biden people and they found that out in 2020 as well like people who just

for a variety of reasons didn't like Hillary Clinton some of it sexism some of it Joe Biden just had more of the like working class guy shtick going on some of it was Hillary Clinton kept talking about how

she was more woke than Bernie Sanders and that Bernie Sanders was like racist and sexist like there are there's a there's some solid research that suggests that that actually boosted Bernie among some of these like normie more centrist like oh really he's not like that yeah uh okay um totally back so remember Gloria Steinem on uh on on democracy now I think it was being like well you know these young Bernie bro women they want to be where the boys are yes that was amazing And it's like the most okay boomer moment imaginable.

Yeah. Also like openly sexist. Yeah. Seriously. So sexist. Yes. No agency. So Bernie.

Anyway, so Biden, yes, had also believed in 2020 that, you know, he was counted out. Obama told him, don't run in 2020. Biden, you don't have to do this. You don't have to do this, Joe. And then he runs. He wins and he beats Trump. So he really did feel like he had a magic touch with Trump. He's like the white.

He's like the white working class whisperer and that nobody gets it but him. He's Amtrak Joe. He's middle class Joe. He's giving all these nicknames to himself. He's dog-faced pony soldier Joe. He talks the way of the assembly line, the streets. He understands the white working class. Yeah, down in lower Delaware.

He connects with him. At the credit card factory. What about corn pop? I mean, I miss corn pop. We haven't heard about corn pop in forever. when Joe Biden was a lifeguard and he had to deal with a statement regarding his time at the pool that time. He endorsed, he's no longer a bad dude.

He endorsed Harris before Biden and that's why Biden had to, no. Yeah, that's exactly. Wait, go on, Ryan. You were on an interesting. No, no, no, no kids want to touch Kamala Harris's leg hair. I'll tell you that much. So they, anyway, so. That's a deep, deep cut.

That is. Joe Biden would talk some story about how black kids went when he was the, the lifeguard would love to they love touching his leg hair not a creepy story at all he was incoherent in 2020 can we just say that as well i just quick side note this idea that like after the debate they're like oh no now everyone in the democratic establishment has realized that his brain doesn't work it's like no i asked felix beaterman of uh on chapo when ryan and i were on because he i think he's the resident narcotics expert i asked him about uh which drug they were giving Biden and people can go find it. Felix gave a very detailed answer about what

cocktail of pills he thought they had given Biden. See what Ryan gives when he comes on? Ryan's trying to be all serious and well he was incoherent in 2020 but he was also more alpha. Check out Felix Biedermann. He knows the drugs. Okay. And Felix we should also say does one of the best. I wouldn't say a Biden impression. He channels Biden in a way that few can. Ryan, sorry you were saying.

yeah, I actually went back and read our coverage of one of the 2019 debates, and I described him to Matt's point as staggeringly incoherent. Yes. And this was 2019. Yes. And I feel like, you know, everyone wants to give the Democratic establishment credit for now admitting to the general public that he is completely, you know, he's completely lost it and is not going to be able to, you know, compete with Trump, at least on a level of who looks more like they can handle the gears of a country. And no, you get no credit. It was 2020, he got to hide in a bunker the whole time. The point is, I'm vindicated and I'm, this is really, I'm yelling at my brother who said I was crazy for saying that. But that's what he's, that's what he believed. Yeah. So he's,

he's going to have a lot more time in his bunker in Delaware. Chris Coons was on some new show yesterday talking about how, you know, Joe Biden, he's grounded. And I was thinking, yes, he is. He just got sent to his room. But, you know, and, you know, he kept drilling down on how, you know, Biden goes back to Delaware. When anything happens, he goes back to Rojoboth. When his son died, he goes back to Delaware. When he, you know, when he's dropping out, he's at home with his family in prayer.

And I'm like, yeah, he goes home. He does what anyone does. But wherever he's going, maybe he's going to go upstate to a nice, farm the way the family dog does when it disappears but either way he's he's going and we we were thinking matt and i were thinking that we might want to put some creative thought the four of us into kind of how to send the guy off and we actually have some leaked footage of the meeting where the decision was made yeah and we we have sources too guys um yeah we have a a lot of whistleblowers uh within the democratic establishment who send us check out check out check out check out check out

Flopsightenews.com. That's our brand. Don't copy it. Hasbara leaks. Hasbara leaks at flopsite.net. And yeah, so, you know, drop. Dot info wasn't available? No, it wasn't.

It was someone else got that. Dot missinfo, yeah. But in order to, obviously, not get the whistleblower in trouble, some of this footage has been digitally altered, but we have that exact moment. Daniel, do you want to describe this moment? Yeah, we deepfaked the faces and the voices, but the dialogue is verbatim what happened.

Let's just cue it up. This is when... I don't believe you're seriously considering listening to these people. Get him out of here. Bye. I'll fix you, Vincolm. I'm going to fix you. I'm going to get you.

Nice fruit baskets. I'm going to miss him. Yeah, so we subbed in, we subbed in Vinkman for, I think that was Pelosi. That was Pelosi, yeah, that was Pelosi. That was Pelosi. Obama was, I think, the mayor, Walter Peck was either Biden or Jill Biden or Hunter Biden or some composite. But, you know, the line is, I'm going to get him a nice fruit basket.

And we were thinking, well, in addition to a nice fruit basket, what could we get him as sort of a parting care package? and Ron Clayne, his slimmer, says, producer, Adam Levin. And so, you know, we're thinking of things like, if you guys have any contributions, just, we're just, and there's no bad ideas here, we're just spitballing. So, for instance, there's going to be a Biden presidential library. We know that because what I heard was Obama basically said to Biden,

look, buddy, if you don't drop out, there's never going to be a Biden presidential library. So now there better be one. We're thinking as a cornerstone of that library, we got to get a nice big piece of Gaza. rubble that we can donate to the project so that would be an appropriate parting gifts so we're looking for other parting gifts that in the light of his Gaza policy that might be um and a fitting send-off so if yeah like a retirement gift what would you give what would you give Biden as

retirement gift I mean I think you could you could because he because he spends so much time there at the at the house in Delaware and it's going to be spending a lot more I think they could take that basement and they could remodel it to look like the Oval Office and just let Biden pretend to be president like until he actually croaks. Yeah, that's true. He would know the difference. You actually have made it so that they just like bombed Gaza like, you know, into the Stone Ages again. Like they did it, Joe. There is no more Gaza. It like collapsed into the sea. But just let him keep thinking he's president in the basement and just make it look like the Oval Office. He gets the sleep in his own

Faked His own Lincoln bedroom is all faked He's got his own oval office He's down there He's just giving press conferences To unplugged cameras That's great I'm assuming it's waterfront property right?

I mean they could also do things Like you could have somebody pretend to be Nelson Mandela Who's calling him to like thank him for freeing him Thank him for his service Gold of my ears online too again Yeah his ex-flame I was thinking if it's on the waterfront we need to build him a pier

we need to build him a Joe Biden never mind a library a Joe Biden Memorial Pier definitely make it out of you know we're gonna Ryan Ryan is gonna jump ship on all of us I've already just torched my own credibility Ryan is like contemplating whether he's gonna stay on this podcast at all well I'm actually did you tell him what this podcast is

no I said it's extremely see I said it's you know it's out of Israel but it's really serious They're intellectually honest guys. They're a little bit liberal Zionists, but in general, honest people. Yes. I'm just trying to figure out if this is actually on the ocean. Oh, it's house you mean.

What is the name of the town? He lives in. Did you say he lives in Rahobahubis? Well, Rehobos is where the vacation house is. Which, if I'm not mistaken, if my ancient Hebrew is not mistaken, that would be Rochavut. It is Rahobo.

Yeah, which is the Hebrew word for Rhodes. I don't know what it's the Hebrew word for. I just know it's a town. It's a town in Israel. Yeah. Is he, does he have a vacation home in Israel? That's the question that I'm asking myself right now.

Is this his place? Yeah, I mean, look. Does it have a bunch of like those human trafficker location pins? Like in the Kendrick Lamar video for Drake, you know? Yeah, yeah. What we know is that he bought it, it looks like, in 2017, yes. Look at this journalist investigating in real time. Yeah.

And this is when the big guy was taking his 10% cut and he was getting like extraordinarily rich. He had this, that $900,000 a year no show job at from the University of Pennsylvania. Damn. He then went and made the UPenn president who gave him that job, the ambassador to Germany or something like that. Fuck, what? And then this is not counting whatever Hunter was working on. So in other words, if it's not oceanfront, then I don't know what the heck he was thinking. Yeah.

It's got to be oceanfront. Then he's a fucking weirdo. And I don't want him being president. Is this the place where he had like the boxes of classified documents like right next to his Corvette in the garage? I think that was in his home in Wilmington. Or that was the Wilmington house. Yeah. Wait, Biden did that too?

Yes. And remember they said they were kind of more egregiously. And the guy said he wouldn't prosecute him because he was too demented than a no jury would convict. And Democrats were like, how dare he? That's untrue. And now they're like, oh, wait. They're like, yes, too demented. Good. That's great. Yeah, I got to shit guys, I got to start reading the news more. That's crazy. I mean, I want to make good stuff. I mean, Matt, you were talking about he, about he did that too. But, you know, you look at at what happened. under Biden and Obama toward whistleblowers. You know, these guys prosecuted more whistleblowers

during their eight years in power than all U.S. presidents combined since the Espionage Act went on the books in the early 1900s. And, you know, what Biden is known to have done just based on the facts. I mean, I think there's a lot more to that story than, you know, we ever are going to be told because of the way that the investigation was wrapped up and because of the juxtaposition with, you know, Trump having documents in like the golden plated bathroom at Mara Lago and all that, you know, chicanery that went on. And, you know, and then implying that, you know, Trump basically had the nuclear codes available for, you know, any, any guests in the Mara Lago spa, you know, the Biden thing kind of got swept under the rug. But there are people

that, uh, that did hard prison time, um, on the exact same, uh, allegations. that were made against Biden and who actually took government documents, Daniel Hale, for instance, the drone whistleblower, by their own admission for reasons of conscience. And they felt they were a part of an extra legal, extrajudicial organized murder campaign. And they went to prison. In Hale's case, he went to prison for four years and was held in a large part in a communication management unit, you know, where you're completely isolated from the outside world and under total, you know, surveillance. And, you know, you're looking at the president, you know,

former vice president of the United States who helped to draft legislation to go after whistleblowers, then engaging in this kind of conduct and nothing happens to him. You know, it's just, I mean, Biden's whole career is filled with this. You know, I told a story in one of my reports about Biden, where he actually collaborated with the Republicans to kill the nomination of Jimmy Carter's nominee for CIA director. And, and, you know, it was Ted Sorenson, who was a Kennedy biographer, a friend of the Kennedys. And, you know, Carter had been on the campaign trail, very critical of the CIA. He wanted to put an outsider in charge of the agency. He nominates

Ted Sorensen. And I mean, this is an incredible story if you guys don't know it. But the short of it is Sorensen had written an affidavit in support of Pentagon Papers, whistleblower, Daniel Ellsberg. And the affidavit was never introduced in court, but Sorensen had written it. And essentially what he said is that what Ellsberg is being accused of is a practice that everyone in Washington participates in. People take classified documents all the time. And Sorensen says in the affidavit, in fact, I took classified documents when I was writing one of my books about the Kennedy's. Well, Joe Biden's staff digs this up. And when Sorenson was

about to go into his confirmation hearings, Biden and the Republicans start raising holy hell. And Biden actually says to Ted Sorenson, I don't know if you should be prosecuted under the espionage or what, but he says, you're not, you're not, it's not proper that you should be the director of the CIA. And Carter pulls the nomination. Damn. You know, so, I mean, Joe, this is, and this is, and this is, and this. This relates to Gaza because none of this stuff is just happening in a vacuum. You know, Joe Biden has a 50-year career where you can trace a trail that leads directly up to the actions that are being, you know, being taken in real time in this present moment. He is a mean, I have an update, by the way, business. Yeah, go ahead, Ron.

His address is and it is not on the beach, which is hilarious. You really want to visit from the Secret Service, man. I mean, not that they're, not that they're great at their job these days, but they probably will come after you now. It's already public, it was published in the local community newspaper that he was building a 400, that the Secret Service was building a $455,000. I mean, at. Honestly, I think Secret Service going after Ryan for releasing his address on Bad Hasbara is just good PR for our show. So I think I'm going to allow it. I have one more thing to add to the

This other address is 1,600 Pennsylvania. Not for long. You're talking about building a fence. Let's upgrade it to an apartheid wall. Give him his own state. Or his, you know, give him a canton. Give him partial sovereignty over it. Sure.

He gets a special card. He can breeze right through the checkpoint. Exactly. That's exactly right. The yellow license plate and then he gets to go through. The Biden Authority. Yeah, the B.A. The B.A.

Well, listen, we've talked a lot of shit about a, I think, a person we can all agree is a great and brave man who saved democracy. And, you know, we just, we're here on this podcast officially. Just want to say, thank you, thank you, Joe Biden, for your years of great service to this country, for being here when we needed you, even when we didn't need you. you and doing great things and sometimes terrible things, mostly terrible things, and being such a brave good man. And before we go to commercial, which we do have to do, I just want to, I want to play a little tribute that I think shows my love for Biden. And then we will go to commercial and we will talk about some other things. apart Dr. Jill just signed the DNR so don't you forget about me don't don't don't

don't you love my friend BB Netanyahu hey Jack I'm gone go away I am all right the liquid breakfast club yeah yes all right ladies and gentlemen we're going to take a quick break listen to some ads but stick around please

because we already regret this Ryan I don't know about you but this was a bad bad choice on our part and we're back we are here with Jeremy Skaill And Ryan Grimm, a drop site news, the new venture from the men who brought you other journalism. And are now reconsidering their decision-making process.

Yeah. You know, that's the thing about being someone who has your DMs open to whistleblowers. You also get your DMs open to people asking you to be on stupid fucking podcasts. Tough neighborhood. Tough neighborhood out there. If I had an assistant, I could blame him or her. Yeah, look at that's it. You got to get enough subscribers to get an assistant.

That's how it works. You can then blame. So I want to talk about a little group of best friends known as Hamas. And some of their buddies. Yeah. I recently saw, did you guys interview? Hamas? Is that, is that, is that a thing? Jeremy, you, so you interviewed Hamas.

Mr. Hamas. Yeah. So first question, as someone who slides into DMs to get guests, like, who books, who books that? Are they with like CIA, WME? No, I mean, it's, it's, yeah, I mean, it's not super simple. to get in touch with people from Hamas. You know, it's not the hardest thing in the world. I mean, it's, you know, I've worked in journalism for, you know, about a quarter of a century and spent a lot of time in the Middle East.

And I've also, you know, reported on armed militant organizations. And, you know, I've been around the block with trying to interview people who are on the other side of the gun of American, or in this case, Israeli and American policy, you know, some, some interviews I did face to face, some I did remotely. You know, one, one interesting thing is the, I was told by Hamas people that they prefer Zoom, you know, of all the platforms to speak on. As opposed to Skype or like, yeah, Skype or, you know, they're not touching Microsoft teams, you know, that's, I love that. They're like, well, they, you know, Zoom has the, you know, touch my face-up feature, and it just, it's nicer.

Yeah, they were not, they were not, yeah, they, they definitely were not using that. Did they use any of the green screen effects? There was, there was, there was one, there was one guy who did have something like a green screen with an image behind it, but I'm, I'm going to get in. I don't know why, but my mind is, my mind is flashing to the movie, the Paddy Chesky movie, network where the you know the ecumenical liberation army finds gets themselves like a like a black radical organization you know based on the symbionese one uh gets themselves you know a Hollywood agent and now they're arguing and negotiating residuals and things like that in a in a smoke-filled basement yeah don't you dare fuck with my residuals that didn't happen but i mean i mean you know to

to bring this to a more you know a more serious place sure um i i think that that it is It's indicative of the state of the news media during these past nine plus months that there hasn't been more reporting on the perspective of the leaders of Hamas or Palestinian Islamic jihad or a space where Palestinians are permitted to articulate a defense of armed resistance. even ordinary Palestinians, not just the leadership of Hamas or Palestinian Islamic Jihad. And, you know, there's a fundamental intellectual dishonesty in not just what's being reported, but what's not being reported, that October 7th didn't happen in a vacuum. There is a three-quarter of a century long pretext to all of this. There's a context that if you don't acknowledge it, recognize it, include it in your, analysis when you talk about October 7th and the past nine-plus months of genocidal war, that you're presenting a totally dishonest narrative to your readers.

And part of the context, and I know you guys have talked about this before, is that throughout history, much of the Palestinian struggle for self-determination, liberation, an independent state has been nonviolent. And in 2018 and 2019, even Yahyazinwar, the Gaza leader of Hamas, endorsed the nonviolent marches under the banner of the Great March of Return, where thousands of Palestinians. But Jeremy, where is the Palestinian Pete Seeger, okay? That's where is, yeah, I mean, where is the, where is the Palestinian, you know, Joan Baez? Probably murdered at a checkpoint. Why is it?

Oh, fine. How convenient. Why is there only a sin war and not a virtue peace? I mean, sorry. You know, what is also, yeah, but these are questions, though, that are often asked by, you know, a lot of Democrats ask those kinds of questions. Well, why do they need to use violence? And it just shows a total ignorance of the history of the Palestinian liberation struggle. But in 2018, 2019, I see this is very significant.

Palestinians did do what all of these people said they should have been doing. The Israeli military snipers held the competition to see how many kneecaps they could shoot of protesters. And, you know, so at every turn throughout history, the Palestinians have been told not that armed resistance is unacceptable, but that any resistance is unacceptable. And, you know, when you have a cartoonish version of who the people are within Hamas or Palestinian Islamic jihad, you compare them to ISIS or to al-Qaeda, it might make you feel good to just say, oh, well, these are terrorists that want to murder, you know, mass murder Jews because they're Jews. But when you actually, you know, speak to people and you recognize that these are individuals with a backstory whose life experience

led them to believe that the only solution is armed struggle, then you start to get somewhere with understanding how October 7th happened. Why did October 7th happen? What were the objectives at play with October 7th? One of the most interesting interviews I did was an in-person interview with the second in-command of Palestinian Islamic Jihad. So we actually want to ask you about that particular interview. We have some screenshots of some key quotes from that one.

But go ahead and set this one up for us. And, you know, so I interviewed Dr. Muhammad al-Hindi, who was, Like many of the people who started both Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad, a university student in Cairo, he was from Gaza. He was a university student in Cairo. Many young Palestinians were becoming disillusioned with the Muslim Brotherhood because the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and it was starting to build into what would become Hamas in Gaza, we're very skeptical, if not opposed to armed resistance against the Israelis. These students were very inspired by the Islamic Revolution in Iran in 1979. Many of them actually had come out of a secular leftist tradition. And in fact, there were a lot of prisoners who were part of the Palestine Liberation Organization

and the armed struggle that existed when Yasser Arafat was actually running a revolutionary organization, who then started to forge ties with people who were motivated by an Islamic, worldview and Palestinian Islamic jihad wanted to try to bridge those gaps and create an armed wing that would directly and militarily confront Israel. And so when you understand the political context and you realize that someone like Dr. Muhammad al-Hindi, he's a physician, he's a pediatrician. He worked at al-Shifa Hospital in 1982. Matt, can we get a picture of him up on the screen? Yeah, yeah, here he is. He was fired for his, yeah, this is when we met. He was, you know, fired for his political views. He was repeatedly jailed by both Israel and what would

become the Palestinian Authority. In 2004, the Israelis tried to assassinate him in a helicopter attack on his, on his office. And when you, I encourage people to read the interview that I did with him. You know, he, he offered a explanation. defense and history that I think gives context, not that excuses anything, but explains the why of it, which is what is not permitted. There's a whole campaign against me now, Canary Mission and all of these other people saying that just by merely interviewing people from Hamas or Palestinian Islamic Jihad that I'm supporting terrorism, I think it's journalistic malpractice not to interview these people.

You can go back through history and find that American journalists all through history and British journalists all through history interviewed people that were on the other side of American wars. You had famous interviews with Saddam Hussein, with Osama bin Laden, with all sorts of people that were told are history's greatest monsters. And yet, somehow, this is just almost not allowed or not permitted. And so, you know, when you talk to them, and I asked them also difficult questions, I ask them, you know, one thing that a lot of, I think Palestinians in communities across the world discuss is, you know, did Hamas understand that Israel was going to launch this genocidal war, you know, against the people of Gaza? What were the orders regarding the killing of civilians? Why was a baby taken hostage? Why were old women taken back to Gaza? I asked

them all of these questions. And they answered them. And, you know, you can be satisfied or unsatisfied with their answers. But I think that that is in the public interest to share with the American people in the world, why did these guys do what they did and what do they think about the consequences of it? So it's a fascinating interview. I recommend, I mean, I read the Palestinian Islamic Jihad one and it's the Al-Hindi one in its entirety, the other one not entirely, but they're both wonderful. Can we take a couple of just looks at some of the things that Mohamed al-Hindi said? Because I think these really need to be heard. And then they need to be angrily denounced and turned into, and slandered and turned back into the anti-Semitic

blood libeles that they must be if we're going to keep the Husbarah going. So let's take a quick look at what he said here. You asked him basically, this is kind of his opening statement. And one of the things he says here is, quote, the West had its issues, well, sorry, let's go back one sentence. Ultimately, however, its analysis was that the project of establishing Israel was a Western one. The West had its issues with the Jews. In short, it could be said that anti-Semitism is a European problem

that did not exist in the East. It was solved, however, at the expense of the Palestinian people in the region. The Zionist project is not about the Jews in the first place. Rather, it is a Western colonization project that aims to control the region and preclude its independence and development. This is the Zionist project at heart. We do not have any problem with the Jews per se. Rather, our problem is with Zionism as a racist movement

which is based on usurping our resources and homeland and displacing us. So I guess, look, Jeremy, I don't want to tell you your business, okay? You've been doing this journalism thing for a lot longer than me. In fact, I've never done it. I just host a stupid podcast where we make Ghostbusters references and dick jokes. But it was kind of shocking to me that you didn't ask him the obvious follow-up question. I've sort of wrote it out here. This is how I would have said it.

I'm sure you could phrase it better. But I would say, well, sir, you know, with all due respect, many Jews who believe in Zionism say that your struggle, which you say is about Zionism and not Judaism, they don't agree with you. In fact, they say it's not about their Zionism, but it's about their Jewishness. And, sir, why are you trying to erase their lived experience of how they perceive your ideology and their agency to impose it on the rest of the world as cover for the moral consequences of their action? Are you just calling them a bunch of lying Jews? Like, who are you?

as we've learned, intentions don't matter. It's how it's harm, and it's perceived harm. That's right. That's right. So, I mean, your intentions are in the background. Your daughters are there in the background. And I'm sure you're teaching her that every day. Yeah.

That's right. That's right. It's, it's, you know, if you really study the, you know, this history and, and you start to talk to primary players in the Palestinian side of the, of the, of the armed resistance and they're explaining their context, you recognize why the Israeli state needs to rely overwhelmingly on a narrative that this is actually a war against Jewish people because they're Jewish. And, you know, I talked to the great Palestinian American novelist Susan Abelhoa recently,

and she said that never in history have the actions of an oppressed indigenous population been so heavily scrutinized. And I think that's right. You know, you need to build these kinds of narratives to justify the unjustifiable. And, you know, when you look at it, too, I mean, Palestinian Islamic Jihad and Hamas both conducted campaigns of suicide bombings

in which they targeted both Israeli military forces and Israeli civilians. And in 2005, 2006, Hamas announced an end to the suicide bombing, which they call martyrdom operations policy. And they said that this was a tactic used during a special period of time when you're talking about the context primarily of the second Palestinian Intifada. And after Hamas announced that, you saw a plummet in the number of suicide bombings that had taken place. You know, coming from a kind of Catholic worker background, I find those kinds of attacks, particularly on civilians, to be horrifying. And I think that people should, including from Palestinian Islamic Jihad and Hamas,

be asked about those tactics. But to imply that because these groups have engaged in those tactics, it somehow means that Israel has a forever permission slip to mass murder. Palestinians is a major part of the problem that, you know, you can say, oh, well, Palestinian Samajad, they're the ones that do suicide bombings. If that's the only thing that you're going to mention, and you're not going to give any context, you're not going to examine what kinds of weapons were available to the Palestinian people when they were trying to resist a violent apartheid state and occupation, then you're not interested in an actual serious, honest

discussion. I'm all in favor of having discussions about the morality of tax. used by insurgent groups and organized states. But what the people on the other side of the debates with me are not willing to do is actually do a thorough examination of the historical, political context of why there is an armed Palestinian resistance struggle. To say nothing of the legal context, which is to say that, you know, when it comes to occupied people's resisting versus the right to resist versus the obligation to end occupation.

We're inside of a legal context where to act as if we're going to just judge individual actions on some even moral playing field is just absurd. It's to treat these parties as if they're equal, as if there isn't an occupation. The ICJ or ICC ruling, I forget which in the past few days has driven home for anyone, ICJ, driven home for anyone who hadn't gotten a memo, that in fact this occupation is whole cloth illegal in its entirety. Look, I think it's an incredible interview. What really comes through is the rationality of the guy.

There's a coherent worldview, and there's a, you know, he's willing to... Oh, another interesting thing, Daniel, was I asked him, one of the lines about, you know, in all of this has been that Islamic Jihad is essentially an Iranian front group. And so I asked him about that. And, you know, his... Haddhazbara, by the way, is an Iranian front group. We admitted that on the last episode. It's out there.

So don't worry. You guys are now affiliated with the great Islamic Republic. But his response to this was to turn it sort of back at me and say, why do you treat this like it's like a scandal? Like Iran has always been on the side since the Islamic Revolution of, you know, of the Palestinian resistance. And he also pointed out. that when Israel did mass deportations of the Palestinian leaders of Hamas and Palestinian Islamic

jihad, they deport them to southern Lebanon, where they then developed these really close ties with Hezbollah, Iran, the Syrians were also in play there. But just their worldview is like, this is a totally Americanized, Israelized story. Like, you know, they're not hiding that they're in an actual axis of what they call the axis of resistance, and that Iran is a leading part of it. To them, they were saying, you know, there is no scandal here. We openly, you know, embrace the fact that these entities are working together. Although when I did ask him, I asked him about reports that they have an actual physical

command center, and he gave me the Palestinian Islamic jihad version of like, you know, this is classified information. I'm not going to discuss it. Yeah. Please, please, please contact our customer service team for all inquiries regarding that. We'll, we'll get back to you. I was hoping you'd ask him about- The green screen disappears behind him. It goes from being like a beachfront into the Iranian command center.

We didn't print it because the answer was unsatisfying. But the first question I asked him was, do you condemn Hamas? Oh, yeah, yeah. Did he? Ryan said it wasn't. Did you ask it in a, did you ask it in a pure, Paris Morgan accent? Yeah, I mean, he started. you know, sort of saying, well, we would need

to look at the Hannibal doctrine and all that. It was just not a satisfying answer. I told Jeremy that should be every follow-up question. Just, okay. But do you... We were gaming out how you do this interview. Yeah, Ryan, Ryan was playing

Daniel's role. He was like, you know, can you ask him if he condemns Hamas? And I was like, come on, Ryan. I mean, like, you know, he's got... I mean, you never know what you're going to get with that question. What if the answer was yes? That'd be amazing. Yeah, and be like, well, shit. then I have no problem with anything.

Well, they did have, there was, there was beef between Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad over the, over the decades. Yeah, of course. And I just had a thought of Fatah being like, well, we condemn Hamas. I mean, there is one interesting, this guy who is sort of widely seen as like one of the leading English language scholars on Palestinian Islamic Jihad, Eric Skare. He's a Ph.D. out of Oslo. He's written, he's Norwegian. and he's written two books about the group. And one theory he floated to me, which is quite interesting, is that prior to October

7th, you know, Hamas was, of course, a governing authority. It wasn't, it's not just an armed resistance group, and it's not just Al Qasam Brigades. It's, it actually was a government that was picking up the trash and responsibly for basic. Armed, armed garbage men, Jeremy. Right. Armed, armed sewage workers. Exactly. So, yeah.

But, you know, if you look at it, the, the, the, the, you know, the, you know, the, The Israeli policy of collective punishment, the blockade, the quote-unquote mowing of the lawn, was actually starting to yield results for Israel. And Hamas was, people were angry with Hamas on a governing level. There was a lot of dissatisfaction in the Gaza Strip among residents who, you know, combined with the fact that Israel was just punishing them in every imaginable way. They were just fed up the way, you know, people are in communities across the world with those in power. And also, after the 2021 bombing, you know, which Biden also supported before he called BB

and told them, you know, times up, it's over and then it was over after 11 days. Palestinian Islamic Jihad kept fighting Israel. Israel went on a targeted assassination campaign against Palestinian Islamic Jihad leadership. They killed a number of their senior commanders. Islamic Jihad responded by engaging in periodic rocket attacks against Israel. And then Muhammad al-Hindi, the man I interviewed, negotiated the ceasefire with Israel in May of 2023. So this is just months before the October 7th attacks happened. Eric Skare's theory was that Islamic jihad was offering a solution that Hamas had sat out during that period.

Hamas did not participate in. They maintained the 2021 ceasefire with Israel. Only Islamic jihad was doing the military attacks. So one of his theories was that Hamas's internal. calculation was, yes, it's about the Abraham Accords. Yes, it's about the fact that the status quo must be shattered. Yes, it's about a concern that the West Bank annexations are escalating. Yes, it was a concern that Al-Axa is repeatedly being defiled and may actually be raised to the ground at some point. All of those things are factors, but he said also it could be

that Hamas was feeling pressure from Islamic jihad, not directly, but indirectly, because they were offering something that was tangible. The only answer is the armed struggle, and that that may have factored into the ultimate decision to do this at this exact moment in history. He doesn't have proof for it. I think it's worth discussing. It's a fascinating reality TV show. I'm excited to see what happens when Hezbollah comes onto the set of the show.

There's going to be some spice. There's going to be maybe some love triangling going on. These are a wild card, you know, so we could get into so much, Ryan. I want to love a love triangle. I like that. Yeah, triple H, right? Yeah. Ryan, I want to ask you, you both, and I've heard Ryan, you speak about this, so I want to address this one to you.

You've done some checking up on the Screams without facts story. Oh, was that the name? No, screams without words, words without context. It screams without words, but as somebody else. else pointed out, I can't take credit for this, that's just called a scream. Right. Isn't that just screaming? Screaming.

Yeah. Ah. Yeah. Exactly. You know, so. You can scream words, but it's more common to scream without words. That's right. Right.

Right. I mean, I only scream why. So that's just me. Got it from Nancy Kerrigan. Or no. Like that lady at the Trump inauguration. I miss that she just screamed no oh oh that lady the no lady the meme

a meme developed from it yeah yeah yeah I think of screams without words as the Howard Dean story yeah but yes go on Daniel so we're of course we're talking of course of the now infamous and notorious New York Times piece written by an not Schwartzman and you can tell us more about her but, you know, some real Israeli operatives hired or planted at the New York Times.

And, you know, there were a lot of outlets, including the Electronic Intifada, my brother's outlet, the Gray Zone, you guys who have just noticed there were a lot of fishy things about this reporting. And I think kind of recently there were some updates to this story that you guys looked into how the New York Times handled it. And it was pretty scandalous. Do you want to tell us a little bit about that? Catch us up. I mean, what they did is they made the claim that they, through their meticulous months of reporting, including 150 interviews, had done what other outlets hadn't been able to do, which was to make a systemic connection between the October 7th attacks and sexual violence occurring on that day, to say that Hamas had weaponized rape as a weapon of war. and you read the story and it was one of those pieces where like

just reading the story you get to the end of it it's one of the stories where you just keep you're scrolling scrolling scrolling scrolling all right pretty soon they're going to have the goods here and then you and then the story ends you're like yeah huh yeah they it does feel like bearing the lead at the beginning there you're just like

oh they're going to get to you know sources and uh you know someone actually alleging something that happened to them personally. Right. And then they're like, what happened? Who knows? And then it ends. Right, except they don't even give you the who knows. They tell you like this happens. They imply they know. Yeah. Yeah. And it happened in seven locations. Like they use this specificity that isn't backed up by anything at all. And so like you said, a number of people immediately just just without needing to do any additional reporting just within the four corners of the article itself, we're like, you actually

don't support the headline and the subheadline in here and the lead. Like, you don't, like, maybe everything you say is true here, but you certainly have not demonstrated it, you know, even remotely. And then, you know, we've heard from Jeffrey Gettleman, though, one of the authors, and he makes the point, Ryan, that it's not what journalism's about corroborating facts, backing it. It's about spinning a good yarn, telling a good tale. And didn't they do that? Were you not entertained his yeah his line was something like it's not my job to provide evidence that's a lawyerly thing he said that's the courtroom thing and the indignation has been the the weapon used to defend it since like how like how dare you like how can you

can you believe that anybody would even question this yeah it was built that way and I think from the beginning this was something that I had talked about about the fact that this was a deliberately poison-pilled piece of Hasbara that just to even question it was meant to make people lose their jobs, get in trouble online, get docks, all of this stuff. Get smeared the way Ali and Max and Aaron and all these people did. And I'm sure you can just cut some of that in the aftermath. Yeah. And then the fallout has been, everybody now kind of reluctantly acknowledges, okay, that was a flawed piece of.

journalism uh but they'll say it's a shame because the story was true the times just didn't execute it right and then you'll have these other outlets that will say such a thing like cnn wrote this and then cnn will link to say there's their own pieces or to the guardian's pieces the guardians those pieces all rely on the exact same people right that the times piece relied on but somehow those are considered to be credible while that they're acknowledged that the New York Times ones have fallen apart, it's the most relentless thing I've ever seen, the insistence on continuing this narrative in the face of the inability to stand it up.

You know, also, let's remind people, too, of what all of these independent journalists who were, you know, really early on saying, you know, this, this is a propaganda, you know, this is propaganda warfare here. Right. The assertion, the reason that the New York Times story got so much attention is obviously because it's the New York Times, but also the presentation of it was that there was a premeditated systematic plan to unleash a regime of rape. against women in Israel.

And, you know, as someone who has covered war, I'm very well aware that it would be extraordinarily unusual if there wasn't rape and sexual violence met it out overwhelmingly against women in a chaotic scene of mass violence, particularly when the entire security infrastructure of Israel essentially evaporated within moments of the Hamas-led attacks beginning. So the lens through which I initially was viewing this was, I'm going to presume that there was rape and sexual violence just based on history, but facts matter.

You don't therefore then write a story and say, well, this must be true because it's happened everywhere else. You have to apply journalistic standards to how you look at it. And when we started, you know, examining who did this story and, you know, our colleague in Israel, a great researcher and writer Yaniv Kogan, when he discovered that Anat Schwartz, who is one of the bylined people on that New York Times piece, had given a series of interviews in Hebrew to Israeli media. And he started listening to these. he realized that she is explaining the entire journalistic process that the New York Times used when they went about telling this story. And so, you know, the original journalistic contribution that Ryan and I made to this in our stories, and as you point out, you know, others had been on this and had, you know, and a lot of it was reporting on things that had come out in the Israeli press.

A lot of what independent journalists were doing early on in the U.S. was translating articles that were coming out, bits and pieces in various parts of the Israeli media. And that's also true of questions about so-called friendly fire incidents or Hannibal doctrine, et cetera, but on this story as well. And so, but in listening to the way that Annaut Schwartz described their process, you started to realize there are serious journalistic problems with how they pursued this story. I'll give you just one example. The New York Times, along with CNN, the AP, a number of,

of other outlets, did stories, and the New York Times included it in Screens Without Words, about an incident that they claimed took place in Kibbutz-Berry. And the assertion was that an Israeli special forces paramedic encountered a scene where two adolescent girls appeared to have been raped on October 7 and that one of the girls had what appeared to be semen smeared on her back. And so the New York Times has it in their piece and AP others. And when we started then looking into this more closely, we then ended up reviewing what the family.

We figured out who these girls were because we have lists of everyone under. We did extensive analysis of everyone 18 and under who was killed on October 7th. to try to determine how they died. So we had created a spreadsheet and we were looking and we discovered that it must be only these two individuals. So we started looking at what has their family said about this? And they were a family that had the mother originally came from Britain and she migrated to Israel and they had these two girls.

And the grandmother and grandfather were profiled in British media and made a comment that they said, I can't believe I have to say this, but they were only murdered, nothing else. And so, so we then got in touch with the kibbutz. Gives a whole new meaning to that, to the title of that Steve Martin, Martin short series, only murders in the building, not right now. I mean, this was a horrifying graphic description of what had happened to these two adolescent girls that wasn't just in the New York Times piece, but was, was on CNN.

Tapper also featured this story, the AP featured this story, other news outlets. A whole separate part of this is that it appears as though Alon Levy, the Israeli government spokesperson of the time, friend of the show. We love it. Right, of course, was shopping this story around to various news organizations. And I know Aaron and Max and others did a lot of stuff trying to figure out who this Special Forces paramedic was. But what we were able to do then was to talk to the kibbutz and the kibbutz confirmed to us on the record that the girls had not been sexually assaulted. We went to the New York Times then with that,

and the New York Times said that they were standing by their story, despite the fact that you had family members of the girls, the kibbutz itself saying it's not true, the New York Times stood by the story. And then eventually, the New York Times is shown video by the Israeli military of the discovery of those girls, by the actual soldiers who discovered them

showing clearly that what the Times had implied happened to them did not happen. And to this moment, the New York Times has not issued a proper correction. They did a quiet update, you know,

an update of their story. And the final thing I'll say on this is that when we published our first... I got to say, I got to say, I admire that. You know, a lot of people hated on George Lucas for the... The remastered or for the prequels?

The prequels. and the remaster. Look, it's his story, okay? Artistic ownership and agency, a little bit of creative license. Everyone's a critic. Come on. So, so the final thing I'll say on is, because I think it's so... Update, this didn't happen. Yeah, right. Guys, I got to jump on another call. I'll let Jeremy finish this one of them. But thank you guys. Thank you so much. Thanks so much for coming on. Great to talk to you. Now I can tell you all the dirt about Ryan. Okay. So, excellent. Thank you, Brian so much for coming on how things get really grim. The final thing on this is that if you, when we did our first story about Screams

Without Words, the New York Times Communications Department sent us like a ripping email, demanding retractions, corrections, et cetera. And among the things that they demanded that we correct is that Adam Sella, the junior, the most junior reporter on that story, bylined on that story. We're just saying a lot, because Annaut Schwarzenman had never written a damn piece of journalism in her life. Well, junior, because it was Anot Schwartz's cousin. Right.

Okay, well, hold on. Wait a minute. You're going to get a letter from the New York Times because this is not correct. Okay, okay. So what we said was that Adam Sella is Anot Schwartz's nephew. He had been a food blogger, and then he all of a sudden was put in charge, one of the people put in charge of a massive New York Times investigation alleging that Hamas went into Israel with a systematic rape plan. So they have the food blogger who ends up on the byline with Jeffrey Gettleman

and Anah Schwartz. So we reported that he was her nephew. Well, they said, no, this is not accurate because Anat Schwartz and it's her partner's nephew and Anat Schwartz is not married to him. They are just domestic partners. So this is false. So in our newsroom, it's her nephew. It's her nephew in In common law. You can see, so, so in our, in our newsroom then, we had this argument, we had this argument about, like, should we actually correct this? This is insane to say that, like, oh, well, sorry, it's not her nephew. It's her partner that she's not married to nephew. And I was the one who said, no, absolutely.

We should issue that correction. A hundred percent. And, like, we should go over the top. We regret this grave error that we've made in our, in our piece. You should do a notes app apology with it, too. You know, you put it out on Twitter. Jesus, I can't believe we could be so, you know, so just. My confession video, dear readers, I haven't told you.

I made a horrible error. I misidentified Anodh Schwartz's partner's nephew as her nephew, and it undermines the entire credibility of our piece about their valiant piece of journalism that was robbed of the Pulitzer Prize. Well, our notepad, our notepad with the, the exact relationship had been somehow smeared with semen so that we couldn't read the couldn't read the accurate relationship. Boom.

Oof. Ryan seems to have made the right decision to end his representation in the bad Hasbarah show. Yes. Yes. But that's, so, I mean, the one thing I don't think I'll ever understand is what the general corporate, or it's not even a corporate culture, but the culture of journalism in general in which you have these giant news organizations like New York Times who are doing stuff like refusing to correct or retract something

that has been proven as false reporting. Like, what is it like in the journalism, in the world that you're in? I can tell you what we heard from people within the New York Times. Yeah, that's what I'm interested in because I know there are people I'm talking about whistleblowers, like people within the New York Times, and I mean, we don't need to get into all the details of this, but we also published a, no, I mean, I'm just saying just for time's sake, people can look it up. We did a series of stories based on, you know, people within the New York Times newsroom talking to us about what was going on there. And it spurred a witch hunt where the New York Times that did an internal investigation to try to figure out who was leaking, you know, to us. And it started with, you know, with a story. that we did at the Intercept about the podcast The Daily and how

their episode about Screams Without Words didn't clear their fact check process. But we also spoke to other people within the New York Times Newsroom who said that the paper was obsessed with awards

and if you have to issue retractions on pieces it makes it very hard to keep going with the Pulitzer Prizes. The Polk, George Polk Award did include Screams Without Words in its package that was awarded the Polk Award this year. So it did get, it was part of the package that won the Polk Award. It did not win the Pulitzer. But also, you know, we try not to reference the wire on every episode, but God damn it.

This is season five. Yes. Yeah, I could see that parallel. But, you know, the end of this is that I think also that there was this panic that if they have to walk back this story and they have to admit that it was it was built on a you know on a a platform of sand you know that just was kind of collapsing under the the the lightest bit of weight or pressure yeah um that this then was going to be perceived as the new york times retracting that there were any rapes whatsoever that occurred on october seven and and i think that

you know well and and you know one of the thing you you you know you know you know you You cannot make decisions about whether to correct factual errors based on any factors other than whether they're true or not. I mean, this is just basic journalism. I think it's beyond that, too. All of us have fucked up. All of us have had to issue. It's not fun. It's not pleasant.

Especially if you do a high-stakes story and you have to say, oh, my God, we got it wrong. Sure. You have to own it. There's to this moment refusing to correct verifiably, demonstrably false things that they reported. Well, so I think it's that. I think number one also it's that they don't want to get yelled at, continue to get yelled at

by camera. It seems like that they're always going to be on their ass. But also, I think to retract or to correct this story is, you know, to admit its part

in the continued genocide of Gaza. Oh, I mean, this story was so central. It was, central is part and parcel to the ramping up and and and being allowing Israel to continue to do their bloodletting you know you had these two these two moments that I think you know were turning points is not the right phrase but that were key moments where propaganda really saved the day for

the genocide that Israel was intent on committing one was when the Biden administration co-signed the lies about the Hamas Pentagon being underneath El Shifa Hospital. And when the U.S. came forward and said, we have our own independent intelligence that this is true, that gave the green light to Israel to then systematically go after all these hospitals and medical facilities in Gaza and destroy or severely damage every single one of them. And then the second was when, you know, at the very end, just a few days before New Year's, screams without words, gets published. And it was at a moment when you really started to see a global, a rise in global outrage.

You had even European countries that were allies of Israel starting to use stark terms about the killing of babies. Even Trudeau in Canada was starting to say things that are like uncharacteristically strong for him. And he's been all in with this the whole time. So at key moments, these kinds of events ended up putting more fuel in the genocide vehicle. And, you know, I'm not saying Netanyahu and Biden and company wouldn't have continued, but you can go back through these nine-plus months and find this trail of propaganda crumbs. That's right. That were laid at decisive moments to ensure that it would continue. Yes.

With assists from people like Hillary Clinton and Cheryl Sandberg and, you know. Joe Biden and. Yeah, exactly. And I think that's exactly right. that it's not so much that the most horrifying thing about suggesting that there was no sexual violence on October 7th, if in fact there was, would be disrespect to the victims or to the families. No, it would be revealing that what the rest of our paper has been done, has been doing actively is participating in this genocide, helping it to happen. But also, on this issue,

And again, like, I have never said, oh, I know with certainty that there was no sexual violence on October 7th. I, you know, if I have to, you know, sort of theorize about it, I would be surprised if there wasn't just based on my experience. But I'm not going to run around banging pots and pans about atrocities that we don't have documented evidence for. And no forensic evidence for a planned, coordinated systemic thing. For sure, this systematic, you know, this narrative about a systematic. pre-determined thing has absolutely no basis in fact that anyone has presented. But in a way, it's also similar to the discourse around the Hannibal doctrine, the question of, to what extent did Israel intentionally kill or injure its own citizens to prevent them from being brought

back to Gaza? It's also relevant to the discussion about the shelling of houses in some of the Kibbutzim and the number of Israelis that were killed at the hands of their own forces, high-powered weapons from either helicopters or tanks, you can make an argument, or part of the argument should also be that all people who died on that day, and this is also true of the tens of thousands of Palestinians who've been murdered with U.S. weapons and support, everyone who died during the course of this, their families deserve to have some understanding of what happened to their loved ones. And just, you know, even if you want to look at this purely from the perspective of the family

members of Israelis who died on October 7th, they should be provided answers that are real and factual from their own government about the extent to which orders were given to launch operations that they knew were going to kill Israeli civilians. That's one part of this argument. But the other part of it is, to what extent does Israel know that certain incidents of violence or killing that occurred were done at the hands of Israeli forces? From the beginning, we were initially told 2,000 people were killed that day. We were told that the overwhelming majority of people killed were civilians. And then when you start to look at the actual Israeli official numbers, it gets down to around a little bit more than 1130.

people died that day, you know, Israelis and foreigners who were resident in Israel. You know, you had several hundred soldiers who died that day. You had 695 Israelis that were identified as civilians and 75 foreigners who were identified as civilians. When you start to look at the factual at the factual reality of this, then it allows you to make a different. sort of assessment of what of what happened that day and you know I again I don't think Hamas or or or or Palestinians or anyone involved with with this should be absolved of any questions about why they did certain things that they did but what I won't participate in is pretending that there wasn't a 75 year 76 year political and historical context to the

October 7th attacks and I won't pretend that a single thing that happened on October 7th justified anything that we have seen since then that's been supported by the U.S. government. And if that makes me whatever Canary and all these other groups want to say, they can have at it on Twitter, I really don't care because facts actually matter. Yeah. I agree with you completely and I'm jealous that you get to be on Canary Mission and I'm still not on there. I had never even heard of this except like I've never even heard of this thing until they made this video with like me and ali abunima and yeah yeah they're like they're mostly like docs in college students and uh academics you know that was their thing for a while

um i hope they don't get into my dorm room that would be problematic dude yeah then they'll prank you so hard in your dorm room but i got i got i got to run you i got to run you guys um but yeah i'm sorry I'm sorry to disappoint you, Daniel, but. No, no, no, no. I think the, I think the, the, the, um, you've more than done your, uh, your, your, your part. Thank you so much for doing us for this long. Thank you. Yeah.

Yeah. And dropping so much knowledge. Yeah. And all of this was off the record, right? This was all just on background. Yeah, yeah. We're going to, we're going to, um, press the board afterwards. We're going to replace your face with, uh, Harold Ramis.

Yeah, yeah. It's all going to look like Ghostbusters. Don't worry about this. they won't even know who you are, it's all. No, putting like a green screen of like the Islamic Jihad logo. No, we're not going to put a Hamas headband on you or anything like that. Producer Adam, if you want to do it to Daniel, it's fine, but... Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Well, Ryan's already agreed to it, so we've already doing it with him. Got it. Jeremy Skehill, thank you so much for coming on. Really love your work and appreciate you taking your time to come on this show. Really, really appreciate everything you do. thank you guys thanks for your for your work and for having me on yeah and thank you at all of you out there listening to this show patreon.com slash bad hasbara bad has barra at gmail dot com and i think i got the ending uh so until next time everyone from the river to the sea you didn't just fall out of

that coconut tree you know this was like Kamala harris says oh god i didn't i didn't have one this I that's what I've been doing this whole episode is thinking what am I going to say all right bye see ya jumping jacks was us push-ups was us godmaga us all karate us taking molly us michael jackson us yamaha keyboards us charge of mix on us and or was us keith ledger joker us endless bread success Being happy us. Bequam yoga us. Eating food, us. Breathing air, us.

Drinking water us. We invented all that shit.