Bad Hasbara - The World's Most Moral Podcast - Bad Hasbara 95: Pursuit of Happiest, with Adam Johnson

Episode Date: March 27, 2025

Matt and Daniel are joined by Adam Johnson of the Citations Needed podcast to discuss the detainment of Academy Award-winning director Hamdan Ballal by the IDF, Israel's place in the world happiness pecking order, and a couple of hot zionist jams racing up the charts in time for summer.Come see Matt Lieb and Francesca Fiorentini do stand up at Cobbs Comedy Club in San Francisco on May 7th. Tickets here: https://www.livenation.com/event/G5vYZb0MwzkkR/francesca-fiorentini-and-matt-liebDonate to Gaza Great Minds: http://gazagreatminds.org/donate/Find Citations Needed at https://x.com/CitationsPodSubscribe to the Patreon https://www.patreon.com/badhasbaraSubscribe/listen to Bad Hasbara wherever you get  your podcasts.Spotify https://open.spotify.com/show/5RDvo87OzNLA78UH82MI55Apple Podcasts https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/bad-hasbara-the-worlds-most-moral-podcast/id1721813926Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/bad-hasbara/donationsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Moshwamah bitch, a rib and cocoa toast. 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. Olive garden us.

White foster us. Zabrahamas. As far as us. Hello, everybody, and welcome to Bad Hasbara. World's Most Moral Podcast. You know what it is. You know how we do. My name is Matt Leap. I'm your Most Moral co-host. I'm Daniel Matte, the other Most Moral co-host. We are so excited for another just wonderful episode of Bad Hasbara. Thank you to all of the listeners

slash watchers out there. We're so excited for another episode of the podcast we wish didn't have to exist. Yes, we are to, yeah. I have to start by saying we're so excited so I can trick my mind into being excited. It's my way of

trying to trick the piggies and to be oh, if they're excited about the slop, then I'll be even more excited about the slop. It's not that we're not excited. Listen, I am, we have a lot of really great stories to go over today. no it's a it's a it's a it's a chunky one today yeah it's very robust it's very robust

but hey we got to keep cope alive exactly we're trying to uh yeah keep the cope alive you know that is uh that is what we do here on bad has bar a shout out to producer adam levin who's out here on the ones and twos and you know on the threes and fours as well uh please subscribe on youtube if you haven't subscribed then you're met up because listen, why are you not doing it? It's stupid. You should have subscribed by now. Yeah, you should have been subscribed. And if you haven't, then you can just click one button and it's done. And you can please also subscribe on whatever podcast app you're using and make sure to leave us five stars in review. It helps people see

that the show exists. It helps the algorithm, blah, blah, blah. Do it. Yeah. I found out you can leave reviews for individual episodes too yeah yeah on spotify there's a comment section which is a lot of fun to look at sometimes i'll check it out and uh people um people will say some nice things and then sometimes it's just kind of the same old shit uh they'll be like oh it's a pretty good episode i really liked your guess when you let them get a word in itch wise it's just like at this point if you've listened to this podcast long enough you have to know we're going to just talk and talk and sometimes, you know, we'll do, we try. We'll do better. But for now, what do you expect from us? Trying to listen to another show, a show where people, you know, just sit back and let

other people talk about that. But we will. Different show, different spectrum. Exactly. It's called cooperative overlap and I will die on that hill. Please, if you are in San Francisco in May, specifically Wednesday, May 7th, come out to Cobb's Comedy Club. It is over in North Beach in San Francisco. It's a great comedy club. Me and my wife Francesca Furentini, we're going to be co-headlining. We're each doing long sets. It's going to be super fun.

Really excited for everyone who's going to come to that show. And you could be one of them. So buy your tickets. Click the link. Do it. Buy tickets. Please buy tickets. I want to get invited back.

Today's episode is brought to you by Gaza Great Minds. Gaza Great Minds provides tent classrooms and quality education to Gaza's children affected by war, as well as much-needed professional psychological support. So please, if you have any money that you are willing to part with, make it go to a good cause, specifically Gaza Great Minds. And you can donate now, Gaza Great Minds.org. so please do that and if you have any

money left over after that and you're like hey I like the show I wish I had double the amount go to patreon.com slash bad hasbara and subscribe to our Patreon. Don't subscribe to us first do it like a matching funds thing exactly exactly for every dollar

you give to a good cause give one dollar to a bad cause and that bad cause is supporting this podcast that we are all so excited about. Oh, my God. But really, though? No, but really.

For real? For really. I am excited about this episode. We are so seriously, you guys. Yes. This is going to be a fun one, despite the horror around us. But before we get into that, I need to know, Daniel, what's the spin? Well, today we have a true artisan of media criticism.

as our guest. That's right. I've been listening to this guy's podcast. A lie Somaliye. Somali, Somali, there we go. Exactly. Very good. Somalia. Yeah. That was a workout. A true connoisseur of media bullshit.

Do you break a sweat when you come up with a pun? Or is that just me? Like, because I'm like sweating over here trying to get Somal laia out of my mouth. Like, do it, man. My heart rate goes up a little. but my pun cardio is game is strong. I know, very strong. Yeah, I got, so I pulled a few records

with songs having to do with media criticism, I guess, or just media skepticism. So number one, Joe Jackson, not Michael Jackson's father, but the British Joe Jackson, is she really going out with him? There's a song called Sunday Papers on this classic record, I'm The Man. No, sorry, look sharp. This is Look Sharp.

Sunday Papers, which is sort of a, you know, making fun of the TV tabloids, or the tabloid newspapers. Sure, sure, sure. Rage Against the Machine says, turn on the radio. Nah, fuck it. Turn it off. Hell yeah. I want to shout out real quick, Tom Morello, who shared one of my tweets on his Instagram stories. So that was pretty sick.

And open invitation. As soon as I saw that, I immediately DM them like, Tom, go on back. That has Fara. That'd be hell of cool. Wouldn't that be cool? He probably gets a lot of tweets. Can you make some sound effects with your guitar? Can you make it sound like a turntable?

Yeah, make it sound like whew-wee-wee-I-W! I like when it goes, wee-o. And then, chilling in the name of. Yeah. Producer, Adam. Nice, nice, nice night. Shut up. And today we have to be extra careful to call him producer Adam,

because our guest's name is Adam. Yeah, we got too many ads. And then Kendrick Lamar's GNX has the song TV off, turn this TV off, turn this TV off, turned his TV off. And that matches this sticker that someone gave me at the most recent Mahmoud Khalil protest. I love it. I love it.

TV off, Sudan and Gaza, there's a picture of the guy who ran on the field at Kendrick's Super Bowl show. So that's a little quick hit of what the spin is today. GNX is a great album, man. I love it. Where is your real big fish turn the radio off seven inch? He's right. You should have some real big fish.

Isn't that a Christian rock group? No. No, no, that is the only SCA group I know. Oh, right. Skaw, of course. Yes, it's SCA. Adam loves SCA. I know one SCA band.

And that's just my life, you know? I feel bad about it. I know it's a whole genre, but... I've got some fishbone and I've got some English beat, but that's about all I've got, ska-wise. Sure. Those are probably good bands. Okay, so that's the spin.

That's what we're listening to. And now we need to spin ourselves some guests. What am I talking about? We have a great guest today, very excited. He is a writer, and he is the co-host of the wonderful media critique podcast, Citations Needed. Ladies and gentlemen and everyone else, please welcome to the pod, Adam Johnson. Hi. All right.

Thank you so much for having me on. Thank you so much for coming on. How are you doing, Adam? had. I'm doing, I'm doing okay. Again, I have this weird AC wind tunnel thing coming and hopefully it's not too loud. I apologize to your producer for that. Yeah, it's fine. We, you know what we're going to do? We're going to put some noise reduction on that track and we're going to make it, we're going to make you sound like you're in a studio. I just don't want you to listen who's thinking of a hurricane. I'm in Chicago. We don't have those. You don't have hurricanes in

Chicago? Despite being the windy city, it apparently has nothing to do with wind. I was disappointed to learn. I will say every time I've been to Chicago, I've been like this fucking bullshit. Yeah, apparently it has to do with the blowhard nature of the politicians back in the 1880s when people made those like old-timey cartoons. Although that strikes me

is slightly not true. Is that true? Because every time I'm... Supposedly that's true. It is contested, but I think that is consensus among historians. Because every time I'm in Chicago walking along, you know, the lake... It can get windy because of the lake, but I don't get windy, and I'm always like psychologically probably thinking that it's... I'm like, boy,

This city is windy, but that's only because I've been groomed to think that. I don't think it cracks the top 20, like, windy cities. Weirdly, you know, have you ever been to Amarillo, Texas? No. I think that's like the windiest city or top three. And it's, it smells like cow shit. No offense if you're listening to you from Amarillo. It smells like cow shit.

And it's, it legitimately is windy because that's why it smells like cow shit, because there's no land. It's, or rather, it's all flat. There's no hills. Anyway, not really that interesting. But if you ever find yourself in the panhandle of Texas. I'm thinking maybe all the winds from Amarillo comes from all those cows farting up a storm. Yeah, those are the end of the podcast.

Those are some gusty cows. I think I may have alienated my panhandle listenership, but go ahead. No, they love you, I'm sure. Adam, thank you for coming on. We have a lot of stories to get to. But I want to talk about what you do and sort of what citations needed does. which is essentially media critique, which I think is sorely needed, obviously, at this time. It's kind of what this podcast is as well.

And you wrote an article for The Intercept back in early 2024 in which you talked about the way in which the mainstream media, so to speak, or the institutional art. our media institutions like New York Times and whatnot talk about Israelis versus how they talk about Palestinians. So I want to ask, do you think that the New York Times is fair and balance? No. So that was the first part of what ended up being a four-part series. The remaining three were published in The Nation, actually. And it's actually going to be expanded to a much larger project which should be coming out later this year which is that we really

what we wanted to do with that project and by we I mean my co-author who's anonymous he is a Palestinian American he does data analysis and quantitative research but because you know Palestinians have a tendency to be targeted

and you know harassed and doxed he remains anonymous but I just wanted to let you know that I didn't crunch those numbers I did the analysis. He did the actual data, which is remarkably hard to do because the way that newspapers and websites work. There's a lot of effort that was put into that. Because what we wanted to do is we wanted to show what we wanted to show in the subsequent pieces in the nation that dealt with MSNBC and CNN, that dealt with the Sunday morning news shows and dealt with

Washington Post and Pell and Axios and others, was we wanted to show that this bias that people claim is not just about sort of screencapping headlines, but could be showed very empirically, very scientifically. Everything was open-sourced. Again, we, that piece went semi-viral and people tried to poke holes in it. No one could because, again, we linked to everything, linked all the articles showed our data. And what we showed was just a pretty glaring asymmetry in coverage as a kind of starting place to tease out sort of why that is and the bigger dynamics that lead to that, because what we wanted to do is make it so obvious and so dispositive that it wasn't something anyone could kind of dispute.

You know, one of the more, there's a lot of examples, but one of the sort of more glaring ones we covered there, and then subsequently in our article on CNN and it was in B.C., is the asymmetry in what we call emotive words, which is to say the kind of words that are designed to solicit an emotional reaction from readers

or viewers when an Israeli is killed versus a Palestinian, the words like murderous, barbarous, horrific, brutal, and these were, I could I don't have the numbers in front of me, but for the New York Times study, which was just six weeks, it was roughly 12, 15 to 1. Our MSNBC, we since expanded that study. It's, again, depending on the time frame, if you go a full year, it's usually about... Even the nouns used, right? Like, Slaughter was one of the words that you...

Right. So Slaughter, yeah, we used sort of variations thereof. Slaughter, barbaric, again, I could pull up those numbers if you'd like me to read them. And then the point being is that, and then when you ask people who work there, which we've subsequently done for other projects or people who are maybe sympathetic or attend, you know, go on those programs. And actually a separate study was done by Canadian journalist. And gosh, forgive me, I can't remember the name of their publication. but they asked the CBC why they use these sort of asymmetric emotive language. And they gave this perfectly kind of racist tautological answer, which is, well, that's just the way it is. But why? Why? Because they're terrorists. Yeah, but why is dropping a 2,000 pound bomb on a apartment full of children, not terrorism, but it's terrorism in October 7th, like, how do you define? Well, that's just, that's how the government defines it. So everybody kind of reverts back to these, like, because when you push, when you have the data and you show the asymmetry, which again everybody knows but it's useful to have right i don't think we're necessarily blowing anyone's mind with any great revelation but it's useful to kind of come armed with the data um they they they they they invariably if you ever get sort of get them on the hook they invariably

kind of revert back to these um to these uh you know sort of post nine eleven thing you know kind of word uh mush that's like well what they they kill for the kind of sadistic glee therefore it has this kind of emotive charged, whereas Israelis kill reluctantly with a heavy heart because they have no choice, because all the toddlers are just between them and the tunnels. And they sort of, you know, otherwise they, you know, they don't do it for any kind of sadistic reason, whereas the, the other bad guys are kind of ontologically evil. And they do it because of... Even their sadism isn't, which they film and put on TikTok isn't for sadistic reasons.

Right. It's an expression of their... Yeah. Oh, those are just, yeah. So here's the actual data, if you'd like me to read it. So this was a detailed analysis of Palestinian versus Israelis. This is just the first 30 days. This was CNN and MSNBC.

And they were remarkably identical. It's actually really, I can show you the data. It's actually remarkable how identical they are. So Barbaric was used 102 times to describe the killing of Israelis. Zero times for Palestinians. This is on air from anchors, journalists, guests. Slaughter was used 181 times versus six for Palestinians. Brutal was used 332 times for Israelis, only 13 for Palestinians,

and Massacre was used 402 times for the killing of Israelis versus only 24 for Palestinians. So this is, again, this is not even including the obviously wildly asymmetric death toll that by even with 30 days in had been, I think at that point it was roughly 6 or 7 to 1. The good old days. Right, exactly, versus what it is now, which is probably upwards closer to 150 to 1. Well, because that one stayed constant because the number of Israeli non-combatants killed is confined to that day.

To a single day. You know, like, right, because they're throwing, yeah, the rockets, they're going over and not very sophisticated. Right. Yeah. So again, that, that, that asymmetry was kind of a starting point in our research because, you know, I think most people kind of assume this,

but it was, we thought it was useful to have, And then we showed other kind of asymmetries, for example, the number of times CNN or MSNBC mentioned Palestinian prisoners who, again, are taken from their homes, not given trials, kept in cages. That's another word for that. It's called kidnapping. Thousands of them never mentioned really at all. Thousands of them are literal. To the extent they are mentioned, they're mentioned only in so far as they facilitate the Israeli hostages. Right.

And thousands of them are literal kids, too. So truly kidnapping to a literal degree. Right. And then, of course, the mention of... And sometimes they kidnap them while they're napping. That's true. Yeah, and then the asymmetrical, of course, mentions of rape, because there's been several documented cases. U.N. report. Horace has written about it.

Of raping of Palestinian soldier sexual humiliation, of Palestinian so-called prisoners. We can call them hostages if you want it. I think that sort of neutral term people use is captives, which is kind of maybe less low to term. And that's just not mentioned at all. It wasn't mentioned in our study of the Sunday morning new shows, which is where we did a detailed analysis of all 160 episodes of CNN's with a state of the union, NBC's meet the press, CBS's Face the Nation, and ABC's this week with George Stephanopoulos. They made no mention of, again, Palestinians being raped, they made the mention of virtually no mention of children dying with only a rare exception.

and of the 160 episodes we analyzed this was or rather I'm sorry 208 episodes rather so it's 52 over episodes for the first year from October 7th to October 24 we studied we found that of the of the I think 400 plus guests over 208 episodes of the of the four main Sunday morning shows which nobody watches but people who matter watch so they're actually quite influential right yeah yeah they had only one Palestinian guest on for seven minutes and that was CBS, CBS, Faced the Nation on November of 2023, had on the Palestinian ambassador to the UK. And that was it.

They had 20 Israeli guests, obviously dozens and dozens of American pro-Israel guests. Right. So we wanted to kind of put those studies out as a place where academics and others could build off as others have, and we build off other academics to document what we argue is basically, and I don't say this to be polemical, I think it is an incitement to genocide. 100%.

Strictest sense of the word. Yes. Both in terms of it's kind of lurid, racist coverage. It's obviously a total asymmetry of empathy. It's complete dehumanitation of Palestinians. It's denial of death counts of Palestinians. It's, you know, again, reinforcing fake stories. Lurid's kind of made up stories from, you know, 40 bad babies, et cetera.

Right. And the argument we're trying to build and we're trying to build it with, again, our subsequent project and research they're working on now is that while, you know, we're not lawyers, we can't make a legal case towards, towards, you know, incitement to genocide. I think there's a strong moral one, there's certainly strong ethical one for anyone who studies media. And that's kind of what the point of that, of that project was and both its past and current iterations. Yeah. And anyone going who has the, you know, who manages to slip through the, through the filters and get involved. on these networks. I saw one guest. I forget who. Oh, yeah, it was Mark Pearl Mutter, the doctor, the surgeon who either is in Gaza or has been, did a great thing. He was

on CNN recently, and he called out CNN to their face. I mean, going armed with this stuff, that stuff should, you know, you should, no one should be on these networks without telling them to their face that not you the anchor specifically this but you know but your organization has taken part in um in enabling this thing i'm describing all right yeah i mean and there's a pretty again i think there's a pretty clear-cut case for that um and that's what you know it's one we're working on making stronger and building so i wanted to um pivot to a story that just happened recently and sort of the uh coverage that was it was given by the new york time but first let's get into the details of it so Hamdan Balal who is the Oscar winning

co-director of the documentary No Other Land here's a picture of him holding his Oscar was assaulted by Israeli settlers and then abducted by Israeli soldiers while receiving medical attention for the assault by Israeli settlers and in the middle of receiving medical attention. Yes. From, I'm assuming, a Palestinian ambulance. It could have been a Palestinian ambulance, but an ambulance was called to the scene after he was assaulted by settlers, not just like punch, but like on the ground, they continued to beat him. And then, you know, when an ambulance came, the IDF came later and

then abducted him. And he was, you know, gone for a period of time. People, you know, had no idea where he was. He only just a couple hours ago, it was reported that he is now out of Israeli detention. And I think a lot of that has to do with the fact that the story spread rapidly. So we have just a little video of the attack on Hamden and the people he was with. So they're being attacked by some people in masks. They run back to their car. And they're with some American observers as well. And while they're in the car, the settlers just start smashing it and, you know, getting

ready to pull them out and do more violence to them. So now we still are getting more info on what happened. Apparently there is a video of HMden getting treatment by the ambulance and then getting taken by the IDF. We don't have that video yet, but this was first came to light when the other co-director or one of the I think there's four co-directors, but the Israeli co-director, Yuval Ibrahim, tweeted about it, where he said,

a group of settlers just lynched Hamdan Balal, co-director of our film, No Other Land. They beat him and he has injuries in his head and stomach bleeding. Soldiers invaded the ambulance he called and took him no sign of him since. So this is, you know,

obviously a huge claim. but the IDF disputed this claim. They said, uh, and, uh, you know, and then,

uh, apparently, uh, the IDF statement about this, uh, was communicated this way. Uh, I'll read their statement just so people know.

There's always two sides to every story. Um, so, uh, the IDF said last night, several terrorists hurled rocks at Israeli citizens. damaging their vehicles near Susia. Following this, a violent confrontation broke out

involving mutual rock hurling between Palestinians and Israelis at the scene. Oh, common ground. That's coexistence for you. Exactly. They both have the same interests. IDF and Israeli police forces arrived to disperse the confrontation. At this point, several terrorists began hurling rocks at the security forces. In response, the forces apprehended three Palestinians suspected of hurling, rocks at them as well as an Israeli civilian involved in the violent confrontation. The detainees were taken for further questioning by the Israeli police. An Israeli citizen was injured in the

incident and was evacuated to receive medical treatment. Contrary to claims, no Palestinian apprehended was apprehended from inside an ambulance. Don't believe the hype. So the Hasbaris, when it came to this story immediately, and they're still now doing this, started spreading the new narrative that they are

trying to you know, they're trying to get everyone to bite on, which is that this man, Hemdan, Balal, was a rock-throwing terrorist, that he was throwing rocks, and therefore

it is well with the rights of an occupying force to be engaged in a friendly intramural game of mutual rock throwing during which he committed some infractions the referees blew the whistle

and they send him to the penalty box yeah happens all the time there are rules to this shit you have to play fair exactly you know this is this is just how it is you know there's listen there are two sides to every story

there's the side that has Arabs and there's the side that's telling the truth. And that is what everyone wanted us to know. It's hard to know where to find the truth in these times. And thank God, and I think Adam Johnson, you'll agree. Thank God we have the New York Times. Because the New York Times came out with this story in which they fully explained what was happening.

And I'm going to read this to you. And Adam, you know, both Adam and Daniel, you can stop me if at any point you feel like you're hearing anything biased. Israeli police questioned Palestinian Oscar winner, who witnesses said was beaten. Subtitle is, witnesses say that Hamdan Bilal was assaulted by mass settlers in his home village. The Israeli military said he was detained on suspicion of throwing stones, which he denies. A bunch of people said some shit. That's the story.

What were the settlers doing in his village? Don't ask that question. Yeah. I love two sides of the story. One is people who were there. And the other one is the military occupying force that is being accused of doing the crime. These are the sides of the story. And we have to, they both have equal weight.

I think we can all agree. Well, I think this is a good opportunity real quick to talk about one of my favorite fake indignation. when the Atlantic magazine writes an article every few months about why the word settler colonialist is, like, offensive. Why it makes them sad. And literally you have people who call themselves settlers. So at least we're checking 50% of the box, which is to say they're settling land and stealing land that is not theirs by definition. And then, of course, the colonial aspect is what the foundation of Israel was called. You can go back and look at articles in the New York Times.

It was called the Zionist colonies or the Jewish colonies as it would sometimes be called. So, you know, combine those two words together. You get a pretty, I think, correct description of what's going on. At the very least, again, it's settlers, because, again, they call themselves settlers. But then everyone gets, you have to get really small beans and act like you're offended by the implication that there are people who are engaging in what we would call sort of classic 20th century settler colonialism, which they're very much obviously doing in the West Bank. I mean, that's what makes this story. And a lot of the outrage over no other land is that this is even kind of falls squarely within a sort of squishy liberal Zionist framework. Yes.

Which is a kind of rejection of the settlements and the sort of dispossession and land theft going on in the West Bank. But even still, right, you can't sort of have the, it's bad for PR so we need to come in and do the, well, there's both sides, you know. And what's remarkable reading that story just reminds me so much, I don't know if you've ever had the chance. to read Benjamin Madley's book American Genocide about the Genocide in California? No, I have it. It's a phenomenal book. I recommend it to everybody. We had them on our pod after I badgered him for a few months.

But basically, it describes in detail how the settlement of California well, the West in general, but California in particular, required this kind of franchise model of vigilante settlers to go in and terrorize, harass, and kill, frankly. They even had a sort of

scalping system where the federal government would pay you for how many Indians you killed. in California. And then the federal government would sort of keep its hands clean. And then it would come in later and say, oh, I guess we have no choice but then move them because, you know,

we're going to move them for their own protection or we're going to sort of, and the model is very similar. And that's why, like anti-peace war. Yeah, exactly. There's been this kind of, this double game with the settlers, right? Whether it's like, they serve a very

functional purpose, right? They've turned the West Bank into Swiss cheese. There's, again, even if you wanted to have a Palestinian state, you know, the two states solution deadenders. There's nowhere to put it. It's, there's no, it's, again, these are not settlements in the sense that they're, their tent cities like they were maybe to some extent in Gaza in the early 2000s. These are, you know, KB. Max, McMansion homes that look like the suburbs of Phoenix. They are, they are there, they are there to stay. And, and that's their job.

Their job is to make a contiguous Palestinian state impossible. And they've achieved that job since the, you know, mid-2000s when settlements have gone from, what, 100,000 to, you There are several hundred to hundreds of thousands, if not up to the millions. Yeah. And so that's the role the settlers play. Israel, you know, Israel and kind of pro-Israel propagandists get to sort of keep their hands clean and be like, oh, well, they're the rogue factions or they need to be reined in and this kind of limited hangout critique.

And, you know, meanwhile, that's part of the plan. And that's sort of explicitly now part of the plan where maybe, you know, even five years ago there was some fanged gesture towards building a Palestinian state. And now there's, again, nowhere to put it by design. And so Benjamin Madley's book is, it's obviously not exactly the same, and there are differences, but the basic model of kind of using these sort of freelance thugs. And I think they were compared to KKK by a couple people, and that they had, you know, sort of mass visualantes to go out and sort of be the vanguard of this dispossession and colonization of their land is very similar. It's a very similar playbook. And this is why, again, when America's critique Israel, I always remind me, they'll be too smug because we're the blueprint.

And so it's this very similar in how you sort of play this double game of keeping your hands clean while, you know, sort of basically terrorizing people into leaving or killing them or really just taking their land. And you see this over and over again in the West Bank. So this is, yeah, this is like an average Monday in the West Bank, really, especially as it's accelerated over the last few years. So to continue this New York Times story, let me just read you some. excerpts from it. So the details of the episode are not entirely clear. But Palestinian witnesses

and a group of American activists on the scene said that before he was arrested, Mr. Balal was set upon as a group of assailants, many of whom were masked, attacked his home village of Susia. The episode drew attention

to rising settler violence in the West Bank during the past. This episode drew attention to something we've been trying to draw attention away from. Yeah, exactly. Unfortunately, here's another paragraph about that, but blah, blah, blah. So here's a little bit more. The two sides provided different accounts about how the episode began. In a statement, the Israeli military said, quote, several terrorists had hurled stones at Israeli vehicles igniting a violent confrontation in which Israelis and Palestinians through rocks at each other.

Nassar Najawa, a field worker for the Israeli human rights group Betselam, who lives in Sousia and other Palestinians said the confrontation began after the town's residents had sought to drive away

Israeli shepherds, hurting livestock on land claimed by the village. The group of mass Israelis soon joined the others on the outskirts of the village where they attacked two Palestinian homes, they said. There's a lot going on here with the, you know, this like quote. It's no quote, actually.

It's just a, here's what this Israeli field worker from Betzelim said. And it says, you know, they said that how it began was that the whole town was essentially throwing rocks, you know, at a Israeli shepherds. The idea that this is like a side to the story and not a just kind of the creation of a justifiable excuse for settler violence, it's like it's insane. The idea that...

Especially since, I haven't seen them reporting on the following shepherding related stories, which are documented that I've seen videos of. Number one, Israeli settlers stealing Palestinian sheep and goats. Number two, Israeli settlers

scaring the shit out of and chasing in vehicles Israeli sheep and goats off of Palestinian lands. Number three, Muhammad al-Kurd posted this just yesterday, Israeli settlers leaving the corpses of dead goats

in a Palestinian reservoir or aquifer or something to contaminate the water, which apparently is a well-practiced you know, Sunday activity or maybe Saturday Shabbat activity for these fanatics.

So just the notion that there was some some innocent, reasonable Jewish humble Jewish settlers who just wanted to graze on the Holy Land with their flock. They were just walking their sheep. Yeah. And and

you know, for me like even if you, you know, give all of the benefit of the doubt to the idea that these shepherds were merely just moving their sheep. They just wanted, you know, to graze on some land and, oh, we didn't know this was Palestinian land. First of all, it is all Palestinian land as they are literally settlers. But second of all, this is not a justification for the targeting of some other guy. And so what the Hasbaris, you know, at least on various social media platforms have done

they have started saying, oh, it was Balal himself, Hamdan Balal who was throwing the rocks. They've started trying to produce video evidence of it. They, you know, showed videos of people throwing rocks and they're like, this is him throwing rocks

at, you know, settlers or police or whatever the fuck. And you know, Adam, you were talking about earlier, this kind of like the way in which this news is reported as being sort of incitement to genocide, I feel like it's, you know, it's that maybe in more micro terms in this particular case where this is like, this is a justification. This is serving as a justification for an act. It's incitement to terrorism. Yeah, it's incitement to terrorism. Well,

Well, you know, like, you know, it's excusing, you know, whoever gets caught in the crossfire of this, you know, dual rock throwing contest. And one thing you can never, ever, ever do is have history or context at all, really. You can sort of talk about this, you know, kind of opaquely reference rising settler violence. Well, what does that mean? Why is there settler violence? What does the map of the West Bank look like now versus, you know, in 2000 or 2005? What, you know, what does it mean to steal people's lands incrementally over several years? What is, what land is left? Where are they to go? What is the, what is the political agenda of

the settlers? The political agenda of the settlers is to genocide and erase Palestinians from the West Bank and increasingly, of course, now Gaza. That is their explicit goal. I mean, these are, these are, as you said, fanatics even relative to the kind of normal Zionist sort of, you know, extended moral universe. I mean, this is, these people are explicitly fanatics. They're explicitly genocidal. They're explicitly racist. But they're sort of presented as this kind of, what were they doing there? What was their goal? Their goal is to slowly terrorize and steal the land of Palestinians by their own admission. This is not a kind of lefty assertion, right? No, and so that, this is something they openly talk about. That is if they're not the on-the-ground schlichtim, which is

Hebrew, or it's the Zionist term for like ambassadors or emissaries, they're, they're the, at this point, they're the Knesset's boots on the ground. I mean, the Knesset is full of, these people are in the halls of power. They're not a fringe group anymore. Yeah, exactly. And their violence is not inexplicable or strange or inscrutable, as you're saying. Yeah, and, but again, that context is just never mentioned. Yeah. And if, if there's a, if there's a, if there's a, if there's a of explicit, you know, ethnic cleansing and explicit removal of a people who are indigenous to a land, right, who have been there for, you know, generations and generations, right? That is recognized by the UN as Palestinian land, is recognized by the U.S. State Department,

technically, as Palestinian land. It's just removed. And so you get this kind of, you know, he said, he said kind of narrative. This is very typical to New York Times. And this comes up in our research a lot because for our project, we're also doing reporting. And we're reaching out to media workers who are disgruntled who want to talk about. about, you know, people, and what they, I said, well, we've heard time and time again, and what I've heard from others as well on social media and elsewhere is, like,

any attempt at contextualizing or providing history is seen as, I mean, really implicit terrorist apology or kind of anti-Semitic or, or it's sort of given all these load ideas. Like, you, so you can sort of report war crimes or report episodes of Israeli violence, but, A, you always have to have both sides, right? IDF just making shit up, the least credible organization on Earth who's been caught lying thousands of times. But you can't really put it in the context of part of a broader ideological agenda, even when the people in question are explicit about their ideological agenda, right?

These are groups, organizations, people's political currents that don't hide behind liberal Zionist rhetoric. They don't claim to be seeking a two-state solution. They don't claim to have this kind of high-minded worldview of coexistence like some liberal Zionists do. They are explicitly genocidal and exterminationist in their dogma. And that just isn't brought up. And that this is, again, this, of course, would, would, would, would, would not fly if it was, you know, we can sort of torture ourselves to say, oh, you know, Hamas says river to the sea and this and that.

And we can sort of, we have to, we have to, we have to, highly, highly, highly, highly implicit, right, kind of vaguely genocidal language. Right. Meanwhile, groups that, like, have T-shirts that say, I'm pro-genocide. Or they're kind of, kill the Arabs. It's like, there's no dog whistle. It's just a regular whistle. Right. They're just routinely kind of abstracted out into this, well, who is to say, you know, what happens?

There was, you know, fog of war. I think a couple of media outlets used clashes, which is a classic. I remember in 2018 during the March of Return when hundreds of, predominantly, you know, teenagers were walking towards the, I'm not even a border, really. It's a fence because it's not their border legally. And they were just being mowed down by sniper, you know, fire we now know, based on subsequent human rights watch reports, they had games. They were basically playing bingo with body parts shooting at Palestinians in cold blood, unarmed Palestinians in cold blood.

And, you know, it was clashes at the border. Clashes. Clashes is an all-time great, right? Clashes is a great kind of all-time. Clashes between bullets and cartilage. Right, exactly. And I wrote about that for fair at the time. And it's, again, it's the, it's the, keep your head down, do the fog of work, clap, trap.

And what you write is kind of technically accurate, right? It's kind of not, it's not inaccurate. but it is, of course, wildly misleading, highly decontextualized, and extremely asymmetric and what kind of, you know, affordance and generosity is allowed for one side, and the other side is, of course, given maximum cynicism and incredulity or incredulity about it. A slight side note. I remember for a long time the chief New York Times correspondence based in Israel were all, like, severely ideologically compromised. like, I don't know if it was Jody Rodoran or Ethan, what's his name, or Isbel Kershner.

They're charging the IDF, yeah. Yeah, yeah. It's just sort of standard that New York Times will station people there whose families serve in this. Which, of course, they would never do. They would never have a, you know, a Beirut correspondent who had someone in the hospital. Yeah, yeah. What is it? Because they're a boogie, boogie terrorist organization.

The IDF is a, is a mere civilized army that, you know. Right. Do they have anything like that? going on right now are you are you cognizant of who their main correspondence are and what their affiliations are or you know i don't know you know i do i do remember writing about when david brooks was criticizing um a bunch of like well i guess it was i guess they were black kids in a inner city because they kneeled during the national anthem it was lamenting about the lack of patriotism in american youth and literally the year prior as kid had gone off to join the idf um and i remember thinking

like look i mean i'm a leftist right so i don't really think anyone should have have any loyalty to any country. Right. You know, I don't, I don't, this is why my, my, my, the dual loyalty trope among many issues is that I don't really care if someone fights, you know, to me, the IDF is the same moral distinction as fighting in the U.S. military. I don't really see much distinction, especially because the U.S. military is aiding the IDF.

So I don't really think that children of journalists necessarily should have any greater fidelity to the U.S. than they do Israel, except to say that perhaps maybe volunteering for a foreign Army is kind of an added step of aggression and ideological commitment, right? Like Jeffrey Goldberg is from Long Island and he went and became an idea of prison guard despite, you know, not really speaking Hebrew or having any relationship to Israel. Because, you know, and he says in his book, quite explicitly, like I wanted to be a man. I wanted to sort of a certain manliness. And, you know, would that have been better? Had he joined the U.S. military and gone on, you know, picked on people in Latin America or invaded, you know, Iraq or whatever? No, not really,

right they're both kind of equally bad um so you know i don't really look into that very much because mostly i think it kind of doesn't matter to me that much um but it is certainly is certainly asymmetrical in how it's applied right i mean any foreign correspondent forget hesbalah or whatever even just you know any kind of you know jordanian military or or or any sort of even u.s. allied military that would be seen as as as sort of suspect or or compromising um but it's just totally you know routine In fact, I believe, if I'm not mistaken, I think the New York Times correspondent, the home they lived in was stolen from a Palestinian to a couple of decades prior. It was actually stolen land they were living on. Yeah, I believe so.

And that's, of course, that's even putting aside that when it comes to Israel and their relationship to journalists, you know, they'll take any pretext to claim. I mean, this kid, Hosan Shabbat, you know, they're, yeah, well, they just murdered this 22-year-old, 24-year-old. Hassan Shabbat, I think his name was, and of course they're very quick to come out with, don't believe the hype is, you know, don't, you know, the press jacket is deceiving. He's actually a terrorist. Well, that's the power of the terrorism framework, right? Because it shuts your brain off and it applies a totally different standard to the IDF that it does in the Palestinian militants. I mean, it's the perfect kind of ideological thing in the jig because, again, ABC News, CNN embeds with the IDF. And then meanwhile, they had.

they had reporters who were present, you know, during October 7, they say, look, they were in on it. And it's like, so wait, we can just kill ABC and CNN reporters now because they're obviously, that's what a ride-along is. Right. You can kill journalists. It's like, you know, at this point, they're just saying, no, journalists are fair targets if they are next to anybody who we can consider to be an enemy. I mean, they just need family members. And they use terms like links. I mean, this is all very, this is all very tenuous. I mean, again, Gaza, you know, in Gaza, Hamas runs the government. I mean, you're going to have links to people who run the government. If you're in South Lebanon, you're going to have links to his law. It's a possible not do.

It's their way of, you know, kind of like reinforcing this. There are no non-involved people in, in Gaza. There are no civilians because in one way or another, they're all connected to Hamas, which is kind of like saying in one way or another, we in the United States are all connected to our government. It's like, yes, that is true. of course it's true. But in Israel, it's even more true. And Muhammad al-Kurd had the perfect response to one of these Israeli journalists being like, I've deleted my tweet about this journalist because it turns out he received military training from Hong. Muhammad al-Kurd tweeted back at him in Hebrew. He said, great. So that means that the families of all Israeli journalists who have ever served in the IDF or embedded with the IDF are now legitimate targets. Excellent. Right, exactly. They have conscription in Israel, unless you're one of a one of the, you know, one of the, you know, it's a citizen army.

The entire, right. And so, again, this is, the number of degrees of separate, there is no country in the world where the degrees of separation between citizen and atrocity are fewer. No, it reminds me when, when Jim Scudow was, when Iran was bombing Tel Aviv when they were, they had a little tit for tat, I think about nine months ago. Yeah. And he says, you know, and they are targeting the Mossad headquarters, which is, which is, which is, and I think he even said, It was in a densely populated neighborhood at Tel Aviv. In the middle of Tel Aviv. Human Shields, human shields.

Yes, you're right. Yeah, but no amount of pointing out the hypocrisy ever, like, breaks through into anyone who doesn't. Well, that's where, that's why the terror, the war on terror framework is so essential. That's the low bearing. There are these boogie, boogie terrorists and these are proper sort of militaries with, you know, rules. And they suppose that's why I hate all these kind of, AI loosens the rules. There's no rules. There's no fucking rules with the IDF.

That's a bullshit story. And so, like, you know, talk about UNRWA for a second, right? The UN's, you know, refugee agency, it is now just sort of taking for granted that it is a Hamas arm. And their argument is that 12 people who worked for UNRWA, out of 30,000 supposedly were involved, links to October 7th. They really only showed evidence for a handful of, I think, three. And again, and then the media just, and this is another thing we're writing about in our larger project, and we is that the media says links to new york times splash front page of course it came out the

exact same day of the i the icj ruling showing plausible genocide on january 26 2024 and then there's this like puffy puffy links you know onra links to hamas and then you read the fine print and you're like wait 12 people out of 30 000 like so what's the standard here on right supposed to monitor the off hours activity of 30 000 people like how is that in what in what historical example and I've asked journalists, name me one other historical example where people who worked at an organization committed some off hours, you know, acts, right? And then, and then the organization was held accountable for that. Like, that's, that's unprecedented. That's never happened before in the history of fucking mankind. Right. And it's so clear what the motivation is to. Right. It's to sort of,

it's to militarize everyone in Gaza. And they did this with medical workers. Of course, they did this with El Shifa Hospital and they raided in November of 2023 with the whole underground bunker that ended up not existing. The New York Times tried to put lipstick on a pig by acting like there was some tunnel. But if you read the actual article, the tunnel didn't actually touch any part of the hospital. It was just vaguely adjacent to it. And also it wasn't remotely what they claimed it was, which was this kind of bond villain layer. And then so that's in the Washington Post abunked it. Washington Post has been much better than New York Times on this. And then the New York Times tries, you know, it's Hamas Terror. It's like, you know, terror tunnels under the hospital. And it's

like, again, fucking hospitals are adjacent to military bases all throughout Tel Aviv. Like, that is a totally normal thing you do. And again, this is, time and time again, you know, and you need to militarize medical professionals. You need to militarize aid workers because these are the organizations and groups and agencies that are essential to sustaining life. And if you want to remove life, you have to attack them. Why was El Shifa Hospital made such a big deal of?

Well, if you, you know, on October 13th, 2023, forgive me, I'm ranting here. They issued an evacuation order in, in Hebrew and Arabic, telling everyone they need to leave, no exceptions, right? They call out Shifa Hospital five times a day saying you got to leave, you got to leave. They say we can't leave. We have people who are on dialysis. We have newborn babies. We can't just, we can't walk to the border to Egypt or, you know, whatever fucking tent city they provided.

They'll all die and we're doctors and we're not leaving. Great. We're going to come in and we're going to shell and blow it up per the evacuation order. Well, that's a little awkward because this is back during the time period and people actually cared about bombing hospitals and attacking hospitals. Right. before it became normalized. They don't even bother anymore.

So they say, oh, there's a Bond villain layer. They have some guy, you know, mock it up on Blender, show a bunch of evile terrorist underneath. I mean, we're talking 15 different, you know, tunnels and rooms and maps and little evil terror plotting. It looks like the sort of infamous, you know, Meet the Press, Donald Rumsfeld's bin Laden layer, right? Oh, sure. And, of course, right, because they needed to militarize hospitals because it was essential

to carrying out their evacuation orders of North Gaza, which was essential to their ethnic cleansing plan of North Gaza, which is where they were going to begin the ethnic cleansing plan, which again, is called by human rights watch. It's called by Amnesty International with ethnic cleansing before Trump even took office, right? And so the constant sort of links and terror framework and all this kind of, it's just, it's not meant to make any sense. It's meant to kind to be this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, what are the links, you know, right, there was there was a Hamas fighter who showed up to the hospital. Oh, great. I guess we get to blow up the hospital now. That's how it works. And God,

everyone knows no IDF has ever been sight of a hospital in Tel Aviv. Right. And, and, and, and trying to unpack the shit, as you know, is, is, is, is almost impossible. I mean, it's, well, but, I mean, you kind of fucked yourself under that answer because you cited amnesty international and human rights. it's well known that at least at least 30 of their employees respectively regularly once a month if not more by ice cream at Ben and Jerry's and we know for sure that that's a terrorist-loving organization because I mean they literally were claiming doctors either Ben or Jerry it could be either I mean literally everybody was Hamas I mean it got to the point where it's a meme now

calling anything Hamas has become a meme and that meme but it's again this is this is this This is a, this is a bullshit. This is a lie that is being reinforced by the Wall Street Journal in New York Times. Yes. And again, less so Washington Post has been better on this, Evan Hill especially. But, like, the New York Times just routinely props the shit up. Right. And it allows for these narratives, these like kind of alternative narratives, these Hasbara spins to kind of like spin out of control and become part of like, oh, well, you know, this is the excuse that I'm going to tell myself as to why this happened to someone who just won an Oscar for doing a film about how shit like this.

happens. And, you know, it's interesting because you compare, like, the, uh, the, the two, the two types of tweets. You've got one that's the Eval Abraham tweet that I wrote. And then you have the, you know, sort of IDF explanation. And then you have the New York Times here, serving as like the mediator of like, here's, we're going to get down to just the facts, sir. And, uh, what you have is, you know, that the, uh, excerpt that I read about how, oh, well, the town's residents were throwing rocks at an Israeli shepherd, being the thing that all the Hezbarus

are putting out there, so going, see, they started it. Meanwhile, in this very next excerpt that I'm going to read, Mr. Balal said he received some medical treatment at an Israeli military facility before being held,

handcuffed, and blindfolded on the floor of a detention center, according to Ms. Samel, who is... Le'at Semel, who's a legendary Israeli human rights lawyer. Yes, a lawyer.

And, let's see, Basil Adra, another director of the documentary, said he was also at the scene. He shared video footage that he said he had filmed of a blindfolded man. He identified as Mr. Bilal being marched by Israeli forces to waiting vehicles.

Now, if you compare... Hold on. He identified him as Mr. Belal. That's his fucking co-director. Yeah, man, he identified. Yeah, well, that's the thing. What is it with him in a corpse? They're saying he was with him. Right.

He knows the guy. Yes. He is, this is, you know, obviously implying he could be lying. But I just got to say, if we're going to compare stories here, you know, both sides, you know, are being like, oh, they're, you know, they're lying. They're exaggerating in the story. Yuval's story was he, uh, that, um, you know, Handan was, uh, you know, lynched, as he said. but, you know, jumped by a bunch of Israeli settlers. And then he was arrested by the fucking and, you know, absconded with by the military force,

the occupying military force that backs the settlers. That's what he said happened. Who further tortured him overnight on the cold floor of a settler, of a jail cell. Yes. soldiers invaded the ambulance he had called and took him no sign of him since. Now, you know, people can, the whole point of the Hizbar is so that you dispute the details. And you say everyone's, everyone who is Palestinian is exaggerating. The truth of it is what I say the truth is.

And the truth of it is is that if the Palestinians had just not thrown rocks, then we would never have had to call in the fucking Israeli. KKK and then their fucking actual military come in and you know it's the fog of occupation exactly it is

it's the constant victim self victimized narrative like there's a when you believe that there's a broad conspiracy comparable to the Nazis that occupies the highest levels of everywhere Europe governments

agencies the UN that sort of wants to get rid of Jews in the world because you know for the lull Right. Again, something that did actually happen in Europe, right? But it wasn't, wasn't Palestinians, that this is, when this becomes your kind of self-fictimized narrative, it, you know, it doesn't matter what's true. I mean, again, I know you guys know this, but like, it's just, you need to keep pushing back and pushing back and pushing back for the greater sort of greater truth. Right. And that's why it's like, you would think from a journalist's perspective, one angle we try to take is like, is there any way that the IDF could ever sort of, sort of, of fundamentally discredit itself as a source. Like, it's always given this kind of, Israeli officials say, it's a really official say. And it's like, yeah, but after they lied nonstop for, you know, not only 17 months, but decades before, and I could list off all these examples, again, the sort of fake nurse inside

El Shifa saying Hamas was holding people in there. I mean, just outright lies, you know, making up phone calls that never took place. Again, bond villain layers under El Shifa Hospital. You would think eventually there would be like, you know, the IDF, comma, who has a credibility problem blah blah blah blah like they just can't possibly discrediting should be uh talked about the way we talk about uh the humas run anything and that is just i mean it's Alex Jones I mean it's it's it's like it's it's just constant conspiracies constant lies and that's projection obvious lies yeah and like they just institutional and can't be discredited it's quite phenomenal

and the many times they lie to the New York times they're okay well both we got to get both sides and that's the other side. Well, in the words, the public enemy, can't trust it. You certainly cannot trust it. So we need to take a quick commercial break, but don't worry, we'll be right back and please listen to these ads now.

And we're back. This is Badass Barra. We're the most moral podcast here with Adam Johnson. How you doing, Adam? Do it okay. Doing okay. Thanks for having you. Hellly.

Yeah. The second second. Matt, I realized something during the break. What's up? There was a pun right there that I, that I, uh, I just lift, I just left it. Oh no. I just left the pun on the table? On the side of the road, like an orphan, you know?

What did you mean? Unwanted dog. When you talked about the public enemy song, can't trust it. Hmm. It's actually, it's not about the media. It's not about propaganda. It's actually about a turkey that's very large and the string. you have is too small

in it. You can't trust it. You can't trust it. I love it. I love it. I entered the 2025 and 2006 or 2026-2007 O'Henry Punoff in Austin, Texas. Have you guys ever been to this? No. That sounds incredible though. I don't know if they still have it. It's been a few years, but it was

I was there before. It was cool. And it was a pun-off. And I'm telling you, you watch these like master punsters. And by the way, this is what happens when you become a dad. This was not, I was not a dad. then, but I am now, so now I'm sort of Kerrigan. And it is like, it is just nuts how they come up with

the stuff so fast. Because I, punning is the lowest form of comedy, obviously, we can all agree on that. Sure, we know this, we know what we're doing. As a conventional wisdom confirmed by the fact that AI can do it pretty well. And, and they, but they can't do any other humor well. But it was like,

it was a total blast. You would go there. It was like, it was in some park and like, you just watch these elite punsters go, they would go back and forth. One of the competitions is they go back and forth on the topic, and then the first person to sort of get stumped is out. Yeah. Anyway, if ever get a chance, I think it's still going on in Austin. If you ever in Austin, I love it.

That sounds amazing. You should check it out. It's like a rat battle for people with autism. I never went there for South by Southwest, but I would go for that. Yeah. I want to say it's in May. Forgive me for not Googling this prior. It's been many years.

I just, I just dated myself. Um, okay. So this next story, uh, uh, uh, We little break from all of the sadness. We're going to talk about happiness, folks. They did it again. Ladies and gentlemen, Israel has ranked as the eighth happiest nation in a global survey, down from fifth last year. This is the grimest happiness story since Todd Salon's.

This is, so here is a headline from the Times of Israel. Israel ranks as the eighth happiest nation in global. survey. From the Times of Israel, I'll read a little bit. Israel is the world's eighth happiest country, according to the World Happiness Report, 2025 Thursday. In the annual survey conducted during the second year of Israel's war against Hamas and other Iranian proxies, alongside domestic political turmoil, Finland, came in first for the eighth year in a row while the U.S. dropped to its lowest ever position at 24. Israel, which always ranks highly in the report, fell several places from

2024 when it ranked fifth, though the survey had been based on data collected prior to the unprecedented Hamas invasion and the slaughter of October 7. Fucking stick to the story. I'm sorry, but I love that, where they were just like, okay, so we were the fifth happiest nation and the Hamas attack definitely brought us down a few rungs but guess what we're still happier than you Mexico so this is an incredible story like if you watch this podcast you know that we've covered this a lot Israel loves to advertise itself through these kind of like poll rankings

of their economy, of their happiness, of their general like, you know, good timing. Yeah, ingenuity. And it's just, it seems like projecting happiness seems to be like the favorite pastime

of Israelis. You know what I mean? It's, it's like the glumest, the glumest, like, what's a kind of comedian who has a I guess a ventriloquist A ventriloquist, yeah, yeah, yeah, with

this smiley-faced dummy and they you know, they project a really happy tone for the dummy and the ventriloquist itself is the most morose, depressed, Jeff Fox Unworthy. Yes. Yeah, I mean, and it's interesting because it's like it's something that I've always seen amongst like Israelis

especially. It's kind of very distinct from sort of diaspora Jews Jews who are not from Israel you know it's like this this sort of like culture of like

dance and look happy motherfucker whereas like I would say that you know being a Nebish is sort of you know maybe more our stereotype here of ourselves and also we have I have no

qualms about it like being a cynical unhappy person is my identity and it makes me happy to have that identity but you see this a lot in kind of like the the videos that they make

there's this one that I need to play is this guy what is his name Tam Tamir he did someone shared this with me and I just have to play it it's we need to do a longer segment on this guy at some point

Yes, we do because it is He's got some raps Yeah, so I got to play I got to play a little bit of this guy He is doing a little rap for us about how happy he is You don't like the facts Always speaking blah blah

I cause a little film with your caca True fact I could send you all the way to Gaza All you do is joke just like really wonka Always matching into switches like Juk Kim What you love please go play Duke Kim Genocide, Apatatat Paca every night Only one thing to say he's really

is here to stay. Well, if you can care about you? Nah. We don't tell by you. I'm sorry, I need to stop real quick. And, like, doing a rap parody song about how happy you are while saying apartheid genocide, paca, paca to me, just, you know, I would say reeks of, at the very least, rudeness at the most kind of, I guess, like, cope. deep spiritual misery. Yeah, yeah, deep spiritual misery. Someone is accusing you of genocide. You're like, oh, me?

I think not. I'm doing a parody song. We have the best country in the whole damn one. Got the dog. That's a fairly well. You were thinking. We don't give a fuck about you. So this guy,

uh is obviously having the time of his life so uh yeah point is is that there's sort of this like projecting happiness thing and uh it it comes off a very strange i think that like it's one of those like types of hesbar that israel's been known for for a while but it really like it it felt like only i because like before october 7th uh in general people didn't know what Israel was and what it was about. So it felt like me and a handful of people who actually were anti-Zionists and studied this whole thing would be like, damn, it is really weird how Israel always kind of like talks about how happy they are. And now I think that more people are seeing an actual genocide in front of their face. It really is one of the more strange forms of Hasbara, this constant

projecting of like, you know, we are statistically more happy than you, which is a weird thing to be during a genocide, I would think. You know what I mean? Well, there's a kind of, there must be a kind of psychological hot house effect where when you're in this bubble, and there is an article we have, I think, from the Jewish forward that tries to explain this. And I think in a way it's correct, it's suggesting that, you know, all the other. all the adversity creates a kind of insular,

uh, we're really feeling good, aren't we guys? Look, every Israeli that I'm still in touch with, obviously would be someone who dissents, if not entirely from the entire national project, then certainly from the, uh, the genocide that's going on says it's,

they've never seen it so miserable that the society is just, it's just rampant ugliness and, and, and, um, and that everyone is, is actually just miserable and anxious and depressed. But morale is a prime commodity. You almost have to,

you almost need to put in a war measures act to produce morale to keep people invested in a country like this that's so clearly tanking on the world stage. Somehow it's a country where everybody's a DJ. I'm not exactly sure how that's. possible, but it seems like every viral clip of some horrible war crime, they're doing some

DJ or DJ adjacent activity. They always got a fucking turn table, no matter where they're at. Yeah, I don't, so I don't know what's going on with that, but I mean, in general, I'm dubious of, like, happiness surveys, and because I think a lot of it is obviously culturally and linguistically sort of a little bit obscure and kind of hard to, like, compare

one to one. Sure. But there, I guess there are kind of semi-empirical ways you can measure it with respect to, like, you know, quality of life and things like that. But, but, yeah, I mean, look, this is kind of a Marx argument 101, which is like, yeah, when you're in the, you know, to use a kind of orthodox Marxist term, when you're in the core of empire, rather than its periphery, you're usually going to be happier. Right. If you're the one leveling out, I'm, I assume, I don't know if both of you have been to Israel, but, you know, I remember when I went in 2013, it was, that's what I, going there radicalized to me in some sense, in the sense that it made me realize that everything I was told was total horse shit. Right.

Because I went to Palestine as well, and like, you go there and it's just a, again, it's a totally fucking walled-off universe. Now, this, you know, since October 7th of 2023, it's maybe a little different as far as they've actually lost hundreds of, if not thousands of soldiers or troops or whatever. But so there is a little bit of pain point versus like 2014 when I think it was 1,500 dead civilians in Gaza and, you know, 523 children versus 6 Israelis, two of whom I believe were heart attacks. So this is a little bit different, right? Proportional, not really, but in terms of the skin in the game. But it is a wholly walled off society. Now, obviously, settlements or even parts of Jerusalem, it's a little bit more kind of up front, but it is, it is in many ways they live in an alternate fucking universe.

Right. There's this, there's these literal concentration camps, you know, only a few, a few kilometers away. Right. And you're in some place that looks like a shitty kind of version of Paris. I mean, it's a very bizarre experience. And it's also like, you know, it's claustrophobic. I mean, that's the thing that I, you know, in talking to my Israeli friends, you know, this is now

obviously I'm getting a biased sample because these are people who I, who have moved out of Israel. But even when I was there, you know, it was like talking to people and they're like, I want to, I want to go. I want to go to, like they all were excited about leaving to go to Europe. but it is interesting the amount of focus there is on like look how happy we are and we do have an article from the forward that I think is fantastic that we're going to read together from the forward despite war and political turmoil Israel is the eighth happiest country on earth I think I know why Daniel do you want to read this one sure yeah okay Eschman, senior columnist. The World Happiness Report 2025 ranking just came out and Israel is once again in the top 10. Say what? I love a good say what. That's in the article. I didn't add. Yeah. How can it be that people embroiled in war and internal strife facing a degraded economy and international isolation can still be happy? Great question. Clap along if you lost 60,000 jobs. I mean, I mean, from afar, Israel doesn't look happy. Just this week, at a mass protest against Prime Minister Netanyahu's decision to resume combat in Gaza, policemen through opposition leader, Yajir Golan, a retired general to the ground.

The night before, Haredi protesters, that's ultra-Orthodox, in Biteshamesh, angry over a zoning decision, overturned the mayor's car with him and his family inside. Fuck. That's a mitzvah. After Israel resumed airstrikes and ground operations, militants in Gaza are back to launching rockets toward Tel Aviv. And Houthi rebels in Yemen this week fired ballistic missiles at Israel, sending millions of Israelis to bomb shelters at 4 a.m.

Also this week, former Israeli Supreme Court Chief Justice Aharon Barak said the country is heading towards civil war. All that in a year when tourism is down 71% and some 80,000 Israelis left the country. It was all the depressives who left. It was all those bummer Israelis who left. Exactly, yeah, yeah. Leaving only the happy people. Yeah, exactly.

But when investigators for the World Happiness Report pooled pooled Gallup World Poll data from people in more than 140 countries and ranked those countries on happiness based on their average life evaluations over the three preceding years, Israel came out number eight below Finland, Denmark, Iceland, Sweden,

the Netherlands, Costa Rica, and Norway. All Nordic except for Costa Rica and Israel. interesting. That's three spots down from its previous rank of number five, but Israel is still comfortably nestled among mostly northern European countries we associate with the easy life. This finding, which has been similar since the report began in 2012, tends to evoke the same explanations. Israel has a strong sense of community, which is a primary factor in happiness, proponents will say. It is family oriented. Taxes pay for health care and education, taking those worries off the table. It is a free society where you can do and say,

what you want, that you pronoun is for a particular subset, and love whom you love, and where people, no matter what else is happening, still like to go out and have a good time. With some exceptions, that's all true. And even the Arab-Israeli minority, here we go, which makes up 20% of the population, and you still face some legal and cultural discrimination,

identify strongly as Israelis with some 60% in past surveys describing their personal situation as good or very good. and those were the two choices by the way yeah that's right yeah well are you a happy arab or the happiest era yeah good or very good i mean clearly the goal of this i mean as as as as as you know to know is to like they're they need to replenish their supply of they're having a major problem replenishing their military um that's why that's why they have to go into orthodox communities and basically you know do conscription do like these kind of press games Because it's, it is, you know, again, it's a fairly small country.

It is committing a, it is committed to carrying out a pretty, you know, again, this isn't like fun to go over there and commit genocide. Well, it is for a lot of them, but presumably for some it's not. And they need to get people to go volunteer from other countries. And this is obviously part of that recruiting element, right? Like come to our, come to this ethno national estate and you'll be among your own people. people and you'll be happy and you'll be happy you'll finally be happy but happiness is of course not a morally interesting criteria right you'll get you'll get tax credits you'll get tax credits for

rating yourself as very happy on world happiness index exactly so what happened like like six months ago or eight months ago at some point into the genocide there were all these reports of his of a massive wave of PTSD cases of just coming back pissing themselves, nightmares, shakes, like just, you know, a total breakdown is. They're not happy. Daniel, you can, you can have PTSD and be pissing yourself and be, you know, staying up all night crying and, you know, acting out violently against you and your family and still be like, you know, shit's pretty chill right now.

You know, I think happiness is one of those metrics. I mean, it is true that for the, you know, for the most part, except for, again, except for I mean, the majority of the population is pretty much, this is the issue with like the moral hazard of these kind of, of the asymmetry of technology of Iron Dome and all those is that they have, there actually is very, this is the first time really, only because of the logistics of having to physically carry out a genocide and raid hospitals and you can't, like, you can't just bomb your way to do that. Like, this is really the first time there actually has been any skin in the game, but even comparatively speaking, it's pretty minimal, right? Right. No, the, the, the, you know, insulation. of the everyday Israeli is still pretty strong. And so, like, you can, you, it's just weird to brag about what is clearly a happiness based on that insulation, like, being like, man, look at us.

We don't even know what's going on. I wonder if, I wonder if the explanation is that so many young Israeli men who are living in this macho society where masculinity is strictly enforced have finally gotten an outlet for their cross-dressing impulses by, you know, their, I don't know, autogynophilic, you know, suppressed identities where they can go to, they can go to Gaza and raid the panty drawers of... And finally be free to express themselves. That's exactly right.

Yeah, they were born this way. But do these explanations go far enough? The United States landed 22nd on the list in its lowest spot ever, sinking from number 11 in 2012, is the U.S. that much less free, less family-oriented, less communal? The U.S. has its own fair share of political strife right now, and health care and education costs can range out of control. But overall, we have a higher standard of living, stronger economy, no wars on domestic soil, longer weekends, and 85% less shouting. I'm estimating that last step, but it feels about right. My hunch is that Israel's weird, persistent happiness,

that's a slogan, has something to do, has to do with some other aspect of its character. Something that might have to do with some words, Reut Karp, the owner of Cafe Otef, in Tel Aviv's Bohosheek-Florantine neighborhood, original name there, shared with me when I visited last summer. Hamas terrorists killed Karp's former husband and his girlfriend in front of the Karp's three children

at Kibbutz Reim on October 7th. The murderers scrawled, Hamas doesn't kill children on the wall. I never heard that report. threw a blanket over the children and left. You probably didn't hear that report. Oh, okay, okay, got it. Yeah, yeah, we don't kill kids.

They didn't kill the children. That's right. That's why you didn't hear the report. That's right. Carp, who was away, spent the rest of the day on the phone with her traumatized kids until the IDF arrived. When the government relocated the members of the destroyed kibbutz to central Tel Aviv, carp opened the cafe to provide them with work and a feeling of home. I told Karp how much I liked the cafe's bright, friendly design.

That's important to me, she said. that it's happy. Happy, along with bright red pictures of the Negev's poppy-like an enemy flower, the cafe also displayed a large haunting drawing of Dvir Karp, the murdered father of Karp's children. Many of the workers survived the Nova Music Festival massacre, which took place on the Kibbutz Reim's grounds. All of that tragedy is rolled into the design of a place

that when I visited was buzzing with life. I mean, just the description of this, cafe is like it's it's this uh it's this creepy like i you know like i you know i when you hear these accounts of like uh people with their personal stories of uh of tragedy you know there's there's no part of me that's like no you should should be unhappy but there's there's i think something different when your happiness uh is um bottled and sold in order to create more human meat for the meat grinder, you know, it's just this like, uh, these, this sort of, uh, you know, we need to boost morale, uh, in the diaspora so that people know that even if the worst

happens to you and your whole family is massacred, you're still going to be very happy. Just go, just look at this cafe. Especially if your whole family is massacred. I just realized what this is. Yeah. This is that song from the Book of Mormon musical, turn it off. Oh, yeah. That's right. Yes. It's just like, when those nasty feelings arise, just turn it off. Yeah, exactly. Because being happy is part of your Mormon identity. Yeah, that, you know, there's a lot of parallels there actually between sort of like Mormonism and evangelical Christianism and Zionism because there is this like, when I went on birthright,

you know, I've talked about this before. When I went to the like mega event that they had, it was, it felt like a Christian megachurch event. It did not feel Jewish. It was, it was, you know, Hebrew. It was technically Jewish, but it was this sort of, you know, kind of brightly lit techno-haul exuberance that felt, you know, as manufactured as those feel no matter what. It's crazy. So he continues talking about the sort of communal psychological aspects of this national hysteria, I mean happiness.

And that might just be the secret. Dan Ariely, an Israeli-born economist, whose most recent book Misbelief explains why people believe irrational things I wonder if that included the irrational things

we cover on this podcast told me that is Israel's very hardship that accounts for its happiness which begs the question why can't Gaza be so happy although of course the genuine joy

you see on the faces of its people when the rare good thing happens there's something too you know communal hardship and... Oh, 100% and joy.

But anyway, he says, in most countries, people lead a somewhat comfortable life and they have no experience where the people around them step up

to really help them, he wrote in an email. In Israel, life is for sure less comfortable, but it's also very clear that people can count on their friends and family

to step up and help them in a time of need. Friends, family, and total strangers. During my July visit, I also saw an old friend, someone who is highly critical

of Israel's religious parties. Oh, that's good. What a brave and stunning stance. Hell yeah. Who since October 7th has, yeah, he, since October 7th has been doing the laundry of Haridi Jews displaced by the attacks, since October 7th, he's been, he's been hand-washing the shitty diapers of soldiers with PTSD. My friends look at my laundry line and see these white underwear in Sitsis,

which is the fringes on, on the Talit, waving in the wind and wonder what the hell, he said. What they, I'm sorry, but. the idea that they would wonder like what the hell are you doing washing tizi like it's like it's it's israel what what where else are you going to see that on a clothes line that's very strange to me but okay fine i mean it makes sense that yeah that communal bonds are an essential part of people's like self-perceptions a hundred percent i just don't think anyone's surprised by seeing their neighbor yeah i mean someone else's like fucking oh no no no no i wasn't I was speaking about, like, more high level, sorry.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. It actually sort of makes sense, right? Especially if you have, if you do have this kind of us versus the world. 100%. You know, mentality. I imagine Nazi Germany in 1940 is quite cheerful in terms of it. Right, in the sense that there's a sense of moral purpose. There's a kind of moral narrative.

You wake up in the morning. It's kind of us versus the world. Yep. Again, especially if you buy into this elaborate kind of epistemology that you are the center of a vast conspiracy, to parlay dead toddlers into some kind of race crime against you. I mean, again, I don't doubt that people believe this. And that psychology is interesting. You know, there's people who study, again,

the sort of worldviews of French Algeria or Rhodesia or these kind of other kind of colonial projects. And they do begin to view it as they're defending their kind of indigenous homeland. And it makes sense that you would find purpose in that or meaning in that. 100%. It builds an alternate sort of moral universe where to the extent to which you've acknowledged there's all these dead children and dead civilians and dead people that it's all Hamas's

fault because of blah, blah, blah, human shields and you do so reluctantly and they kind of forced you to kill them. You know, again, it's sad. It's all very fucking sad because you are, because they're just fundamentally pot committed to a fundamentally broken ideology. Yeah. And they are just going to go fucking down. with it and they're and and and and you're just chasing good money after bad that's right and and and

and it's logical conclusion can really only reach one place uh which is full blown no holes bar genocide yeah first we should then we cry then we laugh our fucking asses off well so you know we at bad hasborough thought that in honor of this this this massive wind Israel's this massive win for happiness in the world. That's right. Israel actually deserves a new anthem because Hatikva is a pretty morose song. It's very wistful. It's very longing.

I mean, the lyrics are about returning to our homeland. But, you know, I just felt that it needed an update. So, Matt, if you would, we created a little, a little new version of Hatiko. Tikva we like to call Happy Tikva Here's Happy Tikva Please remove your hats Welcome to the land of

Carefree joy and mirth Eight on the list of Happiest on earth We dance around on TikTok With psychotic glee, that's their best cure for PTSD. Who can curse our genocidal crimes? All world hates us happy fucking times.

We're so ecstatic, being a pariah state, so we sing this cheerful melody. Life is a non-stop desert techno festival. Maybe next year will be number three. world's happiest dirge beautiful oh that is the new lyrics for hatikva happy teakva oh and with that that i think we have a podcast uh adam johnson thank you so much for coming on the show and uh talking about us bar with us yeah yeah thank you for having me uh yeah you were great Thank you for doing it.

I cracked the top 100 guest list. Oh, definitely. Top 10 for sure. Top 95 for sure. Oh, 100%. Oh, thank you. Thank you. I was worried about that.

Okay. So where can people find you? Oh, well, the podcast citations needed and I guess, you know, social media. Adam Johnson's a fairly generic name, but I should be up there. Yeah. But ignore the other two major Adam Johnson, one of whom may or may not have committed a sex crime. That's not me. Different guy. That's an English

English soccer player. Do you have to go along to, do you have to go around to your neighbors, knock on their doors and say, hi, I'm not that out of him. Thankfully, he was English, but I remember when it happened, he was, I was the, I was the, like, first hit on you Twitter, so I got yelled at by a bunch of English soccer thing. But the other Adam Johnson won a Pulitzer Prize. So confuse me with him if you don't find him.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. You're somewhere in between sex criminal and Pulitzer Prize winner. But we'll have, the golden median. We'll have the links to citations needed and to your social media on the description for the video on the podcast. Adam, once again, thank you for doing the show. Thanks for having me on. And thank you all out there for listening. Patreon.com slash bad as barra. Baddhizbara gmail.com.

All right, that's the show. Thanks everyone for listening. And until next time, from the river to the sea. I'm so fucking happy. Jumping jacks was us Push-ups was us Godmaga us All karate us

Taking Molly us Michael Jackson us Yamaha keyboards Us Charger binks on us Andor was us Heath ledger Joker us Endless Friends success

Happy Meals was us McDonald's was us Being happy us Bequam yoga us Eating food us breathing air, us, drinking water, us. We invented all that shit.