Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar - 8/28/26: Norm Finkelstein Returns to Discuss Gaza, Hasan Piker, New Book Gaza's Gravediggers

Episode Date: August 28, 2026

Norm Finkelstein returns for a special Friday show where we go in depth on a number of topics including Democrats condemning Hasan Piker after blatant lies about Piker's statements on Zionism, the Israeli propaganda of sexual assault on Oct 7th, and Norm's new book Gaza's Gravediggers. Buy Norm's Book: https://orbooks.com/catalog/gazas-gravediggers/   To become a Breaking Points Premium Member and watch/listen to the show AD FREE, uncut and 1 hour early visit: www.breakingpoints.com    Merch Store: https://shop.breakingpoints.com/    Sign up for BP Free Trial: https://breakingpoints.supercast.com/ See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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We need your help to build the future of independent news media, and we hope to see you at breaking points.com. Good morning, everybody, and happy Friday. We've got a special edition of the Friday show today because I'm driving. not only by the great Ryan Grimm, but by the world-renowned Norm Finkelstein, who has a new book out that everyone needs to check out called Gaza's Gravediggers, an inquiry into corruption in high places. And Norm, it's always a pleasure and an honor to have you. Well, you know what? It's always a pleasure to be your interlocular. You're smart, you're serious, and you're competent. So I was like that. And I, uh, I always, whenever I meet a stranger and we get into conversation, at some point that comes around, do you watch Crystal Bull on breaking points? Yeah.

Well, that is very kind coming from you. High praise indeed. I never praise. I speak facts. I have a lot that I want to get to with you today. I want to dig into your book, which I think is extremely. important. I want to get into a particular chapter in your book about the mass rape allegations, probably the most controversial part of the book, although you have a way of courting controversy by

stating facts, I would say, in general. But I wanted to start by getting your reaction to something that's been in the news lately, which is that Hassan Piker has come under attack from the right, but also from a lot of quote unquote liberal Democrats for comments he made about the rise of anti-Semitism. And so let me just read his comments for you, Norm, and then get your reaction to the attacks on him and also the substance of the comments. So this is what sparked all of this outrage. He said, quote, look, the anti-Zionist Jews in my community, you have a very tough job ahead of you where you have to go back to your communities, try to get your elderly relatives to understand that this connection between Israel and Zionism that's expressed over and over again

through a lot of these Jewish institutions, is teaching people the idea that Jews are monolithic, and this is a dangerous mode of propaganda. If Jews in America keep putting this idea out there, that they are singularly invested in Israel, eventually someone's going to come around and take action. Not against the state of Israel, mind you, but against American Jews. I don't know how many different ways I can explain this.

I don't know how people don't recognize how dangerous this predicament is, how dangerous this is for Jews. your reaction to those comments and the outrage surrounding them? Well, first of all, a qualification, which is I don't really know Hassan Piker as a podcaster. I don't watch podcasts with any kind of regularity. So it's no offense to him. I just don't, that's not my mode of intellectual engagement and inquiry. Having said that, I think we should make some general more.

and then specific ones. As you become more, as you become a bigger public figure, your personal responsibility increases. The things you might say in your room and your house, or you might say in a bar, you don't say in public. And it's the same thing here.

If you have an audience of 10, it's very different than if you have an audience of a million. That's because words can have an impact. I don't mean in the sense that a word is the equivalent of a physical blow. I mean in the sense that words can have a political impact. They can determine the result of an election. And here, Abdul-Sayyad's election is at stake. And wrong words.

can put that election at risk. So let's make it clear. Legally, morally, some might use the fancy word epistemologically. Of course, he has the right to say what he believes or even wants to say and doesn't believe that right is there. but politically you have to weigh your words. You have to be careful. As I gained a bigger and bigger audience, I won't say I didn't say what I believed. I did say what I believed. I was more careful.

I was more careful because I realized suddenly my words can have a political impact. After October 7th, many people were very curious how I would parse morally and factually what happened. And that was for me a very fraught moment trying to figure it out because my words now would politically count. So having now said that, the second qualification, I would like to enter a third.

I was on Hassan Parker's program. I have to say I was positively impressed. He had done his homework. It was clear he read the book. It was clear he had thought through. what would be the right questions to ask. And as you must know, most interviewers do not read anything beyond a blur for a book they're interviewing. So I thought, okay, the young fellow, he's trying to be serious.

And I respect that. He was trying to do his job, as you do. Okay. As to the remarks themselves, I find it a truism. If Israel calls itself the state of the Jewish people, if Jews do not repudiate that title, or what's a thousand times worse, embrace that title uncritically, then the reasonable, and we have to say reasonable, not irrational. The reasonable inference is that you support the actions of the state of Israel.

You accept that those actions represent you. Israel is calling itself the state of the Jewish people. You are embracing that title. Well, then you are embracing the genocide that Israel is carrying out, allegedly in the name of the Jewish people. And that being the case, you can't be shocked if people react very angrily and more at what then naturally ensues.

I just think that's obvious. Every country endures, You know, in the 1950s, there was a book written, it was either the 50s or the early 60s. It was called the Ugly American. And it was about how if the United States carries out in a certain way, don't be shocked if the citizens are being held accountable for the actions of that state,

and Americans are regarded as ugly, the ugly Americans, the supporters of criminal actions by the state. We all understood that during the war in Vietnam, that a lot of people were going to feel a high degree of resentment against Americans until there was a large anti-war movement, which made clear there was a distinction between the citizens at the state. Didn't every German brace yourself for the last 80 years? Hasn't every German had to bear the burden of what happened during World War II?

They still carry that burden 80 years later? So the idea that non-Jews will feel a high degree of animus towards Jews if there isn't a clear rupture between American Jewish opinion and Israeli opinion and Israeli state opinion, but also happens to be Israeli society opinion, unless there is a clear rupture between American Jewish opinion and Israeli state and society opinion, then, of course, there are going to be dire repercussions

when a state is carrying out a genocide. I want to add one caveat to that and then we're done with the question. The caveat is, I feel that Hassan Piker, not from any malice, absolutely not, not from any malice, but maybe oversight or maybe myopia. I believe he left out a crucial point. the most recent polls show that 30, between 30 and 40% of American Jews believe Israel's carrying out a genocide in Gaza. That rupture has occurred to a significant degree, and it's a very public rupture. You must remember, but some of your audiences, their memories are very short. You must remember the biggest mobilizations at the beginning of the Gaza genocide,

the mobilization at Grand Central Station in New York, the mobilization at the Statue of Liberty. They were all initiated by Jews. it was Jewish organizations. It was Jewish Voices of Peace. The organization, I always gets name wrong, not in my name. Or if not now,

if not now. Those are all Jewish organizations. I happen to believe, and you know, I don't have a jot of Jewish chauvinist blood in my body. It doesn't exist. All right, I don't want to say not a jot. I'm Jewish.

I have to say the fact that 30 to 40% of American Jews are willing to acknowledge that Israel is committing a genocide when you bear in mind from their early childhood they're being brainwashed at home often in synagogue on high holy days, and so forth, that Israel is a critical, if not the critical element of their identity. That's what they carry around. When you're asked the question, what is the main thing that makes you Jewish?

Very frequently, the answer to the question used to be support for the state of Israel. You know, and that they managed to work themselves out of that bubble and say, well, facts are facts. They're committing a genocide. That's pretty impressive. Actually, I don't believe, I really doubt any other collective would be capable of that. If you were asked Americans during the Vietnam, well, I don't know, I suppose it would be what stage in the Vietnam War. But even towards the end, I don't think a majority of Americans would have acknowledged that the U.S. is committing massive war crimes in Vietnam. I don't believe a majority would acknowledge.

I could be wrong. I'm sure there are many polls. So I think it's an impressive fact. If you looked at the encampments in spring 2024, Jews are very prominent in those encampments. They were. That's just a fact. Yes. So I think that element was missed in Hassan Piker's remarks.

And I suspect because I hope, and it's really a hope against hope, I hope he won't turn into a grandstander, which is one possible path at the fork in the road when you become a prominent personality. That's one possibility, one path, the fork in the road. And the other is

And I'm speaking for myself. I don't believe it's self-praise. It's simply a fact. And I'm serious. I'm deadly, lethally serious. Every time I get an email praising me, expressing homage to what I have done with my life,

I honestly, I don't smile. I become very unhappy. Do you know why? I swear. Because it means I have to work harder. I have to work harder. I have to live up to the expectations. I have to rise to the occasion. So it just means for me more work, more work. Why am I answering emails? I've got to read this. I've got to read that. So that's the other forp in the road, the other possibility, the other path. One is you become a grandstander. The other is you become more and more serious about your responsibility. Because now you are, as I began this answer to the question, now you're responsible to many more people. They now have high expectations for you. And taking your answer in its entirety, I think you've also identified a real contradiction

that he's going to have to grapple with in streaming eight to ten hours a day while also intervening at the highest level of politics. Because the point that you made that 30 to 40 percent of American Jews have denounced what Israel is doing is a point that he makes probably on a daily basis. but he didn't make it within the four corners of the clip that his opponents used and more to the point, what we read you is what he actually said,

they matched together kind of separate clips to make it even kind of less charitable to him. So this new world where somebody who speaks eight, nine, ten hours a day and has people paid to watch him and clip him to undermine him just presents a new dilemma in podcast politics that hasn't quite existed before.

There are two aspects to it. One is there's a French expression. Espri de Lescalier, the spirit of the staircase. And you know what it means? It means you say something, let's say, Crystal Ball, you're interviewing somebody, and you're saying, you say something, and then after the interview, you walk out, and you're walking down the stairs, you think, oh, why didn't I say that? And why didn't I say that?

It's the staring on the stairs. That happens literally every interview I do, Norm. Exactly. Every time. You're walking down the stair goes, oh, how do I forget to say that? You know? So he may have forgotten to say it. So that's one thing.

And the other is, it is true. I find it difficult. to take anybody seriously who streams 10 or 12 hours a day, where is the reading? Where is the preparation? I asked him once that. He's actually reading right there. It's wild.

It's a whole other world. It's like imagine if you just streamed yourself reading. I should just let me say two things. First of all, the first thing I want to make an acknowledgement. I make mistakes like that of leaving things out. And I have a very close collaborator, friend, and comrade, Jamie Stern Weiner. And he said to me on several occasions, he said to me, Norman, I think you should remember in the midst of denouncing American Jews for this and that and the other,

remember the fact of the achievements, the things they did that in many ways, vindicated American Jews. That's why I was careful to say it now, that I do, I'm more conscious of remembering to say that because I was told, I believe more than one occasion by Jamie, not to omit that. So I made that mistake. Norm, I wanted to ask your related question to that, because I've interviewed a few what you would call liberal Zionists who have come out and said Jeremy Benamy, you know, of Jay Street being one of them, who's willing to say it's a genocide, recognizes the war crimes, you know, sees the horrors that are being committed, but is still deeply committed to an Israeli state and thinks that it is possible to have a liberal, Democratic Jewish, ethno state. I wonder if you could speak some to that mentality because it's something that it's very hard for me having not grown up in those Jewish institutions and with the teachings and the culture surrounding that to understand how someone who can see civil rights abuses

so clearly on the domestic level still holds on to this idealized notion that somehow Israel could be very different from its current expression. I think there are, I listened to your interview with the fellow, was it with the fellow from J Street? Yeah, Jeremy. Yeah. What's his last name? Ben Ami.

Ben Ami. I listened to the interview. And first of all, I don't believe it's politically useful now. I'm not talking about ideologically or intellectually. I don't think it's politically useful now to discuss final solutions to the Israel-Palestine conflict. It's not in the drawing board. It's Karl Marx famously said that he doesn't make recipes for the future. You have to deal with the here and now, what's possible, and where you can actually infect, effect, or inflect change in the here and

now and also in the foreseeable future, of course. There is no solution on the drawing board right now. There's no, the Israeli government is off the charts, out to lunch, over the cliff, and the Palestinian life is completely disintegrated and atomized. There is no representative Palestinian institution, and there is not anything near a representative Palestinian institution. So how can you in this context talk about solutions? It just seems as Professor Tomsky would say, it sounds like the subject of a graduate seminar. It doesn't have much contact.

That's number one. Number two, even though I wrote my doctoral dissertation on the subject of Zionism, and I have, therefore, some material stake in it, not that the dissertation got me very far professionally. I don't believe in the, it's valuable to, it's useful to use terms like Zionism because there's no common, there's no consensus on the meaning of the term. It means so many different things to so many different people, such that Noam Chomsky throughout his life.

life, called himself a Zionist, and Benjamin Netanyahu called himself a Zionist. And when you ask Professor Chomsky, he would say, since I was five years old, I've been a Zionist. I know when I was five years old, I was learning how to tie my shoe and zipper my pants, but Professor Chomsky, by five, had already read the whole corpus on Zionism and had resolved who was a Zionist. So the term is too indeterminate, in my opinion, to have any political utility. I do believe, and I'm sure you're aware, I do believe that the terms or the phrase Jewish supremacist does have a meaning and it does have a resonance.

Everybody knows what white supremacy is. so it's not hard to form a fairly concrete image of Jewish supremacy. And I think Jewish supremacy is the core problem right now. Now you could say historically the problem was Zionism, and there's an argument there. I don't want to get into it. But right now, the problem is that Sellem, the Israeli Information Center for Human Rights and Occupy Territories, as it said a while ago now in the early, around the 2010, 2011, it put out a report and it said, because at that time there was widespread debate as to whether Israel was an apartheid state.

And each of the major human rights organizations put out a report. Amnesty International put out a report saying it's in its totality an apartheid state. Human Rights Watch put out the report saying the occupied territories are an apartheid situation, but Israel itself is more problematic. And then Bette Selim weighed in, and the executive director of Betzelm at that time was a very impressive guy. His name was Haggai El-Ad. He had his Ph.D. in physics from Harvard.

He was very morally serious. And it was very striking to me that the major human rights organizations published voluminous reports. The report by Bet Selim was just a few pages. It was a skimpy report. But I think it captured the core of the problem. As you know, in the natural sciences, the more simple of proof, the more elegant it is. If you can prove something in one page that another person has proven in a hundred pages, your proof is considered the more elegant, the more impressive one,

which is, of course, different in the humanities, as the famous renegade Christopher Hitchens famously put it. His quip was, why say in four words what you can say in 40? So the standard in the humanities is just the reverse of the one and the natural sciences. So going back to Haggai El-Ad and the Dudd Selim report, I said it was a skimpy report. And basically its essence, I think, is this.

It said, let's stop talking about occupied territories. There's one state. It extends from the Mediterranean to the Jordan. It's been that way since 1967. Well, you do the math. We're in 2012 or whatever it was at this point. It's one state. And he said, the foundation of this state is Jewish supremacy. That's the essence. It's a Jewish supremacist state. So I would say, We should scrap the term Zionism, which has no determinant meeting, especially before a broad public, and that's who we're speaking to, hopefully, and not ourselves, hopefully, and hopefully not posing and posturing for the cameras, but wanting to effect concrete, meeliorative change. I think you should use that term. Now, having said that, we return to your question.

And the question essentially is this, in theory, does a Jewish state, a state that calls itself Jewish, does it necessarily have to be a Jewish supremacist state? That's the essence of your question. Is it possible for a state to be a Jewish state without being a Jewish supremacist state? And your point of contention with Jeremy Ben-on-Me was that's not possible. That a Jewish state, by definition, has to be a Jewish supremacist state. that's your contention, in essence, if I'm not mistaken. And my answer to that would be, and here I have to say,

Professor Chomsky convinced me on the point. It all depends on how, and I'm not saying this out of deference to him, I use the verb, he convinced me, he persuaded me. it all depends on how in what aspects is the state Jewish. Hypothetically, if it simply honored Jewish holidays as the national holidays, if it had Hebrew as the national language, even though at the time Hebrew and Arabic were both national languages in Israel. I believe, I'm pretty certain on that.

So if you used to see signs, there would be in Hebrew and Arabic. But I could be, I don't want to stand on that point, but that's my recollection. So if it's a matter of holidays, national holidays, celebratory holidays, in the Hebrew language, you can say those are, and also Saturday is the day of rest rather than a Friday or a Sunday. No, things like that.

You could say it's Jewishness is more or less, more or less innocuous. More or less innocuous. But when there's discrimination in every department of social life, whether it's in housing, residents, jobs, if the army only has Jews serving in it and all sorts of benefits, social benefits come from service in the army, then obviously it becomes much more problematic. And then it reaches a very high level of problematic when it's objective, its objective, its goal is to make a homogeneously Jewish state. Yeah. Then it becomes obviously very problematic. Yes. So I think that is my, just to pause you for a saying,

that is my central contention of what most people, when they say a Jewish state of Israel, what they intend is that the majority population from a demographic perspective in Israel would be Jewish. And you can, you know, feel free to correct me if you think this is wrong. But I think all of the discrimination, the apartheid, the atrocities really flows out of that view of a quote unquote Jewish state. Because the moment that, you know, you, open up all possibilities of citizenship in an equal way to the entire population from the river to the sea, then you have a threat, an existential threat, to that conception of a Jewish nation. Look, I never quarrel with facts. That's my creed on life. And there's no question that there's a very high degree of plausibility in what you're saying. Because the moment you say it's a Jewish state it's the natural next step is that

Jews have to be in the majority and the next natural step from there is then non-Jews inexorably pose a threat to your majority status so since non-Jews

inexorably pose a threat to your majority status, and your majority status is a keystone of a Jewish state, then it follows that the best way to meet that threat is to get rid of everybody who is not Jewish. It's just built in the Zionism. The Zionist view was we can tolerate a 15 to 20% non-Jewish minority in our state. That was, ideally, the state would be homogeneously Jewish. That was the ideal.

Practically, they were willing to tolerate a 15 to 20% non-Jewish minority. So here's the thing. They expelled about 80% of the population in 1947 to 49. They got it down to about 15 or 20% non-Jewish. And then lo and behold, by the 1990s, it looked like Israel was slowly but, surely losing that Jewish majority. And what saved them?

You know what saved them? It was the miracle of Russian jury, of Soviet jury, about a million Russian, allegedly Jewish. In fact, in the last stages, 40% were not Jewish, but they called themselves Jewish. And Israel didn't care. Just as long you were publicly Jewish, they took them in to rectify or to preempt that potential growing Arab minority.

And now Israel is, if we accept that Selim's statement, that it's one state, and I think it's correct statement, it's been one state for a long time. That's why it should never be said the Occupy territories. That's incorrect. The essence of an occupation under international law, its essence is very simple. An occupation is temporary. That's what makes an occupation an occupation. If it's permanent, it's become an annexation. If it's illegal annex, if that permanence was the result of illegal acts,

It's an illegal annexation, but it's not an occupation. An occupation, that's the whole problem. Language is so loaded, in particular political language. I don't want to get off on 10,000 digressions, but the biggest myth of what happened in Gaza after 2023 was that it was a war. There was no war in Gaza. I just read the new crisis group report.

They were very scrupulous in describing it as a war. They knew exactly what they were doing. Very careful. There was the Hamas massacre on October 7th, and then what ensued was a war. war, and they say it over and over again. The moment you say that Israel's won 95% of the propaganda war, it's propaganda war. It wins it the moment you start describing it as a war.

In the same way, this is not an occupation. Go look up any legal definition of occupation. Its essence is, it's temporary. It's an annexation. and it's also, as the International Corps of Justice said in July 2025, it's an illegal annexation, an illegal. They call it an illegal occupation, but it's an illegal annexation. So that being said, let's accept what Bette Selim has said,

one state between the Mediterranean and Jordan, and it's half and half. it's half Palestinian Arab, half Israeli Jewish. And if Israel says it will only tolerate a 15 to 20% minority in its Jewish state, then expulsion is built into it. It's built into it. Just like Danny Morris said in one of his rare moments of lucidity, Benny Morris, he said that transfer, which was the euphemism for expulsion, transfer was, and now I'm quoting him. He doesn't like it when I quote him, but I'll keep quoting him. He said, transfer is inbuilt and inevitable in Zionism. That's what he said. It's inbuilt and inevitable in Zionism. There are two reasons. One is the ideological.

reason, namely, how can you have a Jewish state? If you don't have a Jewish majority, that just doesn't gel. But there's also a practical one. The Jews own no land, virtually no land in Palestine. They owned about, by 1947, they owned about 17% of land, 18, 20%. How do you build a Jewish state if you have no land on which to build it? So of course he was correct that it was inbuilt and inevitable. But as I said to you, there's kind of a discrete question, and the discrete question is, can you conceive a Jewish state that's not a Jewish supremacist state? And I would say that's a slightly more gray question, though I acknowledge what you say. You say that it's hard to conceive the notion of a Jewish state without a Jewish majority.

And if the two are kind of inextricably intertwined, doesn't that pose serious questions about the status of the minority? Because the status of the minority will be to forever be perceived as what Israel calls a demographic threat. And your population growth will always be carefully monitored to make sure you don't cross that threshold of threatening the Jewish majority.

So I recognize that's a problem. The other way to look at it, and I'm not saying, It's a, I'm not saying it's the answer. Take the case of the UK. It calls itself an Anglican state. That's its official title. The Anglican Church is the Church of State. It's an Anglican state.

But if you asked most British who are not Anglican, does the fact that the UK defines itself as an Anglican state, does that, is that for you an oppressive burden? I think most Brits would say no. They don't much care about it. It's there. It exists, but to use my terminology, it's more at the benign as it gets the malignant end of the spectrum.

So that's what Jeremy Ben Ami had in mind, then I think it's tolerable, but I have to have like an infinitude of asterisks when I say that because there are so many qualifications leaving aside that you may be right. It might be inherently, intrinsically, incompatible Jewish state that is not a Jewish supremacist state. And not to get bogged down on this because we want to get to your book,

you know, as soon as we can, but it also makes me think of, you know, people's responses when they say, well, Ireland is a Catholic country. Italy is a Catholic country. At the same time, as you're seeing more and more Muslim migration into those countries, you have a surge of xenophobia, and we don't know what the shape of those countries will look like. We don't know if the Catholic will maintain so apartheid controller. You're totally correct.

The only caveat I would enter to that is it's under. clear whether these states are reacting to an influx of Muslims or they're reacting to a collapsing economy in which Muslims have been made the scapegoats. In other words, in times of prosperity, it's quite possible those populations would be much more welcoming, as was the case in my own the United States when there was obviously massive immigration after World War II of 10,000 different varieties. But we still embraced the idea. It took many forms, but the one that just comes to mind was when David Dinkins described the United, David Dinkins, described New York as the gorgeous mosaic.

and there was a certain pride in that. But when times, you know, when the economic situation significantly deteriorates, people become much less generous. I see it in my own life. I went out to dinner with some people the other night, one of whom was from, I can't remember, well, two foreign countries, no point in naming them. And on the immigrant question,

And they were very tough, even though they were immigrants. Well, we came in legally. They're coming in illegally. My taxpayer money and, you know, so on and so forth. I think it's a lack of generosity, not the born necessarily of xenophobia, but the born of very hard times. Let me actually, let me ask you this, Norm. So I think, you know, we, one of the things that we're all grappling with is we all watched what was done in Gaza with our taxpayer dollars. It was not hidden. It's often boasted about. In fact, an Israeli, you know, top military commander just came out and bragged about. I would order the strike on the World Central Kitchen aid workers all over again. I have no regrets. They're affiliated with Hamas. Just to give one example of how brazen and how proud they are of the atrocities. Just one clarification, and I want to hear you.

It wasn't that it wasn't hidden. It wasn't it couldn't be hidden. The Times during that first year, the New York Times, it did everything it could to hide the hotlands in Gaza. Well, and you're right. There was a distinction between what the Israelis were saying and what their press was saying and the attempt by Western, quote-unquote, liberal media

outlets to pretend that none of that was being said and it wasn't being announced very publicly? The Times were still saying after the end of the first year, it was still saying that maybe Hamas had a command and control center under Al-Shefa Hospital. They wouldn't let go. Oh my gosh. Incredible. And then, as you know, the rape, the mass, the Hamas rape hoax. The thing is, I'm not I'm sort of a technophobe, but I recognize the values of the technology. It was it couldn't be hidden because of the web. Legacy media carried on just as it always did during that first year. And then they had to catch up with public opinion because public opinion had been persuaded

by what it saw by folks like yourself, hearing folks like yourself, on podcasts, on TikTok, and everything else. So we can't say it wasn't hidden. It was hidden, but it was unsuccessful. Get Bell, Pure Fiber Internet with Crave, Netflix, and Disney Plus. From $94 a month, price guaranteed for two years on Internet with a two-year term and auto pay credit. Visit bell.com for details and to check availability. Bell, connection is everything.

Hey, this is Hayes Davenport. And Sean Clements. We host the podcast, Hollywood Handbook on the Big Money Players Network. Our show is extremely accessible to first-time listeners. Each week, we talk to someone in show business, aka The Biz, and try to help them with their careers and see what they have to offer us. Everyone has a good time, and no one gets mad at their publicists for letting them do our show. We've had a lot of great guests like Sarah Sherman.

Not that great. Actually, can you help me shape this? How about we flip it on his head? How about we flip the script? What is the surprise woman? Actually, you think is the straight man is actually the one who's acting weird. Adam Scott, this entire time you've been expecting Adam Sandler to come to visit the show. I would never expect.

I would never set expectations for something like that to happen. If the universe allows for something like that to happen, I'm open to it. I'm always going to accept. You know, Danny McBride, fine. Yeah, it's all this fragile masculinity. Exuding. I could smell it walking down the hallway, to be honest with you. I was like, is that weed?

Nope, it's fragile masculinity. Ben Stiller, no. Because a lot of times, out of context, people don't get it or even know what a circle is. You know what I mean? They're like, they're like, oh, everyone's so dumb. And fake. Right, fake. And also not interesting.

or just like, oh, I've got my life. I don't care about your life. And a lot of other big shots that wouldn't be where they are without us. Oh, and by the way, Will Ferrell told us personally he loves the show and he wants to be a guest on every episode, but he's just so busy. Listen to Hollywood Handbook on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. If your bookshelf and your for you page are equally important to your personality, welcome home. This is Pros Society. the weekly podcast that's part book club, part group chat for thought daughters, pop culture

obsessives, and anyone who thinks Pride and Prejudice and Love Island deserve the same level of discourse. I'm Eli Rallo and every week we're connecting the dots between books, the internet, and the conversations everyone can't stop having. I'm going to have to look up this story. I'm obsessed. I'm obsessed. From bestselling authors and your favorite book talk creators to the latest pop culture moments, nothing is off the table.

It's like if you can hide some real. messages inside compelling characters, and that is a Trojan horse. Whether you're looking for literary deep dives, smart pop culture conversations, or a community of readers who love to think a little too much, you're in the right place. Listen to Pro Society on the Iheart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. See you between the pages. So your book tells part of the story of how this was allowed to, occur and you focus not so much on what did occur, which, as you said, they were unable to hide.

And you focus a lot on the liberal institutions and the failures that allowed a genocide to be carried out before all of our eyes. Talk a little bit about your approach and also what you see as some of those key failures as having been. Well, let me begin with the obvious. The main perpetrator of the genocide, obviously, was the state of Israel. Its main enabler was the United States. That, I don't believe, required any special expertise to demonstrate. It was in your face, though now they're trying to downplay the road. of the U.S. by saying they were helpless.

You know, the David Kirkpatrick article in the New Yorker magazine, they did everything they could behind the scenes, which is, of course, completely ridiculous. As the article said, 70% of the weapons were coming from the United States. If you were so appalled by what was happening, there was very, you just pulled a plug. So that, it seems to me,

didn't require any kind of argumentation on my part. It was in your face. Then there was the question of chronicling the horrors in Gaza. When I wrote the book Gaza and Inquest into its martyrdom, nobody had read the human rights reports I referred to. They just collected dust a handful of people. And I was writing, as it were, I was writing for history. I was writing for the ages.

I said at the very end of that book, I don't think anyone now is going to read it. I didn't. I had a university press put it out, and it was supposed to be a scholarly book, which I thought maybe in a hundred years, somebody will dust it off the cobwebs, the dust in the cobwebs,

and read what happened in Gaza? It was a record. a historical record, a document, less than a book. This time you didn't need it. First of all, everybody knows what happened. Yeah. You didn't need a book to recall it in detail. The general picture is pretty straightforward and is out there.

South Africa, it submitted a memorial to the International Corps of Justice. The memorial is your basically. your statement for what's called the merits phase of the court's proceedings when they decide whether or not a genocides occurring. And from what I've read, the memorial consists of 750 pages plus 4,000 pages of documentation. Wow. Okay? So I say to myself, I don't think you need me to do this anymore.

It's been done. So then, leaving those two things out, there was one other possibility, which is if I had impressive narrative power, a great story of Gaza, what happened to Gaza, there was a great British, British, I guess he was Irish, journalist named Robert Fisk. And he wrote this book called Pity the Nation. about what happened during Israel's invasion of Lebanon in 1948, excuse me, 1988.

And it was just breathtaking prose. It was prose that was poetry. He had that narrative gift, the sweep, the language, the evocation. He was in Lebanon during the Israeli invasion in 82. really a appendous literary as well as

historical document. I don't possess that. I'm not trying to light the false

modesty. I have very powerful expository power. Yeah, we can't all be Robert Fisk. Right.

I can put together a logical argument and there will be no wiggle room left at the end. I'm pretty good at that how to compose an impregnable logical argument. So I couldn't do the narrative and then I decide, well, there is another area. Namely, it's those people who we have higher expectations of. the UN, not the New York Times, not the Washington Post, God forbid, Atlantic Magazine or the New Yorker,

but from officials in the UN, from human rights organizations, we have higher expectations of them. And then the question becomes whether they rose to the legitimate. legitimate expectations we had of them. And my opinion was up until November 2025, which maybe we'll get to, up until then, I thought the UN record wasn't in general bed. The statements, the statements now, I'm not talking about the actions.

The statements by Secretary General Gutierrez, Martin Griffiths, Philippe Lazzarini, the head of UNRWA. They were good. They were strong. They were consistent. It was a pretty good showing.

But there were also areas where it was unacceptable. It was unacceptable. And those are the places. I look at it. I look at the how the human rights organizations acquitted themselves when it came to the Hamas rape hulks I look at

how the vice president of the International Corps of Justice Julius Sabatindi how she acquitted herself how the president of the ICJ at the time Joan Dunahue how she acquitted herself and my goal was to enable, facilitate, or expedite a house cleaning. These people have to be either censured or ousted for how they carried on during the Gaza genocide. By 2025 November, I added a requiem. at the end of the book, after the UN Security Council passed Resolution 2803,

which gave the deed to Gaza. And here I'm not engaging in hyperbole, which gave the deed of Gaza to a retarded ape, who happens at this moment to occupy the oval, office. And he in turn, he in turn, delegate responsibility to a malignant twignant twit named Jared Kushner, Steve Whitkoff, Tony Blair, the inspiration for the vampire diaries, Tony Blair, and They, in turn, chose this vomitious nonentity named Nikolai Mladenov to execute all of their policies. And at that point, I concluded this was November 2025, that the UN had turned into a rotting corpse.

It was no longer an isolated case here, a Julius Seventi, a Pramila Patton, and others, a Joan Dunahue. It was a rotting corpse. And had I written that a few months later, I would say that after the most brazen, flagrant, breach of international law in the modern world, namely the aggression by Israel and the United States against Iran. After that, with the UN Security Council staying absolutely silent on that aggression. It's a corpse. It's a corpse.

You could not even condemn an aggression which didn't even bother to pretend it was otherwise. You know, in September 1939,

when the Nazis invaded Poland, they fabricated a border incident. The German troops got dressed up in Polish uniforms and fabricated a border incident. Because even Hitler, even their furor understood, you have to pretend that you're acting in self-defense. And self-defense has a very specific meaning here. fast forwarding to after World War II, Article 51 says it has to be an armed attack in order to justify self-defense.

It has to be an armed attack. Now, there is some debate about whether an armed attack, an armed attack, which has already been launched. that it's irreversible and inevitable, but it hasn't yet, you know, let's say the planes haven't yet reached the target, whether you're allowed to retaliate. In that instance, what's called a preemptive attack, the planes have already been launched, the missiles have already been fired, then whether you have the legal option to preempt that attack by firing your own missiles, Yeah, there's a gray area. There was no gray area when the Israel and the United States attacked Iran. There wasn't, here's the deal, the bottom line.

There wasn't even a pretense of an armed attack that they were responding to. It was, and I repeat, the most brazen, flagrant, active aggression in the modern world. And the Security Council did nothing. So for me, leaving aside everything else, leaving aside everything else, Iran has the right at this point to do anything. Now, I want to underline, they have the right to do anything because there's no international law anymore. There's no law regulating state behavior anymore. You, meaning the UN, you meaning the states in the world, you annulled international law,

you canceled international law. You didn't respond to what's considered the highest crime under international law, the crime of aggression. You let it pass. Well, then Iran has no obligations any longer to abide by international law. If you say, why are they targeting the Gulf states? Well, leaving aside the nuances of that,

why shouldn't they? There's no international law. If for the sake of their survival, they're going to target the Gulf states, what prevents them? International law? That's not very credible anymore. So I'm not going to go into the details

of what's happened during the Iran War. I'm just saying as a legal fact international law died on November 17th, 2025 when the UN

gave the deed of Gaza to Donald Trump. I'm just going to read to you for a half second from the International Crisis Group, its

most recent report. I'm quoting it now. Trump is set to hold lifetime executive power over the Board of Peace, you know, the body that's lifetime a little further down. It says, the Trump administration's proposition is essentially an open-ended, open-ended, U.S.-led protectorate in Gaza. He owns it.

And when that malignant twit, Jared Kushner was asked about it, he said, we are going to run Gaza like a private company. Do you get it? Donald Trump is the chairman of the board of Trump, Inc., and now Gaza is one more property in his portfolio. That's what the UN Security Council did. And then it proceeded to stay silent in the face of the most brazening.

flagrant breach of international law. So it pronounced its own death sentence. It pronounced its own death sentence. At this point, Iran has no obligations whatsoever to abide by international law. It can target who it wants and what it wants for the sake of its survival. You don't like that? Then look in the mirror.

You created that situation. So that's what I resolved to do in the book. I started out by trying to point to the pockets of corruption in the international political and human rights organizations. But by the end, by 2025, I decided it wasn't pockets. Yeah. It's a fish rots from the head down. When the UN Security Council did what it did, the whole place.

now reeks, it stinks the high heaven of rot. Get Bell, purefiber internet with craved Netflix and Disney Plus from $94 a month. Price guaranteed for two years on internet with a two-year term and auto pay credit. Visit bell.ca for details and to check availability. Bell, connection is everything. Hey, this is Hayes Davenport. And Sean Clements. We host the podcast Hollywood Handbook on the Big Money Players Network.

Our show is extremely accessible to first-time listeners. Each week, we talk to someone in show business, aka The Biz, and try to help them with their careers and see what they have to offer us. Everyone has a good time, and no one gets mad at their publicist for letting them do our show. We've had a lot of great guests like Sarah Sherman, not that great. Actually, can you help me shape this? How about we flip it on his head, right? How about we flip the script?

What is the surprise woman? Actually, you think is the straight man is, Actually, the one who's acting weird. Adam Scott, this entire time you've been expecting Adam Sandler to come to visit the show. I would never expect. I would never set expectations for something like that to happen. If the universe allows for something like that to happen, I'm open to it. I'm always going to accept.

You know, Danny McBride, fine. Yeah, it's all this fragile masculinity. exuding. I could smell it walking down the hallway, to be honest with you. I was like, is that weed? Nope. It's fragile masculinity. Ben Stiller, no. Because a lot of times, out of context, people don't get it

or even know what a circle is. You know what I mean? They're like, oh, what's just a state. Everyone's so dumb. And fake. Right, fake and also not interested or just like, oh, I've got my life. I don't care about your life. And a lot of other big shots that wouldn't be where they are

without us. Oh, and by the way, Will Ferrell told us personally he loves the show and he wants to be a guest on every episode, but he's just so busy. Listen to Hollywood Handbook on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. When I was 14 years old, I was kidnapped and held captive for nine months. I survived and I've spent my life exploring how other people survive what should have destroyed them. I'm Elizabeth Smart and these are the Survivor Files. I just remember This low, taunting voice next to my ear saying, shut up, don't say anything. Every week, I'm with survivors who live through the unthinkable. I knew if he woke up, without a doubt, he was going to hurt me.

I started feeling that there was someone at the end of my bed, and I just started screaming. They are abducted, stalked, controlled, and nearly silenced. But these aren't stories about what's taken. from them. There's stories about what it takes to make it out alive. Listen to the Survivor Files with Elizabeth Smart on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Your analysis of the UN's role in its interactions with the kind of Israeli campaign that you describe in chapter one to produce what your chapter title calls Rape, Rape Fantasies, had another chapter, so to speak, right after your book went to the printer.

When a new report came out, they called it the Civil Commission, I guess in some type of effort to give it a governmental gloss. And there's a real trap, and I'm curious for how you went about strategically handling this. There's a trap in this entire reporting project when it comes to examining the allegations that Israel is making about October 7th and Hamas's use of alleged use of systematic sexual violence that you have to, in order to rebut it, you have to repeat a lot of the allegations. You have to get into a lot of things that nobody wants to talk about. Nobody wants to think about. and you have to identify connections between all of the different players that make you feel crazy. And so I'm curious how, because so you have an essay in your subsect.

So what you did is after this commission report came out, you read through it and you analyzed it. And so I consider it sort of an addendum, an appendix or epilogue to your book itself. And hopefully in a paperback, this maybe can be included. So talk to us a little bit about this project, the civil commission project that was described as like the denouement of the entire project. That this, for once and for all, they're settling the question. And how did you personally, politically, strategically, and as a writer, you know, confront this without kind of losing your mind? Well, there are a series of questions there and they're all important questions. number one, I knew that immediately as the book came out, regardless of his gravediggers,

people were going to say, but he didn't address the new report. And therefore, it would undermine, undercut all of my findings, because the findings would seem obviously inadequate in the face of this nearly 300 pages. report. So even though I knew it was going to be an arduous and agonizing task, I felt it had to be done or else chapter one of the book would be rendered obsolete. Number two, it was 300 pages or nearly. and the immediate assumption is if it's of that physical sheer physical weight, there's got to be something there. There's got to be something there.

I remember when I was a young man and I read the book from Time Immemorial, which claimed that Palestine hadn't been, the Palestine was empty on the eve of Jewish, colonization, and then all these Arabs and neighboring countries sneaked into Palestine and claimed to be indigenous to the land. And the book was a national bestseller. And everybody said, it's got to be true because Joan Peters, the alleged author, she points out that the book has 1857 end notes. So, as they say in law,

prima facie, there seemed to be a case that it couldn't all be made up. In the case of from time immemorial, I was a young man, I was still in graduate school, I discovered it was all made up. And in the case of this report... While you're talking,

I'll let people kind of see the actual physical product because it almost makes the case for itself as you're talking. You'll see it's just a bunch of quotes for the first like 30 pages from Hillary Roder Clinton. If you scroll down further, you'll see that half the pages are footnotes. Half the pages are footnotes.

And so you have to scroll down considerably more because you're several, yeah, You're not yet in the body. We're still at nothing. Like notice that there's still nothing. Yeah, that's correct. Yeah, yeah, that's correct.

Still nothing, still nothing. We're not yet at the book. Yeah, we're not. Still nothing. Yeah, the book. Yeah, the book. Now we're at the forward. We're 30-page in.

We're at the forward. Yeah. More bios. Totally correct. So, more quotes. More, you know. summary. I have to say

all this, all you're saying be totally correct. Here, now go back. Just go back. Here, these are the footnotes.

Go to the next page. Just scroll down to the next. Next, right there. You'll see. Next one. You see the length of the footnote?

So everybody, by the way, listen closely, including me. sometimes known as the world's leading forensic expert, which is a nice title, but sort of like on the lines of the tallest building in Wichita, Kansas, how many forensic experts are there?

Even I was daunted. I have to say, I'm going to speak with complete candor. I wondered whether I was wrong. I did. I'm not going to deny that. And the book had already been published. and that would have been, as you can imagine, a supreme humiliation and would have totally discredited me for the remainder of my life if I were wrong.

And I did harbor that fear because, as I said, of the sheer weight or bulk of the report and of what's called its scholarly apparatus, all those footnotes. We're at 70 pages and now we're doing background and context, by the way, for the record. Okay. So then I have to read it. On my first reading, I was not as despondent, but I still was concerned. It took me a second and then a third reading to discover that in the immortal words of Brianna Joy Gray, it was a nothing burger. It only had, if you have my text, do you have my text? Yes. I have your subsection.

essay. Yeah. So if you go to it, scroll down a little, you just keep scrolling out. I'll go to it. It's like five or pages in. Here, just here. It's called, I catalog how many times each of their witnesses is mentioned. So the Divis family, 13 times, the same testimony. Tally Biner, 10 times Goldstein Almak 26 times they were just recycling over and over and

oh she Dr. Kochav Elkhayam Levy If you scroll down a little further where you see the end notes just the end notes to my chart This is

for each person how many times they're mentioned. Oh, my goodness. Now we know where all those long footnotes come from because they're mentioned even more times in the footnotes. Exactly. It was the classic Hitler technique.

You keep repeating, repeating, repeating. That's what Hitler said. If you scroll all the way up to the top, His two classic techniques of propaganda, he talks about in mind conf, just scroll down a little. So I quote Hitler, the most brilliant propagandist technique will yield no success unless one fundamental principle is born in mind constantly and with unflagging attention. it meaning propaganda must confine itself to a few points and repeat them over and over. And that's exactly what she did, just repeating it over and over. So that having been said, and there are many other things to be said about the modus apparendi of this report.

and time won't allow me to go into important details, but nonetheless, details. The question is the big picture. Where do we end up? So what we end up with is, as many of your viewers will know, there was no forensic evidence of sexual violence or rape by Hamas on October 7. none exists. There, Israel seemed to have what I would call a plausible,

but maybe not a dispositive, a definitive alibi. Its alibi was, Israel wasn't prepared for a massacre of this magnitude. It had a finite number of forensic pathologists in the state as a whole, and it had to process the bodies rapidly for burial, Jewish ritual burial.

I personally found that I'm not saying it's true, but I found it plausible. But now we had, so we don't have forensic evidence, then we have two other possible kinds of evidence. One is testimonial evidence and the other is digital or photographic evidence. Let me take them in reverse order. Okay? Let's start with this. the digital photographic evidence. The report states that it has 10,000,

10,000 photographic and digital segment pieces of evidence from October 7th. 10,000, what it says, 10,000 photographs and digital segment. and digital segments from October 7th. Okay, that's our first piece of evidence, our first fact. Fact number two, they said it would take 1,800 hours to look, to examine all of its digital and photographic evidence. for those of your listeners who aren't able to rapidly calculate it, that would mean

if you, Ryan, or you Crystal, if either of you were to sit down in the room eight hours a day, seven days a week, looking at all the digital and forensic evidence, excuse me, digital and photographic evidence, it would take you more than seven months. More than seven months. We're talking about digital and photographic evidence

from a very finite parcel of land called the Gaza envelope. We're talking about CCTV evidence. traffic camera evidence body cam evidence dash cam evidence we're talking about

Hamas body cam evidence Hamas dash cam evidence because when the militants were killed their cameras were seized Hamas GoPro evidence okay

a vast accumulation of technological evidence also not trivially iPhone evidence people taking pictures as the massacre is unfolding

okay now what's the bottom line listen there isn't one photograph, one photograph, one digital segment of Hamas committing rape or sexual violence. Not one. Not just of rape. There is not one photograph or digital segment of Hamas committing rape or what's the technical terminology or other forms of sexual violence.

Now, that's very strange. It becomes stranger still when you factor this into it. The main conceit of this report, the main conceit, the main thesis, if you're in graduate school, of this report is that Hamas systematically and methodically committed rape and other forms of sexual violence in order to terrorize, to shatter the espree of Israeli society. It was a psychological act of terrorism. That's the core thesis of the report.

Now here is the thing. Hamas never posted any images of sexual violence and rape. According to the report, they used the sexual violence and rape as an act of psychological terror. If that's what you're saying, and they didn't post any of the images, which you say they purposely carried out rape and sexual violence in order, this is what they're saying,

in order to terrorize Israeli society. Well, if that was their objective, if that was their goal, then, They would have posted the images, right? You said that was their goal. Ms. Cotchev, Al-Qaim, Levy. Cheryl Sandberg, the main endorser of the report.

Sheryl Sandberg, the former C.O. of Meta. Cheryl, if you will excuse my familiarity, Sheryl, if that's the thesis of the report, the Hamas purposely committed sexual violence and rape in order to post it on the social media so as to terror psychologically terrorize Israeli society. Cheryl Ms. Koechav Al-Kayam-Levi Why didn't they post any of the images?

There's only one possibility judging from your logic. Crystal, Ryan, if they didn't post any of the images and their goal was to psychologically terrorize Israeli society with those images, then what's the only possible conclusion? They didn't post any images because there weren't any images.

And if there weren't any images, it's because it didn't happen. So as I point out in what I wrote, the most compelling proof to date, listen closely. Ms. Kodchev Al-Qaim Levy, Cheryl Sandberg, another main endorser, Ram Emanuel. Listen closely. By your own logic, your report is the most compelling evidence to date that Hamas did not commit sexual violence and rape as a weapon of war. In other words, if you read the report correctly, the report is the most compelling proof that it didn't happen. which is, as you can imagine, an irony. I remember my good friend Jamie Stern-Winer.

He said to me, I mentioned him before. He said, why do you think they did that? It was so stupid. First of all, most of the reports to date said that were about 5,000 images, and images, meaning photographs and digital evidence, they doubled it to 10,000. So now you have a very high person

to demonstrate why you don't have any images of rape and sexual violence. And then he said to me, Jamie, or he asked me, he said, why do you think they made that thesis about Hamas did this in order to say, they were purposely posting these images in order to psychologically terror. Why do you think they did that?

It was so dumb. And the answer, in my mind, with all due regard to Jamie, the brilliant fellow, the answer is obvious. Number one, nobody reads the reports. This report was just mind-numbingly dull. I mean that. Do you know, there were moments at night when I would say to myself, you know, Norm, you have a finite number of years left. Is this the best, most productive use of your time,

or even the most joyful use of your time in the days that remain to read this trip? So most people don't read it. And number two, most people say, 300 pages, there's got to be something there. There's got to be something there, you know? Ram Emanuel says in the report that the very beginning he says he has a blurb and he says for those of you who don't believe the Hamas did this that and the other he says here's your summer reading

and I'm thinking to myself Ram this is your summer reading because you didn't read it I was going to say, I wonder what percentage of all of those many pages of blurbs of people actually even bothered to read it. Zero. Ryan Rhym said zero. Yeah. Zero. So they just figured they would get away with it. Yeah.

That's what happened. And that leaves us, so we have already, let's call it, two zeros. No forensic evidence, no digital or photographic evidence. And then we come to the third possibility, eyewitness testimony, or as they call it nowadays, eyewitness and ear witness testimony. Ear witness is considered some credible form of evidence for some things, I suppose. Here we have a problem. Let me start with the preliminary, if you'll allow me.

Sure. The preliminary is Israel is a very tightly knit society. there are multiple overlapping, to use that idiotic woke word, intersectional loyalties in Israeli society. There is the loyalty. You belong to the same nation state. Everybody has what's called patriotism. You have the loyalty.

In the case of Israel, you're all part of the same family. The Jewish family, the same Jewish blood runs through all your, everybody you know, because Arabs don't count, they don't exist. It's what you call to put it in the most basic terms, the familial or blood loyalty. So we have the state or patriotic loyalty. We have the familial and blood loyalty. And then you have a third kind of loyalty. And it's in Israel.

it's the most pronounced loyalty. It's the loyalty of having everybody served in the IDF. It's a citizen army. It means everybody feels this intense loyalty to the IDF. Why do I mention this? Because those compounding, you can call it, those compounding loyalties, it's the midst of a genocide in which the population overwhelmingly supports it. All the polls show that there's only about 5% of Israeli Jews who thought, Israel was using too much force in Gaza, and that was for all three years.

Only about 5%. 40% thought Israel was not using enough force. You know? And then you know all the polls about, if the IDF enters the city, should it kill everybody in the city? There was the pole. Are there any innocence in Gaza? And all the Poles do not cast Israel in the best light.

Having said that, I believe, you shouldn't trust the word in this really says. I'm sorry. I recognize that's a high bar. I will then say two things and then get more into the testimonial issue. Number one, the standard used by human rights organizations is witness testimony and there also has to be some digital evidence. that's what makes the standard in human rights organizations is reasonable grounds to believe. And in order for the report to conclude reasonable grounds, it has to have both witness testimony and some digital evidence. Given that we already know there is no digital evidence, as a matter of fact, Amnesty International stated, we haven't even heard.

heard anybody claim that was digital evidence. That's what they said. Given that fact, then the conclusion of every human rights organization per force is or had to be. There's no reasonable grounds to believe rape and rape and other forms of sexual violence occurred. That's by their own legal standard. That's the legal standard. Now, the digital evidence doesn't have to be of an event in particular. It could be, let's take an example.

The digital evidence could be Israel photographs all of these Palestinian Gazans who are undressed. You know, remember the mass scenes of them down to their boxer drawers and things like that? So if then a witness claims that he or she had been forced to undress, the fact that there was already some evidence that Israel imposed that humiliation, that digital evidence can be used as confirmation of an individual testimony, which may not have been in that particular picture. Is that clear? Have I made myself clear?

You just need to demonstrate that the testimony falls into a pattern, P-A-T-T-E-R-N, a pattern that has been digitalized or photograph. But the individual testimony doesn't have to be that picture and that photograph. Well, they don't have that for sexual violence and rape. So that's the conclusion they perforce should have reached. That's not a conclusion they did reach, and we can get to that. Let's get back to this report. So I said, I wouldn't believe a word. And Israeli said, as a default setting for the reasons I set out.

Now, in the case, case of this particular report, it uses what it calls survivor-based inquiry. If you read the report, you know what survivor-based inquiry means? You don't ask the alleged victims any questions. Now, this is literal. Any questions that might hurt their feelings. links. And they also said quite explicitly, as you discuss in your paper, that they wanted to lead with a therapeutic approach, which is understandable if that's the approach they want to take,

but they also separately say they took a legal and academic approach, which is in complete contradiction because it doesn't allow you to say, well, you said that you heard this, but, you know, we looked at your cell phone data and it looks like you weren't there at that time. Can you maybe walk us through? Because maybe you had a genuine misremembers and it doesn't go to the core of your testimony, but it's good to probe it because maybe it does. Meanwhile, there's some people in the report that you also flag who have been exposed even by Israeli government officials as having been total fabulous and fraudsters.

and they still wind up being central players in the record. Yeah. And they'd say that even if this approach compromises, namely the therapeutic approach, compromises our factual findings, we put their feelings first. It says it literally. Yeah. I don't know if you find it. I italicized it when I was going through that. What they said, maybe you can find it while I'm speaking.

So effectively what the commission, the civil commission did was it acted as stenographers. It just rolled down whatever anyone said. Yeah, the physical and emotional well-being of the testifier is our highest priority, even if it compromises our documentation efforts, unquote. You have to laugh at that. Amazing. I wonder if you can read it one more time because I'd like the viewer, to hear what she said.

Yeah. The physical and emotional well-being of the testifier is our highest priority, even if it compromises our documentation efforts. You know, you have to ask yourself, is this gathering evidence or is this group therapy? What's going on here? So now you have... They also said the delicate triangle between therapy, documentation, and justice requires constant balance.

Except, but I say, if you're not going to critically evaluate the testimony, then you have yourself upset the balance. You put the balance on therapy and not on documentation. So now we have two problems. Number one, in my opinion, and I know it's not going to be a popular opinion. On the other hand, I'm not here to be popular. just how I evaluate. I don't think,

I think the default setting is not to trust the word they say. Number two, there was no interrogation. There was no fact finding. There was simply stenography. It was a group therapy session. It wasn't trying to ferret out to truth.

Even, okay, I'll grant, I'll grant. Maybe you should be delicate. Maybe you should walk on eggshells. Okay, I'll grant it if people are traumatized. But they didn't do anything. They just sat down, put a microphone, and speak. That was their documentation. She keeps saying, I archived this testimony.

I archived that testimony. You know, trying to put it like, Ryan said they called a civil commission, a highfalutin body. Now they archived. I said, this is not archiving. This is the equivalent of a hoarder collecting junk. I have to keep saying to myself, I live during the war during the war in Vietnam. The ground troops entered in March 1965. About three years later, there were large, I'm not saying a majority, but they were certainly significant. There were significant organizations of Vietnam vets who opposed the war and publicly exposed the crimes committed. There was a famous organization, actually one of the heads.

I didn't particularly like him was John Kerry. It was called VVAW, Vietnam Veterans Against the War. And then they gave what was called testimony, I think was called the Winter Soldier in testimony, in which they described the horrors that the U.S. was committing in Vietnam. Is there anything remotely equivalent to that three years after the Gaza genocide? Maybe two or three people who are quoted in Horitz. So why should I trust that testimony? But let's now get to the testimony, okay?

I've now give you, in my opinion, the context, the proper context. Let's now get to the actual testimony. So, on the question of rape, one person, a male, is said to have alleged that he was raped. That one person, he goes by the name D period in the report, that person, number one, he's completely discounted in Israel. Yeah. If you take the most comprehensive report that came out by Israel, it's called the D-N-A-H, the D-N-A-H, the D-N-A-H, the D-N-A-H,

on October 7th, sexual violence in October 7th, it doesn't even mention him. Hear me? Yeah. They didn't even mention him. So, we have not one there it, listen, not one

survivor testimony of rape on October 7th, not one. Now, number two, their key witness, my memory is, her name is Darren Komarev, I believe that's a name, Darren K-O-M-A-R-B,

Darren Kamara. She's listed number one in the report. Okay? She's their star witness, as it were. She's not an eyewitness. She's an ear witness. Okay. Now, let's see more of the details in this ear witness.

She was in a caravan which had no windows or apertures to the outside world. She's sitting in this caravan and she says, in her uninterrogated testimony, she said, I heard three discrete rates. I heard a gang rape. Then I heard a second rape. And then I heard a third rape, all going on simultaneously. I admit I'm an older person.

But I'm thinking to myself, I'm sitting in my apartment. When I hear a buzzer, I can never tell whether it's somebody at the door or because I live in the parkway, whether it's a car passing outside. But she,

the air witness, their star witness, she managed to discern three discrete rapes going on outside this killer. in which she has self-isolated. And then she says, in one of the rapes, the fellow,

the woman was shot in front of the fellow. I'm thinking to myself, how does she know that? She was shot in front of him. How would she know that? Then she says, he was her boyfriend. Yes, I saw Crystal her eyes. So look, she was his girlfriend.

How would you know that? From inside your self-isolation in the cubicle, how would you know that? I'm thinking to myself, and she says, I heard it. here, here and here. And I'm thinking to myself, did she hear the Boston Pops, the Vienna Boys Choir, and the Beatles reunion,

here, here and here? It was just so ridiculous. And this is your star witness? Right, if that was one piece. I should also add, in his testimony, the fellow who claimed, you know, the one fellow, you read his testimony in the report. He never said he was raped. He himself, I quote the testimony in what I wrote. He never said he was raped.

Allow me now to turn to the question of rape of the hostages. Okay? Let's begin with the obvious. This is a perfect opportunity to film your sexual violence, to post on the web, so as to psychologically terrorize Israel's population. You have them captive. And your objective is to commit sexual violence, including rape, in order to psychologically terrorize Israeli society. You have them captive. Here's the opportunity.

Is there a single image? Is there one? Is there even on the edges of an image? There's nothing. What is the testimony? Well, as you both probably know, many of your listeners, there's a testimony of the woman,

a not Shoshana. Okay? I won't go into the details. I'll just state, if you read her testimony, she never said she was raped. She did not. She said, an extreme, I suffered extreme sexual assault. Okay.

What? What was it? What happened? She never says. Even the report is very careful not to say that she, had been raped. Now, somebody asks,

well, what could it have been? Well, rape requires, usually, as you know, there are a thousand different

definitions, but in general, it requires some act of penetration. I don't know what happened. Maybe the guy said touch her,

to touch his penis. Maybe. I don't know. But the bottom line is, there's not a single witness who claimed that they suffered sexual rape sexual violence is separate now

right not a single one there is one witness who says that he heard or she he or she heard reports of sexual rape heard reports of rape doesn't say it happened

there is one witness her name is Aviva Siegel who claims that she saw an act of fallatio, coerced fallatio. However, when she was interviewed by Amnesty International, which bent over backwards to validate the Israeli claim, she didn't say it. Now, let's turn to.

the second tier, we looked at rape. What about other forms of sexual violence? Now there, we have all of this strange evidence by witnesses. Remember, no digital evidence, witnesses. So we know that the witnesses, they did take a lot of digital, they did produce, a lot of digital evidence about what happened in October 7. Took a lot of pictures and so forth. I should say these were witnesses who were first responders. Okay. So now let's turn to the question of sexual violence.

One fellow says, he says, I found a woman with her leg spread. I tried to close her legs. I couldn't. because her vagina was stuffed with aluminum cans. Not single, singular, aluminum cans. Another says, if you can quote it, Brian, all of these household items were stuffed into a woman.

The only thing they left out was, was the kitchen sink, the toilet bowl, and the corner gas station. Otherwise, everything was stuffed into women's vaginas. I'm thinking to myself, why didn't you take a picture of it? You were busy documenting. As you know, I presume, there was one alleged picture of, of some physical objects thrust into a woman's pelvic area, but the forensics pathologists who examined it said you couldn't tell.

There's only one picture. Human Rights Watch looked at it, several forensic pathologists. They said you couldn't tell. But here you have this massive sequence of the most graphic, grotesque, ghast, ghast, ghastly descriptions of sexual violence, not one did the first responder document.

No, you may say, well, first responders were too busy, you know, there was so much killing, so much death. Fair, that's a possibility. but there's a problem. The report says that the first responders did take a lot of pictures. Just like the report said, quote, we have extensive digital evidence from Hamas cameras. Then where are the pictures of sexual violence?

Why, when you see those cameras, those gopros. Yeah. Where are the pictures? He said it's extensive. And now you have extensive evidence provided by first responders. And they're seeing all of these ghastly, ghastly commissions perpetrating of sexual violence. Not one picture. I'm available to happen.

Well, and I think that is the, I mean, that really is the crux of the thing. If the argument is not there were possibly isolated incidents of rape or sexual assault, the thesis, to your point, is this was used as a weapon of war and of terror. And so, you know, if you can't produce any forensic evidence, if you can't produce any digital evidence, that really, I mean, I mean, it really undercuts, destroys the idea that this was used as a technique of terror because that's, you know, you wouldn't, you wouldn't then try to hide and try to make sure there was no visual evidence of those acts if they were committed en masse as a strategy on October 7th. And the testimonial evidence is wacky. Yeah.

It simply is. And we know some of those first responders like the, you know, fabricated, other later debunked hoaxes as well. And she did not discount that evidence because she's constructing a comprehensive archive. Right. So she won't discount it. Well, Norm, thank you so much for spending so much time with us today. And everybody should go and check out the book, Gaza's Gravediggers.

Take a look at the substack, which goes into detail about this report. and, you know, case by case, the testimonials and what they said and what you found. And it's always such an honor and a pleasure to get to speak with you, Norm. All right, guys, that's going to do it for us today. Nice to be back from Spain. I left my daughter there. I felt a little weird getting back on the plane without her. But I kept close tabs on what you guys were up to, Ryan.

I was really wanting to jump in on the whole Hassan Piker freak out. I was very much missing the opportunity to weigh in on that one. Yeah, we're on day. I just checked out Drudge Report. He's the top story right now on the Drudge Report, which to this day still drives a lot of kind of cable news and chatter kind of inside, inside Washington. In fact, let me see if it's still up there.

Yeah, here, just so people who don't understand, like what this Drudge Report is like, If you're young, you have no idea what this thing even is, but it's extremely influential. It's still extremely influential. Yeah. At its peak, it was like insane the amount of clicks and views you would get if you ended up with the Drudge Report link. But it's still all cable news producers. It still is. The GenX and Boomers get a lot of there.

And here's their top headline right now. They make him look so cool in that photo. They do. They pick the good one. And Brett Bear, rebutting the Don in any event. Wow. Amazing times we're living in.

It's wild. It's wild. All right, guys, well, we still have the month free subscription going on, breaking points.com. Check out the newsletter, all that good stuff. And we will be back to you on Monday. See you then. I'm Munga Chitigula, and I'm back with a new season of my podcast, Skyline Drive. This time I talked to scientists, biopunks, curmudgins, blues owners, super seniors, and Goa's

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