Provoked with Darryl Cooper and Scott Horton - EP:6 When Civilians Become Targets: Blood on the Path to Aid
Episode Date: August 2, 2025The humanitarian catastrophe unfolding in Gaza takes center stage as Daryl Cooper and Scott Horton examine damning testimony from a retired US special forces officer about Israeli tactics at food dist...ribution centers. Colonel Coney Aguilera, a veteran of twelve deployments including Iraq and Afghanistan, recently revealed witnessing IDF soldiers deliberately firing on civilians - including children - who were simply seeking food. His firsthand account confirms what media reports and humanitarian organizations have documented for months, adding another layer of credibility to claims that civilians are being deliberately targeted. Beyond the immediate crisis, the conversation weaves through the tangled history of the region, challenging common misconceptions about Palestinian identity and nationhood. Cooper brilliantly dismantles the narrative that Palestinians lack legitimate claim to their homeland, explaining how property rights and generational ties to specific places represent the most fundamental basis for belonging. "These were ordinary people with their lives, families, and livelihoods in this place," Cooper explains, cutting through ideological abstractions to focus on the human reality. Perhaps most revealing is their exploration of Netanyahu's documented support for Hamas - a cynical strategy confirmed by multiple sources including Israeli police interrogations where Netanyahu admitted "controlling the height of the flame." This historical context upends the simplistic framing of the conflict, revealing how Israeli leadership deliberately strengthened Hamas to prevent Palestinian unity and block statehood possibilities. As Horton points out, most Gazans today were either minors or not even born during the 2005 elections, making collective punishment not just morally indefensible but factually nonsensical. The conversation represents a growing shift in American discourse, particularly among conservatives who have traditionally supported Israel unconditionally. With figures like Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens publicly challenging Israeli actions, and polls showing 50% of Republicans now disapproving of Israel, we're witnessing a sea change in public opinion that transcends traditional political divides. Ready to delve deeper into these critical issues? Subscribe to Daryl's Martyr Made podcast for his upcoming series on German soldiers' experiences in WWII, and explore Scott's extensive interview archives at scotthortonshow.com, where you'll find thousands of conversations with experts on foreign policy, war, and peace. Chapters 0:00 Introduction 9:51 The Deep History of Slavery 19:07 Understanding Palestine: Historical Context 34:42 Gaza Humanitarian Crisis: Colonel Aguilera's Testimony 48:55 Resistance Under Occupation: Hamas and Israel 1:06:42 Netanyahu's Role in Supporting Hamas 1:13:58 Closing Thoughts and Show Information Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Transcript
Discussion (0)
Thank you.
what's up you guys welcome the show hey hey uh how you doing darrell doing great man how are you
doing good good to see you at a productive productive week i hope it's been hot as hell here
giving me an excuse to stay indoors and just uh try to work on this next this next podcast of mine
so that's been nice uh man i'm really looking forward to that maybe we should start with that
you're martyr made huh who's that and what does that mean and uh and what's this new podcast you're
working on terrible person if you if you google his name you'll you'll find that out very quickly
um so yeah i think probably most of the people listen to this only what most of the people
listen to us probably already know i do a long form history podcast where i dive like really deep
into a given historical topic i just sort of follow my nose and my interest at a given time you
know, I did the early history of Zionism and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. I did a long
series on Jones Town. So I did one on Nietzsche and Dostoevsky. I go kind of all over the
place, whatever's on my mind at the time. And some of these episodes are four, five, six, seven
hours long. So not for everybody, obviously. But I do go deep and I try to be very careful with
my research and everything. And so right now I'm working on doing a series. I put the prolog
out the first episode, real episode of the series will be out here shortly.
called Enemy, the Germans War, and it's not a full history of the Second World War.
I would need 50 episodes to do that, but it's the experience of the war from the perspective of the
Germans, you know, and not just the Third Reich High Command and the geopolitical stuff.
I'm really interested in what's an average conscripted soldier experienced on the eastern front,
you know um what the
german civilians who were who whose brothers and sons and fathers were
conscripted and sent off to fight um what they were going through as the heavy
bombing was coming through their cities and you know and then of course just how a society
um of very civilized and cultured people uh descends to a level of
of barbarity during that war that has kind of become a byword for all of us you know
to the point that it lasts today is like the reference point for where you cannot
under any circumstances, regardless of the enemy you're fighting, regardless of what the stakes
are, that you can't go there. You can't go to those depths because there is something worse,
it turns out, than losing a war. And it's having to wake up the next day and realize
that you did that, you know, that you're those people. And so,
you know, again, like, I'm interested in learning how people who, I mean, look, these are
ordinary people.
These aren't people who are aliens to us or anything like that.
You know, they were just Europeans in the 1920s, 30s, and 40s, and they ended up doing what,
you know, we all know happened in the east over there.
And so I'm very interested in just how a country and individual people kind of bring themselves
to that point and rationalize.
it and then process it afterwards as well man i can't wait to listen to that it's going to be so
interesting so cool and then like what substack might people look at if they wanted to sign up for that
darrell oh go to subscribe dot martyrmaid dot com i'm told that if you have a non substack dot you know
substack dot something uh that that twitter doesn't throttle you i'm sure they're smart enough
to have figured out that little scheme by now but i do it anyway um
But yeah, subscribe.mortemate.com.
You can get on my podcast as well as interviews, essays, kind of, I try to put out a lot of content.
It's slowed down a little bit lately as I'm pounding out the last bit of this episode.
But usually it's a piece or two a week.
Usually essays with audio, with an audio format that I read for people who'd rather listen, you know,
and it's 7, 10, sometimes 15 page essay a week on given topics.
You know, I'm on, I think, Part 17.
of a series, probably 200, 250 pages at this point. I should probably turn it into a book,
but on the history of slavery and the lead up to the U.S. Civil War, like I said, I kind of
pick whatever topics I'm kind of stuck on and obsessed with at the time and just run with it.
Yeah, I'm behind, man. I got too many jobs, Daryl. God dang it. I want to hear all the
whole history of slavery. I was like, I remember like just checking in on the progress of just
the titles of the episodes and where you were at.
And I think if I remember, it was like part seven and we're still not at the 1860s yet.
I was like, I am at part 17 and I just talked about the Haitian revolution.
Okay.
So I mean.
So this is the whole world history of all slavery ever, huh?
Or what?
Yeah, I start out the first few episodes are all, you know, I go back to ancient Babylonia and like all of and just try to, you know, one of the interesting.
things about the topic is that um you know if you go back like it's hard for us maybe as
americans specifically to understand how class bound the world was until yesterday and is still
in a lot of places today you know there's that famous scene from uh from the right stuff the
the tom wolf book where he talks about how uh one of the astronauts it's not really a scene in the
book he's just writing about it but he says like how one of the astronauts when they came around
from the backside of the moon
when they were out of communication
and they came on,
the first thing he wanted to know
was who won a baseball game
that he was interested in.
And it's like,
there's something to me at least very romantic
about the fact that, you know,
America's a country that was built
and went to the moon on the backs of,
you know, I mean, he wasn't a working class dude.
He was probably like an astrophysicist astronaut or something.
But still, like he's a guy who wants to know
the ball game.
game score. You know what I mean? And those are the people that took us to the moon and built
this country. And I love that. And so it's hard for us to sometimes wrap our heads around,
like, how firmly classbound the world was in some places is. And you go back and you find like all
of these ways of talking about slaves and slavery that are familiar to us from, you know,
racist screeds in the 1840s, you know, in the South. And it's like not just similar in tone,
It's similar in themes, similar in just the way, the language they use, the way they talk about it, going back thousands of years.
And it's because, you know, these are the people at the bottom of the social totem pole.
And they're an outcast class, whether or not they are technically classified as that.
And there's just, it doesn't even, you know, like one of the, one of the most interesting things that you find reading about American slavery is how it actually got worse and more harsh over time.
you know, over time,
which is kind of the opposite of what you'd think,
because in a lot of other ways,
we were becoming more humanitarian and more aware of these things,
and the character, slavery in a lot of ways,
and the racial kind of animus behind it,
kind of got worse over time in the sense that,
you know,
it almost as if, you know,
the experience of having slaves,
or put it this way,
Here's a better way to put it.
People think that like Africans were made into slaves because the Europeans who took them were racist.
In a lot of ways, it's kind of a reverse causality, especially in America where it's, you know, you're around slaves.
Everybody has contempt for slaves.
Everybody looks down on slaves.
Everybody sees them, you know, exhibiting characteristics that any slaves are going to have that I would have if I was a slave.
you know, they think they're lazy, they think they don't do any work unless they have to,
and they're always trying to mlinger and get out of things, because of course, I would too, you know.
And like, but they see all those things, and then they attach those stereotypes to those people.
And then here in the United States, all the slaves were very, very distinctly different from the majority population.
And, you know, black people.
And a lot of the racial animus actually came as a result of slavery as opposed to.
And having to rationalize it, too.
That too.
it's unfair for you to do this to somebody they go yeah but you got to understand this is a different
race that's so much different and lower that that makes it okay when the real thing is they don't
want to have to change their mind and stop operating in their current way you know yeah i mean
you know i go back into deep history on that too because you know it's really interesting how like
there's a lot of historical contingencies that are like they're really just coincidences
that they happened in this particular way in this particular
order, but then because they did just inform the whole cascade of events that comes after it.
So the fact that, you know, the first countries to go across the Atlantic and start colonizing
the new world were Portugal and Spain. And, you know, these are two countries that just in
1492, they finished the Reconquista, you know. So you have a people who had been literally
at constant war for 700 years to drive the Muslims out of Iberia.
I mean, this was this, you think of like, we always think of like a warlike society as like Sparta.
Dude, the Spanish peninsula, like for those hundreds of years, like that was a warlike society.
They were in a constant state of war for that entire time to the point where all of their institutions, their social values, all of these things developed around this like martial concept, you know.
And the fact that it was, that it was them who first went over to the new world.
and that they just happened to have been in contact for hundreds of years with the Muslim world
that ran most of the African slave trade at a time when it had, you know, there was no slavery in Europe,
kind of familiarized them with not just the slave trade networks that existed in Northwest Africa,
but also just sort of morally conditioned them to think of it as just normal.
You know, it was just always around because Spain, remember, Spain is a place that slavery,
basically existed in Spain unbroken until, I mean, you can go back to Roman times. There was
slavery there. And then when the Roman Empire fell and the, you know, the Visigoths came in and
others came in. I mean, they were still slavery. So the rest of Europe and then the Muslims came in
and they brought slavery in, you know, very early on. And so the rest of Europe kind of goes into
the feudal mode and slavery kind of goes by the wayside just because you can't go take your
neighboring provinces, peasants as slaves, unless you want a war with that guy. So like, you know,
human resources were valuable and people protected their own like property. And so technical slavery
disappeared, but it never disappeared in Spain, in Spanish Peninsula. And so it was much more
familiar. And, you know, then you add in like their proximity to, there's just a constant direct
interaction for centuries with the Muslims. Their idea of what slavery, how it worked and what
justified it. All that stuff was just very heavily influenced and even to a certain extent really was
just grafted over from arguments that Muslims always made regarding it. And those were largely
based on you go back all the way to Aristotle because remember the Europeans had lost track of
Aristotle and a lot of the Greek philosophers and the Muslims had maintained those and studied
them for a long time. And their ideas about slavery and about how they're just,
this is straight from Aristotle, there are just different types of people in the world.
There are different types of people who are suited for different kinds of things in different ways
of life and that these were, you know, you could break them down into racial groups and other
type of geographic groups. And, you know, Aristotle says, you know, there's surely like,
you know, a Greek out there who's fit only for slavery. And there's surely an, you know, an Ethiopian out
there who's who's fit to be a democratic citizen but in general this is the case and that
informed the way the Muslims thought about it and then was grafted on over into the Spanish and
Portuguese when they came over to the new world and so it just kind of seemed very natural
you know to them whereas if you you know if it had happened to have been the English who had
come over first and started the whole thing off I mean honestly it probably still would have
eventually gone the same way just because there was no way we were going to
Europe just didn't have the manpower to colonize the new world without bringing in just slave armies
to do most of the work. But you know, but you do wonder. And so this is like, this is why I'm on
part 17 and I'm only at the Haitian revolution. You know, I tried to go real deep. And I even did a
whole essay on, you know, this canard that you've probably seen it. I think the nation of Islam back in
the 90s wrote a book about it. It was called the Secret History between blacks and Jews. I think it was
the nation of Islam put it out. And it's all about how Jews controlled the slave trade and,
you know, all the slave ships and everything. And it's, it's total bullshit. Like, the only way that
they do that is they count all of these conversos, you know, these Jews who had converted to
Christianity, and some of them a generation or two down the line, they were extremely prosperous.
And they owned a lot of shipping companies and, you know, shipping interests and things like that.
That's all true. But, you know, I'm sure.
I don't know. I'm a Christian. I'm not in the business of questioning other people's conversions without really good reason. So as far as I'm concerned, those are Christian, you know, Christians running the slave trade. But yeah, I did a whole essay just on that. And, you know, they, it's, yeah, it's a fun one. Because, like, now I'm into the part that, like, I really wanted to start the series about. I started it as a, I want to talk about, yeah, slavery, but then, like, as a lead up into the civil war. That's really what I'm interested.
interested in is those 60 years really like of the 1800s like before the civil war how did the country
bring itself to like this point and you know me i mean i i do the putin thing where i say let me take
you back to the kevin ruse and 1020 ad you know and start there so yeah it's been fun that's cool man
well um i got to catch up on that i think it's really a shame that podcast apparently on all these
apps can only be played at a maximum of double speed i'm ready for quadruple dude i can take it man
hit me i got to catch up on some things and i still got some reading to do so when we were kids
and those micro machines commercials came on yeah like the rest of us are like trying to figure out
what he said and you're just like oh you make some interesting points right yeah no problem for me man
i was raised on that stuff all right so speaking of slavery and people with no rights whatsoever
the poor Palestinians
of the Gaza
strip are still being subject to
absolute nightmare, starving to death every day.
I'm barely looking at the front page of anti-war.com,
and I've been looking at the front page of anti-war.com for 26 years
and every day, but like, man,
oh, it's so ugly over there.
But I don't want to spend
all of the rest of the show on it because
we've got to talk about Rushagate 2
and potentially some other things,
but there's a couple of things that we definitely need to talk about.
The first, let's just resolve this question from last week,
which I had noticed, but I didn't have a chance to say,
and I did see where someone in the comments was like,
well, hey, man, what gives?
So we're going to have to reconcile this.
My thing was, insurgent Mass says,
and at least the Israeli government claims,
I think I tried to build in a caveat that, like,
they have a conflict of interest.
Maybe I only thought that and didn't say it out loud.
They do have a conflict of interest in the sense
if they want to pretend that there's still a lot of Hamas left to kill,
then that's a good pretext to continue to kill everybody, right?
So I could see that as like a conflict of interest in the Israelis reporting.
The Israelis, it didn't come out that way, right?
It was Ehud Olmert was criticizing Netanyahu and saying,
listen, there's just as many Hamas now as there were then.
And, you know, my idea was, as I've learned from Stanley McChrystal and Sergeant Matthew,
you kill two, you create 20.
And that's how it goes.
And obviously there's a finite number of palisional.
Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, but it's two million of them. What percentage of that or the raw
number of that that are fighting age males? I don't know. I guess I can presume the Israelis have
AI that just targets all fighting age males and calls them all terrorists and anybody around them
too and whatever. So surely they're taking probably the brunt of the strikes, but then again,
I know they have a vast tunnel network there and that, in fact, Ghazan type, whatever you call it,
resistance has had a tunnel network under there for thousands of years. It's how they've always
fought is hiding in that sand that's really good for tunnels for whatever reason that kind of dirt or
whatever i read a thing about that and um so you says man they're not even putting up a fight anymore
this is just a slaughter now and then i says yeah them Hamas ain't ever going to go all the way away
they're going to keep fighting and resisting and if it comes to the final cleansing of the place
they're not going to allow it they're going to still fight and you won't be able to put men on the
ground to really force them all to leave without getting shot and whatever
but it seems like there's a little cognitive dissonance here about just how what Tomas is,
where you're right, they certainly aren't firing rockets,
but maybe I'm wrong that they have enough resistance left to put up much of a resistance at all.
I don't think you're wrong.
And I don't think, yeah, I don't think there's actually,
we really actually disagree here.
What I was trying to get at, you know,
I think because this was in the context of just all of the people being killed at aid distribution sites
and things like that.
The point I was trying to make is that there's no heavy combat going on.
Right.
You know what I mean?
That Hamas cannot put together, I mean, a platoon level unit to go execute any kind of an operation.
Tell me how that compares to one year ago or one and a half years ago.
Well, I mean, you saw on October 7th, you know, you had thousands of people in a concerted air, land, and sea operation that had been kept under wraps for months involved a,
a lot of machinery that they had to build and put together themselves and so forth.
I mean, that's a big operation.
It takes a pretty complex and sophisticated organization to do it.
Everything that you see now...
Wait, what about one year ago?
After six or ten months before?
I mean, things were starting to slow down by that point,
but they were still at a point where you could say there were areas that needed to be cleared
out of concentrations of fighters, you know?
And so there was heavy combat going on.
The Israelis were taking casualties in combat from enemy fire, you know,
not just some lone dude with an AK who pokes his head out of window
and takes a pot shot and then gets blown up by a tank or something.
But like in combat, you know, that was all happening.
You know, maybe 10 months into it is like probably where it was tapering off.
But you still had that to a degree.
And again, the point I was trying to make is just that you could at least
create a narrative to rationalize some of the some of the killing we're seeing now of of all the
non-combatants if you're like look man there's firing coming from that crowd you know there was
we were in the shit like it was crazy and like you know bullets are flying and things are
blowing up and we're shooting and you know you don't know who's who and we killed a bunch of
that's not what's going on I mean there's we see videos of this shit you know what I mean
and it's like there's nothing going on it's just a bunch of
people going trying to queue for food and they're shooting at their feet and shooting over their
heads and sometimes shooting them and there's just there's no way to justify it you know and and that's
that's what I was I was just trying I was I was referring specifically to the heavy kind of but so on the
more narrow question of Hamas's relative strength or relative obliteration or like you know what I mean
what's left of them to defend what's left of the I mean I think probably they've killed a hundred
maybe 200,000 people there, but that still leaves 2 million, right? So, um, well, think about it like
any other like any other counterinsurgency, right? Like how many Taliban did we kill? It was a lot.
We killed a lot of Taliban to the point that like the guys that ran us out of Kabul, they were the
sons of the guys we killed back in 2001. You know what I mean? Like, and so I think that the,
that the people, that the Palestinians and the Ghazans in particular have demonstrated
that as long as, you know, they still have two legs to get up and walk and two arms to carry a
weapon, they're going to put up with whatever level of suffering they have to and fight back,
you know?
And so when we talk about Hamas, the organization, sure, they might be decimated right now.
You know, they might not have a command structure and the ability to marshal resources and personnel
for like scaled operations but we just think like that that's the superstructure that's built over
the resistance to the occupation which is not going to go away you know and i think they've proven
that over the years and when you look at like what we did with the taliban i mean you're talking
about 20 years of just you don't hear much about like because there were no big set piece battles
or anything we killed so many of those young posthune dudes walking around the mountains out there
and 20 years later their sons came and took the place back from it and then
man, I said a couple. So, I mean, that's Hamas in a sense, you know.
Hamas is just what we call the resistance right now. Yeah. I mean, this is the same thing
from Iraq and Afghanistan that, yeah, they're not armored divisions, whatever, but that's
the whole point. They're just light militias. In other words, you could organize one in a week
or less. You know, even if you take a heavy hit, you come right back together again.
Yeah. And, you know, even Iraq is somewhat different than those, than Afghanistan and Gaza.
the sense that, you know, there was a large contingent of foreign fighters in the country
who were not well-liked. They were feared, but they were not well-liked by the majority of the
population. It still took a long time to get the tribes on our side because they didn't think
we'd protect them, and ultimately we didn't when the bill came due. But we could at least
employ a strategy of trying to win over the local population while framing as a fight against
this international force that we're throwing out.
And, you know, in the victory condition being basically breaking the back of that force,
you know, and there's still going to be Shia militias and Sunni militias and, you know,
but we could at least like have a victory condition that we could proclaim and even if it
was illusory.
Gaza and Afghanistan, like, what was the victory condition in Afghanistan?
Like, get the Pashtun majority to just accept like a hodgepodge of minority government
people over them for i that was never going to happen ever well in the same in gaza you know like
william buper the army expert in debunking coin which is counterinsurgency strategy he calls these
forces anti-fragile in other words the harder you hit them the harder they come together the more
solidified they are you're not breaking them now of course ultimately you can kill every last one of
them or you know really beat them down to such a point of of absolute weakness you know obviously eventually
if it's if the the differential in actual firepower and intelligence and whatever is that different.
But in the meantime, essentially the more you kill them, the more you recruit, the more committed they are to resist.
And so it's counterproductive the whole way through essentially, which by the way, one more thing about that is, you know, Mike Flynn, who is famous for being framed as part of the Russiagate hoax as Donald Trump's incoming national security visor, which maybe we'll get to that part in a minute.
But before that, he ran intelligence for J-Soc in Iraq, and then he ran intelligence for McChrystal running the whole war in Afghanistan at the beginning of the surge in 2009 and 10 there.
And he had written this thing complaining about what he called anti-insurgency, which meant when you just bomb them all the time, but you don't know what the hell you're doing, versus, you know, high IQ counterinsurgency where you flood the place with Marines, and then somehow you'll have the magic.
intelligence and you'll know who to bomb instead of just bombing random people all the time where so
in his conception coin works which we're rejecting that because that's stupid but he's right about the
first part that anti-insurgency is even dumber than counterinsurgency if you want to call it
that that was the way he was framing it that this is purely counterproductive you cannot achieve
anything when you're simply bombing from the air and you don't really know who you're killing
you do know you're enraging whoever their survivors are and giving them real motive to continue the
fight. Yeah, that's built in. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. And you know, you would think that this would be a lesson that
we've learned over the last 25 years or more, but apparently, yeah, way more. Go back to Vietnam,
go back to the Philippines. I mean, but, you know, one of the, like, one of the things that I've
mentioned before with regard to the strategy employed by the Palestinian resistance since the 67 war,
and we may have talked about this in a previous episode, but they, you know,
After the Arab secular Arab states kind of got their asses booked by Israel in 67, they were kind of at a loss for what to do.
They had been waiting for Nasser and the rest to come save them, and that was sort of the strategy, such as there was a strategy at all.
And after that failed, and it became very obvious that that was never going to work, they kind of turned to the Algerian method, you know, because that's the one example they had of running a colonizer out of a Middle Eastern country was the Algerians run in the French.
out, not taken into account. And that was just through pure brutality, street murders, bombs,
just all of the things that, you know, we deplore as terrorism, but done in a genuine resistance,
you know, way in Algiers, the Palestinians employed. Now, one of Yasser Arafat's two closest
confederates was, he was a Palestinian, but he was a veteran of the Algerian war. He's kind of the one
who helped build this out and sold the idea in the first place. But they did that without taking
into account the fact that the French could go back to France. The Israelis are not going back to
Poland. Like, that's just not going to happen. They don't have anywhere to retreat to, but the Israelis
are making that same mistake with the Palestinians. You know what I mean? Like, you can see it just with
the absurdity of like the solutions being floated. I mean, they want Europe and Egypt and Jordan to
take them all. They want to drive them out. Indonesia, Ethiopia. I mean, these are ridiculous ideas. I mean,
just absurd, ridiculous, say we're going to move hundreds of thousands of people against
their will into countries that are already shaky at best in their governance and like
social structure. Absurd ideas, just totally ridiculous. And so they don't have any word
to retreat either. And so when the Israelis go in and just use conventional military tactics
to attack, like you're attacking a mass army when you're talking about a few guys amidst a
civilian population of 2 million, yeah, it's exactly what you said. All you do is harden the
population against you. Every single person in Gaza right now knows somebody who is not a Hamas
fighter who's been killed or wounded. I guarantee it. You know what I mean? And like,
that's the kind of thing that lasts. Yeah, for sure. It's so ugly over there. And so let's play
some clips. We have a couple of clips from Tucker Carlson's interview of a retired.
now special forces officer i believe he was a lieutenant colonel in yeah 12 deployments uh to
iraqistan to jikistan was one he mentions interesting i know i was like yeah okay um but yeah
four against the jihadis in that one you know go ahead yeah been there uh so he's been there
done that and um yeah let him i think you know maybe the clip he'll he'll tell his story he was a contractor
who got brought over there for Aguilare. Aguilary.
Aguilore. Yeah. So I'm trying to get him on the show. I don't know if I'll be able to.
I'm sure he's getting a lot of calls, but he did this in-depth interview on Tucker's show.
And of course, Tucker asked all the best questions and really got the best out of him.
But then I haven't seen it yet, but I know he was also on with Saga and Crystal on breaking points.
He did Democracy now. And I believe his first big interview was on the BBC.
see. So people want to look into all those things and take a look at the guy. I'm under the
impression, as Tucker said, that there are attacks against this guy now, but I'll be surprised
if they hold up. Yeah, of course. I mean, anyway, go ahead. Yeah. Yeah, let's run them and see.
You've spent your life in combat zones. That's why I think your testimony is so compelling,
because you have a frame of reference. You've seen a lot of destruction and a lot of killing in
your life for 25 years. How would you compare what you saw in Gaza to what you've seen and say,
or Iraq?
Nothing compares.
Nothing I have seen in Iraq
in Afghanistan, in Baghdad,
in Mosul, Sadr City,
all throughout Afghanistan, Syria,
the Southern Philippines, some places
where there's dense populations.
I have never witnessed anything
as brutal, destructive, violent.
And I would say
that steps far over
our international law.
laws of how we persecute wars and how we engage in warfare, we've long departed from that
standard. And America, America is a part of it. Yeah. So, and he goes on to detail about
killing us civilians over there. Essentially, the story's telling this is what the Israeli press was
reporting and what we've spoken about before, where they have these very few food centers run
by this strange Israeli-backed NGO, which they discuss it strangeness to. And they've replaced
these hundreds of unrest sites, the former UN relief agency that they ran out of there, with four
major sites. And he says, I think three of the four are all the way in the south near the Egyptian
border. And then one of them is in the Narazim corridor halfway through as they've cut the
place in half. So, and then he's describing how.
again, and this is confirmed already pre-confirmed by the media reports in other places,
again, especially in Haaretz, where what they're talking about is how they hold everybody
back until all the food is ready. They lay it all out. And then they just kind of open the gate
so that it's a stampede, right? They don't have like a some kind of gate system where they can
bring in a few people out of time and any kind of orderly thing. They force them to essentially
fight like mad over the stuff
to get this stuff and people are
starving and then but the whole
time that they're corraling them around
and bringing the people and they're
forced he says to go through
war zones like where they
know these are battle zones
still active where they're forcing the people
to cross and then
there are no signs he says
he asked them why you just put up a sign
that says go this way
and they go no that would cost too much
we're not doing that so instead
how do they tell the people, the Palestinians,
how do they heard this giant mass of starving people around?
They heard them by shooting at them.
They shoot over their heads.
They shoot at their feet.
They shoot right past them, supposedly,
in order that they know if you cross a line,
if you start dropping dead,
it's because you're crossing a magic invisible line.
Go back the other way.
And if you start dropping dead this way,
there's a line there too, apparently.
And so you better stay in between these lines
where people are getting shot and how will you know when you cross the line you got shot and they're
doing this and they're as he puts it oh yeah no we're shooting at their feet yeah well guess what
there's ricochets these bullets bounce up and kill people and you're shooting over their head but it's
dark and there's a berm and then but there's a trail going in zigzagging back there so you're
shooting over these people's heads but you're hitting those people over there and he says then
you know this is like at dawn and then daylight really breaks and you can see there's just bodies
line on the side of the path all the way down he says they tried to blame this on hamas like i'm telling
you know this is the idf and he even said specifically dude no point in embellishing any of his
statements here i got no agenda to do that he said listen i don't know and i'm not talking about all
of the idf their air forces and whoever i'm talking about this brigade of army reservist conscripts
who are clearly untrained undisciplined out of control they're absolutely and they're not just
shooting with fully automatic machine guns, including apparently like heavier ones,
not just M4s, which are 5, five, six, trying to get shot with one of those.
And, uh, but, um, they're hitting them with artillery and with tank rounds.
You're going the wrong way.
So they shoot them with a tank.
And he's talking about men, women, and children.
And then he's told the same story in multiple places about this young boy comes and
kisses his friend's hand, kisses his hand, says thank you to them in the most sincere, like,
these guys have been around in the Middle East fighting for a long time.
They know that this is like the most sincere form of respect that this 12-year-old boy is showing them.
After walking 12 kilometers, he says, to get there through this, you know, deadly maze.
And then the kid gets a little bit of food and he leaves.
And then he hears fully out of machine gun fire.
And he says, he just got there.
So he thought, oh, no, something must have happened.
I wonder what happened.
So he ran to go and check it out.
And he could see the IDF was just machine gunning the crowd of people and including this little boy, this 12-year-old boy, they killed him.
and then people try to say that was fake and then he explained to Tucker here's their debunking is the photo of obviously a different boy and he says i took that picture too it's a different boy from a different camp this kid for him to get there he'd have to have his own helicopter because i'm telling you he couldn't get there from here so don't you give me that your debunkings debunked and in fact you can see the kid he's talking about has very short hair and the kid that they say is him has you know one inch of hair for
flopping down here clearly you know an inch and a half i don't think we should even give those arguments
the time of day honestly like you're right you're right people are going to say whatever they're
going to say about this guy and who knows maybe he left in a huff disgruntled employee maybe he had
guys he didn't like to me darrell i got to tell you man but the real point is the point is that
what he's telling us is just what we've been watching on camera for months for a year maybe you know
he's just telling us what IDF soldiers have told Harat's, you know, newspaper, what IDF officers have
come out and talked about. That's all he's doing. So it's not as if, like, we all thought this
was like a nice, clean war. And then there's this rogue dude coming out of nowhere telling
stories. He's just telling his perspective on what we've all been watching this whole time.
And so they can say what they want about him. There's no reason to think he's lying just because we've,
we've seen all the things that he's talking about. Here's the thing, man. I heard, I talked to a friend
today on the phone. And he told me that that's what his friends say. That's all fake. That's a bunch
of propaganda. That's all Hamas lies. And these are people who are not Israel Lobby Hasbara spreaders.
These are Israel Lobby Hasbara receivers and, you know, victims of this stuff who internalize it all.
And, you know, what are you on the side of the other guys? Like, no way.
This is the side and we're on it and anything that's going to cause us too much discomfort.
Like, wow, the sideway back fight like barbarians and are deliberately using starvation as a weapon or deliberately machine gunning men, women, and children and shooting them with tanks, that can't be right.
Or else, why am I so stupid to go along with this?
And so it's easier to say that you're lying.
And so that's the problem, right, is that's the reason I dignify it, right, is I'm always hung up on this, man.
I one time said to the other Scott Horton years ago before he was a Rushagate Coot, I really liked him.
And he would say, you know, about anti-chorcher stuff and this and that and whatever.
And I said something along the line of just dismissing propaganda.
And he said, I forgot the exact context anymore.
I don't know, whatever.
But he cited to me the Declaration of Independence, the decent respect for the opinions of mankind.
So you've got to figure the average guy listening is an honest guy and he just hadn't heard your point of view yet.
And you got to give him a chance in a fair shake.
And maybe even it's fair to assume that he's heard the other side's propaganda 100 times more than yours.
So you better make a good case and you better show them that you got a respect for someone.
Just because somebody who believes something wrong doesn't mean that they're so damn bad.
But it oftentimes does mean that people spreading that propaganda are.
You know what I mean?
I think there are times where like especially, man, like people get caught up in some lie or whatever.
but like isn't the case everybody right when you're out driving around that like it kind of occurs to you like maybe that wasn't true you know what i mean like when you're doing something else kind of space out a little bit and think from a little bit different perspective that like man that does kind of sound cruel now that i think about it or dismissive or overly like biased or whatever um again i always say this i know i'm redundant about it but i i think i don't know if i've said this on this show but i i'm first
firmly convinced, Darrell, that most Americans don't understand who's occupying who over there.
In fact, there was a poll that Grant F. Smith did that showed that a majority of Americans thought
the Palestinians were occupying the Israelis because or else, why would we be on the side
of the bullies in the whole thing, right? It doesn't make sense. So that's how people rationalize
it. They just don't understand. Or they think, like, Ben Shapiro lies to them and tells them
that Palestine is a sovereign nation that's next door to Israel and it attacked Israel. And now
Israel is defending itself from it, right, instead of admitting that, no, this is not a sovereign nation.
It's an Indian reservation.
These people are under Israeli control that all this land was de facto, whatever you want to call it, annexed, taken under the control of Israel in 1967.
It's their land, essentially in terms of like, not their rightful ownership of it, but their direct exercise of control over it.
It's been like this longer than I've been alive by quite a bit.
So by nine years.
So when you, when I, I'm firmly convinced I've just seen it happen.
When I explain that to people, they go, oh, well, no wonder.
And I think I probably did say this before.
It's called, they're called Palestinians.
So it sounds like they're from a place called Palestine.
And everybody's got a country, like who doesn't have a country?
So, of course, they're from a country called Palestine.
And we even talk about the Palestinians and Palestine as a place, only,
it's just like a place that's indefinitely on hold that doesn't exist right now because Israel's
squatting on top of it. But otherwise, it would be called historic Palestine. That's what it's been called
for eons now. And the canard about how, you know, the Palestinian national identity so called
is this recent invention. It's like, dude, national identity in general is a recent invention.
Say more about that, please. I mean, you didn't have like the nationalist movements in Europe,
you go back just a couple hundred years even in Europe, and nobody's talking about like the Polish people as a nation, as a political and social entity that has sort of sovereign rights of its own or anything like. Nobody thought that way. You started to get a little bit of that with England, a little bit with France under like the absolutist monarchs, but it took a while to percolate. By the time you start getting like the nationalist revolutions in the rest of Europe, which is, you know, where that idea originated. You know, I mean, you're talking like the Palestinian
were only behind by like a little a little while you know and i mean jewish national identity even people
have trouble understanding this part of it because they think i mean you have to remember like jews are
there are ethiopian jews there are middle eastern like arabic speaking arabic looking jews
european jews sephartic jews like you know people who are from different countries all speak
different languages some are atheists some are reform some are super orthodox some are zionists some are not
And so the idea that, like, you have this group of people, like, it's an interesting exercise to, like, ask somebody, like, what is a Jew?
Give me something or some list of things that you can say as a descriptor that applies to this entire group of people.
Because it's almost impossible unless you want to say that a Jew is somebody who practices Judaism and then an Israeli is somebody who's an Israeli citizen.
But, I mean, you know, you would have a whole lot of trouble trying to find any point of.
like a commonality between, you know, a New York City atheist Ashkenazi Jew and religious
Ethiopian Jew, like living in the Middle Eastern.
There's be very hard to like draw any, there's no genetic component, there's no religious
component, there's no cultural or linguistic component, anything like that.
And so the idea that like there was this Jewish nation that's just persisted throughout
history and they came back to claim their rightful land is that that's a myth by itself.
you know and i really know like i think one of the reasons that that uh this gets you know a lot of
people have the reaction that they had that you're talking about is um their their idea i get
this from people all the time when they listen to my series on the early history of it all
is like basically their idea of it is like you know the book of genesis the kingdom of
david and solomon um maybe if they real like uh you know real bibb bible students the
Babylonian exile. But then the Romans, Jesus comes along, you know, during Roman times. And then it's
just blank until 1948. Like that's really like how most people, that's, that's where their
knowledge of it is. Like from the time of Jesus until 1948, it's just one big blank. They have no
idea what's going on there. And that's why you get these just totally ridiculous, like, arguments
about how, you know, one of the other ones that people like to use is how, you know, oh, yeah, a lot of
the Palestinians, quote, unquote, who lived there, you know, they moved in there, like,
after the British came, because the economy was growing and so forth, they act like people
are coming from, like, all corners of the globe to move in there when, like, the overwhelming
majority of that in migration was like, I live on one side of the Jordan River, my cousin
lives on the other side, and I say, come on over here, we got a job for you, or they live in
southern Lebanon or something, and they travel 20 miles to, like, come into, quote, unquote,
Palestine and like you know which at the time obviously was not a was not a sovereign country and so
you know these are things that are very easy to dismiss but people don't have any of the context for
it they don't understand you go back to the year 1900 and jews were maybe 2% of the population
of Palestine the whole area and they were religious Jews who lived in jerusalem for religious
reasons they were not Zionists in fact they had problems with the Zionists when when the movement
really got started and so i mean you're talking about a place that for hundreds and
hundreds of years had virtually no Jews there. And you know what it would be like? It would be,
it would be like, this is especially true because if you look at the genetics, actually, the
Palestinians, Palestinian Muslims, especially the Christians, but the Muslims as well,
they share as much or more common DNA with the ancient inhabitants of that region as any
Askinazi Jew does from around the world.
And so you want to talk about like, this is our genetic inheritance.
This is us as a people.
Like both sides have as much quote unquote right to it, even under that rule.
But, you know, it would be like if like a bunch of radicalized, revolutionary Boston, Irish
Americans went back to Ireland, said, we're the real Irish people and ethnically cleansed
a bunch of people and put them all up in, you know, all sorts.
County up on the old year's millions going home to sicily going yeah quote unquote and kicking everybody
out of their house cutting their throat and moving in saying this isn't your land you took our land
and moved in when we were gone and like that's that's what it's like you know and it's when people like
yeah just last thing is that one of the reasons is so important to understand how this whole thing
started you know that that this was not something that happened like after 1945 when you know you
You just had a bunch of sort of bedraggled kind of suffering former inmates of the concentration camps,
kind of just looking for a place to have a little bit of peace.
This was a revolutionary movement in a revolutionary time, like the Bolshevik movement,
the communist revolutionary groups around Europe, Eastern Europe and Central Europe,
they were drawing from the same pool of young Jewish dudes as the Zionists.
They were in direct competition.
They write about this like a lot, about how they're competing with the communists for these revolutionaries.
after the war, when Monachan Beggan came down there, he was part of a migration from Poland
where they had like a trained up, drilled, well-equipped, 20,000 soldier, fascist Jewish army in Poland
that was like supporting, you know, the Polish state and was sponsored by the Polish state.
Huge number of them went down to Palestine.
I mean, this was a military invasion and a revolutionary movement that went down there
and violently took this place.
And, you know, the reason that that's important to understand,
Because, you know, one of the first responses to that will always be in this, from a certain context, like in a certain context, this makes sense is, okay, fine, but that was a long time ago.
And, you know, Israelis are there now, whatever their grandparents did.
And, you know, they just got attacked.
So they have to do something about that.
And fair enough to as far as it goes.
But it's still important to understand just because, you know, I get in trouble for saying this sometimes.
But, like, there's, and I said this even right after October 7th, which was like, you know, probably in bad taste, but I still think it was true.
Is there, from a certain perspective, like a people under military occupation, under foreign military occupation, can never be the aggressor, almost no matter what they do.
I mean, under what circumstances do the kids in Red Dawn become the aggressors against the Russians?
You know what I mean?
Well, if they were killing the Russian occupiers families in their, like, tracked homes, maybe.
Maybe.
Yeah, I don't know.
No, you're still talking about killing women and children with no guns in their hands.
I'm not for that.
I'm not for that at all.
I think that when you descend to a place like that, you're selling your soul for a political cause,
and that's not a good thing.
But I do think that, you know, look, put it this way.
it's like accepted foreign policy, like philosophy, international relations principle.
Yeah, we have nuclear weapons.
Part of the reason is for deterrence, but everybody kind of recognizes that, you know,
if the United States was invaded and most of it's conquered and, you know, just some ISIS
is surrounding Washington, D.C., and that's the last holdout, and we decided to launch a bunch of
nukes, people kind of accept that as like, that's what they're for. They're there, they're there
to protect your people and your, uh, social, you know, political association, whether it's a state or
whatever. They're there to, uh, protect you from like the ultimate disaster, which is like
something that threatens your existence. And so, and we're willing to do that. And everybody kind
of accepts that that's not a terrible thing to do. I mean, Israel has an open policy of,
you know, the Samson option when they are in danger of getting overrun. And, and, uh,
that they have the option to launch nuclear weapons in an offensive manner against people,
whether they have nuclear weapons to threaten them with or not.
And most people...
Fuck that. But anyway, I understand that. I agree. I mean, I, you know, especially as I get older,
like if I was the president and, you know, Russia or China got off a lucky first strike and
just the war's over. Like, all we can do now is, are we going to kill a couple hundred million
of them? I probably wouldn't do it. Like, I just, this may be why it shouldn't be president.
but that's how I feel about it too.
That's the job.
Well, yeah, I mean, as far as the whole Palestinians never had a state and all that, it's such
silly propaganda.
Well, look, they were under the domination of the Turks.
That wasn't their fault.
They just weren't strong enough to resist it.
And the British Empire, the most powerful empire in world history after that.
And so, oh, of course they didn't have a state.
Lots of people didn't have a state until the British finally withdrew.
So now, like, India doesn't have the right to have their own government.
Israel gets to occupy India, too, because they didn't come together as a nation.
state until 49 or we're in eastern europe they were all under arthurian empire yeah india didn't
get their act together until a year after israel so israel gets to occupy it because there never was
an indian state and they get to steal whatever they want occupy new deli and move right into your
house um the whole thing is silly and and that's why they always have to just interrupt any argument
about this with you're a nazi and your hatred is suspect and whatever because they can't withstand any
kind of syllogism explaining the situation, you know what I mean, and what they're doing?
And not to mention that, you know, all of those arguments, those to me, those are all arguments
over abstractions.
Yeah.
They go around the, they go around the fact, okay, there's no nation state.
These are all like ideological concepts and political philosophy concepts that people came up with
like in the last few centuries.
The bottom line is there were a bunch of people living there.
They had their lives there.
They had their families and their livelihoods in this place.
place and you came in whatever your reasons or excuses from a completely different continent
and drove these people out at gunpoint.
And in our tradition, in our tradition, it's property rights that counts.
John Locke, life, liberty, and property, come mix your labor with your land.
I think you probably tell me a little something about that, Darrell, you know,
and that which you justly acquire through voluntary means from other property owners,
you know, that's, so, of course, yeah, why do I own this land?
well it was my grandfather's land and then he left it to my father and then he died and now it's mine
that's why you know what i mean of course that's if you ask a palestinian that's how they know
why do i say that's my grandmother's house well here's the deed and here's the key so is that good
enough evidence you know it seems pretty convincing yeah and people will say oh it was taken by
conquest so was the united states so were a lot of countries and my answer to that is yeah but i don't
think that the Native Americans were like evil in 1850 for like taking out settlers. Like they were
fighting to protect their, you know, their land and their home. Like I like, and I don't think
anybody feels that way about them. I mean, think about this. Like this conflict is 80 years old at
this point, right? Yeah, 80 years old. Although, wait, on that point, you'd have to admit that if the
Indians had kept their targets at fighting age males, that would have been a lot better public
relations for them instead of yeah they kill civilians so we're going to have to just wipe them
out because they pose this absolutely insatiable irrational threat that sees no difference it says
in the Declaration of Independence they don't discriminate between men women and children so we got
they're the worst enemy we face that kind of thing so just like with Hamas if Hamas had just
driven right past that rave and driven right past those kibbutzs and gone straight to the
military base that would have been some pretty damn good public relations actually
not as not that bad ones
instead they set themselves up to be
demonized as as as the Islamic
state and all of their subjects
too and look at what it's robbed them
you know what I mean when they could have just left those people alone
in fact it would have been better they driven
slowly by the rave and kind of just gave them the middle
finger right and like made a show
of how they were not targeting these people
you know I mean I agree that I mean
the Palestinians and Arabs in general have suffered
from just catastrophic public relations
since I mean since the first world war really like they just and that's why they've lost again and
again and again largely but at the same time I would say that like I think the answer most people
would give to that is the March for Peace you're like yeah you guys told us that for years and
years and years and we tried it you mean the March return of 2018 a March of return yeah you want
to talk about that yeah I mean like people like me idealist naive people like me always said
that, you know, they should do, what they should do is they should do something like the green march
that the Moroccans pulled off against the Spanish back when they wanted that portion of Morocco
back that was still occupied. They decided we're just, we're not going to be armed. And we're just
going to walk in because we just don't think that they have the will to gun us all down. And if they
do, it'll inflame public opinion badly enough back in their country that will win anyway. And so
we're just, we're just going to, we're just going to walk toward the gates. And our bet is that they
won't stop us. And if they do, you know, then that, we'll use that propaganda. And so the march of
return, I mean, they finally, after years of people like me, morons from the outside like me saying
they should try that, they tried it. And thousands of them got shot by snipers, you know.
And I want to emphasize to people, when you're talking about snipers, this is always important
to remember. I mean, thousands of people getting shot by snipers. Kids, there's videos of people
in wheelchairs, people getting shot in the back, women, people with journalists vests on, all being
shot by snipers who had at first they had a they had a um a line in the sand they were to shoot
anybody that came within 300 yards of the fence i mean that's a long ways and they eventually like
reduced that down a little bit when public relations got difficult but you're talking about
thousands of people being shot by snipers and snipers that's different than spraying machine gun
fire and things ricoishing around and people being in a crowd that gets hit snipers are executioners
You know, they look at their target.
They see the expression on their face.
They see what they're holding in their hands.
And they can tell what's in their pockets, and then they shoot that person, you know.
And to have thousands of people, unarmed people, of all ages, both sexes, you know, just weekend after weekend after weekend, getting shot like that, it really kind of, you know, I mean, that's a, I don't know exactly know how to answer people who give that reply to the idea that.
what they should have done is drive past that rave, you know, because they would say we tried that.
And you see where that got us. It got us nowhere. You people on the outside, yeah, there's
some like usual suspect activists out there who like got our back. But it didn't, it didn't
change any policy or any public officials mind in Europe, America, anywhere that they were just sniping
thousands of us, our kids, our wives, et cetera. It didn't change any of your behavior.
Well, it's funny because it's just like, it is, Darrell, though. This is the same thing that they say
about the Israelis is you shouldn't stoop to their level.
You lose the game when you act like they do.
And then, but that's the same thing for Hamas.
I agree.
What I'm saying here is I'm not talking about a great march of return and walking unarmed into a military base.
I'm saying they could have driven past the rave and passed the homes and gone straight to the military base and sack the military base and taking their hostages from the military base where everybody there, they're humans and many of them are conscripts, but at least they're wearing all of green by the rules, their fair game.
And so, and again, I get what you're saying about.
settlement and cowboys and Indians and all of that and there's i don't know some kind of gray area
is there but um in this case especially i think it just goes to show um you know not just how morally
wrong it is but how so apparently morally wrong it is that people even assume that netanyahu
set it all up to happen this way because it's so damn ugly that then he can exploit it to now look
what he's doing he's finishing the job he's taking he's using the opportunity to genocide these people
right out of there. This goes back to Arnon Soffer and the population problem, the advisor to
Benjamin Netanyahu. People look this up on my site. It's at Scott Horton.org or slash fair use.
And this guy was a demographer from down at Tel Aviv University who came to Ariel Sharon and said,
you've got to look at these numbers, man. These Palestinians are multiplying like rabbits.
And so what we need to do is this was behind the disengagement. By disengaging from Gaza,
we'll just be figuratively
kicking 2 million people out of the country.
They'll still be controlled by Israel.
They'll still be under Israeli control.
But it'll be a siege
and we won't have settlers there anymore.
We'll call at the end of the occupation
and we'll be able to subtract the number of Palestinians
that anyone can accuse us of occupying by 2 million.
So now we're not an apartheid state.
Now it's still majority rules,
even though cruelly so over the West Bank,
that kind of thing.
But then the reporter, because there's an interview
with the Jerusalem Post and the reporter asks him yeah but I mean what are the Palestinians of the Gaza
strip going to do in that situation under a total siege like that they're going to completely freak out
right and he goes yeah oh yeah they're definitely going to go crazy and try to fight and resist so we
will have to just kill and kill and kill and that is what will keep them down and and keep us you know
on the steady course there and again that that dovetails with what dave weiss glass and other
advisor to Sharon said that this is the disengagement is to put the peace process in formaldehyde
so we don't have to give them a Palestinian state because we do this ridiculous siege and we claim
oh see we tried it we gave Gaza independence and they just turned over to Hamas and five
rockets at us when meanwhile the whole scam was they knew that it was going to lead to just
exactly what they have now they're going to create completely intolerable conditions for those
people and then when they resist we'll use that as excuse to kill even more
own words. That's the Lekud, man. You might not want to believe that USA is allied with a government
like that. But yeah, they're worse than George III. You know, I mean, you just have to look at the
history of the Lekud Party that came out of the revisionist movement, you know, to begin with in the old
days. I mean, the first Lekud Prime Minister, Manakum Began, you know, it's a fascinating life story
and everything, but unrepentant, outright terrorist. I mean, led a group, the
gun in Palestine back in the 40s that just they were, I mean, full-scale slaughter of women
and children, bombs in marketplaces, all, you know, throwing, going to Palestinian neighborhoods,
just throwing grenades into houses where people are sleeping to drive them out.
The second Lakud Prime Minister was Yitzhak Shemir, arguably, I didn't even worse than Began.
Began was at least something of a soldier. Shemir, I mean, you know, it was a coalition of the three
major groups in Palestine, but largely led by his stern gang that pulled the Dariusine massacre,
which is just, I mean, it was the Mili massacre, basically. And these are the people who are the
first two Lekud prime ministers. You go a little bit further down the line. I always tell people to,
like, just imagine, just trying to think of like how this looks from the other side's perspective.
You have Ariel Sharon, the butcher of Beirut, the guy who really ran like a rogue war in southern
Lebanon without even, I mean, it really was like him in IDF Northern Command, just sort of
deciding to go to war in the late 70s, early 80s with Lebanon, oversees the sovereign
Shatila massacres. It's just a total humanitarian disaster. And to the point that everybody in the
region knows him is the butcher of Beirut, and he gets elected prime minister, you know, and so
it's like, that looks to them the same way it looks when people in Gaza elect Hamas. You know,
they're like, okay, that just proves it like these people are crazy.
You know, it proves that they're like, they hate us.
They're that brutal.
That's how it really looks.
And that sounds crazy to us because Ariel Sharon knows to like put on a suit when he gives, you know, and like, and go and speak without a, you know, too much an accent and use colloquialisms that are familiar to Americans.
Like they're very, they're all very good at that.
That's why Netanyahu's been in power as long as he is because he just understands the American right better than probably most Republicans here in our country.
And that's, you know, really like, I mean, that's the, that's the main asset he can sell to
the Israeli people is I can keep the Americans on side. Like, who are you going to put up that can do
that? But, but, you know, again, so it sounds like a little bit crazy to us, Ariel Sharon or
Benjamin Netanyahu looking to them like they're electing Hamas, but it's not crazy.
So look, I'm glad we're focusing so much on Hamas at this point because it reminds me the thing
that I wanted to say to you, which was about I was on hold on to do the Pierce Morgan
show yesterday i debated wesley clark again about ukraine only with a couple of hangers on some
kook and some russian uh were like not helpful but anyways mostly me versus the general i think i did okay
it was probably not as good as the last one but um while i was on hold pierce morgan was whoop in the
israeli ambassador i guess to england um or maybe it was the ambassador of the united states i don't know
which is what his name uh his name was uh yichal i don't know if you know the guy but anyway
Anyway, Pierce Moore was just whooping the guy.
And at one point, he went contrary to the usual talking point because he was trying to make a different point.
And I think, I'm not really reading his mind, but sort of seemed like he realized the slip, but he was committed to it at that point.
But at one point in his rant, the Israeli ambassador says, nobody elected Hamas, right?
They're just this horrible, criminal, terrible gang, right?
And then Pierce Morgan says, in fact, Israel backed.
Hamas and Netanyahu had a policy to support Hamas in that right and the guy doesn't deny it
okay so then this might be and I was sitting there on hold going oh oh pick I want to jump in here
if I can't you know I mean which I'm on for the Ukraine debate in 10 minutes but I wanted to jump in
and say oh that's right Netanyahu voted for Hamas you want to talk about it's okay to kill
anyone who lives near anyone who voted for Hamas? Well, it ain't the people of the Gaza
strip when the majority of the people in 2005, when George W. Bush forced them to hold that
election, the majority were minors and only a plurality of voters. In fact, they didn't get
a majority in any single district, anywhere in the West Bank or the Gaza Strip. They got only a
plurality until the Gaza bombshell, big disastrous coup attempt of 06, which led to Hamas
kicking Fatah out of the Gaza Strip and taking full control of the thing, which is purely,
you know, blowback from American foreign policy there that forced it to be that way.
And so you want to these people, the hawks, the excuse makers, they want to pretend there's
some popular sovereignty in Ukraine, whereby some unanimous assent and consent, the people of,
I just say Ukraine, of the Gaza Strip, whereby some unanimous assent and consent that they all
chose Hamas to be their duly elected and rightful representatives and therefore they share
in the responsibility for what Hamas does. There's no way in the world when a majority of them
were minors in 05 and the majority of them are minors now. They weren't born yet. They were literally
not born yet. Yeah. So if there was ever such a perfect like example, right? Like if
Lizander Spooner wanted to teach you why popular sovereignty is stupid. He might just point to the
Gaza Strip right now. These people share virtually no responsibility for Israel quite literally
boasting Hamas on them. And yes, I don't want to overstate the origin. It was the Muslim
Brotherhood who coined the thing in the first place. But Israel, and we have this from Richard Sale and
UPI, SALE, Richard Sale, everybody read it so good. It's all based on CIA, Shinbet,
Massad sources. Same for Andrew Higgins in the Wall Street Journal. Same for Trita Parsi and
Treacherous Alliance and Robert Dreyfus and Devil's Game. And Jeremy R. Hammond, in his book,
Obstacle to Peace, that Israel supported the rise of Hamas in order to marginalize the nationalist
pseudo-Kami Fatah, which is Yasser Arafat and the PLO, which is now run by Abu Mazen.
That's something the British for doing that back in the 20s, dude. That's right.
Like, that's a tactic that's been going back to the 20s, like supporting radical Islam in that country first to split off the Christians from the movement because the Christians provided up until really like the 1970s, like a very large amount of the leadership structure in the PFLP and, well, they were communists.
So maybe not, they wouldn't call themselves Christians, but a lot of them were from Christian families.
And the PLO as well, like in 1979 or 80 when Yasser Arafat went to Iran to visit the Ayatollah after the revolution, the Ayatollah was pressing.
on you need to make this an Islamic movement, declare a jihad, and he refused. And I'm not
any fan of Arafat or anything like that, but he refused for a reason. He knew that game. You know,
he understood what that was about because it had been going on for a long time. And, you know,
I think you've said this before. It's probably been said by a lot of people. But even if they did
elect Hamas, that's the logic that Osama bin Laden used to justify knocking down the Twin Towers.
Like, you guys are electing the presidents that are killing our people. So don't cry.
innocent to me, you know, change your government if you don't like it. You guys have the vote.
Right. We, we barely have the vote. Like, if you want to call it that at all, like in most of
these countries. So, like, I just reject the logic altogether. I mean, there's absolutely no,
there's absolutely no level of responsibility or, or just like collective sharing of guilt or
anything like that that will, that should get anybody to agree that it's okay to go kill a bunch of
women and children, and to do it indiscriminately and on purpose.
You know, Darrell, there was an episode, I guess it was on Pierce Morgan, where Dave Smith was
up against Dean Kane from Superman. And Dean Kane goes, oh, well, they all voted for him
and they all elected, they're all from the country that did the thing. And Dave goes, oh, yeah,
well, your country did Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Somalia, Libya, Syria, Yemen. So are you saying
that they have the right to kill you? And he goes,
And then he didn't say another thing for 40 minutes, and that was the end of his participation in the show that day.
They're like, oh, geez, wait, does Barack Obama committing a sin give someone the right to murder me and my family?
Boy, that doesn't sound right.
You might call that a non sequitur when you apply it to me and people I care about now that I think about it.
You know, sorry Superman.
Yeah.
And you know, I've gone through.
Yeah.
And also, wait, on the Hamas, on the Hamas, Netanyahu said, we control the height of the flame.
And there were three different sources that said that he said that while he was briefing Lakud ministers and telling them, yes, it's true.
I am backing Hamas.
But listen, anyone who wants to thwart the establishment of a Palestinian state must support Hamas.
Because that's how we keep them divided and so that we can keep telling the Americans, you don't expect us.
to negotiate with a bunch of terrorists, do you?
But don't worry, everybody.
We control the height of the flame.
But they, meaning I do, he was saying.
But they lied and go, uh-oh, he didn't say that.
Those three different separate on the record name sources are all lying about that,
except that there's a new documentary out called the BB files,
which is all about the corruption of him and his wife extorting everybody to buy her champagne
and fancy jewelry and all these things.
And they show in that video they have the tapes, Daryl, of the pull.
police the shin bet interrogations of netanyahu sitting at the desk and shin bet asks him i mean
you got to trust the hebrew translator of the of the movie but i do there's no reason to doubt it in
this thing it's not some kind of put on this documentary is fully serious you know you could have
your hebrew speaking friend check it and the police say to him what are you doing back in hamas
you're getting a bunch of money to hamas and he says yes i am doing that but don't worry
we control the height of the flame uses the exact same
term that he had used in that supposedly disputed quote.
So, right, just like if you had Bill Clinton saying, yes, I'm backing Al-Qaeda in Bosnia
and Kosovo in Chechnya, but don't worry, we control the hide of the flame right before
September 11th, which is actually pretty close, right?
They said, they even say at the, at the Pentagon, they would say terrorism is a small price
to pay for being a superpower, which is basically the same thing.
we know what we're doing but they don't know what they're doing they're drunk as hell getting us
all in a bunch of trouble on both sides you know yeah uh you know i keep my my like naive hopeful
side dwindling as it may be um i just keep hoping these you know the Israelis the ones i know
at least and the ones that i've known in the past like say what you want about any group people
one thing you can say about the Israelis or at least i thought so is that this is like a very very
politically engaged and politically astute people, you know. And I'm surprised that they've allowed
a guy like Netanyahu to take over their political system for as long as they have. Just even,
even outside of the way he's prosecuted things against the Palestinians, just his corruption and
just his hokeyness, honestly. Like, it's, it doesn't fit with the character of the Israelis. I know
that they would tolerate a guy like that for so long. But again, you know, the fact that he knows how to
play the American right like a fiddle. I mean, you see actually right now, I mean, that is like
pretty much the main strategic asset that the Israelis have, is their ability to influence the
Americans. And so I guess if he's if he's good at that, then he's a good prime minister.
Well, look, there's a crack up coming. I mean, that's the whole thing. No, they should not have
let him drive. He's been a total disaster for Israeli security. Greater Israel is a suicide project,
just like the American Empire is. And it's destroying their.
country i always wonder what people say about oh israel's not going to make it and that kind of thing like
what are they even talking about and i usually i don't know there's only so many people whose opinion
i really take seriously about large questions like that or whatever but i believe it was john meersheimer
who was saying on a clip that i saw the other day that well what's going to happen is people are just
going to move away from there it's going to not be a secure country and people are just going to leave
so it's not that anyone's ever going to invade and conquer them until you know the very end of the
thing, but they're just going to make the country just, and I always believed this too, and maybe I
believed this long enough ago that I must not have known what I was talking about, Daryl, but I've
always thought that Israel could have gotten along it. They just kept the labor guys in there and
more or less tried to make peace with their neighbors instead of just this absolute constant bullying,
constant denial of the rights of the Palestinians, constant threats against everybody else,
this Oded Yanan style policy of breaking up all their neighbors and keeping everybody weak so they're
strong.
That's short-term thinking.
That's high time preference thinking, dude.
That's stupid.
It's not a way.
Don't they want their country to last for the next few hundred years or something to the
imaginable future or not?
The whole thing is completely nuts.
And so I saw that, and this is what they're talking about.
This is, look, this is the story of Tucker Carlson right now, man.
his turn against war is it's so huge and important and but also emblematic right the same things
that are making Tucker Carlson say enough of this I'm ready to come out and oppose this is the same
that's making the entire American right no sorry one half of the American right turn against Israel
and in the latest polls is 50% of Republicans say that they disapprove of Israel like you know
on the just basic approval disapproval thing they disapprove half so for the American right
that's a lot you grade that on a curve we're talking about huge progress and i don't remember
what the previous number was but it was low man if you go back just a few years ago this is a major
shift and there are people you know i saw you may have seen the clip of kansas owens and of course
she's been really great on this for a while now since october 7th you know air at least right
around there but there's a recent clip of her where she's saying i would rather saw off my leg
than ever support Israel again in any way forget it you're the chosen chosen by who satan like
she's mad and she speaks for a lot of people as like dude you're not reeling her back in dude
you guys made a mistake pushing her overboard because she can swim she ain't afraid at all y'all so
like yeah and how are they coming back from that how they're going to get Tucker carlson
back on board for the war party dude they ain't gonna you know what i mean like there's whole
segments and again he's emblematic he's the leader you know by far but but he's emblematic of so many
people who are just going guess what i actually don't give a damn about israel maybe even i
disfavor them and it doesn't cost me anything what does it cost me to actually not favor this
horror show any longer maybe nothing you know what i mean so it's just easy for people i think
they're finally understanding we don't have to believe in this anymore just like ron paul said
we don't have to believe in this stuff and be going oh i don't okay great
Yeah, and as far as Mearsheimer's comment about the project kind of dissolving just because people decide to leave, I mean, that's not far-fetched at all. And it's not just a security question either. I mean, you know, it's also just if Israel and they're on their way in this direction, unless something changes fast and dramatically, if they are, you know, if they're looked at around most of the civilized world as they see it, like a South Africa, like a Rhodesia, you know,
know, this pariah state that, you know, you can't travel to foreign countries because people
don't want to see you there.
And the Israelis got options, man.
You know, they're not like, these are educated, literate people who can move to any city
in Europe or the United States and assimilate just fine.
And, I mean, Israel was having enough trial.
Think about, like, they got a conscript army.
And, like, there's this idea that, like, everybody in Israel carries an M-16.
And, like, is a, you know, they're down at record lows in terms of, like, the number of people
they can get into the army to do their mandatory service because people leave for America
for a few years, they go to England for if you just avoid that whole period of their life,
stay if they can, a lot of people. And I mean, that's why you have things like the American
Jewish Committee back right after October 7th, I think it was early 2024, putting out this
like a public service ad or whatever that said, this is the American Jewish Committee saying
that Israel is the only country in the world where Jews can be safe. I'm like, I'm not American.
but like that's an asset if you need to keep people there and if you need to drive Jews from around the world to go to that place is to get them to think that way when in reality of course Jews are in never in more danger than when they're in Israel because of the way the government there's behaved you know and it's really sad because one of the early fears of like a lot of Jews who weren't on board with the Zionist movement yet is around a lot of countries it was you know in America it really wasn't until like the 1930s that it started to pick up um
One of the arguments that they would use against it is, no, no, no, you're going to go down there.
You're going to create a state.
That state is going to do the kinds of things that states do.
And then people are going to look and see the Jewish state that says it speaks for all of us and represents all of us going and starting wars and assassinate just all the different things that states do.
And that's going to come back on us.
And that's what's happening too.
And that's really sad.
Yeah, it is.
And by the way, there's another great new documentary that's out called The Settlers, which is, I,
guess a Dutch journalist or something, and he did a previous one that I haven't seen. This is,
I believe, his second one where he goes back. Is that the Louis Thoreau one? Yes, sir. Yes.
The other one's called the ultra Zionists, and it's worth watching too. Okay, good. So I'm going
to catch up on that. But so he's with Daniela Weiss, who's one of the leaders of the settler
movement since the 70s and all that. And one of the guys he's interviewing at one of these
outposts way out in the West Bank, tells him, yeah, I'm born and raised in Brooklyn, New York.
and I decided to come here
and steal these guys land and whatever thing
I'm like man
I don't know that whole like
they're just the lowly
survivors of the Holocaust who need a
refuge kind of thing is wearing thin
when you're talking about people from Brooklyn
New York
who like boy that's some pretty expensive
real estate man in Brooklyn
and then they get to go
and squat and steal
someone else's property way out there
in the name of they need a
Refuge? Come on, man. Well, that's just a damn lie. I'm sorry. That ain't going to work on me because that couldn't possibly be right. There ain't nobody in Brooklyn threatening any Jews at all. Give me a break.
The last thing, and I know we got to wrap up because we've been running along, is, you know what? Actually, just cut that whole part. Let's go ahead and wrap it up there because I'd go off on a long tangent.
All right. All right. Well, so to wrap, that's our show. We're now our third week.
at number one on uh apple new podcasts that's pretty good our first week nothing our second week
eighth place ever since then first place uh for new podcasts on um apple which is nice i don't know
how long they'll count us as new but we're doing good there and then uh he's marty made check
him out on substack and martyramade dot com if they just want the audio of the podcast feeds and
and all that right and they can look you up on all the pod catchers and such yep and then um i got some
things to plug first of all uh check out my interview with or my uh new debate with general clark
today on the pierce morgan show that's out there and um then uh i'm at sportin dot org that's where i got
my 6 000 interviews going back to 2003 scott horton show dot com where i have the also interviews
but also i have the beginnings of the audiobook um is the first two sections of the audio book of
provoked which is still like i forget it's nine or 12 hours just to get you through hw bush and bill
Clinton. So that's a lot to get you started there. That's my substack. And then I'm the director
of the Libertarian Institute and I got a lot of really great guys over there and adding all the time
and publishing books, great podcasts and articles every single day over there, top quality stuff
at the Libertarian Institute. I'm the editorial director of anti-war.com, which is actually the
most important project on the internet since 1995 where Dave DeCamp and Kyle Anzloan and Eric Gares
do all the hard work, getting you all the bad news every day. That's anti-war.com. And then I'm an
amazon.com where i wrote these books that i got to sell and so um please go and buy them at uh it's
um afghanistan is fools aaron the terror wars is enough already and um the ukraine war is provoked
and then i also got transcripts my interviews with dr paul if you're a dr paul lover and then
well let me say something real quick about your books for everybody out there if you're like
not familiar with scott and you're like who's this dude why should i buy his book on this because
like there's some professor at Harvard who wrote a book like that says it's on similar topic
because they're not as crazy as this dude. This dude's crazy. I was going to help you write
the Russia book. And after like a couple months of me kind of like being occupied with other
things and I check in and you're like, oh yeah, I'm on my, I'm on 350 pages. I'm like,
oh, wow, of footnotes. I was like, you know what? I think I'm out to. This one's all yours.
I mean, this dude is crazy. And he does, he does research like nobody else.
Andy's just been on this for so long.
And like he said, 6,000 interviews.
I mean, talking to experts about this stuff multiple times a week for, what, 25 years at this point, something like that.
I mean, honestly, that is more, that's more time put in than most Harvard professors of international relations or something like that, like into the issues, especially the nitty gritty of actually what's going on.
So if you haven't gone out and bought Scott's books and read up on these things, then you shouldn't really even like,
go out and have a conversation about them yet go get them go read them go listen to them and then
you'll be the smartest person in your friend group ah that's very nice you say and then well there's
one more thing about that too which is that if you're familiar with the great tom woods and the
liberty classroom he built me my own liberty classroom it's called the scott horton academy
of foreign policy and freedom see i got the jammer on my jammer and um and uh what it is is
it's i hope sincerely it's going to debut in the month of august here next month and uh it's
going to be courses taught by me one on the middle east one on the cold war russia and the ukraine
war but then i've got a bunch of other really great experts teaching courses on all kinds of
great things including israel palestine ramsie barood and why and how america lost every war since
1945 with William Bupert and all kinds of really great stuff.
So that's at Scott Hortonacademy.com.
And right now it's just sort of a splash page and a really great video that Dan Smots made.
But if you put your email address in there, then you'll be the first to know when the thing
goes live and it should be real soon.
So that's about all I got to say about my gigantic list of URLs that people need to type
into things.
And then thank you for your patience.
See you next week, guys.
We're going to be able to be.
Thank you.