Scott Horton Show - Just the Interviews - 10/12/23 Darryl Cooper on the Israel-Palestine Conflict

Episode Date: October 16, 2023

Darryl Cooper of the MartyrMade Podcast joins Scott to discuss the Hamas attacks, the Israeli response and the Israel-Palestine conflict more broadly. They touch on some of the Israeli military and intelligence failures in the lead-up to the Hamas attacks last Saturday. And they mourn the fact that a lot more death and destruction is all but guaranteed to come from this. Discussed on the show: “NETANYAHU IS FINISHED” (Seymour Hersh) Fear & Loathing in the New Jerusalem “It’s All About Provoking Your Reaction” (Libertarian Institute) Rules for Radicals by Saul Alinsky Darryl Cooper is the creator of The MartyrMade Podcast, jumping headfirst into the fever dreams of human history, never checking the depth until he’s in over his head. He is also the co-host of The Unraveling podcast w/Jocko Willink. This episode of the Scott Horton Show is sponsored by: Tom Woods’ Liberty Classroom; ExpandDesigns.com/Scott. Get Scott’s interviews before anyone else! Subscribe to the Substack. Shop Libertarian Institute merch or donate to the show through Patreon, PayPal or Bitcoin: 1DZBZNJrxUhQhEzgDh7k8JXHXRjY Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

All right, y'all, welcome to the Scott Horton Show. I'm the director of the Libertarian Institute, editorial director of anti-war.com, author of the book, Fool's Aaron, Time to End the War in Afghanistan, and the brand new, enough already, time to end the war on terrorism. And I've recorded more the 5,500 interviews since 2000. almost all on foreign policy and all available for you at scothorton dot for you can sign up the podcast feed there and the full interview archive is also available at youtube.com slash scott horton's show all right you guys on the line i've got my good friend darrell cooper you know him as martyr made from his wonderful podcast where you can learn all about the history of the miners of West Virginia and a hell of a lot of other things, including going way, way back the conflict in Israel and Palestine.

And, of course, you know all of his very hot takes from Twitter as well at Martyr Made. Welcome to the show, Darrell. How you doing, bud? It's always good to talk to you, Scott. Thank you on me on. Very happy to have you here, man. So listen, I mean, there's so much to talk about in terms of what's happened here in Gaza over the weekend.

last weekend and then the war there going on now. I almost don't know where to begin, but I think I kind of know where to begin. I wonder, oh, I meant to mention as part of your introduction there that you were something or other in the Navy. Can you talk a little bit about your Navy experience for just a second so people have a grasp on that? Sure.

I did 10 years in the Navy focusing on air defense, and I got out in 2009. And from 2009 to 2020, I was a DOD civilian engineer. Also working on air defense systems with United States and allied militaries. So I travel all around the world. I went to Israel probably in 10 years, maybe 15 or 20 times, worked with IDF and contractor personnel over there on air defense matters, sometimes just conferences and things like that. But I have spent some time with these guys and spoken offline with them. And, you know, it's been interesting to see how their opinions have developed over the years.

you know as you've gone from the 2009 little conflict with Hamas where you know it really is the old saying about fighting the last war is that really taught a lot of the Israelis i noticed when i would talk to them that Hamas was not a military threat they weren't somebody that really had to be taken seriously they could they could hurt uh undefended soft targets and cause a lot of damage but they weren't a strategic threat or a military threat and then in 2014 that That false lesson came back to bite the IDF because, you know, they went in, they just, they rushed in to Gaza after those three teenagers were killed and they kind of got punched in the mouth on the ground and they pulled back like they did in 2006 and just kind of leveled

the place. But even after that, I would talk to them and they admitted and they would talk about how Hamas's ability to coordinate and operate defensively had increased. but still nobody ever imagined that they would have this kind of offensive operational capability and now that they do you know I know that like for example when they would talk about Hamas it would be I don't want to say necessarily dismissive they took them seriously because they could hurt people but totally different attitude than when they would talk about Hezbollah they talked about Hezbollah as a serious military threat everybody expected that there

would be another major war with Hezbollah and that that war would be a fight to the finish and that it was one that was going to require the mobilization of Israeli society to fight. And that's how everybody kind of looked at it. You know, you worry and assume probably at this point that they're going to start to get that mentality on two fronts now and feel like they've got serious military threats to the north and to the south and over the course of the 10 years that i would travel over there for work you you know you did notice people becoming more paranoid more let's just say there's not there there's there's not much of a constituency for peace left in israel and there's a lot less now than

there was when i started going over there in 2009 and so it's it's a bit frightening to think about where things are going to go from here man uh well you sure got that right maybe we'll get back to that a little bit later um i want to it's just interesting to me i don't know um i want to focus a little bit on just you know the actual what tactical or operational failure of the Israeli security forces on saturday morning the way that that happened i mean you talk about you know what a sophisticated attack it was but I don't know a couple thousand guys

a bulldozer some mini bikes some paragliders and some AK47s sounds like something that actually maybe even some sort of half-baked sergeant could come up with and do if he was trying hard

no is that really that special of a special operations mission compared to professional soldiers. I mean, we are talking about a militia here, but. Yeah, not necessarily compared to a professional military, but, you know, in the early hours of the fighting, there were reports that there was fighting going on in 21 or 22 separate locations. They had come, as you said, by land, sea, and air, and all managed to hit their targets within a couple hours of each

other so that they were all active at the same time. I read one place that there were about, this was a couple days ago, that there were about 1,500 bodies of Hamas members, Hamas fighters found around the border area, people who had been killed. And so you have to imagine, you're talking, if that's the number that's been killed, I mean, you're talking about thousands of people involved in this. And a lot of moving parts. I mean, it's really not, it's not a small operation to manage let's just say 5,000 people to send them on several different vectors, you know, in three-dimensional space because you're going into the air to converge on different targets all at once. Now on the other hand, you know, this isn't, this wasn't a military operation.

It's a different factor when your goal is to kill everyone you see. And, you know, nobody would look at the terrorists in the Bata Klan massacre and say, oh, you know, wow, look at all those confirmed kills, you know, they got so many, nobody would ever say that. It's a totally different kind of thing. And it makes it much more difficult to defend against. And, you know, the risk, of course, is that you kind of descend into paranoia because you really can't defend everywhere all at once. Yeah, which, yeah, and that paranoia expresses itself then in worse kind of violence. So I've read all these weird articles from all over the place with all these different tales that I'm sure all.

All of them are at least partially true here about the lead-up. One of them, I think from, I don't remember anymore, the tablet maybe, maybe from the Times, was saying that, look, there's a lot of, this is my term here, Bob McNamara stuff, right, where like this guy had it in his head, you could win the Vietnam War with gizmos, with sensors and trackers and high-tech electronic fences and all this kind of crap which the Vietnamese would just piss on the fence and neutralize, you know, this kind of deal.

Technopoly, this false understand, this false view of the world through the lens of technology where sure the quote-unquote border because it's not a border, but this regional divide here with Gaza. We've got remote control machine guns, Darrell. They'll, you know, like on idiotocracy, right?

When he escapes from the prison, they got their remote control machine goes out front. Which imagine just the thought that goes into that in the first place, that you don't even have a man there. You got a remote control thing to do it. But then the way I read, oh, this was the New York Times, I'm pretty sure. Where they go, look, they got a couple communications towers that ties all this together. Well, one of the first things Hamas did was they attacked them with drones, drop grenades or whatever with drones somehow. and disabled these cell phone towers. And then from there, they had the run of the place for hours

because the Israelis were essentially blind because they had funneled all of their high-tech, fancy stuff all through this one sort of central communications network that Hamas was able to then quickly disable. And then, so they were able to then fly right into these bases and whatever and catch guys in their bunks. You know, there was no alert passed down, and they were able, apparently, to get,

according to this, I think this was the New York Times and they got officers as prisoners in a lot of these military based. They got one flag officer. It was the video of him being dragged out in his pajamas. It looked like they pulled him out of bed, yeah. So

that's really something. I can totally see that through the eyes of Neil Postman, right? We're like, you've got this kind of, this ideology of circuitry that just takes you out of the real world, right? We're like just our gadgets.

are going to make up for the work we're not putting in, you know, that kind of mentality. And then also, there's this whole chain of events, right, with the radical right here. So the first thing is Netanyahu is going to go to jail. But one way to not go to jail is if he's the prime minister again. So he forms a coalition with these right-wing wackos that he would have never formed a coalition with before. In all of his years, he had never gone that far. I mean, say or feel what you like about the guy, he could be worse. He has been much more responsible than some on the Israeli right, for sure.

But now instead of keeping these guys at arm's length, he brought them in. But then that means he's got to appease them with all this stuff, including letting them get away with more on the West Bank, right, and colonizing more of the West Bank. Well, to do that, they got to overthrow the Supreme Court's authority to stop them from doing that. So then they do that. Well, what happens then? A bunch of officers and spies quit in disgust. And a bunch of, you know, I guess enlisted guys can't quit. They're conscripts and what have you, even if they're under contract, whatever, but officers can quit.

Or I'm not exactly should the law and the rules there, but I know in America it's a lot easier for an officer to quit. And especially reservist officers and that kind of thing. thing, they're like refusing to show up. Everybody's refusing to do their job in protest against Netanyahu. This is, you know, like the Deep State versus Trump kind of thing in a comparison in a way, that because of his alliance with these cooks, they're not willing to countenance what he's willing to do to, quote, unquote, Israeli democracy. And that's why, remember, it even came out that the Biden administration agreed with Mossad to support the protests against what Netanyahu was doing with the court. That was in the discord leak, right? That Biden had a deal of

Mossad, I believe it was, to support, and imagine that, Mossad outright working against Netanyahu, trying to prevent that. But then, so that led to then another major bit of readiness, you know, that was lost among the forces there because, and Netanyahu all along is telling himself and all of his buddies that essentially we bought off Hamas and they are right now calm and complacent and you know under heel and remember Egyptian Islamic jihad fired off some rockets a few months ago and Hamas didn't do anything and in fact I think the Washington Post said the spies are complaining that Hamas tricked them and they were talking on the phone about how yeah we're never going to attack Israel not anytime soon and this kind of thing and leave five years at least

before we're ready for anything like that Yeah, yeah, exactly, dude. We're not, you know, the head of training is the laziest trainer we've ever had. Whatever, anyway, I'm ad-libbon. But so the point is, real quick, you know, the thing you were just talking about. Well, just to wrap up, in other words, it's public choice theory, right? It's all these weird little competing parochial interests inside the Israeli state that are essentially working to sabotage their basic security concerns. They got these people walled in this ghetto, but they're not. doing the work to keep them locked in there, leaving their own people subject. And then once they break out, where they're unable to respond effectively, dude, Darrell, I read in the times, or it might have been the post, or it might have been the Jerusalem Post. I'm sorry,

I'm so old and stupid now. But where the general told them, yep, and then, so after a couple of hours, me and my guys got ready and moved out. And it was like, wait, what? And it was like unremarked in either paragraph above or below it. It was just, this is the history of that morning. Here's how it played out.

And General, what's his name, says, yep, after a couple hours, we were ready to head down there and see if we could try to do something about it. You know, like the jet fighters on 9-11, man. They're busy doing something else. I don't know. It really goes to show you that, you know, from an outside perspective, it's really easy to look at things like this monolithically and not realize that there's a lot of intricacies that, you know, people talk about, for example, Israeli influence on American politics and politicians. You say, well, okay, what is Israel then? If you've got the Mossad working against Netanyahu, working with the Biden administration to do that,

then what do you mean by by israel obviously there's factions at play and you come to the united states there's there there's like there's a big split i'm sure you've done episodes on this before but uh you know there's a there's a pro-cotter faction in the united states they go people go into government they push pro catari policies they get out of government they go work for a think tank that's funded by god i mean just in and out revolving door and then there's others who they go they get into government, they push pro-Saudi policies, pro-Israel policies, and they get out and they go work for a think tank that's funded by them. And so when people, I mean, if Trump showed us one thing, he showed us that these governments are not all one thing. These states have factions

that are often at war with each other and very often will do things that, I mean, you're talking about it's compromising Israel's basic security in protest to a demand. political dispute, you know? And it's, it's really, you know, that I hadn't actually like thought about it all that way, but it helps answer the question that I've had, you know, ever since this started is it just seems absolutely just, I can't explain how Israeli intelligence possibly missed this. I get it. There were triple agents. Samas was engaging in misinformation. They underestimated them. I get all those things. But man, the Mossad and Israeli signals intelligence, they have their reputation that they've got for a reason.

And over the years, you know, you read the history of the Mossad, and they have been able to infiltrate and turn people and just compromise Palestinian organizations so thoroughly for decades and decades. And for an operation like this, which had to have taken months, minimum to plan, thousands of people involved. Lots of equipment involved. You know, those Qasamu rockets are not, they're not giant tomahawk missiles or anything, but they're seven, eight feet long, you know, 2,500 of them or 3,500, however many were fired. That's a warehouse or two full of these things. And for those intelligence agencies to have missed this on the 50th anniversary of the Yom Kippur War, where you have to imagine that they were on, you know, higher than average alert.

It's almost inconceivable. Oh, you know what? That reminds me. Wait, the Yom Kippur thing. There was another Jewish holiday. Some weird harvest festival. You know about this? Uh-huh.

What's it called? It's Sukat. Sukat. Okay, so you know about this. The thing I read today said that Netanyahu pulled, oh, this is Seymour Hersch this morning. Seymourneux talking to angry Israeli intelligence friends of his. Netanyahu pulled 800 IDF.

away from Gaza to go protect this festival in the West Bank, run by these right wing cooks. Well, because that's what Netanyahu came to office to do, right? He came to office to expand the settlements in the West Bank. That's his focus. That's what he's really interested in. Gaza really is a distraction to him to a certain degree until, you know, until this happens. He would much rather believe what you were saying he thought, which is that Hamas is not a threat right now. They're docile. They're not going to do anything and be able to focus on continuing to colonize the West Bank. And wow, yeah. You got to imagine heads are going to roll in the Israeli political and intelligence and defense apparatus. But I don't know who you hold responsible for something

like this. I mean, you don't want to get back to like sort of the broader, some of the broader issues. And then we can maybe talk about some of the tactical and military issues that we're going to be talking about probably much more in the next few weeks. Is it like, you know, I was talking to Jock earlier today. He's a military guy. He's engaged in counterinsurgency operations in Iraq. And I told him, I asked him. I said, okay, 2004, those four Blackwater guys get lynched in Fallujah. Bush sends the Marines in, tells them to go. Wait a minute.

Stop, stop, stop. Wait a minute. What happened? Did I get seen? What happened? What happened was Israel assassinated Sheikh Yassine, who they had helped to build Hamas, which we're going to talk about. And then that caused a riot in Fallujah and the lynching of the Blackwater guards.

Okay. And then you pick up the story from there. That was Israel that got us into that. And everybody knows the history of Iraq War II knows how absolutely pivotal Fallujah 1 in April 2004 was for the really the birth of the real heart of the Sunni insurgency against the occupation and the new Shiite government

there is and it was Israel that kicked that whole thing off for us. Anyway, go ahead with your story. So Bush sent the Marines in, told them to go retaliate and they were given a pretty broad mission description, you know, to do that. And if you tell the Marines to go retaliate

and don't very strictly, define their mission. The Marines are going to do what Marines like to do, and they destroyed that city. And I asked Joe, but so you get up to 2006, we want to go into Ramadi and clear that place out. We want to try a whole new counterinsurgency approach, right? We don't want the Shiite government's telling us, you're not going into Ramadi if we're going to have another Fallujah. We can't, you can't have that just politically. And so we came up with a, another plan where we sent special operations supported by infantry in there. And over the course of many, many months, they just took this place, you know, neighborhood by neighborhood, house by

house. And I said, in that situation, this was, you know, a lot of the insurgents that they were fighting in Ramadi specifically, a lot of these guys were not Iraqis. They were from Syria. They were from Chechnya. They're from all over the place. And they had actually been really mistreating the Ramadi population pretty badly, you know, and they were not loved. They were feared by much of the of the Ramadi population, not that they didn't have some base of support there. But it was, you know, you could go into that situation hopeful that if we can demonstrate to the civilians here that we can protect them from these people, that they will take our side. They'll work with us. They'll help us. And eventually, what ended up, you know, winning the Battle of Ramadi was that we got

the tribal sheiks on board. We bought them off and proved to them that we could at least protect them to a degree. And they're the ones that helped turn the population against the jihadis there. Now, you know, you go into Gaza where you have a, this is a domestic insurgency, you know, where these are not foreigners coming in here. Not to say every single person in Gaza supports Hamas necessarily, but if it comes down to Hamas versus the, the IDF, then yeah, they support Amos, most of them. And, you know, you're not turning those people to your side if you're Israel. And so this is just not a conventional counterinsurgency issue. And I said, how do you go in and approach a place like this without just doing it like Fallujah,

you know, except this is a city with two million people who don't have anywhere to flee? And Jock, who's thought about this stuff for decades, this is all he's thought about for decades, He didn't have an answer. He said, I don't know what they do. I really don't know what they do other than go in there and cause a ton of damage and then leave with the job half done. And he wasn't advocating this. No, no, no, I understand.

I understand. And leave with the job half done because people are just kind of tired of all the bouncing rubble and all the photos of babies being pulled out of it. And then you leave and those, you know, maybe you kill a ton of Hamas guys. And maybe that even means that operationally they're hampered for a while, but it's a city of two million people. And, you know, think about like for all the devastation that Israel wreaked on Gaza in 2014, I mean, they leveled whole sections of that city. It was a devastating assault. And I think, what, 2,500 people, Palestinians were killed and about 10, 11,000 were wounded.

Let's say Israel goes in there and kills 100,000 people. They wound 300,000 people, right? Just a massive, destructive, really totally unprecedented in the context of this conflict, assault on this city. Okay. I mean, you still got millions of people there. And guess what? In a few years, those 12-year-olds are going to be 16, and you're, it's really hard to think of a way that by the time we go to our graves, that this issue is not still flaring up every couple of years. It really is. I mean, people ask me

all the time because I did the Israel-Palestine podcast. Like, what do you think the solution is? And I just got to tell them, man, I have no idea what the solution is. And partly that's because, you know, you take somebody like, you know, I'm not a journalist or anything. I'm a history nerd. And so I tend to focus on the history. And when you know the whole history of this situation, you understand very well that both sides have a whole list of grievances that justify their their animosity toward the other side you know any time you have a long running conflict like this it's been going on for decades i mean both sides are going to have a long list of things that they have a good reason to be upset about um and yet when something like this happens when Hamas breaks out and Just, you know, they're doing this with Netanyahu in office. They're doing this where in a way where they're not just killing civilians. They're attacking civilians, butchering civilians on camera, releasing those videos on the internet for people to watch.

But you have to imagine you're, you know, that these people are hoping to provoke an overwhelming response from Israel. Because they kind of know that at this point, it's really. really hard for Hamas to lose this, this current battle, no matter how many of them get killed. And, you know, I think if you were to take Scott Horton and make him Prime Minister of Israel right now, you could resign. But other than that, Scott Horton is ordering an assault on Gaza that's going to kill a bunch of civilians. There's just no way around it. Well, I mean, the subject of a no confidence vote, that's for sure. Right, right, right. Exactly. So, like, and you would be, and you'd be replaced by somebody's,

who is. And so when something like this happens, the response is almost mechanical. And, you know, it can be moderated maybe and steered in a wiser direction by good leadership. But in general, it's a mechanical response that Hamas is inviting on Gaza. And you just really feel for all the people there who are, and, you know, a lot of people, not people who listen to Scott Horton will know better than this, but there's a lot of people out there who see these videos of, you know, there's 50 people gathered around an Israeli corpse that's being paraded around, and they're all cheering. And people look at that, and they say, look at these animals in Gaza cheering. And it's like, those could be the only 50 people in the whole neighborhood who feel that way. But that's the

conclusion people are drawing that, and it's being, and it's being very actively pushed by a lot of people. I mean, you see, don't get me started on somebody like Ben Shapiro. I mean, he's like, he's just out here baiting people into genocidal attitudes. There's no other way to put it. I mean, you know, years ago, Shapiro put out this tweet that he's had to pay for several times now where he said something about how Israelis love building things and living in peace or something. And Palestinians are animals who like living in filth and blowing things up. And people have pointed that out. And over the years, he's sort of apologized and walked that back. But over the last several days, you look at what he's saying and you realize he shouldn't have apologized. That's exactly what he thinks. Exactly what a lot of people think. And, you know, a lot of the language out there from even mainstream people is really, you know, pre-genocidal language.

And it is. It's gone very far. A defense minister of Israel said, we're fighting animals. We're fighting human animals, he said. And he painted with a broad brush. He was not talking about Hamas. Hey guys, Scott here for Leo Hamel find jewelers out of San Diego at Jewelry StoreSD.com. They do business nationwide. They sell jewelry and watches, specializing in engagement rings.

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fine selection and to find out more. Hey, y'all, you should sign up for my substack. It's Scott Hortonshow.substack.com, and if you do that, you'll get the interviews a day before everybody else, but not only that, they'll be free of commercials. How do you like that? Pretty good, huh? Scotthortonshow.substack.com. Hey, y'all, libertosbella.com is where you get Scott Horton's show and Libertarian

Institute, shirts, sweatshirts, mugs, and stickers and things, including the great top lobstas designs as well. See, that way it says on your shirt, why you're so smart. Libertas Bella, from the same great folks who bring you ammo.com for all your ammunition needs too. That's libertasbella.com. You know, one of the things that happens to is like, people over here do need to understand that like this kind of barbarism from Palestinian insurgents is not new. you know starting about the mid-70s or so the Palestinian groups really did kind of shift to focus their focus toward just amping up the level of horror of their attacks you know

you had the coastal highway attack in 1979 um as there was a there was another attack where they took over a city bus and and drove it down the coastal highway just shooting at everybody they could see there was another where near naharia in 1978 where a few guys came they took a rubber dingy down came ashore and they just massacred this family you know the one of them grabbed this four-year-old little girl and just smashed her head against a rock until she was dead and then they all got killed by security forces and nothing was accomplished except uh except people were horrified and these these kinds of things have been happening for a long time and You know, from a distance, it's easier to look at it dispassionately.

I'm sure I would feel very differently about, I feel much less dispassionate if I was an Israeli. And yet, like, the thing people, there's another side to that. Because people will say, you know, that there's a difference between bombing a neighborhood and a bunch of civilians get killed and attacking a neighborhood and just going in and massacring all those families. And to a certain extent that's true. It's not true if you're one of the people who lost your family. There is a sort of difference in the sense that, you know, if you live next door to an Air Force commander who has ordered airstrikes that have killed civilians, maybe you think that guy should be at the Hague or something. But he could be a good neighbor. He could be a good family man and otherwise good person, you know, because it's just maybe it's a twisted value system.

but that's normalized and he can be a civilized person. You don't want to live next door to the person who went and massacred a family with a machete or something. You just, you wouldn't want that person anywhere near you. And so there is a sort of difference to it. Now, on the other hand, it's not that black and white that you have Palestinians doing massacres like this and the Israelis bombing places that happened to kill civilians or something. You go back to the early 80s just before the invasion of the invasion of Lebanon. And Ariel Sharon was defense minister, Beggan made him defense minister in 81. After the previous guy got fired shortly, Bengal got fired shortly after being accused by other Israeli military officials of massacring civilians.

And so I don't know if somebody's accused of massacring civilians. if replacing him with Ariel Sharon is the best move, but that's what happened. And, you know, Beggan was kind of senile and broken by that point. So Ariel Sharon went up there, and under his, under his ministership, you know, IDF Northern Command basically just went completely rogue. They weren't reporting to the prime minister. And they were running rogue operations in southern Lebanon where they were lighting off car bombs.

I mean, hundreds of car bombs killed thousands of people. Hey, they tried to kill the American ambassador. Right, right. killed hundreds of people, I should say, wounded thousands of people, where they were purposely trying to ignite a civil war in Lebanon. Like they were going in, trying to make it look like Palestinians were bombing Shiites and Marinites. They were trying to make it look like the Shiites were bombing the Palestinians. And, you know, we're talking major attacks in civilian areas. One car bomb, 83 people were killed. 300 people were injured in another

23 people were killed. You know, one of them, a ton of women died who were working in a Palestinian, a PLO-owned clothing factory. They all burned to death. And so these are the things that are being done up there. And if you are even, forget about being an American, even if you're an Israeli, most Israelis have no idea that this was going on today. You know, they don't know about it anymore than most Americans today know about the atrocities

that were occurring, maybe even less to a degree, but the atrocities that we pulled in, say, Korea, like, they just don't know. And so when you don't have that information, it gives you a certain lens to view all of these things through. It's very different from the other side, because the other side is looking at this and says, this guy, the butcher of Beirut, the guy who presided over Sabra and Shatila and who was literally sending terrorists to just massacre civilians in southern Lebanon. And by the way, he had a whole plan. Ariel Sharon is one of those evil genius type dudes. What he wanted was for the Lebanese to ethnically cleanse the Palestinians so that they would all have to go to Jordan and that they would then, he had this whole plan.

And that once they were over there, they would overthrow the Jordanian government. And that would become Palestine and they could stop bothering Israel. That was literally his plan. Ronan Bergman writes about this in one of his books, an Israeli journalist. And so... And I'm sorry, but just put a thumbtack in or whatever so you don't forget if you can... Or even now, maybe if you can keep your training thought,

explain Sabra and Shatilla. So during... After Israel invaded Lebanon, you know, the PLO was not on friendly terms, to say the least, the other communities in Lebanon. And a huge part of that was on the PLO themselves, for sure. They were walking in like they own the place and they developed very, very, very violently negative relations with the Maronite Christian community in Lebanon. And there were massacres back and forth. There were times where the Maronites massacred, like a lot of Palestinians. There was one massacre of Palestinians that about about a thousand people were killed by the Maronite militias.

And then a few months after that in retaliation, Palestinian militia went and massacred about 500 people in the town of Demur, just peaceful civilian people. And so this is kind of the thing that was going on. And by the time you get up to Sabran Chitila in 82, you know, the animosity is extraordinarily intense. And so we have, we have, you know, the histories have kind of come out now that at the time, well, so I'll just tell you what happened first is as the IDF looked on over these two camps, Sabra and Chitila, which were full of Palestinian civilians, mostly women and children because the men are fighting agemen.

Israel's allied with these militias at the time. They're allied with these militias. and they let these militias go in there with knives and machetes and other things, primarily. They were armed with guns, too, but they went in and with, you know, bladed weapons massacred 1,000, maybe 1,200 people. And it went on all night under the watchful eyes of the IDF. You know, they didn't do it themselves, but the history has kind of come out now. And Ronan Bergman writes about this, too, how, there were Israeli officers who have come out since then.

And as the Maronites were preparing to go down into those two places and go after the Palestinians, he saw them sharpening their knives, talked to him, and they told him exactly what they were going to do. And the Israelis, we kind of know now, they knew what was coming and they allowed it to happen, which if you're the military power and control of an area is as good as, you know, we blame the massacres of Jews by Ukrainians and and polls and stuff on the Germans because they were the military power there facilitating those massacres, you know. And so this is Sharon is defense minister. He got his war in Lebanon, which is what he was what he was hoping for with all those terrorist acts that he was, that he had Northern Command doing. And I mean, when I say

this, I don't mean that they were going to existing Palestinian terrorists. and just sort of facilitating their operations or something. They were building these car bombs at Israeli military facilities and giving them to them and paying them to go do these things. And so my point with all that was, you know, most Americans don't know about that. Most Israelis don't even know about that. All the Palestinians know about that. all the Palestinians know every detail of that story and a million more that I just told you.

And so they look at it and they say, okay, this guy has done this. And what happened to him? He became the prime minister. You guys voted him the prime minister. Like the butcher of Beirut, the guy who is, you know, we have Israeli flag officers who, and this is one of the good things about there being these factions out there is, you know, when you do have good Israeli journalists like Bergman, And there are people with sometimes just personal, professional rivalries or agency rivalries. And you can get information about people from their rivals, you know, within the government. There are a lot of people who do not like Sharon, did not like him then, thought he was a war criminal then, don't like him now. And so you can get people to talk about him who were there.

And, you know, when we see 50 Palestinians surrounding an Israeli court, cheering. And we look at that and say, well, you know, these people, they must all be animals. They must all just be psychotic, you know, sadistic people. That's exactly how the Palestinians look at it when they say, look, you got this guy Ariel Sharon who massacred all these civilians, oversaw all this horror, and then you elected him prime minister. And, you know, like that's much more general acclaim than this video showing 50 Palestinians cheering or something. That's the way that they're going to see it and that's a reasonable way to look at it yeah if we take one seriously anyway then you have to take the other seriously i think and and they call hamas isis

they call hamas isis like only isis would murder a bunch of men women and children but geez i don't know ISIS had all kinds of characteristics that we're kind of omitting here when in fact murdering men women and children is pretty much what all armed groups of men do when they're right like there are exceptions especially you know i guess there are extremely disciplined armed forces but then again those are the ones more likely to have much heavier weaponry and write off collateral damage while killing many more people as we're seeing right now yeah i mean there is some truth to the to that idea that a terrorist group is an army without what is it like a fighting group that doesn't have an air force something like that i can't remember

what it is. There is something to that, for sure. Well, and that goes kind of the question of... These are dark days. Of what can be done here, because, you know, I mean, the Lehi and Haganah and whatever, all the eargun and the different terrorist groups that created Israel, well, they became a perfectly nice state, Darrell. And then Hezbollah, you know, they're more than a terrorist group. Say whatever you want about them. I don't think anybody is. a fan of Nasrallah or whatever, that's a red herring, but just they were a terrorist group.

They were a militia that committed brutal terrorist acts at the very least, but, you know, this thing. Now they've grown up to be sort of a sub-state, a mini-state, and a real political party, and all of that doesn't take away all their violent attributes, but they haven't done a suicide bombing in 24 years. And so, like, that's pretty good. and then you got the IRA and Sinn Féin up there. I mean, I don't know the whole history of this.

This is like secondhand stuff. I'm sure you could, you know, completely school us all on this. But I had read, again, this is some secondhand crap. I don't even know I'll bring it up, but whatever. I read that they would commit terrible atrocities against British soldiers. Like, cut a guy up and leave them on the doorsteps to the barracks, right? And then in order to provoke the English army to doing something terrible against them and then back and forth again with the terrorism, the reaction and the counter reaction. And yet we got a peace deal in Northern Ireland and it ain't perfect, but it's held for hell, 20 years now, 25 years now or something, right?

That was late Clinton when, wasn't it? Or was that early Bush? I think that was late Clinton when George Mitchell went and did that. so you have you know sin fain became a political a real political party and the IRA I don't know if they're really a militia at all now or they're you know a much less significant security force and they don't go murdering brits or planting bombs in London no more or any of that so um I mean I know it ain't easy but like we got by national states somebody mentioned Quebec it's not the perfect example you got Switzerland with their cantons you've got Bosnia with its kind of separate camps although it's under international rule really but i mean there's there's got to be a way that sovereignty can be shared there where i mean you know for many years is disarmed and are they're part of the same state with the israelis too you know the thing is i you know i i agree uh that that would be fantastic um i just i don't think there's much of a constituency because there's much of a

constituency for that in Israel or among the Palestinians. I mean, look, any settlement that would satisfy the Israelis is going to amount to the Palestinians agreeing to ratify their own ethnic cleansing. I mean, there's just no way around that at this point. That's what you're asking to do. Back during the Oslo negotiations, when Arafat came back to Romali flew in and he was met on the tarmac when his plane landed by a bunch of old women, grandmas, and they were all throwing little metal objects at him. And reporters went up and so it was, and it was the keys to their homes that they had been holding onto for 50 years since they'd gotten driven out of them. And he was going to now agree to give away like these settlements, these areas. And so they were

throwing the keys of their homes at them. And I mean, you know, this is the real difficulty, right? is you remember what happened with the Oslo courts. You had a Jewish extremist who killed Yitzhak Rabin and you had Hamas who went and lit off a couple suicide bombs on city buses in Tel Aviv. And just like that, the peace process that, you know, people were very invested in. I mean, years of work, political reputations on the line. You know, even the Clinton administration was hugely invested in getting something done, you know. And people like Arafat had eaten their pride to a large degree, like to get something done and a few suicide bombs and it was all over with. Netanyahu got elected and that was that. And I don't know how it would take a mass

change in people's attitudes that I just don't think is certainly not in the cards in the immediate future, man. Yeah. Well, I'll tell you. So, you know, everybody's always stuck looking out of their own eyeballs, and I had some early reactions to last Saturday's events that just said that this is stupid, that this is going to make everybody hate them. But the thing is, well, let's focus on how true that is, that in the West, you had a boycott divestment and sanctions movement in Europe and the United States. that's growing. More and more intellectuals coming out and saying, look, this ain't fair. And I don't know millions, but maybe millions of American Jews who are absolutely disgusted with the status quo.

In fact, many of them, they just want to let the Palestinians go so that they can have their Zionist liberal dream of the 80-20 super-duper majority inside the 67 lines. and they don't care about all this messianic stuff about seizing the West Bank. If the West Bank has all these Palestinians on it, then, ooh, just leave them alone. Yeah, even David Ben-Gurion back in 67, was telling Israeli, if he said, don't do this. Why would we do this? This is just going to saddle us with the problem we're never going to get rid of. So even there. So he was recognized back then.

Yeah. And so even there, that's like a more cynical take. But also, I don't want to sell people short, too. There are a lot of American Jews who either have no interest in Israel whatsoever, aren't even part of the debate whatsoever, and shouldn't be put on the spot asked either because none of their concern any more than it's any of ours, really. But, you know, there are many who are, you know, their civil rights-era liberals, right? And they believe in this whole thing about, like, blacks should sit at the lunch counter

until they get their damn meal. And how can you believe that and not believe that about the Palestinians? And especially when you, if they, and you know, like I'm a good friend of he's a good friend of mine. We're good friends together.

Philip Weiss, who represents this sort of liberal Jewish anti-Zionist fed up with this stuff kind of thing. How can they be liberals? How can they care about poor people and we? people and also be the evil right-wing nationalist overlords of these poor Palestinian Indians on their reservation, lording it over them in this way like this. They can't stand it. So, um... Everyone's right-wing about what they know best. Yeah, well, maybe. But so, anyway, I was going somewhere with that, which was that now Hamas has really ruined that, like, you can see where...

Yeah, because any of these questions about what can be done have to follow... those conversations are going to have to be had in the aftermath of what is about to happen. Yeah. Yeah, which means it's all set back forever. And not just what's about to happen, but also what just did happen, where, you know, the, the, I know it ain't fair and I don't believe in collective punishment, but I'm saying, or collective guilt or collective identity even. but I'm just saying this is the way the world is that like Hamas has just made the Palestinians look really damn bad to the West in a way that that severely undermines any progress that they were making but now obviously they made the choice that they don't care about that right they're giving up on that anyway I think here's the but here's the counter argument right okay is they would say what progress right like the the the the the settlement continue to expand in the West Bank. We're still here living in this open-air prison camp in Gaza. Nothing is changing. Things are actually only getting worse. And for years, people like you, Daryl, like me, said, do you know what you guys really should do? Forget all this terrorism stuff. You know what you should do. Remember back in 1975 in Spanish Morocco, you know, Spain still

owned part of Morocco over there, and the Moroccans wanted that part of the Sahara back. And they weren't going to get into a war with Spain because they didn't have to. they realized, you know what, I don't think these Spaniards really have the will to kill a bunch of our civilians in order to hold on to this speck of the desert. And so they had the Green March and they sent a bunch of their people that just walk past the border guards. And they did. They wouldn't shoot at them. And then the Spanish just left because it was proven that they didn't have the will to do that in order to hold on to the place. And so people like me had been saying for years, that's what you guys should do. Something like that. Something like the Green

March. And so in 2018, 18. They did. Yeah. You know, and, and I know there were people flying kites supposedly that were set on fire, trying to start fire. By, by the standards that we established in the cities of the United States in the summer of 2020, that was a mostly peaceful protest. Okay. And what happened? I mean, Israeli, the Israelis, Israeli snipers were given orders to shoot anybody that came within 300 meters of the fence. 300 meters. Yeah. I mean, that's not a, not a. Not a. A single Israeli was killed. Not a single Israeli was injured. Nothing happened to any Israeli. They shot hundreds and hundreds of people. There are videos of them shooting a person in a wheelchair. They were, you know, shooting their kids got shot. Women got shot. And these are by snipers. This is not collateral damage. These people are essentially being executed. Right. And so they're there. The Palestinians look at and say, okay, we tried your way. So now. And not just you, Darrow, but you know, that was what Thomas Friedman had said in the York Times was get your Martin Luther King up. Get yourself a column of civilians and just peacefully march toward your grandmama's home. They won't be able to stop you. And then exactly what you just described played out. And then Thomas Friedman didn't say shit. I'm sorry. Go ahead. Yeah. Yeah. But please continue your train of thought. I'm just sorry. Because it wasn't just you who they may or may not have heard. This was what the American liberal Zionist

establishment in America was telling them. I mean, Thomas Friedman is somewhat reasonable compared to a lot of people on this issue. He at least acknowledges the people of God's in the situation that they're in in a realistic way. And I think he really believed it. Just like you that like, look, man, do your green march. They won't be able to stop you. And yeah, they sure will all right, you know? Yeah. And not only that, they were able to do it and suffer no real diplomatic consequences, know anything, really. I mean, you know, they had snipers shooting hundreds of people, including kids and people in wheelchairs, on camera.

And without a single Israeli so much as getting a hang nail. And they didn't suffer diplomatically anything. They suffered nothing. In fact, I mean, I guess maybe that had to do with the Trump administration being in power at the time, but maybe not. I don't know if it really would have mattered. I mean, it's not like the deep state was taking their marching orders from Trump at the time anyway. And so, yeah, yeah, I misjudged, you know, the Israeli will to do something

like that. And I shouldn't have because I told you I'd been going over there for about 10 years and always having kind of discussions over drinks with these guys. And I would just, it was unmistakable that over the course of that period of time, you saw the intensity of the hostility escalating, the sort of the dehumanization of the other side escalating. And, you know what this is kind of a this is kind of a pivot to a slightly different topic but go for it

one of the things that you know we were talking earlier about the intelligence failure here that you know just it's really like inconceivable if you look at the past performance of the Israelis but

it makes me wonder you know in 2014 a lot of people just remember Gaza being leveled by Israeli planes and artillery. They don't really remember much because didn't really get reported much that Hamas showed an ability to fight back that they had never shown before. I mean, they deployed six brigades of between 25 and 3,500 people in six different sectors along the front with Israel. The brigades, at a brigade level, they were supporting each other. They also were able to put on like a layered defense where each brigade had their own anti-tank forces,

their own snipers, their own mortar forces. They were providing support fire with their mortars and snipers to other sectors, other brigades. This was something that the Israelis had never seen out of Hamas before. And they, you know, again, they paid for it. They lost tanks. They lost a lot of armored vehicles. And they lost a lot of soldiers when they went in there. And then they just pulled back and kind of leveled the place from the air,

very similar to what happened in 2006 in southern Lebanon. This time I kind of wonder, I mean, Hamas has to be expecting when they do something like this, when they put these videos out on the internet of them doing it, they know that the Israelis are going to be coming in heavy. And I imagine they're prepared for it. And that's a bit concerning for the simple reason that if the Israeli intelligence is so compromised and so bad right now, they probably don't know much about what Hamas has got waiting for him in there once they roll in. and if the Israelis start taking casualties that they're not expecting, if this is a harder fight than they're expecting it to be. And I think after something like this where, you know, this is looked at, I think, by most Israelis,

by somebody like Netanyahu, this is not a tactical or strategic operation they're about to really engage in. This is a punitive operation. You know, they kind of know that this is not going to solve any kind of problem, but they've got to do something. They've got to go in there and hit back hard enough that it feels satisfying and that they can say, all right, we showed them and then leave. And so given the Israeli intelligence failures up to this point, I have to imagine that they probably don't have a great idea of what Hamas has waiting for them. And if they have a tough time on the ground, then man, they're, I mean, they're just going to flatten that.

city. They're going to flatten that city. And the more insecure Israelis feel, the less restraint they're going to be able to, they're going to be able to have in these situations. If they're able to open that border and the people, the civilians are at least allowed to go to Egypt, will they ever be allowed to come home or that'll be the end of that? Of course not. Of course not. Of course not. Of course not. Sorry, hang on just one second. Hey, y'all, Scott Horton here for Tennessee Hot Sauce Company. Man, this stuff is so good. They get all different flavors.

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Ron Paul, and you'll see what I mean. Use promo code Horton and you'll save 25 bucks. And this show will get a little kickback too. That's Rickasali.com slash Ron Paul. Casali is C-A-S-A-L-I. Rick Casali.com slash Ron Paul. And there's free shipping, too. So they're trapped, but they're better off. trapped in a way or they're giving up the whole damn game which by the way the population of the strip is super majority refugees that's not where they're really from they're from north of there and east of there but that's you know their grandma was yeah but okay so go ahead of course not they would so so okay well let's

see I saw a clip of Cornoe West arguing with Alan Dershowitz they can't just you know Sean Hannity can't just interview Cornell West. He's got to have Dershowitz there to interrupt the whole time and not let the man, you know, finish. But so Dershowitz says, well, look, he told, they told the people flee. And Cornel West says, come on, there's nowhere to flee. And Dershwin says, sure, there is. They said, get out of Gaza City, but you can go to Rafa or you can go to, and I'm sorry, he names a couple other places in, you know, smaller places within this very small Gaza Strip. And, of course, Corno West said, yeah, right, with no fuel, no water, no electricity, you know, their cars can't run.

There's, you know, everything is chaos, bombs everywhere and whatever, everybody's on foot. And, you know, people who are weak and sick and whatever who can't be moved in, whatever else, that he would have said if he'd been allowed to finish. But so, you know, I don't know. I guess I'm asking you to speculate about, like, if that could be. one plan that the Israelis have in mind to try to like, um, filter the population of the strip back and forth. Of course, that's always been the plan, right? And then back again. It's always been the plan. The plan has always been, it's why the settlement operations are so important to their strategy to break up geographically, break these communities up, separate them and break up,

Bank, you mean, and disrupt the ability of the Palestinians to continue to coalesce a national identity. This is really an unrealistic goal at this point, but the goal over the decades has always been, you hear him say it. When they say there's no such thing as a Palestinian people, no such thing as a Palestinian nation, the idea was go be Jordanians. Your Arabs in Jordan or on the West Bank, go be Jordanians, go be Egyptians, go be Syrians. Like Palestinians, you made that up, you know, 100 years ago. Don't, don't, that's stupid, you know, go, go be these other things. You're just Arabs. And that's always been the goal to try, but, you know, I mean, when you, when you are engaged in a conflict for going on a century now and people suffer together to the degree that the Palestinians have, you're, you're creating a collective identity that is going to be as hard as iron and it's not going anywhere.

And that just is going to have to be reckoned with. Yeah. Now, I'm sorry. I'm not very clear. I'm kind of rambling on. But I was actually making a separate question, although that's a very good point, of course. But my question is just more like operationally what the Israelis may have in mind for this particular thing, where, I mean, obviously, one option is forcing all the people back, you know, not back, forcing all the people into Egypt somehow, forcing the Egyptians to accept that. or then I guess what I kind of was imagining from the Israeli military point of view

if they're really their stated goal which they didn't say this in 08 or 14 or any of these previous ones but their state of goal here is to completely obliterate Hamas off of the face of the earth and you know kill every last fighter they got and this kind of thing so I wonder if you think that they would have a plan to like where they're saying again quoting Dershowitz quoting them that like hey everybody just flee south because Israel is going to be bombing Hamas targets in the north. So if you're an innocent civilian, get out of the way. But then, whatever, in a few weeks, say, okay, now we're going to bomb a bunch of Hamas targets in the south.

So everybody go north again and somehow, like, try to orient a ground operation, make checkpoints and things, if they really occupy the place, and try to filter the population through and pick out the fighting age male. and kill them or pick out Hamas fighters and, you know, idea them and imprison them or some kind of thing. Or like, what could they possibly have in mind? I mean, given, other than, like you're saying, well, we're just, what we're going to do is we're going to carpet bomb the place until everyone's dead. And that'll include Hamas. Because I don't think they're going to go that far. And I don't think you do either.

But like, so they've got to have some kind of stupid plan to, because like you were saying this at the top of the interview, really. They're like, what are they going to do? they're going to reduce Hamas down but they can't get rid of it right but what plan do you imagine them to try what do you think they'll try as a process to try to

eliminate it to the degree that they can you know I mean it's a lot to speculate but like what a stupid thing what are they going to do like Russia and Ukraine they're just going to carpet bond the place with artillery until everyone is just I mean the place is only a

mile or too wide or whatever I mean, the thing is, is that time is not on. If previous conflicts are a guide, time is not on the Israeli side. You know, they've got a window of opportunity where they can do some things. And then after that, world opinion is going to force some restraint on them, whether they like it or not. That happened in 2006, happened in 2014. This is a much bigger thing that they're retaliating for. So maybe they've got more leeway.

But there's going to come a time in the coming weeks or months, at least, where for the last, several weeks or months, all the world community is seen is Palestinian babies being pulled out of rubble. And the whole thing that kicked it all off is going to be yesterday's news to a degree. And the Israelis are going to have to, they're working on a clock. And they also have to account for the fact that, you know, the Israelis are practical people. They're politicians. They've always had to be, they understand the predicament of some of these Arab countries that they've been trying to make peace with, like Saudi Arabia and the UAE, they understand that, you know, they want, this is something that, like, you know, I think is real, like, they really do want

these peace deals with the Arab countries. I mean, it would, it would, they're very excited about it. They put a lot of work into it. They're, these were not things that were imposed by the United States or bribed by the United States. These are things that were, like, sincerely negotiated between the Israelis and the U.S. and these Arab countries. And it's something they're very invested in. And they know that if they go past a certain point in Gaza, it's not going to be tenable anymore for these Arab countries to continue to formalize. That was one of the major points of this massacre in the first place, wasn't it? Yeah. I had to be. Absolutely. Did you see my article that I wrote up on the Institute today? Or it's that long tweet I wrote about terrorism is all

about provoking the reaction? It just came out today? Yeah, it's on the Institute today. It was a tweet that I wrote last night, but you know, I got a blue check so I can write a big long, annoying tweet. I just wrote this tweet, and it was, you know, I learned this right after September 11th from my good friend and one of my mentors, William Norman Grigg, who at that time was the editor of the New American magazine. And he had put out, but could we have prevented the attacks, I believe, was the name of the article from November 2001 in the New American. And I'm pretty sure it was in there. He quoted Saul Olensky. And I found the footnote. It's page 75, if I remember correctly.

from rules for radicals, Saul Olinsky says that in all asymmetric political action, which he doesn't say this, but you would include terrorism. The action is in the reaction of the opposition. So, in other words, like for bin Laden, for example, how's a group of 400 bandits going to take on a superpower? Well, they're going to get one really nasty attack off and they're going to get that superpower to take advantage of the crisis by and overreact, but knowing that the empire is a big stupid idiot that will blow its own brains out, trying to take its revenge and get away with all that it can get away with in avenging that attack. And so the reaction then is, and then also, this didn't really happen in Afghanistan, but George Bush made it happen for

them in a rock war two anyway provide a place for a whole new generation of jihadists to come and fight right so yeah you're i mean you're actually and the counter reaction and back and forth so you're about to have another hundred thousand people in gaza who at least had a second cousin who was killed or wounded by an Israeli soldier air strike that's that's what you're about to have another hundred thousand maybe another couple hundred thousand because these are very tightly knit you know families and that's going to be the case and how many of them are going to look at this and say oh we blame Hamas for bringing this upon us roughly the same number as the Israeli people who look at this attack and say we blame our own government for the occupation and bringing this on us which is to say not very many right

probably fewer yeah probably how many people blamed bill Clinton for bringing on 9-11 not until Ron Paul said it seven years later, you know. And so there's an evil genius to a group like Hamas. And, you know, these are people that think very long term and don't particularly on an individual level have much compunction about, about facing death. So, you know, the goal of the goal of a, of a group like this is not to, they're obviously not trying to conquer and hold some part of southern Israel by doing an operation like this. they're trying to make people in Israel feel insecure, just make the place unlivable so that, you know, you've got a daughter whose life you value a little bit, like maybe 1% more than you value the Zionist project. And you've got a cousin in New York who owns a business and says he's got a job waiting for you.

This was, you know, there was a large outflow of Israelis who were moving to America and other places. They started to get an influx from Europe because of the rise of Islamist, you know, anti-Semitism. But there wasn't outflow. of people who were leaving, and you have record low numbers of the Israeli population that actually serves in the military now. It's down below 50%. It used to be almost universal. And people, you know, this is a demographic question to the Palestinians. You know, Arafat said that we'll defeat you with the womb of the Palestinian mother. And they look down the road decades and say, if we can just make, this is like a group like Hamas, their mentality. If we can just make these people feel insecure enough that we wear them down, they get tired of it, that they go take that job in New York and just leave, then eventually,

you know, the 25% of the population of Israel that's Arab, that's going to creep up to 30%, and then 33%. And once it starts to hit a certain level, and they're looking down the road and seeing the projections where those lines are going to cross maybe at some point, maybe that trickle of people emigrating will become a flood because nobody wants to be the last one fighting to get out the door. And so the goal of operations like this, you know, the shock and the horror and the chaos really is the point. It's not an after effect. And it just, it really doesn't fit into our strategic consciousness the way we think about military operations. And you have to think about them a little differently, you know? Yeah. Well, look, I mean, Jesus Christ, we went through September

11th where they deliberately flew planes full of civilians into buildings full of civilians and slaughtered 3,000 of them. And I know they're military at the Pentagon, but anyway. So, like, why would they

do such a thing? We ought to have been figuring this out. You know, I remember, Darrell, I never forget this, man. It's like, I don't know, September the 19th or something maybe. driving my cab down i-35 and i'm listening to right wing talk radio and the guy sounds so reasonable and he's going listen they're just not being honest with us about the cause of this terrorism

and until they're honest with us then they'll never do the right thing our whole policy is based on a lie and so we have to be honest about what's really going on here so that we can do the right thing to protect our country and live in a better world you know and the truth is religion of Satan, and we have to kill every last one of them. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, and I'm just thinking, oh, man, you know, and then, so here we are, it's 20 years later. Nobody learned nothing since then. I like this anecdote. I told it a few times. I'm not telling on anyone anymore, because I wouldn't say her name, and she's dead anyway. But I was at a friend's house during one of these terrorist attacks in France. I forget this is Charlie Hebdo or the Eagles of Death Metal Concert,

one of these ISIS AQ, AP type attacks there in France in the Obama years. And I'm at my friend's house, and there's his mom who's now a little old lady. I knew her back 25 years ago when we were kids, and so now she's this little bitty old lady, and

she's a sweet little old lady. And then the TV's on in the background, and she goes, well, I guess we're just going to have to use nuclear weapons and kill them all. and like I cut her a little slack just because she's an idiot she doesn't know anything and because she's a sweet little old lady 100% of the rest of the time Darrell you know

but I says to her I go come on like maybe you just don't know enough about it to make a determination like that are you sure you're willing to call in an airstrike to kill whole cities full of civilians you know because I got to say something you know me but I was nice about it enough I respect her And she said, well, but look, but we've tried everything, you know, which as far as she knows is right, because like, I don't know, the guys in charge have all this power. And they've been trying real hard to solve this whole terrorism thing for us.

And it keeps happening, Daryl. So what else are we supposed to do with SEPD escalate to a bigger bomb, man? And then, so that's the general public's kind of view. And then you have, that carries, it's like, what's scary when you're talking about the genesis. kind of rhetoric coming out of Ben Shapiro and stuff like that is like where the average dipshit dad who says yeah kick their ass and take their gas or whatever when that level of mentality is coming out of the top opinion makers right wait i could have been cussing this whole time maybe all right next time i think i said the s word i might i might have even been i might

have done worse but um yeah those those people who like the average schmuck in your neighborhood who says use nuclear weapons, turn the Middle East to glass and then take all the petroleum after none of them exist anymore and that kind of... Like nobody cares what they say because that's stupid and it doesn't speak very well of their character that that's how people are. These are kinds of cliches people do

deal in. But then like you're saying, you got powerful opinion leaders talking like that. You got this whole thing about a parking lot and about enough is enough and the whole... Again, they sound exactly like this little old lady that I know who died. Yeah, who I knew.

Lindsey Graham. Who... We tried everything. We killed so many of them, do. You know, we kill the new count at the cost of war projects. Four and a half million people have been killed in the terror wars. And that still didn't do the trick, man. So now what?

We got to escalate the thing somehow. And I guess, like, the problem is there's no, Robert A. Pape ain't big enough to shout this stuff down. You know what I mean? Like, this is just how people look at it all. I mean, then there's also the factor that, you know, even if you could sit that lady down and educate her on the whole history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, early Zionist terrorism that, you know, ethnically cleansed the Palestinian, all these things. And so that she looks at it all and she says, wow. In fact, I just got an email like this yesterday from a guy who called me a Nazi sympathizer on Twitter because I was being too sympathetic to the Palestinian. And then he went and good for him, he went and listened to my whole series, the whole 30-hour

Israel-Palestine series. And he wrote me this long apology saying that it had transformed his perspective on the whole thing. And now he had a lot of sympathy for both sides and everything. And now the thing is, you can do that to somebody. And then Hamas goes and rapes and kills a bunch of women on camera. And it's like, well, okay, like none of that really matters right now. like what matters right now is what's about to happen and what's about to happen is already written in the book

you know it's it's just it erases all that like i don't know what to say to people who uh you know they know that i have sympathy for the predicament that jews were in in the early 20th century that i have a lot of sympathy for the Palestinians and that you know from a historical grievance perspective i think that the Palestinians are are generally in the right that their claims or that their claims are in the right you know they were ethnically cleansed violently um but that doesn't really help me argue with people who are saying yeah but they just raped and killed a bunch of women on camera and they'll do it again if they have the chance and that's true they would hummus would you know and um it's tough you know it's a it's a it's a tough thing it's a tough time

to be reasonable over a you know over a situation like this you know on just on september 12th Nobody wanted to hear about Bill Clinton, nobody wanted to hear about U.S. occupation in the Middle East or anything like that. Nobody wanted to hear it. And it took some time before people were willing to hear it. And even today, you know, a lot of people aren't. And so it's tough. You know, a time like now, people will actually get upset with you. They'll get angry with you for trying to calm people down, for trying to tell people like, hey, like look at how you're talking. about civilians this is not how you want to talk about civilians and there'll be somebody there who will get angry with you and that's what happens in times like this and that's the that's exactly the mentality and and the response that humas hoped to provoke when they when they engineered this operation yep no question about it everybody um a friend of mine used this phrase uh the other day they aggressively misunderstand right that people just it's um I don't know how it used to be in generations before me.

I don't know if it's always been like this in my lifetime or how much it's changed since, like, I don't know, the 90s or something. Where, and this is much more your pay grade than mine, Darrow. About like this kind of weird, is it this, is it the postmodernism, this deconstructionism where every syllable out of your mouth I know is a lie and a premeditated public relations ploy. And so now my only job is to be a detective and figure out who you really represent,

what your agenda really is, and the real secret reason that you're pretending to believe the thing that you say. And that's how everybody takes everything from everyone. Which makes it really hard for anybody to make a damned point. you know what I mean I try to say when people interview me that like look man I'm a kid from Texas

I don't give a shit about Russia I don't care and you know what I don't usually cuss on the show but it's late at night I don't do the show at night I cuss more at night maybe I don't care about Russia any more than I'm like all interested in what's going on down in Panama

not now anymore than I was in 89 I just don't think it's right to start wars and kill people chill and a Hamas lover 20 times online today alone yeah yeah both I know yeah I was I was accused of spinning Hasbara yesterday and then I'm gonna anti-Semite the rest of the time and I have seen people say that because there's been some apparently exaggerated war propaganda from the Israeli side that now the whole thing's fake and that if anybody on the Israeli side died their own government must have just murdered them in cold blood in order to make Hamas look bad and this kind of crap and you know at this point ain't nobody can have even discussion at all if you can't even agree on just like the basic thing like no we all agree the 40 decapitated babies thing that was not true but the murdering people in their homes they sure as hell did that and shooting people in their cars when they drove by we see saw that, and et cetera, et cetera, you know. So everybody's so partisan and so biased. And I guess

that's one of the good benefits of being a libertarian is I don't have a dog in anybody else's hunt. I'm not, my party didn't make any of these choices. And so I don't feel any need to defend them. I wouldn't anyway. But you know what I mean? But so, and the same thing for the Israelis and the Palestinians. I don't really have a dog in that hunt either, other than I do have as i said on twitter an extended family member who was murdered on by hamas yeah on the i've got friends on both sides and in fact i have a friend who he lost some people on the palestinian side yesterday as well and i'm sorry you're saying yeah no i i've got friends on both sides of this conflict and it's been sad over the years to watch their attitudes toward the other side uh evolve

you know these are people who aren't hamas members or you know kahanist settlers in the west bank or something these are pretty normal people who would be friends with a nice guy like me right and uh every once in a while especially in the aftermath i remember back during the 2014 war man sometimes they would let something slip and maybe they would catch themselves and be like oh i shouldn't say that but that you're like damn like that's not something i expected to come out of your mouth but you know that's the direction of these things yeah you know it's interesting i've actually um i've noticed a lot of times american jews will even go like too far on the side of the Palestinians in a way that like well these guys are just freedom fighters right i'm like well yeah no

not necessarily you know i'm a star wars geek so you know twice there were two giant galactic civil wars against the rule of emperor palpatine and the first time the enemy were all so bad guys. The second time it was Princess Leia and all our great heroes, right? But the first time it was the droids in Osama bin Laden, a bunch of suicide bombers and killers and guys with red swords

going around murdering people. And just because they were against the central government didn't make them heroes. And just because the central government was oppressing the hell out of them didn't make them good guys. Right? So there ain't no reason why you have to choose sides of part. I think most people are able to understand

that. You know, like I do think that there are outliers, of course. But I think the average person you talk to, even the ones like us who get accused of being Israel haters or something, they understand perfectly well that Hamas, that these guys, they're not only not heroes, that these guys are monsters. And, you know, the thing that, again, that doesn't matter at a time like this, but that does matter if you step back and look at it from just a broader historical perspective is that the conditions that the Palestinians have been forced to live under is a breeding ground

for monsters and that doesn't mean you make excuses for the monsters but but you know they're not going to stop being bred as long as that breeding ground is still festering and I don't see anything coming from the Israeli side from anywhere that that is even is even poking its head toward a serious solution that both sides are going to be able to live with. So we're just going to have to play this one out. Yeah. Well, in fact, I mean, they can't even talk honestly about it at all. So, you know, remember, again, it was 2007 when Ron Paul finally got in his big fight

with Rudy Giuliani and said the simple truth that, like, hey, we've been bomb in Iraq for 10 years before September 11th. And that was why they said that they did it. And people said, whoa, you know what? I remember that. Bill Clinton bombed Iraq. Bill Clinton bombed Iraq all the time, dude. That was a thing, wasn't it?

That wasn't a secret. It was the no-fly zone. It was a heroic mission to save the Port Shiites or something. I mean, you know, the bombing and the blockade and all that. So when Ron Paul said that, come on, they don't hate us because we're free. They asked because all those things that Bill Clinton did. people are like oh yeah you know what like i also hate bill clinton like i wouldn't go that far but i understand why someone over there might considering all that he'd done to them and so even

though people you know nominally consider the 90s peace time i think when ron paul said that at least people understood that that was true and you know what frankly bill clinton didn't have a full scale war in iraq he had iraq war one and a half where he just bombed him all the time that's all and so that's the way but people remembered that and But it also made sense that that would be a good enough reason to motivate some terrorists. And a few liars claimed it, but no one really believed that he was making excuses for those guys. All he was doing was telling the real truth that like, come on, man. You know, what was really going on was Osama bin Laden had adopted the morality of Bill Clinton and Madeline Albright and said it's all right to kill these civilians in order to get what we want.

And I thought we were making some progress toward getting people to understand that a little bit until a couple days ago. Yep. Thanks a lot, jerks. Just like, you know, America really picked this fight with Russia in a lot of ways. And then this guy rolls all his tanks into Ukraine. Like, yeah, thanks, man. We were making some headway and getting people to understand this. But I guess too late.

All right. Well, listen, it is late at night. and we're over time and you're out of time. But thanks very much for coming on the show, man. It's great to talk to you again. Always great to talk to you, brother. Take care. Hell yeah.

All right, you guys. That's Daryl Cooper. He is Martyr Made, the podcast, and Israel, Palestine, as he said, the 30-hour. Was that right? Nod your head. I got you on mute. About that 30-hour. Boy, I thought my Waco thing was a big thing.

30-hour podcast on the history of Israel and Palestine. and man, I love the one about Mother Jones and the miners and all that. That was so cool. Best podcast out there. Martyr Made and follow him also Martyr Made on Twitter. The Scott Horton Show, Anti-War Radio, can be heard on KPFK, 90.7 FM in L.A.

APSRadio.com, anti-war.com, Scotthorton.org, and Libertarian Institute.org.