TRIGGERnometry - EMERGENCY EPISODE: Bari Weiss On Israel/Palestine

Episode Date: October 18, 2023

In light of the unfolding events in the Middle East, we invited Bari Weiss to speak to us and examine the different sides of the conflict. Bari Weiss is an American journalist, writer and editor. She was an op-ed and book review editor at The Wall Street Journal (2013–2017) and an op-ed staff editor and writer on culture and politics at The New York Times (2017–2020). Since March 1, 2021, she has worked as a regular columnist for German daily newspaper Die Welt. Weiss founded the media company The Free Press (formerly Common Sense) and hosts the podcast Honestly. Become a Premium Member to receive exclusive benefits https://triggernometry.supercast.com/ OR Support TRIGGERnometry Here: Bitcoin: bc1qm6vvhduc6s3rvy8u76sllmrfpynfv94qw8p8d5 Music by: Music by: Xentric | [e-mail] | https://www.xentricapc.com/ YouTube:  @xentricapc   Buy Merch Here: https://www.triggerpod.co.uk/shop/ Advertise on TRIGGERnometry: [e-mail] Join the Mailing List: https://www.triggerpod.co.uk/sign-up/ Find TRIGGERnometry on Social Media:  https://twitter.com/triggerpod https://www.facebook.com/triggerpod/ https://www.instagram.com/triggerpod/ About TRIGGERnometry:  Stand-up comedians Konstantin Kisin (@konstantinkisin) and Francis Foster (@francisjfoster) make sense of politics, economics, free speech, AI, drug policy and WW3 with the help of presidential advisors, renowned economists, award-winning journalists, controversial writers, leading scientists and notorious comedians. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

I think there's been a shattering of a lot of myths and illusions and delusions this week. What did Israel get in return? It gave the land, but the peace never came. This is what has come. I think that this week has the potential to finally and forever separate out liberals from anti-liberals. They were celebrating Jewish slaughter, and people should never, ever forget that. If you don't believe in good and evil after this week, you're sleepwalking.

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Have we learned? I think we've learned. I think there's been a shattering of a lot of myths and illusions and delusions this week. We can start maybe in the Middle East and then move on to the ideology that has captured so many of our elite institutions that has revealed itself for the moral perversion sort of lies at the heart of it. But if we go to Israel and begin on the early hours of Saturday morning when Hamas terrorists infiltrated the border via air and land and sea coming with one intention and one intention only, which is not the liberation of the Palestinian people, but the annihilation of the Jewish people. And that is what they did in the ensuing hours. By now, I hope anyone watching this knows the horror

that ensued, but just to give people a sense for those who are reading things, claiming that all of this is sort of propaganda or misinformation, families, whole families were burned alive. Babies were beheaded. Women who had gone to an EDM music festival in the desert were raped next to the corpses of their friends. And as of this morning, and we're recording on Monday morning, more than a hundred and ninety-nine people were taken hostage into Gaza and God knows what is happening to them. It's the kind of massacre that if you follow Jewish history, you might expect from a pogrom in Eastern Europe in the 19th century. But here it was taking place in the state formed after the Holocaust that was meant to be a safe haven for the

Jewish people. So what have we learned? I think one thing we have learned is that Hamas told us who they were. And yet somehow we forgot. Somehow Israel, in a way, forgot. The reckoning of how this happened and how the most militarily sophisticated country in the world could have been so caught off guard and could have allowed itself to be the site of the worst massacre, single-day massacre of Jews since the Holocaust, that is the reckoning that's going to take place over the next weeks and months and years. But I think for sure one thing we know is that Hamas fooled Israel

and Hamas fooled the world, right? Israel believed and was giving these permits for people in Gaza to come work over the border. Hamas gave the perception that it was war-weary and just wanted sort of to get along and of course that revealed itself not to be true. I think one of the other things that a lot of us are thinking in the wake of these past horrendous

is the idea we all, or most of us grew up on, right? Most of the Jewish world grew up on the idea of a two-state solution. The idea that if we could trade land away, Israel could trade land away, that we would get peace in return. But I think one of the tragedies of the past week is all of us wondering whether or not that's actually true, right? Israel, to remind people, does not occupy the Gaza Strip. It pulled out in 2005. It dismantled every single Israeli community there, gave back everything.

There has not been a single Jew in Gaza until now, in the form of 200 hostages being held there. And yet, what did Israel get in return? It gave the land, but the peace never came. This is what has come. And so I think it's leaving many people who feel like the moral situation with Israel having to occupy the West, bank, otherwise known as Judean Samaria, it's a horrible situation. And yet what would happen if the thing we've all prayed for for our entire lives happen, which is at least me as a liberal Jew, Israel pulls out, well, then is it just going to have another Hamas terrorist statelet at its other border? So I think that is one of the things that we're currently reassessing. I think the other thing that has been shattered in the wake of this massacre is the folly of a

of a foreign policy embraced by the Obama administration and then revived by the Biden administration to, I don't know what the right word is, but to do business with Iran, right? And you could justify that policy, maybe in 2014, 2015, 2016. I don't think that there is any way to justify that policy today. Iran are the paymasters of Hamas.

We read in the Wall Street Journal, they literally gave the orders for this attack. So why is the United States pursuing a policy vis-a-vis Iran by which we're giving them billions of dollars? It doesn't make sense. Barry, Sam Harris and Eric were here. This interview will go out before theirs. But one of the things people will hear Sam talk about is essentially that we have misunderstood the nature of the threat, which is Hamas is not about liberating Palestine or anything like that. These are jihadists.

and they're driven by that motivation. Is that your take on this? Yeah, and I would say that when people mistakenly taught, people, well-intentioned progressives who don't know very much about the history, talk about Gaza being occupied. And they're inadvertently right. Gaza is occupied by a terrorist group called Hamas, which uses the most barbaric weapons of war,

mass rape of women, the killing of the elderly, the disabled, and children, but more than that, it is using a weapon of the sacrifice of its own citizens, right? There are rules in war. There are rules in war. And Hamas literally sets up its operations in hospitals, in schools, so that they can actively try to create as many civilian deaths as possible.

That is their actual aim. Israel is begging Gazans that live in half of the, the strip to go to the other half in order to save civilian lives, because that is what an ethical military does. There's always going to be horrific tragedy in war. But instead, Hamas is countering and saying, stay in place. And that is part of their strategy. Why? Because they want civilian deaths in order to create rage around the world against Israel. And so it is unspeakable. what they are doing to the people of Gaza. And if anyone has any illusions about what Hamas is,

just look at what they did. Look at what they did and look now as the ground operation against Gaza's beginning at what they're doing to their own people. Benjamin Netanyahu has, is, how can I put this? There's a lot of people who are quite rightly furious with him because they believe that he's let the Israeli people down the IDF were found wanting. Can you explain a little bit of what actually happened in terms of security?

How did this awful tragedy occur? We don't know the answer to that yet. Here's what we do know. Israel, for anyone who's been paying attention over the past year, has been in the most heated, almost cold civil war among its population about whether or not these so-called judicial reforms that some people view as overdue and that other people view as bringing Israel to the brink of a constitutional crisis, even though it doesn't have a constitution, but the brink of sort of the end and the unraveling of democracy. There have been massive protests in the streets, and by the way, it's not just secular, liberal versus hardcore and Orthodox.

Many of my Orthodox friends in Israel have been taking to the streets every single weekend with their family to protest the next. Netanyahu so-called judicial reform. We don't have time to get into what that reform looks like, but the takeaway is that Israel was internally weakened. Israel was internally weakened. You had people who were high-ranking officers in the Israeli defense forces saying that because of what Netanyahu was doing, because of the judicial reform and because of the bigots that he had brought into his coalition government, they wouldn't be showing up if they were called to duty. So that is the sort of state of affairs internal to Israel

when Hamas terrorists start to cross over the border on Saturday. The other thing that was happening was that it was a major festival holiday. And my understanding is that a lot of troops that would typically have been at the border with Gaza had been moved to the West Bank. But, you know, again, we don't know the full extent. You have to think for a second. This is the most militarily sophisticated country in the Middle East.

They know if a bird lands on the fence between Gaza and Israel. So how is it that more than a thousand terrorists could simply cross over the border? There's been reports still unverified about a possible cyber attack that would have allowed for that. It's unclear as yet. But I think if we can take one takeaway a week in, it's that having a weakened internal society that was divided against itself, sent a very, very dangerous signal to Israel's enemies. And obviously, the events that occurred were horrendous and awful. How do you see the response to that?

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only on Netflix May 8th. Perhaps it shouldn't surprise those of us who have been following the illiberal ideology that has taken root among so-called progressives and in our most elite institutions among our institutions of higher education in all of our sense-making institutions in American life. And yet still, I will never forget the shattering that I feel watching college students across America and across the world cheering on the slaughter of Israelis.

And not just Jews, people from Thailand, people from all over Europe, Americans, innocent people. When people are marching on the quads of American universities singing Glory B to the Martyrs, when 50,000 people are marching on the streets of London with images, printed out images of a Hamas paraglider taped to their shirt. Imagine on the days after September 11th if 50,000 people marched through the streets of London with an image of the al-Qaeda hijacked planes flying into the World Trade Center. or an image of Auschwitz, or an image of Timothy McVeigh. Like, these are symbols of mass slaughter. And they are being, it is being celebrated.

It is being celebrated. We are seeing people mass around the Sydney Opera House screaming, gas the Jews. Gas the Jews. Where's the Jews? Where's the Jews? Stop the Jews. Stop the Jews.

Stop the Jews. And I guess if it's the Jews, West the Jews, Jews. there's any silver lining that has come out of this most horrific week, the most horrific week, I think, of my lifetime and I think the lifetime of, please God, that will be the most horrific week of our lifetimes. It is that people have showed us who they are. People have showed us who they are. And they were serious when they said that they were for decolonization. They're saying, this is what decolonization looks like. Decolonization wasn't an academic idea. Decolonization is about the massacre of Jews and the massacre of Israelis.

So the combination of college administrations that have had so much to say about Roe v. Wade, about the war in Ukraine, about the murder of George Floyd, all of a sudden have discovered the virtue of institutional neutrality when it comes to the massacre of Jewish people. And they're pro-free speech now as well, which is really sure. Exactly. Glad they discovered that. And so the combination of the silence of people that have moral outrage for all kinds of other causes, but none when it comes to the massacre of Jews combined with young people who, whether because they are brainwashed or watch a lot of propaganda or genuinely feel it, are celebrating. I think it's very important for people to understand when people the day after, this massacre were out there cheering for it, saying from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free. The bodies of these burned people weren't even in the ground yet. They could not even be identified. So there's not even an illusion that they were protesting the inevitable Israeli response to this war.

They were celebrating Jewish slaughter, and people should never, ever forget that. Barry, one of the reasons that I think we've all opposed this ideology is that it reduces all human interaction to this very basic oppressor, oppressed dynamic. And essentially seems to have no rules for what should happen to the oppressor, right? This is what decolonization looks like. And I think you're right. I think what you said about London, by the way, I don't think it was 50,000 people with those badges. No, it was 50,000 people. and a few people wearing those badges.

And there were people chanting awful things there too. I suppose the question I want to ask you, and our good friend Douglas Murray, was recently on a British show with Julie Hartley-Bruer, talking about the idea of proportionality. Because a lot of people are, in my opinion, rightly concerned about the fact that there are going to be very heavy civilian casualties in Gaza as a result of this.

And of course, I'm sure you will say, as I will say, that the people who are responsible for that Hamas. But what, how do we manage that? There are clearly lots of people in the West who, I think it's fair to say, not anti-Semitic who don't hate Jews, who nonetheless do not want to see millions of people killed and displaced. No one wants to see, no one wants to see any number of people in Gaza killed or displaced. No one.

But unfortunately, Gaza is ruled by a group that actively wants them to die for the the sake of a propaganda campaign against Israel. A propaganda campaign, by the way, that has been unbelievably and enormously effective. And if you want evidence of that, just look at what Francis had just asked me about before. The evidence of it is everywhere. There are basic rules of war, though. And just imagine if we were here in the U.S. and a group of people came over the border and went house to house and slaughtered our children and took our grandparents hostage or killed them and streamed it live on their Facebook pages for their families to see, raped American women, what would America do in response? It would have to eliminate

the threat. It simply cannot live with that existential threat at its border. And I think that is how Israel is seeing the situation right now. There's never the idea that innocent people and innocent children and women in Gaza, living under Hamas rule, are going to die in this war is horrible and should make any person of conscience heartbroken. Period. Full stop. But it's really important for people to remember why they are in that situation. And they're in that situation because they are ruled by a group that is a latter-day ISIS. Barry, did this, surprise you, the outpourings. Because maybe it's me being negative. Maybe it's me because I have families from the Middle East, Lebanese, Lebanese, Coptic Christians in that, I know the anger

and I know the resentment. And when we talk about hatred, it's a word that is overused, but there is a lot of hatred in that area. And I've seen it from family members myself to the point that I do find it shocking. Hatred of Jews? And Israel, to put it bluntly. Yeah. And the response hasn't surprised me in a way. I kind of knew that this was going to be the backlash because that resentment and that fury has always been there. So am I surprised by the reaction in the Middle East or the West? Both.

I'm not surprised by the reaction in the Middle East because of everything that you just referenced. I am, and in a way, I've been writing about the campus issue since I was 19 years old. At the time, at the time, I would not have had the courage to use the phrase anti-Semitic, but there are professors at Columbia University where I graduated from that are absolutely anti-Semitic and that publish pieces in the days after the massacre celebrating the resistance. And so I saw the roots of this ideology and what it would mean not to be.

just for the Jewish people, but for civilization and the West, back in 2003 when I was a college freshman. So in a way, I'm not surprised. But I think the thing that has shattered me is just how widespread it is, how excused it is from the people who claim to want to hold the moral high ground on every other issue. One of the things that has happened this week, I have heard a lot of friends who are left-leaning on the left, expressing shock at what they've seen from their own side. What have they been saying? I can't believe this.

This is crazy. I can't believe the people on my side. How are they justifying this? I can't believe they sell. Like, I can't believe is a phrase I've heard a lot from people. People who are like woke AF, you know, too. So the question I suppose I want to ask you is, given that, I feel like a lot of people's eyes have been open this week. Do you think this is the week that wokeness ended?

I'm an optimistic person despite this past week, and I remain extremely hopeful that this week can be a watershed moment in finally opening people's eyes to the absolute illusion. liberalism of this worldview. You have to ask yourself, what kind of worldview would let people see the massacre that we have just witnessed and justify it or explain it or remain silent in the face of it? It's an ideology that says people that oppressors, and we can discuss whether or not Israel or the oppressors in the situation of the Middle East, they deserve it. They had it coming to them, that this is what decolonization looks like. I'm not an expert on the politics of Israel and Palestine, but it is also deeply unsurprising to me

seeing what's happening in Palestine. The instinct here, given the complexity, is to see things in terms of this is horrific, what's happened to Israel. But when you all examined colonization and decolonizing, what did you actually think that would look like? Like, for real, it is so interesting watching people comment on this. When you are violently oppressed for that long, what do you think the uprising against your oppressors looks like? And I say this, as a white person living in colonized Australia on stolen land.

Like, some of you all need a bit of a reality check, I think. Because like, what did you think was going to happen? What did you think breaking free of colonial oppressors' chains looked like? If you find yourself justifying or explaining or remaining silent in the face of babies burned alive with their mothers, you need to look in the mirror and ask yourself what you've gone along with. And I think there are a lot of good, well-intentioned progressives who have gone along with this ideology thinking, oh, it's just about social justice. It's just about inclusion.

It's just about diversity. It's just about making amends for past wrongs of America and the West. I really believe that now they could be waking up to the reality of the conclusion in the real world of what that ideology believes. One bright spot that has given me hope in the past few days is that the universities, which have been essentially the hotbeds, not just the intellectuals, not just the intellectual centers of this worldview, but really the indoctrination factories of it. People, donors are finally saying it's enough. You have Mark Rowan, an enormous donor to the Wharton School at University of Pennsylvania, Ivy League School, really important school of business, saying we were silent for too long in the face of an ideology that we thought was just a little crazy. Well, it turns out it's not just a little crazy.

It actually, it is an ideology that justifies the massacre of people as it's happening. And he's saying, I'm closing my checkbook. And his model of courage, other people have followed suit. You've John Huntsman, who just, the Huntsman building is built at University of Pennsylvania, announced not another penny. You have people pulling their funds from places like Harvard and the like. And I think that that isn't necessary and overdue move. Colleges are free to do whatever they want. They're free to teach whatever they want.

Professors have academic freedom. They can go and publish on the electronic intifada, as Joseph Mossad did, all hail the resistance or whatever it was that he wrote. But that doesn't mean that good people should be funding those ideas. And I think that this week, a lot of people are finally saying, enough.

And you mentioned the oppressor, oppressed dynamics. I want to steal man, I know it's painful and I know it's not pleasant to do, but I want to try and steal man the argument that is being made by these people so we can break it down. And I think it's important to do because whether we like it or not, there are a lot of people who believe the narrative that is being imposed. So the narrative is that Israel is an occupying force, that Gaza is an open-air prison, that people in Gaza live terrible lives, which they do. They do. That Israel and Israeli soldiers regularly commit atrocities.

That Israel has bulldozed Palestinian houses and olive groves and so on. And that I think the quote is, violence is the language of the oppressed. And this is what resistance looks like. One man's terrorists and another man's freedom fighter. And in the same way that you and I might say, well, civilian casualties and Gaza as a result of Israel's bombings are collateral damage that is inevitable, they might say, well, how is Gaza supposed to fight back?

How are the Palestinians supposed to fight back? And in the words of Congresswoman Alexandra Ocasso-Cortez, I'm always on the side of of the oppressed, right? What say you to this argument? Well, let's start with the first thing you said, which is that Israel's an occupying force. Israel has not occupied Gaza since 2005. Ariel Sharon gave back the Gaza Strip,

pulled out, the Israeli army pulled out every single Jew that lived in Gaza in the hopes of so-called land for peace. People would argue, sorry to jump in Mary, that the existence of the state of Israel is default occupation of a land that was never supposed to be taken. taken over by the Israeli state because it didn't exist.

That's what people would say. Right. And what I would say to that is those people need to read a little bit of history. The Jews are indigenous to the land of Israel. Full stop. It doesn't mean that there aren't other groups like Palestinians, then Arabs, who also have a claim of indigenity to the land of Israel. But the Jews are indigenous to the land of Israel.

And I think one of the reasons that people have such a hard time with this, is that it's sort of an anomaly in history in which a group that is native to an area can be expelled and massacred and decimated over 2,000 years and yet have a continuous presence in that land and ultimately come to reestablish a sovereign state there. It's very hard for people to wrap their minds around it. The reason that Jews are called Jews

is because we come from the land of Judea. Most countries don't have a birth certificate, but Israel does in the Bible. And whether or not you believe in the divinity of the Bible or not, it was written in the land of Israel. You know, you have to go back and look at the history. Remember the UN partition plan in 1947 that was meant to separate, that was meant to create two states. Yeah. Yeah. And then just go forward at every single period over the past 75 years in history. You have one group of people, the Jewish people who then became the people of Israel, the Israelis who accepted a partition plan from the United Nations who said, yes, we are willing to have a two-state solution and live in peace with our neighbors.

The Arabs rejected it. That is the story of the past 75 years. It's the story of Israelis saying, we are willing to give land for peace. All we want is a safe haven for the Jewish people, which history unfortunately has proven in our blood that, and this week once again showed that, you know, imagine if this week happened. and there was no Israeli army to fight back. That is the story of the Jewish people since the exodus from Egypt. Can I ask a really dumb question as someone who really doesn't know this conflict or understand it very well at all? Can they just not, can they not give Gaza independence and let them go? What do you mean?

They have let them. Gaza is ruled by Hamas. But they need food and water and electricity from Israel, right, to survive? Well, but why is that? I mean, one of the things I think people don't, when people talk about Gaza as an open-air prison, they forget also that Gaza has a border with Egypt. Right. Egypt right now is not letting these poor people. Well, they built a wall. Into Egypt.

Yeah. Right? Like, why is that? Why is that? And why isn't their moral outrage around the world about that? Why is it buried? Arab states have taken a lot of Palestinians refugees in the past. they don't take any now.

One of the reasons I think is that whenever they have done in the past, it's led to very bad things happening in their own countries. I think also part of it is that it is, tragically, for the Palestinian people, a very, very good, they are a very, very good political pawn and tool to foment rage against Israel and Jewish people. And how do we also, how do we separate this? Because this is very important. There are people who are, let's just call them pro.

Palestine, but that doesn't mean they're anti-Semitic at all. How do we separate that? Because there are people who obviously anti-Semitic pro-Hamas want to see the extermination of a whole race of people. Those people unfortunately exist, and they've existed for thousands of years, and that's just the truth of it. But there are also people who are pro-Palestine, who are not anti-Semitic. Of course, and those are the people you hear who are saying clearly right now, and I wish there were more of them. Hamas is evil. And what Hamas did to massacre Israelis is absolutely unequivocally evil.

And the reason that I'm speaking out against Hamas is because I believe in the dignity and the liberation of the Palestinian people. You cannot be for the liberation of Palestinians and not be against Hamas. And I think that's a very, very clear moral line. There are many people I know who are. pro-Israel and pro-Palestine. One of the reasons that so many people who are pro-Israel are also for a Palestinian state is A, because we believe in the sovereignty and the right of people to establish their own fate in their land. The same logic that allows someone to believe in the

establishment of the state of Israel leads them to believe in the establishment of a Palestinian state. And the other part of it is that if you're pro-Israel, surely you don't want Israel occupying another people. It will create a moral rot in your society if you have to do that. But Israel has found itself in an impossible situation as Gaza, as what's happened in Gaza has just showed us. You pull out, you get a Hamas statelet at your border. You don't pull out as they haven't in the West Bank, and you occupy another people. I think one of the things a lot of people are going to be looking for in the wake of this week is some kind of third way, some kind of paradigm shift that can break us out of this impossible moral not.

And it's also with the situation in the West Bank. And look, Barry, I'm not as I've favored this, obviously, as you are. Please correct me if I say things that are factually incorrect. But for as long as I've been aware of the situation that's been going on in the Middle East, people have been saying what's happening in the West Bank is intolerable, you know, Israeli settlers encroaching more and more on Palestinian lands. Is that still the case now? It is definitely still the case that there are Israeli settlements.

in the West Bank, from the sort of Jewish perspective, I'll say, or certainly the religious Zionist perspective, the West Bank, otherwise known as Judean Samaria, is where most of the Jewish history, the biblical history, took place. There's a lot of extraordinarily holy sites there, a lot of places that are significant. But as a liberal Zionist and not a religious Zionist, I have always believed that I don't care what holy history has happened in a place. If it can bring peace and save Israeli lives and save Palestinian lives and bring peace to the region, give it back. It doesn't matter.

And so you would give back the entire West Bank? I've always believed in giving back the West Bank if it would bring peace. Unfortunately, in the wake of this week, that view. of mine that I have held for my entire adult life has been shaken to its core. How can I, like, what would that look like for the security of Israel to simply give it all back? What happens if Hamas or another terrorist group comes to power there? I don't think a lot of people realize, and maybe it'd be useful to show your listeners or your viewers a map of the entire Middle East. The Israel is the size of New Jersey. It is a tiny little sliver.

And, you know, it would be an existential threat, you could argue. If Israel were to give away the West Bank, a view that I have held for, again, my entire adult life, that I now find myself reassessing. And then what happens if peace doesn't break out is it certainly didn't in Gaza? And a terrorist group comes to power there. Then what? And Barry, one of the questions I want to ask you is about the impact of all of this here. And I'll just say, Constantine, like, the Jewish.

world, like you have to remember that the pullout from Gaza was instituted by one of the most hawkish prime ministers in Israeli history, Ariel Sharon. And yet the majority of Israelis and the majority of the Jewish world supported it because that is how desperate they were for peace. And I think that one of the shatterings and the reckonings of this week is, what do you do when your neighboring population does not actually seek peace. Like what happened? It's not that the people don't, but the leadership doesn't. What do you do? I mean, if you go. A leadership day elected. Yes. What does mean? Right. What does it mean? This is the question we're all wrestling with. When we had Sam and Eric in here, I brought this point up many times. I mean, I, well, I mean, obviously I don't know what

the solution is, but I don't think anybody does. That's why it's, it's going on, right? That's why it's an unresolved issue. It seems to me like a physical separation of some kind is the only answer here. But there is a physical separation and Israelis called us a security barrier in Palestinians and their supporters called it an apartheid wall. Right. There is a physical barrier. But Gaza relies on Israeli electricity, water supplies for the people there to survive. That's why it's not a workable solution, isn't it? Isn't that the real real? I think the real reason it's not a workable solution is because a group that has in its charter, the explicit annihilation of the Jewish people as its reason for being is ruling over.

They fundamentally don't accept the existence of Israel. Let's be honest, right? Let's be honest. Yeah, so let's be radical truth here. Yeah. Well, no, what I mean is all of the stuff about how, you know, you need to make peace, you need to do this. It's all. bullocks because if these people don't accept the right of the state of Israel to exist in any way, how can you have peace? How can there ever be peace if these people want to see Israel wiped off the map, quote, unquote? How can you have peace? How is there going to be peace? I don't get it. I don't know. I got to be honest with you. Like, as of this morning, peace is the last thing on my mind. The first thing on my mind is how can Hamas and the threat that it poses be destroyed?

I agree. No, and it's the right reaction. It's understand Hamas, Israel has to destroy Hamas. There's no question about that. But ultimately, if we're talking about civilian lives and people living and surviving in Israel and in Palestine, at some point, peace is going to have to be made. And I just don't see what that looks like. I don't get it. I don't see what the solution is. I have to be honest, today, I don't see what the solution is either. Yeah, that's fair. And a lot of the slogans that I've written and enchanted, for my life, my entire life about a two-state solution, about the ability for there to be peace, about I feel mugged by reality in this week. To me, it comes back to that word again, hatred, in that I don't think that people in the West understand the depths of hatred in its truest form that exist in that region. I always remember talking to these relatives of mine being shocked and horrified with people who are very, very intelligent, very well educated,

successful careers, and they would come out with things that would make my skin turn even whiter than it already is. Which is very white. Which is very white. Let's be honest. And when you have, because the problem with hatred is not only that it's a very powerful emotion, a very toxic emotion, it means that you're irrational and that you will do irrational things because it's such a cancerous emotion that takes over and destroys everything.

So until you deal with that hatred, I don't think you're ever going to solve the problem, if I'm being honest. Well, I saw some videos this week. Maybe there was so many videos that came out of the horror. But I watched a video of just a young Palestinian girl, beautiful in Gaza, probably five or six years old, talking about how wonderful it is when Jews are slaughtered. What do you do when a population is indoctrinated in that way? Yeah. What do you do?

I don't know. And that's why Hamas is who they are and why they're allowed to flourish because they feed on hatred. That's what they do. That's what these people do. That's what all extremists do. They allow the narrative to be propagated.

They push the narrative and then they feed off the narrative. And that's the real worry. And then you look around at the surrounding countries, whether it's Lebanon, where my family originate from or Iran. And they're led by a lot of them, Islamic fundamentalists who also, unironically, a rabid anti-Semites as well because the two go together. I think it's just really, really hard for people like us that live in, I know this word has been overused, but like true privilege in the West. Western privilege. Western privilege to

understand hate and to understand that what's driving this is not poverty or or, or, or anything else other than an ideology that is based on the embrace of evil. Like we live in a culture in which even the idea of good and evil seems like so old-fashioned. Like how could anyone believe in good and evil after this week? You're sleepwalking. Barry, when we had Sam here, one of our audience members, we do a special section on locals where people get to ask our guest questions. He was asked a question by an audience member,

Trump, Sam famously not a fan of Trump. To put it lightly. Put it lightly. We all recall the viral moment from the last time he was on. Somebody said, would this have happened if Donald Trump was in power? It's impossible to know. But I can say this. I think whether because he was perceived as strong

or simply perceived as crazy, the Middle East was a changed place under his president. I don't know if I hate Trump quite as much as Sam. Definitely not a fan of Trump. But if you just look, putting aside his boorishness and his character, just the policies that happened under the Trump administration, like the Abraham Accords, like the scuttling of the Iran deal. These were really, really positive things for the region. And I don't think that, you know, people can love Joe Biden. People can hate Joe Biden. I don't think there's any question that Joe Biden is not perceived as a man at the height of. of his powers and at the height of his strength. And certainly this administration's re-embracing of their Rand Deal framework first put forward by the Obama administration has made the Middle East a much, much more dangerous place. Can I say something else, Barry, about this as someone who's kind of a westerner, but also not? Yes.

And it comes back to your point about people not understanding that good and evil do exist. There's something else that people in the West fundamentally don't understand, which is power. And that's what you're talking about. Donald Trump was boorish, obnoxious, unpredictable, but he was seen in places where power is the one thing, the only thing that matters, as powerful and as someone who might react very harshly to being crossed. And that is a superpower in the world. And one of the reasons I've been so concerned about the direction of travel, with all the stuff that you and I, I, you know, all of us have been talking about for a long time, is we have become deeply uncomfortable

with the exercise of power in the West. And that's why I asked you the question about Trump because there's no question in my mind that neither Ukraine or this would have happened. If Trump was still in power, for all the concerns that you might have about him, and the concerns might be the flip side of the fact that he was willing to use power to do things.

Exactly. But we have fundamentally lost the willingness to be powerful, and it bothers me tremendously. I saw a tweet this week that I kind of laughed at and bookmarked to go back to, which just said American Empire didn't go far enough. And it was sort of glib, but I really, I've been thinking about what was the groundwork that was laid that allowed for this week. And I think a big piece of it is American weakness. And America's sort of recession from the world stage and in the weeks of the Iraq and Afghanistan war,

like this war wear weariness here at home. this sense that, you know, we tried, it failed, let's go home, the idea that America's done more bad than good on the world stage. Well, what happens when we pull back from the world? We're seeing it. And the war in Iraq was a crime. It was a mistake and it was a crime, in my opinion. That does not mean that America has no role in the world.

And, you know, all Putin, the leaders of China, of Iran, they're all banging on endlessly about this beautiful new multipolar world. and there are idiots in the West who are like, oh, yeah, a multipolar world. No, the multipolar world is just a new axis of evil. Yes. That's what it is. Right. And the process of breaking down the world we currently have looks like this.

It looks like Armenia and Azerbaijan, Ukraine and Russia, Israel and Palestine, and God knows what else. God knows what else. And God forbid China and Taiwan. Yeah. Yeah. And this is the multipolar world that all these people wanted. And the Pax-American, I have to say, was a very good, was a very good.

was a very good situation. And the use of the past tense is a very troubling thing to me. But look at the world. Oh, 100%. But this idea that America is evil and is the evil empire, that starts at the universities. Yes, it does. I mean, I can't count the number of seminars.

This is going back years now. The number of classes I took at Columbia where the idea of decolonization was put forward. I mean, I was marinating in all of these ideas. Now, I had enough of a sense of right and wrong. and a sense of who I was in the world that when I, I'll give you one example. I remember very clearly getting into a conversation with a friend who also identified as a feminist. And she was justifying female genital mutilation to me because she believed that we in the West

didn't have the right to judge other people and cultures, that it was chauvinistic for us to do so, that it was sort of the mark of colonization for us to do so. And I remember so clearly, I was like as a sophomore in college, stepping back from that conversation and saying, whatever this is, I'm not that. Whatever ideology this is that could justify the mutilation of women under the guise of, I don't know what. Righteousness is wrong. And that, I remember so clearly that day, it sort of sent me tumbling down this path to really

examine this ideology that I was encountering in so many different facets. so many different courses. And basically what was coming back to me again and again was just this idea that anything the West was was wrong, to put it crudely, any values that claimed to be Western were in and of themselves chauvinistic and oppressive toward other people. And I had to step back and say, but hold on. These values have literally allowed for my life to be possible. These values have literally allowed for the greatest flourishing of equality, of human dignity, of rights for minorities that we have ever seen in the history of the world. So those people who are claiming that we should just go and dismantle them, we should look at those people with an enormous amount of skepticism. And right now we're seeing the fruits of their ideology.

And they are very, very terrible ones. As of Venezuela, I really do appreciate it when a Colombian graduate explains to me that socialism is a beautiful thing. It's wonderful. But I'm being glib about it, but there's a very serious point to be made there in that, and I say to these people when BLM rose to power, and people were championing it, particularly in our industry and comedy, and I said the words to them, you do not know the forces that you were messing with. You have no idea. You have never seen el socialism. I have. Believe me, it's not pretty.

But you can't explain that to people who've never seen it. Well, there was an incredible, I'm sure you guys saw that BLM Chicago put out an image. I think the words where we stand in Palestine of the image of death, the image of a Hamas paraglider. And I think a lot of sort of good progressives imagine that it was somehow a mistake. And then days later, BLM Chicago put out a tweet that was so true. They said, if you're shocked by that image, you haven't been paying attention to what we believe.

And they're right. They're right. People didn't want to pay attention because they didn't want to see because they wanted to be with the cool kids. They wanted to be on the side of the good. They wanted to go along with something that pretended to be anti-racism but was actually about something far more insidious. And you see it with the college kids with the pictures of shit.

And, you know. Exactly. And I remember when I was at university and I said to him, know who Shaguerre is? Do you have any knowledge of him? Do you know, for instance, that he was a rank homophobe who despised gay people and had them executed? Do you know that? But this is like when I'm seeing people with signs that are like queers for Palestine. You know, I'm like, I saw this unbelievable instance of this trans person at a rally, you know, cheering on what had happened. I wanted to say, do you know what they would do to you? Do you know what they would do to you there?

I mean the oxymoron of queers for Palestine. It's just, it's unbelievable. Stay away from tall buildings. Actually, they're quite pro-trans in Iran. In Iran, they are, yeah. Well, for the reasons of they don't want there to be gay people. Yes. It's a very interesting moment right now in terms of what's happening in the West.

And I wonder if this is, you know, look, I think one thing we should also acknowledge is, I see people posting this thing as like, you know, when they came for these people, I stood up, when they came for these people, I stood up, and then when they came for the Jews, no one stood up because that, and I don't think that's true. I think we've seen a tremendous outpouring of support. I mean, that speech by Eric Adams, the mayor of New York. Unbelievable. Unbelievable.

Unbelievable. And I'm also heartened. Douglas Murray's speech? Yeah. Did you see that? In a synagogue, yes. Oh, my God. Yeah.

I think we also ought to acknowledge that the world was shocked by what happened, and many, many people stood up and said something. And I hope that this is a wake-up call for people in the West. I'll be honest with you. We've been in the... Do you think it will be? Well, this is what I was going to say. I'll be honest with you.

What I saw, I wasn't in London. I have many people, friends in London, Jewish friends and non-Jewish friends, who I've been speaking to about what I saw there. This may sound like hyperbole, but I don't see how this issue gets better in the UK. We have an open border. We don't vet the people who are coming in. This is only going to get worse on the UK. But in America, it feels like to me there's a fight to be had over the future of this country

and the attitude it takes to all of these issues. So what does that mean for the future of the UK, if you believe? Nothing good. Nothing good. I mean, I don't see how it gets better. Do you feel that way too, Francis? I think there's always hope. I think there's always hope

You've got to have hope And you've got to believe things can change And that There are always bad moments And there are always dark moments And there will always be dark moments in history And there will always be dark moments in life But that doesn't mean that the darkness will continue

And that I hope that people have That people are starting to wake up That people who are actually going You know what This ideology isn't good This they may Because they're very intelligent

They say nice things and they promise simple solutions to complex problems. But actually, this is a mask-off moment, and you're really seeing what's going on. But this isn't what I'm talking about at all. The fact that people are going to realize workiness is dumb, great. Okay, cool. But that isn't the issue we have in the UK.

The issue we have in the UK is we have a significant minority of people who openly support what Hamas did, and we are importing more of those people every day. The 50,000 people that I saw marching, How many of those people are immigrants and how many aren't? I have no idea. Nobody does. None of us know what percentage of those people actually support Hamas

and what potential of those people just think Palestinians are being badly treated. We don't know. But what we do know is there are some among them who support what Hamas did and the police refuse to do anything about it. The police – Hamas is a prescribed terrorist organization in the UK, which means that if you express public support for Hamas, you should be arrested. and, in my opinion, deported.

That's not going to happen. The last time there was a flare-up, so to speak, in the Middle East, we had people who drove down for hours from a different city to London to Jewish areas of London with Palestine flags and screamed using megaphones, fuck Jewish women, rape Jewish women, kill Jews. Those people were not prosecuted for what they did, even though it is the law of it.

the land that they should. Why were they not prosecuted? Not enough evidence. It was on tape. It was on camera. Yeah. Yeah. So the mayor of New York stands up and gives a speech saying, I am your brother, I stand with Israel. The mayor of London stands up and says, diversity is our strength. So I think another big change that's happening in the American Jewish community this week is, I mean, I think people will know this, but seven out of ten Jews vote Democrat. We always have. You know, American Jews are overwhelming. liberally liberal. Why, Barry, I don't get it. Why? Why? Why? Because historically, the Republican party was a xenophobic party, did not welcome immigrants, did not have a social safety net, and had

deep anti-Semitism at its roots. That's why. History. Okay. Now, I'm not explaining that, I wonder actually how this week may have changed things, but I definitely think that American Jews see how vulnerable we are, see how vulnerable we are, see how long. vulnerable Jewish communities are around the world and are definitely like the number of people on my WhatsApp and Signal and tech saying we should learn how to use a gun. People who I never in a million years would think about owning a gun are now changing their minds real fast. And also as well, you know, there are a lot of metropolitan liberal Jews in London and New York and all of these places. Well, I put it to you, that's about to change. I mean, one of the things we've only got a couple of

minutes you're very busy, is I think we are going to see the Overton window, but also politics shift to the right now. I think it's inevitable. That's already been happening. Yeah. But yes, I agree with that. Yeah. I agree. The question is, you know, will that look like, how right wing will it go? Yeah. Right? And yeah, that's the worry. That's a huge worry. I mean, there are a lot of, don't forget, like, Bill Maher had a great top to his show this past week where he said, you know, the far left and the far right have united on one thing and it's hating the Jews. And there have been a lot of statements put out by influential people on the sort of so-called new right in this country, justifying or explaining

away the slaughter or basically not caring about it too much because they view it as the new current thing. Same people that put their pronouns in their bio and then the Ukraine flag. Well, now we got to support Israel, and we don't want America. We want to, you know, look out for America. We don't want America involved in world affairs. And that sort of brew of sort of neo-isolationism, combined with sort of latent anti-Semitism, combined with a revolution at, you know, whatever the, you know, current thingism is, have led them to be sort of silent in the face of a massacre. That is also very alarming. Agreed. Barry, we've got to let you go. Before we do, we always end about the same question, as you know, which is what's the one thing we're not talking about that we should be?

Oh, God. I know there's one thing on the front, at the front of your mind, of course, but this probably brings to light other things that you might want to bring to our audience attention. One thing I've been thinking about this week is the number of women I know in this country who, after Trump got elected,

put on their pussy hats and marched for women's rights, terrified that Trump was going to sort of bring in a reality, bring the handmaid's tail to reality, or who were taking to the streets and certainly the op-ed pages of our newspapers in favor of Me Too and the idea of believe all women. Well, here we are where rape has been used as a weapon of war against Israeli women, some of whom have been taken hostages,

and I don't think I've seen a single statement from a feminist organization in this country about it. What does that tell you about the actual state of American feminism? What happened to the idea of believing women? Well, I guess not in the case of them being Jewish women. Thank you.