The Darrell McClain show
Independent media that won't reinforce tribalism. We have one Planet; nobody's leaving, so let’s reason together!! Darrell McClain is a Military veteran with an abnormal interest in politics, economics, religion, philosophy, science, and literature. He's the author of Faith and the Ballot: A Christian's Guide to Voting, Unity, and Witness in Divided Times. Darrell is a certified Counselor. He focuses primarily on relationships, grief, addiction, and PTSD. He was born and raised in Jacksonville, FL, and went to Edward H white High School, where he wrestled under Coach Jermy Smith and The Late Brian Gilbert. He was a team wrestling captain, District champion, and an NHSCA All-American in freestyle Wrestling. He received a wrestling scholarship from Waldorf University in Forest City, Iowa. After a short period, he decided he no longer wanted to cut weight, effectively ending his college wrestling journey. Darrell McClain is an Ordained Pastor under the Universal Life Church and remains in good standing, as well as a Minister with American Marriage Ministries. He's a Believer in The Doctrines of Grace, Also Known as Calvinism. He joined the United States Navy in 2008 and was A Master at Arms (military police officer). He was awarded several medals while on active duty, including an Expeditionary Combat Medal, a Global War on Terror Medal, a National Defense Medal, a Korean Defense Medal, and multiple Navy Achievement Medals. While in the Navy, he also served as the assistant wrestling coach at Robert E. Lee High School. He's a Black Belt in Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu under 6th-degree black belt Gustavo Machado. Darrell Trains At Gustavo Machado Norfolk under the 4th-degree black belt and Former Marine Professor Mark Sausser. He studied psychology at American Military University and criminal justice at ECPI University.
The Darrell McClain show
Anna Kasparian Versus Bill Maher On Genocide, History, And Power
Start with a boast and a blind spot: “The truth never makes me uncomfortable.” From that line, the debate ignites. We take you inside Anna Kasparian’s appearance on Bill Maher’s Club Random, where calm receipts meet moving goalposts, and where big claims about Gaza, genocide, and history collide with facts on the record.
We unpack the core disputes in plain language. What does “genocide” actually mean in international law, and why have major human rights organizations and genocide scholars said Gaza meets the threshold? Did Israel “give Gaza back,” or did border, airspace, and resource control keep occupation intact? What does “from the river to the sea” mean when stated in full, and how do decades of Arab peace offers—from Egypt and Jordan’s treaties to the 2002 Arab Peace Initiative—undercut the story of unbroken rejectionism?
We also confront the most persistent deflections. Women’s and LGBTQ rights in parts of the Muslim world are real concerns; they do not justify bombing civilians or starving a population. “Human shields” allegations do not erase the duty to protect noncombatants. Viral atrocity stories demand verification, not certainty theater. And the “half a loaf” myth from 1948 dissolves when you look at maps, expulsions, and the expansion that followed. Throughout, we condemn terrorism and hostage-taking without handing a blank check to siege, settlement growth, and annexation talk that make a genuine peace structurally impossible.
This is a guided tour through claims Maher leans on and the evidence he skips: ICJ filings, casualty data, occupation law, and the political incentives that keep the conflict running. We don’t ask you to pick a camp; we ask you to keep a principle. If the moral rule is “don’t kill civilians,” it applies on October 7 and it applies every day since. Press play for a clear, sourced breakdown—and bring your best counterarguments.
If this episode sharpened your thinking, follow the show, share it with a friend, and leave a review telling us the one claim you still want us to test next.
Hey friends, um, it has been too long since we talked at this channel about what a truly ludicrous uh person Bill Maher is. Honestly, I was halfway to forgetting about the guy, but this got my attention. This is my friend Anna Kasparian on Bill Maher's podcast, Club Random. If you've never seen the show before, it's a really strange thing, given who Bill Maher has always been. Since it's sort of his attempt to create something like the Joe Rogan show, which is just not a natural fit for Bill Maher's personality or the kind of talk show host he's always been. Like, say what you want about Joe Rogan. Um, you know, there's a lot you can say there. I mean, he went from being a Bernie voter in 2020 to being a Trump voter in 2024, so uh the trajectory is uh capital N, capital G, not good. But the the whole sitting around drinking whiskey and shooting the shit with you know, whatever guest, like that whole thing actually makes sense for Rogan, for who he is, what he's like, for the simple reason that he's just naturally a really good conversationalist. He's incredibly good at creating a relaxed atmosphere and putting guests at their ease and getting them talking and just kind of you know being someone who likes to spur them on to talk more and you know, getting them to open up and laugh with him and all that stuff. I mean that that's really his talent. Uh Bill Marr, not so much. The usual criticism of Joe Rogan is that you know he goes too far in the direction of just agreeing with whatever the guest says. Like when I was on the show, he agreed with me about unions of Medicare for All and Economic Equality. And when Donald Trump was on the show, he agreed with Trump uh about everything. Bill Marr definitely does not have that problem. He's just nonstop talking over his guests and yelling at them if he doesn't agree with what they say, which makes the hey, this is just two dudes or a dude and a woman, you know, hanging out in a rec room, splashing some bourbon into glasses and having a good chat, right? It makes that whole shtick an incredibly weird fit for what he's actually doing. Like the man is just congenitally incapable of listening to what people say and learning anything new. Um also as I see people uh pointing out in the chat, the camera angles on club random are just odd. Like I just don't know what's going on there. But uh, in any case. Um so Anna went to the show, and I'm sure some of you watching have uh, you know, itemized lists you'd be only too happy to give me of you know her bad takes and uh why it's terribly problematic that I still like her, but I'm just gonna have to uh say that I'm not losing any sleep over the fact that some of you guys think that. Um, you know, both because I'm, you know, on general principle, quite honestly, if I ever start denouncing real-life friends to pacify leftists on the internet, I really hope somebody does me the favor that Chief Bromden does for McMurphy at the end of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. But also watching this exchange, I kept thinking, yeah, this is why we're friends, or, you know, really beyond friendship. This is why I'll always think, you know, she's a force for kid. Um, you know, she doesn't have to agree with me about Marxism or have all the same opinions about every subject that I do. She just has to keep being the kind of person who would embarrass Bill Marr this bad. Because, well, let me just start by playing you like 20 seconds. This is the immediate lead up to the Gaza part of the conversation. Uh, now a few minutes before what I'm about to show you, Bill had baited Anna about Gaza while they uh were talking about something else. And uh she sort of rolled her eyes and moved on. But this is the moment just before it comes back up, uh, because she's gonna bring it up this time. Anna was just talking about some of the things that she now thinks that she got wrong over the years, uh, when she was too quick to accept, you know, media narratives about ongoing events that she'd later find out were oversimplifications of what happened. And she says that what she got out of that, you know, was that as a journalist, she needed to eat her vegetables. And then she says this to clarify what she means.
SPEAKER_03:To me, eating vegetables as someone who works in media is reading and consuming content that you know is gonna make you uncomfortable because it's gonna challenge what your preconceived notions are. If you're listening to a podcast, the truth never makes me uncomfortable.
SPEAKER_04:It only exhilarates me.
SPEAKER_20:I mean got that? Uh the truth never makes them uncomfortable. It just exhilarates them. And I just want to say something about the dynamics of what's going on here. Bill has this deeply weird Club Random podcast. And Anna's happy to go on and drink whiskey with him. Um, you know, I can testify that she actually does like bourbon snatchdick. And even in the face of Bill's Titanic awkwardness and prickliness, she's even opening up uh in just the way that guests on a let's just hang out and shoot the shit show like Club Random are supposed to do. Like to the point where she's saying some very self-critical things about some of her past failings as a journalist. And instead of responding at the same way, same wavelength, um, you know, saying something thoughtful or reflective or god knows even self-critical himself, Bill just tells her that, you know, he's an epistemic superman who's never ever had any reaction to the truth except for being exhilarated by it. Nothing true could ever make him, you know, even momentarily uncomfortable. Like the man has never in his life had a strong belief and felt discomfort when he had to think about uh whether he got it wrong. He's just the one human being who has never had that experience because he is just that rational. And this is where Anna has finally had it and steers things back to Gaza, where you know, kid, he needled her a little bit earlier and she pretty much let it go at the time. So let's watch that part.
SPEAKER_04:No matter where it's, you know, on whatever side it is. Yeah.
SPEAKER_03:You want to talk about a little bit of shit? You want to get exhilarated, right?
SPEAKER_04:I think exhilarating. I know you're gonna say genocide, and I'm gonna say, well, you don't know what the word means. And it's like, if you don't even know what the words mean.
SPEAKER_03:I'm Armenian, I know what the word means.
SPEAKER_20:Um, I'm Armenian. I know what the word means. I really can't think of uh better example of identity politics being used for good than that. But it's also just worth highlighting how incredible what Bill is doing in this opening gamut is. Because last I chant, every single otherwise respected human rights organization in the world has said that Israel's committed genocide in Gaza. Yeah, yeah, if you want to play this game. Uh I guess you can insist that the long and damningly thorough South African filing at the International Court of Justice that documents all the evidence for Gaza filling, you know, fitting every element that's used in the UN Convention on Genocide. Um, then that whole document reflects that none of the lawyers who uh put together the case know what the word means, and Amnesty International doesn't know what the word means, and Human Rights Watch doesn't know what the word means, Bestellum, by the way, doesn't know what the word means, and the overwhelming consensus of academic uh scholars of genocide around the world is just because none of those scholars know what the word means. And only Bilbar and people who agree with Bilbar know what the word means. Or maybe every single otherwise respected major human rights organization of the world, the preponderance of genocide scholars and etc. etc. etc., all do know what the word means. But they're just like insidiously pretending not to, because they're all anti-Semites who love Hamas, especially the Israeli Jewish Holocaust scholars who say that it's genocide. But gosh, that doesn't seem very like just everyone prefers to build not for a minute and not for a second, but it's possible that he himself might be missing something there. That thought just ever seems to go through his head.
SPEAKER_04:The people who hate oppression so much are on the side of the people. And that's not just a Muslim. If if you social justice warriors, if you have any other issue besides gender apartheid in the world that is above that, you're just a joke. That if you're if you hate oppression, there is there is one issue which should be above all because it affects more people, hundreds of millions of women, who have basically no freedom in the Muslim world.
SPEAKER_03:Right, so we should slaughter them instead, which has just been happening.
SPEAKER_00:Now of course, I would be remiss um uh if I did not say that I find it rather rich that somebody like Bill Maher is going to pretend that he cares about women and his his just care and love for women is why he wants to uh murder uh Muslims. Uh anybody who's watched uh Bill Maher over the years has seen his shtick and his trajectory is knows he's just anti-religious. Uh he's a proud atheist, and he thinks that the most uh barbaric uh religion is Islam, and his want to want to uh wage this war is because he's ha has a uh antenna, I would just say, for anybody that happens to be a Muslim who's doing anything uh wrong around the world, and he has a gap and blind spot for anybody who happens to be uh, let's say uh European Christian or white wrong white Anglo-Saxon Christian who's doing anything wrong around the world. That's just particularly because culturally he's gotten used to dealing with uh uh the George Bush types of people and the Donald Trump type of people because he's an American. It it it's the foreign person over there that he thinks is a is a unique threat that must be dealt with because, oh my goodness, look at how they treat their women and they to keep their women in, as he says, Beeky prophets. I always challenge people like Billmore to go look at what the Muslim women wear in the Middle East, and go look at what uh traditionally Catholic nuns wear and tell me how different it is. One woman, because they're over there, is oppressed, one woman here is spiritually liberated. Um I'll let you wrestle with that on your own. Let's get back to the clip.
SPEAKER_20:And that's just such a perfect response to the bullshit that Bill is pulling here, which is exactly what apologists for the genocide always do. Talk about the oppression of women in the Muslim world, talk about how ironic it is, that people who support gay rights are supposed to are opposed to the mass displacement and slaughter of people in an area where gay people are treated badly, like every tired, pointless lol lol years for Palestine, lol lol joke during the last 26 months of like mind-numbingly evil, live-streamed atrocities against the civilian population of Gaza. And this is exactly the right response to cut through all the nonsense. Like, yeah, the oppression of women in many parts of the Muslim world is very bad. But what exactly do you think follows from that premise? Do you think we're helping the Muslim world by killing lots of them and dropping 2,000-pound bombs on their children's schools? And by the way, I think Ana is completely correct, just like Zoran Mamdani is completely correct, you know what he says it. To be clear that October 7th is very bad because killing civilians is never ever justified. Let's not have any confusion around that principle. But of course, that's the same principle that's been violated so many times over by the Israeli military in Gaza that I mean, where do you even begin? There's just no comparison. If you're going to use that principle to justify condemning the murder of several hundred Israeli civilians on October 7th, which you should, how much more intensely would you have to use it to condemn the systematic displacement of millions of civilians for their homes? The murder of tens of thousands of children, and the mutilation of God knows how many more, the calculated, premeditated, and gleefully admitted use of starvation as a weapon of collective punishment of civilians. You can find a zillion statements from Israeli officials, politicians, you know, say, well, if they want food to be allowed in, then uh all everything that's happened in the last 26 months since October 7th, 2023. Unless, of course, you don't really apply that principle to Palestinians, unless you think, okay, that's a principle for Israelis and Americans and other people that we really think are people, but you know, we don't really care about the almost unfathomably larger scale violations of the same principle in Gaza, because you don't quite think of Palestinians as people, the way you think of those other groups as people. And let's be real about this. This is what everything that Bill thinks about this comes down to in the end. And by the way, it went by so fast it's easy to miss it, but I think when they were talking about October 7th, I heard Bill say something about raping babies, which is just amazing, right? Uh because that's not even something that was ever alleged. Bill just fused together in his head two atrocity stories that, by the way, are both not true. You know, what really happened on October 7th is bad enough. Um killing civilians is always wrong, period, no exceptions. If you think there's an exception for, quote, settler unquote civilians, and you know, every Israeli Jew is a settler might be off an issue or whatever, then honestly, I have nothing but contempt for you. Um, you know, there is a fringe of people, you know, within the left who say that. Uh, I think we should politely but firmly have nothing to do with them. And taking civilian hostages is a serious war crime in itself. But both of those, right? Killing civilians and taking people hostage or detaining them without charges, even, you know, with their children and et cetera, uh, which is somehow supposed to be different from taking hostages, are things that Israel has done to the Palestinian population at a vastly larger scale. Right? No, you know, that doesn't make what Hamas did on October 7th acceptable, small-scale war crimes against civilians whose government has engaged in large-scale war crimes. They're still war crimes, that's they're still unacceptable. Let's not have any equivocation about that. And look, you know, I'd be shocked if if there were actually zero rapes, that this was the first time in the history of the world that, you know, hundreds or thousands of angry young male fighters were unleashed in enemy territory with a mandate to kill or capture uh random people, and there were literally zero sexual assaults. But the idea that there was mass rape used as a weapon of war, this has been asserted many times and investigated many times. And it just doesn't seem to be true. So Bill has that long discredited narrative mixed up in his head with another story that's been discredited forever about beheaded babies on October 7th, which seems to be about as true as, you know, uh, you know, for the you know, for the old heads out there, right? The Iraqi soldiers we were told were dumping babies out of incubators in Kuwait when Bush Senior was manufacturing for the first Gulf War. Right? So, you know, Bill fuses the two to get something about raped babies that nobody ever claimed. Although, by the way, if you want to talk about actual rape being, you know, used as weapon of war, Google uh Sade Time, that's S-C-E, second word T-E-I-M-A-N, and boy, you're in for a learning experience about that one. We have uh systematic rape of Palestinian detainees by Israeli soldiers at this prison camp. We have Israeli politicians defending that rape on the floor of the Knesset, we have Israeli mainstream media pundits uh defending the rapists on Israeli television, but of course, that's not the kind of thing that's ever gonna penetrate the fog of weed and cigar smoke and smug self-confidence that just blankets Bill's head at all times.
SPEAKER_04:Well, you should you should prosecute a word to the end. That doesn't that does involve slaughter of every war, you know.
SPEAKER_03:Uh I think, listen, civilians get killed in wars. I think everyone knows that, everyone acknowledges that. Especially when you hide especially when you hide behind them. But when 83%, according to the IDF's own data, and this is report, by the way, I consume Israeli media on this. I don't consume American media on this. And Israeli media is super honest, way more honest than our media is. So when the IDF's own data indicates that 83% of the people that they've killed are civilians.
SPEAKER_04:Because they hide behind them.
SPEAKER_03:But Bill, do you understand that by killing so many civilians, they are essentially multiply- multiplying extremism?
SPEAKER_04:I do understand that. Do you understand that there's very often in the world two very bad choices?
SPEAKER_03:And you only I mean I'm an American and I have to vote in presidential elections. Yes, I do know that.
SPEAKER_04:You don't have the good choice. You have the bad choice and the even worse choice. Israel has been being attacked by first of all, the entire Arab world rejected them for 75 years. They kept trying to make a deal. They kept saying, no, we want it all. That's what from the river to the sea means. It means we want it all. We don't want to compromise. They've never wanted a compromise. Israel gave Gaza back.
SPEAKER_20:Okay. There are so many things wrong with this. Like what Bill gave us is essentially a history lesson from an alternate dimension. Like, let's start with the part that's the least wrong, although it's still very extremely wrong. You know, from the river to the sea, by the way, isn't even a like slogan. That's that's the first part of a slogan, right? It's a reference to a geographical area, which is the area of Israel's current borders. Go in from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea. I find it fascinating that people like Bill never seem to want to quote the full slogan, which is from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free. Possibly because saying the Palestine will be free part introduces the uncomfortable thought that that might not be the situation at the moment. You know, that the Palestinians are very unfree in various ways throughout that area. The ones who live within the Green Line, within Israel's pre-1967 borders, are the most free since, you know, at least they have, you know, they were eventually given uh citizenship and voting rights, which have been denied to millions of other Palestinians, the West Bank and Gaza, for blatantly racist reasons. Uh, because if they got citizenship and voting rights, there would be too many citizens with the wrong ethnic, you know, ethnic background. Israel would therefore lose its Jewish character as a state. Israeli politicians say this stuff out loud just all the time. They have no compunction about it. So, yeah, compared to the disenfranchised permanent non-citizen intervention of the West Bank and Gaza, the Palestinians within pre-1967 Israel are more free than that. You know, they were kept under martial law and denied citizenship for the first couple decades of the state, but they were eventually given citizenship. But to this day, they're subject to forms of discrimination and areas like housing and education that would be illegal in any normal Western democracy. You know, any town under a certain size is legally allowed to have a selection committee uh that uh could determine cultural compatibility of new residents, right? Uh figure that out and then start thinking about how the same law would play out in Alabama. Um and their participation in the political process has been, you know, to various extents, that's been push and pull over the decades, but it's been severely curtailed often by Israeli laws banning any political party that gets too. Anti-Zionists from participating in Israeli elections. But yeah, even when you put all this on the table, sure, those Palestinians are certainly more free than the Palestinians of the West Bank and Gaza, who are just sweepingly denied basic democratic and human rights and legal equality because they're ethnicity. If you're an Israeli settler who lives in Hebron, for example, you're considered for every legal purpose to live in Israel rather than living abroad. You vote in Israeli elections. You have the protection of the Israeli army. If you're accused of a crime, you're tried in a real court. Palestinians in Hebron have none of those things. They don't get to vote in elections to decide who rules them and controls every aspect of their lives. Israeli military operates there whenever they they they have a mind to, right? I mean, there's no constraint on that at all. And, you know, if you know if you're in uh B or C, right, you know, where the Israeli army is there all the time, right? You know, they absolutely don't pretend to be there to protect your interest if you're a Palestinian who lives, for example, in Hebron. And if you're accused of a crime by Israeli authorities, uh, you're tried in a totally separate and unequal legal system, a military kangaroo court, where your your chance of getting justice if you know um Israeli authorities falsely accuse you is exactly as good as you'd think it was. In other words, what they've got now is a single apartheid state from the river to the sea. And so, you know, look, I mean, different people could be opposed to Zionism for different reasons and from different directions. You know, you find people who are like pan-Arab nationalists or Islamists who might you know chant like there's an Arabic slogan that's like similar but it's not the same, it's like from the river to the sea, Palestine should be Arab, right? You know, that's that's obviously a very different thing. And you know, they're advocating a political program that like a secular socialist like they wouldn't like. But, you know, when Western, by the way, disproportionately Jewish pro-Palestine protesters chant from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free. What they're talking about, by and large, is a single democratic state free with equal rights for everybody, which is exactly what would happen if I had my way. Right? Like, like my first choice would be that what should happen, you know, is exactly what happened in South Africa in the 1990s, which is a transition from an exclusionary, in that case Afrikaner ethno-state, to being a real pluralistic, normal, multi-ethnic democracy with equal rights for everybody based on a universalist, specific nationalist conception of citizenship. You know, you could tell me that that's too utopian, and you know, fair enough. I can't many things that seem very utopian given the way the world is right now. I'm a socialist. I want workers control the means of production. Um you can tell me that after everything that's happened, uh, people can never live together in peaceful coexistence because two different ethnic communities, uh, you know, too much has happened between them for that to be possible. Um, but but I don't really buy that argument either for two reasons. First, like look at Germany in 2025. There are no children of grandchildren of great-grandchildren of SS officers who are bet whose like best friends are Jewish or Roma or whatever, right? On a historical timescale, it's it's actually remarkable how quickly that happened. Second, if there was a two-state partition tomorrow, that would still leave a couple million, you know, Israeli Arabs living on the Israeli side of the lines. So assuming you don't want to ethnically cleanse them, right, as part of this two-state solution, there's gonna be coexistence either way. There can't be people living together in the same state either way. The question is whether it's gonna be on terms of equality or whether those couple million people are gonna be second or third class citizens in an exclusionary ethnostate where you know the state unabashedly sees it as a core imperative to make sure those people never become the ethnic majority. All of which is just to say, yeah, look, if I could ask a magical genie to implement my preferred solution, that would be it, especially since partitioning the country between a Tulich ethnic state and a separate Palestinian state would mean hardening divisions forever. And we've seen how that's played out in contexts like Northern Ireland or India Pakistan. But also I do realize that I'm an extremist on that. You know, maybe in 20 years what I want will happen. History often surprises people. But right now, most Palestinians and most other people in the region have long since given up on any sort of one-state truly democratic solution. They're just focused on ending the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza so there could be a Palestinian state. So at least West Bank and Gaza Palestinians can finally get some basic human rights because they'll finally be citizens of something. And this brings us to the thing that Bill is way more crazily wrong about in what we just watched. He said that for 75 years, all the other countries in the region totally rejected Israel and demanded everything. In fact, what he just said is so crazy. I want to back up and play that last bit again.
SPEAKER_04:Israel has been being attacked by, first of all, the entire Arab world rejected them for 75 years. They kept trying to make a deal. They kept saying, no, we want it all. That's what from the river to the sea means. It means we want it all. We don't want to compromise.
SPEAKER_20:And again, this just could not be more wrong. The PLO started advocating a two-state solution in the 1980s. Uh, in the 1990s, they made a huge deal of renouncing their original charter, which called for one state. And since then, they've never stopped advocating a two-state solution. The you know, Arab-Israeli Communist Party are all two-staters and you know, happened for decades. Um even Hamas renounced their original charter and adopted a new charter in the 2000s where they said, you know, and people could say, oh, well, you know, they clearly didn't mean it because, you know, they've committed atrocities, etc. It's like, okay, well, lots of Israeli governments that, you know, have like said they'd be willing to have a diplomatic settlement have committed atrocities. So I don't understand the the uh the standard there. But um, you know, but in the new charter they adopted in the 2000s, they said they won't be willing to accept two states for the sake of Palestinian national unity, right? They didn't like it, but they wouldn't stand in the way. Uh, you know, my understanding is that like for decades now, even Hamas, which I know there are inevitably when this, you know, there are gonna be people in the comments on uh this video calling me a Hamas apologist. Um I'm very very far from actually being one. But even Hamas has many years ago come up with some sort of Islamic law loophole where you can have a long-term truce that lasts for generations or centuries. So, no, there isn't even any significant Palestinian faction that says we want it all at this point. Certainly the PLO has been spending uh decades getting countries around the world to recognize, you know, an independent Palestinian state that's currently hypothetical, you know, it's a legal construct rather than a reality on the ground. But, you know, like this has been a huge priority for them, getting countries around the world to recognize a separate Palestinian state as a way of helping Detroit prodded to actually happen. And yeah, there was a peace deal at Camp David that Arafat ultimately, you know, didn't like immediately jump on and accept. Although, you know, contrary to the Arafat walked away myth, he actually kept negotiating at Taba, and the Israelis were the ones who ultimately pulled the plug. But, you know, the myth never dies. And by the way, there probably would have been a successful peace deal at Camp David if Ben Yahu hadn't lobbied to get uh poison what you know poison pills that he knew Arafat would never accept inserted into the language, which you know we know because he bragged about later, right? And Bill's claim that okay, I'm sorry, one more time, because this is really amazing.
SPEAKER_04:The entire Arab world rejected them for 75 years. They kept trying to make a deal, they kept saying, no, we want it all.
SPEAKER_20:Again, what do you say? The entire Arab world rejected them for 75 years. Israel kept trying to make a deal, the entire Arab world kept saying no, we want it all. Um and seriously, what timeline is Bill giving us the history of here? Because if he's talking about our world, Earth A, right? This is a dispatch from the 1970s, right? When Israel only existed for a couple decades, not 75 years, right? But I mean, seriously, like it sounds like he's talking about the 1970s, you know, the three nose of Khartoum. Meanwhile, Egypt did a peace deal with Israel by the end of the 70s already, right? That was like Carter broker in that. Um, Jordan did a full peace deal with Israel in 1994. And, you know, all the rest of the Arab countries that have not done that, right? Every single country in the Arab world, all of them, has been signed on to the Saudis' uh Arab peace initiative since 2002. That is a very simple deal offering full diplomatic recognition and normalization with Israel, in exchange for Israel withdrawing from the West Bank and Gaza, accepting a token number of refugees and acknowledging that injustice, but uh, and letting the Palestinians form a separate state in the way, you know, the West Bank and Gaza. So for the last 23 years, it's 2002, every Arab country that hadn't already recognized Israel uh has been offering that deal. And for the last 23 years, since 2002, Israel said, fuck off. Netanyahu says every five minutes that he will never allow a separate Palestinian state as long as he's in charge. Uh the Knesset last year voted on a resolution to formally condemn the idea of a, you know, Palestinian state west of the Jordan River, i.e., a Palestinian state anywhere in Israel-Palestine. But Bill doesn't know any of this because he has his favorite narrative nestled firmly in his head. That narrative is about Arab rejectionism and the Palestinians never missing an opportunity to miss it, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. It all sounded good to him the first time he heard it, you know, in like the mid-70s. And no new information will ever dislodge it. But remember, he's never uncomfortable about the truth, and it always accelerates him.
SPEAKER_04:That's what from the river to the sea means. It means we want it all. We don't want to compromise. They've never wanted to compromise. Israel gave Gaza back.
SPEAKER_03:But did they back them back in 2007? Let's say our country was occupied by Mexico, right? We have a bunch of um people who are occupying our land, and then they decide, you know what, we're gonna leave. Let me finish. Let's say Mexico decides, you know what, we're gonna leave, but we're gonna control their electricity. What goes in, what comes out.
SPEAKER_04:But they were attacking.
SPEAKER_03:We're gonna mow the lawn and just like randomly decide we're gonna slaughter people because they allegedly threw ropes? They they have literally allegedly. I mean, Israel has nuclear weapons, Bill. They have nuclear weapons. And they don't have military superpower backing them.
SPEAKER_04:Wait, no, they have nuclear weapons which they don't use. If Hamas they don't use it, they just pretend it's like. If Hamas had a nuclear weapon, how many seconds would it take before they used it on Israel?
SPEAKER_03:I have no idea.
SPEAKER_04:Three. Three is the answer. Three seconds.
SPEAKER_03:How do you know that, Bill? Come on. Because it's in their church. If they use a nuclear weapon against Israel, um, I'm pretty sure the very land that Hamas cares about would be done for.
SPEAKER_04:Okay, then they would be martyrs, and that would be a good thing. Because that's their difficult view of the world. It's a good thing when you die. That's where they spring. Single s might invest sometimes on children. The fact that you can't see the moral difference between these two sides always amazes me a little bit.
SPEAKER_03:I don't, I actually don't see the moral difference when you have like Basilel Smotrich and Ben Gavir literally talking about exterminating the entire population of Gaza. Okay, and these these are not they are. I mean, the statements are brazen, they're upfront, they're honest, this is what they actually want to do. I mean, the West Bank is another example. The West Bank had nothing to do with what happened on October 7th, but they're annexing that land anyway. Uh, they're raining terror on innocent people, innocent Palestinians, they're driving them out of their homes. Like, listen, I am willing to admit, because it's the truth, that what Hamas did on October 7th was a fucking atrocity. Killing innocent people. But but you have a difficult time at least acknowledging the atrocities that have been committed against innocent civilians in Gaza.
SPEAKER_04:Well, it depends on what you call an atrocity.
SPEAKER_00:So again, let me uh this is gonna be one of the ones where I insert things. So this is this is what I find fascinating about this uh type of argument that Bill is trying to make. What Bill is uh trying to say is he he he he's saying that there is no moral equivalency between Israel and Hamas, and I'll let you guys uh work that one out on your own, but I will say that it is a documented fact, you can go look it up yourself, that the person who helped found, fund, and come up with Hamas is the current prime minister of Israel, Bibi Netanyahu. So apparently Bibi Netanyahu thought Hamas was a very uh reasonable and significant trading partner, legitimate government, etc. etc. Why did Benjamin Netanyahu prop up Hamas? Because he was trying to divide and conquer and undermine the PLO. He was also trying to undermine the peaceful left-wing prime minister of Israel at the time, and the Israeli Israeli Prime Minister at the time that actually was murdered, you can go look him up. There are people who accused Benjamin Netanyahu and the Lakud Party of inciting enough outrage that led to the murder of the leftist, more peaceful prime minister of Israel, which then Bijanyahu got in and he followed the philosophy of Yaboginsky and those types of people and took the Israeli government into a more right-wing direction, Hamas being in control, so it can be the constant boogeyman when he talks about them giving Gaza back or giving the West Bank back. You can go pull up a map, look at the lines, and see that the second you look at the map that the project was entirely untenable, you cannot say you gave your population their land back when you control the water supply, when you control the electricity, and when you control egress, etc. etc. It would be the equivalent, this is the analogy, of me breaking into your home, uh saying that it is not my home because my ancestors lived there 5,000 years ago. Uh, me having the uh Air Force, the Army, and the Navy, and uh foot soldiers um on my side, and then saying, now look, uh, you have freedom to have your bedroom, and we split the kitchen and the bathroom and the living room uh is mine as well. Now, you will then say you want all your property back. I killed several of your family members and say, Well, of course I had to kill them, and they threw rocks at me when I was sitting on the couch. This is an outlandish and ridiculous argument, and I'm not shocked, but I'm um uh somewhat uh perplexed why Bill, who claims to be the great rationalist, cannot see the flaw in his logic. Again, and I've said this in private conversations, and I'll say it in public conversations. The people who are uh for for Palestine, a pro-Palestinian cause, whether it was the PLO or whether it was Hamas right now, they have no Navy, they have no army, they have no Marine Corps, they have no air force. So you can call it a war if you like. It is not a war. It cannot be a war because one opposing force has none of the things, and the other force has an air force, a navy, snipers, ground defense, and the other force has rocks and tunnels they have to hide under, and what? Uh self-made self-made homemade bombs and stuff like that. To pretend like that is that is an equivalent military force is uh it stretches all stretches all of the imagination to the point of blind credulity.
SPEAKER_20:Yes, truly. Who's to say what's an atrocity? Such a difficult question. Who knows? What what do words mean, Bill? And there's a lot that you could say about uh that chunk that we just watched. Um, but I just want to highlight one thing, which is the pattern where Bill throws an argument against the wall. Anna starts to dismantle it, and he interrupts her mid-sentence to rush on to the next argument and see if, you know, see if he can make it to the next goalpost shift before his audience has time to think about what she just said. We never even got to whatever point she was building up to with the thing about Israel having nuclear weapons and you know being backed by the world's biggest superpower because she literally didn't get through the sentence. I suspect that where she was going with that was that, you know, Israel is clearly the actor in this situation with the most power to uh resolve it towards a peace deal, if they actually wanted to. But that's just a guess, because Bill literally never let her get there. He just cut in with uh this uh dumbass argument about how uh Israel can't possibly be genocidal because they don't use their nuclear weapons in Gaza, which assumes that, you know, by the way, that nothing can count as genocide if you don't do it in the uh fastest and most efficient way possible. Um, which, by the way, as Sam Badger pointed out in a really good essay he wrote about this in the Substack, by that standard, the Holocaust wasn't genocide either, because the Nazis often delayed to kill a Jewish prisoners in order to do things like use them as forced labor to build V-2 rockets. And then Bill asks her as an ultra-spug gacha, if Hamas had news, how long do you think it would take them to use them? And then he answers his own question: three seconds. And she makes the obvious counterpoint that, you know, wait a few seconds here. You can't really use nuclear weapons if you're fighting over territory in a tiny country without killing yourself in the process or you know, irradiating um the land that you want and irradiating the land that you're already living on. And he just cuts in with uh his absolute certainty that they would do it anyway, because they'd want to be martyrs. Uh, since that fits the cartoon narrative in his head about Islam. Even though like Iran is run by political Islamists and in the four and a half decades since the Islamic Revolution, they haven't so much as initiated a full-fledged land war with any other country. I mean, they've, you know, backed proxy forces in various places and, you know, tried to be a regional player, but you know, they've been extremely cautious and conservative about risking their own military. Um, you know, to the point that when Trump bombed them, they just did a token response to make sure that it would de-escalate. You know, they they certainly seem to have a sense of self-preservation. But Bill is somehow sure of this anyway, in the case of Hamas. And then he's shifted entirely off the nuke thing before Anna can even connect the dots. Uh, they're just sitting there begging to be connected, which is, huh, the fact that Hamas couldn't use nukes if they had them without irradiating the land that they wanted and the land they were already living on should maybe tell anyone with two brain cells to rub together for warm that maybe Israel doesn't use nukes less because Netanyahu and Ben Gavir and Smotrich are too humanitarian to use nukes. And more because they too don't want to irradiate the very land that they're trying to seize, and for that matter, the land that they currently live on. All wars are going to have a transformation.
SPEAKER_02:A double tap on a hospital? All more A double tap on a hospital? So when the first responders show up?
SPEAKER_04:I don't know exactly what you're talking about. I re I vaguely remember the thing.
SPEAKER_02:Right.
SPEAKER_04:Yeah. First of all, that's an old terrorist trick. That's what they do all the time.
SPEAKER_03:Okay, but you are you at least going to acknowledge that the idea of doing that was wrong?
SPEAKER_04:Yeah, I'm sure they have committed what we would call war crimes, as every army does in every war.
unknown:Right.
SPEAKER_00:I'm sure they have committed what we would call war crimes. Okay. So if they would commit what uh we would call war crimes, how do you expect the people who they are committing the war crimes on should respond? Should they respond? By praying that the bombs stop Bill. I mean, you are an atheist and you think prayer is stupid, correct? How should they respond? Uh so how he thinks they should respond is slavery and submission and uh obedience forever, which is something that he would not do. He could comfortably say from his perch uh in the United States of America, having never done anything for anybody, uh, especially when it comes to uh putting on a uniform and going and fighting for anything he b actually believes in.
SPEAKER_20:What we would call war crimes. I just cannot even call that himself, you know, like for a second. Cannot let that thought penetrate his head.
SPEAKER_03:Including our own, right?
SPEAKER_04:In every war, including the civil war. Uh I forget who it was who made the good point. Like, um during the Civil War, a lot of people would say, especially in the South, that uh Sherman did not have to burn Atlanta quite as badly as he did. I mean, we were pretty brutal. But would you also then just say, well, we don't know who the good guys were in that war? No, I think it was the North. I think they they committed the atrocity in Atlanta. Yep, that's true. They burned when they shouldn't, and they were very rough on the South. They were still the good guys. They were fighting against slavery as Israel is fighting to survive, and also, you know, they are the front line in the Western world. I totally disagree with you on this entirely.
SPEAKER_03:I think much of the problems we have in the Middle East is due to the enabling of this expansion. Look, it's an expansionist policy. If Israel wasn't trying to continue expanding in the Middle East, I don't think they would be dealing with the enmity, like the enemies that they're dealing with.
SPEAKER_04:They've never been asked, they've never been trying to expand.
SPEAKER_03:They're trying to annex the West Bank right now and Lebanon.
SPEAKER_00:Again, this is pure stupidity. Go and look at the map of Israel in 1948 and what Israel what the Israeli land was, and go look at what the map is in 2025, and then say with a straight face, Israel has not expanded.
SPEAKER_03:I'm southern Lebanon and Syria, which they succeeded in.
SPEAKER_04:These were all places that they were attacked from. When they became a country in 1947, they said, okay, we will accept half a loaf. They had as much right to that land as anybody. There was a continual presence there since a thousand BC when King David had a I don't care about that at all. Okay, but it's relevant.
SPEAKER_00:And for the record, Bill Maher is an atheist who does not actually believe King David was a person. This is just a nonsense argument.
SPEAKER_04:They're not colonizers.
SPEAKER_20:She didn't, actually. Uh but the uh level of Gish Gallop between nonsense talking points here is just amazing. And again, just as a reminder, the thing that's supposed to be the difference, right? The whole revise of club random as opposed to what he does on his HBO show is that this is his laid back hanging out and drinking whiskey and just having a conversation show, which makes all of this pretty funny, darkly funny given what they're talking about, but pretty funny nonetheless. Anna brought up the IDF doing double tap strikes in hospitals. And he seemed confused about what she was even talking about. She started to explain, well, you know, the responders come and then you you hit it again to kill the responders. Um and he pivoted to what aboutism about, you know, the terrorists doing stuff like that. She started to say, okay, but you know, Pitts, does that make it okay when Israel does it? And then he was all the way back to the 1860s talking about Sherman's march to the sea, you know, like long before the Teneva convention. Uh, and by the way, I mean, you know, Sherman's March to the Sea is absolutely nothing compared to what's been done to the population of Gaza. And that was an actual civil war between vast armies that you know could could actually like you know pose meaningful threats to each other. Whereas despite all of Bill's bullshit about Israel fighting to survive, you know, I mean, the more honest um you know, apologists, I mean, I'm thinking here of people like uh, you know, Yoram Hazoni, uh, will admit when you pose the question to question to them directly, that there's never been any scenario of any kind where Israel's actual military survival was somehow at risk from Hamas, right? That Hamas somehow had that capacity. And then we got this alternate dimension history lesson where Israel, quote, accepted half a loaf, unquote, in 1948. And just for anyone who doesn't know the actual history in our timeline, birthday, the Palestinian leadership at the time was advocating that the British rule of Palestine end in a way, you know, that played out like it had when British rule had ended elsewhere. You know, that you know, just the whole former colony would just become independent as a unit. Um, not everywhere, obviously, it's gonna be Pakistan, whatever, but you know, some places, and that's what they wanted. Uh, they wanted a single state with equal rights for Jews and Arabs. Uh, you know, you can go back and and read the documents where they said this explicitly, you know, I mean, going back to like the uh Arab Council's like statement, you know, rejecting the appeal commission or whatever uh in uh in the late 30s. But the UN partition plan gave most of the land in the country to uh the the Zionist Ayushov, even though the Arab population at the time was something like twice the size of the Jewish population at the time. Right? I don't think that there's any any place on the planet where the people there would just accept a minority within your country is going to declare independence to create an exclusionary ethnostate, probably enough the majority is the land mass. Um and good luck to any of you who are within its borders, right? Everybody could predict that Arabs who ended up you know within that new state wouldn't, you know, wouldn't get equal rights, which they certainly didn't, that didn't even get citizenship until the late 1960s, and you know, they had to carry around ID cards uh, you know, to prevent passing, right, uh, for the majority of Israel's history. So yeah, oddly enough, that that wasn't a popular proposal with the uh Palestinian population at the time. Uh so there was a civil war, and eventually other countries in the region intervened. Although, by the way, you know, I mean, I know this is not the narrative in people's heads, but you go back and look at the details of the timeline, right? The other countries in the region didn't intervene until after lots of widely reported atrocities against the Palestinian population had already happened. You know, whether or not you think that's why they did it, right? I mean, that is the timeline. And no, in fact, Israel did not rest content with the half a loaf that the UN had offered them. And it wasn't the UN's loaf anyway, right? I mean, you know, it was the loaf of the people who lived there. Uh, but putting that aside, right, you know, I mean, the like the portion of the loaf the UN offered them was pretty goddamn generous. Right? Remember, the UN actually offered them the majority of the land mass, even though they're outnumbered two to one. And Israel didn't even accept that part of the loaf, right? They gobbled up as much of the rest of the loaf as they could seize. The final borders after 1948 were way beyond what was envisioned in the UN partition plan. Those borders are 78% of the total territory of Israel-Palestine. And when they got a chance to seize the rest of the loaf and the 1967 war, um, you know, which they started, by the way, right? There have been lots of saber-radling from Arab countries, and I guess closing the canal is supposed to be an act of war, right? That's the that's the theory that people always give when they say, no, no, actually, 1967 was defensive, although by that standard the U.S. had gone to war with Cuba during the Cuban Missile Crisis, right, because of the blockade. So I don't really understand that defense at all, but whatever. As far as the actual shooting goes, Israel started the war in 1967 and took the rest of the loaf, right? The remaining 22% of the loaf, at which point they almost immediately started building settlements, started building cities full of their own citizens, you know, scattered around the rest of the loaf, the loaf, right? And you know, the rest is apartheid history. That's the reality. Bill doesn't know any of this, he doesn't care. You know, he doesn't want to know, he doesn't want to know any of this. But remember, you know, the the truth, the truth always exhilarates it.
SPEAKER_03:And they're annexing land. That's what colonizers do.
SPEAKER_04:First of all, you know, the holidays are that special time of year. Uh oh.
SPEAKER_20:Um it really is, by the way, uh here, I'll just uh put this on mute while we play through the ad. Um it really is hard to overstate how intellectually lazy uh Bill is. You know, Anna initially said it's an expansionist project. She didn't even use the word colonizers until Bill did. But, you know, then when he did, she was like, well, that that would fit the definition, right? But she's obviously not calling the Israelis colonizers in the sense of like not indigenous. I think quite rightly, you know, she she couldn't give less of a shit one way or the other about whose ancestors uh were aware of first. You know, I'm certainly not descended from people who lived in Los Angeles 3,000 years ago, and neither is Bill or Anna, right? But all three of us have a right to live there all the same. On any kind of minimally sane liberal democratic standard, no one's rights have anything to do with where their ancestors lived. Um when Anna said, you know, what she said was that Israel was an expansionist, which is just a fact. Even in 1947 and 1948, they were seizing more of the loaf than even the ridiculous UN partition plan gave them. Um and you know, ethnically cleansing a lot of Palestinian villagers in those parts of the loaf. And then in 1967, they started occupying and settling the rest of the loaf. And as Anna points out, right now there's a move to formally annex the rest of the loaf uh in the West Bank, not to mention uh parts of southern Lebanon, not to mention the really brazen nonsense in Syria, where Israel's been illegally holding on to the Golan Heights forever. And the official excuse was that they needed it as a buffer zone. And then, just in the last year, they took the opportunity of the new government coming in in Syria and the instability around that, and they claimed to be intervening on behalf of like a Syrian group, because they could they didn't even have the pretext of any sort of attacks on Israel coming from there. Uh, no one there was even threatening at the time, but they took the opportunity to seize more Assyrian territory, which they said they needed as a buffer zone to protect the Golan Heights. In other words, as a buffer zone for their buffer zone. Does anybody seriously doubt that given enough time they'll start demanding a buffer zone to the buffer zone to their buffer zone? And no, even if King David had a summer home in that region in Syria, it would be absolutely irrelevant to all of this. Neither international law nor sort of basic human morality recognized historically this land was associated with our ethnic group as an excuse to seize territory. I mean, we'd all recognize that nothing that happened in the 19th century would justify Mexico, you know, sending an armader to uh do a reconquista of Los Angeles, kicking out me and Anna and Belmar, uh, and no historical arcana about the Kievan Rus or whatever happened at the court of Peter the Great could justify Putin invading Ukraine. And those examples are like last week's news compared to King David, who may or may not even be an actual historical figure. I mean, just for context, he's supposed to have reigned about 15 or 16 centuries before King Arthur is supposed to have reigned in Britain. And if he was real, right, which isn't if, but if he was real, we we sure don't know much about him. So it's kind of amazing that Bill Maher, who made a name for himself as one of the OG smug atheists, wants to justify what he thinks should happen in 2025 on the basis of best half-mythological biblical stories.
SPEAKER_04:Slash club random.
SPEAKER_03:Love the night. Reach for Zen after dark, a limited cocktail-inspired series.
SPEAKER_04:Again, they were willing to take half a loaf. Then they were attacked in 19. Excuse me.
SPEAKER_03:It's way more complicated than that. That's okay.
SPEAKER_04:If they do, really wouldn't. Tell me the war. So for instance, they attacked what we're doing.
SPEAKER_03:Okay, so in 1967, when um was the first time? No, that wasn't the first time. But when you say that they have offered land to the Palestinians, land that belonged to them in the first place, it didn't belong solely to the whole point of this whole two-state solution was okay, we'll give you this territory if you promise not to militarize. Without a military, you don't have a country. You don't have a country without a military. You don't have a country without borders, right? Without a military, you can't defend your borders. So if I were engaging in these negotiations with the Israelis, I would say, listen, I respect the territory that you're offering. However, we need to militarize. We need to protect our borders. To me, that's a big thing.
SPEAKER_04:But that's not what they ever used it for. Again, they gave Gaza back in 2005. They could have chosen.
SPEAKER_03:They didn't give Gaza back in 2005. They have Gaza but didn't really leave Gaza when they had complete control over the territory.
SPEAKER_04:Excuse me, just let me finish one sentence. They could have turned Gaza into a state.
SPEAKER_00:It's so funny. If one thing we know about Bill Maher from real time in Bill Maher and from Club Random, he habitually you're interrupting everyone and never lets anybody finish their sentence.
SPEAKER_04:It was much more like, I don't know, Dubai or something, if they wanted to. They didn't. Hamas took over right away. They never have elections after that.
SPEAKER_03:You're right about that. You're right about the election.
SPEAKER_04:They're a terrorist mafia, their own population is terrorized by them. They don't like them. All they did was import weapons from Iran, build tunnels, and use it to prosecute this war against Israel. They never used it. So of course Israel is going to be defensive. Their issue was they were not defensive enough, which is why October 7th happened.
SPEAKER_03:So you're making good points. I'm going to concede to some of them. Not all of them.
SPEAKER_04:But but I don't even know why you want to talk about this. I know, I know. I'll ask you one more question.
SPEAKER_00:I don't even know why you want to talk about this. Uh, sixty thousand women and uh and children are are killed. Those women that Bill Maher just pretended that he gave a f uh a a hoot about. I don't even know why you want to talk about this. Uh can't we talk about how we don't like trans people? Just ridiculous.
SPEAKER_20:So notice that after repeating the half-al-oaf thing for the third time, and yep, still doesn't make any more sense than it did the first two. Bill is right back to Israel leaving Gaza. And Anna, who just has the patience of a fucking saint in this conversation, goes back to make the same point again about how Israel was still very much in control of Gaza. There's a reason that every human rights organization on the planet still considered it to be the occupying power, you know, even though they changed their military arrangements, right? Uh, from you know, occupying you know, within to you know, encircling and controlling every aspect of what went on. And Bill just ignores it and says Hamas could have created a state, you know, in Gaza, like Dubai. When obviously Israel wouldn't have let them create any state of any kind, Dubai or you know, Iran or anything else, right? Israel retained full control over Gaza's air and land and sea borders, everything that came in and out, to the point that Israeli generals talked about putting Gaza on a diet only letting in the uh you know necessary amount of nutrition. Uh, Bill thinks that Israel would have let them get away with forming a separate state. Like, they could have started inviting into embassies from around the world and Israel would just let the embassies come, taken a state of the UN, built a Palestinian army base without being immediately bombed in the Arians. Come on. And of course, he immediately pivots from there talking about how justified, you know, how justified Israel was in serving control over Gaza and how she would exert even more control over Gaza, because then October 7th wouldn't have happened. Now, seems to me that October 7th wouldn't have happened if Netanyahu had it by his own account. He brags about it in exactly these terms all the time. Uh, which Anna knows and Bill doesn't because Anna reads Israeli media. Uh, and Bill doesn't. Um and in fact, you know, if Israel hadn't been pursuing, you know, with it, you know, with uh the help of the United States, a regional normalization that would have totally frozen out the Palestinians, take away the only card they had left, and in fact, hadn't spent all of 2023 leading up to October 7th backing settlement robots against Palestinians in the West Bank. None of that justifies the attacks on civilians on October 7th, but if you're looking at what-ifs, where October 7th didn't happen, it seems to me that not doing all that stuff I just said and actually trying to end the conflict instead of doing everything in Netanyahu's power to, you know, tighten the screws of the Palestinians even more, that is what would have been a hell of a lot more likely to prevent October 7th than just tightening the screws on an already controlled and terrorized population even more than Nanyahu was, in the hopes that it would make them just lie down and take it forever. But forget that. What really gets me here is that Bill is trotting out the lazy propagandistic talking point that Hamas could have started a wonderful independent state in Gaza if they wanted to, and then within 30 seconds, he's saying, Yeah, of course Israel controlled Gaza like a prison. And October said it proves that they should have controlled it like an even more tightly controlled prison. And he's just too high on his own bullshit to even notice the contradiction there. And by the way, just to try and keep track of all the bullshit he's laid out in this conversation, I realize I haven't said anything about the uh the human shields talking point that he's brought up uh several times. Uh, but I I knew he would. I stopped an article I wrote about that in 2023 in the show notes. Um I I said, you know, everything I have to say about that there, but basically, anyone who thinks Hamas uses civilians as human shields is even true, doesn't know what they're talking about. That charge has been investigated a bunch of times, you know, Amnesty International, it's not true. And more importantly, if somebody whose humanity you took seriously was actually and literally being used as a human shield, you wouldn't say that justified dropping a bomb on them, that that made it okay. But just to pick a seasonally appropriate movie reference, if Bruce Willis's character diehard had shot Hans Gruber threw a hostage, right? Gruber was like holding somebody up, you know, uh using them as a literal human shield, and uh, you know, Bruce Willis was like, I get you. Nobody would be rooting for him for fuck's sake. But anyway, read the article.
SPEAKER_03:My problem, my problem is, okay, even if I concede entirely to everything you're saying, how about a little bit of ire directed toward Benjamin Netyahu, who's the guy who facilitated the funding and has totally been getting to facilitating the funding of Hamas? Why did he crop up Hamas? Because he wanted to essentially discredit the PLO.
SPEAKER_04:I mean, there's there's all kinds of whatabouts you can say.
SPEAKER_03:The very man crap Hamas is not saying that he needs to fight them.
SPEAKER_04:I mean, funding Abu Shabbat.
SPEAKER_03:Why are you funding Abu Shabbat? Who's also high species?
SPEAKER_04:These things are not wrong. It just looks like you're looking for something to make a false equivalency to be able to do it.
SPEAKER_03:I need Palestinians to live in their own territory. I want them to be able to govern themselves. I want Israelis to live in peace and safety and protect themselves. You can attack them as long as they're doing what they're doing.
SPEAKER_04:They're doing it in retaliation for being attacked. Of course it is. They've been attacked, they were encircled. You see Lebanon. Why are they in Lebanon? Because Hezbollah was attacking from there. In response to what they're doing in Bible, yes. Well, before that, they've had four wars there.
SPEAKER_03:Was it when they were trying to annex land from southern Lebanon that they were attacked?
SPEAKER_04:They were not trying to annex land. They were trying to put a border between the country that was continually attacking them. If they were if we were being attacked from Canada. I imagine we would want a little border between Maine and Canada. Sure.
SPEAKER_03:It's not too. I hear about this issue a lot. I do. Yeah.
SPEAKER_04:Let me ask you one question and then maybe we need to go. I just want to go, I want to go have dinner. I'm not interested in this.
SPEAKER_09:Yeah.
SPEAKER_04:Um it's not really what I started a podcast for. You seem to be seems to be itching to get to it, and uh now that you have, I'm not going to like back down on it because you're not Jewish, by the way.
SPEAKER_03:Oh, I didn't accuse you of being Jewish. It wouldn't matter if you were.
SPEAKER_00:I'm not Jewish, by the way. Uh it depends on who you would ask, if even with that claim. Because if you watch Religious, uh Bill Mar's father was Catholic and Bilmar's mother was Jewish. And so it depends on who exactly you would uh ask in in the diaspora uh in uh Judaism. But a lot of people in in the diaspora of uh uh Jewish thought actually believes that if you were born Jewish, you are in fact a Jewish because he was he was born from a Jewish mother. So it does not matter if he is Jewish or is not Jewish, but I just thought that was funny that he would insert, oh, I'm not Jewish, I'm just saying this because yeah, but you're just saying the same stuff I've been hearing you say since I don't know. Um I I got wind of Bill Maher in the 2000s uh with his George Bush hatred, and um uh and I I'll just put it this way, you can go back and listen to years and years and years of uh of him talking about this topic, and uh he is always at the same talking points, he hasn't learned nothing, and at the same time, uh, he's been remarkably cowardly uh on the situation because he always, when he talks about the topic normally, he never invites the hardline experts um uh on the topic. He kind of will have a bunch of sycophants who agree with him on the subject. Normally, if he does have to talk about it, he'll make sure it's him and another alleged expert on his side versus one other person, because he knows he can't not uh stand the scrutiny of actually, I don't know, having uh to talk to somebody like uh Norman Fickelstein. Uh he he would he would not know what to do with that. He had this show for years. And uh he invited everybody on, everybody you heard of and everybody you haven't heard of, like a Barry Weiss, but somehow this is his pet peeve. Never invited on Noam Chomsky to talk about the topic. Uh had a um used to have on Christopher Hitchens all the time. Never really bruised the topic of Christopher Hitchens, being that Christopher Hitchens actually wrote a book with Edward Saeed on the topic of Israel-Palestine. Uh something about bringing it up to the hitch uh brought out Bill Skinner Coward. So when he came up with him, he just talked about how much Islam sucks, of course, because Hitchens was a uh not not necessarily an atheist, he called himself an anti-theist, uh, which is a philosophical term he came up with for his version of uh atheism. He uh he had a debate years ago with Glenn Greenwald on the topic, and when Glenn Greenwald spanked him, uh Glenn Greenwald was uh I I I don't I can't say definitely that he has not been back since then, but uh yeah, definitely have to sit back talking about this specific topic. Mark Lamar Hill wrote a book except for Palestine, now and Bill Maher is very uh aware of who Mark Lamont Hill is because Mark Lamont Hill debated and destroyed Alan Dorsovich on the topic. So somehow he he he never has a law. He knows that Cornell West is on the opposite side of him in this discussion. Cornell West had a debate with Alan Dorsovich on the subject several times. Guess who always gets invited off to talk about Israel-Palestine? Alan Dorsovich, who Bill Maher agrees with, not Cornel West, who Bill Maher does not agree with on the topic. Bill Maher is a uniquely interesting figure only in the sense that he is a coward who on the topic, who pretends like he's a rationalist on the topic. He pretends like he knows a lot about it, but he does not, because he's not letting new information enter into his uh cerebellum.
SPEAKER_04:The history and the politics of it. I respect your perspective. But if you had to live in the Middle East, so tomorrow, Anna, you gotta go live in the Middle East. Where would you live? You can pick one city, uh, any city. You can uh, you know, as far as extended you could live in Karachi, you could live in Cairo, you could live in Amman, Jordan. Uh you you seem to love Lebanon. I mean, Beirut's nice when the bombing's not happening and the assassinations have stopped. Um or you could live in Syria. That's wonderful in the summer.
SPEAKER_00:Uh who's doing the bombing in uh Beirut and Lebanon?
SPEAKER_03:Well, we now have a terrorist leading Syria.
SPEAKER_04:The Houthis, I'm sure, would make room for you. Uh Tel Aviv, or in the West Bank, Ramallah. Ramallah, I think this is too wonderful for a like a little bit in the fall. Um, where would you live? What city would you live in? Where do you think it'd be comfortable in that dress?
SPEAKER_03:I'm sure it would not be comfortable in this dress in any of the various Middle Eastern countries that have been destabilized by the state.
SPEAKER_04:You're not really blaming it on Whitey. Listen, are you you're blaming Islam on Whitey?
SPEAKER_20:This is amazing. First, Bill complains about the fact that they're talking about it as if he hasn't spent the last 26 months constantly taking shots against Anna's side of the issue, against anybody who speaks up against the genocide in Gaza. Um, you know, lecturing those dumb college students who think that uh genocide is bad. Seems to me that he talks about it all the time. But now he's acting like, oh, this is so boring. Why aren't we even talking about this? Except for 30 seconds later, he does that bizarre, I'm not Jewish, by the way, I think, and uh you know, says how much he cares about the issue, which he just said he didn't, you know, he didn't want to talk about it. Now he's saying how much he does care about it, and uh how sure he is he knows the history, although God knows the zero sides of this conversation. And then he's gonna do uh the most lazy, the most hacking way, you would want to live there, would you think? Not an athletic, which also look, even if the answer to the question was that she'd live in Israel, you know, live in Tel Aviv is one of it, right? I'd much rather live in the United States than in Saddam Hussein's Iraq, but I still thought the Iraq war was bad. Um whether a country is more pleasant to live in for its own citizens, and whether it has a right to expand and bomb and terrorize other people outside of its bombers are two very different questions. And by the way, yeah, generally it is nicer to live in the country sending the bombers than the place being bombed or sanctions or coup or you know, missile strike or whatever. But okay, but that's a very literal-minded answer uh, you know, that I might have given to this monumentally stupid gotcha. And his responses actually make a deeper and more interesting point, which is that the rise of this kind of fundamentalist Islam that Bill is talking about is to a great extent downstream of imperial meddling in the region, which is just true. I mean, that's just history. And beyond the genuinely impressive stupidity of reinterpreting that as a relational point, why be? Listen to exactly what he says. You're blaming Islam on one hand. Because Bill is literally incapable of making the distinction between the most extreme fundamentalist interpretations of Islam, you know, political Islam, it's a political faction on the one hand, and Islam, the entire major rural religion on the other. It's just all the same to him. Never mind that a lot of the countries he's talking about were vastly more secular well into the late 20th century than they are now. Or that like Wahhabism, which is the kind of you know, Islam um that's practiced by the fundamentalist factions like Taliban, Al-Qaeda, ISIS, whose actions give the most grist for you know Bill's view of Islam as a whole, right? You know, Wahhabism is a modern phenomenon, right? You know, it's it's something that you know was was like came about um you know around the time that like David Kitt was alive. Uh and it has about as much to do with golden age Islam as Southern baptism has to do with medieval Catholicism, uh, or that the Islamic revolution in Iran, right, on the Shia side was was very obviously to a very large extent a reaction against Western imperialism, or etc. And no, none of this is to say that imperialism from the global north is the only force acting on this situation, or the you know, the only actor with any kind of agency. Everything else is just a reaction. That would obviously be too much, but it's also just totally absurd to say that imperial destabilization, even just in the last couple decades, has been an absolutely massive part of the equation in terms of what's creating the space for fundamentalist factions to have a lot more power and influence in a lot of those places. Um, you know, without even, you know, without even getting into cases where the US has has literally backed um, you know, fundamentalist factions, um, like for example, you know, the Mujinide and the um you know the last part of the Cold War that you know have have then turned on us later, of course, right? But I mean, where the US fingerprints are even more obvious. Like even putting that aside, I mean, certainly the point about destabilization holds. But again, Bill, the truth always exhilarates Bin Large. You can't process any of that. I'm not blaming Islam on a whitey.
SPEAKER_04:What you're saying is we destabilize, that's why you can't wear that. Did we not destabilize it?
SPEAKER_03:Are you starting terrorist organizations in Syria during the Syrian civil war?
SPEAKER_04:Starting under the Obama administration. Did that not destabilize Syria? No, what's destabilized? It looks good. I mean it was. You're saying you can't wear that dress in Syria because of whitey destabilizing?
SPEAKER_03:I didn't say that.
SPEAKER_04:Okay, that's basically great.
SPEAKER_03:But the United States did destabilize various countries and I think that's a good idea.
SPEAKER_04:Why could you wear it?
SPEAKER_03:You want me to talk about jihadism and is Islam, but like why won't you? I mean, I I don't I don't believe in jihadism, which is why I'm furious.
SPEAKER_00:Like I said in the very beginning, that's Bill Maher wants people to stick to jihadism and stuff like that because that's the soup he swims in, and that is the only place he is comfortable talking about. He can only talk about Islam in the form of its religious uh iteration. He cannot think about it as a geopolitical entity who is responding to other geopolitical forces. He cannot talk about it as a movement that is underpinned by countries that are then responding to foreign policy around it. His brain only thinks uh religion uh a religion bad uh good American religion. He he has he has a uh ape uh parasite uh uh parasite uh type brain on this. And uh it shows because his foreign policy knowledge is is uh uh just put it this way, uh elementary at best. He he seems to have the foreign policy knowledge of an orangutan, and uh it shows anytime he talks to anybody who is a pro um or exper on international and foreign affairs.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah, this is the United States just had Architecture.
SPEAKER_04:Are you saying every Muslim is a jihad? I don't think they are. Okay, but why can't you wear that jihad? Let's focus for a second. No, you won't you won't answer this question.
SPEAKER_03:I'm not gonna defend that religion, like that extremist religion at all. That's not what this discussion is about. This is a lot of people. No one does.
SPEAKER_04:Then stop starting war. It's that simple. Stop attacking Israel and it's not.
SPEAKER_00:So what what woman and child that Bill just pretended that he cared about an hour ago started a war? What 60,000 dead children started the war? None. It's just a talking point. It's just something you say when you don't want to think.
SPEAKER_04:Okay. But the fact that you can't answer that question and you know that. I don't know what the question is. What's the question? You keep doing that. What's my question? What's your question?
SPEAKER_03:No, go ahead. I'm gonna specifically go.
SPEAKER_04:The question is if you could live anywhere. Right from uh in North Africa all the way to uh we left out Uzbekistan. You could live there, uh, Kazakhstan, um uh Saudi Arabia or none of the above. And none of them have none of them, literally none of them. But if you had to choose one, you would you would so it can you karachi Pakistan and Tel Aviv same thing?
SPEAKER_03:I will figure something out, but it's not as smart as I know you are.
SPEAKER_04:That's it's come on. You're gonna get killed, you're gonna get killed for that for good reason. Because yes, you are, and for good reason.
SPEAKER_03:I'm Armenian, I'm Armenian. I have literal family members who currently live in Iran. I have no love for the Iranian regime. Let me be clear about that. Let me just say something. There is so much disinformation. Armenian Christians who are part of the Armenian diaspora as a result of the 1915 genocide against Armenians. They're living in Iran right now. They're going to church, they're being left alone by the Ayatollah, as awful as the Ayatollah is. So look, I'm not saying I wouldn't want to live in Iran. I don't want to live anywhere in the Middle East. I want to live here in the United States of America.
SPEAKER_04:You're like a politician. You're avoiding the people. No, I mean it's super honestly. No, you're not. No, you're not. 100% of the people. No, no, no. Because the question is if you had to pick a city, and you're not answering that question, you're doing the colour. You're doing what politicians are doing and saying, I don't want to live in any of them. I want to live in America. That's not the question. If you had to pick, would you rather live in Tel Aviv? Because I promise you, you wouldn't last a week in the other places, and you could easily live in Tel Aviv. So if you don't think that speaks of a difference between cultures and civilizations, then okay, we'll we'll we'll leave it there. But I promise you it does. And if you had to actually do that, I think you would agree with me.
SPEAKER_03:I think given my very harsh and uh vociferous criticisms of the Israeli government, I probably wouldn't feel so safe living in Tel Aviv without under this government.
SPEAKER_04:Under disgovernment. First of all, they would they have free speech there, so it would it would not be an issue.
SPEAKER_00:You can go ahead and uh see about uh Israel and free speech. Um I'll just give you one person to look up. Go look up the famous Jewish dissident American who uh uh just go look up Noam Chomsky and uh put Noam Chomsky banned from Israel or something like that and see what pops up. If you see why, and you see how much uh Israel uh values free speech. I may I may actually uh put it in the show notes just for fun.
SPEAKER_04:Uh but that is a side issue. We're not really talking about a person, not you.
SPEAKER_20:People are violently attacked by right-wing nationalist mobs for saying the kinds of things that Ana uh says in Israel all the time. There have been a zillion times that have happened. Uh certainly, you know, Arab citizens of Israel have been arrested for you know things like Facebook posts. Um that, you know, so I think the general state of free speech in Israel might not be quite as good as Bill Fix. Also, by the way, you might want to look into uh the uh you know ethnic cleansing of uh the Armenian quarter of uh of East Jerusalem. But you know, just specifically in terms of anti-relevant things here with your with your vociferous talking.
SPEAKER_04:Yeah, just a regular woman of your.
SPEAKER_03:I'm sure a woman of my age who grew up in the Western world would probably feel the most comfortable in Tel Aviv. I will concede that. Wow. Okay. But we're having a discussion about which culture we like. When in reality, I'm having a discussion about the value of human life and wanting innocent people to live, whether they're Israelis or whether they're Muslims in some other Muslim country.
SPEAKER_04:But you know what? When I'm bored, I know the audience is bored. So I'm gonna cut it there because we've been around that mulberry bush before. Right.
SPEAKER_20:There you go, right? It just shuts down the discussion. And of course, exactly no one in the audience was bored at that point. If you look at the video on YouTube, it'll be in the comments there say they're bored, but if he'd kept at it, Ana might have actually been able to steer the topic back to why he was okay with the relentless calculated destruction of every piece of infrastructure that would support civilian life in Gaza, the expulsion at gunpoint of literally millions of civilians from their homes, uh, the you know bombing that you know says says damage the overwhelming majority of stand-in structures throughout Gaza, um, and the deliberate calculated slaughter of tens of thousands of children. And of course, we can't have that. We could talk about King David and biblical history and whatever old things happened in 1948 or 1967, or with the you know, Gaza disengagement under Sharon. We could talk about which country you can wear which dresses in, we could talk about every subject under the sun, except for that horribly inconvenient wall of dead kids in Gaza. But really, what matters, what you should focus on, is not those children will never grow up, uh, is could you wear that dress in Rah? Because if not, clearly that justifies everything. All purpose free pass to do anything you want to anybody who lives there forever. But honestly, uh, as grotesque as this is, I really did enjoy how Mad Bill was getting in this conversation, and how Anna just seemed calm and cheerful and unruffled and just steadfastly didn't get mad back at him, and how that just made him even angry. And judging by the comments, I I think a lot of his audience got that too. Um anyway, uh, just as a little palate cleanser, uh, you know, get the get the taste of club random out of your mouth. Uh, I actually showed this video once on the show before, but I think I have to show it again. This is Chris Kavanaugh's um amazing video, uh Glenn Greenwald uh versus Bill Maher, the musical, uh, which is a musical adaptation of a somewhat similar clash that happened uh um, you know, I don't know, 10 years ago or something, uh, between Bill Maher and a different former GTA, they guessed.
SPEAKER_17:It's not our fault what came out of. We didn't go into Egypt. Well, we did wound up with the Muslim brothers.
SPEAKER_18:We were supporting and propping up Nubarek for 30 years, even as we were cheering for all the Tigerswear demonstrators as though we were on their side. And it was our government that kept nubaric in power, just like we've done the promise in the entire Muslim world. I wasn't talking about violence. I was talking about the audio, our fault you turn the father back and go back to a thousand years before our loops. So I don't think we can take all the blame. I don't think we should I think we should take all the body to the court as that well, that's the name of Christianity. Because it makes me feel good. No, it makes you feel good to say it's better to feel better to put a crown on your head and say, I'm a good person. How do I prove that? You get to ignore the responsibility that your government has for the violence and instability in the world by saying, Look, it's a primitive religion over there that's to blame.
SPEAKER_00:So anyway, um I played that actual full clip on the show before, and um I'm gonna play it in uh in its entirety here so you can hear, and this is from almost twelve years or so ago, and as you see, Bill Maher hasn't learned, even when it doesn't matter if he's talking to a journalist who's a woman, who's a commentator, or he's talking to an investigative journalist who's a constitutional lawyer, uh, who's an expert on the topic. Same talking points gets demantled, dismantled, Bill will repeat them in ten, fifteen, twenty years. Like he doesn't know.
SPEAKER_01:Frankly, is based on a very elementary moral principle. I realize it's almost universally rejected, but I'd still like to reiterate it. Uh our prime concern should be our own responsibilities. Uh we should our prime concern for anybody should be the predictable consequences of your own actions. I mean, it's very uh self- it's very uh convenient and uh you know being self-righteous and to talk about somebody else's crimes. Sharia laws, Islam, the actual doctrine of Islam is martyrdom in jihad. So, you know, if you were a Russian uh commissar in the 1970s, it would be very convenient to concentrate on U.S. crimes. But the important thing to do in Russia was not that. I don't care whether uh Sakharov said anything about U.S. crimes. Uh, what you care is what they're saying about their own society and something they can do about it. And the same elementary moral principle applies to us. Uh the focus of our attention should be on what we can do, what we are doing, uh, what are the options for us to try to uh terminate major crimes in which we're involved, and there are plenty of them, and to uh mitigate uh uh harm and atrocities elsewhere. Uh and there's a lot that we can do. It's not our fault what came out. We didn't go into Egypt.
SPEAKER_21:Well, we could go into Egypt. We were supporting and popping up Mubarak for 30 years, even as we were cheering for all the Tahir Square demonstrators as though we were on their side, it was our government that kept Mubarak in power, just like we've done across the entire Muslim world. And it's amazing for you to say that, well, look at all these Muslims, the minute you give them a little bit of freedom, they go wild and they start being all violent. How can you be a citizen of the United States, a country that has generated more violence and militarism in the world over the last five or six decades, and say, look at those people over there, they are incredibly violent. We play a significant role in what has been happening in the Middle East because we've been interfering and dominating that region in order to have access to the incident violence.
SPEAKER_04:I was talking about theocracy. That doesn't happen here.
SPEAKER_21:No, okay, that doesn't happen here, but at the same time, Iran isn't invading lots of other countries and occupying them for a decade, nor are fundamentalist Muslim countries the way the United States is. So these things are interlinked because we are continuously interfering. In that part of the world. And so to say it's all our fault. It's not our fault, but when you send your military for six, six, straight decades, into other countries to bomb them, kill their children and women and innocent men. Yeah, you take responsibility for your actions and say to the extent of that region.
SPEAKER_04:And that religion goes back a thousand years before our revolution. So I don't think we can take all the black.
SPEAKER_21:I don't think we should. I think we should take a lot of it. And there's lots of bodies and corpses that have been piled up in the name of Christianity and Judaism as well. Not recently. Have you heard of the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza for the last 50 years motivated apart by extremist views of Judaism or the wars in Europe or the fact that there were generals in the United States saying we have to go and invade and destroy Iraq, a country of 26 million people, because our God is bigger? Lots of religions, not just Islam, produce violence.
SPEAKER_03:What's the point about either?
SPEAKER_21:No, it makes you feel good to say our side is better than it's not. You get to ignore the responsibility that your own government has for the violence and instability of the world by saying, look, it's that primitive religion over there that's not.
SPEAKER_01:Uh and what you want to do is I mean it's easy to stand up on a pedestal and scream as well, fascism, and so on and so forth. Maybe that makes you feel good. But if you want to deal with a threat of terror, you'll ask what its sources are. And ask how those sources can be dealt with.
SPEAKER_00:A bit of an all-arounder delinquent who built our head on the show several times and somehow uh didn't bring it up as he talks about this subject. Thank you for tuning in, and we'll see you on the next episode.
SPEAKER_19:Everyone in the uh civilized world has roughly agreed between the majority of Arabs and Jews and the international community that there should be an offer of two states for two peoples in the same land. I think we have a rough agreement on that. Why can't we get it? The UN can't get it, the US can't get it, the Court can't get it, the PLO can't get it, the Israeli Parliament can't get it. Why can't they get it? Because the parties of God have a veto on it. Everybody knows that this is because of the divine promises made about this territory. There will never be compromises. There will never be compromised. The enterprise of mutual and it incidentally goes. The absurdity of all arguments from design. One grows weary of writing about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, not because the subject lacks importance, but because one might as well be writing about the tides. The same arguments resurface with each wave of violence, the same justifications are deployed, the same atrocities are committed with the same explanations, and the same international community issues the same meaningless statements of concern. If insanity is doing the same thing repeatedly while expecting different results, then the Holy Land is the world's largest psychiatric ward. But here we are in 2025, and I'm told the situation requires comment, as if my comment or anyone else's will make the slightest difference to people who have been murdering each other over the same strip of land since before I was born and will continue doing so long after I'm gone. Still, one must try to speak clearly about unclear things, especially when the unclear things involve the killing of children, which both sides manage to do with appalling regularity while maintaining their respective claims to moral superiority. Let me begin with what should be obvious, but apparently isn't. Both peoples have legitimate claims to the land, and both peoples have behaved abominably in pressing those claims. The Palestinians were indeed displaced from their homes in 1948, and this displacement was indeed a catastrophe for them, whatever one thinks of the circumstances that led to it. The Jews indeed faced centuries of persecution culminating in genocide, and their desire for a homeland where they could defend themselves is entirely understandable. Anyone who denies either of these facts is not serious about resolving anything. The tragedy is that these two entirely legitimate narratives of suffering have become weapons used to justify further suffering. The Holocaust is invoked to excuse the occupation, as if the gas chambers of Europe gave Israel permanent immunity from moral criticism. The Nakba is invoked to justify terrorism as if the displacement of Palestinians gave their descendants the right to blow up buses full of civilians. Both sides have become so invested in their own victimhood that they've lost the ability to recognize the humanity of the other. And now, in 2025, we have the latest round of violence, which looks remarkably like all the previous rounds, except with better technology. Hamas or its successor organizations fire rockets that are increasingly sophisticated but still largely ineffective. Israel responds with airstrikes that are devastatingly effective but politically counterproductive. Civilians die on both sides, though in vastly disproportionate numbers. The international community condemns everyone and no one, and eventually a ceasefire is declared that holds until the next time it doesn't. The American position remains what it has always been. Official support for a two-state solution that everyone knows isn't going to happen, combined with unlimited military aid to Israel and occasional finger wagging about settlements that continue to expand regardless. The Europeans issue statements about international law that no one takes seriously. The Arab states make noises about Palestinian rights while secretly cooperating with Israel on security matters. The whole thing is a diplomatic kabuki theater where everyone knows their lines and no one expects the play to end. What's particularly galling is the religious dimension that poisons everything it touches. Jewish fundamentalists claim God gave them the land. Muslim fundamentalists claim God gave it to them, and Christian fundamentalists support Israel because they think it will hasten the apocalypse, wherein, incidentally, all the Jews will be converted or destroyed. One might think that adults in the 21st century could find better reasons for territorial disputes than the alleged real estate preferences of their respective invisible friends, but apparently not. The settlers, those religious zealots who believe God is a real estate agent who promised them the West Bank, continue their project of making a Palestinian state impossible by creating facts on the ground. They build their hilltop outposts and dare the world to stop them, knowing that the Israeli government will eventually legalize what was illegal and protect what was supposedly unauthorized. They are the most honest actors in this drama in their way. They want all the land and they're taking it and they don't pretend otherwise. Meanwhile, the Palestinian leadership remains what it has been for decades: corrupt, incompetent, and more interested in maintaining their own power than in improving the lives of their people. The Palestinian Authority governs like a mafia with NGO funding. Hamas governs like a death cult with Iranian backing, and ordinary Palestinians are trapped between them, their Israeli occupiers and their Arab brothers, who use their cause for rhetorical purposes while treating actual Palestinian refugees like unwanted guests. The peace process, that phrase that should be retired for exhaustion, continues to be invoked by people who know perfectly well that there is no process and there will be no peace. The two-state solution is dead, killed by settlements, demographic changes, and political realities that no one wants to acknowledge. The one-state solution is impossible because it would mean either the end of Israel as a Jewish state or the permanent disenfranchisement of Palestinians, neither of which is acceptable or sustainable. So we're left with the current reality, a de facto one-state arrangement where Palestinians live under Israeli control but without Israeli rights, a situation that looks increasingly like apartheid, yes, I'll use the word that sends Israel's defenders into paroxysms of rage. If you control a territory and its people for more than half a century, if you subject them to different laws than your own citizens, if you restrict their movement and control their resources, what else should we call it? The fact that Israel has legitimate security concerns doesn't change the fundamental nature of the arrangement. But here's what the anti-Israel crowd doesn't want to hear. None of this absolves Palestinian organizations of their own crimes. Terrorism remains terrorism even when practiced by the oppressed. Targeting civilians remains a war crime even when you're the weaker party. The fact that Israel has more power doesn't make Hamas or Islamic Jihad or any of the other death cults into freedom fighters. They're theocratic fascists who would create a Taliban-style state if given the chance. And no amount of legitimate grievance changes that fact. The BDS movement, meanwhile, continues to pretend that boycotting Israeli academics and artists will somehow bring about peace, as if the problem were insufficient economic pressure rather than fundamental disagreements about existence itself. They adopt the tactics of the anti-apartheid movement without understanding that South Africa's white minority needed the black majority in a way that Israel doesn't need the Palestinians. The boycotts make Western activists feel good about themselves, but do nothing for actual Palestinians except to convince Israelis that the world is against them, which hardly encourages concessions. And through it all, the body count rises. Palestinian children killed by Israeli missiles aimed at Hamas leaders who may or may not have been there. Israeli children traumatized by rockets and sirens, even if the Iron Dome intercepts most of the projectiles. Young Israeli soldiers enforcing an occupation that corrupts them even as it oppresses Palestinians. Young Palestinians who see no future except resistance, that usually means their own deaths. The whole thing is a machine for producing human misery, and everyone involved knows it, but no one knows how to stop it. The truth that no one wants to acknowledge is that this conflict will not end until both sides give up things they consider essential to their identity. Israel will have to give up the dream of greater Israel and accept that security doesn't come from controlling territory but from making peace with neighbors. Palestinians will have to give up the dream of return and accept that the refugees aren't going back to homes that no longer exist in villages that have become Tel Aviv suburbs. Both will have to give up the notion that they can win this conflict rather than merely survive it. But this won't happen because both sides are led by people who benefit from the conflict's continuation. Israeli politicians win elections by promising security through strength. Palestinian leaders maintain power by promising resistance until victory. The conflict has become an industry that employs thousands. Soldiers, bureaucrats, aid workers, journalists, activists, propagandists. Peace would put them all out of work. So we continue with this grotesque dance, this call and response of violence and retaliation, this competitive victimhood where everyone's grandfather's suffering justifies today's cruelty. The Israeli right becomes more fascistic, the Palestinian resistance more nihilistic, the international community more useless, and the prospects for peace more distant. Anyone who points out the obvious that this is insane, that it solves nothing, that it only perpetuates suffering, is dismissed as naive or treacherous or anti-Semitic or Islamophobic or whatever label serves to shut down thought. I've been called all of these things, usually by people who think criticism of Israel is automatically anti-Semitic, or that acknowledging Palestinian suffering makes one a terrorist sympathizer. This binary thinking, this with us or against us mentality, this inability to hold two thoughts simultaneously, that Israel has the right to exist and Palestinians have the right to freedom, that terrorism is wrong and occupation is wrong, that Hamas is fascistic and Israeli policy is oppressive. This is what makes the conflict so intractable. What would I propose? Since no one asks but everyone expects a solution: complete withdrawal from the occupied territories, massive international investment in Palestinian development, a truth and reconciliation process, shared sovereignty over Jerusalem, compensation for refugees, security guarantees for Israel, and a gradual normalization of relations. Will any of this happen? Of course not. It requires leaders on both sides who care more about their people's future than their own power. And such leaders are notably absent. Instead, we'll have more of the same: more settlements, more rockets, more airstrikes, more children dead, more hatred cultivated for the next generation, more conferences that achieve nothing, more statements of concern, more weapons sales, more humanitarian aid that doesn't address the fundamental problem, more of everything except peace. The saddest part is that Israelis and Palestinians are more alike than different. They're both traumatized peoples who've convinced themselves that their trauma justifies anything. They both claim to want peace while taking actions that make peace impossible. They both believe their cause is just and their methods are justified. They're like two drowning people pulling each other under, each convinced that their survival depends on the other's destruction. Years ago, I met a Palestinian doctor and an Israeli teacher who had both lost children to this conflict. They had become friends, united in their grief and their determination that other parents not suffer as they had. They were working together for peace, against the wishes of many in their respective communities who saw such cooperation as betrayal. They knew their efforts were probably futile, but they continued anyway because, as the doctor said, what else can we do? Hate forever? That's the question, isn't it? What else can we do? The answer apparently is yes. Hate forever, kill forever, suffer forever, in the name of causes that have become more important than the people they're supposedly serving. The land has become more sacred than the lives lost fighting over it. The past has become more important than the future. The dead have become more important than the living. And so it continues this war that's not quite a war, this peace that's not quite a peace, this endless, grinding, soul-destroying conflict that makes everyone involved worse than they might otherwise be. In 2025, as in 1925 or 2005, or probably 2055, the Holy Land remains the place where hope goes to die, where God's supposed favorites act in ways that would shame the devil, where the promise of redemption has become a guarantee of damnation. The international community will continue to pretend that a solution is just around the corner, if only everyone would be reasonable. But reason left this building long ago, replaced by rage and righteousness, and the kind of certainty that allows people to kill children while maintaining their sense of virtue. Until that changes, until both sides decide they'd rather live in peace than die for justice, the killing will continue, and those of us watching from the outside will continue our useless commentary like a Greek chorus in a tragedy that never ends.
SPEAKER_12:Christopher Hitchens, let's go to Cambridge, Maryland. Good morning.
unknown:Good morning, good morning.
SPEAKER_13:Thank you very much. Mr. Hitchens, I have three direct questions. Short question. Do you feel that Israel has a right?
SPEAKER_12:All right, thank you, Nicole.
SPEAKER_19:Very good questions. And I think I know what you're trying to pin me down on. Uh on the first, yes, I do. Um, but I think the securely recognized borders should not allow for Israeli colonization or occupation of the territory of its neighbors, which is what it's doing now. The right to exist argument has been um has been used now to the point where what it's going to mean is that the Israel you're talking about will include the uh the annexed and illegally occupied West Bank. Um so the right to exist argument is going to rebound on those who use it unclearly and who don't say what they mean by Israel. It's very interesting. The Israeli um government has never said uh where it thinks the borders of Israel really ought to be and what it would settle for. I think it would be an immense help if Israel's going to insist on the right to exist, if it tells us where it thinks Israel's boundaries should be. Every other country does do that. I've got to give you the straight answer. I think Zionism, the idea of building um state of Jewish farmers on Arab land in the Middle East is a stupid idea to begin with. I've always thought so. My mother wanted to go and be a Zionist when I tried to talk around it. It's been a thing in my family. Um I think it's a bad idea. I think it's a mesionic idea, I think it's a superstitious idea. So the idea of Israel's right to exist is Well no, now there is no point with you anyway. Um bad ideas. It doesn't mean that anyone can just come and evict or destroy them. And I'm I'm not saying that. But I think I'd have to say it so as not to seem shady, you know. I've always thought it's a silly, messianic, superstitious nationalist idea, and it's a waste of two days. I mean guaranteed a quarrel with the Arabs because it meant we're going to take away from you what's most precious you'll know. We're trying to make Jews independent already a silly idea. That's not the way to rescue Central European Jewry making. Guaranteed the justice of the Arabs of which now anyone can think of, and is now entering the third, fourth generation. Fourth generation of Palestinians brought up either in exile or uh dispossession or under occupation and humiliation. And now we know something has to be done to address what's a part of the original uh original original misconception. So I've been uh writing in favor of the Palestinians all my life. And I I'm uh no more and no less a favor of it than I was. And the other butcher administrators. And the other butcher administration in favor. Well yes, they're working towards it. It's a pity about the time, because they were aging towards it before. I don't want it to look as if they did it. Anyone who doesn't agree with a principle, I think. I think most people do. They do, but they uh but why in that case do we have the one and not the other? After all, it's America that pays for all this and arms the Israelis is is uh very much involved in it. If it's a matter of principle, then we should witness to it a bit more forcibly than we do. On the point of uh purchase, I'd like to take up on a a single word, very important. You wouldn't say, would you, that the United States has no purchase on the government of Israel. No, no. I mean, in other words, if the Israelis are going to continue to build settlements in an identifiable, just a single suburb of Jerusalem, which where most of the Arab population can produce documents proving they've owned their homes since before the British mandate. If you guys if American policy can't get them to stop building in that one identifiable suburb of Jerusalem, then there's no such thing as leverage or purchase. And Obama went all the trouble to point out that this is a terrible thing. He should have said more than he did, in my view, that it's theft as well as an obstacle to negotiations, and then walked away from that. So that a punk government like that of Netanyahu, under the influence of a rat-bag religious party, the Shass Party, Crackpot Orthodox party that happens to run the Ministry of Housing, is allowed to humiliate the United States in not just in the person of its vice president, who was there at the time, but its president and its Congress and its voters. And immediately the president backpedals, and now he's being attacked by some leading American Jewish organizations as being in principle anti-Israel. So he's had a fight with one of the Democratic Party's most important voting blocs. He's done nothing for the Palestinians, and he's made himself look like a jerk. This is not impressive. But when was American policy in the Middle East impressive? Well, actually, when I'll give you an example. When George Bush Sr. uh said to the Israelis, if you go on like this, we will I will ask Congress to suspend your loan guarantees. I thought that was extremely impressive. And so did everyone else in the Middle East, and it led to the nearest we've ever had to a proper peace conference. That was in Madrid. Bill Clinton chose to run that year from the right against Bush, uh, saying that he wanted, he thought Bush was being soft on Cuba, just like Kennedy. Uh uh thought, I don't know how Nixon were being soft on communism in Cuba, and also from the right on Israel, saying if he was president, the Israelis would not be subjected to this kind of pressure. So the last time that there was an impressive American policy, it was a Republican administration, and it was undone by the hero of every liberal in this room.
SPEAKER_11:Good morning. Great. Uh uh l like your type type of argument, you basically have intellectual discussion instead of uh screaming arguments. I'm uh I'm a libertarian basically on the opposite side of the spectrum as you. But uh I wonder if you could clarify a couple things for me. I believe Palestine was the entire area covering Israel and Jordan. I wonder if you could tell me at what point the Palestinians went to Jordan and I realized they were kicked out when they blew up some passenger jets or something. And uh do you are you familiar with that? Uh yes, I think more than you are, um, by the sound of it. Um I'm not sure I've I don't well go ahead. Basically revolved around the Palestinians that were from Israel. I don't understand if the uh there's 22 Arab states why they have to take over Israel.
SPEAKER_19:Uh-huh. Um, well, there are 49 American states if someone told you you couldn't apart from the one you're sitting in, if someone told you actually we would rather have few particular plans for ourselves. From now on, this will only be this you'd only be a landholder or a householder here if you profess the best thing with them. We'll put it to faith. Otherwise, get out. It's ours. You're happy to go to Colorado on that basis. I don't think so. And I think if you think about it, you wouldn't insult anyone else uh by treating them, their society or their country as as disposable as they are. The Palestinians do not feel uh that God gave the land to someone else and they therefore have to be flown out. And I completely agree with them. Uh they've they've every right to resist that ridiculous proposal.
SPEAKER_12:Kate Scott, Massachusetts. Go ahead, please.
unknown:Good morning.
SPEAKER_10:A question for Mr. Hitchens, please. Your honor asked away. Do you believe it's healthy for the United States to be so much influenced by Israel? We are a large country, they are very small, but they have much influence in the media and especially in politics.
SPEAKER_19:Well, believe me, I knew um I do understand the question, and there are tons of voice which can be asked in the two voice of voice, uh suggestions, so it's proportional as well as possible, is the result of the Western Western system is not recognized as well, I would say Western state, the right space, and distance, we will defend existence of just space. We will not underwrite it becoming expensive to cry space. Yes, it wanted that there was more um discussion always runs in both the media and in Congress. And that's what the Israelis. Everybody knows. Uh I mustn't think about that question because I know how toxic it is. Everybody knows that if you want to occupy people against their will, if you want to be the governor of another people who haven't chosen you, you will end up visiting terrible cruelty on them. There cannot, there certainly cannot be a humane occupation. The majority of Jewish people in the diaspora and in Israel have for a long time favorite to say the solution to this problem. It's a national question, it's a land question. This is also the expressed view of the United States Congress, of the American Jewry, of the United Nations, of the European Union, of really and of the Palestinian Liberation Organization. It's what the majority of people involved in this view want. Why can't they get what we all want? Why is it made impossible? Because in both communities, a veto is held by the party of God. In the first case, by the Messiah and accepters, who think that by establishing fate accomplished by violence and stealing of other people's land in the name of the Jewish people and in the name of God, they can help to bring on the Messiah. If only they say we get all the Arabs out of this area and all the Jews in, gathered, then the Messiah would come. Finally, after such a long, sweaty wait.
SPEAKER_16:I think call him the Talemagan. I think you have no more. I think what's in the film, nothing's in the film.
SPEAKER_19:Even if, like me, you think that as a s as a secular Jewish person, secular party Jewish person, that the probability is on secular grounds, Zionism was a very big mistake to begin with. And is of uh a false messiah for the Jewish people whose main achievements have been in secular diaspora societies, even if you believe that the fact remains that there is a self-determined Jewish community in Palestine, that that is something to which I think the Jewish people do have a right. Maybe not to a state, certainly not to an exclusive one, but to a diaspora uh derived you should, as it used to be called, uh as much right, in other words, to be in Palestine as any other historic community does. What is what's gone wrong with the Israel-Palestine this period? What's what's most notably gone wrong? Ask yourself, because this is going to come back to you very soon. Um what you've gained.
unknown:Well, there were there are two communities, um, one Arab and actually quite largely Christian, but predominantly Muslim.
SPEAKER_19:One Jewish and quite predominantly specular, both approximately the same size and number, with equally good claims to at least part of the land. And the majority of Jewish people in the diaspora and in Israel have for a long time favored a two state solution to this whole problem. It's a national question, it's a land question. This has also been expressed view of the United States Congress, of American Jewry, of the United Nations, of the European Union, of really and of the Palestine Liberation Organization. It's what the majority of people involved in this view want. Why can't they get what we all want? Why is it made impossible? Because in both communities, the veto is held by the party of God. In the first case, by the Messianic settlers, who think that by establishing fate compli by violence and stealing other people's land in the name of the Jewish people and in the name of God, they can help to bring on the messiah. If we if only they say we get all the Arabs out of this area and all the Jews in gathered, then the Messiah will come, finally, after such a long, sweaty wait on his arrival. The on the Arab-Palestinian side, the veto is now held, the whip hand is now held by a party that says you're absolutely right that God decides matters in this territory. You're completely right. Only he can award territory. He's the king of real estate around here. He says you've got the wrong God. He says it only belongs to Muslims, not just Arabs. Or Palace says only Muslims, not Christians, not secularists. Let them try and live their lives between wanting God over what's pretty built on a part point. A hard report. The whole world is in danger of going to hell on a sled because of the parties of God in Palestine and nuclear weapons have been introduced into this combat.
SPEAKER_15:And it's an Israel-Palestine question. And it's a question of primogeniture and real estate. Because it's not as though they were stealing land that was never theirs, and it's not as though the others were never there. It's a question of all of them were there very, very far back. And then until the seventh century they were not there, and then the dispossessors, the dispossessed became the dispossessors. And it's a rather complicated story, mostly with real estate. As I said, I'm gonna go who came first. Was it the God of Abraham? Was it Muhammad? Was it Jesus? I think that that's the complication. I don't think that the um wild cowboy madmen and the colonies of the settlements are are uh are any anything typical. Of course, they're atypical. But I don't think that the question of Israel-Palestine is starts there. I think it started way long ago. And of course, the only solution is the two-state, as we all know, and we're all on the same side. It was just that I wanted to bring up the point of the origin of the conflict. I don't know if you agree.
SPEAKER_19:Well, it's um it's always good to be asked to begin by straining out the Israel-Palestine thing. Why don't we get that out of the way? Um there's I think there's a distinction you're failing to make, and it's actually, if I may say it, uh, clarified a little in uh it's called uh Gionnet Par Grand, available at fine bookstores everywhere, including in this voisinage. Uh it's very archaeology, which I think is a very courageous and honest profession, Secular Professor Finkelstein, the head of the department of uh university, has clarified it for us. The story of the exodus from Egypt, the wandering in Sinai, the conquest of Jericho, so it is all old into it. It's completely fantastically made up. There isn't a word of truth in it, and it's just as well it isn't true, because it involves, if were it true, it would involve divine instruction for tail side and enslavement, as well as general population and other things that without which we could well do. However, it's very obviously it made you say, come on, what what if it's none of it's true? Oh, Moses thing is all made up. Can't you give me anything to cling to? What? Yes. If you go and dig in Palestine, uh the first thing that any archaeologist will do, going to a village would be dig in the mint, dig in the rubbish dot that find what people threw away and went and it was ordered. It's very, very interesting always. Well, if certain hill communities built way, way, way, where you'll find that while all the other neighbouring is don't have any, do have, excuse me, do have pig birds in their vents and in their culture. There are these villages don't. No pigs. That's not the only proof, but it's one of many. There have been Jewish people in Palestine for a very long time. Their claim to have the right to live there is as good as anybody else, has a better understandable. But the question is this. By many Jewish spokesmen at the very beginning of the enterprise, my purpose or first proof of this, do you want a state for Jews? Or do you want a Jewish state? Now just ponder this perspective. Since I'm stuck with this, I may as well absolutely clarify. Here's what I mean by that mistake. Should Pakistan be what Muslim claim to be? A state for Muslims. Muslims who didn't feel safe in that state, or should it be a Muslim state? Well, everyone has to follow Muslim law. Well, if you're not a Muslim, you don't really have any rights. And that's the difference between attempt to blur. And I think we're better off on blur.
SPEAKER_12:There you go. Go to another student in Denver. Go ahead, please. Please go ahead. That's Professor, go ahead.
SPEAKER_05:Good morning, everybody. I'm Yang Min. I'm from I'm the Viting Scholar from China. I'm against the possible a possible war to Iraq. One of the reasons for Bush to make a possible war to Iraq is that Iraq violates UN's resolution. Of course, UN's resolution should be respected by other countries. But there are still some countries in the world who are that violates UN resolutions. For example, Israel.
SPEAKER_12:Thanks. Thanks, Professor. Do you have a comment on that?
SPEAKER_06:Professor Yamid is supposed to buy the the uh I think Israelis reporting recognition of the largest number of U.S. populations for the reporting this treatment of the non-Judician population, the other population of Palestine.
SPEAKER_19:And it's now by everyone, and even though the president himself president is the word of Palestinian and state in the same sentence and in opposition to one another. Um there are treatments of Palestine, there should be a just solution. But in the meantime, it seems that Israel is suffering unhealthy for uh violations, not just for the resolutions, but of the rights of the UN stands for and it bodies. This is a very serious allegation in my U.S. I think that threatens to jeopardize the whole project of America's uh sponsorship of racial change in the region was seen as the military ally of a racist holy uh killer like uh Ariel Sharon. Uh the whole appeal of the American project is the next time diminished because it's a very, very serious problem in the provision to identify.
SPEAKER_07:Some of those resolutions that are not that many, uh not as many as you would think, is because they face the same problem that we do of terrorism, of suicide bombers, of people who are not interested whatsoever in making peace with Israel, but in destroying Israel, groups like groups like the uh Palestinian entity that are basically also probably funded by people like Saddam, and indeed the Islamists who want to destroy the state of Israel and then join with Saddam and the Saudis and many other Arab regimes in a fanatical Hitlerian anti-Semitism that wants to see Israel taken off the map. Now, the other difference is quite obvious. Um Israel is not threatening the world with giving terrorist entities weapons of mass destruction to destroy other countries and innocent civilians. Saddam is uh that's an absolutely clear distinction, which makes the priority obviously of defending the same thing.
SPEAKER_06:Um is inflated with violation of the non-referiscially and maintains its default.
SPEAKER_07:Yes, and if it weren't for that, um if it weren't for its defense, it's sitting there with one-tenth of one percent of the land that Arabs have. If it didn't have those defenses, it would have been obliterated long ago. And you know it. And you know, that the surrounding powers want Israel destroyed. Well, let's take almost none of them even acknowledge its right to exist. And they're fomenting terrorism against civilians, which is exactly the same as the terrorism fomented against us.
SPEAKER_06:The uh UN resolutions that have been violated. You talk about all these violations occurred, well was very one you had heard of or one was touching organization. As Hezbollah, which it rose incidentally in response to completely leaving Israeli Russian occupation in South Emil.
SPEAKER_07:Do you deny that Hezbollah has very close ties with Islamist fundamentalism and terrorism? Hezbollah means a party of God.
SPEAKER_06:So why are you unlike it? It gives a clue about his views about theocracy. You who argue against theocratic terrorism are giving Hezbollah a pass? Hezbollah was the organizer of a resistance into an illegal and criminal Israeli occupation. Well, don't you think that Al Qaeda? They have under international law every right to resist and repel that occupation.
SPEAKER_07:Don't you think in the same you could use the same argument about Al Qaeda, resisting the tyranny in Saudi Arabia? Quite obviously not, in Al Qaeda.
SPEAKER_06:It's not terroristic to have to attack the world.
SPEAKER_07:It's not about Lebanese citizens resisting anything. It's bullet. It's about the destruction of Israel, the use of terroristic tactics to kill innocent civilians. Now, why can't you condemn that?
SPEAKER_06:That's what I meant earlier. Okay, when I said what terrorism become effectively used because of propagandization and emergency. So you are you are you actually international law gives the right to Palestinians and the Lebanese to resist.
SPEAKER_07:Hezbollah is an international terrorism funded in part from the movers in Iran that you despise, and that you will not condemn it for its suicide attacks upon the on on Israel and its and its use of terrorists. I'm emphasizing what isn't obvious. So I'd like you to emphasize just for the record what is obvious that Hezbollah is our enemy.
SPEAKER_14:Hey, you know, if uh if Hezbollah wants to fight, that's fine, but they don't need to go blow themselves up in the middle of uh, you know, populated areas, get the get an army and go fight. You know, that's ridiculous. They're terrorists.
SPEAKER_06:That's what they do did to in South Lebanon. You can see them out in there, but we still can't.
SPEAKER_07:Did you have another point, Middle? I do want I do want to give you a point about the Lebanese. No, it's Syrian-controlled Lebanon. It is an in i it it's it's nonsense to regard it Lebanese that this is a s this is a Syrian satrapy controlled by a vicious anti-Semitic dictator who was using terrorist tactics to destroy the state of Israel. Come on back.
SPEAKER_14:In fact, uh I got just one more thing I'd like to say. This this business that we got going all around the world. Look, it's all academic if we don't all stand together. You know, the the Democrats can't snivel, you know, and everybody else. We all gotta stand together and fight terrorism.
SPEAKER_12:Or we're gonna we're gonna have a state of terrorists with no America no more, there won't be no Europe no more, we'll live in the seventh century, and we'll all learn how to say Bel Air, Ohio, you disagree with the president. What would you like to say this morning?
Podcasts we love
Check out these other fine podcasts recommended by us, not an algorithm.
The LUNSB Show with T-Bone and ChickBrew
Tony Knuckles
Over opinionated with Josh Scott
Josh scott
The Jamie Kilstein Podcast
Jamie Kilstein
The Back Row with Jamie Kilstein
Jamie Kilstein
Your Calvinist Podcast with Keith Foskey
Keith Foskey
BJJ Mental Models
Steve Kwan
Renewing Your Mind
Ligonier Ministries
The Hartmann Report
Thom Hartmann
The Glenn Show
Glenn Loury
#RolandMartinUnfiltered
Roland S. Martin
Newt's World
Gingrich 360
Pod Save America
Crooked Media
Ralph Nader Radio Hour
Ralph Nader
Bannon`s War Room
WarRoom.org
Bannon’s War Room
dan fleuette
The Young Turks
TYT Network
The Beat with Ari Melber
Ari Melber, MS NOW
The Damage Report with John Iadarola
TYT Network
The Majority Report with Sam Seder
Sam Seder
The David Pakman Show
David Pakman
Get A Grip with Kendall Reusing
Kendall Reusing
Ultimately with R.C. Sproul
Ligonier Ministries
Grace to You: Radio Podcast
John MacArthur
The Briefing with Albert Mohler
R. Albert Mohler, Jr.
StarTalk Radio
Neil deGrasse Tyson
The Bill Press Pod
BP Pods
Ask Pastor John
Desiring God
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
Comedy Central
Ask Ligonier
Ligonier Ministries
Lost Debate
The Branch
Coffee-Time-Again
Dale Hutchinson
5 Minutes in Church History with Stephen Nichols
Ligonier Ministries
The Ezra Klein Show
New York Times Opinion
Why Is This Happening? The Chris Hayes Podcast
MS NOW, Chris Hayes
Changed By Grace
PodPoint
The Benjamin Dixon Show
The Benjamin Dixon Show
Thinking in Public with Albert Mohler
R. Albert Mohler, Jr.
Who Killed JFK?
iHeartPodcasts
The MacArthur Center Podcast
The Master's Seminary
Jean Jacques Machado : No Gi Required
Jay Zeballos
Trauma Bonding
Jamie Kilstein
This Day in History
The HISTORY Channel
The Ben Shapiro Show
The Daily Wire
The Sean Hannity Show
Sean Hannity
Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar
iHeartPodcasts
The Kyle Kulinski Show
Kyle Kulinski