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AJC Chief Policy and Political Affairs Officer Jason Isaacson sits down with U.S. Special Envoy to the Middle East, Steve Witkoff, for a live discussion in Washington, D.C., to introduce AJC's Center for a New Middle East. They cover plans for rebuilding Gaza, the future of Israeli-Arab relations, and the evolving geopolitical landscape, including the impact of the Abraham Accords and shifting regional alliances. Tune in for insights on diplomacy, security, and what's next for the Middle East. The views and opinions expressed by guests do not necessarily reflect the views or position of AJC. Resources: AJC Center for a New Middle East Initiatives and Policy Recommendations Listen – AJC Podcasts: The Forgotten Exodus: with Hen Mazzig, Einat Admony, and more. People of the Pod:  Why Germany's Antisemitic Far-Right Party is Thriving Instead of Disappearing Spat On and Silenced: 2 Jewish Students on Fighting Campus Hate University of Michigan Regent Jordan Acker: When Antisemitism Hits Home Follow People of the Pod on your favorite podcast app, and learn more at AJC.org/PeopleofthePod You can reach us at: peopleofthepod@ajc.org If you've appreciated this episode, please be sure to tell your friends, and rate and review us on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. __ Transcript of Conversation with Jason Isaacson and Steve Witkoff: Manya Brachear Pashman: This week, AJC's Chief Policy and Political Affairs Officer, Jason Isaacson, sat down for a live conversation with Steve Witkoff, the US Special Envoy to the Middle East. They discussed plans to rebuild Gaza, political upheaval in Syria and Lebanon and expansion of the Abraham Accords. For this week's episode, we bring you that live conversation to you. Jason Isaacson:   Good evening, everyone. Thank you for being here, and thank you Special Envoy Witkoff for participating in this evening's program, introducing AJC Center for New Middle East, and extension and refocusing of the work that we've been doing for decades to advance Arab Israeli understanding, cooperation and peace. Your presence here means a great deal to us.  As you've heard from my colleagues, AJC looks forward to working with you and your team in any way that we can to help ensure the success of a secure Israel, fully integrated in the Middle East. Now let me begin by thanking you again, renewing our thanks and thanking President Trump for your relentless efforts, which began even before the President took office, to assure the liberation of the hostages still held by Hamas and Gaza now for 508 days, we know how dedicated you are and the President is, to gaining the release of Edan Alexander, the last living American hostage, and the remains of the four other Americans, Itai Chen, Gadi and Judy Weinstein-Haggai, and Omer Neutra, and all of the hostages living and dead, still held captive by the terrorists.  So I want to point out that leaders of the Hostage Families Forum are with us here this evening. As is Emmet Tsurkov, whose sister Elizabeth Tsurkov was kidnapped by terrorists in Iraq two years ago. We are all counting on your and your colleagues' continued efforts to free them all. Thank you again, Steve.  Now my first question to you, how does a successful real estate developer make the transition to Middle East diplomacy, as you certainly have. Clearly, there are profound territorial issues at play here, but there are also powerful and tangible factors, perhaps less easily negotiated, factors of historical narrative, of religion, of nationalism. How do you cut through all that? How do you achieve success given the very different career that you've pursued up to this point? Steve Witkoff:   Well, first of all, Jason, thank you for having me, and welcome everybody and to the hostage families, I just want to welcome you here. Some of the people I probably have talked to already, and just know that my heart is always with you. You know, President, I'm a very close friend of President Trump's, and I think he felt that, hopefully, that I could do a good job here. And so I think the job had a lot to do with miscommunication and correcting that. It had a lot to do with getting over to the region and understand what was happening, and maybe most importantly, it had a lot to do with his election and peace through strength and the perception that he was not he was going to take a different path, that the old policy prescriptions that that had not worked in the Middle East were not going to be tolerated by him anymore. And I think that's in large part what allowed us to get a positive result.  Adding to that, of course, was all of the good work that Prime Minister Netanyahu in his administration had achieved with Nasrallah Hezbollah in Lebanon, he had basically gutted Hamas. So many good things that happened. And you know, on top of that, the raids in Iran, and it created this perception that a lot of the a lot of what emanated out of October 7 was never going to be tolerated again. And that began the, you know, that began the pathway to achieving the result we achieved in the first phase. But that's just half of the problem. So we've got a lot more to go. Jason Isaacson:   I've got some questions about that, as well as you can imagine. Help us understand the President's priorities and therefore your focus in this very complicated region. There's the continued trauma of October 7, 2023 dozens of Israeli and other hostages still held by Hamas terrorists in Gaza, and the deep wounds inflicted on Israeli society in that attack. There's the need to rebuild Gaza and to assure it is no longer governed by Hamas.  There's the prospect of advancing normalization between Israel and Arab states building on the Abraham Accords of the first Trump administration. There are also political upheavals and some hopeful signs, although the jury is still out in Lebanon and in Syria, and there's the ongoing threat to peace and stability posed by the Iranian regime. How do you prioritize? What are your expectations for success on these many tracks. It's an awful lot to deal with. Steve Witkoff:   That was, I think I counted like 14 questions. Jason Isaacson:   This is my specialty, by the way. Steve Witkoff:   I can see. I have to, now you're testing my memory on all of this. Jason Isaacson:   Priorities.  Steve Witkoff:   Yeah, I would say, How does the President think about it? Well, first and foremost, he wants something different for the region, yeah, and different in the sense that the old way of thinking we've they've rebuilt Gaza three or four times already. Like that's just an unacceptable use of resources. We need to do it in a much more in a much better way, a. B, we need to get rid of this crazy, ideological, psychopathic way of thinking that Hamas thinks. What they did, it can never be tolerated. I saw a film that many in this in this room did not see, made by Southern Command when I was in Gaza, and it's horrific. I mean, it is a horrific film. What happened in this film and what they did to people.  So this is not, this is not the act of people who are going to war. This is the act of barbarians, and it can never be tolerated. Normalization is critical for the region. Saudi Arabia embraces it because they can't finance in their own markets today. And why? Because there's so much war risk. I actually saw Jamie Diamond today, and I discussed it with him, and I said to him, you know, think about an area like Saudi Arabia. They have tons of money, but they can't leverage their money. And they can't because the underwriting risk on war, it can't be underwritten. So you're not going to see typical senior financing. Go into those marketplaces they can finance if they do a deal in New York and they can't finance in their own country. Makes no sense. And that's going to lead to a lot of stability.  In terms of the Iranian crescent, it's basically been decimated. Look at what's happened with Syria. No one ever thought that that was going to happen. We've got an epic election in Lebanon. And so tons of things happening. Lebanon, by the way, could actually normalize and come into the Abraham Peace Accords, as could even potentially Syria. So so many profound changes are happening there, and yet it's been a flash point of conflict, and I think that there's a possibility that we end it. Now, do we have to make sure that Egypt is stabilized? Yes, they've got some issues, economic and financial issues, and also on their streets. Same thing with Saudi Arabia, and we have to be cognizant about that. But all in all, I think there are some really good, good things that are happening.  Jason Isaacson:   Yeah, and I hope with your intervention and the president's power, more good things will happen in the coming months.  Steve Witkoff:   We're hopeful.  Jason Isaacson: So you've recently returned from your latest trip to the region with meetings at the highest levels in Israel, in Saudi Arabia, in the United Arab Emirates, next Tuesday in Cairo, will be a meeting of the Arab League to discuss the future of Gaza. What is your sense of, drills down on your last answer, what is your sense of the region's readiness to advance to the next phase of negotiations, to free the Israeli hostages, to shift to a new Israeli force posture in and around Gaza, and put a governing structure in place that excludes terrorists. Can we assure that Hamas no longer rules, no longer poses a threat, that its missiles, tunnels and other infrastructure in Gaza are destroyed? Steve Witkoff:   Well, you know, central to the May 27 protocol that was signed with the Biden administration and the Israelis. Central to that is that Hamas cannot have any part of  a governor governing structure in Gaza. And that's from that's a red line for the Israelis, but it's a red line for us, too. You see the film. And we have to thread that needle in phase two of the negotiations.  Jason Isaacson: How do we get there?  Steve Witkoff:   We're not entirely sure yet, but we are working. You know, we're making a lot of progress. There is, Israel is sending a team right now as we speak, it's either going to be to Doha or to Cairo, where negotiations will begin again with the Egyptians and with the Qataris, and I may if that negotiation goes positively enough. This is the initial phase of the negotiation where we've set, we've set some boundaries, some contours about what we want to talk about and what the outcomes we expect to happen. This is from the United States at the direction of President Trump. If it goes well, maybe I would be able to go on Sunday to execute and finish an arrangement. That's what we're hoping for. Jason Isaacson: Put phase two on track.  Steve Witkoff:   Put phase two on track and have some additional hostage release, and we think that that's a real possibility. We had a lot of conversation this morning about that, and with all of the parties I'm talking about, and people are responsive. Doesn't mean it's going to happen. That's a very chaotic place the Middle East. Jason Isaacson:   But you've got cooperation from the Quint, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Jordan, Egypt, Qatar.  Steve Witkoff:   Yes. All of those countries in that region, they want to see, they want to see stability. There's new young leadership there. Everybody understands that it's untenable to be at war all the time. It just doesn't work, and it's setting everybody back. Look at Israel, by the way, they're drafting, they're conscripting people at 50 years old to go to go to the fight. That's, uh… Jason Isaacson:   And reservists are being called back to duty again and again. Steve Witkoff:   Correct. People can't work, by the way, economies are suffering throughout there. But on the other hand, Hamas can't be tolerated either, and yet, we need to get the hostages back to their families. Pardon me? Jason Isaacson:   Israel is still resilient. Steve Witkoff:   Of course it is. Of course it is. But we, you know, look, I don't want to talk about all these things and not acknowledge that the most that the primary objective has got to be to bring those hostages home. It has to be. Jason Isaacson:   I mentioned the Quint before: Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Jordan, Egypt, Qatar. Egypt and Jordan, longtime peace partners with Israel, were proposed by the president as the possible place in which Palestinians evacuated from Gaza could be housed temporarily, or perhaps more than temporarily. What is your sense of the possibility of the dislocation of Palestinians from Gaza? Is that essential to the idea of rebuilding Gaza, or not essential? Steve Witkoff:   Well, first of all, let me acknowledge King Abdullah, and also the Egyptians, General Hassan, who runs their intelligence unit. President Sisi, their ambassador. They're dug in. They're focused on solutions. It's a complicated situation right now, but they've done a great job, and they've been available, and whenever I call them, they're responsive.  The Jordanians have had a tough trip here, but, you know, they've managed through it. But let's just talk sort of about what the President talks about. Why is he talking about Gaza in the way he's talking about it? Because all the for the last four decades, the other ways of thinking have not worked. We sort of always get back to this place.  First of all, it's a giant slum. It really is, by the way, and it's a slum that's been decimated. On top of that, I was the first American official to go there in 22 years. I was literally there in the tunnels, on the battlefield. It is completely destroyed. There's 30,000 shells that are laying all over that battlefield, in large part because the Biden administration held up munitions shipments to the Israelis, and they were firing 1973 vintage ammunition that didn't explode. Who would let their children wander around these places?  In New York, there would be yellow tape around it. Nobody would be allowed to come in the they were digging tunnels. So everything underneath subterranean is swiss cheese, and then it got hit by 2000 pound bunker bombs. So you could have dust down there. It's so devastated. I just think that President Trump, is much more focused on, how do we make a better life for people? How do we change the educational frameworks? Right now, people are growing up there, in textbooks, in the first grade, they're seeing AK47's, and how you fire them. That's, that's, this is just insanity. What's going on out there.  So we have to directionally change how people are thinking there, how they're going to live together. People talk about two state we at the Trump administration, talk about, how do you get to a better life if you have a home in Gaza in the middle of a slum that hasn't been fixed up correctly, is that as good as aspirationally having a great job and being able to know that you can send your kids to college and they can become lawyers and doctors and so forth? That to me, is what we want to achieve. And when, when we began talking about Gaza, we were not talking about a giant eviction plan.  What we were talking about was the fact, unlike the Biden administration, and this is not a knock on them, it's that they didn't do their work correctly, the Biden administration, that May 27 protocol is based on a five year redevelopment plan. You can't demolish everything there and clean it up in five years, let alone x-ray it on a subterranean level and figure out what foundations exist, or what, what conditions exist to hold foundations, and then what we should build. It's easily a 15 year plan, and it might be 20 or 25 years.  And the Wall Street Journal, one of the most mainstream publications, two days ago, finally came out with a major article talking about that and basically validating what we've been talking about. Once you understand it from that perspective, you understand it's not about an eviction plan. It's about creating an environment there for whoever's going to live there that's better than it's ever been in the last 40 years. Jason Isaacson:   Steve, thank you. Before October 7, 2023 the betting in many foreign policy circles, as you know, was that the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and Israel were closing in on a deal to normalize relations, coupled with an enhanced security agreement between the US and Saudi governments and Saudi access to the full nuclear fuel cycle under US safeguards. Where would you say that formula stands today? Is that still the framework that you're expecting will describe the relationship between the United States and Saudi Arabia and between Saudi Arabia and Israel? Steve Witkoff:   Well, that's why I keep on going back to the May 27 protocol, because it's chock full of misinformation. And so the Saudis were operating, as were the Israelis, as if you could redevelop and reconstruct Gaza in five years. You can't. You can finish demolition, you can finish refuse removal, you can do all of that in five years. But for that, there's nothing else is going to get accomplished.  So when the Saudis talked normalization with the Israelis and defense treaty, they were thinking about it on a five year time frame. Once you begin to think about it as a 15 or a 20 year deal, it almost begs the question, are Gazans going to wait? Do they even want to wait?  I mean, if you're a mother and a father and you've got three kids, do you want to wait 20 years to maybe have a nice, safe home there? And this has nothing to do with relocation. Maybe we should be talking about relocation, or, excuse me, the ability to come back and, you know, later on. But right now, right here, right now, Gaza is a long term redevelopment plan, and I think once the Saudis begin to incorporate that into their thinking, and the Egyptians and UAE and everybody who has a vested interest in Gaza, I think you're going to see development plans that more mirror the way the President is thinking than what the May 27 protocol contemplated. Jason Isaacson:   Are you suggesting that the possibility of normalization between Israel and Saudi Arabia will come after there is a fully formed Gaza redevelopment plan?  Steve Witkoff:   I think so. Because I believe that. I believe it's just sequentially logical, because that's when you begin to think about how Gazans are going to think about it. Right now, we're talking about it in the abstract. And there are many countries, by the way, out there, that from a humanitarian standpoint, we've talked to many of them, are actually extending themselves and saying, Hey, look, we'd, we'd love to be a part of some sort of permanent solution for the Gazan people.  No one wants to see the Gazan people in some sort of diaspora, they're sort of disengaged, and that doesn't work. That only is going to fester and lead to more radicalism in the region. So we've got to get a solution for it, but we need to levelset the facts first. And the facts have not been levelset. They've been thinking about this from a perspective of facts that are inaccurate. Now we've level set those facts. We're going to conduct a summit pretty soon with probably the biggest developers in the Mideast region, many of the Arab developers, lots of master planners. I think when people see some of the ideas that come from this, they're going to be amazed. Jason Isaacson:   Steve, thank you. Final question, from AJC's many contacts and visits over many years across the Arab world, including regular exchanges over three decades in Gulf Cooperation Council countries, we've come to believe in the inevitability of Israel's full integration in the region, that the more the region's leaders and elites focus on the potential advantages to their societies, including their security of normal relations with Israel, the more likely it is that we'll achieve that goal. Is that the sense that you have as well, from where you sit? Steve Witkoff:   I do. I think, look, I think that the people of Israel want to live in peace with with the people of the Middle East. And it could be incredible. Jason Isaacson:   And vice versa.  Steve Witkoff:   And vice versa. I had a discussion with His Royal Highness, His MBs, his brother yesterday, the defense minister, an exceptional man, by the way, and we talked about how Saudi could become one of the best investable markets out there, when it can be financed. Think about this. The United States today has the greatest capital market system that the world knows. And when you have a great capital market system, when. You can borrow, when you can lease a car, when you can buy a home and mortgage it all those different things. It drives an economy. It propels it.  Right now in the Middle East, it's very difficult to finance. The banks don't want to operate it. Why? Because tomorrow a Hootie missile could come in if you're building a data center, and puff it's gone. We don't have to. Banks don't have to underwrite that risk in New York City or Washington, DC or American cities. So I think as you get more stabilization there, I think the real estate values are going to go through the moon. And we talk about this, Israel is a bedrock of great technological innovation. I think you know, all of the Arab countries, UAE, Saudi, Qatar, they're into blockchain robotics. They're into hyperscale data centers. These are the things that interest Israel, and yet they're driving so much of the tech surge out there. Imagine all of them working together. It could be an incredible region, so we're hopeful for that prospect. That's that's the way the President thinks about it. We've we talk at length about this, and he gives us the direction, and we follow it, and that's his direction. Jason Isaacson:   I thought I heard applause about to begin, but I will, I will ask you to hold for a second, because I just want to thank you, Steve whitco, for sharing your vision and the President's vision for how to move forward to build a more stable and prosperous and peaceful Middle East and and you've laid it out for us, and we very much appreciate your Thank you.  Steve Witkoff:   Thank you.  Manya Brachear Pashman: If you missed last week's episode, be sure to tune in for my conversation with AJC Berlin director Remko Leemhuis about the victory of a centrist right government in Germany's recent election and its plans to build a coalition excluding the far-right, antisemitic political party, Alternative for Germany. Remko and I discussed why that party's unprecedented post war election returns are a cause for concern.

jQuery(document).ready(function(){ cab.clickify(); }); Original Podcast with clickable words https://tinyurl.com/23r77m8z Contact: irishlingos@gmail.com Over €1bn spent on accommodation Breis agus €1bn caite ar lóistín d'iarratasóirí tearmainn i 2024. For the first time ever, the state spent over €1bn in 2024 on providing accommodation for applicants for international protection. Den chéad uair riamh, chaith an stát breis agus €1bn i 2024 ar lóistín a chur ar fáil d'iarratasóirí ar chosaint idirnáisiúnta. New figures, provided by the Minister for Children, Equality, Disability, Integration and Youth, Norma Foley, show that on average, the state spends €2.75m per day on accommodation for people applying for international protection. Léiríonn figiúirí nua, atá curtha ar fáil ag an Aire Leanaí, Comhionannais, Míchumais, Lánpháirtíochta agus Óige, Norma Foley, gur ar an meán, go gcaitheann an stát €2.75m in aghaidh an lae ar lóistín do dhaoine atá ag cur isteach ar chosaint idirnáisiúnta. The figures were provided to Aontu leader, Peadar Tóibín. Cuireadh na figiúirí ar fáil do cheannaire Aontú, Peadar Tóibín. They show that €1.005bn euros was spent last year on applicants for international protection. Léiríonn siad gur caitheadh €1.005bn euro anuraidh ar iarratasóirí ar chosaint idirnáisiúnta. This represents a 54% increase in the amount of money spent on them in 2023. Is ionann sin agus ardú 54 faoin gcéad ar an méid airgid a caitheadh orthu in 2023. The state has spent €2.5bn on providing accommodation for applicants since 2019. €2.5bn atá caite ag an stát ar lóistín a chur ar fáil d'iarratasóirí ón mbliain 2019. Minister Foley indicated that on average the state spent €84 per day on each applicant for international protection during 2024. Thug an tAire Foley le fios gur ar an meán gur chaith an stát €84 in aghaidh an lae ar gach iarratasóir ar chosaint idirnáisiúnta i rith 2024. This represents a 9% increase on the €76.80 spent on each applicant per day during 2023. Is ionann sin agus ardú 9 faoin gcéad ar an €76.80 a caitheadh ar gach iarratasóir in aghaidh an lae le linn 2023. Included in this expenditure are accommodation costs, facilities management and other costs. San áireamh sa chaiteachas sin, tá costais lóistín, bainistiú áiseanna agus costais eile. The largest proportion of international protection applicants currently staying in state-provided accommodation are of Nigerian origin, according to the latest figures provided by IPAS, the agency responsible for providing accommodation for asylum seekers. Is de bhunadh na Nigéire iad an sciar is mó de na hiarratasóirí cosanta idirnáisiúnta atá ag fanacht i lóistín atá curtha ar fáil ag an stát i láthair na huaire, de réir na bhfigiúirí is déanaí atá curtha ar fáil ag IPAS, an áisíneacht atá freagrach as lóistín a chur ar fáil d'iarratasóirí tearmainn. There are currently 6,914 Nigerians in the system. 6,914 Nigéarach atá sa chóras i láthair na huaire. There are 3,072 Georgians, 2,733 Algerians, 2,388 Somalis, 2,209 Zimbabweans, 2,157 Jordanians, 1,715 Afghans, 1,656 Pakistanis, 1,373 Bangladeshis and 1,249 South Africans. Tá 3,072 Seoirseach ann, 2,733 Ailgéarach, 2,388 Somálach, 2,209 ón tSiombáib, 2,157 Iordánach, 1,715 Afganastánach, 1,656 ón bPacastáin, 1,373 ón mBlanglaidéis agus 1,249 ón Afraic Theas. There are 694 from the Occupied Territories in Palestine. 694 atá ann ó na Críocha Gafa sa Phailistín. South Africa, Algeria and Georgia are currently classified as safe countries. Tá an Afraic Theas, an Ailgéir agus an tSeoirsia rangaithe ina dtíortha sabháilte i láthair na huaire.

Erdogan visits Malaysia, Indonesia & Pakistan under Türkiye's ‘Asia Anew Initiative' "Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is on an official visit to Malaysia, Indonesia and Pakistan as part of Türkiye's Asia Anew initiative, aimed at deepening economic, political, and strategic ties in the region. Discussions focused on cooperation in trade, defence, technology, education, disaster management, media, and post-conflict rehabilitation. The Asia Anew policy, launched in 2019, seeks to expand Ankara's engagement across Asia." Gaza rebuild plan without expelling residents in place — Jordan "Jordan's Foreign Minister Ayman Safadi announced a joint Arab, Egyptian, and Palestinian plan to rebuild Gaza without displacing its residents. Speaking to Al Mamlaka TV, he emphasized the need to maintain aid flow and uphold the ceasefire between Israel and Hamas. Safadi did not share specific details on the reconstruction plan but reaffirmed Jordan's stance: ""Jordan is for Jordanians, and Palestine is for Palestinians.""" At least 118 Palestinians killed by Israel in Gaza since ceasefire: official "At least 118 Palestinians have been killed and 822 wounded in Gaza since the ceasefire took effect on Jan. 19, according to the Health Ministry in the enclave. Director-General Munir al-Bursh said that the toll includes those killed in direct Israeli attacks, those who succumbed to injuries, and victims of unexploded ordnance. Of the total deaths, 92 resulted from direct Israeli assaults." Ukraine ready to offer territory swap with Russia — Zelenskyy "Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has suggested offering a territorial swap with Russia in any future peace negotiations to end their nearly three-year war. Speaking to the UK's Guardian, Zelenskyy said Ukraine could propose exchanging land, including territory seized in Russia's Kursk region six months ago. However, he emphasised that ""all our territories are important, there is no priority.""" Modi's BJP fuels extremism as anti-Muslim speech surges in India - report "Hate speech targeting religious minorities in India saw a ""staggering"" rise in 2024, according to a report by US-based think tank India Hate Lab. The report links the surge to the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and the broader Hindu nationalist movement. Critics and civil rights groups have accused Prime Minister Narendra Modi and the BJP of escalating anti-Muslim rhetoric during last year's national elections to mobilise the Hindu majority."

Dr. Saud al-Sharafat, a former brigadier general in the Jordan General Intelligence (GID), joins the podcast to discuss his 29-year career in the agency. Sharafat, who also serves as the chairman of the Shorufat Center for Globalization and Terrorism Studies, views the GID's relationship with the CIA. He details which country is the GID's top adversary and highlights a misconception some Jordanians have about the GID. Finally, Sharafat responds to reports of GID intervention in domestic Jordanian politics.

Richard Freeman joins the show to discuss the OASIS plan as developed by the Schiller Institute to try to bring peace to the Middle East. We know that peace has not been achieved by all the methods whether diplomatic or militaristic and things seem to be getting worse. So why not try the OASIS plan which would be a cooperative effort to bring salt water in, desalinate it, and then provide clean fresh water to the Palestinians, Israelis, Jordanians, Egyptians, Syrians, and more to irrigate, drink, and what water does. Then Rich discusses a 60-year-old plan to bring water, that would rain into the ocean, from Alaska to the southwest US to help irrigate and support sustainable vegetation and reduce the impact of the fires.

Today, the BBC's special correspondent Fergal Keane travelled with the first Jordanian helicopter delivering aid inside Gaza.Adam speaks to Fergal about what it was like to be the first international correspondent to fly with the Jordanians into Israeli-held territory in southern Gaza. And, the Office for National Statistics has projected a population growth of 7.3% between 2022 and 2032; the number is almost entirely based on the net migration of an estimated 4.9 million people over the 10-year period. Adam is joined by Stephanie Hegarty, BBC population correspondent, and Professor Sarah Harper, an expert on demography and Professor of Gerontology at the University of Oxford, to discuss today's ONS findings and what population scientists say about how demographics are changing around the world.You can now listen to Newscast on a smart speaker. If you want to listen, just say "Ask BBC Sounds to play Newscast”. It works on most smart speakers. You can join our Newscast online community here: https://tinyurl.com/newscastcommunityhere Newscast brings you daily analysis of the latest political news stories from the BBC. It was presented by Adam Fleming. It was made by Chris Gray with Miranda Slade, Anna Harris and Shiler Mahmoudi. The technical producer was Mike Regaard. The assistant editor is Chris Gray. The editor is Sam Bonham.

The majestic and beautiful edifice of the Tiferes Yisrael Shul, also known as the Nisan Bak shul after its founder and leader, stood as the central shul of the Chassidic Old Yishuv of Yerushalayim, from its establishment in 1872, until its ultimate destruction by the Jordanians in 1948. The project was initially spearheaded by Rav Yisrael Friedman of Ruzhin, known as the Holy Ruzhiner, who headed the Chassidic Kollel Vohlyn, with the members of the Bak family at its head. Upon completion the shul was named for the Ruzhiner, and it served the needs of the Yerushalayim Chassidic community in the ensuing decades.   Cross River, a leading financial institution committed to supporting its communities, is proud to sponsor Jewish History Soundbites. As a trusted partner for individuals and businesses, Cross River understands the importance of preserving and celebrating our heritage. By sponsoring this podcast, they demonstrate their unwavering dedication to enriching the lives of the communities in which they serve. Visit Cross River at https://www.crossriver.com/   Subscribe to Jewish History Soundbites Podcast on: PodBean: https://jsoundbites.podbean.com/ or your favorite podcast platform Follow us on LinkedIn, Twitter or Instagram at @Jsoundbites For sponsorship opportunities about your favorite topics of Jewish history or feedback contact Yehuda at:  yehuda@yehudageberer.com  

Today's show opens with new cell phone video footage released from one of the people critically injured in the Trump assassination attempt. The footage from James Copenhaver clearly shows the shooter moving around on the room of the AGR building. He pops up and down and runs across, looking for his spot to setup. How is it possible Secret Service counter-snipers never saw any movement? Senator John Kennedy (R-LA) said he is going to stay on top of Acting Director Ronald Rowe as if Rowe had stolen his dog. It seems the Biden-Harris Administration is pro-Hamas and pro-terrorist. First they chose to not prosecute any of the law breakers who protested in D.C. when Prime Minister Netanyahu spoke to Congress. Then, they decided to let the two illegal Jordanians who tried to ram a truck onto Marine Base Quantico get bail to walk the streets again. Then, they just announced a plea deal with KSM, mastermind of 9/11, along with two other terrorists. Embrace weirdness. It means you are unique. An individual. It should me you reject the idea of “sameness” and being part of a commune. Donald Trump showed courage and fortitude in his attendance of the National Association of Black Journalists panel discussion. He was treated horribly by ABC's Rachel Scott, but managed to win the audience over and make her look foolish. When it comes to DEI and Kamala Harris running as an Indian-American before deciding she is black is not a Trump opinion. It's a fact. And if ABC has issue with that, they should take it up with Biden and Harris equally. They are inextricably tied together in everything and we need to never let that fact be forgotten. Looks like the Olympics has found a way to make domestic violence, not only acceptable, but also applaudable. I thought the IOC wasn't going to allow men to participate in women's sports. Yet, an Italian female boxer, for her only personal safety, had to call an end to her fight after just 45 seconds. And, ironically, today is the day the Biden-Harris change to Title IX goes into effect in the United States. Gov. Josh Shapiro (D-PA) tweeted that “trans women are real women.” So, let the front runner for Kamala Harris to be her VP pick live with the label of being in favor of supporting domestic abuse. Take a moment to rate and review the show and then share the episode on social media. You can find me on Facebook, X, Instagram, GETTR and TRUTH Social by searching for The Alan Sanders Show. You can also support the show by visiting my Patreon page!

Show Notes and Transcript Todd Bensman, a Senior National Security Fellow, joins Hearts of Oak to discuss his book "OVERRUN" focusing on how Joe Biden's policies have led to the current border crisis. He highlights the role of progressive Democrats in this issue and emphasizes that most immigrants are seeking economic opportunities. Todd talks about the collaboration between the US and Mexico, the use of technology for legal crossings, and challenges posed by individuals from terrorism-prone countries. He suggests immediate deportation measures and disrupting support networks as potential solutions to the crisis, stressing informed decision-making.  Todd's insights provide valuable perspectives on immigration policies and their implications. OVERRUN: How Joe Biden Unleashed the Greatest Border Crisis in U.S. History Available from Amazon in book e-book and audio-book  https://amzn.eu/d/233iYg9 Todd Bensman is an editorialist and investigative author of the 2023 book OVERRUN, How Joe Biden Unleashed the Greatest Border Crisis in U.S. History and also America's Covert Border War: The Untold Story of the Nation's Battle to Prevent Jihadist Infiltration. The two-time National Press Club award winner, a former journalist of 23 years, currently serves as the Texas-based Senior National Security Fellow for the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS), a Washington, D.C. policy institute for which he writes reporting-based opinion editorials, speaks, and grants media interviews about the nexus between immigration and national security. He frequently reports from the southern border, traveling widely inside Mexico and in Central America. He has testified before Congress as an expert witness and regularly appears on radio and television outlets to discuss illegal immigration and border security matters. He writes columns and editorials about homeland security and terrorism subjects for The New York Post, The Daily Mail Online, The American Mind, Homeland Security Today, Townhall, The Federalist, The Daily Wire, The National Interest, and other publications. He serves as a Writing Fellow for the Middle East Forum and also teaches terrorism, intelligence analysis, and journalism as a university adjunct lecturer. For nearly a decade prior to joining CIS in August 2018, Bensman led counterterrorism intelligence for the Texas Department of Public Safety's Intelligence and Counterterrorism Division and its multi-agency fusion center. Before his homeland security service, Bensman worked as a reporter for more than two decades, covering national security after 9/11 as an investigative staff writer for major newspapers Connect with Todd... X/TWITTER       x.com/BensmanTodd GETTR               gettr.com/user/tbensman TRUTH              truthsocial.com/@toddbensman WEBSITE           www.toddbensman.com Interview recorded  17.6.24 Connect with Hearts of Oak... X/TWITTER        x.com/HeartsofOakUK WEBSITE            heartsofoak.org PODCASTS        heartsofoak.podbean.com SOCIAL MEDIA  heartsofoak.org/connect SHOP                  heartsofoak.org/shop *Special thanks to Bosch Fawstin for recording our intro/outro on this podcast. Check out his art theboschfawstinstore.blogspot.com and follow him on X/Twitter x.com/TheBoschFawstin Transcript (Hearts of Oak) I'm delighted to have Todd Bensman join me today, just after he was on the WarRoom, actually. Todd, it's great to have you. Thanks so much for giving us your time. (Todd Bensman) Happy to do it. Thank you. No, not at all. Just for, obviously, people can find you @BensmanTodd on Twitter, and ToddBensman.com is the website. We'll get into all of those. You currently serve as Texas-based Senior National Security Fellow for the Center for Immigration Studies. You're the author of Overrun: How Joe Biden Unleashed the Greatest Border Crisis in U.S. History, published just over a year ago, and America's Covert Border War, the Untold Story of Nations Battle to Prevent Jihadist Infiltration. I would love to talk to you just on that book, but I'm going to keep it wider on immigration. And of course, you've over 20 years in journalism. And you've got an interesting mix, I think, Todd, of kind of policy intelligence and journalism. And when I mentioned to some friends in the States, I was catching up with you over there. They all said, Todd, he's the real deal. He's one of the few journalists that really understand what is happening in terms of the border and the invasion. Now, obviously, the WarRoom, they know you. Maybe they're UK viewers. We have half and half US-UK. So maybe for the UK viewers, could you introduce yourself, Todd? Yeah, I thought you did a pretty good job there. But yeah, I work for a think tank out of DC that that deals with immigration. Prior to that, had a career, full career as a newspaper reporter for 23 years. That's my main background. I got a undergraduate and graduate degree in journalism. And then when I finished my journalism career, I was recruited to join the Texas Department of Public Safety, which is the big state police agency here in Texas to to work in their intelligence division which I did for another ten years after that so I definitely and then I have another master's degree in homeland defense and security from the Naval Postgraduate School, So I have that kind of a hybridized background and now I'm working for a think tank. So I'm kind of bringing it all together in one place, you know, reporting down on the border all the time, down in Central America, all over Mexico, all over our border to kind of get, you know, a bird's eye view of what's actually happening on the ground. And probably interviewed thousands of immigrants down there over the last few years. Well, maybe I can just start, touch on the book Overrun: How Joe Biden unleashed the greatest border crisis in U.S. history. I've had it as an audio book and I've been listening to it. I know it's available hardback and paperback. And on the back, it says the time has come to acknowledge and comprehend that America is weathering the worst mass border migration event in the nation's history. Millions of foreign nationals have overrun the border starting on Inauguration Day 2021, and millions will flow over until the end of President Joe Biden's term in 2024. Maybe you can tell me why you wanted to put it together, because it is a comprehensive overview of the Biden administration, actually what they have done in terms of mass immigration. So maybe what led you up to beginning to put pen to paper and actually bringing this book together? [4:12] Sure. Well, remember, I live in Texas. I've been doing journalism in Texas and Intel. So I'm very familiar with the numbers in any average year. And I saw that what was happening that started on Inauguration Day was something really large, unusually large. It was a really mammoth event. I could tell within six months, the numbers had broken every record in the U.S. history books of people coming over. And when you have an event, and then it just kept going, I mean, it was just like, it never stopped. The numbers just were absolutely in the millions and millions a year that we know about, that we just caught, with millions more going through uncaught. And I recognize that we're in the middle of a historic event in American history, history and maybe even world history and to me, maybe it's the old journalist in me it seems like when history is in the making and you're in position to see it somebody should write a book, you should write a book about that, that warrants a book at least, a first brush at recording this history and I hope others will follow in my footsteps and keep going, right now I'm the only one, though. Yeah, that's what it seems. I mean, what was the there must have been pushback because there have been quite a number of journalists who go to the border. It seems to be for a trip for footage and go away. And you seem to have really understood more of what is happening. I'm sure there must have been some pushback from different sources because the story you tell is a harrowing tale of the destruction and dismantling of American borders. Well, I mean, it's the book and the story of what happened here today falls right evenly, squarely on the partisan divide. The American left completely ignores my book, will not acknowledge it or even take it on or try to challenge it, which they probably view as providing oxygen to the ideas in it. Or not the ideas, but the actual reporting on the ground of what happened there. And on the conservative right, there's immediate acceptance of all of this information. There's no problem at all. My hope is that 25 years from now or 50 years from now, we won't be in this weird partisan divide. And historians will use my book and find value in it for some future time, really. I mean, I think that's the best I can hope for. But I mean, there really hasn't been much pushback from the left, except in terms of just sort of indifference, because you can't tackle it or challenge it without creating oxygen flow into the ideas. So I think the idea is that they've just decided that it's not really happening. This isn't true, that sort of thing, that it's just sort of a blip. And the Biden administration took that position officially for two years straight before they finally acknowledged that something kind of unusual was happening down there. They would deny that there was anything wrong routinely, that anything was up at all. And whenever they did that, the American media would just comply. They would just agree and swallow that and move along. So, you know, on the one hand, I think that's sort of official denialism and indifference is bad for America. At least this generation of Americans. But for me, as a former reporter and journalist, it's like wheee, this is the best thing. I own this thing. I'm all alone down there with this incredible historic event. And for that, I'm very grateful that they that they did leave off. But I also know it's bad for America. I know. I mean, it does seem so. Biden has systematically neutralized all immigration enforcement laws. And obviously, it's not just him, if anything, it's him. But that's a whole other conversation. But there has to be a group within the White House who have planned this because that collapse of immigration does not just happen naturally. There are systems in place. So that had to be dismantled. Does that mean there is a grouping that have come together to actually systematically deconstruct those immigration policies? Yes, that's exactly what happened. I lay that out in very granular detail in the book, Chapter 4, The New Theologians in particular. I think it's helpful to understand first that the U.S. Democratic Party historically has not been very far apart policy-wise from the Republicans on border security. Democrats like Bill Clinton and Barack Obama have always enforced the law to the best that they could and most definitely did not want mass migration. When mass migration influxes would happen, they were right on it to try to wrestle it to the ground and they would pass laws. And, they understood that the U.S. Legal system is very well equipped and written to prevent mass migration crises. So it's not the traditional Democratic Party, but it's what happened in 2020 was that a liberal progressive faction that is on the far fringes of the traditionalists in the Democratic Party who rode the coattails in with Biden for various reasons, partly because he hurried them. He needed their vote. He needed their vote to get the nomination first. And then he needed his vote to defeat Donald Trump, needed their vote to defeat Donald Trump. And he owed them. And what they wanted was the immigration portfolio. Those people come from a whole other cut of cloth. They have an ideology. I call them the new theologians because it's like a religion, this ideology, and they took it from Europe. It's the European neoliberal progressives that they took it from, which holds that border enforcement and borders themselves are immoral and cruel and must be abolished in the same way that slavery was abolished once upon a time or in the U.S. Jim Crow laws were wrong and cruel. And they got into all of the positions of authority over the immigration portfolio. And they're smart. And a lot of them are lawyers and they systematically dismantled all of the instrumentality of enforcement at the border and put policies in place that absolutely guaranteed to, like an 80 plus percent chance that if you showed up at our southern border on foot, you were going to get in forever. I mean, it seems as though some states, some Democrats have woken up as I've read about immigrants getting bussed or flown around. Certainly Texas has tried to make a point on that. And you've got Democrat mayors saying, oh, suddenly they don't like it. They get angry and how dare you do this. Has that woken up? I mean, specifically in New York, when Adam started pushing back on that, has that opened up a rift in the Democrat Party or is that just quietened down again? Well, the liberal progressive wing of the party, I think, understood that most Americans don't live anywhere near the border, don't see it. It's see no evil, hear no evil, etc. And I think they were relying on that unique circumstance to get away with what they were doing. And as long as they had a compliant traditional media and the president of the United States and all of his chief lieutenants saying it's not happening, there's nothing happening down there, then they could get away with it. And they did for a couple of years because most Americans aren't down there. They don't understand. It's like, oh, the right wing media is down there. Let's just, they're lying, you know, disinformation. and eventually the pipeline backed up. To the point with people in all of these cities, because millions of people were just pouring over in massive torrents, unbelievable torrents of humanity all day, every day, just pouring in with no media coverage. But eventually, they had to go somewhere and live. So the pipeline backed up and it burst in all these cities, Chicago, New York, Denver, Boston, Washington, San Francisco, LA, every city in the United States, all over Florida. You couldn't get away with it. You couldn't get away. You could not avert your eyes from it. Now it was in people's backyards and they were mad about it. Did not like what they were seeing, the massive amounts of resources, municipal budgets that were being diverted to illegal immigrants over native born or residents in their cities who needed the money and needed the programs. Created a lot of anger. And it's in everybody's face. You can go into any American airport and they're all over the place. They're in every terminal, flying still going from here to there. So well We'll get into flying a little bit another point in the book you talked about kind of the relationship between Mexico and the U.S I think you said within like 48 hours legislation was passed in Mexico and it seemed to be that they were ready in conjunction with Biden with people ready to just push over the border as soon as as Biden came in, tell us more about kind of how that works, that kind of relationship between Mexico and what part they've had to play in this. Sure. Well, first of all, you have to remember that, you know, when Trump was still in office, he had a mass migration too, but he wrestled it down like Democrats and Republicans always do, until now. He wrestled it down and he put policies in place that were pushback policies. Remain in Mexico, and then after that for COVID. And these were very, very effective. And they resulted in, tens of thousands, even hundreds of thousands of immigrants being captured by Border Patrol, and instead of admitted into the United States were pushed back to Mexico. And that was going on for the full year of the last the last year of Trump in office. The Mexicans, of course, hated this because they got stuck with the hot potato, right? You know, that game. And it was expensive and they were filling up all of the Mexican detention centers. They were immigrants still pouring into Mexico and being pushed from the United States. And it was this terrible situation for them. And so the Mexicans were listening to the Biden campaign saying, we're going to let everybody in. We're going to be nice and kind and gentle, and we're going to get rid of the COVID pushbacks, we're going to get rid of the remain in Mexico pushbacks, etc. And they waited until the election. 48 hours after the election, the Mexican parliament passed a law that got no coverage, either on the Mexican side or on the US side, that forced, quote unquote, Mexico to empty all all of its detention centers of family units within 60 days or after 60 days. So that by the time Biden was going to enter office, they would be waiting at the border for the transition. That's what happened. They released tens of thousands to the border. They rushed up there and they knew that on the transition day, Biden was going to let them all in. And even though there was COVID restrictions, he was saying, we're going to get rid of those. We're going to end Title 42, which was the COVID pushbacks. And in the end, he couldn't do it for legal reasons, but he still opened vast exemptions in the COVID pushback rule so that all of those people could come in. And so at noon, January 21, you could see them just pouring in. It began hundreds of thousands on that day at that hour when the clock struck noon on Inauguration Day. They were on the march and it never ended. Wow. I thought actually just, I know there's a little pushback on it. Whenever I was over in Texas, I talked to some people and they said, you know, it's not really as bad because if it was, we would be drowning in people. We go about our lives normally in Fort Worth or in Dallas or down in Austin and it seems fine. How do you respond to that? If people don't see it, then they don't necessarily believe it's happening. Well, I think that there are still places where people can, if they choose, can choose not to see it. But it's in every community. I mean, there's six, eight million people in 36 months across that border. Now, we're a nation of 350 million. So there's still room to fan out. But if you're talking about Fort Worth, I would just point you to their school district, which is absolutely completely smashed and overwhelmed with migrant kids. And there's no space for them. And Fort Worth is having to pass bond elections that increase taxes to pay for more classroom space and temporary buildings and teachers and all the rest of that. And they can't even close to come up, keep up with it. And, I mean, really any school district in the country is facing something that looks just like that. So Fort Worth is definitely, if you want to see it, you can see it. What's that movie, Don't Look Up, you know, where the big meteor is coming? There are plenty of people that got away for a long time without looking up and said there's no meteor coming. No meteor coming but they're here and they're here by the millions and all you got to do is look up. I get that maybe if you go down to California, that a Californian government doesn't really care unhappily for its state to be even more destroyed, where you look at Texas you expect there to be pushback and yes there maybe isn't the wall that was expected but you'd expect the National Guard troops to be there pushing back. But that doesn't seem to have happened in a way that maybe I naively would have expected as a Brit thinking, don't worry, Texas have got this. It doesn't seem to be the case. Is that a fair assessment? Yes. I mean, Texas has done more than any other state in the country to get some sort of a control handle on what's happening at the border. But ultimately, as a state, they have no authority whatsoever to actually put policies in place that deter the immigrants from coming through Texas. And what I mean by that is, if you're an immigrant and you cross our border and we let you in, you have to be deported in order to have a deterrent. Like if you spend $10,000 on smuggling fees and you get deported afterwards, and that's a loss, a massive loss, you're in debt, you lost $10,000, you're going to stay home. You're going to stay home. But Texas hasn't been able to do that because behind them is the Federal Border Patrol, who are under orders to usher everybody that they can get their hands on into the country forever. So, if Texas can't deport them and the federal government won't, the federals are going to win out there. I don't mean to diminish what Texas is doing. They're doing a lot of good in other ways. They're catching drug smugglers, lots and lots of them, drug loads, arresting a lot of people smugglers, and breaking up stash houses and patrolling areas where border patrol is not there. So, and with helicopters. And so they're, I think, countering a lot of kind of basic criminality from the border crisis. But ultimately they can't really return immigrants or deport them back to their home countries that's a too big of a of a federal job Tell us about, because there are two aspects, there's the aspect of governments and how they cooperate and the economic pull and push but it's also the individuals and you mentioned the beginning, you had interviewed many of those coming over but did any of those stand out to surprise you? What were, as you got down the nitty gritty and heard the personal stories, how did that impact you and what did you take away from that? I mean, in broad brushstrokes, my big takeaway from interviewing literally thousands of immigrants is on their way in before they get lawyered up or before they're in US control or in custody, that they all are coming because we're letting them in. That's like the big take. I know it sounds simple, but you'd be surprised at how many regular Americans can't really get their head around that or just won't believe it, that they're not fleeing something terrible. They're not fleeing criminality. They're not fleeing government persecution. They almost never talk about that. They're coming for jobs and to earn more money and to enhance their lifestyles. They want to adopt the very famous indulgent American lifestyle. They want to live here. We have a lot of space. We have a lot of money. We're giving a lot of money away. You can earn if you want, or if you don't want to earn, you can get on the public welfare system and live very well. So it's very, I guess, universal, that, that a they're not really fleeing terrible harms at all. They are coming to something much like a good corollary to this would be maybe the California gold rush, where they found a couple of nuggets in the hills in California. And the second word got back east. We had wagon trains and of people rushing to the California gold rushes, not, they weren't fleeing something terrible in Pennsylvania, or they were just kind of poor. And maybe they figured they could do better with this big grand adventure. That I just liken this to that. And people don't really understand that. They're like, oh, these poor immigrants, we must give them sanctuary. That's not what this is. That's, They're like gold prospectors from 1840, more than they are Vietnamese boat people or Jews fleeing the Holocaust. And on that, I just want to pick up one or two stories that you put up recently on the website and on Centre for Immigration Studies. And I think last month, the story was a secret finally revealed, Americans can know the US cities, receiving hundreds of thousands of immigrants flying from abroad. That was May last month. And you'd said a House committee data release confirms a Centre for Immigration Studies report that you had done. But tell us about that information, because you'd expect you expect information to be public. And then after a while, you realize when you delve deeper, actually, it's set up. So the public aren't supposed to really be aware of what's happening. But you're able to list those cities. Tell us a little bit about that. Well, one thing that the Biden administration felt like it needed to do was remove the appearance of mass chaos of thousands of people. Moving between the ports of entry over the border. Once it got to a certain point, there would be some media would go down there and it just looked awful. And it got in the way of them being able to deny that anything unusual was happening when you would have these huge, you know, surging people. So they came up with programs that would let would-be planning aspiring border crossers to stay in Mexico for a little while longer and apply on a cell phone app. To cross quote unquote legally. They could schedule their illegal crossings at a land bridge or they could schedule on a phone or on a computer in their home countries to fly directly into the United States from their foreign airports and therefore remove themselves and their numbers from the total coming through illegally so that they wouldn't draw as much attention. Those are called parole programs. There's a flight one where they're flying directly and there's a land one where you can walk across at the invitation of CBP, U.S. Border and Customs and Border Protection over the land ports. To date, we've got almost 900,000 people have entered the United States through these kind of created admissions programs. But then as soon as they announced them, the administration just shut up about them and nobody asked what was happening with them until I came along and I put in Freedom of Information Act requests. I wanted to know how many, which nationalities were crossing at the land, how many were flying in, which airports were they flying into, which ones were they flying from. So the story that's out right now, the most recent one is about the airports that they're flying from. These are four nationalities for this program, Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans, and Venezuelans. And the idea is we're going to bring them, let them fly in because they're under dire humanitarian stress. We need to rescue them. That's the purpose of the program. We're rescuing people. But when I got my hands on the country of departure list, I found that they were authorizing these flights from all over Europe. Europe, Germany, France, the UK, Italy, Spain, Iceland, Israel, all of the Gulf states, Australia, from places that could not even remotely be called dangerous or where anybody living there could ever claim a humanitarian need to obtain American protection and sanctuary. So this just kind of gives lie to all of the way that they are justifying this thing, this huge admissions program by air that you need to escape from Japan. You're a Cuban and living in Japan and you have to escape from Barbados and Aruba and the Virgin Islands, all these kind of vacation spots, these beautiful jewels of vacation wonderlands is just absurd, nobody who knows this information could possibly now accept what the administration is saying about that program or even about the one where they're crossing the land bridges too. Well we had the same issue in Europe where everyone wanted to to get to the UK despite being in safe country after safe country after safe country in Europe, so we had the same issues. Right the whole thing, asylum there and here is just a complete bogus lie, all of it is just there is no practical use nobody coming to these countries is really looking for asylum. They're using the asylum system to just get in. And then it's like, deport me. I dare you. Track me down and deport me. And of course, there's no will to do deportations in liberal governments like the Biden administration. There's none at all. And they all know it. Or the UK. We don't deport either. We just bring people in. What's the, you talked about the phone app and you talked about disagreement. This isn't agreement with NGO. Is this agreements with countries on how to actually bring illegals back and forward? Can you rephrase the question? So you talked about the phone app that people can actually go on and then they can organize it ahead. And you talked about coming from safe countries. Is this movement, is this organized by governments, you seem to say, or is it NGOs? Right. Well, I mean, most of it is self, I would say, is self-propelled, but it's informed self-propulsion. So, the United Nations has established networks of support all along way stations, all along the illegal immigrant trails in Latin America and also in Europe. They're everywhere. Food, clothing, shelter, transportation, medical, whatever you need along the route, these organizations, the United Nations, UNHCR, IOM, and many other UN agencies, as well as, you know, hundreds of NGOs have gotten in on the action too. Almost all of it is in the U.S. is funded by the U.S. State Department and taxpayers. I think most Americans don't really understand that the facilitation is that they're funding the facilitation of all of this. And I believe that there are a great many immigrants that would have just stayed home out of uncertainty about the ardour of the trail. Were it not for all of these NGOs, all along the way, they're getting legal support and coaching and assistance of every possible kind so that nobody ever really want for anything. And that's got to play on the decision-making process to leave home. Of course it does. It's also the mass economic hit, but it's also the terrorist side. And again, you've put a post up about the recent arrests of the Tajikistani border crossers for terrorism and commented that you had actually testified before Congress on this last year about terrorist entry through the southwest border. Tell us about that wasn't on my radar at all. Do you want to fill us in a little bit on that? Sure. Well, I mean, this is when I was in the intelligence business and in my last few years as a journalist, I reported and worked extravagantly on the issue of immigrants coming from terror harboring countries over our southern border. And I wrote an entire book about this. I still to this day am the author of the only book about terrorist infiltration and what we do about it here in the United States over our southern border. It's called America's Covert Border War. It's all about this. And I've been warning about this for years. Well, now what we're seeing in the crush of humanity that has overwhelmed all of our counterterrorism programs and protocols down there, we're now starting to see terror attacks, terror plots in very recent times. One of them is the Tajikistanis that you mentioned. That's only the most recent one. Eight Tajikistanis arrested earlier in June, the first week of June, in three American cities. They all came over the border. One of them used the phone app that I mentioned earlier. The other ones we're not sure. They could have used the phone app or just crossed illegally. And the FBI got a sting operation going and just arrested all of them. And we don't have a whole lot more information about that case. They're sandbagging. But just a month ago, we had two Jordanians illegally present in the U.S. Conduct a vehicle ramming attack with a big box truck on Quantico Marine Corps base. One of them had just the month before in April of this year crossed the southern border from Mexico. He ends up over in the Washington, D.C. area, northern Virginia, doing some sort of a truck attack on a major military installation that also happens to be a big FBI training academy, very, you know, rich in targeting symbology, right? So. We also have had a Russian cross the border and get caught up. He's from Chechnya area, get caught up in a major terrorism sting. He's sending thousands of dollars to an Al Qaeda group in Syria. The FBI said that they believe that he had they not arrested him in January of this year. I'm sorry. I think it was in 2022. They arrested him that he would have gone kinetic or they thought he may go violent himself, operational, not just sending money. So we've seen 360 people from the Middle East who were already on the FBI's terrorism watch list cross our border. Biggest record by far that we've ever seen in numbers like that. In the book, America's Covert Border War, I point out in the entire first chapter that Europe suffered a series, an unending series of terror attacks from one end of the continent to the other, including in the UK, from immigrants that came in on the 2014-2015 mass migration wave. And I used that in my entire first chapter to warn that this could happen to the United States, were we to have a similar mass migration event. That book published in January, February 2021. So it was a little early, just as this thing was getting started. But here we are. Todd just to finish off can I ask you the solution to this mess and does aTrump administration coming in, does that fix it? Is this too big? has this are there too many people actually in the country and no knowledge of who they are, I mean what kind of is possibly the solution to the mass U.S. finds herself in? I mean, I believe that the incoming humanity can be shut off in about 30 minutes. That's like as fast as they started it, they could end that by just simply pushing everybody back to Mexico. 100%. Everybody goes back to Mexico. That's what Trump was doing. That's why the numbers were so low at the end of the Trump term. So there's Remain in Mexico, there's policies where you can push people back and not let them apply for asylum. They can apply in Mexico. Mexico is a safe country or somewhere else. Those are all doable. And nobody wants to spend $5,000 or $10,000 crossing if you know you're going to get pushed back. You're going to lose your money. It's that simple. It's literally that simple. When I interview immigrants, that's what they tell me. Yeah, we waited until Trump was gone because we would have lost all our money. It's that simple. So it's a cost benefit ratio calculation that every smart immigrant makes, so that the numbers can go down. Now, it's a much steeper hill or mountain to climb to deport eight million people. That is something that the Trump campaign is promising to do. I believe that they will definitely get some kind of a monumental deportation program underway. They're going to take heat for that. There'll be political, there'll be lawsuits, there'll be all kinds of blowback. And so, but the important thing is that when people at home in Tegucigalpa, Honduras, see that the administration is rounding up and wants to round up all Hondurans, they're going to stay home. Just the messaging of some of that is going to deter a lot. And I also think that the administration probably will punish the NGOs and disrupt their flow of cash and remove the network of support that is so alluring for them. So it's, he may not be able to deport that many people in four years but he may not need to. Todd I really appreciate you coming on, immigration is certainly the big topic, even here in the UK, and our election three weeks away as it is over with you for November, I think the best place is obviously the books, all the links in the description, people can follow you on Twitter, but I think certainly go to the website, toddbensman.com, and people can sign up to your newsletter. I think that's probably the best way of keeping in contact with the information you're putting out. Yes, that's right. Awesome. Well, Todd, thank you so much for coming on today and sharing your experiences on this huge issue. Thank you, and good luck over there in Europe, a couple of years ago, they arrested five Tajikistanis there plotting to blow up US military installations in Germany. Yeah, it's the same struggle we face all across the West, but thank you certainly for highlighting this.

6/05/2024 PODCAST Episodes #1401 - #1403 GUEST: Phill Kline, Rep. Tom Tiffany, Elaine Parker, Rep. Morgan Griffith, Rep. Rob Wittman + YOUR CALLS! at 1-888-480-JOHN (5646) and GETTR Live! @jfradioshow #GodzillaOfTruth #TruckingTheTruth   Want more of today's show? Episode #1401 MAGA Vows Vengeance On Communists Episode #1402 Illegal Jordanians Breech U.S. Quantico Marine Base Episode #1403 WVU Baseball Players Reed Chumley and Ben Lumsden Make Surprise Call Before Super Regionals   https://johnfredericksradio.libsyn.com/

On this episode: Bidenomics: Harris Poll finds most Americans believe US in Recession - Mounting evidence points to nightmare scenario for U.S. economy - Household net worth leaving analysts stunned - we'll examine. Borderline: Invasion of illegal aliens under Biden has made housing crisis worse - Many Border Patrol Agents leaving under Biden - Youngkin demands answers from Biden after 2 'Jordanian illegal immigrants' attempt to infiltrate military base - Likely American voters prefer deporting Illegal Aliens over amnesty according to researchers - we'll analyze. Testing The Faith: Terrorist attack on church in Tenn. you likely never heard about - George Barna identifies biggest threats facing the Church - Satanist accepts Jesus during history-breaking baptism as 12,000 get dunked - Anti-Zionists occupy condemned university building, vandalize it with antisemitic graffiti - we'll explore. Plus, 2024 Race: Biden-Trump Matchup Margin Razor Thin With Nearly 1 In 5 Voters Likely To Change Their Minds, Quinnipiac University National Poll Finds; More Than 7 In 10 Voters Plan To Watch June Debate. And, doomed CNN's primetime ratings hit 33-year LOW. http://www.spreaker.com/show/christian-talk-that-rocks https://christiantalkthatrocks.net or http://christiantalkthatrocks.com

In the late hours of Saturday night 170 drones, 120 ballistic missiles, and 30 cruise missiles barreled toward Israel. It was a direct and unprecedented strike on Israel from Iran. Extraordinarily, Israel—with the help of the Americans, the British, the French, and even the Jordanians and the Saudis—were able to intercept 99 percent of the missiles.  Iran said the attack was a response to Israel's hit on a consular building in Syria earlier this month that killed high-ranking Iranian Revolutionary Guard commanders. Many analysts and journalists have also framed the attack the way Iran had: as a “retaliatory strike.” But it's a strange way to describe the historic onslaught considering Iran's war of aggression since October 7. After all, it was Iran that trained and armed Hamas to come and butcher 1,200 Israelis. It was Iran that trained and armed Hezbollah, whose attacks on northern Israeli communities have kept tens of thousands from their homes.  Free Press columnist Matti Friedman nailed it when he wrote that this weekend's attack was Iran coming out of the shadows for the first time: “like a flash going off in a dark room, the attack has finally given the world something valuable: a glimpse of the real war in the Middle East.”  Walter Russell Mead wrote on Twitter Saturday night: “By any reasonable standard, a state of war now exists between the State of Israel and the Islamic Republic of Iran. The questions now are how fast and how far does it escalate, who will be drawn in, and who will win.” Today, Michael Moynihan speaks with Michael Oren, the former Israeli ambassador to the United States about these questions—and what comes next in this unprecedented moment in history. While the U.S. was instrumental in helping Israel defend itself over the weekend, Biden has been clear with Israel: he does not want Israel to respond. He is reported to have said to Netanyahu, “You got a win. Take the win.” But if Israel doesn't respond, will that only embolden Iran further? Isn't that the sort of appeasement that got us here in the first place? And if Israel is compelled to respond for the sake of its country, can it do so without American support? As Michael Oren wrote for The Free Press: “The story of America can end only one of two ways: either it stands up boldly against Iran and joins Israel in deterring it, or Iran emerges from this conflict once again unpunished, undiminished, and ready to inflict yet more devastating damage.” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this episode of "Going Places," I'm sharing a very special story I wrote for Conde Nast Traveler this summer called In the Land of the World's Oldest Bread, A Return to an Ancient Baking Culture.We'll journey together to the heart of Jordan, where baking is not just about sustenance but a profound cultural legacy. Join me as we explore how bread is intricately woven into the fabric of Jordan's community life, from traditional dishes gracing UNESCO's heritage list to the philosophy of Al Barakah that binds individuals to each other and the land. We'll also look at the challenges local wheat varieties face and the passionate efforts of people looking to revive Jordan's connection to its ancestral crops. So, come along on this journey as we explore a story of history, community, and the enduring spirit of Jordan through its breadmaking.This episode and the entire season is brought to you by Visit Jordan. Be sure to visit myjordanjourney.com to learn more about Jordan.What you'll learn in this episode:Journey to Jordan to explore its bread-making cultureDescription of arboud's simple ingredients and baking processJordan's history as part of the Fertile Crescent and its agricultural significanceDiscovery of the world's oldest known bread in Jordan's Black DesertImpact of this discovery on understanding human history regarding baking and farmingDescription of Jordan's native baladi wheat and its influence on culinary traditionsVarious traditional Jordanian dishes that incorporate breadThe shift from local baladi wheat farming to imported refined flour in the 1970sEfforts by Al Barakeh Wheat Collective to restore Jordanians' connection to native wheatOther organizations' efforts to revive ancient wheat and traditional recipesThe concept of Al Barakeh and its cultural importance in JordanFeatured on the show:In the Land of the World's Oldest Bread, a Return to an Ancient Baking CultureSummer reading series:Robb Report: Inside Hotelito, A Luxe Hideaway on Mexico's Guerrero CoastAFAR: In Jordan, Skip the Bubble & Go Here InsteadVogue: An Unexpected Cultural Hotspot in the AlpsBBC Travel: Mongolia's epic celebration at -40CAFAR: The Untold Story of Turkey's Iznik TilesCN Traveler: Seeking Silence In Wadi RumToronto Star: A Lens On The World

Find me and the show on social media @DrWilmerLeon on X (Twitter), Instagram, and YouTube Facebook page is www.facebook.com/Drwilmerleonctd TRANSCRIPT: Announcer (00:38): Connecting the dots with Dr. Wilmer Leon, where the analysis of politics, culture, and history converge. Dr Wilmer Leon (00:46): Welcome to the Connecting the Dots podcast with Dr. Wilmer Leon. I'm Wilmer Leon. Here's the point. We have a tendency to view current events as though they occur in a vacuum, failing to understand the broader historical context in which most events take place. During each episode of this podcast, my guests and I will have probing, provocative, and in-depth discussions that connect the dots between current events in the broader historic context in which they occur. This will enable you to get a better understanding and be able to analyze the events that impact the global village in which we live. On today's episode, we explore the genocide in Gaza, the development of conflict on the continent of Africa, and what does all this tell us about American foreign and domestic policy? And to help to connect these dots is my next guest. He holds the John Jay and Rebecca Moore's chair of history and African-American Studies at the University of Houston. He's one of the most prolific writers of our time. His latest books are entitled, I dare Say, A Gerald Horn Reader and Acknowledging Radical Histories. Dr. Gerald Horn, as always, welcome to the show and let's connect some dots. Gerald Horne (02:05): Thank you for inviting me. Dr Wilmer Leon (02:08): If you would please your two most recent books, I dare say, a Gerald Horn Reader and acknowledging radical histories. If you could tell us a little bit about these two most recent works that you've been able to put together. Gerald Horne (02:23): So the former work, I dare say, is a collection of articles and essays and reviews that written in recent decades dealing with such disparate matters as the anti-apartheid movement in the United States, the urban revolts in Los Angeles in the 1960s and the 1990s, the relationship between black nationalism and the rise of Japan and the first few decades of the 20th century, A number of articles of that vein and character. Now acknowledging radical histories is a conversation or a series of conversations I had with a younger scholar from Colorado where we talk about a number of books that are published over the years, which as you know, includes, works on the black press, on the music we call jazz on the colonial and post-colonial history of North America, slavery, Haitian Revolution, et cetera. Dr Wilmer Leon (03:26): To those varying titles that you've researched, you are one of the preeminent historians, again, one of the most phenomenal writers. What is it that motivates and drives your research? Because everyone, now, I don't have all of your books, but I counted them. I got about 17 of 'em. The topics are just incredibly broad. One thing we can never do with you is put you in a box or pigeonhole you. What drives your research? Gerald Horne (04:04): What drives my research? Well, I would say that particularly concerning research, it's curiosity. Curiosity about something that has not been addressed. And to that end, I should say that from my point of view, the research is much more invigorating than the writing. I mean, the writing is fine, but the writing is like work because what Dr Wilmer Leon (04:29): I meant, I'm sorry, what I meant was what piques your interest and motivates you? How do you pick your topics? Gerald Horne (04:42): How do I pick my topics? Well, I'll give you an example. I was watching a documentary just the other day on black British history, and it was shepherded by a black British subject. He happened to be in Sierra Leone. The Sierra Leone in West Africa was started as a direct result of the British being ousted from what is now in the United States in the late 18th century, and many so-called black loyalists wound up moving to Nova Scotia and Canada to London and eventually to Sierra Leone. And so as he was walking through the archive in Sierra Leone, it occurred to me that there might be an interesting story there concerning black loyalists. That is to say black people who fought against the formation of the United States of America post 1776 and then wound up in Sierra Leone. So I made a mental note to write the Sierra Leone archive to see if they have a website. (05:42) I know that in Sierra Leone they also had a major university for bay, F-O-U-R-A-H, and even though they've had rather crushing internal disputes, but not so much recently, probably more so in the previous decade, first decade or so of the 21st century, it seems to me there's a story there to be told. Now I'm not sure what the story will be. Likewise, this summer I'll probably be traveling to Cooperstown, New York to the Baseball Hall of Fame. I'm not sure what I'll come up with there with regard to a project, but I know I'm interested in the topic, like I'm interested in West African history, black loyalist history. So I'm sure after I poke around for a few days, I'll come up with a topic. Dr Wilmer Leon (06:30): Gotcha, gotcha. It's that constant state of wonder and always interested in looking for the next question that's really telling. Let's move to some of the current topics of the day. Israel's war in Gaza threatens to spill into Lebanon and beyond in response to over 75 years of occupation and oppression. On October 7th, Hamas launched an attack on the settler colony known as Israel. And in response to that attack, Israel has escalated its response to a genocidal devastation of Gaza. Hamas has confirmed the targeting of a deputy head in Dia, a residential area in southern Beirut. Saori was just recently killed. What are your thoughts on the US policy towards this genocide and how do you see this, it seems now to be expanding and escalating beyond the confines of Gaza? Gerald Horne (07:48): Well, obviously the United States is an aider and a better with regard to this enfolding genocide and the US authorities should be very careful because in light of the fact that the South African government pursuant to the Genocide Convention, has brought a case before the International Court of Justice, the World Court, there is a possibility that there will be figures, Lloyd Austin, Anthony Blinken, perhaps Mr by himself who may have to consult a lawyer or a travel agent before they step out of the jurisdiction of the United States of America. Recall that there is a topic under international law known as universal jurisdiction that led to the late Chilean dictator Gusto Pinoche being detained in London for a number of weeks pursuant to a warrant issued by a Spanish magistrate in light of Chile. The others to say the country of Mr. Pinoche torturing and slaughtering Spanish nationals. He barely escaped being brought before the Bar of Justice in Madrid. (08:59) And I dare say that a similar fate might befall some of these US authorities as well, but you mentioned the recent slang of a Hamas leader in Beirut. I'm afraid that there might be a further danger of the Israeli authorities and their US comrades seeking to expand this conflict. Already, you know that the Israeli authorities have said they're fighting a seven front war. Now, ordinarily countries tried to avoid fighting a two front war. Recall what happened during the US Civil War when President Lincoln was being encouraged to attack Great Britain because there was this reasonable suspicion that Great Britain was supporting the so-called Confederate states of America. And Mr. Lincoln said, well, one war at a time, my friends one war at a time. Right now, according to the Israelis, they're fighting wars from their point of view against Gaza, west Bank, Lebanon, Syria, Iran, Iraq, Yemen, and probably there are others that I have omitted. (10:14) Perhaps the most formidable challenge right now is not only in Gaza where despite these Israeli claims that they have killed 8,000 Hamas fighters, you still have an enormous toll with regard to Israeli casualties including deaths of Israeli soldiers. We all know that Hezbollah in Southern Lebanon has caused the abandonment of Northern Israel by reigning rockets from Southern Lebanon down on Northern Israel. In fact, you've had an abandonment effectively of Southern Israel as well. This is presenting an enormous problem for the Israeli economy because what happens when you have these areas abandoned, combined with Israel being heavily dependent upon reservists, that means that folks who ordinarily are involved in the economy sitting in office cubicles, stocking grocery shelves, are either now staying in hotels in Central Israel at the behest of the Israeli government. That is to say they're picking up the tab. Or alternatively, you have people on the front lines who are dodging bullets and projectiles. (11:32) You might've noticed that on New Year's Eve at Tel Aviv, the commercial and intellectual capital of Israel, you had the Hamas fighters shooting missiles at midnight as sort of a welcome to 2024 bravado into Tel Aviv, and this Bess speaks the enormous problems that the Israelis face. We saw that the United States has withdrawn this massive aircraft carrier, the Gerald or Ford, although it still has the Eisenhower carrier near Southern Yemen, where of course the Ansar Allah referred to as tis in the United States have been shooting missiles into I Iraq and Southern Israel, and of course coming into conflict with the US authorities as well. Now, if you monitor Israeli media, they are not necessarily happy about that. They feel that this might be the result of all of these press articles. We've been skimming in the US media in particular where supposedly there are these bitter arguments between Mr. (12:45) Biden and Mr. Netanyahu over Mr. Biden telling Mr. Netanyahu that he needs to stop bombing civilians and needs to have a more targeted campaign against amass fighters. And therefore, by withdrawing this drill, r Ford, the US authorities are saying, you're on your own Israel. Well, I'm not so sure because my understanding is that as opposed to this massive drill or forward or aircraft carrier, they're just substituting, they're sending destroyers amphibious carriers as well, which may be more useful in terms of a ground invasion, particularly into Southern Lebanon. So this war is spinning out of control. But let me also say that as a person, as noted who's been monitoring Israeli media, I must say it's quite striking to listen to a number of these Israeli commentators. Many of them of course have US accents, which is not as a surprise, but many of them, if you step outside of Israel and that conflict, they have a much more realistic viewpoint of international politics, which I guess is understandable. (14:00) What I mean by that is their analysis of the Russia Ukraine conflict is not altogether on board with the mainstream US analysis. Their analysis of the Chinese economy is not necessarily on board with the denigration of China that you hear routinely and regularly in the US media. And that Bess speaks the fact that they're a sovereign state that bespeaks the fact that they're watching very closely and carefully the incipient decline of us imperialism and are deciding perhaps to hedge their betts. And I think that that's a very wise decision because that's something that I would hope and I would wish that many of our Black American leaders would do that is to say they made a wager, whether they it or not, that there would be us hegemony indefinitely into the future. But obviously that's not the case with the rise of the Chinese economy. (15:00) But unlike these Israeli intellectuals I was just making reference to, I'm talking about right wing Israelis intellectual, it's not progressives. You don't see any sort of clue amongst many of our black American intellectuals and leaders as to whether or not they should reconfigure whether or not they should rejigger, but instead they're motoring ahead as if this were 1991. I should also say that this October 7th attack on Israel by the forces from Gaza reminds us as to how matters can change in a matter of hours. What I mean by that is few of us would acknowledge that on October 6th, a few months later, Israel would be fighting for its very survival. But that's basically what's at play Now. There's no guarantee that Israel as an apartheid state will continue to survive and continue to thrive, and that is something that I would once again hope that many of our black American intellectuals and leaders would consider when they contemplate the future of this country. Dr Wilmer Leon (16:08): To that point, I think a lot of folks either didn't listen to what the Hezbollah leader Nasra said on the eighth or the ninth when he gave his speech, one of the points that he was very, very clear to make or one of the questions he was very, very clear to ask was How long are you all willing to do this? And that question just to me was very reminiscent of the Vietnam question, the Kong question, the general Jaap question, who wrote the book? What people's war, people's army, how long are you willing to fight a counter insurgent urban gorilla war that you're not really prepared to fight? And the point that he was making was, we're here till the end because we're fighting for our freedom and we'll die standing on our feet. We refuse to keep living on our knees. Gerald Horne (17:16): Well, that's a very important ideological point. And speaking of which, one of the heartening aspects of this otherwise tragic situation is that because of this understandable focus on historic Palestine in the US media, you see that many of our friends on the left and some even beyond the left or beginning to refer to Israel as a settler colonial project. What's interesting about that is that I think it's also leading some on this side of the Atlantic to begin to look at the United States itself as a settler colonial project. That is to say that that was its origins hundreds of years ago before the settlers revolt of 1776. And speaking of which, it's not beyond the realm of imagination that as this conflict in historic Palestine unfolds that the 708,800,000 settlers on the West Bank occupied territory may be forced to evacuate as a part of a wider peace deal. (18:28) Now, I admit that that does not seem in the cards right now, particularly in light of the fact that all polls suggest that the Israeli populace, if anything, feels that their government is not hitting Gaza hard enough, believe it or not. So obviously to talk about settlers being forced to withdraw, it seems farfetched. But then again, it seemed farfetched on October 6th to talk about Israel fighting for its very survival. Now, if the way folks have analyzed the United States post 1776 would apply to Israel, if there's a settler's revolt on the West Bank of occupied territory, then you can expect if you use that US prism for many to see that as a step forward since after all, they're revolting against an Israeli regime, which we do not necessarily approve of, just like the settlers in the 18th century revolted against a British regime that many did not approve of. (19:33) I mean, that sounds ludicrous, perhaps fantastical, but I'm trying to make a point about how we should use this conflict in Israel and the focus on it to leverage it on our behalf so we can get a deeper analysis of our plight. You recall in my opening comments, I talked about the black loyalists. It's no secret. Historians have acknowledged for some time that the black population of North America, by several orders of magnitude did not stand with George Washington and Thomas Jefferson and James Madison and Patrick Henry. They did not engage in class collaboration, which has been a hallmark of the settler population of European descent across class lines obviously. And therefore they lost and many of them fled as noted to Nova Scotia, to London, to Sierra Leone, and then those who were left behind were treated atrociously because if you fight a war lose, you should expect to be treated atrociously. (20:35) Likewise, if there's a settlers revolt on the West Bank, do not expect the bulk of Palestinians to stand by the settlers. I mean, it's unfortunate I even have to make that statement. But in any case, to go back to a global view of this conflict, what's also striking is how there's daylight that's emerging between the us and its so-called European allies with regard to this conflict. Now, on the one hand, you have the federal Republic of Germany, which in some ways is more hawkish than the United States of America with regard to the Israel question, after all, Germany is occupied by US military forces. One of the most important US military bases in the world is the Ramstein in what used to be West Germany. But already you see that with regard to the United States trying to knock together a convoy to confront the Yemenis that initially it was announced that France, Spain, and Italy were on board, but that was premature. (21:45) They ultimately said that they would not fight or confront the Yemenis under US command. It would have to be under European Union Command or United Nations command or some other entity That Bess speaks how also that the alliances that the United States has come to rely upon may be in need of repair. And you also see that the need of repair with regard to this Ill-advised venture venture in Ukraine, where you see Hungary obviously not on board a key European union country, and France has been making noises about not being on board. And perhaps at some point those noises will be concretized. And likewise, with regard to the new Cold War against with China, which the Israeli right has been talking about quite a bit lately, you notice that France is not on board Germany, even though it's occupied territory is not on board because they see what side of the bread their bread is buttered on, and they want those deals from China whose manufacturing capacity dwarfs that of the United States. By certain measures, this economy is already larger than that of the United States. And so this crisis, this conflict in historic Palestine has exposed and revealed to the world not only the weaknesses and frailties of the Israeli regime, but also the weaknesses and frailties of its partner in arms speaking of the United States of America. Dr Wilmer Leon (23:32): And to that point, what you see when you look at the dynamics in the region, you've mentioned Hezbollah in the north, you've got Syria, you've got Anah in Yemen or the Houthis as they are known, and they are all acting on one hand in their best interest, but their common enemy is the United States and it's aircraft carrier in the region known as Israel. And on October 7th, there was a lot of analysis that was saying, oh, Hezbollah was behind this, that Hezbollah was collaborative. And again, Hassan Raah was very clear. He said, we weren't involved on November 7th, but we're in on November 8th, October. We weren't in on October 7th, but we're in on October 8th. So if you would talk about those dynamics, particularly Anah, because they seem to be wanting this smoke, they seem to be wanting this fight, who would've thought that a small poor country like Yemen would now be having the international impact that it's having on world trade as it is selectively attacking ships that are traversing that body of water? Gerald Horne (25:04): Well, there's quite a backstory to go back a year or so recall that the Ansara law was in a death match with its neighbor in Saudi Arabia and fighting the Saudis to a standstill. But then what happens is that China brokers a peace accord between Iran, a close ally of the Yemenis and the Saudis, and then of course, that leads to a drawdown of the conflict between the Saudis and the Yemenis. And note that with regard to this, so-called Convoy, that the United States is trying to knock together for a confrontation with the Yemenis that the Saudis have not joined in, in fact, the only neighboring country that has joined in as the Seychelles, which is far distant from the Saudi Yemeni border, far distant from the Red Sea and far distant from the Suez Canal as well. Dr Wilmer Leon (26:11): Are you referring to Joe Biden's coalition of the willing that seems to be unwilling? Is that what you're Gerald Horne (26:18): Referring coalition of the willing that's unraveling. Dr Wilmer Leon (26:21): And Gerald Horne (26:23): It's understandable because if you know anything about US foreign policy in recent years and decades is that Washington is an unreliable partner. Despite spending a trillion dollars a year on the Pentagon, they were chased out of Afghanistan in August, 2021. They were able to overthrow Libya in 2010, 2011, but obviously have turned that North African country into a kind of charnel house. They were Ed in Vietnam, 19 75, 19 53, after sending thousands of troops to the Korean peninsula, they were forced into a truce, which is held until recently. Although keep in mind that the North Koreans who fought the United States to a standstill in 1953 has been suggesting that they're willing to rumble again if the United States does not stop its provocations. So it's understandable why the Saudis would not be enthusiastic about joining the So-called Coalition of the Willing. But I should also go back a bit further than the past year. (27:33) Recall that during the height of the Cold War culminating in 1991 with the collapse of the Soviet Union, you had a socialist party in control of Aidan. Aidan, of course, is a southern Yemen. It's now a launching pad for attacks on Israeli flagships or ships set it to Israel. But what happens that the United States as ever could not leave well enough alone, it did everything in its power to destabilize that particular regime and succeeded. And so now they're faced with an even more formidable challenge coming from Ansar, Allah, Allah. And then if you look at Syria, for example, recall that one of the criticisms that has been made of Mr. Obama was that Juan had an opportunity circa 2013 to bomb Syria and the regime in Damascus of President Al Assad that he backed down the hawks, thought that he should have moved forward even though he tried to say that he did not have support from London, the usual sidekick in these imperialist adventures of US imperialism. (28:54) And he did not necessarily have support in Congress as well, but in any case, that did not prevent the United States from supporting under the table various disreputable forces, including forces with suspicious ties to Al-Qaeda and to isis, but for an intervention by the Iranians and Moscow, perhaps President al-Assad in Damascus would've been overthrown by now. So this is a very open and notorious train of events that I'm describing. It also sheds light on why Egypt is not necessarily enthusiastic about joining this convoy to help to circumvent the Yemeni defacto blockade on the Red Sea because the Egyptians get a significant portion of their government revenues from operating the Suez Canal about 9 billion annually. But the Egyptians also have reason to suspect the good intentions of US imperialism particularly, and in light of the fact that the US imperialism is backing this genocidal campaign in Gaza. (30:20) And to that end, I should mention that there's the Rafa crossing between Gaza and Egypt and the scuttlebutt from Israeli sources is that you should expect a more massive attack on that Rafa crossing, which in some ways would be a declaration of war against Egypt, believe it or not. To that end, Jordan was not on that list of seven fronts where Israel is supposedly now involved in conflict. But if you monitor Israeli media, they're beginning to raise serious questions about the pacifist intentions of the Jordanians. I recall that a significant percentage, if not the bulk of the Jordanian population is Palestinians. They're particularly important with regard to skilled labor, with regard to engineers and physicians and all the rest. And the Israelis are now charging that they suspect that there is a smuggling of weapons from into the West Bank occupied territory, which is allowing the Palestinians on the West Bank to resist more stoutly. (31:42) The incursions made by the 800,000 settlers who by the way, are armed with rifles from the United States of America. And so this seven front war easily could turn into an eight front war, a nine front war with folks in your audience. That is to say the US nationals and citizens basically picking up the tab at the same time when homelessness stalks the land, when hunger is out of control, when many of our children do not have adequate textbooks or they're fed inadequate versions of history per Governor DeSantis of Florida. And so it reminds me of the slogan raised in 1972 by Democratic presidential candidate George McGovern, the senator from South Dakota, when he said, come home United States of America, he was referring to come home from Vietnam. Now we can say, come home United States of America, come home from these wild-eyed schemes of war and conflict in West Asia. Dr Wilmer Leon (32:51): And you and I for the last 30 minutes, we've been discussing Gaza, we've been discussing the settler colony of Israel, we've been discussing Yemen and Anah. Why should African-Americans care? That is something on my radio show inside the issues on SiriusXM that people call in and ask all the time. Wilmer, you spend all this time talking about the Palestinians, Wilmer, you spend all the time pick up what's happening in Venezuela, what's happening in Argentina, what's happening in Peru, why should we care? Now, you just touched on a bit of it, but explain to my audience as African-Americans, why does this matter to us? Gerald Horne (33:46): Well, first of all, I pay quite a bit in taxes, and I'm sure there are many in your audience who do the same politics amongst other things is about where do your tax dollars go. Now, if those who call into your other programs and object to talking about foreign policy, I guess they don't care where their tax dollars go. Well, sorry, I do care where my tax dollars go. I just mentioned that a trillion dollars is spent annually on the Pentagon, which can't seem to win a war anywhere. So obviously there is a mismatch of revenue, taxes, and purposes war when we should have a match between revenue, taxes, and education and healthcare. Secondly, with regard to historic Palestine in particular, that conflict could trigger World War iii. Now, maybe there are those in your audience who think that there's some sort of black neutron bomb. (34:54) You recall that the neutron bomb under Ronald Wilson Reagan, it killed people, but left property standing. I guess they think that a neutron bomb would kill everybody except black people, and so therefore we don't have to be concerned. Well, I think that that's science fiction of the worst kind, and then we also know that there is a disproportionate percentage of black people in the military. It's no accident as historians like to say that the top military man and the top civilian in the military are both black Americans. Lloyd Austin, chief of the Pentagon, CQ Brown, the head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. You might've noticed that in the anti-affirmative action decision rendered by the US Supreme Court about eight or nine months ago, they had a special carve out for US military academies for West Point, the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs, the Naval Academy, and Annapolis, Maryland, because those who rule this country recognize that because of the horrendous history that we've suffered, that's bred a culture of fighting. (36:08) I wrote a whole book about boxing where I tried to explain why there was a disproportionate percentage of black Americans excelling in the sweet science, Muhammad Ali, Joe Lewis, Jack Johnson, sugar Ray Leonard to list us long and likewise, that feeds and bleeds into the military. You know that during the conflict in Vietnam, one of the startling aspects of that genocidal conflict was the disproportionate number of black Americans who were killed during this war because we were overrepresented not to mention the disproportionate percentage who were subject to court martial and other kinds of pulverizing penalties. So there are so many reasons of why we should be concerned beyond just being humanitarians, beyond just being folks who are concerned about our own future. Because when these wars happen, inevitably what happens is that it puts wind in the sails of many of our chief antagonists right here at home. And they might get the bright idea that if the Israelis can liquidate Willy-nilly, the Palestinians, perhaps the Israeli comrades here in North America can liquidate Willy-nilly their long-time, long-term antagonists, speaking of black folk. So it's a shame that we have to spend time explicating the obvious because explicating the obvious prevents us from going on to discuss more naughty and difficult questions to our detriment. Dr Wilmer Leon (37:56): You mentioned the Zionist settler colony of Israel and a seven front war, and what we see playing out right before us in terms of American foreign policy is I'll just say a multi-front war. We've got the United States and Ukraine, we have the United States in Gaza, we have the United States trying its damnedest to pick a fight with China. So those are three fronts. Then we've got Venezuela and Guyana with the United States convincing Britain to send a ship over there. We've got the United States involved now in Argentina. So help me understand who it is that seems to think that a getting involved in these multi-front conflicts is a good idea, let alone who thinks we can win. To your earlier point, we haven't won anything since 1953. And the other point is we're the ones that are starting the conflicts, we're starting fights, we can't win. I don't get the logic, and I know there isn't any, Gerald Horne (39:22): Well, I'm sure that those who are nit pickers would point to the successful invasion of Grenada in 1983, Dr Wilmer Leon (39:34): And Panama Gerald Horne (39:35): Could sit comfortably in Yankee Stadium in the Bronx. I guess you could count that as a victory. But I think in Dr Wilmer Leon (39:44): Order Panama, Gerald Horne (39:45): On Panama, and of course, Dr Wilmer Leon (39:46): Oh wait, I left one out because now we're also trying to get Kenya to be the menstrual black face on white foolishness as we try to invade Haiti. Gerald Horne (39:58): I think that in order to understand these conflicts, you have to understand the military industrial complex. That is to say, if you look at the stock of Lockheed Martin, look at the stock of Raytheon, look at the stock of Boeing, or look at the front page of the New York Times a day or so ago talking about how high level Pentagon officials like Esper, the Pentagon chief under Mr. Trump and Top Generals, they're now defecting to Silicon Valley with all of these harebrained science fiction schemes about new weapons that they expect the Pentagon to pick up the tab for. So the US military and the Pentagon is basically a slush fund for the 1%. And obviously it does not matter to a degree whether or not the Pentagon is fit for purpose or whether or not the Pentagon actually is spending tax dollars in a manner that will allow us imperialism to overthrow regimes. (41:08) Of course, US imperialism, to be fair, was able to overthrow the regime in Libya, for example, about a decade or so ago. However, I should say that with regard to China, if the United States cannot adequately confront Russia a country of 150 million compared to the United States, 330 million, not to mention the United States being backed up by the federal public of Germany, Germany, 82 million, France and Britain, 60 million each. Not to mention Poland, which by some measures is spending more on the military proportionately and per capita than a number of its Western European allies combined. They are obviously not able to subdue Russia and Ukraine. So how are they going to subdue China? A country with a population of 1.3 billion, which as noted has an economy by some measures larger than that of the United States of America. We have the Taiwanese elections coming up in less than two weeks. Taiwan is the island of 20 million or so off the southern coast of China that China claims as its own. (42:22) The United States, of course, sometimes explicitly, sometimes implicitly would like to see Taiwan declare independence, which would violate the pacs with China going back to the era of not only Richard Nixon, but Jimmy Carter, that would be a flashpoint. That would be a red line for the people's republic of China. So far, the United States has been able to sign up the Philippines to be a kind of pit bull nipping at the heels of the people's Republic of China. I don't think the United States should be counting on Australia, although Australia supposedly is part of Aus, Australia, United States, Japan, India, et cetera. And so once again, Washington is playing with fire because it keeps sticking its nose into business that does not concern it. And at the same time, thus far, it has been able to escape without any substantial blows or at least military blows to the homeland. (43:34) But that lucky training of events is not inevitable, and in any case, even if there's not a military blow to the homeland, there is all manner of collateral damage, which you can see in the streets of Washington DC in terms of the tents for the homeless, you can see it with regard to the streets of Portland, Oregon with folks sleeping on sidewalks as if they're seeking to emulate a Calcutta in the 1940s. So at some point, I think that the majority of the citizenry of this country will have to realize that the present course is not sustainable and that a course correction is long overdue. Dr Wilmer Leon (44:25): We saw recently Secretary of Defense, Lloyd Austin, go to Kenya, sign a five year mutual defense pact with Kenya as the United States is trying to convince Kenya that they need again to be the black face on American imperialism and go into Haiti. The Kenyan Supreme Court has said, wait, not so fast. And I think on around the 25th or 26th of this month, we'll get a decision from the Kenyan Supreme Court. When I saw the photograph of Secretary Austin with his counterpart from Kenya signing this agreement, it made me wonder if the United States is trying to buy a bulwark in Kenya as we see Niger fading and we're seeing a turn anti colonialist turn in a number of other African countries. Is the United States trying to buy a friend in Kenya? Gerald Horne (45:26): Well, that's a possibility because if you look at East Africa in general, particularly East Africa that abuts the Red Sea, which we've already made reference to, that region is on fire right now. I mean, look at Ethiopia, one of the most populous nations on the continent, which just had this internal conflict with regard to Tig Gray. The latest news is that the Ethiopians in search of an outlet to the Red Sea, which they lost when their former province Eritrea seceded from Ethiopia about three or so decades ago, they've just cut a deal with Somali land, which is not a recognized nation, although it's part of the larger Somalia. And now what's happening is that Ethiopia now has that outlet to the Red Sea through Somali land. The Somalis are in high dungeon, they're very upset. Now, some of you may think that there's nothing they can do about it because after all, they have their own internal problems with Al-Shabaab, but oftentimes you need an external issue like Ethiopia to get Somalis to rally around the flag. (46:44) And so this could lead to an explosion on the Red Sea, and you mentioned Kenya. We should not see it as accidental that the first, thus far, only US president had roots, African ancestry had roots in Kenya. Kenya has had a long-term, long-time relationship in the United States of America. As a matter of fact, I wrote a book on Kenya some years ago, and what I pointed out was something that I would hope other scholars would follow up on, which is that Great Britain, which had this massive empire was always looking for those who could be defined as white to staff its empire. And if you look at the early history of Kenya, going back to the 1890s, some of the key personnel happened to be Euro-Americans, for example. And all through the decades leading up to independence from Kenya in 1963, you had a substantial number of Euro Americas. (47:54) As a matter of fact, I start my book talking about the British committing atrocities against the so-called Mal Mal Revolt pre 1963. The figures that I focus on are Euro Americans committing atrocities against Kenya pre 1963. So there's this very close relationship between Nairobi and Washington. That's why this attempt to have Kenya come to police, Haiti should not be seen as a shock, nor a surprise, particularly since the President Ruta now in power, many of us were surprised by his victory in the election of late. He was not necessarily the anointed successor of his predecessor, speaking of President Hu Kenyata. And so he, by his own admission as a hustler, as a matter of fact, that was his slogan, he wants to have a hustler society. Well, this Hustler society might involve accepting dollars from the US Treasury in return for doing dirty deeds in the Caribbean. Dr Wilmer Leon (49:20): Where's the Congressional Black Caucus? Where's the naacp? Where's the voice? The conscience of the Congress, I wrote a piece a while ago, is the conscience of the Congress unconscious, particularly as it relates to the invasion of Haiti. You've got people like Hakeem Jeffries and Kamala Harris trying to go down to Racom and twist arms to get some of the Caribbean countries to have backed his play. They all said no, which is why the United States, I believe, which is why the United States wound up in Kenya and a willing recipient of America's larges in terms of again, being the minstrel face on American imperialism. Where is the conscience of the Congress here? Gerald Horne (50:11): Well, with regard to the Congress, there's a split in the Congressional Black Caucus, particularly with regard to Palestine, where you have a stalwarts like Cory Bush of St. Louis and Andre Carson of Indiana, who happens to be a Muslim, some Lee of Western Pennsylvania, Jamal Bowman of Bronx, Westchester, New York calling for a ceasefire. And as a result, the Israeli lobby, the Zionist lobby, is pledging to spend a hundred million dollars or more during the 2024 electoral cycle to make sure they do not return to Congress. Those stalwarts do not include the aforementioned speaker in waiting. So-called honking Jefferies. Wait a Dr Wilmer Leon (50:52): Minute, wait a minute. I'm sorry to interrupt you, but I get a sense of some hypocrisy or inconsistency here because you have APAC openly threatening and admitting to what I would interpret as involving themselves in American elections. But somehow if China is alleged to have done it, or if Russia is alleged to have done it, that's the reason for us to go to war. Is it me or is that some sense of hypocrisy? Gerald Horne (51:27): Well, obviously when we come to power, we'll have to have a thorough investigation of the Zionist lobby. As a matter of fact, I was just rereading DU autobiography and I got into the chapter where he talks about when he was indicted 1951, allegedly being the agent of a foreign power because he was campaigning against nuclear weapons and campaigning for peace. Now, fortunately, he was able to escape prison at the age of 83, but that tells you how seriously, the US Justice Department, at least at one time took this question of registering as foreign agents. But in any case, the list of stalwarts that I was reciting does not include Gregory Meeks of Southeast Queens, the ranking Democrat on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, and I could go on in this vein. So obviously we have some house cleaning to do with regard to these elections. (52:31) Setting aside the Israeli lobby, which you may recall dangled a cool 20 million before the nose of Hill Harper, the actor who was running for office in the state of Michigan, if he would go after Congresswoman Rashida Tib of Michigan, the only Congress person of Palestinian origin in the US Congress. But I would caution and warn the Israeli lobby that they need to pay more attention to what's going on in Israel, because as I said, as I monitor the Israeli media, I see much more understanding even on the Israeli right, by the way, about the global correlation of forces. I mean, for example, you just heard the news, I'm sure that the Zionist lobby forced Claudine gay, the first black woman, president Farber, to walk the plank because she was not vociferous enough in terms of denouncing amass post October 7th, and they gen up these plagiarism charges against her. (53:42) And you also see that it'll be quite easy as US imperialism goes into decline for the Zionists to be scapegoated, although obviously that would be a simple minded explanation. But it reminds me of the who Lost China debate post 1949 after the Communist Party came to power. It wasn't the United States to lose China. It didn't belong to the United States, but certainly that led to the destruction of careers, et cetera. And already, perhaps to follow up on this point, there may be members of the Zionist lobby who are paying attention. For example, Nelson Pelts, a car carrying member of the 1% who is fighting a gorilla war to replace board members of Disney, which has been hemorrhaging cash because of a futile attempt to keep up in the streaming wars with Netflix. He's also on the board of Unilever, a major European corporation among his assets, or Ben and Jerry's ice cream. (54:50) Ben and Jerry's, as you know, are staunch and stern critics of Israel. And what happened is that the Simon Wiesenthal Center of Southern California, which is a leading member of the pro-Israel camp in this country, then went after Ben and Jerry's, and then Nelson Peltz went after Simon Wiesenthal Center. He resigned from their board. I found that to be extraordinary. Perhaps he's keeping up with the news. Perhaps he recognizes the danger that happens when you have the Zionist lobby overreaching. And the analogy I've often brought into play is a major force in US society, circa 18 60, 18 61 who owned billions of dollars in assets in the body, some enslaved Africans, my ancestors likely yours as well, and they overreached. They decided to go for the gusto and try to overthrow the Lincoln government so that they could perpetuate the enslavement of Africans forevermore. Well, they were a powerful force. (56:01) After all, Virginians and slave owners that controlled the White House had controlled the US Supreme Court were disproportionately represented in the State Department and the Treasury Department, et cetera, but they overreached and wound up losing everything that is to say losing their most valuable property. That is to say their investment in enslaved Africans. And now Israel might be on the verge of replicating that dastardly example. And I trust, and I hope that the Zionist lobby will not be caught with its pants down and will recognize that it needs to draw back. It needs to cool its jets, it needs to cool the hotheads. Otherwise it may find itself in an analogous boat that would couple them with the unlamented departure of the Confederate states of America. Dr Wilmer Leon (56:58): Isn't that overreach the very same problem that the United States is facing on the global scale as again, we look at the failure in Ukraine and newsflash to folks that war is lost as we look at the fight that the United States is trying to pick, as we look at the development of bricks and the growth of bricks, as we look at what's happening again in Peru and what's happening in Argentina and what's happening in Bolivia and what's happening in Venezuela, the United States, and again, the United States trying to overthrow Haiti, well, not overthrow, but reinve because it already controls the government, what's left of the government. So we're transitioning from the unipolar to the multipolar, and with the United States fomenting, all of this unrest has to a great degree sanctioned itself right out of the party because a lot of the countries that I've mentioned, Russia, China, Iran, Venezuela, they have all developed relationships. They're developing currencies to lessen the impact, if not eliminate the impact of American sanctions. So all of that isn't that overreach what the American Empire has been experiencing, and we will look back 10 years from now and say, that was the beginning of the end. Gerald Horne (58:24): Well, certainly it's overreach. I mean, I'm glad you mentioned Argentina because in a message to comrade earlier today, I was drawing an analogy between the new government in Argentina coming to Power about three weeks ago under President Belay and the Zionist lobby, because Argentina had the rare honor of being asked to join the bricks, Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa, which is the rising challenger to us, imperialist hegemony, but for various reasons that need not detain us here, they slapped the side, that invitation because they're making a bet on the pass, on the continuation, (59:09) On the continuation of dollar hegemony. And if people were trying to figure that out, you may want to add to your equation the fact that by some measures, Argentina has more psychiatrists per capita than any other country in the world. I mean, they're trying to sort out who they are. I mean, they border Brazil, which has the largest black population west of Nigeria, and there's this real hysteria and fear in Buenos Aires about being considered, so-called Third World. And so joining an alliance led by an Asian China and including a heavily black Brazil was something that apparently among other things, offended their racial sensibilities, or I should say racist sensibilities, but do not fret because I do not expect President Malay to serve out his term. A general strike has been called within days. I expect them to be driven out of office, not least because Pricess are going through the roof. (01:00:15) It reminds me of when the United States had exerted sanctions against Zimbabwe some years ago after Zimbabwe had moved to extrapolate the land of the settlers, reversing the fruits of settler colonialism, which still was quite rare, and the United States tried to drive the economy into the ditch, and so you could go into a tavern and harra the capital and spend maybe 1 million Zimm dollars to order a beer. By the time you drank the beer and was time to pay the tab, you had to pay 5 million or perhaps even 5 trillion Zim dollars. That's how terrible inflation was, and that's where Argentina is heading. Now at Lee Zimbabwe had the excuse that it was trying to do right by its landless population. It was trying to reverse the fruits of settler colonialism, and so therefore, it was fighting a just war. Argentina does not have that excuse. It was invited into the bricks. (01:01:19) It was invited to join the winning side. As a matter of fact, I've made the joke that perhaps it's not a joke that I'm hoping that the Bricks has individual memberships because I'd like to join the bricks, quite frankly, and get off this sinking ship known as the United States of America. So certainly, once again, I think that as I monitor the Israeli media, they recognize what they're up against. But despite that, they're not necessarily curtailing their genocidal war campaign. I guess the best you can say is that they know what they're up against, but they're saying full speed ahead. And it reminds me of the book by the journalist Seymour Hearst, a Samson option, where he suggested that in a crisis like the biblical figure, Samson, the Israelis would bring down the temple on all of us, which would of course mean triggering World War iii, which could mean destruction of Israel, perhaps even destruction of its sidekick in Washington. Dr Wilmer Leon (01:02:33): Dr. Gerald Horn, as always, my brother, thank you so much for your time. I greatly, greatly appreciate that analysis. Thank you so much for giving me your time, giving us your time, and joining us today. Gerald Horne (01:02:45): Thank you for inviting me, Dr Wilmer Leon (01:02:47): Folks. Thank you so much for listening to the Connecting the Dots podcast with me, Dr. Wiler Leon. Stay tuned for the new episodes every week. Also, please follow and subscribe. Leave a review, share the show, follow me on social media. You can find all the links below in the show description. And remember, this is where analysis of politics, culture, and history, converge and talk without analysis is just chatter, and we don't chatter here on connecting the dots. See you again next time. Until then, I'm Dr. Warmer Leon. Have a great one. Peace and blessings. I'm out Speaker 2 (01:03:32): Connecting the dots with Dr. Where of politics, culture, and history.

Find me and the show on social media by searching the handle @DrWilmerLeon on X (Twitter), Instagram, and YouTube. Our Facebook page is www.facebook.com/Drwilmerleonctd All our episodes can be found at CTDpodcast.com.   This week's episode features Ray McGovern. Former CIA analyst and foreign policy advocate in Washington, DC. He join us to give some history and context on the Israeli/Hamas war.   TRANSCRIPT:   Speaker 1 (00:42): Connecting the dots with Dr. Wilmer Leon, where the analysis of politics, culture, and history converge. Dr. Wilmer Leon (00:51): Welcome to the Connecting the Dots podcast with Dr. Wilmer Leon. I'm Wilmer Leon. Here's the point. We have a tendency to view current events as though they occur in a vacuum, failing to understand the broader historical context in which most events take place. During each episode of this broadcast, my guests and I will have probing, provocative, and in-depth discussions that connect the dots between current events and the broader historic context in which they occur. This will enable you to better understand and analyze the events that impact the global village in which we live on today's episode. According to my guest self-proclaimed Zionist, Joe Biden, with no witts about him is assuring the destruction of Zionist apartheid Israel as corrupt US Intel leaders have unleashed the dogs of war. We cannot be bystanders, quote, indifference to evil is more insidious than evil itself. That's Rabbi Abraham Heschel for insight into this. Let's turn to my guest. He leads the speaking truth to power section of Tell the Word a publishing arm of the ecumenical Church of the Savior in inner city Washington. He served as a CIA analyst for 27 years. His duties including chairing the National Intelligence Estimates and preparing the President's daily brief. And he also ran the Russia desk for the CIA. And in January of 2003, he co-created veteran intelligence professionals for sanity. He is Ray McGovern. Ray, welcome and let's connect some dots. Ray McGovern (02:34): Thanks, Dr. Leon Dr. Wilmer Leon (02:36): Ray, you recently published a piece at raymcgovern.com entitled, can You give a brief synopsis of what's happening in Israel? And it's based upon a response to a question from, I believe your youngest daughter. She asked you to explain to her what's happening in occupied Palestine and it opens as follows. I was nine years old, 1948 when there was huge celebration in the Bronx at the founding of the state of Israel. No one told me that Arabs had lived on that land for centuries and were displaced by force. Tens of thousands of them crammed into postage stamped Gaza and now host to millions of Palestinians. Ray, I'll throw it to you. Why was it so important for you to write this piece? Ray McGovern (03:30): Wilmer? Frankly, I was really encouraged that one of my children, and we have five, was interested in knowing what I thought about this. (03:43) Prophets are without renown in their hometowns and sometimes in their own homes. So when Miriam asked me this question, I said, well, she wants a short, concise paragraph, so I'll try and I failed. I couldn't do it In one concise paragraph, I said, look, here's somebody who's genuinely interested. She has three young children. She's got a very busy life, but she knows that this is important. So let me explain some of the background to this. And so I started out first with the, so-called religious justification for what Israel did. Well in occupying lands already occupied by Palestinian people for centuries before I have been in the West Bank, I have been in Israel at one point, we went up a hill to a Jewish settlement. This is about eight years ago now. At the bottom of the hill, there was devastation. There was no running water, there was poverty of an extreme kind. (05:03) When we went up to the top of the hill, whoa, you look like a golf course for God sake, green lawns being watered, okay? And a rabbi from Cleveland telling us why he's entitled to be there as a settler. So one of my colleagues, we were on a little delegation, said, well, a rabbi, how do you explain the conditions right down at the bottom of this hill in Palestinian territory, and you're beautiful settlement up here. And he said, without hesitation. Well, God promised us this land. Now, I had heard that before and I know not enough about the what's so called the Old Testament, the Hebrew scriptures, but I knew this. I knew that they depend on Deuteronomy 15 four for that. So I basically, rabbi, please cite the part of scripture that justifies your settling on this land. And he said, that's easy. He said, Yahweh said to the Jewish people, you shall have this land flowing with milk and honey. (06:22) And I said, continue, rabbi, continue. And he said, what do you mean continue? I said, well, you're only giving us half of the deal, right? He said, well, what do you mean? I said, read the rest of the verse. So there shall be no poor among you. He said, oh, you forgot to. So it was a deal. It was, well, you might call it a covenant. All right. You shall have this land so that there shall be no poor among you. And I thought that Miriam should know this, that when she hears people say, oh, wait a second, I promised this stuff. It was a deal. And the Israelis, of course, have broken that deal in a scurrilous way. So that's the way I started out. I went into some of the more recent history. But go back to the Hebrew scriptures. It's very clear what God's promise was. Assuming you think this is important. And of course the settlers think it's important. That's why they always cited Dr. Wilmer Leon (07:28): Ray two things. One, it would be one thing if the scripture said, I will give you this land of milk and honey so that you will not be poor. But that's not what it says. It says so that there will not be poor among you. And there's also a reason why those individuals are called settlers. And there's also a reason why that region is called the occupied territories. Ray McGovern (08:06): That's right, Wilmer. And it's an embarrassing history we Americans have because we were settlers on the land, peopled by Native Americans, and we kind of pushed them aside just as Israel has pushed the Palestinians aside. So it's not a happy history. But when you're a settler, well, that's a nice way of putting that. You're coming from outside and you've displaced people who have a right to live on those lands. So as I said in the beginning of this piece, I came from the Bronx. I lived there for my first 22 years before I went in and served as an army officer. Now, when I was nine years old, 19 eight, oh man, it was sort of like the 4th of July, 10 times over Israel had a home, right? And as I noted at the beginning, well, nobody told me. Well, he told me that it was not a land for people, a land without any people in it. (09:15) Well, there were people in it. And that's the basic part of all this. And if you go more recent in the history, I was serving as a CIA analyst in 1967 when the Israelis attacked Egypt and Syria decimated their Air Force and enlarged Israeli territory to include parts of Syria, to include the West Bank, to include the Sinai, to include Gaza, lots of places to include, right? Okay. Now we thought, or we were told that Egypt was about to attack Israel. Well, that was the legends put forward for many years after 1967. But finally, man, be a former Israeli prime minister, got up before an audience in Washington in 1982 and call it chutzpah, call it honesty. Call it a cleansing of his conscience. But this is what he said. It's not long. I want to read it so that I don't mess it up. All right, man. Bein former Israeli prime minister quote, in June, 1967, we had a choice. The Egyptian army concentrations in the side eye approaches do not prove that SSO is already really about to attack us. We must be honest with ourselves. We decided to attack him. (11:07) It was duly reported in the New York Times and people in New York and elsewhere where I was living. Oh, isn't that interesting? So the Israelis said, well, that's called aggression. That's calling creating Libens home. Okay? Not terribly dissimilar from what happened in the thirties at the hands of the Nazis in Germany. And so that's the truth behind all this. Now, how did the UN react then back in 67 when all this happened? There was the unanimous security council resolution, resolution two, four, two, that call for Israel to withdraw from the occupied territories. Was it a close vote? It was unanimous. Okay. Did the Israelis do that? No, they didn't do that. Why didn't they do that? Because of chutzpah? Because the Israelis can always depend on the United States to defend them no matter what they do. And so they have occupied all those territories. They gave back the Sinai to Egypt when there was an agreement under Jimmy Carter, but the Sinai is not worth keeping. (12:17) Actually. Now the people in Gaza are bearing the brunch of this occupation, this oppression, and as I quoted Rabbi Heschel, one of my very favorite people who marched with Dr. King back in the late sixties, that we're not all guilty, but we are all responsible. How did I put it? How did he put it? Indifference to evil is worse than evil itself. That's what we have to measure up to this time. There's been evil in Gaza, and we have to make sure that we don't one sidedly accuse one side and give the other a free ride, so to speak. As has been the case since the US reacted to the UN resolution, it didn't do diddly, as we say in the Bronx to enforce it. Dr. Wilmer Leon (13:23): There's a lot of misinformation. There's a lot of disinformation and outright lies that are being used in support of the Zionist US narrative of this illegal occupation of Palestine, as well as the genocide of Palestinians. I want to read a brief statement and then show a map before I come back to you. Here's a statement. This is from the foreign office, the 2nd of November, 1917, and it reads, dear Lord Rothschild, I have much pleasure in conveying to you on behalf of his Majesty's government. The following declaration of sympathy with Jewish scientist aspirations, which has been submitted to and approved by the cabinet, his majesty's government view, with favor the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people and will use their best endeavors to facilitate the achievement of this object. It being clearly understood that nothing shall be done, which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country. (14:36) I should be grateful if you would bring this declaration to the knowledge of the Zionist Federation, yours, Arthur James Balfour. Now this is known as the Balfour Declaration. The British government decided in 1917 to endorse the establishment of a Jewish home in Palestine, not Israel, Palestine. After discussions within the cabinet and the consulting with the Jewish leaders, the decision was made public. And we have this letter to that point. Here's a map from National Geographic from 1947 where you can see Lebanon, Syria, trans Jordan, Egypt, and Palestine. Israel is not on this map. Why? Because contrary to the dominant Western narrative, Israel did not exist. That's why we know now Israel is actually the occupied territories. Ray people will have a tendency to try to categorize this conversation as anti-Semitic, which is why if we can put the map back up one more time, I want to be sure that people see this map. This is history. This is not narrative. This is not rhetoric. This is history. Ray McGovern. Ray McGovern (16:14): Well, history can be very antisemitic. (16:22) I mean, it's hard to realize that most Americans are blissfully unaware of all this. The maps show the story. Now, the situation right now is different. How is it different? Well, the Soviets, I used to be a Soviet analyst analyst of Russians, foreign policy. The Soviets used to talk about a concept called the correlation of forces. Now, it's not rocket science, okay? It had to do with the balance of power in the world. Now, guess what folks? The balance of power in the world has shifted. People are now talking about a shift from a unipolar world, which is what the US was since World War ii, and particularly since the Soviet Union fell apart to a multipolar world where other countries are allowed to have a say in these things. Well, I look at it as a bipolar world, and I would refer more recently just to the yesterday's vote at the un, where the US was the only one to veto a resolution calling for a ceasefire in Gaza, calling for the Israelis, not to ethnically cleanse Gaza as they apparently still intend to do. (17:53) So what's my point? My point is that everyone, not even the British voted with us this time, okay? 12 to one was there was two abstentions. So what am I saying? I'm saying that the Arab countries, well, here's an example. The Arab ambassadors in Beijing asked the Chinese, please get us all together. We would need to talk about what's going to happen in Gaza. And the Chinese did. The head of Iran calls up arch rival the head of Saudi Arabia and says, we got to do something about this. And they have a cordial conversation. Okay? Next thing you know, he is talking to the head of Hamas. He's talking to the head of Hezbollah, okay? So there are things that are happening here where it's where the deck is being stacked heavily against the United States, and it's sat traps like the UK and France and Germany. They're not very long for this world, those governments, okay? So what we have here is a condition where 20 years ago, the US could work its will. Okay? No longer can it. Hamas is well-equipped. I don't think that killing civilians is a good idea, nor do I. When you look at it or when you look at it, you say, well, was this unprovoked? (19:31) Unprovoked seems to be the adjective of choice here. Just as PCIs decision to defend his compatriots in the DBAs was not unprovoked, neither was Hamas' reaction here without making any moral judgements, which is something that intelligence analysts are not called to do. Actually, we can say you can understand this given the recent history and the more distant history that we've referred to earlier. Dr. Wilmer Leon (20:07): I'm very glad that you put it that way because a lot of times people misconstrue, and I'll just put this on a personal level. I'm not a former, not an intelligence analyst, but I am a political scientist, not a political operative. And so people have a tendency to misconstrue my explanation of events with my agreeing with the events, my saying, I understand why President Putin and Russia went into Ukraine. I understand it because I understand the history. I understand why Hamas took the actions that it did. I don't condone the killing of civilians. I don't condone the killing of children, but I understand why Hamas did what they did. If you could quickly, Tony Blinken, you were just talking about the shift from the unipolar to the multipolar world. Talk a little bit about Tony Blinken and this whole concept of the rules based order, because Tony Blinken in the Biden administration, they love to talk about the rules based order, but when you try to find a definition of it, you can't because it only exists in the mind of Tony Blinken. They rarely talk about international law. They always want to talk about the rules based order. Ray McGovern (21:46): You put your finger on it, the rules based international order, well, it's a contrived expression. It's meant to substitute for international law and the United Nations. It was invented by Blinken and Sullivan and Nolan, and I mean poin and Laro, the foreign minister have made fun of it. Well, tell us about this. We try to Google it, but could you please give us, can you give us a piece of paper to describe what the rules based into law? And of course they can. And what it means is what we say goes, we make the rules, and that's it. Dr. Wilmer Leon (22:30): And you follow our orders. Ray McGovern (22:33): People are getting wise to that increasing number of people witness the vote at the UN yesterday, 12 to one, the one being the United States. The saving grace here, as I say it, is that the UN is still being respected by China, by Russia, and by some of the other countries that are insisting that we abide by UN regulations. First and foremost in this context, security council resolution 2, 4, 2 of November 22nd, 1967 ordering is to relinquish control of the occupied territories that they seized in 1967. So what's the hope here? Well, the hope was yesterday. The US talks about Russia being isolated. Look, (23:34) And maybe just maybe these Zionists, and I'll use that word advisedly. I mean, Joe Biden has bragged about being a real dy in the world. Zionist, so has Blinken and Sullivan, the rest of them. Okay? What does that mean? That means the people that occupied the Palestinian Territories occupied by Palestinians for as just as Native Americans in our example, four centuries before, it doesn't make sense. And it's not going to make any headway no matter how much we invoke this rule space, international order. Thanks for raising that, because it's very telling how we thought that we could just invent a new phrase and substitute it for international law. And the UN Dr. Wilmer Leon (24:29): President Biden, when he went to the region on this, so-called Peacekeeping tour, wherever the heck he was supposed to be doing, he talked about peace. And to your point earlier on, not on this trip, but earlier on he was very clear, I am a Zionist. And then Tony Blinken goes and he says, I am here not only as the Secretary of State of the United States, but I'm here as a Jew. What message do you think that sends to the Arabs in the region who he allegedly is supposed to be trying to find some common ground with and bring about some type of peaceful resolution to this conflict? Ray McGovern (25:18): Well, I think the word is chutzpah and naivete. If blinken doesn't know how that goes over with the Arab leaders that he is talking to, he is hopelessly blind. Wait Dr. Wilmer Leon (25:35): A minute, wait a minute, Ray, does he care? Because what that I remember very clearly probably two years ago when Blinken went to Anchorage, Alaska to meet with the Chinese delegation, and the Chinese delegation got up and said, we're not going to sit here and let you lecture us. We're China. We don't have to sit here and listen to you. And they got up and walked out of the room. That to me, sounds eerily reminiscent or what just transpired with Tony Blinken in the Middle East sounds eerily reminiscent to what he tried to do with the Chinese. Ray McGovern (26:17): Well, Wilmer, you probably have seen President Biden reading from his little notes, even in a very short a session with Netanyahu. So who writes the notes? Dr. Wilmer Leon (26:33): Tony Ray McGovern (26:33): Blink. Well, Blinken writes the notes. Dr. Wilmer Leon (26:36): Victoria Newland. Ray McGovern (26:37): Victoria Newland. Now, what does Victoria Newland have in common? What Jacob Sullivan have in common? They're all of Jewish extraction. Now, should that ordinarily matter? No. Does it matter? Now? It happens to matter. Now we're talking about a Jewish home land created at the expense of the Palestinian people. We're talking about Zionism, which is a political movement, not a religion. So the three top people at the State Department have traditionally been Zionists, not only Jews, but Zionists. Now, this is not lost on the Middle East leaders or China or Russia. And you could see their hold on Biden from the very first part of his administration. The first thing he did, we got up and he said, now China, China's going to be, has aspirations to be the most powerful country in the world, not only economically, but strategically. That's not going to happen on my watch. (27:51) Okay? Next thing he does is he lets himself be set up by Stephanopoulos George Stephanopoulos, who says, now, Mr. President, do you think Putin's a killer? And by, oh, he's a killer. Okay? And then they meet with the Chinese at Anchorage and read him the riot act about the rules. Basically, the Chinese say, we know all about this. We spent a century throwing off your predecessors, the British selling with the gun diplomas. That's all the folks. And as you say, they didn't put up with it. So you have at the very outset of his administration laying down the line, look, were all powerful, which is not the case anymore. We're Zionists, which happens to be the case anymore. Let me introduce one sort of comment that Biden made without reading from his little cards there, I think was on the plane coming home yesterday. He said, I made a note of it. He says, I can understand why people in the Middle East region would not believe the Israelis, or that maybe the bombing of that hospital was not intentional. (29:17) Well, I can understand why the people of that region would not believe the Israeli. The question is why you believe him, Joe Biden, and whether now Jacob Sullivan, I have to tell you, people object to my saying Jacob Sullivan, but that's his first name. Okay? Just like remember Scooter Libby who worked for Janie. His first was Israel Libby. So why does he go by Scooter? Why does Jacob go by Jake? I don't know, but I can make a little guess here. Okay. Jacob Sullivan is Zionist as the Newlands and the Blinken of this world, and of course the president who styles himself as the supreme Zionist. What does that mean? Well, it means that it's over the US and Israel. It's just going to take a couple of months. Now for people to realize that, and the fear I have Wilmer, the fear I have is that there's too much at stake personally for President Biden and for Blinken and Nod and Sullivan and Nolan and Hunter Biden, there's too much at personal stake for them to go away quietly and acknowledge the new correlation of forces. (30:37) If they lose the wars, if they lose the election, they could end up in jail. The evidence is there, and court documents in sworn testimony, bribery, impeachment proceedings may go forward. So I'm always saying, I don't give a rat's patooty about what happens in impeachment considerations. What I care about is how they are likely to react to save their own patootie. And that introduces an element of instability and personal stake that worries me greatly. And it doesn't matter what worries McGovern greatly, I'm sure it worries Russian and Chinese leaders greatly too, and has them on tenterhooks as to what will happen over the next year. Dr. Wilmer Leon (31:29): When you look at the surveys right now, when you look at the polling data, the race for 2024 between President Biden and former President Trump, by most polls, is a dead heat, one or two points. It's within the margin of error. History tells us that countries tend not to shift leadership or change leadership in the midst of conflict slash war. You mentioned if they lose the election, I'm sorry, you mentioned if they lose the war, if they lose the election, does Joe Biden need this conflict in his mind in order to save his administration? Ray McGovern (32:19): I don't think Joe Biden is Compass Menis. I think that Blinken and Sullivan, Nolan, they are extremely Compass mentors. They have a lot to fear. Let's say that Trump wins election, as I said before, the evidence is out there, not only of bribery and those kinds of things, and Hunter Biden's laptop and the inclusion of corrupt former intelligence officials and all that kind of stuff. But Blinken was personally involved in arranging for Biden to win via a subterfuge. What do I mean? Well, when Hunter Biden's laptop was revealed and the scarless repeat stuff on, and his dealings with calling his father's brand name into, well, how did they decide to handle that was three weeks before the election. Oh, what happened? Well, by testimony to Congress, by a former acting director of the CIA, his name is Mikey Morell. He said, I got a call from Tony Blinken, and he said, the best way to handle the Hunter Biden laptop is could you get former intelligence directors to say that it has all the earmarks of a Russian intelligence disinformation operation? (33:56) And Mikey Mell said, sure, I can do that. Three days later, Mikey Morell has rounded up 50 count 'em, 50 former intelligence directors and very high officials, speaks pretty poorly of them, doesn't it? 50 plus Mikey Morrell, and he says 51 former intelligence directors, including four or five former directors of the CIA, as if that enhances their credibility. Say, this has all the earmarks, Russian intelligence, disinformation operation. Now, was that consequential? Well, all I know is that two days later, Joe Biden had his last debate with Trump, and Trump raised this. Biden said, oh, don't you know that this is in all the earmarks of a Russian intelligence operation? Now, why do I go into that detail? I mean, that should not have happened. Okay? I don't know whether that won the election for Biden or not, but you don't do these things. They have to be illegal, in my view. (35:09) So Blinken himself is on 10 hooks. He could be prosecuted, he could be put in jail, and Jacob Sullivan, just the word about him, he invented Russiagate, the non-existent Russian hacking of the DNC computer for Hillary Clinton's emails and all that stuff that showed that she had stolen the nomination for Bernie Sanders. That was Sullivan. He was a big campaign manager for Hillary Clinton. So that's all out there. Now, I don't know if Trump came in, and I will not comment on what I think of Trump. If he came in, he's not loath to hold these people accountable, and on this case, he's got the law behind him. So again, there's great incentive on the part of all these people preparing their notes for Joe Biden to keep the war going in Ukraine and not lose before the election, and to help the Israelis to the degree the US can still not lose in Gaza. The last one is not possible anymore. Neither is the first one. So what am I afraid of? I'm afraid that they will react according to this personal stick they have, and it's to happen before when you have this kind of personal stake and you have advisors like these guys who are saying, Joe, look, if we lose this, look what happens then. You don't have to write notes to Joe. He understands this. He's a politician, and that's what worries me. Sorry to carry on at that point. Dr. Wilmer Leon (36:52): I Ray McGovern (36:52): Think this is an important aspect. It's not really covered elsewhere. Dr. Wilmer Leon (36:58): You are former intelligence official, and you understand the subtleties of diplomacy. And one of the things that I find very interesting is when you listen to President Putin, when you listen to President Xi, when you listen to Raisi in Iran, they speak in very subtle undertones. So when Donald Trump assassinated, general Ray McGovern (37:29): Soleimani, Dr. Wilmer Leon (37:31): Soleimani, Iran said, we're going to retaliate, and a lot of people expected the retaliation to be coming shortly thereafter. It did not come well, as Tony Blinken was traversing the Middle East recently, the Iranian foreign minister was doing the same thing with his allies and released a statement saying, Israel, the time is up. Did that convey to you a not so subtle message that people need to be paying attention to? Ray McGovern (38:17): Well, it does, and that's really one outstanding aspect of what happened over the last week. The notion that the president of Iran would call up the leader of Saudi Arabia to coordinate on what they're going to do. I mean, that's a tectonic shift in the relationship between those two countries. And raci, the president of Iran has been traveling all around, and he's got, he talks to this area and he talks to the Egyptians, and actually the Egyptians and the Jordanians wouldn't even receive Joe Biden when he wanted to see them. So what we need to do is recognize, Dr. Wilmer Leon (39:13): And Mohammad bin Salman made Tony Blinken wait an entire day, actually overnight, because I guess he had gone fishing in somewhere in Saudi Arabia, and he was on a fishing trip in Saudi Arabia and couldn't be bothered. So he thinked Tony, again, from a diplomatic perspective, that's one of those not so subtle messages that says, I really don't feel I'd being bothered with you. Ray McGovern (39:43): And Saudi Arabia is very, very, very important, not only because of the oil, but because of the raro schmo that was going on with China and with others. So maybe the Saudi foreign minister was supervising some beheadings in the public square. You get pretty busy in Saudi Arabia when head start rolling, and I understand he did give Blinken access to a men's room there as he waited. So there's some niceties that were observed, but he gave away overnight. You don't do that with, at least you didn't use to do that with the Secretary of State of the United States of America, least of all. Would the Saudi Arabia's have done that? So that's just one little symptom of the tectonic shift in relations where us is no longer the unipolar power, but rather a bipolar with them with the United States. And I am an American citizen. I really mourn the fact that because they're own ineptitude and chutzpah that would put ourselves in this situation. And I dare say that the Israelis do what everyone thinks they're going to do. Now, it's going to be all hell to pay because the Iranians has Pua, Hamas, the Egyptians, the Hezbollah, the others, even the Saudis for are not going to sit around and tolerate the of 2 million people in Gaza. Dr. Wilmer Leon (41:39): Yemen isn't going to be too happy with this either. Ray McGovern (41:44): Yemen as well. Yeah. Dr. Wilmer Leon (41:46): So people watching this, people listening to this, they may be saying, wow, Wilmer, you and Ray are spending an awful lot of time talking about foreign policy, talking about the Middle East. We have homelessness in the United States. We have abject poverty. We have all these declines in the standard of living in the United States. Why spend so much time talking about this instead of talking about that? Ray McGovern (42:19): Well, because they're connected. As you well know, every billion you send to Ukraine, every billion you send to Israel is at the expense of these people. The poor people in our country that need all that kind of help, there shall be no poor among you. Well, that's a universal. That's a universal, in my view. It doesn't have to be a Hebrew scripture. I mean, the Christian, the Christian, and I say Judeo-Christian attitude toward justice Wiler. We have this American concept of justice where you have this blind lady of all people holding these scales and the images impartiality image, no favoritism to one or the other. Now, lemme tell you something, and your listeners, the Judeo-Christian, the biblical concept of justice is unbalanced and biased to the core in favor of the poor. The hated poor as the Old Testament called the very word in pre Aramaic for justice, denotes not connotes, denotes showing mercy to the poor. (43:46) Now, that used to be kind of observed, FDR, my father's favorite president, he cried when FDR died. He knew in his heart what he needed to do, poor people. He brought us out of that depression. There used to be a Democratic party that cared mostly about the poor. When I asked my father, I said, dad, what's the difference between a Democrat and a Republican? He said, all Democrats care about people. Okay, care about poor people. Well, that ain't the case anymore. They're all joined at the hip. And what do they care about? Stuffing their own pockets. What was really a revelation to me was when Pope Francis came to Congress 2015, I think it was, and there was a joint section, and he stands up there, and to his credit, Pope Francis says, and I quote, the main problem today is the blood soaked arms trade. Okay? The main problem today is the blood soaked arms trade. (45:04) Now what do those congressmen, what do the senators do? Oh, they go, they, oh, yeah, right? And he stood up, and then they looked in their pocket ship envelope from Raytheon was still there, and it went from Lockheed over here. I mean, it was giving hypocrisy a bad name, okay? These guys know what the message was, but they're so soaked in this money and this power that it's going to take a lot of us, a lot of us who care about the poor, and a lot of us who can show opportunity costs is what the economists use. (45:45) For every 150 million you spend on creating an F 35, what could be done in your school district to pay the teachers a decent way? What could be do? What could be done in Iowa or Nebraska or any of these places which are being downtrodden? Okay? People need to make this very specific. This money is going to these high people that are making 20, $30 million a year as salaries, as CEOs or Raytheon and Lockheed general dynamics. That ain't sustainable. We need to get up and find out where these people live. Shame them into relenting a little bit and saying, look, maybe 10 million is enough for your salary, and maybe we'll give the balance to the poor. So round this thing up, I happen to be out of the Judeo-Christian tradition, and this reinforces my, what's the word, my imperative to honor the concept of justice, which is not balanced in favor of everybody because it's, it's not a level playing field. It's a unbalanced, it's biased and prejudice to the core in favor of the poor. Now, that's what I come out of as a faith perspective. I'll just add one other thing. I had a Jesuit teacher who was a real good friend of mine. I said, well, how would you describe your theology? I said, that's very simple. I can put it in one sentence. I said, what's that? He says, well, it all depends on what kind of God you believe in and how God feels when little people are pushed around. (47:47) And, okay, I'll say that again, and how God feels when little people are pushed around. Now, you don't have to believe in God. You can just believe in justice. I had agnostics and atheists tell me, look, Ray, you don't have to go into the Bible here. Human beings know that we're supposed to be fair, and that's true. Human beings used to know that we need to get back on the track here and do everything we can to make sure they realize that. Now, the more so since things are getting very, very perilous for us, not only in Ukraine, but in Western Asia as it's called now, Dr. Wilmer Leon (48:29): In mentioning Ukraine, you also have a piece at your website, Ray mcgovern.com entitled, fact Checking Putin on Ukraine. President Putin gave an interview right before he went to China for the Belt and Road Initiative Conference, and you say, media consumers should be permitted to learn what Putin said, particularly about Ukraine and Russia's problems dealing with various US administrations over the years. Readers who rely on the paper of record, however, will be shielded from his remarks, and thus, any temptation to ask if they might be true. And you went through a lot of what Russian President Putin had to say. You did your own fact checking. And what were some of the conclusions that you came to regarding President Putin's the veracity of his comments? Ray McGovern (49:35): Well, I checked them all, and there were two that I needed to consult others on because I wasn't a hundred percent sure. One had to do with when Soviet Russian forces went up there near Kiev and were abruptly withdrawn very early in the war in Ukraine, I always wondered about that. Putin claims that that was part of a deal, not a covenant, but at least a deal. Now, what was the deal? The deal was reached with Ukrainian officials in Glarus and in Turkey. There was a deal to stop the war, to have a ceasefire, to commit Ukraine, not to join NATO, and to bring Russian troops down from where they were threatening Kiev. That's what Putin claims. Now, I checked around because my memory is just one person, but I found out, yeah, that's probably why the Russian troops went down from that area. It's not because they couldn't have taken Kiev, although they didn't really have all that many troops there. (50:54) But the Russians, from the very outset of their special military operation, appeal to the Ukrainians, look, we'd like to have a deal here. All we want is some respect for our own security. We don't want NATO coming in as a bulwark against us. Now, what happened? Well, the Ukrainians talked and they reached an agreement in Ankara on the 31st of March, 2022, and it said these things that I just spelled out what happened? Well, the US in the person of Boris Johnson from the uk, he visited Kiev right away and said, no, no, no deal. You may be willing to deal with Russia, but we're not. We want to continue this thing. The object here is to give the Russians a bloody nose, a strategic defeat. Okay? And so what does Zelensky do? Oh, okay. Sorry. Sorry. I won't do that anymore. Okay. That's how that thing went down. (51:58) Now, I remember reading this in S, the official organ in Ukraine. I mean, that's pretty good. But when I had confirmation about this from some of the people that know the military situation a little better than I did, I said, yeah, well, that was correct too. Now, Wilmer, without belaboring this, I have to tell you that after fact checking all this and trying to offer this as an alternative view by somebody who had fact checked it, I couldn't get it published. I couldn't get it published on a very, well, what we shall say, a very anti-war website. Dr. Wilmer Leon (52:46): But Ray Ray, that's got to be impossible because Joe Biden has told us that we stand for democracy, that Putin is a dictator and that he's an autocrat, and we stand for the freedom of press in America. Ray, how could you not get something like that published? Ray McGovern (53:07): Well, I guess my point Wilmer here is that I've long since stopped trying to get something in The Times or the Washington Post. I used to be able to do that 10 years ago, like twice a year. But the alternative media, for God sake, the progressive media is now saying, oh, that sounds a little bit too. So here, I check these things. I double check with the people who know about things they're not quite sure about. I put it out there and say, well, that sounds a little bit too, we can't run that. So that's the alternative media. That's the binder where nobody wants to feel like they could be susceptible to criticism of being pro Putin, that my friend, is how bad it has become. Dr. Wilmer Leon (54:02): I was at dinner with some friends, and one of them asked kind of a generic question about this media and whose interests are being served, and this can't be some invisible cabal that is behind the scenes, being sure that a particular narrative is only being articulated. And I said, no, it doesn't really have to be a cabal, because when you look at Jeff Bezos, for example, and he owns the Washington Post, and he owns Amazon, and look at where Jeff Bezos has received most of his money from Amazon Data Systems, which is a defense contractor. I said, look at, what's his name, knowns Tesla, and he controls X, and where does he get most of his money from? SpaceX and starlink defense contractors. So it doesn't necessarily have to be a cabal as much as it is the confluence of interests that understand which side their bread is buttered on. Is that fair to say? Ray McGovern (55:29): Well, Wilmer, I have an expression or an acronym called the Mickey Mat, the military industrial Congressional Intelligence Media, academia think tank complex. It's in some dictionaries now. Okay, why do I say media? Because the media is controlled by the rest of the Mickey Mat. That's the situation we're in now. Now you mentioned Jeff Bezos, and you correctly pointed out he gets lots of money from the federal government, CIA, and others. Okay, but the people he picks, well, there was a fellow named Fred Hyatt who ran the editorial section of the Washington Post, like the op-ed section. Okay? And before the war in Iraq, about 90% of the op-eds were, oh, yeah, they're weapons of mass, weapons of, okay, so what happens after the war when there are no weapons of mass destruction? He goes up to the Columbia School of Journalism, and when a naive student says, Mr. Hyatt, you kept saying that there were weapons of mass destruction as flat fact, and it turned out not to be any. How do you explain that? And Hyatt famously said, well, if there weren't weapons of mass destruction, we probably should not have said that. There were, (56:58) My patron, Robert Perry of recent memory turned to me at that, and he said, Ray, that used to be sort of like a cardinal principle or journalism. If something's not true, you're not supposed to say it's okay. What happened to Fred Hyatt? He stayed in place for 20 more years running the op-ed section. So what's my point? No one, no one is held accountable for these things. That's up to us. We have to find ways to hold people accountable, and what that involves, I leave to people, but we have to start getting off to our rear ends. We have to put our bodies into it as I have in the past. They're not going to kill you. They'll beat you up, all put you in prison, but it's worth it because so much is at stake right now, and I've never seen, never seen a more tentative, a more dangerous time to include the prospect of the use of many nuclear weapons, which eventually would do us all in. Dr. Wilmer Leon (58:01): We have just about a minute and a half or so left, and I want to read, this is from M-S-N-B-C, and this is from the April 6th, 2022. In a break with the past US is using Intel to fight an info war with Russia, even when the intel isn't rock solid. What that means, boys and girls, is M-S-N-B-C is admitting that they are lying to the American people under the pretext of the noble line. They're lying to you. Boy, Ray McGovern American people, first of all, Ray, thank you so much for your time today, and where can folks find your work? Ray McGovern (58:51): Well, I'm sure that Plato and his noble liar kind of turning around in the grave right now. Dr. Wilmer Leon (59:01): Where can people find your work? Ray McGovern (59:03): Oh, where? Okay. Well, I am Twittering. That's @RayMcGovern. Okay. My website is raymcgovern.com. I'm also on Facebook and on Instagram, so I hope that you'll tune in. My son who runs my website always says, Ray, always say, always add. If you don't get it, you won't get it. You don't get it. But I'm too humble to say that. Dr. Wilmer Leon (59:31): Ray McGovern, thanks for joining me. Big shout out to my producer, melody McKinley. Thank you all so much for joining the Connecting the Dots podcast with me, Dr. Wilmer Leon. Folks, this is where the analysis of politics, culture, and history, converge talk without analysis is just chatter, and we don't chatter on connecting the dots. Stay tuned for the new podcasts every week. Also, please follow and subscribe. Leave a review, share the show, follow me on social media. You can find all the links below in the show description. I'll see you all next time, and until then, please treat each day like it's your last, because one day you'll be right. I'm Dr. Wilmer Leon. Peace and Blessings. I'm out.

Shownotes and Transcript The question 'who is indigenous' comes up a lot while discussing demographics and immigration.  And no country has this been asked more than Israel. Brian of London joins us to discuss a Twitter/X post and article titled "Israel Palestine: Who's Indigenous?". For some reason this question is contentious. Brian breaks it down (according to anthropologist Jose R Martin-Cobo) under a series of headings of Land, Culture, Common Ancestry, Language, Religion and Blood. Basically we are looking at a historic continuity. Brian uses these headings to look at whether it is the Jews or the Palestinians that fit this indigenous definition  Brian of London completed a PhD in Computational Fluid Dynamics just as the Web was emerging. But then he left academia to do management consulting and eventually moved to Israel to do business. Brian's working on the cutting edge of the new Podcasting 2.0 to make sure this relic of the early web, stays free from capture by the centralising forces of Web 2.0 and their dangerous desire to turn us all into dairy cows. Brian was also the admin on Tommy Robinson's Facebook account that had over a million followers before it was nuked! In his spare time, he assists with a gigantic class action lawsuit in Australia on behalf of the entire crypto industry. Interview recorded 2.1.24 Connect with Brian... X                        https://x.com/brianoflondon?s=20 Connect with Hearts of Oak... WEBSITE            https://heartsofoak.org/ PODCASTS        https://heartsofoak.podbean.com/ SOCIAL MEDIA  https://heartsofoak.org/connect/ Support Hearts of Oak by purchasing one of our fancy T-Shirts....  SHOP                  https://heartsofoak.org/shop/ *Special thanks to Bosch Fawstin for recording our intro/outro on this podcast. Check out his art https://theboschfawstinstore.blogspot.com/ and follow him on GETTR https://gettr.com/user/BoschFawstin and on X https://twitter.com/TheBoschFawstin?s=20  Transcript (Hearts of Oak) And it's wonderful to have Brian of London join us once again. Brian, thanks so much for your time today. (Brian of London) Well, thank you very much for having me on.  Not at all. There's lots to discuss in your neck of the woods, as they would say in the Brits, in your part of the world. And obviously we have had, we have a Tera Dahl who was just back from Israel. She'd been there three, four weeks for Real America's Voice reporting. We had Bridget Gabriel on actually discussing. But I think we want to go on a slightly different tact, and it was one of your tweets looking at, and I think part of it was from another article, Israel-Palestine, who's indigenous? and I've always had a very firm understanding because of biblical history and where I come at this from a Christian but even there's confusion amongst parts of the Christian world and community but that may mess this conversation up even more. But let's, Israel-Palestine, who's indigenous? Maybe tell us why this was of interest to you, and then we can go with some of the categories and how you define this term indigenous. Yeah, and I just realized I've got my window open. So if you're hearing background noise, tell me, otherwise I'll leave it open. I'm in my bomb shelter, which everyone should know. And fortunately, we actually haven't been in it for about 10 days now and the last major barrage of rockets was just to the south of us on midnight on new year's eve obviously they did the fireworks for us and that.  We we had our Muslim mayor, Sadiq Kahn do the fireworks for us as well in London but it was different firework.  Different and the thing with that was actually it was, they fired them. They always fire them at exactly on the hour. In fact, there's a joke that the guy controlling the missiles, his name is Abu Dekar. Dekar means on the minute. So we say, oh, Abu Dekar is firing again. Because they fire at exactly 12, so then the alarm goes at sort of 12.01, and the missiles arrive at sort of 12.01 or 12.02. Anyway, I didn't hear an alarm because it was south of me. I just heard the booms when we intercepted.  But yeah, I'm in my bomb shelter. But what I sent you, I sent you an article which actually was published in 2014 by a friend of mine. And I helped get this published because Israeli Cool, the blog that it's on, the guy who runs that and me both found this guy who is a Métis Canadian indigenous person. Or they call them First Nations in Canada. That's the politically correct term. He doesn't mind being called an Indian. He's quite happy with that or whatever terminology, but he's Métis, which is a tribe that its original area was sort of somewhere in Canada. But he put out this article in a very obscure kind of place, and I just grabbed it and I said to him, can you just say all of this stuff again for the Israeli audience? And that's what we did. And because he has studied properly the way the UN came to regard what an indigenous person was. Because indigenous means something completely different from people than it does for plants and animals. Plants and animals are indigenous when they've been in the same place for thousands or millions of years. But people is a totally different beast. We have moved around the world ever since we were people. Vast migrations out of Africa. The term indigenous just doesn't mean anything. It doesn't mean the same thing for a person as it does for a plant. The kind of way that this is seen in the academic literature, and remember, this is infused with leftism, so we're picking and choosing here a little bit. And this guy, Jose Martinez Cobo, he came up with this definition. And this has stuck. And this really is the way the entire field looks at indigenous. And I'll just read or direct from the summary of his work what these rules are. Self-identification as indigenous peoples at the individual level and acceptance as a member by the community. Okay, so you have to actually feel that you're indigenous, okay? Historical continuity with pre-colonial and or pre-settler societies, okay? I'll read them off and then we'll sort of go through them and what they mean for Jews and Israel and what they mean for Palestinians, for example, and then we can sort of look at this in relation to Brits and Irish people and, you know, English, Welsh, Scottish, and, strong link to territories and surrounding natural resources, distinct social, economic, or political systems, distinct language, culture, and knowledge. I'm going to skip one, and then I'm going to say resolve to maintain and reproduce ancestral environments and systems as distinctive peoples and communities. Okay, this is anthropology language. But the basics are, and my friend summarizes them like this, land, language, culture, spirituality, and the last one is blood. And we'll get back to that because that's actually that's the one that's just the least important actually for Jews, especially for Jews. So Jews self-identify this is obvious it's like, we've been three and a half thousand years or so I mean the the numbers claim there's a book to my right, if you go full screen there's a book the atlas of Jewish history just behind me. And in that, this one here, the Atlas of Judaism, okay, we can go back to. If you go back to that, if you start looking for dates, Abraham kind of is dated at about 4,000 years ago, to 2,000 BC. He walked from Mesopotamia all the way down across the Middle East, Iran, Iraq. It's mixed up because none of those are real. Well, Iran and Persia became real soon, you know, later. Basically, none of it is what is there today. And he walked across that. And then he walked down through Israel. And he walked on a road that we have in Israel today called Highway 40. It's the road that runs down the backbone of what we call Judea-Samaria, what the Jordanians renamed the West Bank, that road follows the path that Abraham took and is described in the bible as the path that Abraham took and when you when you drive quickly down that road today you see the road signs in the order in which they appear in the bible. It's as real as that and that is 30 or 40 kilometres that way I'm pointing off to the east, the sea is that way that's my west, this stuff is real. Now, whether you believe the story of Abraham was real or not to the Jewish people, it is foundational. It is our ethnogenesis. It's the start of what led to being Jewish, but that's really. But I just want, actually, when you say it, it depends what you believe is real or or not, the level of documentation to actually prove that actually the Old Testament story and New Testament story is more documented than nearly any other historical event. And yet the world believes parts of history, but you've got this mountain of evidence and they say, oh no, that's just fables. So when you say, if you want to believe it or not, actually, it's there staring you in the face that there is no more evidence for the biblical events than there is for anything else in the world. Correct. And it's even more than the biblical events. It's that the book that was woven around it, the Hebrew Bible, it was something that Jews preserved through an enormous act of preservation that I don't think has a parallel in the world. Okay. The Torah, as we call it, the way it is passed down is we write it out by hand. And the people who write the Torah, they write it without making a mistake. And if they make a mistake, they throw it away and start again. And there's no tippex and there's no scratching it out and there's no backspace key. This is and this document is so unbelievably well preserved that when you dig up the dead sea scrolls that were that were, you know in the caves of Qumran for three thousand years or two and a half thousand years when you dig those up, actually I don't know they might be a bit more modern than that but when you dig them up I can go and look at them and my Hebrew is not great but I can read the words. Biblical Hebrew is different from modern Hebrew, but I recognize the words. And if I open a modern Torah, they are the same. The transcription errors down the Torah is… We have this record. Abraham ends up in Hebron. He buys a cave to bury his wife in. That purchase of the cave in Hebron again. It doesn't matter whether you believe it happened exactly. That purchase forms the basis of our property rights in the modern world. That purchase of a cave is the oldest recorded land transaction that follows the modern form of transactions, offer, consideration, acceptance. Our whole edifice of modern contract law is built around that cave purchase. And that's part of Judaism. Judaism, then, of course, and I'm no biblical scholar, but Joseph goes to Egypt, the children of Israel become numerous, they leave Egypt in a hurry, which is also a story of the emancipation of slavery. Again, Jews led the way in that. What's interesting about our civilization today is not that we had slavery. It's not that the Americans had slavery. It's that it was abolished, and Jews abolished slavery within their own systems a millennia before. What's interesting about the West is not having had slavery. What's interesting is having got rid of slavery. I'll put forward that that's a Jewish. You get that because eventually, and it took the South Africans a lot longer than anyone else to realize this, but when you read the Bible and you read all men are created in the image of God, you just have to get rid of slavery. It doesn't work. Again, a Jewish thing. All of these stories, and then the Jews come back to Israel, and yes, there's wars and stuff, and there's Canaanites and Philistines and battles and Jericho, and the walls come tumbling down. All of these phrases I can just throw at you. The majority of a reasonably educated Western populace, they just understand those cultural references in a way. I don't need to explain Jericho. You know, I don't need to explain a lot of this stuff. David and Goliath, that's David the Jew versus Philistine Goliath. It happened actually near Gaza. Well, in the hills, sort of inland from there. But Samson, Samson and Delilah, that story is in Gaza. All of these foundational stories for Jews, which Christianity also adopts, the whole of the Hebrew Bible is basically part of the Christian canon. That happens here. Those are place names. Into the New Testament, Armageddon is Megiddo. It's 80 kilometres that way. I can drive there. Yes, I think I can still drive there. It's not closed. We have such ties. We have our ancestors buried. The reason why Hebron is special today and why Jews want to live there is because there's a massive building that Solomon built. It's the same era as the famous Western Wall, the Temple Mount. That building is built on top of this cave that Abraham bought. That's why it's there. That's where we buried our matriarchs and our patriarchs. This is a, and you know when when Martinez talks about historical continuity and strong link to territories and surrounding natural resources, the strongest link you can have is ancestral burial sites, you know everybody sort of knows the kind of, from America, the you know, how, oh this is this is ancient burial lands, well Hebron is the burial site of Abraham's family, basically. Nablus, who is the modern name. The old biblical name is Shem. That's actually closest to me. That's literally inland from me now. That's the burial site of Joseph. There's a building there called Joseph's Tomb. Now, the Muslims sort of revere it because they stole our prophets and stuff. But they only revere it because we do. The site of the temple in Jerusalem is the site on which Abraham was supposed to sacrifice Isaac, where the whole story of the ram and the burning bush, the.. sorry, the ram caught in the bush, not the burning bush, that's Moses. That story happens on what is now today the temple mount. That was the position of the high holies. That's why we built the temple there, twice. That's why the Romans destroyed it. That's why the Muslims came along when they conquered it and built a mosque and a mausoleum on that spot, because it matters. Those are elements of colonization. These other components like distinct language, culture, and knowledge. Now, yes, we revived Hebrew as a modern language. That was controversial because some very religious Jews would say that Hebrew is the language of prayer. It's the language of the Torah. are we shouldn't use it for day-to-day stuff when we're going to be obscene and tell jokes and in fact what tends to happen is we use Arabic for the worst stuff but um, that was controversial but it was also hugely important that there is continuity that any Jewish child living in Israel, any Israeli child, can pick up an ancient scroll that was buried in the desert, and all the letters look familiar. That's amazing. Nobody reads hieroglyphics. The Roman Catholic Church teaches their clergy to read Latin, but it's not a day-to-day language anywhere. Hebrew is a day-to-day language, and it has biblical continuity back 3,000 plus years. Now, when I read through this list, which we'll post later, I missed one. I said I was going to miss one. In the UN, they've got this one line, status as a non-dominant social group. I can't help, and I've discussed this with Ryan. Ryan Bellerose is the Métis Canadian. That's almost like they had to put that in to try and find some way to make Jews not indigenous in Israel. Because we are, Jews are now the dominant social group in one place in the world, Israel. It's like we we won, we're the only ones actually, we're really the only indigenous people that lost our land and got it back and that is essentially, Zionism is that, it is the return of Jews to Zion, you know, by the rivers of Babylon, where, you know, that psalm, that's, what, 600 years BCE? That's Zionism. We've been trying to get back to Zion, Jerusalem, Israel, for thousands of years, ever since we were cast out by the Romans. I think the last time Jews really ran the place was up until when we revolted too much and the Romans kicked us out on 135 or 132 or whatever it was, and changed the name. And again, this is colonizer versus indigenous. What do colonizers do? They bring a new language, they try to crush whatever markers there are of indigenousness. And then they destroy, they build their new stuff on top of old stuff. They try and erase indigenous identities. And that's what's actually happened all over the world. You know, Native Americans cling on in America. Across Europe there are sort of lots of indigenous identities that were crushed by the Romans that never reappeared. I would say that the EU itself was trying to do this, it's it's trying to sort of flatten Europe and you all become Europeans in a horrible Marxist sense and I think that's one of the reasons why Israel is so hated by this globalist elite type thing, is that we are just this total exception. We are the indigenous people that came back, made it work, and made it work. And it doesn't mean, and let's just sort of circle back to the blood, and then I'll let you get a word in edge ways. Blood. This is the bit that gets thrown at us all the time on the internet. Okay? Every time I post indigenous, oh, you're from Europe. Well, actually, I was born in South Africa, so I'm African. You know, bite on that, you chumps. I'm second generation. My parents were born in Africa. I'm second generation African. So I don't know where you think I should go back to. I grew up in London. Yeah, that's true. My accent is London, but I never felt English actually. I've got my British citizenship, but am I English I don't think so. I'm Jewish, Jews belong here, so blood is uniquely unimportant to Jews for one good reason and the reason is Ruth, the story of Ruth in the bible is the story that actually to this day means that Jews accept converts. As soon as you accept conversion, it means blood doesn't matter. Now, we do not have an easy conversion process, okay? And in fact, you know, whenever I've, and I know some of my best friends here are converts, and they're more orthodox than me, more, you know, they observe of Sabbath, Shabbat, more than I do. And in many ways. But there's no hint or there's no feeling for me personally, or you don't find it anywhere in Israel, that if somebody has gone through the process of an Orthodox-recognized conversion, nobody here looks down upon them. In fact, many of us realize that's a lot harder than just being born. So blood. I don't know where his blood is from. In fact, I think the two converts I know the best, Australians and both, I think, from Catholic families, doesn't matter. So I don't care about blood. Now, it turns out I actually am Kohanim, and you can check, but there's DNA markers. But that's not what makes me Jewish. What makes me Jewish is self-identification, keeping the rituals, doing Shabbat dinners. And it doesn't even matter the level of observance. It's some level of observance and some recognition that it means something to be Jewish. So when they throw at you this Khazar crap and go back to Europe, and I mean, even that is ala panim, on its face. That doesn't mean the same thing. On its face, it's just ridiculous, because more than half the Jews in Israel are of Middle Eastern backgrounds. Algeria, Morocco, Yemen, Iran, Iraq, Syria. All of these places is where Jews came from. Right now, and Ethiopia, of course, we've airlifted them. All of these things mean that we're just a mongrel mix these days. And our kids are all meeting and intermarrying between different... There really isn't a level of racism that I can certainly recognize in America. So blood, what does blood mean? It doesn't... It's important. It's one of the markers. But it is not who makes you a Jew. Well, I think, yeah, there are a lot of points to pick up. For me, actually, it's the history. Abraham 4,000 years ago, David 3,000, establishing Jerusalem as the capital. So you've got 2,000 years of history on the land, in effect, before the Romans took over. The renaming of that land as Palestine to remove Israel off the face of the earth, just like Iran want to do..  That's deliberate.. Just exactly. Syria, Palestina and yeah of course the word came from the Greek from palash invaders from the sea, you can, it's like you can get you can get locked in all that crappy silly detail, it doesn't matter and it doesn't matter if it's Israel or the kingdom of David, it was or Judah or Samaria. Today it's Israel because when you form a modern nation, within the framework of modern nations that arose in the 1850s onwards. I can't remember the philosophical name for this, but Israel slots in within modern nationhood as the land of the Jews. Should there be a Kurdish nation? Yeah, sure. I just want to tell you something else about this. indigenous status is not zero sum, because there are indigenous people does not mean that nobody else is indigenous. Now, and I'm not coming to the Palestinians by any means next. We have Aramaic Christians living in the Galilee region. They are following a kind of Christianity that emerged very soon after Jesus died. And they are speaking Aramaic, or they're doing their liturgy in Aramaic. I've met one. There's a famous picture of Tommy Robinson standing next to a bearded guy with a big hat wearing his Mossad t-shirt. That's Father Nadav, and we went to meet him in Nazareth. That's in Nazareth. He lives there. There's a community of Aramaic Christians. The only place you can be an Aramaic Christian safely in the whole Middle East is Israel. And then we've got Druze. Druze is a kind of, it's wrong to call them completely Muslim. They're something else entirely. And their geographic region encompasses Syria and Lebanon and Israel. But where are they best off? Most of them, realize, in Israel. We've got some Baha'is who came from Iran, settled here. They're up in Haifa. We have Samaritans, actually. That's very close to me. This town of Nablus, okay? What's the Palestinian town of Nablus? Well, it comes from Neopolis, the Roman for new city. So even their name in Arabic of Nablus, it's a corruption of a Roman word. It's not Arabic. And you know this because Neopolis, anything with a P is not Arabic.  So the P gets converted to a B. It's just like the Palestinians, when they say it, they call it a phalestini, because they can't say P, so they change it to E. So Nablus, which is the place of Shem, again, Romans, they knew Shem is in the Bible many times, but they have to rename the place Neopolis to assert Roman dominance, and that's what you do. The Samaritans live on a place called Mount Gruzine, which overlooks that. They're there. We've got Bedouin Arabs who have lived here for a long time, but Bedouins have moved across the whole Middle East for centuries. To call them indigenous, they have parts of their culture here, but it's not unique to Israel. That's the point, the Bedouin culture is across the whole of the Arab peninsula all the way out. So did any part of their culture arise in Israel? Not really. But they have something called rights of longstanding presence, for sure. And they serve in our armed forces, and we have all sorts of internal political disputes over where they live and how they live and what their place. But again, that's stuff we can deal with. It's not sort of virulent hatred all the time. But this point of, is Islam indigenous to Israel? No, nothing of it. The only bit that they talk about is the farthest, there's a passage in the Quran that talks about the farthest mosque, and that has been reinterpreted. And there's a very famous clip from Al Jazeera from years and years ago. Professor Mordechai Kadar, he went on Al Jazeera in Arabic and he asked the host, how many times is Jerusalem named in the Quran? And the Quran was written 700, 800 years after the Romans destroyed Jerusalem. Everybody in the whole world, the known, educated world, knew the name Jerusalem. But yet it does not appear once in the Quran. Not once. There's an oblique reference to a night journey by Muhammad to the furthest mosque. And he tied his horse up outside and ascended to heaven. That is the entire basis for Islamic claim to Israel and Jerusalem. Other than the fact that they assume everything. They're a replacement theology. So they brought in all of Christianity. They brought in all of Judaism. They then tell us we forged it to take out Muhammad. And they write their book, the Quran, which they then say, we're the corruptors of. Jews are worse than Christians because we went astray. Jews are the ones who went astray. Christians are the ones who were just led astray. You followed us instead of the Muslims so we're both cursed but Jews are cursed a bit more. But that's that's not the claim, that's the claim, that's what we're fighting over. And of course well yeah and of course you'd, you've got the period of the Romans and then the period of Arabs or Muslims from what 600... And crusaders, Sala in the Kurd, This history just goes, but all of it, the constant theme throughout is, one, there were Jews always here. Jews never left. There were Jews in Sfat. They came back in 1200 and 600. The only people who ever regarded this land as the place of genesis of their entire civilization is Jews.  Yeah. And then you go through, you're right, all those histories with the Ottoman Empire, whatever morphing of Arabness or Muslimness there was on there. And then you're right that Muslims tie Jerusalem to a story about a flying donkey, but we'll not even go into that. We'll not have to base what you believe in that. But the issue, I guess, you have now is that the clash between Romans and the Jews living there was a land grab and dominance. It's something much deeper in terms of Islam, and I 100% believe that Islam was started. One of the main reasons is to eradicate who Jesus is. You can't say Jesus, son of God. You cannot, that he was simply a man. And at its heart, and that means at its heart is also hatred of the Jews and the Jewish people, because without Judaism, you do not have Christianity. It's impossible. But that hatred we have seen over the whole time, and 1948, it is an absolute miracle to see what happens. I think maybe the hatred is from, one, the hatred that Islam has against Judaism. That's one. But also there's a second hatred that I think the miracle of modern-day Israel, that many people cannot accept that, and they look for something darker. You know, Israel being the centre of everything, being in control. And they come up with this idea to remove any understanding that actually you can't explain. 1948, when you read about what happened, I've read it in 67, 73, and all of those, it is a miracle. It could not happen, should not happen. And yet Israel stands there as a proud country, hugely successful in the midst of basket cases of countries. But yeah, talk to us about that level of vitriol against Israel and against the Jewish people that exists not only in the Middle East, but actually exists in the media and across the world, really. Well, I, you know, every Jew does, you know, I guess my kids are starting to do it now. You start, you know, when you're brought up Jewish, eventually at some point you understand that this thing called the Holocaust happened.  And what it does to a lot of us is you go through a phase where you try and, why? What's with the hatred? Why the hatred? And Islamic Jew hatred, I can see that in the Quran. I can see the hundred and whatever verses it is that mention Jews. And whereas we start off a little bit favourable in the early stuff, once Jews reject Muhammad and say no you're not a prophet we're done with our era of prophets, that was a thousand years ago, you're not one of them, once that happened he really then just goes on a the rest of his life is like, how can I f these Jews? And you know he kills a lot of Jews in Khaybar he takes their wives, their daughters, their and then also in Khaybar this other story, this very pivotal battle, after the battle when he kills all the men and he's got the women and one of the stories that's not well, it pretty authoritative, but again this doesn't matter whether it happened or not, it matters whether Muslims believe it, is that he was poisoned by this Jewish woman that he'd taken prisoner before he rapes her and that he died five years later from the poison he was was given then. Now, again, you get all sorts of scholars saying this is unlikely and it probably didn't happen. It doesn't matter. Do Muslims teach their children that a Jew killed Muhammad? Yes, they do. In large numbers, very large numbers. And so Jews rejected the prophet Muhammad. We don't call him a prophet. He isn't a prophet. He's their prophet. He's not our prophet. We rejected that. He fought lots of battles against us. He killed a lot of Jews, and eventually he was poisoned by a Jewess. These are not good things to teach your kids for coexistence. That's what they do. That kind of antisemitism, I understand that. That's ancient and it really hasn't changed. It can be dialled up or dialled down depending on the authoritarian rulers. UAE today might be dialling it down a lot. Great. In two or three generations, I'll feel a lot happier. Now, Nazi anti-Semitism, European anti-Semitism, again, Christianity had its creation stuff, and Christianity for a long time said that Jews killed Jesus. Despite Jesus being one of us, we, you know, and it took until, when did the Catholic Church change that? I mean, it was like in 1960 something or other, was the papal, you know, it's like, okay, thanks. It was the Romans. We can all agree on the Romans, but yes, Jews are stood accused of killing Jesus. That was one thing. Jews are successful. I don't know what it is. I personally have come to believe that Intel, the guy who founded Intel, Andy Grove, his autobiography was called Only the Paranoid Survive. I think Jews have been bred to be paranoid. There's other reasons which are genetically passed down. Whereas the Catholic Church, for a lot, makes its priests celibate, they become the most highly educated members of society, but yet they don't procreate. Jews did the opposite. You become a rabbi, the town supports the rabbi, and the smartest people who become rabbis then have 18 children. Perhaps that's the reason why we've got higher IQ. I don't know. We certainly value, as a culture, we value learning. We value books. We value, the fact that we've got troops in Gaza. What do they do at the weekends? Some of them, they drive armoured personnel carriers into Gaza with a gigantic Torah scroll so that they can stand in some house with bullet holes all around and do the Shabbat service with a real giant Torah scroll. First, they take in little ones, but once the roots are secure, what are we doing? Are we taking a book? This is the most ridiculous. And then what we do is, we do Talmudic rituals, as the Nazis and the anti-Semites would say. We're not doing it. It's not because, we're not out looking for the blood to drink and make my matzah. That's just utter crap. We're doing it because we value these traditions. We passed them down, and the continuity of Jews as a people has depended on us revering those words. That's why copying the Torah accurately for 3,000 years by hand, that's an astonishing cultural achievement that no culture on earth has managed. You know, Aborigines in Australia might have told stories orally, and that's a great sort of pass down. But we wrote it in a book, and the story of Abraham buying the cave becomes the root of Western civilization. So, you know, you can argue Judeo-Christian civilization for sure. And, you know, some people will say that democracy comes from the Greeks or whatever.  Much more of our morality comes from the Jewish Hebrew Bible, the Ten Commandments, than any other foundational thing. And again, the Americans, I'll criticize the Americans and I'll criticize the West in a very specific way. Rights versus responsibility. Okay? If you read the Ten Commandments, what you are reading is not a charter of rights. You do not have the right to life. You do not have the right to property. You do not have the right to your wife. You read a responsibility. You read about honouring your parents. You read about not murdering people. You read about not coveting the other guy's ox or wife. Those are responsibilities. You follow those responsibilities within your tribe. Your rights are implied. And I think America and the whole Western notion of human rights and stuff, it puts the cart before the horse. What are your responsibilities? Your responsibility is not to lob rockets at civilian areas on midnight of new year's eve, your responsibility is not to break out through a fence and go murder and rape people in the most horrible way, if you follow the responsibility of not being complete and utter bleeps then you can have a right to life, we are going to remove we, you do not have a right to life when you commit those acts against us. That's what we're seeing now. We're not Christians, and the whole turn the other cheek thing, it's not in our book, and quite rightly. There's too much of that, and the modern Western Christianity has gone too far. Yeah. Yes. That's an interesting. Here, I'll not go down that route, but actually, I want to finish off with, I'm sure you've had, well, you face, I'm sure, a lot of abuse. And if you are a Zionist Shill, maybe you can share some of that, Brian, because I'll happily be a Zionist, but never get paid for it, which is a bummer.  None of us get paid for this. It costs me a fortune living here.  I know it would be much easier if we did get paid, but that's not how life works. But it's interesting what's happened. Maybe the backlash you get whenever you talk about Israel's existence and the history and that clash, and also what we are seeing at the moment. It's interesting, what's the term? Proportionality is the term that's used. And I always wonder, what's proportional to rape or murder of children? Do you really want to go down that? Because that's a very perverse path if you want to go down that. But yeah, tell us about that, the backlash, but also then Israel doing what it has to do to exist. And if other countries want to be peaceful, then that makes life a lot easier for everyone, including the Arab countries around. Well you know the backlash, first of all, hurty words on the internet doesn't doesn't hurt me, you know I'm very much a bit of a free speech absolutist, I'll block and I'll mute if they're boring. I mean but mostly I like, you know and I'll spar with a few of them you know. I'm just looking to my left, I've got a screen here, sort of one of these things that kicked this off was because someone said, so I get that a lot of Israeli Jews are scared right now. So here's an idea. Why don't we offer them refuge in our own countries? Invite them to Britain, the States, and Canada. It's a win-win. Israelis get to live somewhere they feel safe, and the locals get their land back. Now, after everything I've just said to you, firstly, we've tried living in other people's countries. It doesn't always go so well. You know, German Jews felt great in 1929, and Polish Jews felt great also. This was not a long-term, tenable solution. And so what I replied was, lol, no, we're home. When you dig up London, you find Roman stuff. When we dig up Jerusalem, we dig past that crap to the city of our Jewish King David. Pithy, short, you can't put all the history of the Middle East in a tweet or an x-post or whatever we're supposed to call it. Praise be to Elon. Now, so I get this back. This isn't how the world works. Just because you've owned something thing doesn't mean you always will. Also, the Celtic tribes inhabited London long before the Romans, and Canaanites existed in Palestine long before Israel. Well, as and when some Canaanites show up, and as long as they're not still doing the child sacrifice shit, we will give them a nice little bit of the country, and they can live and practice their whatever Canaanite religion. But the point is, there is no continuity of Canaanites, because probably because Jews genocided them, whatever, I don't care. Canaanite was absorbed into the Jewish tribes. That's what happened. There's nobody doing Canaanite today, so they don't exist. The Palestinians are not Canaanites. They're not Philistines either. They don't know anything about Canaanites or Philistines. But, you know, you get all of this stuff. David, this is a good one, actually. Chrissy, David was a corrupt criminal whose family came from Iraq. That's the Koran version of David. I was wondering. I missed that. I know. I know. That one's just brilliant. And it's just very simple. And it's with a little Canadian flag. And Chrissy is the name. Compassion, confidence, something about a sire. 170,000 followers.  You kind of and then you know you get from sama Lebanese when you check your DNA it's east European, okay my yes yes my DNA did come a bit, because before South Africa we were somewhere in northeast Europe but again and then you know when I look through all of this telling me that I don't belong where I know I belong. Look, I came to Israel when I was 39 years old. I married my Israeli wife some years before that, tried to learn Hebrew in London. I'm crap at Hebrew, okay? I can barely read. I can sort of read, but more often than not, I'm copy-pasting into... Oh, Apple. Apple does not translate Hebrew by default. It's like not not one of their default languages. It's like, get with this. Anyway, I arrive in Israel as a 39-year-old PhD physicist, basically illiterate, but I feel more at home than I did in London. Explain that. I can't explain that. There's this woman, Eve Barlow, she's here visiting right now. She lands and she immediately feels at home. She lives in LA, She's a writer or she wrote, and writes about music. Why does she feel at home? And so many Jews you talk to, and this is a funny thing, when non-Jews come here and feel at home, they then start looking through their family tree and discover that four generations back, they are Jewish. And they start questioning their self. There's something that I can't explain to you that is is magical about being in Israel. Because it's tough. It is more comfortable to live in America and Britain. It really, it wasn't the easiest place to move to, but it just felt better. 100%. I think we'll finish it there. I think it's good to get a short conversation about this in Israel. And of course, you could take it wider into other countries. But that makes it very convoluted. And I think this perfectly fits to this current time. But, Brian, thank you so much. All the links for these will be in the description and our social media posts so people can follow the article and your post on it and have fun at the replies, which is sometimes the best part of Twitter posts. It certainly is. Anyway, yeah, we can do updates about the whole situation another time. But, yeah, thank you. This was really good. This is stuff I like talking about. This is positive. This is the reasons that people need to understand why Israel's not going anywhere. And that's the other. The last thing I'll say is this. You know, for 75 years, the Arabs have fought the correct, well, since 67 in particular, and through the 60s, basically, with the rise of Arafat and the PLO, which was a creation of the Soviet Union, the whole Palestinian identity. That's another point, but I'll just finish with this. They fought the correct battle to remove a colonial occupier from land. They fought the right battle that would have got the British out of India. Or the French out of Algeria, or half a dozen European countries out of bits of Africa. They fought the correct guerrilla warfare tactics, sort of terrorism, murders, all of this stuff. And it spectacularly fails to move Jews out of Jerusalem and Israel, because we are not colonial settlers. We will never be colonial settlers. The mindset, you know, and that's the other thing is, you know, when the Americans come here and tell us that we're not fighting the ground war in Gaza the correct way, and they're going to tell us how well they did in Iraq and Afghanistan, they were fighting thousands of miles from home. Our soldiers can actually stand at the top of a building with binoculars and see their homes. They go home, you know, if they're released at the weekend, they get taken to the border and they're home in 25 minutes. We are not projecting power as an imperial conquering army trying to make Iraqis be Democrats. It's not that. And so that the whole way in which the Palestinians are fought, encouraged by the entire world, encouraged by people shouting free Palestine from the river to the sea. When you do that, you encourage millions of poor Arabs to fight a war that they will never, ever win by the methods that they're fighting. They will never, ever win. They will never commit an act so atrocious that I will wake up in the morning and say, because believe me, October 7th was that act, that I will wake up in the morning and say, you know what? I think I'm going to go live in Berlin. That's not going to happen. You're not going to force me off my land with these acts. They don't work. it's wrong it's just totally the wrong approach, killing us doesn't matter, how many you rape, how many you kill, the only thing that will happen is the scale of our response and the sheer biblical nature of the response will come out, go read the story of Dinah, the men of Shechem, that's the story that's what's going on in Gaza right now, go read that story if you don't know your Bible. One woman was raped in the Bible. Dinah, go read that. Well, maybe those who live in Gaza, the Muslims or the Arabs, if they took this indigenous rights, then maybe they can move the refugee camp to Mecca. I'm sure it would be wonderful and they can enjoy that.  Here's a little bit about Yemen. Yemen is Arabia, Arabs to Arabia. 

This week's episode features the incomparable Alexander Mercouris, the editor of TheDuran.com and host of The Duran show on YouTube. You can find me and the show on social media by searching the handle @DrWilmerLeon on X (Twitter), Instagram, and YouTube. Our Facebook page is www.facebook.com/Drwilmerleonctd All our episodes can be found at CTDpodcast.com. Transcript Wilmer Leon (00:15): Welcome to the Connecting the Dots podcast with Dr. Wilmer Leon and I am Wilmer Leon. Here's the point. We have a tendency to view current events as though they occur in a vacuum, failing to understand the broader historical context in which most of these events take place. During each episode, my guests and I will have probing, provocative, and in-depth discussions that connect the dots between current events and the broader historical context in which they occur. This will enable you to better understand and analyze the events that impact the global village in which we live. On today's episode, we explore the relationships between some of the major conflicts impacting the geopolitical landscape. We'll connect some of the dots between what's happening in Ukraine and Europe, what's happening in Gaza and the Middle East, and what's happening with the relationship between the United States and China. To help me connect these dots is the editor in chief@theduran.com and host of the Duran on YouTube, Alexander MEUs. Alexander, welcome to the show. Alexander Mercouris (01:29): Delighted to be with you again, will Mur, and it's a great pleasure to be on the show. Wilmer Leon (01:33): Thank you so much. And Alexander, let's connect some dots. First, does it make sense to connect the dots between, again, what's happening in Ukraine and Europe, Gaza in the Middle East and the US and China? Because many people see these issues as unrelated, and of course we can add conflicts from other regions as well. But for the sake of time, let's just start with these. Does it make sense? Are these events related? Alexander Urs, Alexander Mercouris (02:02): They are absolutely related. If you see that there is a single connecting thread, that thread is there. It is US policy. The United States is intimately involved in every one of these conflicts. It is the major arm supplier and financial provider to Ukraine and its major diplomatic backer. It is the arm supplier and funder of Israel and its major diplomatic backer. And the same applies to Taiwan, which is of course in the early stages of what is looking like an increasingly dangerous conflict with China. And yesterday there was an article in the Financial Times by a man called Gideon Rackman, who is a very, very well connected journalist, not just in London, but in Washington. And he said that he had discussions with various US officials including members of the Democratic Party and also people within the administration. And they also agreed that these conflicts are all connected with each other. (03:14) The administration believes that they are connected with each other. They are apparently, or so they told Gideon Ratman very gloomy about the way in which these various conflicts are all going. There is in fact, one sense is a sense of controlled panic about this. And as very typically happens when somebody has pulled the strings and made things, pulled the strings in various places and they all start to go wrong. Apparently there are now some people in the administration who believe that they are themselves. Now the target of a plot that the Chinese, the Russians, the Muslim states, the North Koreans, the Iranians, that they're all working together. Wilmer Leon (04:01): When you discussed Ukraine, you mentioned finance and arm supplying. When you mentioned Israel, you mentioned finance and arm supplying. And when it comes to Taiwan, we know for example that Taiwan is now pointing high Mars missiles at China. We know the United States has sent a lot and continues to send a lot of weapons into Taiwan. So many times people hear the military industrial complex and they put that in some kind of grand conspiratorial context. But it sounds like weapons is, and the sale of weapons is the primary motivation here behind these conflicts. Alexander Mercouris (04:52): Absolutely. That is what is driving them in every single case. What has been pushing these conflicts is that the United States, the administration, the political backers of the administration, the various lobbyists in Washington, and you can trace all the lobbyists, all the funding ultimately comes back to a certain limited sources. And the military industrial complex is overwhelmingly the biggest. So the military industrial complex that funds the NGOs, the lobbying groups, all of those people, the think tanks that proliferate in Washington, they are all intimately involved in all three of these crises. And they have all made sure in every case that they're pushed in the same direction. So Ukraine was being pushed towards NATO into an alliance with the United States against Russia in the Middle East. Israel was being encouraged to advance relentlessly within the Palestinian Territories and to forge separate peace agreements with Arab countries, which disregarded the interests of the Palestinians in the former British mandate territory of Palestine and in Taiwan. Now, there is apparently arms packages being prepared for Taiwan, which apparently are intended to completely reequip the Taiwanese army. Its ground forces to the tune of $10 billion. And I got that by the way, from the B, b, C. So we are seeing major funding and military buildups in all of these places. And of course, when lots of weapons are supplied into conflict zones where an area in crisis is flooded with weapons in this kind of way, war follows. Wilmer Leon (06:54): Let me read quickly, let's start with the Ukraine. And there's a piece in the Washington Post entitled Miscalculations Divisions marked Offensive Planning by US and Ukraine. They describe, the Washington Post describes the conflict as a stalemate, but when Secretary of Defense, Austin asked the Ukrainian defense Minister Resnikoff what was going on, this is what Resnikoff said. Ukraine's armored vehicles were being destroyed by Russian helicopters, drones, and artillery. With every attempt to advance without air support. The only option was to use artillery to shell Russian lines, dismount from the targeted vehicles and then proceed on foot. We can't maneuver because of the landmine density and tank ambushes. This is according to Resnikoff. And the Washington Post then says, as winter approaches and the frontline freezes into place, Ukraine's, most senior military officials acknowledge that the war has reached a stalemate. Alexander, that doesn't sound like a stalemate to me. That sounds like an ass whipping. Alexander Mercouris (08:15): Well, absolutely. It's not a stalemate. It is a disaster. In fact, that article in the Washington Post, which is enormous, it is in two parts. If you actually read it carefully. It's an attempt to defend US policy. It's attempt to throw all the blame on the Ukrainians or most of the blame on the Ukrainians for what went wrong in this summer offensive, which has taken place this year and for the coming debacle, which is now shaping in Ukraine. Now let's me just deal quickly first with the stalemate situation. It seems that the US Defense Minister Secretary Lloyd Austin has just recently had a meeting with Ukraine's overall military commander, general Valeri illusion in Kiev. Lloyd Austin was recently in Kiev and Lloyd Austin was told by illusionary that for Ukraine to win this war, it needs 17 million shells and 400 billion worth of equipment. This is all over the Ukrainian media. (09:32) Now UK apparently Austin was shocked. He said, there aren't 17 million shells in the world. We don't have that number of shells in the world to supply you. And in terms of the $400 billion, I understand that is twice the annual Pentagon budget. We're talking about the Pentagon budget for weapons procurement in any one year. These are impossible, impossible demands. Now, they are not the kind of demands that you would get from the general of an army who finds himself in a stalemate situation. What illusion is telling Austin is we are losing the war. We are losing the war at every point. We are outgunned, we've been been out fought, we are on the defensive. The Russians are advancing. There's lots of information coming from the battlefronts which are not being reported in the media in the West, but we can see that in all kinds of places. (10:42) In a marinca in the north, in the south, in the center of the Battlefronts, the Russians are now incrementally and remorselessly advancing and the Ukrainians are being smashed. There is no stalemate. And the story of a stalemate that is being conjured up is one which I don't believe anybody with any true knowledge of the situation in Washington beliefs, it has just been created in order to buy the administration some time so that they can come up with a political strategy and a financial strategy in Congress to try to escape responsibility for the disaster that they have authored. And if you read the Washington Post article, you'll see how their fingerprints are all over this disaster. Wilmer Leon (11:39): When I talked to Brian Tic, when I talked to Mark Sloboda, when I talked to Scott Ritter, they all say Russia hasn't even started the fight yet yet. And that if Russia decided to go all in full bore, it would be a massacre. And so getting back to the Washington Post piece and what Ulu is telling Lloyd Austin that he needs, again, they haven't even started fighting yet. Your thoughts? Alexander Mercouris (12:19): No, this is absolutely correct. What all of those gentlemen have told you is absolutely true. And you can see this when you actually look at the military units that are conducting most of the fighting at the moment on the Russian side. And it's a very remarkable fact, which again, no part of the western media or western governments ever acknowledge, but most of the fighting in Ukraine is not for the moment being conducted by the regular Russian line army. They haven't yet deployed their heavy divisions. They're tank divisions, they're armor divisions, they're heavy infantry. The people with the infantry fighting vehicles, they're Wilmer Leon (13:07): Air force, Alexander Mercouris (13:08): They're air force to any great extent, they're holding back their missiles. Most of the fighting, most of the forces that are currently advancing are a very interesting collection of forces. They're the Don Bass militia who have been retrained and re-equipped. And you are carrying out the biggest offensive, it's ongoing at the moment, which is successful by the way, in a fortified place called elsewhere. It tends to be paratroopers, light infantry, in other words, from the regular Russian military. But these are elite infantry, but there's not relative, many of them. It's chechen fighters, it's various volunteer groups. There are lots of volunteer groups now fighting alongside the Russians in Ukraine. The Russians so far are holding their main army back and it's growing in size. It's growing in size at the rate of 1600 men a day, and apparently around 450,000 have joined up in the Russian military just this year. And the Russian arms production is worrying and increasing all the time. So it's absolutely correct. They haven't actually properly speaking started yet. Wilmer Leon (14:31): And here's something that I don't hear anybody in the West really, and this is very, very fundamental. The United States with Ukraine as its proxy has engaged Russia in the very type of conflict that Russia has been preparing to fight for the last 20 years. And they're fighting it in Russia's backyard. And Scott Ritter, Scott Ritter was on this 0.2 years ago that NATO just doesn't have it. The United States just doesn't have it. I don't remember the number of artillery shells that Russia is sending out all day, all night, but a war of attrition and an artillery type of battle is exactly what Russia has been preparing to fight. So basically the United States stepped into the trap without enough equipment, without enough soldiers, without enough logistics. It was a fiasco from the outset. Alexander Mercouris (15:47): Absolutely. Now, this is where I'm going to come back to that Washington Post article because it's actually extremely interesting because what you can see if you read that Washington Post article carefully, is that the people who really wanted this offensive that we've just been through in the summer were the Americans, the Ukrainian general, the same Ukrainian general that I mentioned before. Valeri, illusionary told the Americans last year, look, this is what I need in order to carry out an offensive. And he pitched the number. He thought so high that the Americans would find it impossible to fair it, and apparently the Americans gasp, this is what this article said. But then they went ahead and provided it and they started training all these men and they went through all the various war games and simulations and all of these kinds of things. And you could see immediately that they were feeding into all of this, their own presumptions about the Russians. (16:49) They thought the Russians were chaotic, disorganized, corrupt, inefficient, incompetent. They didn't know what they were doing. They weren't properly led. Their army was a Potemkin army, as I've seen it called that their equipment was lousy. They weren't remotely up to the standard and quality of the United States. And you could see that some Ukrainian commanders would bear you exactly what the reality was, but they were being brushed aside and they didn't want to launch this offensive. And the Americans were pushing them to launch this offensive, and they did launch this offensive and they crashed into the reality of a Russian army, which exactly as you said was incredibly well prepared. And this is exactly what's happened, that it's been the case right through this entire conflict. The United States has completely underestimated Russia. That is the truth of it. They underestimated its technological and industrial capacities which were multiples greater than they imagined. They underestimated its political will. They underestimated the morale and resilience of its population and Russia's understanding of the existential nature of this conflict. And they grope tely underestimated the Russian military, which they don't really understand and which has been preparing for this war exactly as you said, for at least the last 20 years. Wilmer Leon (18:30): You mentioned morale, and we heard early on in the conflict people saying that the Russian people were turning on Putin and all of these kinds of things. And what seems to have been missed is the Russian people are behind his government a hundred percent. And their ire was not directed at the fact that he intervened in Ukraine. Their ire was directed at him for not doing this sooner and not going in more forcefully. There are many who I understand to be saying, why are you nickel and dimming this? Why don't you just go in, kick butt, take names and move on. But he has a different strategy and his generals have a different strategy in terms of their response. Is that accurate? Alexander Mercouris (19:29): That's absolutely correct. And this has been a longstanding thing, and I've been saying this for years, and all of the people that you've been mentioning at that, Brian Tic, mark Vota, Scott Ritter, would tell you exactly the same thing. But then of course we spend time talking to Russians, not just the kind of Russians, Westerners, talk to other Russians, the kind of Russians that you will find in the streets, the people who drive you, the taxes, who you meet in hotels, those sorts of people. And the important thing to understand about Russia is this is an extremely educated society. This is a very educated society indeed. And it's a politically very educated society. Also, it has to be because Russia's history has been such over the last hundred plus years where you cannot not be educated or well-informed about political and geostrategic matters, and you've had constantly people telling you why is Putin pulley his punches? (20:33) Why does he continue to give to the West so much? Why does he call them partners all the time? Why is he constantly looking to make compromises with them? These people are profoundly hostile to us. They want to break up our country. When we opened up to them in the 1980s, they came here and they basically seized everything that they could and they triggered the biggest economic recession we've ever suffered in our history since the Russian Revolution in 1917. And why is Putin playing it so careful and so slow? And the answer was that he understood as his military people did, that his economic people did, that you can't just rush into a confrontation with the West. You have to prepare for it. You have to prepare for it financially, economically, industrially, technologically, militarily and above and diplomatically as well. And he moved to its step by step and well, here we are, Wilmer Leon (21:43): In fact, I'm glad you mentioned diplomatically because what gets missed, again through lack of context in reporting from the Western media is Putin is playing to the world. What we see now is he, whereas Joe Biden told us he was going to turn the rubble into rubble and he was going to bring about regime change in Russia and he was going to make Russia a pariah and all of that kind of stuff. When you look at President Xi, when you look at President Putin, when you look at President Raisi, when you look at Maduro in Venezuela, these guys are now on the international stage as statesmen, and it's Joe Biden who is looking and as well as Netanyahu as the odd men out. Alexander Mercouris (22:35): This is absolutely correct. Now, this is by the way, something which the Russians themselves are not used to at all. For most of the 20th century, they've been accustomed to a reality where the United States and the West essentially represented the world, and Russia itself felt itself a fortress, an encircled fortress. And this is very much if you spent time in Russia, this is still very much the instinct that a lot of Russians have, which explains why, by the way, they weren't say, we've got to wait and see, try and argue things with the Chinese, explain things to the Indians, make deals with the Venezuelans and all the others. They didn't really see it in those terms. Of course, Putin did, and this is where he's completely different from any other Russian leader that has come before because Putin understood that there are fundamental changes in the world that provided Russia behaved with self-control and discipline far from being isolated globally. It would be supported globally because most of the world could see what was really going on, and it would be the United States that would be isolated globally instead. And that is exactly what has happened, and that is something new. And the Russians themselves, I'm talking about the Russian people are astonished by it. And from everything I'm hearing rather exhilarated intoxicated by it, they did not expect things to turn out this way. Wilmer Leon (24:25): And of course, you cannot in this conversation really have this conversation with also talking about the power of Sergei Lavrov, the foreign minister Wang y in China. Those foreign ministers, again, unlike Secretary of State Blanken, they're true statesmen. They are men that have a much broader understanding of context. They have a much broader understanding of diplomacy. They have a much broader understanding of history, and they bring a whole, well, basically Blinken is playing checkers while these guys are playing three dimensional chess. Let me quickly, let's move because we could spend hours on this part of the conversation. The broader, let's connect the dots between what's happening with this Ukraine, Russian conflict and the broader context of Europe. Because there are reports now for example, that the Bavarian mayor, Marcus Soder, the prime minister in Bavaria, is saying that the increased energy costs, and there are a number of factors now that this whole conflict is having on Europe. The United States blowing up the Nord Stream pipeline, cutting off cheap natural gas to Germany is having an incredible industrial impact. I think Goodyear and Michelin are closing tire plants in Germany because manufacturing costs are too high. This has become an incredibly treacherous, has had a treacherous economic impact on European countries. You're in London, you know this better than I do. Alexander Mercouris (26:25): Oh, absolutely. Now the great success, the great achievement of the United States in the post Cold War period has been the Americanization of Europe's political elite. And it has been an astonishing thing to see, explain Wilmer Leon (26:39): What that means. Alexander Mercouris (26:40): Well, what has happened, and this is not easy to explain exactly how it's happened, and I suspect that there's a lot of this story that we don't quite know, but over the last 30 plus years, Europe, which had its own, each country in Europe had its own political leaders, its own politics, its own history of diplomacy. Remember modern diplomacy as we understand it today, the kind of diplomacy that Avro and Wangee and John Shankar of India and other countries conduct. The rules of that game were created in Europe, and they were being practiced in Europe until very recently, until well within our lifetimes, if I can say. So, all of that somehow seems to have ended. And what happened was that at some point, the Europeans, the European leadership class, its political class, came to identify itself very much with what's called the Euro-Atlantic Project. (27:49) The rules-based international order. You can use all kinds of terms with it, but they came to see themselves as part of a single team with the leadership of that team in Washington. So that instead of practicing traditional diplomacy as it used to be, and instead of focusing on their own national interests, they began to see themselves as part of a team with the United States and focused on the successful failure of that team, that collective team. I believe it was the Chinese who were the first to come up with the expression, the collective west. But that is essentially what you've got, what you've got now, you've got this collective west, which works to an extent, which you didn't even do during the Cold War as a block. And that means that Europeans have been willing, European leaders have been willing to an extent that would once upon a time have been considered inconceivable to sacrifice European vital economic interests. So Germany of all countries, for example, should have known that because of the historic connections between Ukraine and Russia and because of Russian concerns about the security of their western borders and because of the affinities between Ukraine and Russia, Ukraine was a place where the west tread carefully, but they didn't. They went full on board for the entire project, bring Ukraine into nato, pushed the Russians out. (29:40) When that became clear that it was going to result in a war, they went full out for the sanctions. No disagreement, no discussion allowed. To this day, it's very difficult to conduct a coherent discussion about this in Germany, same in France, same in Italy, same all across Europe, same to an even greater extent in Britain. And the result has been the economic catastrophe that you're talking about. Germany cut off from its natural economic hinterland, which by the way is Russia. The energy relationship which had been developing during the Cold War now destroyed the economic linkages, the industrial linkages destroyed as well. And the Germans are finding that their country now is deemed industrializing. And I can say this actually with confidence, because we were the first people on the Duran to say this. We said this on the very day when Schultz announced that he was going to suspend the operation of Nord Stream two. We said then that it was going to happen, but you could see how it has been working out ever since then. And it was completely predictable and completely understandable. And any political leadership which had German interests first and foremost at heart would've seen it. Wilmer Leon (31:13): And I think it's also important to understand that the de-industrialization of Europe, particularly the de-industrialization of Germany, was one of the objectives of this ridiculous mission in Ukraine, that this was a broader water intention to de-industrialized Germany and to sell Germany American liquified natural gas. Alexander Mercouris (31:44): Absolutely. But here again, you see how things have changed in a way because what the United States is now effectively doing is it's cannibalizing its own alliance. It is instead of supporting its allies, it is now predating upon them. Wilmer Leon (32:02): In fact, wait a minute, wait a minute. Because to that point, it's important for people to understand that when the US blew up the Nord Stream pipelines, the United States was attacking another NATO ally Germany. So under Article five, other NATO allies very well could have decided to come to the defense of Germany in the manner that they deemed fit. But of course, the United States is the head of nato. So that didn't happen. But it's just an important point I think for people to understand that the United States engaged in an act of war against a NATO ally. Alexander Mercouris (32:45): Absolutely. Of course, that is unequivocal. I mean, if you attack the vital energy infrastructure of a country and use explosives against it by any historic law of war, that is an act of war, no question. But this is what the United States increasingly has been doing, and you're quite right to say how they've pushed a very, very hard bargain on liquified natural gas. They're tempting European businesses to relocate to the United States. They're trying to exploit the de-industrialization of Germany, in other words, to their own advantage. But of course, this is the diametric opposite of what the United States once did in the 1950s and 1960s. The United States sought to build up European economies because he wanted a strong Europe strong allies so that he could withstand the Soviet Union and its allies. Now, when the United States itself feels diminished, its trying to supplement its own power by predating, by feeding on its allies. And yes, that will work for a time. It will make the United States stronger relatively than it might've been, but at the cost of weakening its overall alliance weakening the collective west, in other words. And in the long term, this is a bad policy as any policy that involves cannibalization ultimately is. Wilmer Leon (34:25): So let's switch gears now from talking about the conflict in Ukraine and its impacts on Europe to what's going on in the occupied territories in occupied Palestine. There was a piece again in the Washington Post who will run Gaza after the war. And the piece says, US searches for the best of bad options. And they're trying to figure out, of course, they want to totally get rid of Hamas. They're talking about could the Palestine authority be the solution? But the interesting thing is nobody seems to be talking to the Palestinians about who they want to run the area. And all of this conversation, in my opinion, is sheer evidence of what the grand plan has been from the very beginning, which is the Zionist government in Israel is a settler colonial state, and as a settler colonial state, you remove the indigenous people so that you can expand the space for your own. This is basically a humongous land grab on the Mediterranean Sea. Alexander Mercouris (35:50): Oh, absolutely. I mean, there are people in Israel who are making talking straightforwardly about this now to an extent that we've never seen before. Some of the language coming out of officials in Prime Minister Netanyahu's government is absolutely at that kind. And this is where I'm going to say what my own personal view about US policy throughout this crisis has been, or how it started, which is when the crisis began in October, there was unequivocally an Israeli plan to force the entire population of Gaza out of Gaza, relocate them in Sinai in each Egypt. Qatar was supposed to provide a tent city to house them there. And of course, once Gaza had had its population expelled, Israel would've quickly finished off Hamas occupied Gaza, Israeli settle settlers would've moved in, and then sooner or later they'd have finished off what is left of the West Bank where there's been increasing amounts of violence and aggression as well. (36:59) And there are even some people in the actual Israeli government, the cabinet who have been talking about rebuilding the temple in Jerusalem, resuming the rituals in the temple and that kind of thing. So that was the agenda. And the United States initially went along with it. Now, this is the thing that people don't understand, but that is exactly what happened. Blinken went along to the Middle East, he met with the Jordanians, the Egyptians, and he was trying to persuade them to agree to allow those people from Gaza to go into Sinai eye in the way that the Israelis wanted. And what then happened, and this is where we come back to the American propensity to underestimate opposition now and a failure to realize or recognize the extent to which the world has changed. What they found was that they came, they came up against a wall of opposition from the Arab states. (38:09) Egypt said, no, the Egyptian president, president, lsi, ridiculed, blink into his face and had it all televised and said, we got the video of it. Mohammed bin Salman, the Crown prince and prime minister of Saudi Arabia kept blinking waiting a whole night before he actually agreed to meet with him. The King of Georgia said, this is completely unacceptable and refused to meet President Biden. When President Biden also came to the Middle East, the Arab states close ranks. And they said, absolutely no. Under no circumstances will we agree to this thing. And they've been pushing back relentlessly. And you've had a whole series of telephone conversations between the president and Arab leaders. And increasingly now the president, president Biden is having to reassure the Arab leaders that there will be no displacement of the people from by Gaza, no relocations, no redrawing of the map of Gaza. (39:20) And instead, they're now coming to this new plan, which is a terrible plan, that we're going to set up some kind of neo-colonial administration in Kaza run by the Palestinians that we choose. This is plan B, because to be very clear plan A has been a complete failure. Now, I think that that is going to be intensely resisted. The Palestinian people, as you absolutely correctly say, are not being consulted about who is going to govern them. Trying to set up a political structure of this kind in Gaza is going to be a sort of further instability and tension. I don't personally think it's even going to happen. Actually, I think that the United States, Israel are finding the going in guards are much tougher than they imagined it would be. And I also think that the Arab states, as I said, the closing ranks, and of course behind the Arab states are the brick states. China and Russia, Saudi Arabia and Egypt, of course are joining the bricks in January. Iran made up with Saudi Arabia and is also joining the bricks. The Iranians have just agreed a major arms deal with the Russians. The Iranian president is in Moscow, even as we speak and this broadcast, and we've just had confirmation from the Saudi government that in a few short time, we don't quite know when President Putin, Wilmer Leon (41:06): Putin is on his way to the Saudis. Alexander Mercouris (41:09): The Saudis. Wilmer Leon (41:11): Do Alexander Mercouris (41:12): You see how the pieces are all coming together Wilmer Leon (41:15): And connect the dots there because you mentioned the Saudis and the Iranians have found reproach mon and have come back together. That was due to the diplomacy of President Xi and the Chinese. We know the relationship between China and Russia, and now Putin is on his way to Saudi Arabia. There are a whole lot of dots that are being connected here, and it's not to the advantage of the United States. Alexander Mercouris (41:46): No, not at all. Now, I think the first thing to understand, and we have to say this base point, we're going to come to China in more detail in a moment, but the biggest single change that has happened in the world over the last 30 years is the emergence of China as an economic, political, and military superpower that is at least the equal in all of these things, economics, politics, military affairs, as the United States itself is. And that has completely changed the global geometry. It means that even during the Cold War when the Soviet Union was a significant alternative poll and rival to the United States, it could not match the United States at every spectrum of power China can. And that has changed the situation globally. And we see how it's playing out in the Middle East because as is so often the case in the Middle East, what the Chinese do, and they do this very intelligently, is that they set out their positions. (43:03) They've talked about the need, for example, for an international peace conference to be convened, to settle the situation in the Middle East. This longstanding conflict between the Palestinians and the Israelis, they want, in other words, to take away control of Middle East diplomacy from the Americans, which is what the Chinese want to do. The Chinese, however, as they always do like to work in the background, they bring the Saudis and the Iranians together. They're working very closely with the Russians. They're letting the Russians supply the arms to Iran. They're letting the Russians do the oil deals with the Saudis, but ultimately it's China that is the key player behind the scenes. And it's such a contrast with the Americans who always wants to be seen doing something. So you have Blinken running around the Middle East as he has been, again, by the way, quite recently, they're incredibly active, going from one capital to another, having doors slammed in his face and giving fresh conferences and doing something. (44:20) But in fact, if actually look at who's really making the big moves, it's and the Chinese, but he's able to do it from Beijing because eventually he will go. Obviously Xi Jinping has been to Saudi Arabia. He was there recently. But it's an extraordinary study in contrast. And again, it comes back to the point that you were making before about the way that the Chinese do diplomacy, the Russians, all of these countries do diplomacy and the Americans don't. The Americans go, they come up with their plans, they come up with their ideas, they give their lectures, they tell people, this is how it must be done. Chinese, much more patient, much more careful, much more willing to let things play out and to take advantage of them as they play out as well. Wilmer Leon (45:16): Two things on Gaza before we move to China. One is the Hamas strategy. I believe that the Hama strategy is a much longer term strategy than the Americans give them credit for. I don't think that their strategy is to win militarily. I think that their longer term strategy is to win psychologically, to make the settlers, the Zionist settlers in Israel so uncomfortable with their reality because they've been sold this bill of goods by Netanyahu and others. We will protect you, we will defend you against those evil Arabs. And now all of a sudden that sense of security has been broken, and I don't know that they'll ever be able to regain it, especially with Hezbollah in the north waiting. You've got Syria in the waiting to take over the Golan Heights. This thing could become an incredible conflagration in the region, the likes of which neither Israel nor the United States can manage your thoughts on that point? Alexander Mercouris (46:41): Absolutely. Now, first of all, let's just say something about Hamas. I mean, a lot of people have been talking about Hamas and some of the things they say are true, but one of the things they consistently do is that they underestimate Hamas itself. It is a highly intelligent organization. It it's politically extremely sophisticated. This is something people consistently underestimate. And what you are describing, actually, the psychological nature of the struggle is that the classic struggle of a insurgency, a revolutionary, a national liberation movement, you can't win on the battlefield against an army. You win politically hearts and minds. Well, Dr. Kissinger, who's now hopefully in another more fiery place actually for it rather, well actually when he was talking about Vietnam, the insurgency, the revolutionary, the National Liberation Movement, all it has to do in order to win is survive. If it survives, it wins. (48:03) And this is absolutely true of Hamas. The Americans have gradually come to understand this. I think the Israelis still are chasing this mirage that they can destroy Hamas completely. What they're actually doing is that they're making it stronger because Hamas is able now to say to the Palestinians, look, we are the resistance. We are the people who are fighting. So for every Hamas official, you kill 10 will come and take their place, which is what, as I said, movements like this do. Didn't we see this very same thing in Afghanistan? Afghanistan in Vietnam, inconceivable place? Absolutely. Hamas is perhaps the best organized resistance movement of this nature in the world at the moment. And everything that they've done, every step that they have taken has been consistent with that strategy. And by the way, I've been in contact with people in Israel and they all tell me the same thing. (49:12) And it goes exactly to what you said. People are afraid. Israelis are afraid. There has been, people are leaving Israel now because they are afraid. And if Hamas comes out of this intact, however bruised and bantered, it will be those people are going to remain afraid and they're get to become more afraid. And that, of course, is what this whole thing is for. Hamas has acted with calculation and intelligence. Israel and the Israeli government walked into a trap, which is fair for everyone to see. They walked into that trap, and the United States opened the gate for them to enable them to walk into it. And has now followed itself because of course, across the Middle East, there was this extraordinary comment that Lloyd Austin made just a few days ago, which he said that Israel is now facing strategic defeat. He's right. But of course, it's a strategic defeat, not just for Israel, but for the United States as well, because right across the Middle East, right across the world, the United States and Israel are seen as joined to the hip if the one loses, so does the other. Wilmer Leon (50:46): And in the interests that I mentioned such as Hezbollah in Lebanon and Syria as it relates to the Golan, I didn't mention Iran, I didn't mention Yemen. There are a whole bunch of factions that will join this resistance. And I hadn't thought to ask you this, but this just comes to mind when we look at the conflict as it's existing right now. And those other factions that I've mentioned are still standing on the sideline that tells me they're standing on the sideline because contrary to Western reporting, Hamas is doing a much, much better job than the West wants to admit. And those other factions are standing on the sideline saying, this is not the time for us to get involved because this business is being handled by Hamas. Is that a fair assessment? Alexander Mercouris (51:49): Absolutely. I come back to this. I mean, Hamas doesn't need to defeat the Israeli army in Gaza. It knows that if you're trying to do that, it would destroy itself. And that's not what it's doing. What's doing is it's resisting. And so long as it is able to keep resisting, it is winning. Now, this is something again, people don't understand. Israel talks about conducting this operation for a year that already tells you how much resistance there is, and that resistance will grow because more Wilmer Leon (52:19): People enjoy. And that goes to Nala's statement a couple of weeks ago when he asked the question very clearly, how long do y'all want to do this? Because we're in it till the end. And he said, said, I don't think you all have the stomach for what you're about to get into. Alexander Mercouris (52:42): Well, that is absolutely correct. And of course, Israel, it's a small country. Its economy is now coming under increasing strain. Casualties are growing. There is going to be increasing problems within Israel itself the longer this goes on. And that isn't even to consider the bigger political diplomatic backlash that there is going to be if there is a year of war. So you could see that this is playing out in exactly the way that Hermas wanted, and it was predictable. It was entirely predictable. They're going to just talk about the general picture, the Hezbollah and all the rest, because I actually, now, this is my own view, and I've consistently taken the view view that these huge American military deployments to the Middle East, two aircraft carriers, one in the Persian Gulf and a higher class submarine equipped with 150 tornado, not tornado missiles, aircraft, all of these things. (53:42) I am absolutely certain that what was the original plan back in October was to use the conflict in Gaza as an excuse to launch that long desired strike at Iran. Again, some people in America believe Iran is a much weaker, more fragile state than it actually is, and strike it, Toran and perhaps a strike it. Hezbollah. Look where the two carriers are. One is in the Eastern Mediterranean position to strike it. Hezbollah, the other is in the Persian Gulf, perfectly located to launch the strike at Iran. Again, what became obvious over the course of October, November was that the Arab and Muslim states were united in their complete opposition to this. So once again, that opposition has prevented that strike happening. And if we talk about Hezbollah and about Nasrallah, people continuously ask, why aren't they attacking Israel in a more sustained way than they are at the moment? (55:03) Why aren't the Houthis? Why isn't Iran unleashing all its forces? The thing to understand is that that is exactly what those people who back in October in Washington decided to deploy all those huge forces to the Middle East, wanted the Israelis, sorry, the Iranians and Hezbollah and all of these places, people to do so. What has happened is that all these forces have now been moved to the Middle East. Hezbollah is still there. It's still very strong. The Houthis are still there. They're still very strong. They're able to carry out all these pinprick attacks on American basis and on American shipping. These vast fleets are located there, but because of the strength of regional opposition, they can't actually move. They're beginning to look rather eff effectual. And going back to that article by Gideon Rackman that I was talking about the start of this program, he said that there are American officials who are now stressing about the fact that two carrier task forces and large numbers of destroyers and other warships are floating around the Middle East doing nothing of any practical value and are pinned down there even as the situation in the Asia Pacific region where these warships are needed. (56:34) If you want the conflict with China, even as the situation of the Asia Pacific region is continuing to shift in China's favor, and it's there, it's actually written out in black and white in Gideon Rahman's article, and he said all of this after speaking to US officials, so you could see yet again how a diplomatic and political strategy of playing a long game, which is what Putin did in Ukraine as we discussed earlier, how that works to your advantage, rushing in attacking Israel in this case, launching strikes against American positions, starting a regional war right away would've played into the hands of the hardliners in Washington and in Israel. Taking time on the contrary slowly shifts the balance in your favor, Wilmer Leon (57:34): And you mentioned time in what's important I think for Americans to understand is whether you're talking about Russia, whether you're talking about Arab states, whether you're talking about China, they have a different concept of time because their cultures are much older than the United States has been in existence. We're talking thousands of years of history that they understand, hence the adage, you have the watches, but we have the time. And President Putin, when Biden announced that the Gerald Ford aircraft carrier group was on its way to the Mediterranean, Putin said, why are you doing that? He said, you're not scaring anybody. These people don't scare. So let's move because we have just a few minutes left. Let's move to the discussion of China because I'm trying to figure out who in Taiwan hasn't been paying attention to what's happened in Ukraine and why would the Taiwanese government want to become Ukraine part two? Alexander Mercouris (58:47): Right. Well, I think the first thing to understand is that there are elections in Taiwan, and there've been elections in Ukraine and both in Ukraine. There were lots and lots of people who were very worried about the situation and didn't really want to see a certain political leadership aligned with the West take power. And I'm sure the same is true in Taiwan. We must be much more skeptical. I mean, I'm sorry to say this, but it's a fact about the outcome of elections. Elections in these kind of countries don't necessarily reflect the feelings and ideas and thoughts and motives and intentions of the people in these countries. They are much more attuned to what people in Washington want to see the outcome that people in Washington want to see. If we're talking about Taiwan, I'm not saying that the elections there are be straightforwardly rigged, but you're going to have the media in Taiwan promoting a certain view. You're going to see splits within the opposition parties, and that apparently has happened. You're going to see all kinds of problems like that start to build up. And of course, that opens the way for a party like the one that we're seeing in Taiwan win the Wilmer Leon (01:00:03): Election. We're now seeing opposition parties in Taiwan being investigated, lawsuits being filed against them as they are trying to coalesce in order to go against Drawn a blank on her name, the current prime minister, president of Taiwan, but Joe Biden met with President Xi in San Francisco, and during the press conference, president Biden talks about, oh, we had a great conversation and blah, blah, and then he turns around and calls GA dictator. This makes absolute, why do you want to try to pick a fight with China in China's front yard? I was saying that Ukraine is Russia's backyard, Taiwan and the South China Sea, that's China's front yard and just like Russia, China, hypersonic missiles, those aircraft carriers groups that the United States wants to send to the region, those are nothing but targets. Alexander Mercouris (01:01:12): Absolutely. This is entirely correct. I mean, it is at fundamental levels irrational. I think this is something we need to say. I mean, American policy in Ukraine is misconceived. American policy in the Middle East is misconceived also, but American policy towards China, towards Taiwan Wilmer Leon (01:01:31): Is Alexander Mercouris (01:01:32): Insane's insane. It's completely rational. Unfortunately, there also seems to be an enormous bipartisan support for it. Now, I'm just going to just, if I may just speak briefly about the San Francisco Sam, because the Chinese were very reluctant to go, Xi Jinping didn't want to go. Xi Jinping had basically lost all trust and confidence in Biden at the start of this year over the balloon incident. The relationship between the two was rocky. We have a Chinese readout from one of their earlier meetings in which Xi Jinping all but called Biden a liar to his face. That readout really ought to be better known than it is, but eventually the Americans persuaded si shing to come. So why did he do it? I think it's extremely straightforward. The Chinese use the San Francisco Summit as a device to demonstrate their power. They got the Americans to agree to all of the conditions they set for the summit meeting. (01:02:44) They wanted the streets of San Francisco cleaned up. They wanted people to come up with the red flags, not protestors. And of course, straight after the meeting with Biden, which achieved nothing, by the way, that's an important thing to say. And nothing of substance was agreed over the course of it straight after. What does Xi Jinping do? He goes to a hotel in San Francisco and all the leaders of the American business community there, Tim Cook of Apple, Elon Musk, all of them, they're all there, bill Gates, and they give Si Jinping a standing ovation Wilmer Leon (01:03:22): Because they're doing business in China. Your iPhone, the batteries for your Tesla, they're doing business with China. Alexander Mercouris (01:03:33): China, exactly. And that was what the Chinese, in their subtle way were wanting to demonstrate. They were trying to show to the Americans, to the American political leadership, to the people in Washington. Look, we are far more strong, far more powerful than you seem to understand even in your own country. When our leader comes, he's able to change the landscape around him, and that was what the Chinese were trying to do. I have to say this. I think that there is this very sane demonstration of power that the Chinese made in San Francisco is going to inflame some people in Washington even more for them. The very concept of a country that is equal and equivalent to the United States in power and which is exceeding the United States in some form of power is against nature. It is so abhorrent that they have to find some way of reversing it. (01:04:55) They've tried to reverse it by imposing economic blockades and technology blockades on China. The Chinese are finding work rounds in terms of the economic pressures. They've demonstrated their economic prowess by developing a super chip in just a few weeks, which the Americans thought it would take them 10 or 20 years to do. Unfortunately, what that means is that in this condition of anger and fear that the United States is losing, its supposedly ordained place that is going to make more people reach for the military auction, which is all that they realistically have. In other words, if you feel you're going down, you become more desperate, Wilmer Leon (01:05:46): Which they realistically don't have because Washington is about, what, 7,000 miles from Beijing? What makes the United States, just from a sheer logistical perspective, I understand the United States has bases all over the world. Japan, I got all that, but you're still basically fighting a 7,000 mile war in China's backyard. And it's not, if this breaks out, it's not just China. It's China and Russia, it's China and North Korea, it's Russia and North Korea. You can bring South Korea into the fight if you want to. I think North Korea will handle that. You can bring Japan into the conflict if you want to. I think North Korea, as I say on the street, we'll let North Korea handle the light work, and it makes absolutely no sense. Connect these three dots and we'll get out. Alexander Mercouris (01:06:51): Well, this is absolutely correct, but it comes back to this extraordinary degree of overconfidence that Americans have, which we've seen in Ukraine. I mean, this idea that this offensive that the Americans were planning in Ukraine last summer would succeed this utter underestimation of Russian military capabilities. Wilmer Leon (01:07:12): Wait, let me just quickly jump in, and I think you know this better than I do. When the United States engages in war game simulations against Russia, it loses when the United States engages in war game simulation against China. It loses every single time. Their systems are telling them. The systems are telling the Pentagon you can't win the fight. Alexander Mercouris (01:07:48): Absolutely true, but they ignore those stipulations. That's the trouble, because this is exactly, Wilmer Leon (01:07:55): Don't confuse me with the facts. Please confuse me with the facts. Alexander Mercouris (01:08:00): This is exactly what happened with the Ukrainian offensive, the Washington Post article goes all kinds of detail because of course, they then change the war games. They factor in all kinds of assumptions that they make about the other side, and that enables them eventually to come out with the answer that they will win, and they do this send of the Chinese, I've been reading article after article in the American media, now the American military media, which is a strange place by the way, but about how actually the Chinese militaries of paper tiger, the Chinese weapons systems don't really work. The Chinese soldiers are inexperienced. They've never really known war until now that Chinese generals are incompetent and corrupt. So all we have to do is just go in and fight them, and we will show to the Chinese what's what, and we will win. And that's exactly what they did in Ukraine this year, and that's what they think they're going to do with China. (01:09:07) Now, anybody with any knowledge of Chinese history, including Chinese military history, we'll know what an absurd view that is. And of course, the last time, in fact, the only time the United States has actually fought China, which is in Korea, the outcome was very different. The United States managed to escape disaster by the skin of its teeth, but don't let facts get in the way of all kinds of confident assumptions. And as for history, well Americans just don't do that to my, at least political leaders don't do that. No. If you go around in Washington today and say to them, well, what lessons do you think the United States should take from the Korean War and from frightening the Chinese? And by the way, the North Koreans there, well, most of them don't even know about it. So I mean, that's the fundamental problem. Wilmer Leon (01:10:08): Americans need to read Sun Zu, the Art of War if they want to play the Chinese cheap, because a lot of those strategies are still applicable and making an incredible amount of sense. Alexander Mercurius from the Duran, thank you so much for joining me today. I greatly, greatly appreciate it. Alexander Mercouris (01:10:30): My great pleasure. Let's do this again, Wilmer Leon (01:10:32): Folks. Thank you so much for listening to the Connecting the Dots podcast with me, Wilmer Leon. Stay tuned for new episodes every week. Also, please follow and subscribe. Leave a review, share my show, follow me on social media. You'll find all the links below in the show description. And remember, this is where analysis of politics, culture, and history converge because talk without analysis is just chatter, and we don't chatter on connecting the dots. See you again next time. Until then, I'm Dr. Wilmer Leon. Have a great one. Peace and blessings. I'm out

What happened after the armistice in January of 1949?  Of course, the major consequence was the Palestinian refugees.  Thinking only of what we consider the internationally recognized boundaries of Israel, probably 80% or more of all the Palestinians inside of that area  on January 1, 1948 were gone by December 31, 1948.  This is the real “catastrophe,” or nakhba,  as the Palestinians call it.  The Israelis were insistent that none of these refugees would be allowed to return.  I am very sorry I can't deliver an hour-long talk on the refugee situation.  I am just not sure how to make it work.  Still, I have tried to incorporate key points into this talk and into the previous talk on the Palestine War of 1948.  And again, I invite you to go to Deep Blue (see that previous podcast if you are unclear) where I have posted my briefing document on The Palestinian Refugees of 1948.  As of April, 2021 this document has nearly 13,000 downloads from around the world.  It is a very thorough summary of the data on the refugees, of the recent research on the topic, of the personal stories of what happened, and of the argumentation.  For those interested in this subject, it is a valuable source.  If you would like to read a short novel consider Khirbet Khizeh by S. Yizhar.  The author was a noted literary figure (Yizhar Smilansky) who concealed his true identity so he could tell what happened when his unit took control of a Palestinian village in 1948.  It was translated into English in  2008.  It shocked many Israelis to realize that a person of such literary stature had experienced these things.  I mentioned the mayor of El Bireh, a Palestinian town just 10 miles north of Jerusalem.  His name was Abdul Jawad Saleh.  I met him in Amman in 1987.  He was one of the most respected of the Palestinian leaders and was later put in charge of the PLO  treasury because everyone trusted him.    He told me that one evening he had a knock at the door and two soldiers told him the governor wanted to talk to him.  This was not unusual so he went without resistance.  But they took him to the Jordan border (I think in the southern desert) and pushed him into Jordan.  They then announced on the radio that he had been expelled.  The Jordanians rushed units into the area to find him before he died of thirst.  I met him in his apartment.  His daughter was visiting and his grandson.  He was the person who made the map of the dead cities and villages of Palestine.   I asked him why they had expelled him (which is a violation of international law, by the way). He said they never tell you why they are expelling you or detaining you  but he thought it had to do with the fact that the city was erecting a “mother statue.”  It depicts a mother lifting her child  to reach for a goal. It is obviously a metaphor for the Palestinian situation.  He thought it was just too symbolically powerful for the Israelis.  When the archives were opened by Menachem Begin in the late 1970s,  Israeli scholars plunged in.  By the late 1980s, they produced a new wave of histories that went beyond wartime hero narratives but relied heavily upon primary source materials: diaries and journals and memos.  They were called the New Historians.  Their research exploded myths about how the Palestinians had fled of their own will, for example or that the military maintained a “purity of arms.”  Ilan Pappe and Avi Shlaim and Simcha Flappan were three of these.  Tom Segev's book, The First Israelis, focusing upon 1949, after the fighting was over, brings surprising new perspectives to the issues.  These historians are hated by those on the Israeli right. 

Dr. Chuck Herring | Ezekiel 37:1-14Interesting things happen in cemeteries.  Tonight, I want us to take a trip with the prophet Ezekiel to a very unusual one to say the least.  Keep in mind that He is writing to God's covenant people who are in exile in Babylon.  They've been there for several years, and they are incredibly discouraged even bordering on sheer hopelessness (37:11).  Is there a future for Israel?  Some say, “No, for all these OT prophecies must be applied spiritually to the church.”  Wait.  These prophecies are too detailed to be “spiritualized” and applied only to the church today.  Jesus taught a future for the Jews (Luke 22:29-30); so did Paul (Rom. 11); and so did John (Rev. 7:4-8, 14:1-5).[1]Ezekiel 37 easily may be divided into two sections by the introductory phrases “the hand of the Lord was upon me” in v. 1 and “the word of the Lord came again to me” in v. 15.  This chapter illustrates Israel's failed past, frustrated present, and future hope.  With that in mind, let's focus on an unusual vision that has often been referred to as…1. The Valley of Dry BonesEzekiel 37:1–3… The hand of the Lord was upon me, and He brought me out by the Spirit of the Lord and set me down in the middle of the valley; and it was full of bones. 2 He caused me to pass among them round about, and behold, there were very many on the surface of the valley; and lo, they were very dry. 3 He said to me, “Son of man, can these bones live?” And I answered, “O Lord God, You know.” (1) The hand of the LORD came upon me: Ezekiel's remarkable prophetic experience is not specifically called a vision, but it certainly has all the markings of a vision.  Notice how the Scripture emphasizes that “He brought me out by the Spirit of the LORD.”   (1) In the middle of the valley; and it was full of bones: This was truly Death Valley; the floor of the valley was covered with human bones. The people represented by these bones were Jews and they were not only dead; they were also disgraced.  (In the thinking of ancient Israel, an unburied corpse with exposed remains was a shocking disgrace to the dead.)  (2) They were very dry: These dry bones are not only dead; they have been dead for a long time.  When something or someone has been dead for so long, we give up hope that it will ever live again.  It was a picture of utter defeat and desolation.  What a vivid description of the Jewish people! [2](3) Can these bones live?  Here's the crux of the issue.  Can a dead and impotent nation in exile and under the control of a godless nation be resurrected and become a living, thriving kingdom once again?One might hope that a recently dead corpse might somehow be resuscitated.  However, no one hopes that scattered, detached bones might live.  Ezekiel responded to God's question the only way he could, saying “O Lord GOD, You know.”§  Ezekiel had no hope for the bones, but he did have hope in God.§  Ezekiel did not presume to know what God wanted to do with the bones.§  Ezekiel was confident that God did know.2. Speaking Life To Dead Bones.Ezekiel 37:4–6… Again He said to me, “Prophesy over these bones and say to them, ‘O dry bones, hear the word of the Lord.' 5 “Thus says the Lord God to these bones, ‘Behold, I will cause breath to enter you that you may come to life. 6 ‘I will put sinews on you, make flesh grow back on you, cover you with skin and put breath in you that you may come alive; and you will know that I am the Lord.' ” (4) Prophesy to these bones: In the previous verse, Ezekiel deliberately left the matter with God, to His power and wisdom.  In turn, God gave the prophet something to do. God commanded him to speak, to prophesy, to preach to the dry, dead bones.  By all outward observation this was a vain and foolish act. (4) O dry bones, hear the word of the LORD: Ezekiel could only preach this message by faith—faith in God's ability to do the impossible.  knew God's word had supernatural power. (5) Behold I will cause breath to enter you that you may come to life: God promised to fill the dry bones with breath—the breath of life.  (6) I will put sinews on you, make flesh grow back on you, cover you with skin and put breath in you that you may come alive: God promised to raise the Jewish people to life again.  This was not the creation of life from nothing; it was the restoration of life to something that had been long dead.The word for “breath” means wind or spirit.  Here is a promise that God would one day give the Holy Spirit to His covenant people under the blessings of the New Covenant…Ezekiel 36:24–28… “For I will take you from the nations, gather you from all the lands and bring you into your own land. 25 “Then I will sprinkle clean water on you, and you will be clean; I will cleanse you from all your filthiness and from all your idols. 26 “Moreover, I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit within you; and I will remove the heart of stone from your flesh and give you a heart of flesh. 27 “I will put My Spirit within you and cause you to walk in My statutes, and you will be careful to observe My ordinances. 28 “You will live in the land that I gave to your forefathers; so you will be My people, and I will be your God. Refer to Acts 2:1-4.3. Dead Bones Assemble TogetherEzekiel 37:7–8… So I prophesied as I was commanded; and as I prophesied, there was a noise, and behold, a rattling; and the bones came together, bone to its bone. 8 And I looked, and behold, sinews were on them, and flesh grew and skin covered them; but there was no breath in them. (7) So I prophesied as I was commanded: If Ezekiel had any doubts, he put them away and did what God commanded him to do. To human perception this proclamation of the word of God was foolish, yet Ezekiel obeyed. (7) And as I prophesied, there was a noise, and behold, a rattling; and the bones came together, bone to its bone: As Ezekiel prophesied, there was first a noise among the bones, a rattling.  As he continued, the bones began to assemble themselves into skeletons. (8) And I looked, and behold, a rattling; sinews were on them, and flesh grew and skin covered them; but there was no breath in them: After the bones were assembled, muscles and tissue came upon the bones. The bones were full of activity, yet still did not yet have the breath of life in them. The reviving of the dry bones clearly happened in stages.§  Stirring of the bones.§  Assembly of the bones.§  Sinews and flesh upon the bones.§  Skin upon the tissues covering the bones.§  Awaiting the breath of God.So here were men in skin, with flesh, sinews, bones; but, they were like Adam before God breathed into him the breath of life.4. The Second Prophecy To The BreathEzekiel 37:9–10… Then He said to me, “Prophesy to the breath, prophesy, son of man, and say to the breath, ‘Thus says the Lord God, “Come from the four winds, O breath, and breathe on these slain, that they come to life.” ' ” 10 So I prophesied as He commanded me, and the breath came into them, and they came to life and stood on their feet, an exceedingly great army. (9) Prophesy to the breath: The previous verse left the valley full of revived, activated bodies that yet lacked breath.  Now Ezekiel was told to call upon the breath (spirit, wind), praying the breath/spirit would come on these who were in a sense the walking dead, so that they may live. (9) Come from the four winds, O breath: In this vision, Ezekiel had already proclaimed God's word to the dead and dry bones, and had seen a remarkable work done. Yet it was not enough. There also needed to be a work by the Holy Spirit.  Spurgeon commented…First, the prophet prophesies to the bones – here is preaching; and next, he prophesies to the four winds – here is praying. The preaching has its share in the work, but it is the praying which achieves the result, for after he had prophesied to the four winds, and not before, the bones began to live.(10) So I prophesied as He commanded me: Perhaps this was, humanly speaking, an easier message for Ezekiel to preach. He had the encouragement of seeing the beginning of a supernatural work with the activation of the dry bones. Now he prophesied and prayed for the work to be completed. (10) And the breath came into them and they came to life and stood on their feet: After Ezekiel's faithful proclamation of God's message, the work of reviving the dry bones was completed. The breath of God came into the reanimated bodies, and they stood upon their feet. (10) An exceedingly great army: The bones were not revived to become a group of spectators or to live for their own comfort. They became an army, and an exceedingly great one. They lived to act under the orders of the one who gave them life.How do these bones live again?  Derek Thomas said that God uses three means to accomplish His purpose.The preaching of the WordEzekiel is told to ‘prophesy' (37:4; literally: ‘preach God's Word'), and he does as he is told (37:7).The prayer of God's servantGod urges Ezekiel to call upon the ‘breath' to come and breathe into the slain (37:9).The power of the Holy SpiritThese are the ingredients of any great work of God.5. God Explains The VisionEzekiel 37:11… Then He said to me, “Son of man, these bones are the whole house of Israel; behold, they say, ‘Our bones are dried up and our hope has perished. We are completely cut off.'” Okay, what does all this mean?  As our Lord and God often does, He explains what He means for us to understand about His Word.These bones are the whole house of Israel: We might have supposed that Ezekiel understood that the bones in his vision represented the exiled people from Judah.  It might have surprised him when God revealed they represented the whole house of Israel. The restoration would include those from the northern kingdom of Israel that fell to the Assyrians some 150 years earlier. Our bones are dried up, our hope has perished. We are completely cut off: The house of Israel had reason to say this, both those from the south and the north. Their only hope for life and restoration was God.Ezekiel 37:12… “Therefore prophesy and say to them, ‘Thus says the Lord God, “Behold, I will open your graves and cause you to come up out of your graves, My people; and I will bring you into the land of Israel.” Behold, I will open your graves and cause you to come up out of your graves, My people: Instead of the bones being exposed, here they are buried in graves. The effect is the same; life is brought to that which was dead.And I will Bring you into the land of Israel: As promised many times in other places (Ezekiel 36:24 and 36:28), this revival of Israel also included their restoration to the land.  This is a political and a spiritual restoration!Ezekiel 37:13… “Then you will know that I am the Lord, when I have opened your graves and caused you to come up out of your graves, My people.” Then you shall know that I am the LORD, when I have opened your graves and caused you to come out of your graves, My people: God would powerfully reveal Himself to Israel through this great work of revival and restoration to the land.Ezekiel 37:14… “I will put My Spirit within you and you will come to life, and I will place you on your own land. Then you will know that I, the Lord, have spoken and done it,” declares the Lord.' ” I will put My Spirit within you and you will come to life, and I will place you on your own land:breath in the revived bones was more than the breath of human life; it was the Spirit of the living God. This is another way of expressing the great promise found in the previous chapter (Ezekiel 36:27).In verses 11 to 14, I want you to see three promises from God…(1) He's will restore them to the land.  (2) He will reverse their spiritual death with resurrection life. (3) He will put the Holy Spirit Himself within them.Undeniably, Ezekiel 37:1-14 is about God's promised restoration of Israel in the last days.  This pictures the future revival of the nation, when the Jews will be brought up out of the “graves” of the Gentile nations where they have been scattered.  Politically, this took place May 14, 1948, when the modern nation of Israel entered the family of nations again. Of course, the nation is dead spiritually; but one day when Christ returns, the nation will be born in a day and be saved.[3]APPENDIX15 Facts About Palestine: 1. Palestine was NOT an Arab nation in 1948 when Israel was created. The Jewish people did not take over someone else's country. 1.      Great Britain, in fact, controlled that region of the Middle East until she grew tired of governing the volatile area and asked the UN to decide what to do with it.2.      Before Great Britain was tasked with administrating the region after WWI, the Turks had controlled it since the early 1500s. Turks are not Arabs.3.      In fact, Palestine has never been the name of any country! 2. Where did the name "Palestine" come from?” 1.      The Romans!2.      In an effort to rid Judea of its Jewishness, the Romans renamed the area Filistia (Palestine) in the mid-130s CE. They were tired of pesky Jewish uprisings (70 CE, 132 CE) and so decided to deport the Jews and change the name. The name came from the ancient Philistines, who have no connection to present-day Arabs. The Philistines were wiped out in 600 BCE by the Babylonians.3.      It was a region and never a nation. There has never been a president of the state of Palestine or a government. It could be compared to New England, which is a region in America and has no government.4.      Furthermore, the region of Palestine never had any connection with an Arab ethnicity.  3. The UN Partition Vote (Nov. 29, 1947) did not merely give Israel authority to create a state, but granted the Arabs living on the West side of the Jordan River also to create an independent Arab country next to Israel. 1.      The Arabs rejected "Partition." They could have had their own nation in 1948, but they said no.2.      The Jews accepted "Partition," and on May 14th, 1948, Israel was re-birthed.3.      The Arabs in the West Bank became part of Jordan, and in Gaza, they became part of Egypt.4.      The Arabs declared war on Israel the day after the UN vote. Five Arab nations, plus the local population, attacked the new Jewish state and lost. 5.      Again, they could have had peace and their own Arab nation but chose war.5.  When the PLO was created, Jordan controlled the West Bank. 1.      The goal of the PLO was to liberate Palestine. However, the West Bank was already in Arab hands. Jordan controlled it. And Egypt controlled Gaza.2.      The "Palestine" they wanted to liberate was Israel proper.3.      In other words, if their goal was to create an independent Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza, then they should've been fighting Jordan and Egypt, not Israel!4.      Of course, their goal was Israel's complete demise. Its original charter called for the liberation of all Palestine. Their maps make no mention of Israel.5. Before Israel was re-birthed in 1948, any person who lived in that region was considered Palestinian: Arab or Jew. The Jewish-owned newspaper was called the Palestine Post. QUESTIONS:1.              Why would any Jew name his newspaper after another people group?2.              Why would any Jew name his paper after an Arab country?Of course, he would not. The word "Palestinian" never referred to an Arab ethnic group—remember, it came from the Romans. It was an invented narrative. That is why former US Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich referred to the Palestinians as an "invented people." (NOTE: That does not mean that they are bad people. Each one of them was made in the image of God. We're not talking here about their value, which is great before God, but history.)6. Jerusalem was the capital of Israel under King David. It has never been the capital of any other country—including Palestine. It has never (until Israel controlled it) been significant to Arabs. 1.      In other words, you will not find these words in the Koran but in the Hebrew Bible: If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget her cunning. If I do not remember thee, let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth; if I prefer not Jerusalem above my chief joy. (Ps. 137: 5-6)2.      The Ottoman Empire ruled over Jerusalem for 400 years. It meant nothing to them, even though they were Muslims.3.      When Mark Twain visited Palestine under Turkish rule he wrote that it was a "desolate country whose soil is rich enough, but is given over wholly to weeds...a silent mournful expanse...We never saw a human being on the whole route. There was hardly a tree or a shrub anywhere. Even the olive and the cactus, those fast friends of the worthless soil, had almost deserted the country." 4.      It only became important to the Arab and Islamic world, after the Jewish people began to return and redeem the land. 5.      It should be noted that the Jews purchased the land and did not steal it. How could they? They were under Turkish rule. They started the Jewish National Fund and lawfully purchased land in Palestine. In 1919, there were approximately 500,000 Arabs in what is now called Israel. That number mushroomed to about 1.3 million by the time Israel declared independence. In other words, over those 30 years (1919-1948) well over half of the Arabs in Palestine were not born in Palestine. They came as immigrants from all over the Middle East because of the economic opportunities that the Jewish pioneers were creating as they were clearing the land and establishing farms. Once again, this proves that there is no long history of Palestinian culture and that they are just after the city. 7. When Israel captured Jerusalem in 1967, it was not from Palestinians but from Jordan. QUESTIONS:1.      Why didn't Palestinians demand Jerusalem when Jordan controlled it (1948-1967)?2.      Why didn't the Jordanians create an independent Palestinian state in the West Bank in 1948? It was certainly within their power. The reason is simple. Jordanians made no distinction between Arabs who lived east of the Jordan and those who lived west of the Jordan.  8. Israel had no plans to attack Jordan during the Six-Day War.  Jordan's King Hussein believed the false reports from Egyptian President Nasser of Egypt that they were winning the war against Israel. King Hussein, in hopes of getting more land, attacked Israel, and his troops were driven back over the Jordan River in a matter of days. That is how Israel ended up with Jerusalem in 1967. Taking Jerusalem was not one of the military objectives of the Six-Day War. It was a gift from Jordan. Israel sent word to the king of Jordan through the United Nations that Israel would not attack their forces if they did not enter the war. Had they heeded that advice, Jerusalem would still be part of Jordan. 9. There is no language known as Palestinian.  Palestinian Arabs speak Arabic like Jordanians, Syrians, and Egyptians.10. There is no rich Palestinian history.  You will not find history books that detail Palestinian culture going back centuries.11. Palestinians are Arabs, indistinguishable from Jordanians, Lebanese, Egyptians, Iraqis, and others. I want to continue to be clear. There is nothing wrong with being Arab. We are not arguing any type of racial superiority. That is not of God. We love the Arab peoples and want their best. We are simply making the point that there is no Palestinian Arab ethnicity or history.12. Most of the Arab countries in the Middle East are relatively new. 1.      Jordan was created in 1922 by Great Britain. They took 80% of ancient Palestine and created Transjordan. She achieved independence in  1946.2.      The Syrians were under French control until 1946 when they became a nation.3.      Lebanon achieved independence from France in 1943.4.      Iraq became an independent nation in 1958. These were nations created after World War I from within the Turkish Ottoman Empire. None of them existed before the San Remo Conference in 1920. The purpose of this conference was to decide which Allied nations would take responsibility for the different regions of the now-defeated Ottoman Empire. 13. The total land mass of Arab states (and this doesn't even include non-Arab states in the Middle East like Iran and Turkey) is 98.4 compared to Israel's 1.6 percent. 14. When the Jewish people began to return to ‘Palestine' in the late 1800s: 1.      The Turks, not the Arabs, controlled it.2.      Every bit of land was paid for by the returning Jews—nothing was stolen! 3.      Even in 1948, when Israel declared independence, the Arabs were invited to join the new state. Many did, becoming the most liberated Arabs in the Middle East, enjoying freedoms never known in Syria, Egypt, or Saudi Arabia. (I regularly see Arab women taking driving lessons!) Israeli Arabs are the only Middle Eastern Arabs with full civil liberties like freedom of speech and religion. 4.      However, roughly 800,000 Arabs fled Israel, assuming that the five Arab nations would crush the new Jewish state. The gamble didn't pay off, and they became refugees. 5.      The Arab nations did nothing to help integrate the refugees into their society but kept them in refugee camps until today. 15. Israel was a swamp-infested wasteland that no one, including the Arabs, really cared about.  Until the Jews returned, the land suffered neglect. It was only after the Jews came back and made the land prosperous and fruitful again that the Palestinian Arab narrative was invented. The Religious Significance of Jerusalem Jerusalem or Zion appears nearly one thousand times in the Hebrew Bible and New Testament, whereas it never appears in the Koran.  Again, this is about history, not about any type of superiority or racism against Arabs. God loves the Arabs and made them to love him. He also loves the Jewish people and will not ignore the covenant he made with Abraham and confirmed with Isaac and Jacob.[1] Warren W. Wiersbe, Wiersbe's Expository Outlines on the Old Testament (Wheaton, IL: Victor Books, 1993), Eze 37.[2] Warren W. Wiersbe, Wiersbe's Expository Outlines on the Old Testament (Wheaton, IL: Victor Books, 1993), Eze 37.[3] Warren W. Wiersbe, Wiersbe's Expository Outlines on the Old Testament (Wheaton, IL: Victor Books, 1993), Eze 37.

Tim, Shane Cashman, Libby Emmons (The Post Millennial), & Serge join Riley Moore to discuss the Pentagon sending tens of thousands of US personnel to assist Israel in the war, Biden requesting $100 billion to fund the Ukraine & Israel wars, a hospital in Gaza suffering a major explosion, & Jordanians attempting to Storm the Israeli embassy in Jordan. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this episode, America has only one political party - the Uniparty. Nobody wants celebrated national meetings without a game plan. Our native lands viewed as a scene of a crime.

We've been off for a few week, but now we're back!While we were on holiday, Jordan took the opportunity to implement a new cybercrime law that has set alarm bells ringing among human rights defenders. The cybercrime law contains some incredibly vague language, which critics say will allow the government to target free speech, and effect the basic rights of Jordanians. It will also limit the ability of Jordanians to call out corruption or human rights abuses in the country. This week on The New Arab Voice, what's in Jordan's new cybercrime bill? How will it impact Jordanians? Why are the cracking down in this way and what does King Abdullah have to gain from this? And what does it mean for democratic hopes in the country. To help guide us through Jordan's cybercrime bill, we're joined by Marwa Fatafta (@marwasf) a digital rights advocate and works as the MENA policy and advocacy manager at Access Now (@accessnow), a global digital rights organisation.We also speak with Jamal Al Tahat (@JamalAlTahat1) to guide us through the thinking of the Jordanian state. Jamal is is a senior consultant at Democracy for the Arab World Now or DAWN (@DAWNmenaorg). He has spent decades advocating for democratisation in Jordan.And finally, we speak with Issam Ureiqat (@IsamUraiqat). issam is the Director of Al-Hudood (@AlHudoodNet), an online satire publication that was recently blocked in Jordan because of jokes the website made about the royal family. This podcast is written and produced by Hugo Goodridge. Theme music by Omar al-Fil. To get in touch with the producers, follow then tweet us at @TheNewArabVoice. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Saudi entrepreneurs Sara Bin Laden and Renad Aljefri, recent WIN fellows, join The 966 from Jeddah to discuss their experiences and journeys to-date. Renad and Sara recently took part in the second cohort of the Atlantic Council's Women Innovators Fellowship, known as the WIN fellowship - a program launched by the empowerME initiative of the Rafik Hariri Center for the Middle East, by venture capitalist Amjad Ahmad. Before the conversation with Sara and Renad, the hosts discuss Richard's One Big Thing, the PIF's investments in Saudi football and the Saudi Pro League, as well as a discussion of the new names that will be playing in the Kingdom, like Karim Benzema and N'Golo Kanté, and Messi's decision to go to Miami. Then the hosts discuss Lucien's one big thing, the mixed picture presented by recent VC numbers in the MENA region. The hosts conclude as always with the program's "Yallah!" segment, featuring 6 top storylines on Saudi Arabia to get you up to speed heading into the weekend. 4:35 - Richard's One Big Thing, the PIF's investments in Saudi football and the Saudi Pro League, as well as a discussion of the new names that will be playing in the Kingdom, like Karim Benzema and N'Golo Kanté, and Messi's decision to go to Miami.26:38 - Lucien's One Big Thing is the mixed picture presented by recent VC numbers in the MENA region. May represented a bounce-back of sorts for the MENA VC and startup ecosystem, with venture funding into the region's startups touched $445 million spread across 39 transactions, compared to $7 million raised across 11 deals reported in the preceding month, according to a monthly report in Wamda. The UAE accounted for 90 per cent of the total raised during the period, but Saudi Arabia saw the most total investments into deals with 15. Saudi Arabia topped the charts thanks primarily to the graduation of seven homegrown startups from the Flat6labs Riyadh accelerator prorgram, headed by Riyadh-based venture capitalist Eyad Albayouk.38:34 - Saudi entrepreneurs Sara Bin Laden and Renad Aljefri, recent WIN fellows, join The 966 from Jeddah to discuss their experiences and journeys to-date. Renad and Sara recently took part in the second cohort of the Atlantic Council's Women Innovators Fellowship, known as the WIN fellowship - a program launched by the empowerME initiative of the Rafik Hariri Center for the Middle East, by venture capitalist Amjad Ahmad. The WIN Fellowship program is a collaboration between the Atlantic Council and Georgetown University, offering a structured fully sponsored yearlong executive training program, mentoring and networking opportunities with leading U.S. and MENA business executives, government officials, and policy experts. The top participants, and Renad and Sara were both selected for this - attend a fully sponsored trip to the United States for leadership training at Georgetown and meetings with US business and government leaders.1:08:45 - Yallah! 6 top storylines to get you up to speed heading into the weekend. Saudi Arabia will make a deep cut to its output in July on top of a broader OPEC+ deal to limit supply into 2024 as the group seeks to boost flagging oil prices. Saudi's energy ministry said the country's output would drop to 9 million barrels per day (bpd) in July from around 10 million bpd in May, the biggest reduction in years. OPEC+ has in place cuts of 3.66 million bpd, amounting to 3.6% of global demand, including 2 million bpd agreed last year and voluntary cuts of 1.66 million bpd agreed in April.U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken had an "open, candid" conversation with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman about a wide range of bilateral issues, a U.S. official said. Blinken's visit came days after top crude exporter Saudi Arabia pledged to deepen oil output cuts on top of a broader OPEC+ deal to limit supply, as it seeks to boost flagging oil prices despite opposition from the U.S. administration. Blinken and the crown prince met for an hour and forty minutes, a U.S. official said, covering topics including Israel, the conflict in Yemen, unrest in Sudan as well as human rights. The Iranian embassy in Saudi Arabia has been reopened at a ceremony attended by Iranian Deputy Foreign Minister for Consular, Parliamentary and Expatriate Affairs Alireza Bigdeli. The previous day, on June 5, the Iranian foreign ministry had announced that the Riyadh embassy, consulate-general in Jeddah and the Iranian mission to the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) would be officially reopened on June 6 and 7. IATA — an association that represents around 300 airlines in 120 countries — forecasted that the global aviation industry's profits are expected to reach $9.8 billion in 2023, more than double the $4.7 billion forecast in December, driven by pent-up demand for air travel following the pandemic.  Revenue passenger-kilometers for Middle Eastern carriers stands at 88% of 2019's figures, showing the airlines in the region have already been making strong progress. GCC carriers will be at the forefront of the surge in passenger numberswhich IATA expects to double in the region to 550 million by 2040. The PGA TOUR, DP World Tour and the Public Investment Fund (PIF) announced a landmark agreement to unify the game of golf, on a global basis. The parties have signed an agreement that combines PIF's golf-related commercial businesses and rights (including LIV Golf) with the commercial businesses and rights of the PGA TOUR and DP World Tour into a new, collectively owned, for-profit entity to ensure that all stakeholders benefit from a model that delivers maximum excitement and competition among the game's best players. The UK Government will be eliminating the need for visit visas for individuals from the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Kuwait, Oman, Bahrain, and Jordan. Instead, these individuals will have the option to obtain an Electronic Travel Authorisation that will be valid for two years, and the cost for this will be only £10 ($12). This change will align the entry requirements for Gulf travellers and Jordanians with those of US and Australian citizens.

In part one of this two part series, Elliot shares his experiences from inside the Za'atari refugee camp. In this episode you will hear from the refugees themselves. They describe in their own words, what Arsenal means to them, and the impact the Coaching For Life program has had on their lives. You will also meet the Syrians and Jordanians working inside the camp to help administer the program and ensure that it carries on. Tomorrow, in part two, you will meet the Arsenal people who have been instrumental in designing and delivering the program, and how it relates to the work being done in North London. If you'd like to contribute to the fundraiser, you can do so at the links below. Everyone who donates to our fundraiser has a chance to win VIP box tickets to the Brighton game! Support the fundraiser at https://www.justgiving.com/page/arsenalvision Bid on VIP tickets at https://go.rallyup.com/arsenalvisionpodcast/Campaign/Details Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Dr. Yezid Sayigh, senior fellow at the Carnegie Middle East Center, joins the podcast to discuss Jordan's 1970 civil war. He examines the origin of the crisis and discusses how much support King Hussein had among Jordanians for the crackdown against Palestinian militants. Dr. Sayigh, author of the award winning book: "Armed Struggle and the Search for State: The Palestinian National Movement, 1949-1993," explains why Syria invaded northern Jordan during the conflict. He views the US role in the affair and notes the lessons King Hussein learned from this uprising.

Jordanian political economist Laith Al-Ajlouni joins the podcast to discuss the Hashemite Kingdom's ties with the International Monetary Fund. He addresses the IMF's priorities in Jordan along with the reasons pushing Amman to first work with the Washington DC-based organization in 1989. Al-Ajlouni also explains why some Jordanians cited the IMF as one of their grievances during the Arab Spring protests. Finally, the Amman-based analyst notes whether the Jordanian government will soon wean itself off of the IMF after working with the organization for nearly 30 years.

Welcome to The Times of Israel's Daily Briefing, your 15-minute audio update on what's happening in Israel, the Middle East and the Jewish world, from Sunday through Thursday. Diplomatic correspondent Lazar Berman and political analyst Haviv Rettig Gur join host Jessica Steinberg for today's podcast. Steinberg reviews the Friday night terror attack outside a synagogue in Jerusalem's Neve Yaakov neighborhood that killed seven, as well as a spate of shootings and attempted attacks over the course of Saturday. Rettig Gur discusses the reactions of Public Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir to the terror attacks and how his responses are worrying for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as the government moves forward with its response to the situation. Rettig Gur also examines the Palestinian discourse with regard to the terror attacks, and Palestinian reactions to the changes in Israel's government. Berman talks about the official diplomatic condemnations of the Friday night attack, including from the Gulf and UAE, and with many diplomats highlighting that it took place on International Holocaust Remembrance Day. Berman discusses Netanyahu's meeting last week with Jordanian King Abdullah II, their first in four years and the issue of maintaining the status quo on the Temple Mount, which is under the administration of the Jordanians, and has been a source of tension between the two governments, given the increase in visits from Jewish religious nationalists, including Public Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir. He also speaks about President Isaac Herzog's trip last week to Brussels, which included an address to the European Parliament to mark International Holocaust Remembrance Day and time spent with the local Jewish community. Discussed articles include: ‘His soul is eternal': Funerals held for 3 victims of Jerusalem terror attack Washington, UN, UAE, many others condemn ‘heinous, tragic' Jerusalem terror shooting Netanyahu and Abdullah meet in Jordan, signaling they want to move past tensions Netanyahu vows to maintain Temple Mount status quo in meeting with Jordanian king Herzog welcomed by Belgian king ahead of meetings with EU, NATO chiefs Subscribe to The Times of Israel Daily Briefing on iTunes, Spotify, PlayerFM, Google Play, or wherever you get your podcasts. IMAGE: National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir speaks to the press at Jerusalem's Shaare Tzedek hospital on January 28, 2023 (Courtesy Olivier Fitoussi/Flash90)See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

"We owned two houses, on either side of the road by the Mandelbaum Gate in Al-Quds. After the war 1948 our houses ended up on either side of the border with a barbed wire running between them. One house was in Israel and the other one on the West Bank, annexed by the Jordanians", says George Baramki Khory. Photo: Cato Lein. Recorded in Al-Quds.

A three-day meeting of 150 officials took place in  Abu Dhabi this week with participants  from the six Negev Forum countries: the US, Israel, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Morocco and Egypt. The officials met to plan regional projects in six categories: clean energy, tourism, healthcare, food security and water technology, education and coexistence, and regional security. The Jordanians were invited to be part of the forum, but they have yet to join. KAN's Mark Weiss spoke with foreign ministry spokesperson Lior Hayat, who participated in the gathering. (UAE Foreign Ministry)See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Jewish Diaspora Report - Episode 47  On this episode of the Jewish Diaspora Report, Host Mike Jordan discusses the History of the country of Jordan, the Palestinian Jordanians  and idea of a "Two State Solution" between the Palestinians and Jordanians.   Explore these challenging issues and join the Jewish Diaspora Report for future episodes on issues of Politics, Culture, Current Events and more!   Check us out on Instagram @jdr.podcastSupport the show

On this episode, we hosted one of the most influential Jordanians in the education sector, Shireen Yacoub, CEO of Edraak, a massive open online course (MOOC) platform (as of the recording date).In her last interview as the CEO of Edraak, we reflected on her journey in the education sector in Jordan. We looked at the broader landscape of the education sector in the region, what to look out for and what skills are needed for today's labor market.He had a lot to debunk on this episode, so we hope you enjoy learning from it as much as we did!في هذه الحلقة، استضفنا واحدة من أهم الأردنيين المؤثريين في قطاع التعليم، شيرين يعقوب ، الرئيس التنفيذي لشركة إدراك منصة الدورة التدريبية المفتوحة على الإنترنت  (اعتبارًا من تاريخ التسجيل)في آخر مقابلة لها كرئيسة تنفيذية لإدراك، تأملنا في رحلتها في قطاع التعليم. واطلعنا على الصورة الأوسع لقطاع التعليم في العالم العربي من حيث آخر المستجدات وما هي المهارات اللازمة للنجاح في سوق العمل اليوم.تطرقنا الى الكثير من المواضيع المهمة، لذلك نأمل أن تستمتعوا في الحلقة والتعلم منها بقدر وسعكم!

Artworks taken from collections, museums destroyed: Anastasia Soroka and Grigor Atenasian explore what's been happening to Ukraine's cultural heritage since the war began, in a special BBC Russian report. From Venezuela to Peru Guillermo Olmo is the first BBC Mundo correspondent to be based in Peru. Originally from Spain, he spent a couple of years reporting from Venezuela during a time of protests and economic crisis. So what's it like to shift to a new, quieter country? A Somali perspective on the Mo Farah story The British Olympic champion Sir Mo Farah made headlines this week after revealing that he was illegally brought to the UK as a child. He said he was given the name Mohamed Farah, and made to work as a domestic servant. BBC Somali's Sidiiq Burmad is based in Somaliland, where Sir Mo was born. Why have so many Jordanians lost faith in their government? A puppet, a prime minister and a pundit – they all feature in a report by BBC Arabic's Murad Shishani from his home country, Jordan. He was investigating recent survey results showing that trust in the government is the lowest it's been for more than a decade. He tells us what he found out. K-pop's plastic problem In the age of online streaming, K-pop fans still buy multiple physical CDs to get the promotions and merchandise attached to them. But now many are voicing concern about the environmental impact, and demanding a change in the behaviour of bands and fans. BBC Korean's Bugyeong Jung looked into the story. (Photo: Russian journalists remove portrait of Arkhip Kuindzhi, painted by his pupil Grigory Kalmykov, from Mariupul Kuindzhi Art Museum basement. Credit: Screenshot from UNION TV Channel)

Amer Sabaileh, a columnist for 12 years at the Jordan Times, joins the podcast to discuss King Abdullah's May letter criticizing Prince Hamzah. Sabaileh, previously a professor at the University of Jordan, views Hamzah's popularity among Jordanians. He also evaluates whether King Abdullah's latest letter will close the chapter for the Kingdom on the 2021 sedition affair. Finally, Sabaileh details the differences in tone between Hamzah's March apology letter to King Abdullah and his April tweet renouncing the title of prince.

The Dead Sea, shared by Israelis, Jordanians and Palestinians - is a unique salt-lake, known for its exceptional geographical, biological, and historical value, and is the lowest point on Earth. Tragically, the Dead Sea is drying up. A documentary produced and directed by Ido Glass and Yoav Kleinman, together with Oded Rahav, and other participants 

The Nabi Musa festival dates back centuries, an Islamic celebration of the Prophet Moses that started at the end of the Crusader period. While the festival was abolished by the British during the Mandate it had been revived later under the Jordanians and more recently under the umbrella of the Palestinian Authority. The festival is deeply connected with Nabi Musa, the alleged tomb of Moses and developed through the centuries as a display of local Islamic and then civic identity of Palestine. In this episode Awad Alaby tells us everything about Nabi Musa and the festival, its origin, development and sadly its end. With Awad, we also discussed his family history and how important will be in the future to develop a strong family history of Palestine, a way of preserving Palestinian heritage and celebrate life. In the end we also discussed the question of the podcast as a public history tool, one that can discuss the complex history of Jerusalem and its people without making it simplistic.Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/jerusalemunplugged. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Professor Sean Yom, an Associate Professor of Political Science at Temple University, joins the podcast to discuss how the Kingdom's electoral laws have been impacted by tensions between individuals of tribal background and Jordanians of Palestinian descent. Dr. Yom, the author of the upcoming book, "Jordan: Politics in an Accidental Crucible" discusses the chances a Jordanian of Palestinian origin has of serving and advancing within the Kingdom's military or intelligence directorate. Finally, Professor Yom addresses why Jordan's Prime Minister announced in 2013 that the country would bar Palestinian refugees fleeing Syria entry into Jordan.

An interview with Jordanian journalist Suha Ma'ayeh on the December 28th brawl in Jordan's Parliament. Ma'yaeh, whose articles have appeared in Foreign Policy and the Wall Street Journal, details why Jordanians have such little trust in the country's legislative branch. She also discusses which groups have been over-represented in parliament as well as the influence of the Hashemite Kingdom's security sector on lawmakers' votes.

An interview with former Jordanian labor minister Dr. Jawad Anani explaining the reasons for the Hashemite Kingdom's 25 percent unemployment rate. Dr. Anani, who also served as head of the Royal Court under King Hussein, discusses the preferences among many Jordanians to work in the public sector.

An interview with former Jordanian minister Dr. Fares Braizat on the new public opinion poll asking citizens across the Hashemite Kingdom about their views on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Amman's ties with superpowers including the US and China, along with Jordan's role in the region. Dr. Braizat is the chairman of the Jordanian think tank that conducted this poll.

Found in Estonia podcast chat number 43 with Ahmad Hussein from Jordan. *Story of how it took Ahmad 6 years to move to Estonia *How different can studying architecture be in Jordan and in Estonia? *Why are Jordanians pushy when offering food? *So Estonians are cold and extremely hot at the same time? *How can living abroad help him to discover himself? Get monthly updates from our email community and next events by signing up on: www.foundinestonia.ee

Hazem Mulhim's business was born on a street-side shop thousands of miles away from epicenters of technology. He started it in Amman, Jordan 35 years ago, and EastNets now is a recognized global developer of financial solutions serving 1000 financial institutes on five continents. His career began with Siemens in Kuwait where he first saw how computing saved the medical industry. He had just graduated with a Master's degree in Electronics Engineering and Medical Electronics from Bulgaria in 1980. He also hold a Certificate of Advanced Management Program (AMP) from the prestigious Institute of INSEAD, France and an OWP from IMD Lausanne, Switzerland. While in Kuwait, the IT industry was starting to take off in the US and elsewhere, and Hazem foresaw how computers would dominate our future.He applied for work in the US in 1982, and it was there that he developedhis deeper insights into technology and entrepreneurship. Hazem's journey has been dotted with a lot of growing pains and sacrifices. Throughout his career, he had to pivot with the times to ensure his business survived. Since 1984, EastNets has been transforming. They have shifted from smart cards to networks and computers, and finally to provider solutions for the critical operations of anti-money laundering (AML), KYC, payments and antifraud. Survival eventually meant global expansion, and the fastest track forward was to acquire an entity with access to new markets. His choice in 2007 would rest on SIDE International, a leader in AML solutions based in Belgium. In 2018, a patent was published in the USA for designing a system for cross border remittances while securing financial regulatory compliance. With fresh blood injected in EastNets, they penetrated new markets, winning multiple prestigious international awards. In 2017, Chartis ranked EastNets as Category Leader in its RiskTech Quadrants, the industry's leading report on financial crime and risk management. Currently, their teams are optimizing solutions with artificial intelligence and blockchain capabilities. In no small part, EastNets success is its dedication to investing in competitive human resources. Hazem joined Rewell in 2016 as the executive committee chairman. Today, the Society is training more Jordanians and building more capacity for women entrepreneurs in underprivileged communities.

What happened after the armistice in January of 1949?  Of course, the major consequence was the Palestinian refugees.  Thinking only of what we consider the internationally recognized boundaries of Israel, probably 80% or more of all the Palestinians inside of that area  on January 1, 1948 were gone by December 31, 1948.  This is the real “catastrophe,” or nakhba,  as the Palestinians call it.  The Israelis were insistent that none of these refugees would be allowed to return.  I am very sorry I can't deliver an hour-long talk on the refugee situation.  I am just not sure how to make it work.  Still, I have tried to incorporate key points into this talk and into the previous talk on the Palestine War of 1948.  And again, I invite you to go to Deep Blue (see that previous podcast if you are unclear) where I have posted my briefing document on The Palestinian Refugees of 1948.  As of April, 2021 this document has nearly 13,000 downloads from around the world.  It is a very thorough summary of the data on the refugees, of the recent research on the topic, of the personal stories of what happened, and of the argumentation.  For those interested in this subject, it is a valuable source.  If you would like to read a short novel consider Khirbet Khizeh by S. Yizhar.  The author was a noted literary figure (Yizhar Smilansky) who concealed his true identity so he could tell what happened when his unit took control of a Palestinian village in 1948.  It was translated into English in  2008.  It shocked many Israelis to realize that a person of such literary stature had experienced these things.  I mentioned the mayor of El Bireh, a Palestinian town just 10 miles north of Jerusalem.  His name was Abdul Jawad Saleh.  I met him in Amman in 1987.  He was one of the most respected of the Palestinian leaders and was later put in charge of the PLO  treasury because everyone trusted him.    He told me that one evening he had a knock at the door and two soldiers told him the governor wanted to talk to him.  This was not unusual so he went without resistance.  But they took him to the Jordan border (I think in the southern desert) and pushed him into Jordan.  They then announced on the radio that he had been expelled.  The Jordanians rushed units into the area to find him before he died of thirst.  I met him in his apartment.  His daughter was visiting and his grandson.  He was the person who made the map of the dead cities and villages of Palestine.   I asked him why they had expelled him (which is a violation of international law, by the way). He said they never tell you why they are expelling you or detaining you  but he thought it had to do with the fact that the city was erecting a “mother statue.”  It depicts a mother lifting her child  to reach for a goal. It is obviously a metaphor for the Palestinian situation.  He thought it was just too symbolically powerful for the Israelis.  When the archives were opened by Menachem Begin in the late 1970s,  Israeli scholars plunged in.  By the late 1980s, they produced a new wave of histories that went beyond wartime hero narratives but relied heavily upon primary source materials: diaries and journals and memos.  They were called the New Historians.  Their research exploded myths about how the Palestinians had fled of their own will, for example or that the military maintained a “purity of arms.”  Ilan Pappe and Avi Shlaim and Simcha Flappan were three of these.  Tom Segev's book, The First Israelis, focusing upon 1949, after the fighting was over, brings surprising new perspectives to the issues.  These historians are hated by those on the Israeli right. 

In this episode you hear Amani define mindlessness and mindfulness. There is no getting away from the fact that 2020 has been an incredibly challenging year for everyone. In times like this we felt inspired to think and write about mindfulness. It feels like our lives have been put on hold indefinitely and we have become acutely aware of daily routines we used to do mindlessly. Do you feel that during lockdowns you have been thinking about things you used to do mindlessly? Have you thought about what mindfulness means to you? Don't forget the worksheets to lesson 1 -4: https://bit.ly/The-Arabic-We-Speak-Advanced-Mindfulness-1-4-New This lesson series is for advanced level learners and focuses on listening comprehension and vocabulary development. In this lesson series you find ten recorded texts that are visually and structurally supported to help you engage with mindfulness-related subtopics. Before you listen, read the introduction and engage with the images to activate schemata around the subtopics. This way you prepare yourself for targeted listening. Please bear in mind that concepts mean different things in different languages and cultures. By the end of this lesson course you will get a idea of what the concept of mindfulness means to us specifically (with us we mean us two, not all Jordanians or all Muslims in the world). The English texts are not literal translations, but there to help you with cultural and conceptual understanding of the original Arabic texts. At this level, you would want to try to avoid them as much possible and only fall back on them if absolutely necessary; this way you immerse yourself with spoken Levantine Arabic and push your second language acquisition into a higher gear. Kindly note that all the learning materials are free and available for you to download and copy for educational use only. You may not redistribute, sell or place these materials on any other web site without written permission. Thank you so much for listening. Salaam, Dalal & Amani Background music: Hüzzam Kanun Taksim by Ehl-i Keyif

In this episode you hear Amani talk about our city Amman. We used to go out together to our favorite places in town every Thursday night. It feels so strange to be driving around for necessary errands and not be able to go to our favorite places to hang out with friends. This estranging experience made us more aware of how blessed we are to be living here and it inspired us to tell you about how we love our city and how much we miss it. Do you also feel you have become more mindful of your hometown? Don't forget the worksheets to lesson 1 -4: https://bit.ly/The-Arabic-We-Speak-Advanced-Mindfulness-1-4-New This lesson series is for advanced level learners and focuses on listening comprehension and vocabulary development. In this lesson series you find ten recorded texts that are visually and structurally supported to help you engage with mindfulness-related subtopics. Before you listen, read the introduction and engage with the images to activate schemata around the subtopics. This way you prepare yourself for targeted listening. Please bear in mind that concepts mean different things in different languages and cultures. By the end of this lesson course you will get a idea of what the concept of mindfulness means to us specifically (with us we mean us two, not all Jordanians or all Muslims in the world). The English texts are not literal translations, but there to help you with cultural and conceptual understanding of the original Arabic texts. At this level, you would want to try to avoid them as much possible and only fall back on them if absolutely necessary; this way you immerse yourself with spoken Levantine Arabic and push your second language acquisition into a higher gear. Kindly note that all the learning materials are free and available for you to download and copy for educational use only. You may not redistribute, sell or place these materials on any other web site without written permission. Thank you so much for listening. Salaam, Dalal & Amani Background music: Hüzzam Kanun Taksim by Ehl-i Keyif

In this episode you hear Amani tell you how we practice gratitude in uncertain times and how we perceive challenging experiences in our lives. Do you have a routine to practice gratitude in your life? And how do you perceive challenging experiences? Don't forget the worksheets to lesson 1 -4: https://bit.ly/The-Arabic-We-Speak-Advanced-Mindfulness-1-4-New This lesson series is for advanced level learners and focuses on listening comprehension and vocabulary development. In this lesson series you find ten recorded texts that are visually and structurally supported to help you engage with mindfulness-related subtopics. Before you listen, read the introduction and engage with the images to activate schemata around the subtopics. This way you prepare yourself for targeted listening. Please bear in mind that concepts mean different things in different languages and cultures. By the end of this lesson course you will get a idea of what the concept of mindfulness means to us specifically (with us we mean us two, not all Jordanians or all Muslims in the world). The English texts are not literal translations, but there to help you with cultural and conceptual understanding of the original Arabic texts. At this level, you would want to try to avoid them as much possible and only fall back on them if absolutely necessary; this way you immerse yourself with spoken Levantine Arabic and push your second language acquisition into a higher gear. Kindly note that all the learning materials are free and available for you to download and copy for educational use only. You may not redistribute, sell or place these materials on any other web site without written permission. Thank you so much for listening. Salaam, Dalal & Amani Background music: Hüzzam Kanun Taksim by Ehl-i Keyif

Israel releases two Jordanians held in administrative detention for security offenses. Russia is reportedly in possession of advanced Israeli interceptor missile, Negotiations to avert threatened municipal strike (Photo: Associated Press) See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Netanyahu Seeks Pardon For Elor Azaria  A military judge has denied the appeal of Elor Azaria, upholding the manslaughter charges and sticking to the eighteen month sentencing. Prime Minister Netanyahu is turning to Facebook to say that he will recommend a full presidential pardon for Azaria from President Reuven Rivlin. #ElorAzaria #Pardon #Netanyahu ____________________ Jordanian Media Publishes Identity Of Embassy Guard The Jordanian media has just made public the identity of the Israeli security guard, 28 year old Ziv Moyal, involved in the killing of two Jordanians at the Israeli embassy last week.   #Jordan #ZivMoyal #Embassy ____________________ Syria: Non-Government Iranian Media Reports IDF Attack A private media group in Iran is claiming the Israeli army made a surprise attack in Syria of a shipment of “entertainment equipment” on its way to an event in Aleppo.   #Syria #IDF ____________________ Turkey Rallies Against Israel After Temple Mount Crisis Thousands in Istanbul are now rallying against Israel even after Israel has removed the last of its security measures at the Temple Mount. Many are calling for an end to Israel's control of Jerusalem altogether. #Istanbul #Rally #Jerusalem ____________________ The Saddest Day In The Jewish Religion Rabbi Ronen Neuwirth, President of Ve'AhavTA TLV Jewish Experience speaking at ILTV studio about the saddest day in the Jewish religion, Tisha B'av, which commemorates the destruction of the first and second temples.   #RonenNeuwirth #TishBav ____________________ Anti-BDS Bill Becomes Law In North Carolina North Carolina Governor Roy Cooper has signed a bill barring his state from doing business with organizations that boycott Israel. North Carolina now joins twenty-one other states in the union legalizing punishment to companies that participate in the boycott, divestment, and sanctions campaign against Israel. #NorthCarolina #BDS ____________________ Israeli Startup Cracks Cotton, Sweet Potato Genome  An Israeli startup called ‘NR-Gene' has just made a breakthrough that may mean healthier, better crops. After breaking the genetic code for bread, pasta and wild emmer wheat last year, ‘NR-Gene' has now mapped the genome for cotton and the sweet potato.   #NRGene #Crops ____________________ Hemp Makes A Major Comeback In Israel The Israeli Justice Ministry has taken hemp off the official list of legally “dangerous drugs” and now hemp is about to make its first comeback after 75 years of being banned from Israel.   #Hemp #Drug ____________________ Keep Your Kids Safe; Help Them Reach Out Enon Landenberg, Founder and ‘Dad' at Bosco speaking at ILTV studio about an Israeli app called Bosco that gives you real-time alerts on your child's activities.   #EnonLandenberg #Bosco ____________________ Waze To Come Built-In To Millions Of Cars  The Israeli-founded Waze app just launched Waze for android auto and is about come built-in with Google's android-driven car navigation systems in millions of cars. #Waze #Cars ____________________ Hebrew word Of The Day, LECHAVEN | לכון = TO LEAD/DIRECT Learn a new Hebrew word every day. Today's word is "lechaven" which means "to lead/direct"   #Learnhebrew   #Hebrewwordofday   #Iltvhebrewwordofday _____________________ The Weather Forecast  Tonight should be clear but warm with a low of seventy-eight or twenty-six degrees Celsius. And tomorrow is expected to have little change from today with a hot sun in the sky and a high of ninety or thirty-two degrees Celsius.   #Israelweather   #Israelforecast See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

1. Jordanian Media: Israeli Ambassador Barred From Entry Jordanian media is saying Israel's Ambassador Einat Schlein and her staff won't be allowed back to their embassy in Jordan, not unless Israel guarantees to prosecute the guard for killing two Jordanians in a stabbing attack that took place at the embassy. #Jordan #Embassy ____________________ 2. Israel Removes All Security Measures From The Temple Mount The Israeli government has officially removed all security infrastructure from entrances to the Temple Mount in another effort to diffuse heightened political and religious tension in the region. #MetalDetectors #TempleMount ____________________ 3. When Will We See An End To The Crisis? Dr. Mordechai Kedar, Lecturer at Bar Ilan University speaking at ILTV studio to further analyze the ongoing situation at the Temple Mount. #MordechaiKedar #TempleMount ____________________ 4. U.S. State Dept. Defends Anti-Semitic Terror Report A new report on terrorism by the US State Department is resting almost all of the blame for Palestinian violence on Israel and it's drawing some serious backlash from Jewish and Israeli group. #Report #Terrorism ____________________ 5. Hezbollah Tightens Grip On Syrian-Lebanon Border Hezbollah is making new gains on the Syrian-Lebanon border. The group has struck a huge blow to jihadi fighters based around the Juroud Arsal Mountains and is now setting its sights on the Islamic State. Both Israeli and American leaders are aware that this is a growing threat to Israel. #Hezbollah #Syria #Lebanon ____________________ 6. Palestinians In The West Bank Industrial Zone Package ILTV's Natasha Kirtchuk getting an inside look on the development centers at the West Bank where thousands of Palestinians are employed side by side with Israelis. #WestBank #Work ____________________ 7. Israeli P.M. Netanyahu Calls For Shutdown Of Al-Jazeera The Israeli Prime Minister is demanding that the Arab news network Al-Jazeera completely shut down its offices in Israel. Netanyahu accused Al-Jazeera for purposely inciting violence against Israel. #Netanyahu #AlJazeera ____________________ 8. New Archeological Find Unearths Babylonian Destruction Archeologists unearthed structures dating back over twenty six hundred years ago, offering insight into the Babylonian destruction of Jerusalem. #Archeology #Babylon ____________________ 9. Israeli Invention Helps Cafe Owners ‘Milk' Costs Assaf Blank, CEO and Co-Founder of Milk-it speaking at ILTV studio about an Israeli company Milk-it which helps businesses with everything milk related. ‘Milk-It' measures milk usage; conserving every drop for coffee shops. #AssafBlank #MilkIt ____________________ 10. ‘And By Awesome, I Mean Terrible' Israeli researchers invented "sarcasm" translator for those who have difficulty understanding social cues. This could actually have a pretty serious impact for people with developmental disorders. #Sarcasm #Translation ____________________ 11. Hebrew word Of The Day, LA'AKOTS | לַעֲקוֹץ = TO STING Learn a new Hebrew word every day. Today's word is "la'akots" which means "to sting" #Learnhebrew #Hebrewwordofday #Iltvhebrewwordofday _____________________ 12. The Weather Forecast The weekend has arrived and it brings with it a very welcomed drop in temperatures. Tonight the low should be around seventy-nine or twenty-six degrees Celsius while the weekend is expected to be sunny with a high of around eighty-four or twenty-nine degrees Celsius. #Israelweather #Israelforecast See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.