Podcasts about palestinian liberation organization

TARIFFS, TRUMP DOCTRINE, AND WHITE HOUSE DIVISIONSHEADLINE 1: The Palestinian Liberation Organization has a new vice president.HEADLINE 2: The Houthis launched yet another ballistic missile at Israel on Saturday morning.HEADLINE 3: Qatar and Saudi Arabia are settling Syria's debt to the World Bank.--FDD Executive Director Jon Schanzer delivers timely situational updates and analysis, followed by a conversation with author and Free Press columnist Batya Ungar-Sargon.Learn more at: https://www.fdd.org/fddmorningbrief/

 Today Justin sits down with Dr. Daniela Richterova. Daniela received her master's degree from King's College London and her PhD from the University of Warwick. She is an associate professor of intelligence studies at the department of war studies at King's College London, as well as the co director of the King's Center for the Study of Intelligence. Her work has been published in international affairs, foreign policy, and other major media outlets and journals. She's here to discuss the culmination of her research into the Czechoslovakian STB intelligence agency and its decades of collaboration with third world organizations, most notably within the Palestinian Liberation Organization.Connect with Daniela:BlueSky: @drichterova.bsky.socialTwitter/X: @dRichterovaCheck out Daniela's book, Watching the Jackals, here on Amazon or here from Georgetown University Press.https://a.co/d/eKuKzUDhttps://press.georgetown.edu/Book/Watching-the-JackalsConnect with Spycraft 101:Get Justin's latest book, Murder, Intrigue, and Conspiracy: Stories from the Cold War and Beyond, here.spycraft101.comIG: @spycraft101Shop: shop.spycraft101.comPatreon: Spycraft 101Find Justin's first book, Spyshots: Volume One, here.Check out Justin's second book, Covert Arms, here.Download the free eBook, The Clandestine Operative's Sidearm of Choice, here.History by MailWho knew? Not me! Learn something new every month. Use code JUSTIN10 for 10% off your subscription.Disclaimer: This post contains affiliate links. If you make a purchase, I may receive a commission at no extra cost to you.Support the show

Show Notes and Transcript The current Israeli-Gaza war has sparked much debate focussing on geo politics and historical land disputes.  But few dare ask if Islam is the root cause of the ongoing tension.  Robert Spencer has studied Islam for 3 decades. His dozens of books and the Jihad Watch website are all go to sources of background information on Islam and the history behind it.  He returns to Hearts of Oak to ask if this is a religious problem and we start by looking at what Islam actually says about the Jews.  The aggression and vitriol throughout Islamic text and the history of behaviour towards the Jewish people is an eye opener to all of us.  Armed with this deeper understanding Robert then touches on how the term Palestinian was invented. The history, leader, flag and culture had to be invented as it was all non existent before.  His short book "The Palestinian Delusion" goes into much more detail and is a recommended read.  Enjoy the interview and get ready to see this current conflict in a whole new light. 'The Palestinian Delusion: The Catastrophic History of the Middle East Peace Process' on Amazon https://amzn.eu/d/cPigAab Robert Spencer is the director of Jihad Watch and a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. He is the author of twenty-seven books, including the New York Times bestsellers The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam, The Truth About Muhammad and the bestsellers The History of Jihad From Muhammad to ISIS and The Critical Qur'an: Explained from Key Islamic Commentaries and Contemporary Historical Research. His new book is Empire of God: How the Byzantines Saved Civilization. Spencer has led seminars on Islam and jihad for the FBI, the United States Central Command, United States Army Command and General Staff College, the U.S. Army's Asymmetric Warfare Group, the Joint Terrorism Task Force (JTTF), the Justice Department's Anti-Terrorism Advisory Council and the U.S. intelligence community. He has discussed jihad, Islam, and terrorism at a workshop sponsored by the U.S. State Department and the German Foreign Ministry. He is a senior fellow with the Center for Security Policy. Connect with Robert and Jihad Watch... X                                x.com/jihadwatchRS  @jihadwatchRS WEBSITE                   jihadwatch.org/ Interview recorded  26.3.24 Connect with Hearts of Oak... WEBSITE            heartsofoak.org/ PODCASTS        heartsofoak.podbean.com/ SOCIAL MEDIA   heartsofoak.org/connect/  SHOP                  heartsofoak.org/shop/ TRANSCRIPT (Hearts of Oak) It's wonderful to have Robert Spencer back with us again. Robert, thank you so much for your time today. (Robert Spencer) Always good to talk to you, Peter. Thank you. Great to have you on. Always good to have guests on talking about their books. We'll get into a book that I've been delving into and got a couple of months ago, but only picked it up recently and have read it. We'll get into that in a moment. But obviously, you can find Robert: that is his Twitter handle, @jihadwatchRS. And obviously jihadwatch.org is the website. You can find everything in the links below. Make sure and use it. Make sure and sign up to it. One of the latest, I think the latest piece on that, and we're doing this just two days before the video goes out, is the U.S. Supreme Court gives Hamas-linked CAIRE a 9-0 thumbs up. And CAIR obviously is the Council on American Islamic Relations. I encourage you to delve into that, which gives some of the geopolitics, I guess, that lies behind some of the difficulties that the U.S. Faces as it engages and grapples and understands Islam, which is a massive subject. But the book that I've been delving into and enjoying is The Palestinian Delusion. Short book, 200 pages. And if you want to understand what is happening at the moment in the Middle East, I would encourage you to get a hold of a copy. Available US, UK, wherever you are. The links are in the description. Grab it. And I know you'll want to get it after this interview. But , I do want to get into modern day; what is happening? But right at the beginning, chapter two; chapter one is about the formation of Israel. If we just go on to chapter two, does religion, specifically Islam, lie at the root of the problem? What are your thoughts, Robert? And of course, you delve into this in chapter two. Yeah, absolutely, Peter. Islam is what the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is all about. If you look at the messages from Hamas, from Palestinian Islamic Jihad, from Fatah, from the Palestinian Authority itself, they are all about Islam all the time. Yet that is the one aspect of this conflict that is universally ignored by policy analysts and by policymakers in the West. Every attempt at a negotiated settlement initiated by the President of the United States or any other entity over the last 50 years has completely ignored, 100% ignored, Islam as a factor in this conflict. And yet, from the standpoint of the Palestinian Arabs, that's what it is all about, and we ignore it to our own detriment. Now, chapter two is entitled The Roots of the hatred of Israel. Hatred is a very strong word, Robert, is it not? Yes, but it's entirely accurate in this case, because what we are dealing with is not only a hatred, but what has been termed the longest hatred, that is the hatred of the Jews, which of course is not solely the province of Muslims or Islam, but, many people in the West don't realize that there even is such a thing as Islamic anti-Semitism. Yet, it is very real and it is at the roots of the problem between Israel and the Palestinian Arabs today. Now, we all hear the term Islam being one of the great Abrahamic religions, and yet there doesn't seem to be a lot of love for the Jews in Islam in the text and the history. Do you want to just let us know; because that is a different side that many people will certainly not hear in the legacy media. Yes. Islam, the Quran teaches that Islam is the third revelation after the revelation of the Torah and the Gospel. That is the core scriptures of the Jews and the Christians, and that it confirms the message of the Torah and the Gospel. And that Moses and Abraham before him, and Jesus after him, and all the other prophets in the Bible, in both the Jewish and the Christian scriptures, are people who taught Islam. Islam was the original religion of all the prophets. We can see this particularly in chapter 3, verse 67 of the Quran, which says Abraham was not a Jew or a Christian. He was a Muslim. And you might wonder, well, this doesn't make any sense. How could Abraham be a Muslim when Muhammad is the originator of Islam in the 7th century and Abraham is many, many centuries before that? The Islamic answer is that Islam is the original religion of all the prophets and that it was their followers who twisted their teachings to create Judaism and Christianity. The only legitimate expression of the true teachings of the prophets is Islam. And that being the case, the orthodox mainstream understanding among Muslims of Judaism and Christianity is that they have no legitimacy at all. Now, this is a very important point because, then the Quran commands Muslims to fight against and subjugate the Jews and Christians, among others. And it's in part because of their rejecting the true faith and corrupting their scriptures, although that part comes from Islamic tradition. Now, the difficulty that people have with this arises from the fact that Islamic spokesmen in the West very deceptively, frequently, refer to how much they as Muslims revere and respect figures such as Abraham and Moses and Jesus himself himself. And so Jews and Christians who are uninformed about Islam hear this and they think, isn't that wonderful? How generous and open-minded and ecumenical they are. And we should do the same. We should reciprocate by acknowledging Muhammad as a prophet. And they don't realize that the Muslims do revere and respect Abraham and Moses and Jesus and the rest of them, but as Muslims, not as they are portrayed in Judaism and Christianity. I mean, everything seems to be on the terms of Islam. I knew your book: Did Muhammad Exist? Actually, I think we need to remind ourselves of the world that Muhammad, if he did exist, was born into, which wasn't an Islamic world as we know today. It was a very different world. Yes. North Africa, the Middle East, what we think of today as the heart of the Islamic world, those were Christian lands. They were 99% Christian from Morocco all the way across North Africa and throughout the Middle East. And so it was the conquest initiated by the Arabs beginning in the 630s that ultimately led to the Islamization of those various nations and the steady diminishment of the Christian population. But, it's important to keep in mind, Peter, that the Christian population did not decline because the Christians were gradually convinced of the truth and beauty of Islam. Rather, they were subjugated, as the Quran directs, under the hegemony of Islamic law and denied basic rights in the societies that had been conquered. And the only thing they had to do to free themselves from the oppression of living with this denial of rights was to convert to Islam. And so many people did over the centuries, such that, for example, Egypt was 99% Christian when the Arabs invaded, and now it's about 10% Christian. The Christians didn't all leave. They just converted to Islam over time, because of the pressure placed on non-Muslims. Well, maybe as the world talks about repatriations, especially in the BLM movement, maybe Christians need to get some of that from Egypt. Yes. If there were real reparations for slavery and for oppression, then yes, the Christian population of the entire Middle East and North Africa would be owed an immense amount of money. But nobody's talking about that. I guess we hear the term anti-Semitism and we're told that any feeling of anti-Semitism from Islam is purely misplaced and doesn't lie at the heart of it and this seems to be this distinction between kind of rogue Islamic preachers, but actually key text and that seems, I think commentators seem to want to make a wide gap between that. Yet, as you point out, this term anti-Semitism, it lies right at the basis of Islam from 1300, 1400 years ago. Yes, absolutely. The Qur'an says in chapter 5, verse 82, that the people who are most intense in hostility to the believers will be the Jews, as well as the polytheists. Now, what this works out to in practice is that the Jews are the recipients of the most hostility from the Muslims. This is also because this is not an isolated passage, but the Quran is full of passages depicting the Jews in a negative light, depicting them as schemers who plot against the plans of Allah himself and try to foil them. Who crow about the limits on the power of Allah, saying Allah's hand is chained. That's chapter 5, verse 64. They were transformed into apes and pigs by Allah for their disobedience. That's chapter 2, verses 62 to 66, rather. Chapter 5, 59 and 60, and 7, 166. and many, many, other passages all the way through the Quran depict the Jews as being rebellious against Allah and essentially enemies of Allah. Then the Islamic tradition is even worse and the Jews are depicted as plotting against Muhammad, trying to kill Muhammad, being massacred by Muhammad and punishment for their plots to kill him. Jewish woman poisons Muhammad and this ultimately leads to his death and so on. They're the real villains of the entire tradition. And this carries through to the modern age where Judaism and Jews are so stigmatized in the Islamic world that several ex-Muslims have spoken about moving to America or moving to Europe and encountering actual Jews for the first time and being shocked that they were not evil, horned creatures, devils in human form, trying to disrupt human society in every way, but just ordinary people like everybody else, some good, some bad. And they had no frame of reference to understand this, because Islam is so unanimous and monochromatic in depicting them as evil. I think if someone is watching this as a Christian, they will understand the Bible as the text that they live by, which is full of stories, explains things, not really chronological, but actually, you can read it and you can grasp a lot of its meaning. And that stands by itself outside the Christian traditions, really. Islam seems to be quite different. It seems to be not not only is the Qur'an actually impossible to understand, but actually seemingly is only supposedly, understandable. With a wealth of other writings, which seems to confuse things massively for anyone coming from a Christian background or from the West. That's right, Peter. The Qur'an in the first place is written, in many cases it tells the stories that it tells. In a way that makes it clear that it assumes that the hearers have heard them before and are familiar with the general outlines of the story. So, it leaves out important aspects of the stories, and many times it is speaking about incidents, and events, and not explaining what incident or event is involved. It's as if you were talking to a friend and I walked up and I didn't know either of you very well and didn't know what you what incidents you were talking about, and you didn't pause to explain it to me. I would have no idea what you're what you're discussing, and that's what reading the Quran is like in many ways. So, you have the voluminous hadith literature: hadith means report and it's the reports of Mohammed's words and deeds. In the hadith literature you find what is known as the Asbab al-Nuzul which is the circumstances of revelation that tells the stories of what was going on at the time among the early Muslims. And Muhammad that led to the revelation of this or that passage of the Quran. And that's all very well, but this material comes from a couple of hundred years after Muhammad is supposed to have lived. And there's no trace of it existing before that. And so, it's an open question as to whether these things really give the circumstances of revelation and the Quran passage follows from that, or if these stories were put together in order to explain what is essentially a gnomic, elliptical, incoherent text. And that seems, the latter seems to be more likely. Some philologists like Christoph Luxemburg have noted that if you strip out the diacritical marks that distinguish many Arabic letters from each other, because there are 22 letters in the Arabic alphabet, but 16 are exactly the same character, just with different combinations of dots above or below. And so if you take out the dots and repoint it as if it were Aramaic, then suddenly it's a whole different text and a Christian text in many cases. And so, Luxembourg contends that it was actually a Christian text that was repurposed by the early Arab conquerors in order to create the religion of Islam. And they did this because this is actually the fundamental thesis of my own book: Did Muhammad Exist? They did this because in those days, religions were what cemented political unity. There were no parliaments or constitutions in this era when Islam arose. And you had two great powers in this region, the Byzantine Empire, which was Christian, and the Persian Empire, which was Zoroastrian. They were held together by those religions. The idea was that to be a Roman citizen at this time, a citizen of the Byzantine Empire, meant that one was a Christian and adhered to the tenets of Orthodox Christianity. Consequently, the non-Christians were not considered to be fully citizens of the empire. And this is another story, but it was the Christian identity that was the cement that held the empire together. So, the Arabs amassed a great empire, conquering massive expanses of territory, and then they developed a religion to hold it all together. And because these were warriors who wanted to expand and defend and strengthen their empire, they made their religion belligerent, aggressive, martial, warlike, expansionist, and so on. I think in chapter two, you talk about that we all know of Muslims praying to Mecca, and only then Allah can really hear the prayers properly. But you talk in the book about initially it was facing towards Jerusalem. So, was this just Muhammad wanting to be accepted? and then later on, of course, or at that time, Muhammad wanting to be a prophet. Kind of, in my thinking, that's sheer arrogance, thinking you can be a prophet to a religion you come across. Those concepts of him wanting to be a Jewish prophet, but also praying towards Jerusalem, those are two facts that seem to be missing in any dialogue today. Yes, well, it does seem as if, at least according to the canonical traditional Islamic story; that is of questionable historical value. But there's no doubt that Muslims believe it; that Muhammad taught that he was a new prophet in the line of the prophets of the Bible. And that consequently he was the new prophet of the Jews and a new prophet of the Christians. And both groups said, you're not. The Jews said, you're not Jewish. You can't be a Jewish prophet. And the Christians said, Jesus said: it is finished on the cross. We're not looking for a new prophet. And so he was rejected by both. And this has led to the kind of cognitive dissonance that the Quran says that the Jews and Christians, the Christians in particular in chapter five of the Quran will be rightly guided if they follow the gospel. And yet the Gospel does not confirm the teachings of the Qur'an as the Qur'an insists, and it insists that it confirms the teachings of the Torah also. And so Islamic spokesmen, Islamic scholars throughout the ages have accounted for this discrepancy by claiming that the Jews and Christians corrupted their scriptures. And so, they maintain that Muhammad is indeed a prophet in the line of the biblical prophets, but that it's the Jews and Christians' fault for not recognizing him. They twisted their scriptures to erase the congruence so, that people would not see that the Quran confirms the Torah and the gospel. A s a result, the Jews and Christians are portrayed as these incredible renegades and rebels against God who have dared to tamper with the very word of God that he gave them, and created false religions of their own making. And so here again, they have no legitimacy. I do want to get on to current day but, I want to there there's another concept that comes out in your book which is a widely misunderstood word and that's the word jihad, and we are told jihad is inner struggle. It's a spiritual struggle between yourself trying to be right and to be good and live correctly. Yet, jihad is a term that's used in violence all across the world. What is this term, jihad? The primary understanding of jihad in Islamic theology is warfare against unbelievers in order to bring them under the hegemony of Islamic law. The confusion arises from the fact that jihad means struggle, and there are as many things that are referred to as struggles in Arabic as there are in English. And so you can have great struggles and small struggles. You can struggle to be on time for appointments when you're chronically late, but you can also have a great struggle between civilizations, such as World War II or something. Now, in the Islamic realm, it's the same thing. The Islamic Republic of Iran has a department of agricultural jihad, which doesn't involve blowing things up on farms. It involves trying to struggle to increase the efficiency of the farms and their fruitfulness. Whereas in Islamic theology, the principal meaning of jihad has to do with this warfare against unbelievers. So, here again, Islamic spokesmen in the West frequently confuse people. They're trying to confuse them and make them complacent about the jihad threat by saying jihad just means struggle. And it's about struggling to better yourself. And they don't tell you that Muhammad said the warfare against unbelievers is the highest understanding of jihad, that there's nothing greater than jihad in which one loses one's life and then is rewarded with paradise. In the book, you use a number of examples of what we would call hit preachers. This is in 45, the Hamas deputy minister of religious endowments on Al-Aqsa TV 2010 said: the Jews suffer from a mental disorder because they are thieves and aggressors. A thief or aggressor who took land or property develops a psychological disorder and pangs of conscience because he took someone that wasn't his. And then the next page, you have a from 2018, a program on Palestinian Authority television saying people could be deluded or think that they have no way out with the Jews. The liberation of this land is a matter of faith, which will happen despite everyone. And then the next page up, the Jews are treacherous and conniving cheaters. But again, the argument, many of the guests I have on would not look at Islam as an issue, as a problem. And they would simply say those are misguided, radical preachers, and they don't understand the true, beautiful nature of Islam. How do you speak against that criticism, I guess, that you're maybe picking things out and you're looking at these preachers that actually don't understand Islam, really? Well, in the first place, I find it difficult to believe that people who have committed their lives to understanding Islam correctly would not understand it correctly. While non-Muslims who've never picked up a Quran or have any idea what it says, they understand it perfectly well. Islam is kind of funny in that way that the more you know about it, the less you understand it. And the less you know about it, the more you understand it. We see this with non-Muslim politicians all over the West who assure us with immense confidence that Islam is a religion of peace that has nothing whatsoever to do with terrorism. Those are actually the exact words from Hillary Clinton a few years back, but many, many other politicians say exactly the same thing. And I know that Hillary Clinton doesn't have the first foggiest idea of what the Koran teaches, whereas I, who have read the Koran dozens and dozens of times, committed a great deal of it to memory. Published a translation and commentary of it that's my own, and have studied Islamic theology for 40 years, now. They would say, well, you don't understand Islam at all. And even more to the point, these Muslim clerics who've attended Al-Azhar or other prestigious Islamic institutions and and spend their whole lives trying to understand the Quran and the Islam properly, and they don't get it at all. So, in the first place, it's absurd. But in the second place, what these people said that you quoted, like the fellow who said the Jews are treacherous, conniving, cheaters, that's just Quranic theology. If you read what the Quran says about the Jews, just get a Quran, don't even read the whole thing. Get one with a good index and read all the passages about the Jews. And you will see that every last one of them is negative. Every last one of them portrays the Jews as scheming and conniving and cheating the righteous people. And so this is the prism through which these clerics see the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. They understand it through the lens of the Qur'an, because they believe that the Qur'an is the perfect word of the perfect being that is valid for all times and all places in all situations. They see the world today and they see Israel and the Palestinians. And the first place they will go to understand all that is the Quran, because they would trust Allah over any human authority, telling them what the conflict is all about. The Quran tells them over and over that the Jews are evil and enemies of Allah. So, they see Israel and they think, here are the evil Jews who are enemies of Allah. Even, the fact that they refer to Jews and not to Israelis or to Zionists or some other term of that kind indicates that they're seeing this through theological principles. And those theological principles are deeply anti-Semitic. Well, bringing us up to the present day, for over 2,000 years, the Jews did not have their homeland there in the land that is Israel. And it was under all different, we'll not go into the history, all different, I guess, occupying forces or other forces. And then 1948 happens and the Jewish homeland, modern day Israel, is founded again. And immediately, and this is chapter three, you talk about the jihad of 1948,which is an interesting term. Why that title? Well, the whole thing is a jihad from 1948, from before 1948, when the Zionist settlement began in the late 19th century. Even before that, because there there were always Jews in the Holy Land, and they were always subject to sporadic, periodic attacks. Now, after the Zionism began, these attacks intensify because in the first place, the Ottomans were alarmed when they owned the land that the Jews were moving in, because they thought that it would threaten their hegemony over it. Then when the Ottoman Empire fell, the League of Nations, the precursor to the United Nations, gave Britain the mandate for Palestine to establish a Jewish national home. Now, why did the Arabs object to a Jewish national home? There were already large Arab states right there neighboring this territory. And so it should have been and could have been. A relatively peaceful and orderly process once the Jewish national home was actually founded. After World War II, Germany lost massive territories in the East because it fought a war of aggression and lost. And for reasons of national security, the Poles, the Soviets, and the French in the West took various territories from the Germans. The Germans who who lived in those areas, were sent to what remained of Germany. Nobody complained. Nobody raises, nowadays, some right of return or speaks about occupied German territory in Poland and Russia. It would be absurd even to think about. But it's the exact same situation with Israel. The Arabs of Lebanon, of Syria, and of Jordan are identical ethnically, culturally, linguistically, and religiously with the Palestinian Arabs. There has never been a distinct Palestinian nationality. That's a propaganda creation that was designed to be a weapon to use against Israel. So, when you have Arabs who leave, they did not actually get kicked out. They left because the Arab League told them to leave in 1948, because the Arab states neighboring Israel were going to crush it within weeks. Then they would be out of the line of fire and could return home after Israel was destroyed. It didn't work that way, because Israel actually turned out to win the war. The Arab states, after that happened, could have easily absorbed these populations. And there would be no problem today, just like there's no problem in Europe today, in regard to the German refugees after World War II. And yet they did not do that because they they wanted to keep the Palestinian refugees as stateless, as refugees, as a weapon to beat Israel with. This is what became the linchpin for what I referred to as the Jihad of 1948. The Jihad, because the Quran says in chapter 2, verse 191: drive them out from where they drove you out. It's a myth, as I just noted, it's a myth that the the Israelis drove the Arabs out. It's not a fact, but it's what the Arabs all over the Middle East and the non-Arab Muslims are taught about what happened. So, that is because it triggers the divine command, drive them out from where they drove you out. They have to have been driven out for that to kick in as being applicable. So, now millions of Muslims, Arab and non-Arab, are taught that they must drive out the Israelis, because the Muslims were driven out. It's a divine command, no less than the Ten Commandments for Christians. Consequently, it is a jihad because if it were not for these religious principles that are rooted in Islam and the Quran, the problem would have been solved by negotiations decades ago. But no negotiated settlement ever succeeds, because you don't negotiate away divine commandments. Well, that negotiated settlement, two-term, two-state solution is the phrase that comes up, and you touch on that in that chapter. And we're told this is the way to fix all the problems, if only we can come up with this mythical two-state solution. Why is that then not the solution to the issue that the world faces in the Middle East? A two-state solution would require two states. That requires at least ostensibly that the Arabs have to acknowledge that a Jewish state of some size has a right to exist there and they will never accept that, because the divine command has driven them out from where they drove you out. That does not admit of half measures. It might admit of partial fulfilment that they take over half of Israel and then the other half later. But it doesn't allow for the recognition of the right to exist of any non-Muslim entity on that land. Consequently, the Jewish state could be the size of my office here. The Jewish state could be the size of a postage stamp, and it would not be acceptable, because they have have to drive them out from where they drove you out without any exceptions. The negotiation, the two-state solution would quickly become, or even eventually, even slowly become, a one-state solution. The Palestinian state would make war against what's left of Israel and ultimately destroy it. There would never be two states in that land on an indefinite basis. In your book, one of the chapters talks about the naivety of Carter. Seemingly, every U.S. president has accepted this. Even Trump has accepted; has stated that actually he sees that as the best solution. Is that simply an absolute misunderstanding that this is a religious ideology that lies at the root of all this? Yeah, absolutely. It's because nobody in Washington knows or wants to know about the power and influence of Islam over political issues. They underestimated and misunderstood Khomeini when it was the time of the Islamic Revolution in Iran in 1979. And since 1948, they have misunderstood the Israeli-Arab conflict, because they don't understand Islam. They routinely discount it as having anything to do with this conflict. And yet, it's right there in the Hamas charter. Israel will arise and will remain until Islam obliterates it. Islam obliterates it. And yet, no policymaker, no president, not Carter, not any of the others. Not Trump. None of them have ever pondered. What does that mean until Islam obliterates it? How can Islam obliterate a country? That doesn't even make any sense to the policymakers in Washington, because they think of Islam solely as a religion, and they think of it because they come from Judeo-Christian backgrounds. The way Christianity operates in the West. They assume it's like that, and so, they have no idea of its political, aggressive, expansionist, and supremacist aspects. In chapter four, you say the Palestinians are invented. That's a very strong statement. Surely, we've had the land of Palestine back in the Roman era. That's surely 2,000 years old. So, there must be all this history and people: the Palestinians. Well, I'll tell you, Peter, you're right, and yet not. And I know you know. It's true. The Romans renamed the land of Judea, that is, land of the Jews. They renamed Judea Palestine in 134 AD. And they officially expelled the Jews from the area, although many of them stayed all the way through to the modern age. Now, Palestine was a name they had taken from the Bible, from the Philistines, the ancient enemies of the Israelites, in the Jewish scriptures. And they named it Palestine. They named Judea Palestine as a yet another taunt against the Jews as they were expelling them from the region. They renamed the region against their extinct enemies. But, there were never any Palestinians. And I would ask you, you know. You can find on YouTube, for example, the men on the street interviews, and people are even Palestinians are asked, name a famous Palestinian from history. And they all say Yasser Arafat. Okay, name another. If they were Palestinian since 134 AD, then, okay, name one. Give us one from the second century or the fifth or the 10th or the 15th or the 19th. There weren't any. It was the name of a region. It's like Los Angeles. Los Angeles is a city in the United States. And there are citizens of Los Angeles, but if we start talking about a distinct Los Angeles nationality that deserves its own state, people would laugh. It's the name of the city. And Palestine was the name of this region, but there were never any Palestinians. It was just the name of a place. The idea that it's a distinct nationality was invented by Arafat and the KGB in 1964. And they did it as a propaganda weapon because the whole world in those days was sympathetic to Israel. The Israelis, because they had faced off and defeated massive nations. Arab and non-Arab Muslim nations, and had stood against them even though they were vastly outnumbered and outgunned. They gained the sympathy of the entire world. And so, the KGB in Arafat in 1964 renamed the Palestine Liberation Organization, the PLO, the Palestinian Liberation Organization. Very small change and nobody even noticed, but it was a momentous change, because it indicated for the first time in history that there was a people called Palestinians. And now the whole world accepts it and takes it for granted, but this is an invented nationality that was designed to create an even tinier people that was menaced by the massive Israeli war machine. And that would take the wind out of the sails of Israel, the tiny underdog Jewish state facing off against these massive Arab states. And it's worked very well. Even the Israelis have admitted or accepted the existence of Palestinians as a distinct nationality when there has never been such a people in history. You can go to 1948. Go to the library, read the newspapers from the day. Read the United Nations deliberations when they offered the Arabs half of the area of Israel. We're going to establish yet another Arab state and a Jewish state. And the Arabs said no, because they wouldn't accept a Jewish state of any size. Nobody ever mentions Palestinians. It's funny, because they're the center of the conflict now. And yet, in those days, it was the Israeli-Arab conflict. There was not a single mention anywhere of Palestinians. I mean, Islam does seem to have a trend of rewriting history. And in the book you talk about a number of statements and articles referring to Jesus as a Palestinian. That would be news to Jesus, because I'm sure I read in my Bible that he was Jewish. Yeah, well, obviously this is another propaganda point that's designed to curry favour among non-Muslims with the Palestinians. Even from a historical standpoint, Jesus was not a Palestinian because it wasn't until a hundred years after Jesus that the Romans renamed the area of Judea Palestine. The Gospels are very clear. Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judea. That Galilee was right there next to Judea, where he grew up in Nazareth. And he says salvation is from the Jews. A very ignored statement of his. This is very clearly someone who was operating within a Jewish framework, a Jewish culture surrounded by Jews. And even the theology of Christianity is based on the theology of Judaism, that the temple Judaism before the destruction of the temple in 70 AD was based on animal sacrifices for atonement for sins. And then Jesus is presented as being, as God become man, the eternal sacrifice and the perfect atonement for sins that opens the way of heaven for the people. This is something that really doesn't even make any sense apart from Judaism. And I think Christians nowadays are getting very carried away in this Christ is King controversy that's been going on in regard to Candace Owens and the Daily Wire and so on. It risks ignoring or denying the Jewish roots of Christianity and the fundamental kinship that Judaism and Christianity actually have, despite the undeniable antagonism and the Christian anti-Semitism that was certainly operative in Europe for centuries. Well, you're right. Without Abraham, Isaac and Jacob and all the stories of the Old Testament, God's promised there would be no New Testament and Jesus would not be there. 100%, Robert. Just to finish off with, the last chapter is what is to be done. And it seems from this discussion that what the conflict that we see at the moment between the Palestinians in Gaza and the Israelis is just part of the wider issue of Jews and Muslims, of Islam and Judaism. So, when you say what is to be done, how do you see looking ahead? Well, looking ahead, it doesn't look good, because the American government, which is essentially the principal, if not the sole ally of the Jewish state, is betraying Israel because the Biden regime is very afraid that it's going to lose the Muslim vote, which could lose it several swing states in the November election. And end up with Biden being defeated for re-election. So, they've decided to betray Israel as a result. They're pressing for a Palestinian state. If a Palestinian state were founded, that would, as I discussed earlier, become a new jihad base for renewed attacks against what's left of Israel. They don't seem to know or care that if Israel is destroyed, then the jihadis all around the world will be emboldened like never before, and will step up their attacks in Europe and the United States. This is what we're looking at in the future unless Israel is able to destroy Hamas despite the international pressure to get it to surrender and by surrender. I mean accept a ceasefire that would allow Hamas to live and if Israel can do that then all bets are off and the post-war picture will be radically different. But right now it looks like it's going to be very tough times ahead head, both for Israel and for the West. Well, I would encourage people to get: The Passing Delusion. It's a great book and will help explain what is happening. And of course, Robert's latest book is: The Empire of God, How the Byzantines Saved Civilization. A wonderful endorsement by Victor Davis Hanson. So, if you're not sure about Robert, go to Victor David Hanson. Robert, really appreciate you coming along. Love your work over the many decades with Jihad Watch, certainly one of my go-to places on the geopolitics and deeper. Thank you so much for your time today. Thank you. Pleasure.

Content warning for discussions of antisemitism and genocide. Also, note that from 19:10 until 20:05 you can hear an electric saw in the background. Nothing I can do about that. Episode music can be found here: https://uppbeat.io/track/paulo-kalazzi/heros-time Day 2 will dive deeply into the historic context of the Israel-Palestine Conflict and the Gazan Genocide. Starting 3700 years ago this episode will hit the major beats of the story and attempt to make everything a little bit clearer, if not really easier to understand. Episode transcript follows: Hey, Hi, Hello, this is the History Wizard and welcome to Day 2 of Have a Day! w/ The History Wizard. Thank you for everyone who tuned in for Day 1 last week, and especially thank you to everyone who rated and/or reviewed the podcast. I hope you all learned something last week and I hope the same for this week. Today we're going to be discussing the Gazan Genocide, what is often called, in mainstream, Western, media the Israel-Palestine Conflict. However, we're not going to be starting in 2023, we're not even going to be starting in 1948. To the best of my abilities we are going to drill into the historic context of this genocide and the ongoing historic and ethnic tensions that exist in the region. Before we start with that context I would like to state for the record that what is being done to the people of Gaza is, unequivocally, a genocide. Now, to find the beginning of this we are going to have to go back about 3700 years to the Levantine region. The regions known as the Levant is comprised of the modern nations of Cyprus, parts of Turkey southwest of the Euphrates, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, and of course Israel and Palestine. Both historical record and genetic testing of modern Jewish and Palestinian people show them both being descended from ancient Canaanite cultures. While Biblical narratives show the Israelites entering the region from Egypt and conquering the region under the command of Moses' successor Joshua. Modern archeology and the historical view has, however, discounted this. The Bible is not and should not ever be used as a valid historical source. Indeed, modern archeology and historical research shows that the Jewish ethnicity emerged naturally as an offshoot of the Canaanites in much the same way that the Palestinian ethnicity did. It is also interesting to note that historically, Palestine appears to have been a name for a region and not a distinct nation or kingdom. Indeed, during the seventh century BC, no fewer than eight nations were settled in Palestine. These included the Arameans of the kingdom of Geshur; the Samaritans who replaced the Israelite kingdom in Samaria; the Phoenicians in the northern cities and parts of Galilee; the Philistines in the Philistine pentapolis; the three kingdoms of the Transjordan– Ammon, Moab and Edom; and the Judaeans of Kingdom of Judah. The first written record of the region being called Palestine, by the way, comes from 12th century BCE Egypt, which used the term Peleset for the area. Around 720 BCE, Kingdom of Israel was destroyed when it was conquered by the Neo-Assyrian Empire, which came to dominate the ancient Near East. Under the Assyrian resettlement policy, a significant portion of the northern Israelite population was exiled to Mesopotamia and replaced by immigrants from the same region. During the same period, and throughout the 7th century BCE, the Kingdom of Judah, experienced a period of economic, as well as population growth. Later in the same century, the Assyrians were defeated by the rising Neo-Babylonian Empire, and Judah became its vassal. In 587 BCE, following a revolt in Judah, the Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar II besieged and destroyed Jerusalem and the First Temple, putting an end to the kingdom. The majority of Jerusalem's residents, including the kingdom's elite, were exiled to Babylon. This marks the first historic diaspora of Jewish people from their indigenous homeland. Jewish people in the region enjoyed a brief period of political independence and national sovereignty following the Maccabean Revolt. This would only last for a few brief decades before the area would be conquered by the Romans. During the first Roman-Jewish War Jerusalem and the Second Temple, which has been built back in about 516 BCE were both destroyed. From that point on Roman rule would crack down even harder on Jewish people living in the empire. Many of these tensions were caused by the cultural and religions differences between the Romans and Jewish people. Their refusal to worship Roman gods and their refusal to venerate the emperor made them perpetual pariahs.  Jewish communities would continue to resist Roman rule and oppression and this resistance would come to a violent head in events like the Kitos War and the Bar Kokhba Revolt. The Bar Kokhba revolt, led by Simon Bar Kokhba was certainly influenced by the Romans building a temple to Jupiter on the Temple Mount after the destruction of the Second Temple. The revolt, as with the First and Second Roman-Jewish Wars was a complete military defeat for the Jewish people. The Jewish Talmud relates that, when the fortress of Betar was besieged in 135 CE that the Romans went on killing until their horses were submerged in blood up to their nostrils. This revolt would result in Judea being literally wiped off the map. And I mean that quite literally, while the Jewish population was greatly reduced from the area, both by slaughter at the hands of the Romans and because many people were forced from the region, there was still and there has always been a Jewish population in the Levant. But any Roman map from after the Bar Kokhba Revolt would now show the region labeled as Syria Palestina. The Diaspora of Jewish people from Israel and Judea would result in Jewish populations congregating all around Eurasia. Jewish communities would settle near the Rhine, eventually collating into the Ashkenazi Jewish ethnicity. Jewish communities would settle on the Iberian Peninsula and in Northern Africa collating into the Sephardi Jewish ethnicity. Jewish communities would also remain in the Middle East, in Syria Palestina (though they were forbidden by the Romans to live in Jerusalem) and collate into the Mizrahim Jewish ethnicity. There are also smaller Jewish ethnicities like the Bene Israel from India and the Beta Israel from Ethiopia. One of the conclusions that is important to take away at this point is that both Palestinians and Jewish people, Judaism being both a religion and an ethnicity, are indigenous to the lands of Israel and Palestine. I don't really care if you favor a one state or two state solution, but the fact of their mutual indigineousness is undeniable. Now, at this point we're going to take a huge jump forward in time to 1516 when Syria Palestina falls under Ottoman rule. As many ethnically Palestinian people had converted to Islam following the Islamic Conquests of the Middle East in the 7th century CE they were largely seen as good Ottoman citizens and interfered with very little. Jewish people, on the other hand, because they were not followers of Islam found themselves living under the dhimmi system. This was a common system under Muslim empires that allowed people to practice other religions, but with limited rights and at the cost of increased taxes. Some of the restrictions placed on Dhimmi were: In addition to other legal limitations, dhimmis were not considered equals to Muslims, despite being considered “people of the book” Their testimony against Muslims was inadmissible in courts of law wherein a Muslim could be punished; this meant that their testimony could only be considered in commercial cases. They were forbidden to carry weapons or ride atop horses and camels, and their houses could not overlook those of Muslims.  All that being said, the lives of Jewish people in the Ottoman Empire were still demonstrably better than those of Jewish communities living in Europe and they were much more freely able to practice their religion. We're going to jump ahead again to the First Aliyah which took place between 1881 and 1903. Aliyah is a Hebrew word meaning “ascent”. There have been five “official” Aliyah throughout the 19th and 20th centuries. These Aliyah are periods of increased Jewish immigration to their ancestral homeland. This First Aliyah saw Jewish people, mostly from Eastern Europe and Yeman move to Ottoman Palestine because of an increased number of pogroms. Most of the Jewish people from Eastern Europe came from the Pale of Settlement and by 1903, saw about 25,000 Jewish people immigrate. This period also saw many thousands of Jewish people immigrate to the US in order to escape the ever increasing amounts of antisemitic violence around Europe. This First Aliyah also marks, more or less, the beginning of the Zionist movement. Political Zionism as a movement was founded by Theodor Herzl in the late 19th century. He saw antisemitism and antisemitic violence as an indelible part of any society in which Jewish people lived as minorities. He also believed that the only way a Jewish State could be established would be with the help of European powers. He also described the Jewish State as an outpost of civilization against Barbarism and compared himself to Cecil Rhodes. So, safe to say that Herzl was not a man with good intentions for the people that would become his neighbors. Throughout the first decade of the Zionist movement, there were several instances where some Zionist figures, including Herzl, supported a Jewish state in places outside Palestine, such as "Uganda" (actually parts of British East Africa today in Kenya), Argentina, Cyprus, Mesopotamia, Mozambique, and the Sinai Peninsula.]  Herzl, was initially content with any Jewish self-governed state. Jewish settlement of Argentina was the project of Maurice de Hirsch. It is unclear if Herzl seriously considered this alternative plan, and he later reaffirmed that Palestine would have greater attraction because of the historic ties of Jewish people to that area. This, as it was always going to, brings us to the Balfour Declaration. As soon as World War I began the Great Powers of Europe began deciding how they were going to carve up the Ottoman Empire, the Sick Man of Europe, like a Thanksgiving turkey. The Balfour Declaration was part of this planning. The declaration was a public statement issued by the British government in 1917 stating their support for a national home for the Jewish people in Palestine. The entire Declaration reads as follows: His Majesty's Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours 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. They clearly failed in all regards of their declaration after the first statement. The end of World War I saw the League of Nations place Palestine under British colonial control, leading to the creation of Mandatory Palestine in 1920, with the League officially giving Britain a Class A mandate in 1922. Britain was originally supposed to guarantee Arab independence following the defeat of the Ottomans in exchange for the Great Arab Revolt that took place against Ottoman rule. The creation of Mandatory Palestine and the existence of the Balfour declaration was partially responsible for Jewish immigration over the next 30 years. As Jewish immigration increased, Palestinian peasants, known as fellahin (fellahin were often tenant farmers or other such peoples who didn't own the land they worked) were forced off the land they worked to survive. These tensions would result in small-scale conflicts between Jewish and Arab people living in Mandatory Palestine, though the first conflict of real historic note would be the Great Palestinian Revolt of 1936. The revolt lasted until 1939. It was a popular uprising of Palestinian Arabs that demanded Arab independence and and end to open-ended Jewish immigration to Palestine. The revolt eventually ended with the issuance of the White Paper in 1939. The White Paper was going to attempt to create a national home for the Jewish people within an independent Palestine within 10 years. However this proposal was rejected by both the Arab and Zionist sides of the negotiation. Before the White Paper, and before the massive violence of the Great Revolt was an Arab General strike that lasted for 6 months in order to try and get their voices heard. This led to the creation of the Peel Commission, which recommended partitioning Palestine into separate Jewish and Arab states. This plan was, like the White Paper that would come after it, rejected by both sides. Of force everything would change after World War 2. After the war the British Mandate for Palestine was dissolved and the Israeli Declaration of Independence was issued later that same day. This declaration came as part of the UN partition plan which was outlined in UN Resolution 181 (II). The Resolution set forth to create an Independent Jewish State, an Independent Arab State and a Special International Regime for the City of Jerusalem. This UN Resolution came during the context of the 1947 Civil War in Mandatory Palestine which began after the UN initially voted on the partition plan resolution. This war would have far reaching consequences for everyone in the region and would lead to events like the Nakba and the Israeli government initiating Plan Dalet. Nakba, an Arabic word meaning Catastrophe, refers to the initial ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from their homes following the 1947 Civil War and the broader 1948 Arab-Israeli War. Some 750,000 Palestinian people were forced to flee their homes and their country after the First Arab Israeli War saw Israel in control of all of the land the UN had granted them in the partition plan as well as roughly 60% of the land that was to be Palestine. Causes of Arab flight from Palestine include: Jewish military advances, destruction of Arab villages, psychological warfare and fears of another massacre by Zionist militias after the Deir Yassin massacre, which caused many to leave out of panic; direct expulsion orders by Israeli authorities; the voluntary self-removal of the wealthier classes; collapse in Palestinian leadership and Arab evacuation orders. This period of time would also see many thousands of Jewish people expelled from the surrounding Muslim countries. As you might expect the majority of those people would move to Israel. While we can see that tensions in the region and Zionist abuses of Palestinian people existed before this point, if we HAD to point to a single moment that defined the entire conflict, ethnic cleansing, and genocide it would be this moment. Following the flight of the majority of the Palestinians from Palestine, Israel passed a number of laws, known as Israel land and property laws, disallowing the Palestinians their right to return to their homes in Palestine. Wars would continue over the decades, but the point at which things start to get particularly heinous comes at the end of the Six Day War, also known as the Arab Israeli War. Following this war, which Israel fought against Syria, Jordan, the United Arab Emirates, and Iraq, Israel now had control of the Golan Heights, The West Bank, and the Gaza Strip, and the Sinai Peninsula leaving very little land still under Palestinian sovereign control. Israel would eventually cede the Sinai Peninsula back to Egypt in 1978 as part of the Camp David Accords in exchange for peace and Egyptian recognition of the State of Israel. They retained control over the rest of the territories they had seized. The actions of Israel during this time put increasing strain on Palestinians as more and more of them were forced into refugee camps, and while Gaza is technically under the control of the Palestinian Liberation Organization and Hamas and the West Bank is under the partial control of the Palestinian National Authority both still find themselves heavily under the control of the Israeli government and military. Especially since October of 2023. Human Rights Watch, a non-government organization, considers Israel to still be an invading and occupying force in these two Palestinian regions.  The two of which are separated from each other by the nation of Israel. “Even though Israel unilaterally withdrew its troops and settlements from Gaza in 2005, it continues to have obligations as an occupying power in Gaza under the Fourth Geneva Convention because of its almost complete control over Gaza's borders, sea and air space, tax revenue, utilities, population registry, and the internal economy of Gaza. At a minimum, Israel continues to be responsible for the basic welfare of the Palestinian population in Gaza.” We actually have to backtrack a little bit here before we can finally catch up to the modern day. We need to pop back to 1987, the First Intifada, and the creation of Hamas. The First Intifada lasted from December 1987 until, basically the signing of the Oslo Accords in 1993, although some date the end in 1991 with the Madrid Conference. The Intifafa, or Uprising, was a sustained series of protests, strikes, and riots that began after an IDF truck hit another car carrying Palestinian workers, all four of whom died in the crash. Now, where does Hamas come into this, well in the long history of the Western world, they were created by the people they now fight against. Hamas, in the beginning of its existence, received funding from the Israeli government to act as a counterweight against the more moderate elements of the PLO. Israel would then turn around and try and destroy Hamas when they started to get too powerful. It was Hamas who was behind the October 7th Attacks on Israel. Hamas, by the way, has been the defacto ruling party of Gaza since 2007. Hamas said its attack was in response to the continued Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories, the blockade of the Gaza Strip, the expansion of illegal Israeli settlements, rising Israeli settler violence, and recent escalations. The attack on October 7th began with some 300 missiles being fired into Israeli territory along with coordinated attacks at locations and events like the Re'im Music Festival and various kibbutz's such as Kfar Aza and Be'eri. The attack lasted into the 8th of October and saw 1,143 people killed, 767 of whom were civilians and 36 of whom were children. Also roughly 250 civilians and soldiers were taken hostage with the intent of using them to try and secure the release of Palestinian prisoners in Israel. It does bear mentioning that Israel has knowledge of such an attack a year in advance, according to the New York Times, but dismissed it as impossible. Since this attack by Hamas Israel has been increasing the violence and slaughter that it is committing against the Palestinian people. In the name of their alleged war with Hamas Israel has forced the people of Gaza to move farther and farther to the south as they bombed the northern part of the Strip to glass. Today most of the surviving population of Gaza, some 1.5 million people are forced to live in the city of Rafah, a city that they were told they'd be safe in. They is no longer the case as Israel is now bombing Rafah as well.  Israel has also been blockading Gaza since 2007 and, effectively, has complete control over the food, water, electricity, and medicine that gets into Gaza. Part of this control comes from the fact that Israel keeps bombing hospitals, like they did with Al Shifa in November of 2023. Israel claims that Hamas was using the hospital as a staging ground, despite this being proven false by independent investigations. We know from our previous video that genocide isn't just the mass slaughter of a particular group of people. It is also inflicting conditions of life calculated to bring about the physical destruction of the group in whole or in part. By this definition, concentrating 1.5 million people into a small area without adequate food, water, or medicine, and then bombing that area demonstrates clear intent to destroy.  An even more clear example of this intent was the Flour Massacre that occurred on February 29, 2024. On that day Israel let food aid into Gaza after over a month of not letting anything through their blockade. When people lined up to receive this aid, the Israeli military shot them. The Israeli military set a deliberate trap to lure in starving civilians and then shot and killed over 100 people. We also have massive amounts of intent demonstrated in the words of members of the Israeli government. Such as with Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant called the people of Gaza Human Animals and said that they would allow no food or water to get in. Or when Netanyahu, the Israeli Prime Minister said they'd turn Gaza into a deserted island.  There can be no denying the genocide in Gaza. None whatsoever. The actions of the Israeli government are inexcusable and must be condemned with all possible haste. We are in the midst of a genocide, and so if you've ever wondered what you would have done during something like the Holocaust, now you know. Whatever you're doing now, is what you would have done then. Hopefully what we covered today will provide some needed context for everything that is going on right now. I don't know if it will make anything clearer, and I doubt it will provide you with any solutions, but just because you learn information doesn't mean you can necessarily apply it. Thank you for joining me for Day 2. This was a very heavy topic and next week will not get any lighter. Next week we will be diving into the history and context of the ongoing trans genocide that is currently ongoing in the United States.  Last thing we're gonna do today before we do is the outro is read some reviews that came in on Apple Podcasts over the week. I say over the week, all three of these came in on the 21st. 2 of them came from Canada! And now my notes say “read the reviews* Oh… wait, that was something i was supposed to DO. Not an actual sentence i was supposed to read. I hope i remember to edit this out… Have a Day! w/ The History Wizard is brought to you by me, The History Wizard. PLease remember to rate, review, and subscribe to Have a Day! On your pod catcher of choice. The more you do, the more people will be able to listen and learn along with you. Thank you for sticking around until the end and, as always, Have a Day and Free Palestine.    

Happy Monday! Sam and Emma speak with Rashid Khalidi, professor of Modern Arab Studies at Columbia University, to discuss his 2020 book The Hundred Years' War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, 1917–2017, and his views on the Israel-Gaza conflict as it stands now. First, Sam and Emma run through updates on the Supreme Court keeping Trump on the ballot for November, the GOP primary, the US airdropping aid to Gaza, Super Tuesday, Haiti's State of Emergency, the GOP's struggle to run the House, and the major anti-trust victory over the Jet Blue-Spirit merger, also parsing through Joe Biden and Kamala Harris tentatively wading into the “temporary ceasefire” conversation. Professor Rashid Khalidi then joins, first stepping back to explain why he began his work on Palestinian resistance in 1917, well before the establishment of the state of Israel, looking at the central role of the West – namely Britain and the US – in support and facilitating the violent establishment and maintenance of a Zionist apartheid state. Beginning in 1917, Professor Khalidi then works his way through the history of Palestinian's last century of struggle, first exploring occupation under the British mandate, the role of European nationalism and anti-semitism in facilitating the Balfour declaration and the establishment of a Zionist state, and the combination of violent British and Zionist repression against Palestinians, alongside mass ethnic cleansing, in the decades leading up to World War II. After touching on the evolution of both the Palestinian nationalist movement and the extremist zionist cause over this era, Rashid walks Sam and Emma through Israel's various extreme massacres and ethnic cleansing that occurred leading up to and during the 1948 Nakba, the role of the one-sided UN Partition plan in pushing the start of the catastrophe, and the devastating impact it had on the state of the Palestinian nationalist movement. Next, Professor Khalidi, Sam, and Emma look at the evolution of Israel's apartheid rule and ethnic cleansing over the two decades before the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, and the impact of that war in furthering the devastation, before looking at the rebirth of the Palestinian nationalist movement with the Palestinian Liberation Organization and First Intifada. After tackling the failure of the Oslo Accords (and the negotiations around them), Professor Khalidi runs through the major influence of US politics in all evolutions of the conflict in the second half of the century, a trend that would grow in the wake of the Second Intifada in 2000, and continues to this day, before wrapping the interview up with a quick assessment of the central role of the US in facilitating the ongoing genocide in Gaza, and the role of the other Arab states in the region. And in the Fun Half: Sam and Emma talk with John from San Antonio as he previews major Super Tuesday races including finding Feinstein's replacement and progressive battles in Texas, New York, North Carolina, and more. They also watch CNN's Christiane Amanpour nail Netanyahu's Special Advisor on Israel's involvement in the Flour Massacre, and Jesse Watters spotlights Tulsi Gabbard for Trump's VP. Trump stumbles over the Q-Anon anthem, Tyler from Washington explores the new era of social media, and Mitch McConnell's GOP colleagues begin to demand he align with Trump's agenda, plus, your calls and IMs! Check out Rashid's book here: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781627798556/thehundredyearswaronpalestine Become a member at JoinTheMajorityReport.com: https://fans.fm/majority/join Check out Seder's Seeds here!: https://www.sedersseeds.com/; if you have pictures of your Seder's Seeds, send them here!: hello@sedersseeds.com Check out the Letterhack's YouTube page and catch John from San Antonio appearing on the show!: https://www.youtube.com/c/TheLetterhack Check out this GoFundMe in support of Mohammad Aldaghma's niece in Gaza, who has Down Syndrome: http://tinyurl.com/7zb4hujt Check out the "Repair Gaza" campaign courtesy of the Glia Project here: https://www.launchgood.com/campaign/rebuild_gaza_help_repair_and_rebuild_the_lives_and_work_of_our_glia_team#!/ Get emails on the IRS pilot program for tax filing here!: https://service.govdelivery.com/accounts/USIRS/subscriber/new Check out filmmaker and friend of the show Janek Ambros's new documentary "Ukrainians in Exile" here: https://www.thenation.com/article/world/ukrainians-in-exile-doc/ Check out StrikeAid here!; https://strikeaid.com/ Gift a Majority Report subscription here: https://fans.fm/majority/gift Subscribe to the ESVN YouTube channel here: https://www.youtube.com/esvnshow Subscribe to the AMQuickie newsletter here: https://am-quickie.ghost.io/ Join the Majority Report Discord! http://majoritydiscord.com/ Get all your MR merch at our store: https://shop.majorityreportradio.com/ Get the free Majority Report App!: http://majority.fm/app Check out today's sponsors: Factor: Head to https://factormeals.com/majority50 and use code majority50 to get 50% off. That's code majority50 at https://factormeals.com/majority50 to get 50% off! Blueland Cleaning Products:  Blueland has a special offer for listeners. Right now, get 15% off your first order by going to https://Blueland.com/majority. You won't want to miss this! That's https://Blueland.com/majority Blueland dot com slash majority to get 15% off. Sunset Lake CBD: Folks, right now, when you use code DELTA at checkout, you can get 25% off ALL of Sunset Lake's gummies, including new (Delta)(Nine) gummies. This sale ends on March 6th. See https://SunsetLakeCBD.com for terms and conditions. And as always you can get 20% off sitewide with code “leftisbest” one word. Follow the Majority Report crew on Twitter: @SamSeder @EmmaVigeland @MattLech @BradKAlsop Check out Matt's show, Left Reckoning, on Youtube, and subscribe on Patreon! https://www.patreon.com/leftreckoning Check out Matt Binder's YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/mattbinder Subscribe to Brandon's show The Discourse on Patreon! https://www.patreon.com/ExpandTheDiscourse Check out Ava Raiza's music here! https://avaraiza.bandcamp.com/ The Majority Report with Sam Seder - https://majorityreportradio.com/

Find me and the show on social media @DrWilmerLeon on X (Twitter), Instagram, and YouTube Facebook page is www.facebook.com/Drwilmerleonctd TRANSCRIPT: Announcer (00:06): Connecting the dots with Dr. Wilmer Leon, where the analysis of politics, culture, and history converge. Drt Wilmer Leon (00:13): Welcome to the Connecting the Dots podcast with Dr. Wilmer Leon. And 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 they occur. During each episode, my guests and I have probing, provocative, and in-depth discussions that connect the dots between current events in the broader historic context in which they occur. This enables you to better understand and analyze the events that impact the global village in which we live on today's episode. The issue before us is the ongoing struggle for freedom and self-determination in occupied historic Palestine. And my guest is the award-winning journalist, broadcaster and political analyst who's based in Beirut, Lebanon, Laith Maru, as always, my brother. Welcome back. Laith Mafour (01:12): Thank you for having me. I was a pleasure to be with you. Drt Wilmer Leon (01:15): So let's start with the occurrence on Sunday, February 25th, where a 25-year-old active duty member of the United States Air Force, Aaron Bushnell, emulated himself outside the Israeli embassy in the US capitol of Washington dc This was a one airman revolt against the US backed genocide currently being perpetuated by Israel in the Gaza Strip. He has died from his injuries. Your thoughts Laith on the resonance. What's the resonance of this action in the region? Laith Mafour (02:00): Well, first off, I would like to send my condolences to the family of Aaron and to all American soldiers that are thinking about the consequences of the orders that they're receiving from the depraved leadership in the United States. Aaron right now has become a symbol in the region here he's called the Martyr by the people in the streets. If you look at the social media discussions that have arisen since his emulation and sacrifice for peace in Palestine, you could see so much art being produced right now with the visual of him on fire. And what does this mean for people of consciousness? (03:02) I think right now the region was looking to see if there anybody in the west that will stand up against their violence of their governments and their participation in this genocide. And we saw finally now a human face to the American populace that they are not in alignment with the genocide being perpetuated in their name. Everybody here watched, of course, the live broadcast, the recording of that live broadcast that Aaron did. And there is now a clear just positioning between the selfless act that Aaron took and the security police that were holding a gun at him as he was burning alive. And this of course symbolizes on the one hand how the state and the police in the USA, how they respond to acts of sympathy and solidarity in general. And those images I think have entered now are human collective consciousness and it'll not be forgotten. It's the same as the images of the Buddhist monks that burned themselves during the Vietnam War. And of course American citizens that did the same during the Vietnam War that now are remembered as heroes of human consciousness. Aaron, while he's being attacked and by the Zionist right now after his martyrdom and by the American establishment and media after his martyrdom, he will be remembered 30 years from now by the American people as an icon of American humanism. Drt Wilmer Leon (05:16): Lathe, I appreciate you connecting the dots with the burning monk from 1963 because that's what exactly what I thought about when I saw the video. And for those that don't know, back in June 11th, I think it was 1963, there was a Vietnamese monk named thick Kwang Duk who a Buddhist monk who protested against the persecution of Buddhists in South Vietnam by the government of President dm. And some of the dots that I connected were that Vietnam was a failed French colony as occupied is a failed colony. And in both cases, connecting the dots here, the United States stepped in to try to save the genocidal colonies. And then this also made me think about France Fanon and his book Dying Colonialism, where he talks about the impact that this oppression has on the colonized and that once they finally come to grips with their oppression and how they must resist their oppression, they can't be stopped. And so errands, Aaron Bushnell's martyrdom from all the way across in the United States to me, shows not only the residents within Palestine, but what's happening around the world. Laith Mafour (06:47): Yes, definitely. Look, colonizers that are in Palestine right now are being emboldened by the support of the Western regimes. We see them filming themself committing war crimes and distributing it on social media because they believe that nobody will ever hold them responsible. And so to look at the demonstrations that are happening in the west and how it's been going on for five months now, almost these demonstrations and that they have either been ignored by western media and or have been repressed by the authorities in the West, we see, for instance, last week students, underage students coming out from high schools in New York and getting beaten up and arrested. We see the same happening in Italy where underage high school students walked out to end the war in Palestine. And again, they got beaten and arrested by the police in Italy. And so the population itself in the west who have awakened, who who've seen the same images that we all saw on this planet are reaching now a moment of realization that their own elite governments will refuse to represent them, refuse to listen to them. (08:35) And this is why an action like Aaron's action of his martyrdom is going to be considered a turning point in this movement in the west. Now, he forced a discussion on the media that has been silencing the population for so long, and now more and more of the populace that are out in the streets will be willing to take more direct action. I say this because what Aaron did, maybe we don't need everybody to obviously emulate themselves, but it is the responsibility of specifically white people in the West to put their life at risk to end the genocide that is being committed in their name. And I would say this responsibility is even heavier on Jewish white people in the West. We've been seeing Jewish voices for peace or independent Jewish voices, all these organizations that are anti-Zionists doing regular demonstrations, blocking central square, whatever, a train station or going into a museum or what have you. (10:10) These are all ineffective actions, number one. Number two, they fall way below the threshold of the responsibility of Jewish white people. Jewish white people have to put their life at risk and occupy apac, occupy the synagogues that are pitching hate from the pulpits and free Judaism from Zionists. This may mean they will go to jail. This may mean they're going to get beaten up by the police, but that's the least they can do. This is not the responsibility of a Palestinian Arab or Muslim American or even a black American where all these, our communities are already suffering from the repression of the states. Our communities are already counting their martyrs in Palestine and Congo and Sudan and Haiti. So if are viewers here that are Jewish, that are anti-Zionists or white that are anti-Zionists, you should take the lead of Aaron. And it doesn't mean that you need to emulate yourself, but you do have a responsibility to put your life at risk in order to be not sculpted in the genocide. Drt Wilmer Leon (11:49): To that point, what message gets sent when an African-American woman like US ambassador to the un, Linda Thomas Greenfield cast the vote against the peace settlement in the UN or US vice president, African-American woman, Kamala Harris, goes to Kom trying to pitch the US invasion of Haiti. Or you have members of the Congressional Black Caucus that are engaged that are coming to Israel on behalf of apac people like Congressman Gregory Meeks and some of the others. What signals are being sent? How is that being perceived in Lebanon? How is that being perceived in the region? Laith Mafour (12:41): You mentioned, what's his name? Drt Wilmer Leon (12:45): Gregory Meeks? Laith Mafour (12:46): No, the wretched of the Earth. Drt Wilmer Leon (12:48): Oh. Laith Mafour (12:50): And he obviously spoke to us about black faces with white masks. And this is what people see with the American ambassador of the United Nations. I mean, people are calling her Aunt Jamima, so she's selling the white flower on behalf of the elite. And so Drt Wilmer Leon (13:18): I wrote a piece where I called it minstrel diplomacy. It's black faces on white supremacy. Laith Mafour (13:26): Exactly. And this is what the west has been trying to do for the last 20 years with the bringing of Obama into power to give a black face to American imperialism and colonialism and destruction of seven countries under Obama. Of course, that never benefited anybody who's black or African in origin, nothing that came out of Obama helped the African-American communities. We watch this and I think the propaganda machine is collapsing of the West because there's nobody now that can be tricked the same way that people were tricked in 2008 to elect Obama. In fact, we see the Palestinian Arab Muslim communities in Michigan, for instance, saying that they will vote against Biden no matter what they want to punish him. So even trying to scare these oppressed communities in the US to vote Biden so Trump doesn't get elected, well, they don't care anymore. They all know these communities that it doesn't matter whether it's Democrat or Republican that's going to be in charge in the White House. (14:49) They love to spill Arab blood and Muslim blood, and they will continue in their genocide of the Sian people. People are not going to vote for Biden, not because they think Trump is going to do better. They actually know that he is going to do the same, but they will refuse to be pawns in this duality of theatrics that is called American democracy. And I think the looking at the African-American community, they're also coming, many of them are coming to this realization also. And we saw the churches in the us, the black churches taking position for ceasefire and what have you. Drt Wilmer Leon (15:40): And that's a great, great, great point. There's another story that's in the Washington Post, Hamas leader hiding in Gaza, but killing him, risks hostages. Israeli officials say that they're closing in on yay the accused architect of the October 7th resistance, and they're questioning whether his death will help in the war. They say that that's up for debate and that he's hiding in this labyrinth of tunnels surrounded by Israeli hostages. And there's all this debate and discussion going on. How is this, what's the story there coming out of Lebanon as it relates to S, and hopefully I pronounced it correctly? Laith Mafour (16:34): Yeah, I mean, look, the Israeli propaganda has been flip-flopping for the last month about the whereabout of noir. For a while, they were telling us that he escaped through tunnels to Egypt, and he's hiding in Egypt while his people are being slaughtered by Israel. Now we're being told, no, no, no, he's actually underground. And he's not only using Palestinians as shields, he's also using Israeli POWs as his human shields. So the propaganda of Israel can't decide what it wants. It throws everything possible, every lie possible to catch the audience. We keep on hearing that Israel is that once the representative of Western civilization and that the attack on Israel is an attack on the West, and at the same time we're being told that Israelis are somehow indigenous to Palestine. So they can't make up their mind, and they will throw every possible propaganda point out there, and hopefully one of them will stick with some of the audience, and that's what they continue to do. So go ahead. Drt Wilmer Leon (17:51): Well, what about the subtle or not so subtle message that comes from stories like this one man versus the movement that in this Washington Post article, it says that the actions by the IDF cannot stop until he's captured as though capturing one man is going to have a dramatic impact on an entire movement. And from what I can discern, this whole one man versus the movement thing that left the station 75 years ago, Laith Maru. Laith Mafour (18:36): Oh yes. And the Israelis have periodically assassinated leaders of Palestinian resistance. Even just a few months ago here, the representative of Hamas in Beirut was assassinated through missiles in Al Southern suburb of Beirut. And Hamas still goes on similarly with Islamic shihad, similarly before them feta and the PLFP. I mean, look, the quest for liberation and the idea of liberation, you can't assassinate that, number one. And as we see Palestinians over the 75 years have built their structures of their organizations and the knowledge sharing and in ways that it doesn't matter if you assassinate one person, there's another 10 people behind them that have the same skills, have and have the same positionality, and they continue on. Of course, this is not to underestimate the human factor. I speak differently than somebody else. People like me differently than they like somebody else. And yes, sometimes assassinations of of resistance can have a deterrence, but not in the situation of Palestine. (20:05) Palestine right now in itself is the symbol. And every Palestinian that is born knows how many of their families have been killed and raped and expelled. And why Israel? And this is enough fire to keep this struggle going till the end of this Zionist colony. And this is what is happening right now. We are witnessing the end days of the Zionist colony, and it's a bloody affair. It's going to be a bloody affair because the Zionists themselves and those who are behind them in the West are refusing the solution of South Africa. And they're also refusing the solution that aladin, as you'd call him in English, gave to the crusaders. So we will see a fight to the last man and it's going to be bloody. We're coming now to an end of the first stage, the direct war inside Gaza. We're now at the doors of the second stage, which is a wider war in the region that includes all the non-state actors, Hezbollah law, Iraq, and Syria resistance versus the United States and Israel. And this next second stage will last to four to five months. And as we get closer to the American election, we could be seeing a direct war between Iran and the United States. Drt Wilmer Leon (21:45): Hassan Nara, the head of Hezbollah, he said in a speech, I want to say it was last week, that this issue now has become bigger than just the Palestinians, that this is now a regional issue. And I interpreted that as kind of a clarion call, all adults in the pool. Now everybody's got to be in. Some people, I believe misinterpreted that as his kind of dismissing the Palestinian discussion, but I interpreted that as his saying. No, no, no. That's still at the heart of this struggle. But he's calling on everybody again, all adults in the pool. Your thoughts. Laith Mafour (22:32): Yeah, I mean, look at what's happening in Yemen on a daily basis. The bombings by the us, the UK on Yemen, on the capitol, on the had port, and the daily attacks by the Yemeni armed forces on American, British, and Israeli shipping boats and on the American and British Navy. So we've reached now the United States itself is admitting that they are now embroiled in the largest and most sophisticated naval battles since World War ii. This is not anymore just to confine to Palestine and the repercussions of this war. And as it rolls out even further, before it even opens up fully as a regional battle, we are already seeing historical things that have been set for 600 years. For instance, the naval supremacy of Europe and the United States and control of all waterways that has been now demolished by Yemen before we even got into a full war. It's done in 600 years of history thrown into the garbage, and now we're entering a new era in naval history and control and battle mechanisms and what have you. Similarly, as we now roll into a full war between Lebanon and Israel, we are going to see an end of air supremacy of the West, and we'll discuss that more as we go on with this hour. Drt Wilmer Leon (24:36): You mentioned just a couple of minutes ago about the end of the colony, and there are those who will argue, and I think this is a very valid point, that one of the reasons why the United States is backing the Zionist colony to the degree that it is, is because the West truly understands that the end of Zionist colonialism and occupied Palestine will bring about the end of colonialism itself, whether it's in Niger, in Congo, we pick a colony that this is the linchpin that as goes Israel, so goes the rest of colonization. Is that hyperbole or as we look at what transpired in Vietnam, as Dr. King said, the moral arc of history is long, but it bends towards justice. Laith Mafour (25:35): Yeah. Look, to make it easier for some of our viewers to understand what's the historical moment that we are living. At the end of the Soviet Union, collapse of the Soviet Union, the United States went into a stage of expansion, rapid expansion of its imperial borders, and try to swallow every state that escaped the colonial era after World War ii. And so Somalia, Yugoslavia, Iraq, blah, blah, blah, tens of states, Granada, all of those that got swallowed in by American imperialism. And this stage of expansion reached its furthest point with the capture of Ukraine and the war in Syria. So the fact that the United States lost the war in Syria, that was the furthest point of expansion of American imperial borders, taking one third of Syria and being defeated there. The war in Ukraine was the beginning of the stage of shrinking of the imperial borders, the Russia liberating east and South Ukraine, that meant the United States borders, imperial borders retracted. (27:01) And today the war in Palestine, if Palestine is liberated and it will be liberated, I don't know at what cost humanly it'll be, but it'll be liberated. When the Palestine is liberated, it will force the United States to retreat to its natural borders. Okay? Palestine is the point of projection of power of the United States as an empire into all of Western Asia and into all of East and North Africa. And if the United States loses this base, it is forced to retreat to its natural borders, and that means an end of American imperial era. And this is why we see the United States fighting full force to maintain the Zionist colony because they know the outcomes of it will lead to the liberation of Palestine will lead to that all of Africa and Asia escapes its grip, and we will see revolutionary movements mushrooming across that continent. We already see how the West lost the Sahel countries, Maui, Burkina Faso and what have you that are entering into a federation Now. We're going to have a central African Federation of States that's going to encompass huge amounts of land resources and people that will rise into becoming a pole inside Africa. This is going to be just the beginning of the end of imperialism. Drt Wilmer Leon (28:39): There's another story. This came through Almadi English, Hezbollah Downs, Israeli Aires four 50 drone over South Lebanon. The Islamic resistance announced that its fighters successfully shot down a large air maze, Israeli drone, violating Lebanese airspace over the town of I TFA in South Lebanon using a surface to air missile. Again, hopefully I got that pronunciation somewhat close to reality. And they said that the downing of the drone could be seen with the naked eye. What is the significance of Hezbollah being able to down a drone, an Israeli drone of this type? Laith Mafour (29:28): This is the most advanced Israeli drone. It is the jewel on their crown of drone production. It costs them, I don't know, almost $2 million to produce one of them. And the Lebanese resistance shooting it down over the central part of Lebanon showed that the first off, they have the air defenses that can track this supposed stealth drone. And by the way, the Israelis had to shoot two missiles from what they call David's Lynch, or what do you call it? The swing sling Sling. David Sling, okay. It's such a blasphemous thing to name a weapon of war used in genocide in the name of our prophet David. So they used their most advanced air defenses to try to shoot down the anti-air missile from Hezbollah. They shot it from inside Palestine, probably stationed around 70 kilometers inside the occupied Palestine, so it doesn't get targeted by Hezbollah missile and shot it over Lebanon to try to stop these Lebanese air defense missiles that were trying to shoot the drone and they missed them. (30:59) And so the drone was shot down, and within an hour or so, the Israelis started bombarding the area where the drone fell, including bba, the historical city in the RA valley in central Lebanon, a hundred kilometers away from the borders of Palestine. And they hit two different farms. They claimed that they were trying to target the air defenses of Hezbollah. And in retaliation, Hezbollah actually rained missiles and drones on an Israeli colony on the border of the West Bank, a hundred kilometers into occupied Palestine. And since the morning have bombarded the Maron airb base on top of Alger Mountain in north the Galilee, and the main control and command base of the Israeli military in the Gola and heights, hundreds of missiles since the morning. So we've now entered clearly a new stage. The Hezbollah has began showing some of its advanced weapons that up until now, it's been keeping for the right moment. And there's going to be much more surprises as this war breaks out on a full scale, but a hundred kilometers inside Palestine and a hundred kilometers inside Lebanon. That means both parties are willing and ready to hit their capitals. Tel Aviv and Lebanon. Beirut are at any moment could be the targets of these attacks. Drt Wilmer Leon (33:00): In fact, elaborate on that a little bit because it was, Laith Mafour (33:08): Sorry about that. Drt Wilmer Leon (33:10): It was a couple of weeks ago that Iran sent a missile into Pakistan. And the distance that missile traveled, as I understand it, was around 800 or 900 miles, and it struck its target. There are those who said then that that was as much of a message to the United States and to the west, that they could strike Tel Aviv because the distance between the two was about the same. And so now you've got the shooting down of this Israeli drone. You have Ansara Allah in Yemen that they're using, relatively speaking, very cheap missiles, something like $2,000 of missile to impact the global maritime trade through the Red Sea. The whole dynamic in the region has changed since the last Israeli Lebanese war. And if Israel couldn't beat Lebanon, then I don't know how they think they can do anything. Now, am I right to connect those dots? Laith Mafour (34:29): Oh, yes. Oh yes. And look, even Yemen, up until now, we were told by the commander of the American Navy in the region Central command in interviews to American media that not only is this the largest naval battle since World War II that the US is involved in, but this is also now the first time in history that a ballistic missiles are used to hit moving naval targets. So this is a huge advancement for Yemen, and it shows how greatly trained these Yemeni soldiers are. And they're using ballistic missiles. They're using cruise missiles. They're using drones and naval drones and submarine drones to hit American Navy ships, British navy ships and nobody can stop them. In fact, the Yemenis themselves shot down an MQ nine drone just last week, which is the most advanced American drone. It costs tens of millions of dollars. And then they also captured the most advanced American submarine drone, captured it as a whole Yemenis, and they brought it up to the beach, and they're going to hand it over to Iran and Russia who are going to reverse engineer it. And so Yemen in itself, we should not underestimate their capabilities. And I tell you, if this war breaks out in full, I think up until now, the Yemeni forces have been restraining themselves on purpose, not sinking fully American destroyers or aircraft carriers. But if we have a full war with Lebanon here, I bet you that Yemen will definitely be sinking American Navy ships. Drt Wilmer Leon (36:41): Help me with the history here. I think I've got a fairly rough understanding when we hear the name an Allah, I believe that that roughly translates into helpers of God and that the history is that as the prophet may peace be upon him, was going from Mecca to Medina. He went through Yemen and was assisted in his travels, was defended and supported in his travels by those who from that assistance called themselves the helpers of God. And so to me, going back to Fanan, this goes to the mindset of the individuals that you're engaging in. And so if folks have this mindset, this belief that they are truly helpers of God, you're dealing with an enemy unlike the American forces, who in many instances are in it for a job. This is one reason why these folks have been as the fierce fighters that they've been for the centuries that they've been. Again, is that hyperbole or am I connecting some dots here? Laith Mafour (38:03): No, you're connecting a lot of important dots. Anah means people in solidarity kind of so those who are in solidarity with God and the Yemeni people have a long history that much of you in the West don't know, but they are the original Arabs. The marriage between the Tite tribes and the Canaanite tribes is what gave us what we know as the Arabic people. It is one of the oldest civilization on this planet, queen Sheba and what have you. These are very faithful people that are very tough and humble at the same time, they were the first outside CCA to become Muslim and support the prophet Muhammad and stand in solidarity with him. And of course, they were known as some of the best seafarers in the world. They would travel from Yemen all the way to the Philippines and Indonesia and all the way down to Madagascar and Mozambique, and through their trade and good behavior and spread Islam and spread Islam without any fights. (39:38) You couldn't say that they've ever forced anybody to Islam Yemenis. In fact, they're good deeds and they're good behavior. It's what spread Islam to the most populist Muslim country in the world, Indonesia and so forth. So the way that the West wanted to replace this honorable Arab that is symbolized by the Ani, by the oil sheikhs, the gluttonous oil shakes that the West created as the archetype of Arabs today, the Yei people with their outwardly behavior and stance to the world rebirthed, the honorable Arab to the world, and have frustrated this a hundred year propaganda machine that made the Arab into this filthy oil shakes that are hungry for prostitution and spending money. Drt Wilmer Leon (40:44): The Washington Post has reported that as ceasefire talks continue in Qatar, that the Palestinian Authority President has accepted cabinet resignations, president mah mud Abbas, the head of the Palestinian Authority. He has accepted the resignation of his prime Minister and of his cabinet, and they put this in the context of new, what they call political arrangements that are necessary to achieve Palestinian consensus. And I interpret this as really being a total misrepresentation of reality because as I understand it, particularly relative to this conflict, MABAS has almost no impact, has no control. The Palestinians don't trust him. And so he really seems to be operating as an emissary for the West as opposed to really being able to have any impact on the outcome of this conflict. Laith Mafour (41:57): Yeah, I mean, they're trying to create a Palestinian leadership before the war is even over. And of course, it's not going to go anywhere. The Palestinian groups like Hamas, Islamic Jihad, the PLFP, all others other than feta have been constantly calling for a unity government for a representation at the Palestinian Liberation Organization for a disillusion of the Palestinian authority. And UD Abba as a good house slave is refusing all of these. And in fact, we heard them over the last few attacking the resistance in Gaza saying that they're kind of to blame for the deaths, repeating the racist words of his masters in Tel Aviv and dc. So he's irrelevant. And his government, whether they resign or not, I mean, what are they doing really? There's nothing that his government is doing except collaborating with the colonizer with a Zionist. And right now we can see that, for instance, Russia is trying to bring together the Palestinian factions. They've been invited to Moscow, the Fatma and Islamic Jihad. We'll see what happens there. That's a more logical path to creating a national government for the Palestinians than what the West is trying to do, which is irrelevant really. Drt Wilmer Leon (43:44): So it sounds as though in terms of what's being promoted through the Western media as in the Washington Post, that by going through the path of Mahmood Abbas, the United States to a great degree, is really negotiating with itself. And that because they don't have in the, they make it appear through their descriptions that they have the major players in the room. And I think I read today that a ceasefire is on the horizon. Laith Mafour (44:20): You put your finger on the right button there. You see, they've been saying that there's going to be a ceasefire yesterday. Biden is like, oh, we're going to have a ceasefire over the weekend. And Hamas is like, what are you talking about? We haven't got received anything. Who are you talking with? And this is what it is. There's a circle that's without using that awful word that you do it of Jordanian, Egyptian, Turkish Qari, American and Israelis, and they're all, so they're wishful thinking, but there's so much under so pressure that they're coming out. They're pressure Drt Wilmer Leon (45:01): From who, pressure from whom they're under so much who's under the pressure and under pressure from who Laith Mafour (45:06): They're under pressure from their own populace. They're under who's they? The west elite, the western elite, and the elite in Jordan, Egypt, qar and what have you. They're all under a lot of pressure. So they have to keep on pretending that there is on the one hand a ceasefire possibility and on the other that they can achieve it. Of course, the Palestinians are not going to surrender in Gaza, and the Israelis and the Americans are going to have to either end this war with a defeat and or actually continue to a larger war that's going to have a bigger genocide happening. Drt Wilmer Leon (45:57): There are reports that Danish pension funds are divesting from Israeli banks and companies that financial institutions across Denmark, they're facing new increased pressure from the Danish public to withdraw their investments. This is coming from the new Arab to withdraw their investments from Israel as demonstrations continue for the fourth month running in protest against the ongoing genocide in Gaza. What I see here now manifesting itself in Denmark, I connecting the dots to what transpired in South Africa with the Western move to divest pension funds and other interests from those doing business in South Africa. Are you seeing similarities here? And as we talk about the BDS movement, it seems now to be gaining a lot more traction. Speak to that, please. Laith Mafour (47:06): Yeah, this is one amongst many, obviously it's a huge success to have this withdrawal of all investments. We saw Spain stopped the sale and transfer of weapons to Israel. We saw Japanese arms companies cutting their contracts with arms manufacturers, and this will continue, hopefully, but look at the difference. We have to always, yes, we have to look for similarities with previous struggles, but we have to also recognize the differences during the war for the liberation of South Africa, Namibia and Angola from apartheid control and colonialism. We had Cuba come down with fighters to aid Angola and Namibia in their struggle. But we didn't see Americans come to the aid of South Africa militarily, openly, yes, they were supplying them with weapons, but they were not bringing their navy to fire at Cuban fighters. But what we see today is the United States, the United Kingdom, and pretty soon now we will be seeing European ships. 27 European countries said they were going to send their navies to support the US and the UK in their fight against Yemen. We will see now all of Europe fighting Yemen on behalf of Israel. So this is, I think the limitation of the comparison, the limitation of the comparisons. It seems that the West will fight all the way to maintain the Zionist colony. While they didn't do that, in the case of South Africa, Drt Wilmer Leon (49:03): There's another story. And this one they say was not widely reported if reported at all, Israeli operations in Gaza are in total chaos thanks to private privatization of logistics. They talk about in Tel Aviv that they begin a large scale invasion of Gaza on the 27th of October. And that this was basically a total failure that the Israelis really had no clue. They were in total confusion, they were in total chaos. And that this wasn't that widely reported. One of their retired generals, IDF, major general, its brick, said that there is a total mess that's not being talked about in the media. He was a veteran of the 1973 Yan Kippur War and the 1982 Lebanon War. He said, behind our excellent soldiers, there is total chaos, equipment, logistics, food, everything that needs to be moved forward is not working properly because the Army has entrusted everything to private companies. Because we had been led to believe before all of this started on the 6th of October that the IDF was the superior force, and that a lot of folks figured, oh, that once Hamas went in on the sixth, that oh, couple days this is going to be over. And now what we're finding is now they're struggling for survival. Laith Mafour (50:49): Yeah, they're struggling very, very hard. And remember, on October 7th, Hamas managed to take over 11 basis Israeli basis on the borders of Gaza and the main Shaak and Mossad base deeper in away from the border with Gaza and the main headquarters of the Israeli police special forces like the swat. And so they kept, Drt Wilmer Leon (51:23): Didn't you tell me that Israel lost 12 generals? Laith Mafour (51:28): Yes, Drt Wilmer Leon (51:29): On the 6th of October. Laith Mafour (51:30): So they lost 12 generals on the 7th of October and all their underlings basically also. And so these are the elite units that Israel had and the frontline units with Gaza destroyed completely. And since then, of course, everybody that they replaced these generals with has been practically slaughtered on the battlefield of Gaza, the ages of commanders in the Israeli military that are being declared as dead in the beginning of this war, the average age for a lieutenant colonel or major general were in their late thirties, early forties. Now the ages are in the early twenties, so this is around the 20 year drop in the age of officers in the core that the Israeli military has. So this means that they, they don't have the experience anymore. They don't have the knowledge of the battlefield. And now you add to it that you have mercenaries and private companies doing these supplies for Israel, and you clearly have chaos and add to it that you have American, British, French General sitting in the command center, everybody with their own views of things, it's a total mess. And it's showing that the Israeli military doesn't have options. They can't imagine options except genocide, which they are good at targeting civilians. Drt Wilmer Leon (53:24): In the couple of minutes that we have left, I want to give you the mic and allow you to speak to the West, speak to the world. This is an international program. What are the two major, two or three major things that you feel are not being communicated in the West that people really need to hear in order to have a better grasp of the reality in the region, to have a better grasp of the reality on the ground? Laith Maroth, the floor is yours. Laith Mafour (54:01): First thing I would say to our western audience is that they should be doing more to not only to help us in Palestine, liberation of it, but to get themselves ready for it's coming. For them, they already lost the right to speech, the right to media representation. The right to assembly is almost disappearing. And now, as we saw in the United Kingdom last week during the vote on the ceasefire brought by the socialist, this the Scottish Nationalist Party, they've also lost their right to representation, democratic representation at their parliaments. And if this war continues, as I am predicting, I'm telling you, it's going to be in the next few days, going to a much wider regional war with American and British soldiers coming back in coffins, people should be ready to even lose their possibility to have any representation. The democratic representation in the US and the uk, and people may think this is a little of an exaggeration, but let's just imagine it for a second that the United States goes into full war with Iran and all the access of resistance here. (55:37) As the election is coming in the United States, will there be an election? I mean, Biden already knows that he is losing the election because of the Arab Muslim vote. It's already done. He wants to ban Trump. If he bans Trump, if he can't ban Trump, what is he going to do? We may find ourself in martial law in the West all to save the Zionist colony, and I would urge the public in the West to do something before we get to that point. Because if we get to that point and we're in martial law in the capitals of London, Ottawa and Washington, dc there's no way you can come back from that. It is the time right now to take action, to change the direction of these governments. Drt Wilmer Leon (56:35): If I'm not even going to think to put words in your mouth, but let me see if I can convey this a slightly different way. You're not predicting what's going to happen. You are looking at the current reality and discussing the possibilities of what could happen. And I remember talking with you, you and I talk all the time. I remember talking with you, I want to say last June, last July, last August. And you were saying to me, then something big is about to happen. And I kept saying to you, what are you talking about? You said, well, I don't know, but the sense on the ground is something big is about to happen. And you started saying that more even in September, you said something big is about to happen. And then October 7th happened and I said, that damn lathe boy. So it's a matter of being in tune to what's going on around you. (57:49) And the other dot that I'll connect here, and again if I'm wrong, please correct me for those that don't believe that the Western governments would attack the media. Look at what's being done to Julian Assange, and that I believe is a clear signal the United States is trying to extradite from London, an Australian citizen who's never set, to my knowledge, never set foot in the United States, has no business in the United States, and they're trying to extradite him from London for violating American law, all in the attempt to scare Western journalists to not report reality. Am I wrong To connect those dots? Laith, Maro, Laith Mafour (58:47): You're not wrong, and I just want to be clear that I'm not a fortune teller, but because I live here and have been meeting with people, seeing the things that are happening, and because I lived 27 years in Canada and the United States and married to an American, my children are American and Canadian and have worked on these subjects and have seen the repression that came on myself for this work, I can tell you what is, we're not going to see the same things that happened 20 years ago. The expulsion of students, for instance, from universities, we're going to see them being shot as we saw chemical weapons being thrown at students at Columbia University. We are getting very close as we saw right now with the Vietnam emulation coming back right now, we could be seeing very any moment now American students being shot by the National Guard because they're demonstrating for the liberation of Palestine. (59:56) This is the reality. And as we saw in Palestine here and the region expanding this war, if a war breaks out right now in Lebanon at a full scale, we're just still now skirmishes, the numbers of 40,000 dead in Gaza are going to be seen in one day. It's not going to be something. These numbers are going to explode, and this is going to drag us into those people that are demonstrating in the streets in the US and Canada and England. Are they going to demonstrate less or more when the numbers double and triple and quadruple in days of martyrs? Are they going to take more drastic action like Aaron or not? Of course they are. And how is the state going to respond? It is going to respond with more oppression and the minute the situation gets out of hand, we will see ourself in those possibilities of martial law being called in these countries. Drt Wilmer Leon (01:01:04): My dear brother, Laith Maru, I want to thank you so much for your time today. Thank you for joining the show. Laith Mafour (01:01:11): Thank you. Have a nice day. Drt Wilmer Leon (01:01:14): Folks. Thank you so much for listening to the Connecting the Dots podcast with me, Dr. Wilmer Leon. Stay tuned for new episodes that come out every week. Also, please, please, please, baby, please, baby, baby. Please follow and subscribe. Leave a review, share the show, follow us on social media. You can find all the links to the show. They are listed below. And remember that this is where the 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. Wimer Leon. Have a great one. Peace. We're out Announcer (01:02:09): Connecting the dots with Dr. Wilmer Leon, where the analysis of politics, culture, and history converge.  

Our first check in of 2024 with Havok Journal owner Charles Faint. Charles is a retired Army Intelligence officer with seven tours of duty in Iraq and Afghanistan. We begin by discussing the latest on the Israel/Gaza conflict.  Charles expects Iran to continue supporting terrorist proxies but will avoid a direct confrontation with the US. His rationale is twofold; Iran knows they cannot win a direct fight with the US and are not going to risk doing so over an issue like Gaza. They also don't feel an existential threat to their key interests. Clearly Israel will be occupying Gaza for some time. As to what comes afterward, we both agree that a “two state” solution is impractical and absorbing millions of persons who have sworn to destroy their country is definitely not a wise move for Israel. Charles notes that in the earliest days of the Palestinian Liberation Organization, most of their leaders were secular. “A Deck of Many Things” is an article co-authored by Charles and retired Army Major Mike Warnock. It provides a reflection on Colin Powell's policies in Iraq twenty years later.  They compare Powell's philosophy of “you break it you bought it” in the context of what we did in Japan & Germany following World War II. In those cases, we preserved the administrative infrastructures necessary for each of those cultures to rebuild. While “De-Baathification” was popular among the Iraqi populace, it eliminated those who knew how to keep the lights on and the sewers flowing. We also discuss Ayman Kafel's recent article in Havok Journal about the surge of terrorism in South Asia. The implications of jihadist “franchises” in these areas create a real threat to regional stability and security. Civilians are also at risk as these various factions compete for power and territory. The value of higher education to military officers and the challenges of “going back to school” is the subject of an article Charles wrote about his experiences at Yale University. In general, Charles says his experience was very positive despite having to deal with numerous misconceptions about the military held by some of his fellow students. Lastly, we have a fun discussion about Taylor Swift – NOT a topic I ever considered would come up on American Warrior Radio.

The International Court of Justice is currently hearing South Africa's case accusing Israel of genocide in Gaza. Professor Geoffrey Corn from Texas Tech University joins us to explain how we got here, the case's significance, and why the claims of genocide are baseless.  *The views and opinions expressed by guests do not necessarily reflect the views or position of AJC.  Episode Lineup:  (0:40) Geoffrey Corn Show Notes: Explainer: What You Need to Know about South Africa's Baseless Genocide Accusation Against Israel Go Deeper: 5 Reasons Why the Events in Gaza Are Not “Genocide”  Listen – People of the Pod on the Israel-Hamas War:  Countering the Denial and Distortion of the 10/7 Hamas Attack 4-Year-Old Hostage Abigail Idan is Free–Her Family is On a Mission to #BringThemAllHome What Happens Next: AJC's Avital Leibovich on the Hostage Deal and Challenges Ahead What Would You Do If Your Son Was Kidnapped by Hamas? 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. Transcript of Interview with Geoffrey Corn: Manya Brachear Pashman:   The International Court of Justice is holding its first hearings in a case filed by South Africa, accusing Israel of committing genocide against Palestinians in Gaza. While it could take years for the panel of judges to rule on the genocide accusation, South Africa has asked the judges to issue a restraining order of sorts in the coming weeks that could among other things, call on Israel to halt its effort to root out Hamas and bring home the remaining hostages, at least until a verdict is reached. Here to explain what's at stake and the questions that the court will need to weigh is Professor Geoffrey Corn, Director of the Center for Military Law and Policy at Texas Tech University. Professor Corn. Welcome to People of the Pod. Geoffrey Corn: Thank you for having me. Manya Brachear Pashman:   So you are an expert in international humanitarian law and the law of war, which to some those terms might seem contradictory, or are the? Are they actually one in the same?  Geoffrey Corn: No, they refer to the identical branch of international law, historically, we call this branch of law, the laws and customs of war. Before the end of World War II, it was referred to as the law of war. And then, of course, with the advent of the United Nations Charter, technically war was prohibited. And states engaged in armed conflicts.  And so the name evolved for many years to be referred to as the law of armed conflict, the Loack, that's still what it's called. And in official US circles, we have the Department of Defense law of war manual, and the army law of armed conflict manual, most of the world today refers to it as international humanitarian law. And that, as you know, it can be misleading because it suggests that it's really focused on human rights. In fact, IHL, or international humanitarian law is a synonym for the law of armed conflict. It's the law that regulates the conduct of hostilities, during conflicts between states or between states and non-state groups, and protects victims of war. Manya Brachear Pashman:   So let's cover another basic distinction or definition that will help listeners decipher all of this, the charges that I spoke of in the introduction, they had been brought in the International Court of Justice. And now that's the 15 judge panel of the United Nations.  Not the International Criminal Court, which is also in The Hague, but charges individuals with war crimes. So can you explain for our audience the purpose of the International Court of Justice? Geoffrey Corn: Sure, the International Court of Justice is part of the mosaic of the Charter of the United Nations, a treaty that was created in the aftermath of World War II, to manifest the international community's determination that wars not be the mechanism by which states resolve their disputes. So there are a variety of mechanisms built into the Charter of the United Nations, the one people are most familiar with is the Security Council, which is vested by the treaty with enforcement power.  So the Security Council has the authority to authorize measures for the restoration of international peace and security. So for example, in 1991, when the coalition conducted military action against Iraq to force it out of Kuwait, that was done under the authority of the Charter of the United Nations and the Security Council resolution to restore international peace and security.   One of the four components of the United Nations is the International Court of Justice. It is a successor to a prior international court that sat in the Hague, and its singular jurisdiction is over disputes between states, or to give advisory opinions on international law as requested by the Security Council or the General Assembly. But the primary function of the International Court of Justice is to serve almost like an arbitration mechanism when states have disputes so that they can resolve them in accordance with international law without resorting to force to resolve those disputes. And so it has no jurisdiction over individuals.  It is, as you know, very different from the International Criminal Court, which is a treaty based criminal tribunal, and its jurisdiction is dependent on whether or not the individual is a national of one of the treaty parties, or whether the alleged crimes occurred in the territory of one of the treaty parties is Israel is not a party to that treaty, nor is the United States. But Palestine is. They've accepted Palestine as a member of the court, which means the prosecutor for the international criminal court has jurisdiction to investigate and pursue charges for any alleged war crimes that he believes have occurred in Palestinian territory, which includes Gaza. So two very different courts, very different consequences for their assertion of jurisdiction. Manya Brachear Pashman:   So now, both Israel and South Africa are signatories of the 1948 Genocide Convention. That is precisely why these charges have been brought to the ICJ. It's because they are both signatories of that treaty. Geoffrey Corn: Yeah, so I wouldn't say charges, I would say accusation. Right, because when we say charge, we tend to think of a criminal accusation.  Let's remember that an accusation is just that. It's not proof, it doesn't prove anything. If you read the filing by South Africa, it really is an exercise in selective fact assertion and ignoring inconvenient facts, there's a lot more to this story that we're going to see when we see the Israeli filing in response. So the Genocide Convention says, if there's a dispute between signatories or contracting parties to the treaty, they agree to allow the International Court of Justice to resolve that dispute. So one of the aspects of South Africa's filing is that they alleged that they've made a number of diplomatic forays to Israel demanding that they explain how what they're doing is legal and asserting that it's genocide. And Israel has not responded to those diplomatic forays, and therefore, that's created a dispute within the meaning of the treaty. And one of the things the court is going to have to resolve is whether there is in fact, a dispute between two members of the treaty as a jurisdictional predicate to even reaching the question of whether they should impose preliminary measures. Manya Brachear Pashman:   And does that precede the ruling on provisional measures?  Geoffrey Corn: It will be it will be part of the ruling. In any in any court of law, there's always a question of jurisdiction. Now, in most cases, it's not complicated. If you commit a crime where you live, the state has jurisdiction over that crime, but in the international realm, it's often a matter of debate as to whether or not the tribunal that has been requested to adjudicate an issue is actually vested under the law with the power, that's what jurisdiction means the power to resolve that issue. So the first issue that the court's going to have to resolve is whether it in fact, has jurisdiction pursuant to the terms of the Genocide Convention. And then if it says it does, then it will go to the question of whether there is a compelling case for preliminary measures. Manya Brachear Pashman:   So we know South Africa has a history of anti-Israel positions, it has historically sided with the PLO, Palestinian Liberation Organization and it now appears to be supporting the Hamas terrorists that govern Gaza. There also might be some political posturing going on here ahead of a national election. But how did we get here? A genocide claim against the Jewish state.  Geoffrey Corn: I think the answer to that is twofold. I mean, the first is that there is a widespread public perception that the level of carnage being inflicted as a result of Israeli Defense Force operations in Gaza is intolerable. And it's created a perception among many that the Israelis are actually not just trying to defeat Hamas' military capability–they are trying to destroy in part the Palestinian population of Gaza, that that's their intent.  Now, I personally believe that that is a highly erroneous inference to draw from the facts on the ground. But this is part of Hamas' information campaign. This should be unsurprising from the inception of this conflict, they know that they cannot defeat Israel in battle.  And this is one of the ironies of Israel's military struggle against Hamas. And I would say even if it occurs, Hezbollah. These highly capable organized military groups are under no delusion that they have the capability to confront the Israeli Defense Force and defeat it on the battlefield. For them, combat is not about defeating your enemy.  For them combat serves their information campaign. They use combat to create conditions to advance their strategic information campaign of delegitimizing Israel, but more importantly, in creating pressure both within Israel and externally to force Israel to terminate its operations before it achieves its combat objectives, which are much more traditional, which is to defeat your enemy on the battlefield.  So if you think about it, for Israel, what does operational success look like? It looks like Hamas' military capability has been completely destroyed. The word destroy is a military doctrinal term, and it means that you are combat and effective without substantial reconstitution. What is Hamas' is operational objective? It's to be there when the proverbial and literal dust settles.  And that means they've got to do something that compels Israel to stop before it achieves its military objective of destroying Hamas. They can't do that by force. They can only do that by getting the international community to pressure Israel to terminate its operations before they've achieved these objectives. And the best ammunition Hamas has to do that is creating the reality and the perception of the indifference to the human suffering that's occurring in Gaza.  So this is all connected to a strategic objective of Hamas. And that's why the most prominent statistic that we hear day in and day out is what? The civilian death toll in Gaza, which ironically, never apparently includes an enemy combatant. I guess the IDF is fighting shadows, because apparently they're not killing any enemy, because every casualty is asserted to be a civilian.  And I don't want to, in any way, minimize the tragedy of human loss and war. But you cannot find an enemy that's determined to create conditions where you have to inflict civilian casualties without doing so. And that's the strategy from inception that has snowballed into a public perception that Israel's objective is much more nefarious than simply defeating Hamas. That's one factor. The other factor to be to be candid, is the terribly bombastic statements of certain Israeli government officials that fuel this perception that you have an ulterior motive here that's separate from just achieving a legitimate military goal, and the failure of the Netanyahu administration to be more aggressive in sanctioning or isolating the officials in the government who make those foolish statements.  Manya Brachear Pashman:   To be fair, I should note that Prime Minister Netanyahu did post a statement to social media after this interview was recorded in which he insisted that Israel has no intention of displacing the Palestinian population from Gaza and permanently occupying the Strip, despite those calls from some Israeli government officials.  Israel's legal team is quite likely going to emphasize the extensive precautionary measures taken by the IDF to minimize civilian casualities and they will also quite likely emphasize the ongoing humanitarian relief being facilitated by Israel since mid-October – tens of thousands of tons of medical supplies, food, water, shelter equipment. Still, that doesn't change the level of carnage you mentioned, which is incredibly disturbing for all of us.  You predicted early on that the notion of proportionality would become an issue. You predicted that back in October, regarding Israel's response, and I'm curious if you could kind of explain the notion of proportionality, the misconceptions about proportionality when it comes to warfare. Geoffrey Corn: So it's a critically important question, because if you read the 84-page submission by South Africa, they make what they allege to be the indiscriminate nature of Israeli military action, a centerpiece of their proof of genocide. o when we talk about proportionality in war, there are two different aspects of proportionality we have to understand. The first relates to the right of the state to defend itself. And that really functions no differently than if you were walking down the street and somebody attacked you under the law of self defense. You are allowed to take self help measures to protect yourself, but those measures have to be proportional to the threat. It is a mistake to assume that that is only limited to tit for tat response. They fire a missile, you're allowed to fire a missile. If someone swung a punch at you on the street. The law doesn't say you're only allowed to swing one punch back and then wait for them to punch you again. You're allowed to take reasonable measures.  So if we think about Israel's action of self defense against Hamas, what do we know? We know Hamas represents an ongoing threat of significant military and terrorist violence against Israel. And the only way that Israel would be able to be confident that it's restored its security, the security of its population, the security of its territory, would be to take military action to completely destroy Hamas' military capability.  So the way that that self defense objective is translated into military terms, in the military as a whole, you need to do what is necessary to be able to come back to the political leadership and say, the people in southern Israel are safe again. And so the idea that Israel should just terminate operations and build a wall is unrealistic, because they tried that already. They've had more limited military action against Hamas in the past, and Hamas has demonstrated over and over again, an ability to bypass their defensive measures and inflict death and injury on Israelis.  Once you're fighting, there's another component of proportionality, which is the one that we're all focused on now. And that has to do with what we call the incidental or collateral consequences of attacking a legitimate target. So if I'm going to attack a building, because there's an enemy fighter in the building, and I know that in doing so, I cannot avoid killing civilians, I have to make a proportionality assessment under the law of armed conflict or international humanitarian law. For each individual attack, the commander has to make a judgment.  First, the commander has to assess the military value of attacking the target, then the commander has to assess the unavoidable civilian risks that will be created by conducting that attack. If the commander concludes that the risk, the harm to civilians would be excessive, compared to the concrete and direct military advantage, then the attack would be considered disproportionate and indiscriminate within the meaning of international law.  So if I were to put a question to your audience: you have an enemy commander, you identify him in a bunker, that's the enemy has put under a congregation of civilians deliberately, maybe the bunker is under a school. And he's a high-level enemy commander. And you've done everything you can to get civilians to evacuate. But you know that the only way you can kill that commander is to conduct an attack that will result in 20 civilian casualties.  If we took a poll right now, is 20 civilian casualties excessive in relation to the value of attacking that target–we'd probably have as many answers as we had participants. So the reality is that when we look at an aggregate number, even if we take Hamas as numbers at face value–23,000 civilians have been killed. And we say that proves all of the attacks were indiscriminate. It's a complete distortion of the process of analysis. Because you don't do an aggregate number, you look at the individual attack, you have to decide what was the value of the attack? What was the risk that was anticipated? What measures did the attacking side do to mitigate risks? What measures did the defending side do to exacerbate risk? And you put all that into the equation. So there's been a complete distortion of the way this is actually supposed to function. And what we've created and what South Africa has done in its filing is it's created, almost a strict liability standard. If you kill X amount of civilians, your attack is indiscriminate and it violates the proportionality rule. I always ask a question in response, if you tell me that killing 100 civilians as a consequence of killing a high level enemy commander is too much. How many are okay? Can you give me a number? Is 50 okay, 20,10. There's no book. There's no manual, there's no equation.  And that's why my view from inception has been the much better mechanism for mitigating civilian risks are the steps you take before the attack to reduce that risk. And when we look at that, we see no moral equivalency because you have the Israelis trying to figure out ways to reduce civilian risk, and we have Hamas deliberately engaging in conduct that exacerbates civilian risks. Manya Brachear Pashman: There's been a longstanding concern that in the United Nations, Israel faces a double standard. Other nations don't face this kind of scrutiny when they are involved in armed conflicts, though this court has taken up separate Genocide Convention cases filed by Ukraine against Russia and another filed by Gambia against Myanmar. So is this once again a double standard or is this different?  Geoffrey Corn: Here's one of the ironies, because the effects of combat had been so visible in Gaza. The assumption is we should be dwelling on whether or not Israel is conducting war illegally. Hamas has fired over 10,000 rockets at Israel, they don't even pretend to be trying to attack military targets. They're just firing rockets at the civilian population, which is the blatant first level of violation. Now, fortunately, Israel has prevented most of those attacks from achieving their intended objective. But that doesn't mean they weren't illegal, because the law doesn't focus on whether you achieve your illegal result. It focuses on what you're trying to do.   So when people like Bernie Sanders writes an op-ed in the New York Times and says, Okay, I can see that what Hamas did on October 7 was a war crime. Well, first off, that's, you know, I mean, that's self evident. But what's ironic is he doesn't acknowledge that what they've been doing ever since October 7 is war crimes. Every time they fire another rocket it Israel. They are the ones that are blatantly an indisputably violating the law of armed conflict. And yet it's the Israeli Defense Force that is the subject of international scrutiny persistently And it's no surprise because this is the nature of modern warfare. It's a bigotry of disparate expectations. And the Israelis know it, and they're not released from their obligation because they're fighting an illicit enemy. But it is it is corrosive to fail to acknowledge that the pernicious tactics of that enemy are largely responsible for the level of civilian suffering destruction, that is becomes unavoidable when you're fighting them.  Manya Brachear Pashman:   There are still more than 50 hostages still being held by Hamas, their well-being unknown. Does that change the equation for these court proceedings or the court's decision on provisional measures? Or is that a variable for the International Criminal Court to take up? Geoffrey Corn: There's no doubt that Hamas' has objectives and its stated purpose is to commit genocide of the Jewish people in Israel. There's not going to be but what about them argument. I don't see that happening. I think it becomes much more significant for the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, because hostage taking inhumane deprivation of liberty or war crimes within the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court. We know Hamas is not going to prosecute its own individuals.  And so the credibility of that court is going to, I think, demand that they investigate and prosecute the summary execution of civilians on October 7, the sexual violence against victims, the hostage taking, the deprivation of access to the International Committee of the Red Cross. All of these are blatant violations of the law of war, and are within the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court. So if I were the ICC prosecutor, and I would look at this as objectively as I could, I would look at the conduct of the Israeli Defense Forces and whether or not they've taken corrective measures against what I believe were violations of the law. No military is perfect. There have been examples of Israeli soldiers engaging in ill discipline and unjustified conduct in Gaza. And the Israeli Defense Forces have an obligation to investigate and discipline their own. I would look at how effectively that had been done.  I would look at Hamas' actions. And if I believed there was credible evidence of a violation of the charter that was being ignored by the institutional leadership, I would indict. And if I never got them in front of the court, that's not my problem. My objective is to demonstrate that there have been violations that are worthy of being adjudicated. Manya Brachear Pashman:   Thank you so much, Professor Corn. I really appreciate you breaking this down for us. Geoffrey Corn: Thank you for having me. Manya Brachear Pashman:   If you missed last week's episode, be sure to tune in for my conversation with Dr. Robert Williams, Executive Director of the USC Shoah Foundation. He joined us to discuss the history and tendency to deny atrocities committed against Jews and the foundation's added mission of collecting the testimonies of October 7 survivors. 

Today's Life Lessons feature Dr. Kenneth Levin, renowned psychiatrist and author of several books about complex aspects of psychiatry. One of his books, 'The Oslo Syndrome: Delusions of a People Under Siege,' explores why Israel agreed to the Oslo agreements with the Palestinian Liberation Organization, which were not in Israel's best interest. Dr. Levin discusses the phenomenon of the Oslo Syndrome, where many Israelis develop sympathy for the Palestinians due to the ongoing conflict. He also touches on the issue of anti-Semitism and anti-Israel sentiment among progressive Jews. The interview delves into the historical context and the challenges faced today by the Jewish community.

*) UN Security Council to consider urging Gaza ceasefire The UN Security Council is set to meet under acute pressure from Secretary-General Antonio Guterres and will vote on urging an immediate ceasefire in besieged Gaza. The renewed push for a ceasefire was made by Arab states after Guterres made a rare move on Wednesday to formally warn the Security Council of a global threat from Israel's Gaza war. To be adopted, a resolution needs at least nine votes in favour and no vetoes by the five permanent members — the United States, Russia, China, France or Britain. *) Palestinian Authority in collaboration with US on postwar plan for Gaza The Palestinian Authority is working with US officials on a plan to run Gaza after the war, Bloomberg News has reported, citing Palestinian Prime Minister Mohammad Shtayyeh. Shtayyeh said the preferred outcome of the conflict would be for Hamas to become a junior partner under the Palestinian Liberation Organization, helping to build a new independent state that includes the occupied West Bank, besieged Gaza and East Jerusalem. "If they (Hamas) are ready to come to an agreement and accept the political platform of the PLO, then there will be room for talk…” Shtayyeh said. He also underlined that Israel's aim to fully defeat Hamas is unrealistic. *) Armenia, Azerbaijan agree to take steps towards normalisation Armenia and Azerbaijan have said they would exchange prisoners of war and work towards normalising their relations after three decades of conflict over disputed territory. The Caucasus neighbours have long fought over the Nagorno-Karabakh region, which Azerbaijan reclaimed after an offensive against Armenian separatists in September. The two sides agreed in a joint statement to seize "a historical chance to achieve a long-awaited peace in the region". Both countries have said a peace agreement could be signed by the end of the year. *) EU to give member states authority to halt Russian gas imports The European Union is poised to give its member states the power to halt gas imports from Russia and Belarus, according to a Financial Times report. Any member state will be able to block companies from Russia and Belarus from obtaining space in their gas pipelines and liquefied natural gas terminals, FT cited a draft legal text proposed by Brussels. The EU member states could have the authority to "partially or, where justified, completely limit" access to infrastructure to gas operators from Russia and Belarus, in order to protect their vital security interests. *) After day of rest at climate summit, COP28 negotiators turn back to fossil fuels The United Nations climate conference begins its final week with negotiators expected to zoom in on the future of fossil fuels. Negotiators will work to finalise a key document called the Global Stocktake, which evaluates the world's climate change progress since the 2015 Paris agreement and what needs to be done now to limit global warming. Professional negotiators will turn in a new draft to senior national officials, many at minister levels, who will have to make the political decisions.

Show Notes and Transcript For 6 weeks we have witnessed conflict in The Middle East.  Israel have responded to the October 7th terror attack with force.  Brigitte Gabriel joins us to help make sense of this war in Israel.  As the Founder of ACT for America, Brigitte has been a well known American voice of truth for 2 decades, an upbringing in Lebanon gives her a unique perspective on The Middle East and on regional tensions.  Who exactly are Hamas? What part does religion play in this war? Can Israel win both the military and publicity battle?  Brigitte answers all of these questions and more. ACT for America: ACT NOW - TAKE ACTION https://www.actforamerica.org/  Brigitte Gabriel is a leading commentator on politics, culture, and national security. As a legal immigrant to America born in Lebanon, Ms. Gabriel survived war in the Middle East living in an 8x10 underground bomb shelter from the age of 10 until 17 years old. She lectures nationally and internationally, and her expertise is sought after by world and business leaders. Ms. Gabriel moved to Israel in 1984 and became a news anchor for “World News,” an evening Arabic news broadcast for Middle East Television seen throughout Israel, Egypt, Syria, Jordan, and Lebanon. Her work is of international scope has brought her in contact with world figures such as Margaret Thatcher, George H. Bush, Queen Nour El Hussein, Itzhak Rabine, and Shimon Perez. Ms. Gabriel immigrated to the United States in 1989 and founded a television production and advertising company. Her clients included ABC, NBC, CBS, Discovery, TLC, History Channel, CNN, the Oprah Winfrey show, 20/20, World News Tonight, and Good Morning America just to name a few. She has addressed the United Nations, Australian Prime Minister, members of The British Parliament/House of Commons, members of the United States Congress, The Pentagon, The Joint Forces Staff College, The US Special Operations Command, The US Asymmetric Warfare group, the FBI, and many others. In addition, Gabriel is a regular guest analyst on Fox News Channel, Newsmax, OAN, and many American and international media outlets worldwide. Ms. Gabriel is the Founder and Chairman of ACT for America, the largest national security grassroots organization in the U.S. with over one million members. She speaks Arabic, French, English, and Hebrew. Connect with Brigitte.... WEBSITE:            https://www.actforamerica.org/                              https://brigittegabriel.com/ X:                          https://twitter.com/ACTBrigitte?s=20&t=nsIfzJ-aNH20EjHE2tq25g                              https://twitter.com/ACTforAmerica?s=20&t=nsIfzJ-aNH20EjHE2tq25g INSTAGRAM:       https://www.instagram.com/brigitte_gabriel/?hl=en 'Rise: In Defense of Judeo-Christian Values and Freedom'  Available in hardcover, e-book or audio-bookhttps://amzn.eu/d/bLhqPWQ Interview recorded 13.11.23 *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 Twitter https://twitter.com/TheBoschFawstin?s=20  To sign up for our weekly email, find our social media, podcasts, video, livestreaming platforms and more... https://heartsofoak.org/connect/ Support Hearts of Oak by purchasing one of our fancy T-Shirts.... https://heartsofoak.org/shop/ Transcript (Hearts of Oak) Brigitte Gabriel. It is wonderful to have you back with us. Thank you so much for your time today. (Brigitte Gabriel) I'm so delighted to be back with you, Peter.  So good, and I wish we were talking about a different subject rather than what is happening at the moment in the Middle East and Israel. But first, the viewers can find you @ACTBrigitte and they can also get you on your website brigittegabriel .com, just dot com at the end. And just in case our viewers haven't come across Brigitte before she's been with us before but she is national security analyst, New York Times best -selling author and chairman of Act for America and her latest bestseller is Rise in Defense of Judeo -Christian Values and Freedom. I want to get your thoughts on, I mean there's Hamas, there's Islam, there's the Israeli response, there's Benjamin Netanyahu's political legacy, intelligence failures, international political and media response, danger of spreading, etc, etc. There's so many pieces to this. Let's see what we can unpack in the next 45 minutes. Maybe start at the I mean, October the 7th, the worst attack, I think, in modern day Israel, over a thousand citizens murdered by Hamas on that day. What were your thoughts, I guess, whenever you first saw that breaking? What were your initial thoughts? Disbelief. If I can describe it in one word, disbelief. Watching Jewish people run for their lives, being chased by Hamas terrorists, watching Hamas holding girls, running with them, the girl on the motorcycle, kids running, Hamas parading women, girls, and trucks and Jeeps. I mean, it was disbelief that this could actually happen in Israel to Israelis on Israeli territory. The first question on my mind was, what happened to security? I mean, Israel is known for the intelligence. The intelligence failure was the first and biggest question that popped up in my mind. How could this be? The intelligence failure, how did it happen? I think a lot of people worldwide were in utter shock that this happened in Israel, that Hamas, was able to pull something like this. I mean, look, you and I know people. We have followed the Palestinian problem. We have followed Palestinian news. Nobody in Gaza can pull this off. This is not brains that put this together in Gaza. So, immediately, we knew that, you know, as a terrorism analyst who's been following this for years, I knew that Iran was behind it. I mean, being born and raised in Lebanon, following the progression of Hezbollah in Lebanon, growing, becoming an army, becoming a major army, a structure, discipline, training, all provided by Iran, funding provided by Iran. I knew that Iran was going to be behind the Hamas massacre. So these are all the questions that immediately came to my mind. But again, the word disbelief is what me and many other people across the globe probably felt at that moment. Yeah, there's so many questions, and you're right. One of the reasons I really wanted you on, Brigitte, because you're having grown up in Lebanon, understanding the regional side, understanding the religious context, and now obviously living in America and seeing it from a U .S. perspective. So you bring a fascinating myriad of thoughts to this issue and you're right. My first question was how has this happened? How did the Israeli government, the intelligence services, Mossad known throughout the world for how lethal they are, for how well they conduct, for, you don't know what's going to happen until it happens and then this happens. And my thoughts were actually, if I was an Israeli citizen, I would feel fairly unsafe because that trust in those institutions seems to have gone. Is that a kind of a fair assessment? I think what led to this, this is a great lead into what led to this, because this is what happens when you take your eye off the ball. This is what happens when you start bickering with each other, forgetting that, and this applies to Israel and America, by the way, because we are experiencing the same type of division in America. But in Israel, for the last year, the Jewish people in Israel, the Israelis have felt such division. The country was so totally divided at each other's throat. They forgot that they are actually persecuted by everybody around them. Everybody around them wants their annihilation. And the Jewish people and the Israeli people in Israel forgot that you need to always be united when it comes to your security. I think their hatred towards Bibi Netanyahu, their hatred towards different aspects of government, the right versus the left, the left versus the right, the religious bloc versus everybody else. I think that division and remember I mean I heard even reservists were refusing to show up even to the reserve in the last year in Israel. So there was many problems leading to this. And this goes to show you that we are fighting an enemy who is determined to wipe Israel off the map. Just because Israel was distracted and the Israelis were distracted, bickering with each other over the court system, over the voting system, over the right versus the religious, versus the liberal, versus the left, and everybody's fighting amongst each other, Hamas did not lose sight of its goal. The Palestinians have never wavered in their hatred towards Israel. And no matter how much they bicker with each other, the Palestinians, they are united on one thing and one thing alone, and that is the killing of all the Jews and driving them into the sea. So what happened on October 7th was a wake -up call for Israelis. I think every Israeli that was living in Israel on that day, including those Jews who were visiting from all over the world, Because remember, you know, this was a holiday, Simchat Torah. Everybody was visiting with their families. They were celebrating the holiday in Israel. This is a time when everybody visits Israel. And I think this was a wake -up call for the Jews worldwide to realize anti -Semitism is real. It's not just little pockets here and there. Oh, maybe it's on the rise. I think what happened on October 7th showed all the Jews worldwide, including Israelis, that the people worldwide hate you, they are on the streets demonstrating all over the globe. Sydney, Australia, New York, Canada, whatever country, France, England, whatever country around the world, they are demonstrating against you. And this is why the Jewish people worldwide need to be united on one thing, and that is their security and preservation of their life, their faith, their state, their unity, no matter what happens, no matter how much they bicker with each other on other things, they should never take their eyes off of the security of the State of Israel. You're right, because no other country has to fight for their survival and be prepared at every, every single day. Can I ask about the response? So the response from the Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been full fury, and rightly so. What is your kind of assessment as you look at that military response? Because it's a dangerous situation going into Gaza. And I think in the past, Israel have failed to deal with this. So, I mean, as you look at the military situation, how do you see that? I think good for them for showing up in force. I think this time Israel knows this is an existential threat. This is not just words like it used to be in the past. Look, Israel has never been in this situation before. I mean never Israel, before Israel when it was attacked it dealt with countries, you know, Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, they were countries recognized on the world stage, right now Israel is dealing with Hamas which is a group of militia funded by Iran on the southern border and the northern border They're dealing with Hezbollah, which is not a country. It's a terrorist organization operating within a country. They have actually taken control of Lebanon, but Hezbollah is not a country and Hamas is not a country. But they are both funded by Iran, which is an Islamist country. Devoted for the wiping, for wiping Israel off the map and so good for Netanyahu for showing full force. Look, I am pro Netanyahu. because Netanyahu understands this threat. I'm not pro person per se whether in America or in Israel. So the people come and go, it doesn't matter who's serving in whatever position right now, they come and go. I started my organization Act for America in the United States, President George Bush was in power. Bush came and left, Obama came to power. Obama came and left, President Trump came to power. Got framed and left, President Biden is in power. In one year, we will no longer have President Biden in power and somebody else is going to come. So I do not look at the person in power. I look at the policies that they support and Netanyahu from the beginning all along throughout all his political career. He is a national security hawk. He is somebody that the enemies of Israel fear because they know they cannot push Netanyahu. They cannot manipulate Netanyahu. They cannot intimidate Netanyahu, the same way people throughout the world knew that leaders, corrupt leaders that they could not intimidate or or put fear into the heart of President Donald J. Trump in the United States. They did not know what he would do if he was attacked. And the same thing with Netanyahu. So I do support Netanyahu's full force going into Gaza. Good for him to doing that. And I hope that they will not have a ceasefire. Yes, there's a lot of destruction. Look, it's collateral damage. You know, Israel did not ask for this. The Palestinians asked for this. Remember, Peter, Israel left Gaza in 2005, and they took out every single Jewish person out of Gaza. I mean, remember the fights in Gush Katif when even the Jewish people did not want to leave and the Israeli IDF turned against its own people, kicking and screaming, dragging them out, taking them, evacuating Gaza in order to turn Gaza to the Palestinians. Israel not only took the Jewish people who were alive out of Gaza, Israel went in and dug the bodies out of the Jewish cemeteries of the people who were buried in Gaza because they knew what the Palestinians are going to do to the cemeteries. You and I know what they do. They have no respect for anything. So by the end of 2005, there were no Jewish people alive or dead in Gaza. Gaza could have been an oasis. Gaza could have been Singapore. The Palestinians had an opportunity after opportunity to build Gaza to become Singapore, to build Gaza to become a commercial centre. They have received billions of dollars from the world, but they did not do that. Instead, Hamas invested in building tunnels, billions of dollars that went into the Palestinian authority that Hamas siphoned. Their leaders got rich, they built tunnels instead of investing in their own people, and now they are paying the price. And that's exactly why you are seeing the level of destruction in Gaza, because Israel is not only trying to destroy the building above ground, the majority of the threat, the main threat is what's underground. And in order for you to destroy the tunnels underground, Israel has to use the force that it is using and we are seeing the level of destruction that we are seeing. And Israel has to see this through, ignoring all calls for ceasefire from anywhere else in the world. No one else in the world is calling for ceasefire, Peter. Lives in Sderot. Live in Jerusalem. They don't. So, they need to allow the people who live in these areas, who are under the attacks of Hamas, to be able to defend themselves. Of course you hear some from the international community saying those poor Palestinians living in Gaza, they're pawns of the Israelis, they are suffering under the Israelis, they have nothing, they live in a open prison and yet when you look at the international community, you're right the money that's gone in but also what has happened, I think, is a fault of the west, because the west have seen the people there living under Hamas and haven't thought of doing a thing about it. So, I mean, how do you see that? Because there are people there, but that narrative that, oh, it's all the Israelis' fault, and yet you're right. Those living there have had, certainly the government have had, every opportunity to build something special and prosperous. Look, Peter, everybody that's about, oh, the poor Palestinians, you know, Hamas is bad, but it's the poor Palestinians who are paying the price. Who do you think Hamas is? Hamas did not fly in through the breeze and latch on some tree or latch on some hospital. Hamas are the Palestinians in Gaza. They are a part of the Palestinians in Gaza. They are elected by the people in Gaza. You know, I speak in my first book titled Because They Hate. I talk about when Hamas did the first election in Gaza. Remember, Israel pulled out. They left everything to the Palestinians. So the Palestinians had their own election, their first election. One of the lady that was elected, her name was Om Nidal. She became known as the the Om Al Muqawama, the mother of the resistance. And the reason why she ran, the platform she ran on is because she has video. She sent three of her sons to die as suicide bombers. She actually, part of her campaign was showing videos of her standing next to her sons putting their suicide belt on. Sending them to Israel to blow themselves up and they did blow themselves up and they did die and they did kill Israelis. So she ran on the platform. I already gave three sons. I have another seven to give. That's why she was elected as a member of the government in Hamas. And that's just the first example in 2006. Who do people think Hamas is? Hamas are the Palestinians living in Gaza. And that's exactly why, you know, they teach Hamas controls the ministry of education. Hamas controls the ministry of health. Hamas controls the ministry of defence. Hamas control the ministry of communication. They control everything in Gaza. And who do you think works in these people? What do you think, Hamas are like five people that just parachuted into Gaza? They are all the Palestinians living in Gaza. This is the reality that the world has a very difficult problem time accepting. And here's another thing about the poor Palestinians. Where are the Palestinian voices that when the Hamas terrorists went into Israel on October 7th and kidnapped, okay, we do not want to get into the details about massacring the babies, cutting off the heads, raping women. Burning babies in ovens, etc., etc. Let's talk about the women and the children that they kidnapped and took back to Gaza. Where are the Palestinian voices saying you can't kidnap a six -month -old baby from his mom? You can't kidnap a two -year -old little girl. You can't rape women. We are mothers. We are wives. We are grandmothers We are women, you know, you can fight man to man, but you cannot rape women. You cannot kidnap children Where are the voices of the Palestinians mothers nowhere to be found as a matter of fact? What we saw was basically the girls that Hamas took as hostage, raped, and dragged as dead after they killed in the streets of Gaza, that girl was being kicked, shoved, dismantled, instead of the people saying, no, we don't do this to dead people, especially naked Jewish women being paraded down the streets. Instead, they cheered them on with such glee, with such pride. Even the Palestinians in Gaza who were part of the Hamas massacre on October 7th. I mean, who can forget the guy calling his father, Father, put my mother on the phone. You're going to be so proud. I killed with my own hands 10 Israelis. I just couldn't wait to tell you so you can be proud of me. Who are these people? These are the people of Gaza. These are the Palestinians in Gaza. This is a reflection of a decayed society from the inside. Their end goal is destruction. They celebrate murder and cutting people off and kidnapping people and raping people. They celebrate it as a joyful act. Not even the Nazis rejoiced like that. While the Nazis wanted to kill their enemies, they did not send their own children to die and then celebrated their death just to kill their enemies. The Nazis did not do that. The Nazis knew they were doing something wrong. That's why they did it in secret. That's why they shot people in the back so they don't have to look them in the eye when they kill them. It's totally different with the Palestinians. So for all the people who are crying about the poor Palestinians in Gaza, oh, the poor Palestinians paying the price, the Palestinians in Gaza are Hamas. You make your bed, you lay in it. Yeah, and it's shocking when you see that celebration of evil, the celebration of murder, the joy. It's moronic, really. Yeah. But also, when you were speaking, I was thinking, actually, there are probably many people in Gaza who know where these people are being held, these hostages, and yet there's no rush to free them or to release them. And the international community talks about a ceasefire, but release the hostages, then by all means we can have some kind of conversation, but the call of the international community is for a ceasefire. It's actually not for the release of the hostages at all. And that's really surprised me. Right, they want the ceasefire basically for the Palestinians and Israel should not have a ceasefire. Look, last time when Israel got into a war with Gaza and they had a ceasefire, Hamas kidnapped a soldier. To this day, he has not returned back to his family. That's what they do when there's a ceasefire. The international community who is calling on a ceasefire, for what? So Palestinians can escape, so they can leave. If the Palestinians can leave in four hours, which is now the pause that they're talking about, don't you think Hamas fighters can escape as well? And Israel knows this, the reality on the ground. You know, very different than the young American nitwits demonstrating on the streets, the college kids who do not know their own history in the United States, let alone the history of overseas and the Palestinian -Israeli conflict. And that's exactly why they take to the streets, they are demonstrating for the ceasefire. The ceasefire will hurt only Israel. And actually, instead of preventing bloodshed, it may prevent bloodshed in the short term. Long term, it's going to create even more bloodshed because it's going to empower Hamas. Hamas is going to dance a victory lap, hey, look, we forced the Israelis to cease fire. We are successful against our enemies. We are getting our demands. We get to keep the hostages. We don't have to give anybody back. And we get to have a ceasefire. And meanwhile, Hamas is going to use the ceasefire to move locations, to give a rest to their soldiers, to whatever it is, take a nap, move their ammunition, it all benefits Hamas, not Israel. And right now Israel needs to take care of Hamas, period. When you look over at the West Bank, you kind of see how, although it's supposedly the same Palestinian people group, and yet they don't have the same desire to murder or kill. There is that tension, of course, but actually it's amazing when you see two groups that call themselves the same, and yet one is hell bent on murder, and the other actually complains, but actually accepts that they are living beside a neighbour who they have issues with, but they get on with life. One side can get on with life, the other side can't, and that kind of contrast of the same supposed people group is quite intriguing. Well, here's the intriguing part. The people in Fatah and the Palestinians in the West Bank are looked at as a sell-out to Israel. They're not trusted by Hamas and the people in Gaza. And actually what's so interesting, Peter, is in the last six weeks. There is such infighting. This is what the media is not talking about. I think they are up now to 200 people killed in the West Bank, Palestinians on each other because the Palestinian people want the Fatah leaders to join Hamas the Palestinian people in the West Bank are now saying to each other, if you have a rifle, because you know a lot of them have rifles that they shoot at weddings and celebration. They're saying if you have a rifle you need to either use it or give it to Hamas. So don't fool yourself by thinking, oh, the Palestinian people in the West Bank are much nicer. The only reason they're much nicer is because they're not funded by Iran. They don't have a way to communicate with Iran to go kill the Jews. But rest assured, right now, they are empowered. They are inspired. They are excited. They are mobilized. They are thinking, how can we become like Hamas? How can we make a name for ourselves like Hamas? As the heroes, the brave, the Islamic fighters, instead of the cowards, the weak, the sell off to Israel. This is the talk on the Arab streets right now. And this is the talk on the Arab street, not just within the Palestinian territories, but throughout the Arabic world on the streets. Don't kid yourself. The Arabic streets are cheering Hamas because they all hate the Jews. It's not about the Palestinians. It's about hating Israel and hating the Jews. And I think a little history lesson here is very important. Remember, Peter. When the PLO was founded in 1964. When the PLO was founded in 1964, the Palestinian Liberation Organization, it was founded to wipe Israel off the map. At that time, Gaza was in the hand of Egypt with an Egyptian flag flying over Gaza, and the West Bank was in the hands of Jordan. A Jordanian flag was flying over al -Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem. So when Yasser Arafat started the PLO, the Palestinian Liberation Organization. He was not liberating Gaza or the West Bank. Those were Jordan and Egypt. So what was he liberating? He was liberating back to the line of 48, Israel proper. They did not want an Israeli state to exist in the Middle East. But most people do not know their history. Most people ignore history. The history is boring. It's not interesting, but you know, somehow it's fashionable today in any country in the West. Not just in our country, not to teach history. History is boring, so they ignore it. But that's the reality on the ground. They want to wipe Israel off the map. Fatah is no better than Hamas. Fatah is just weaker than Hamas. Meanwhile, the leaders of both organizations, the leaders of Fatah and the leaders of Hamas, are all mega millionaires, multi, multi, multi millionaires, from all the aid that has gone to the Palestinian Territory. They siphoned it off to their pocket and it didn't go to the poor people who needed it. It went to their pockets with all their banks in Switzerland and in Paris and in London and everywhere else. They are all rich so they have a vested interest in keeping the charade going. You touched on that hatred of Israel and I mean I very much see this and the media don't talk about it in the religious context, in the hatred that Islam has of the Jewish people and that eternal enmity or hatred has been there for 1,300 years plus. Of course, no one wants to talk about that because then you've got another issue that you have to deal with. If this is just land, then you can discuss that and carve a bit here, carve a bit there. But I mean, that conversation needs to be had and that's why I think actually you do have a stalemate because you've got the history of hatred and the only thing that seems to make the Islamic nations happy would be wiping Israel off the face of the earth. Exactly. Jew hatred in context of Islam. This is the subject that nobody wants to talk about because it's very uncomfortable. You know, two things people do not want to talk about, politics and religion. And when you're talking about the religion of Islam, you are talking about politics and religion mixed in one. Islam is a political movement cloaked in religion. So let's talk about Islam. You know, we all heard about the yellow star and you know, and people think that was a German invention. The yellow star was an Islamic invention in the ninth century, in Iraq by Khalifa al-Mutawakkil, the second Khalifa of Iraq who invented the yellow star to identify the Jews as they walk down the street because Jews under Islam are considered nahas. Nahas is an Arabic world that describes Filth, bodily waste, dogs, those are considered nahas. Jews are in the same category. So the Khalifa al -Mutawakkil invented the yellow star to identify the Jews when they walked down the street. So when they were walking down the street, if a Muslim man was coming, the Jew had to cross to the other side of the street as not to dirty the Muslim man who was of higher status, clean who was walking this way. That's why they invented the yellow star. Germany, Hitler copied the yellow star because Germany was working with the Mufti Hussain in Jerusalem, who flew to Germany, worked with Hitler, shared with them what the Islamists did to defeat the Jews. And that's how Germany came up with the yellow star and used it. And as a matter of fact, Hitler had a Muslim division headed by Mufti al -Husseini of Jerusalem who was advising Hitler on how to deal with the Jews. Wow, but expand because obviously Hamas, even in the name, is what Islamic resistance movement, it is purely Islam. And you can't, no matter how much the international community wants to get away from that they can't. And of course that is the fear that that religious context pulls other nations in. That is obviously the big fear. Well, look, other nations know this stuff. Don't you think Jordan knows this stuff? Don't you think Saudi Arabia knows this stuff? Why do you think in Saudi Arabia, people like you and me cannot visit Al -Harabayn, cannot visit Al -Kaaba, cannot visit the Medina? Why do you think that is? Because we are considered filth. We're not allowed because we are Christians and Jews. We are not allowed to enter those cities. Not even Donald Trump went there when he visited Saudi Arabia. Nobody can go there unless you're a Muslim. So it's not that they don't know that stuff. It's we on our side who are pretending this stuff does not exist because we are uncomfortable discussing it because it makes us uncomfortable discussing it. Nobody wants to talk about it because nobody wants to create ripples. It's time. This is why we talk about why Islam needs reforming and why these moderate leaders need to stand up and speak up. But the moderate leaders only stand up and speak up out of fear of Israel and out of respect for Israel. Sadat signed the peace treaty with Israel, not because he loved the Jews so much, but because after the 67 war and the 73 war, they realized they cannot beat the Jews. And if you cannot beat the Jews, okay, you have to live with them. We might as well live in peace. He realized, I'm not gonna spend the rest of my days fighting with Israel. And that's why Sadat said, let's sign a peace treaty. Jordan did the same thing. Jordan followed, not because they loved Israel so much, Because they realized look we have been involved with war with Israel and 57 and 67 and 73. We're not gonna be able to win against them. They are there to stay we might as well have peace. Notice today after all the problems. This is where you are seeing now more writers in the Arabic press. Writing whether in Egypt and Jordan if we would have known Israel could be defeated. Maybe we shouldn't have signed the peace treaty with Israel. People, you know, I know Israelis want to be tolerated. They talk about tolerance all the time. Oh, tolerance, tolerance is a major thing in the Jewish language. I would much rather be respected than tolerated because people tolerate you only for so long as long as they have to tolerate you. But when they respect you, tolerance becomes a side effect of respect because they're not going to want to mess with you. And so this is why, you know, this is an issue that more people need to be talking about. And this is why we need to stand with Israel. We need to support Israel. Israel is truly the front line on this war against Western civilization. Israel is the pinnacle. It's the tip of the spear. We need to realize that Iran, which calls Israel the great Satan. Remember, Israel is the little Satan. We are the big Satan. We are the end goal. Israel is just in the way in the Middle East. Iran wants to establish hegemony, and Israel is just an eyesore in its shoulder. Tell me, because those countries around, and you obviously have an understanding growing up in Lebanon, you look at Lebanon and Syria being countries in chaos, obviously Hezbollah based up there in the north in Lebanon, but then you've got also on the other side the kind of the economic side that Israel have normalized ties with countries, trade links, and the relationships with Egypt and Jordan are probably better than they have been in the past. And then of course, you've got Iran being the outlier that anything can happen there, literally. How does that kind of fit in that closeness with some countries and not wanting tension because realizing that money talks and other countries that are in a mess and therefore anything can spring up and spark things further? Well, peace leads to economic prosperity. Right now, the reason why they are making money with Israel in Jordan and in Egypt and in Qatar and in those areas that signed, like Dubai, and those areas that were involved in the Abraham Accord as well that Trump was trying to put together and bring together. Peace brings prosperity along with it. And when you don't have peace, you don't have the prosperity. And right now, even though we're talking about prosperity and economic cooperation, how many Israelis do you think right now would dare walk in Egypt wearing their yellow star? Any street in Egypt. How many Israelis do you know right now can go or will go vacation in Jordan and wear their yellow star and walk down the street? Zero. Zero. You and I know the truthful answer to that question. Zero. So, people have economic prosperity and they have peace with you when they respect you, when they perceive you as strong. Thankfully, that is holding in Jordan, that is holding in Egypt. Hopefully, it's going to hold in other countries as well. The reason in Lebanon and in Syria and those other countries, they don't have peace with Israel is because they've got Iran supporting them fight Israel. You've got Iran trying to build another counter power to America in the Middle East. So Iran is working with Russia, which is supporting Assad in Syria. Remember, Russia propped up Assad in Syria and kept him protected. He is still here. What was the last time we heard anything about Bashar Assad in Syria? Remember five years ago it was all the news. He gassed his own people. Speaking of gassing his own people, How come we were not seeing demonstrations in the streets in every major city across the globe about the six thousand Muslims in Syria who were gassed by their own leader Bashar al Assad. Well, where were those demonstrations? What those lives don't matter? Only Palestinian lives matter? You know, yeah, the double standard is mind boggling, but the reason why Hezbollah is empowered, Syria is empowered is because they are funded by Iran. And they will continue to be funded by Iran as long as America has a weak president like senile Joe Biden or Obama before him, who empowered Iran, who sent pallets of money to Iran like Obama in the middle of the night in cash on pallets landed at the airport. Biden, right before this whole brouhaha, gave $6 billion to Iran that now we're trying to pause and put a pause on so they cannot touch it. Why? That's exactly how Iran can use the money to fund terrorism. When you have a president like President Trump, who basically had Iran almost suffocating, he had tightened the rope around Iran's neck so much with the sanctions, they were on the verge of collapse. But unfortunately, you saw what happens with the election in the United States. We have now senile Joe Biden sitting at the White House. And again, Iran is back being empowered, courtesy of the Democratic Party in the United States. Well let me ask you about that international community response because it's been initially intriguing watching all the voices come out in support of Israel because you can't do anything else when you see what happened on October the 7th. We've then seen the massive demonstrations, we have them every weekend here in London, all over the world, we see it on social media. And there's that pressure on governments and it's intriguing to watch, obviously Biden initially coming on in support of Israel. That goes against the Democrat party. There'll be tensions there. How do you see kind of all that playing out? Actually, can I answer the thing about Biden, you know, going and supporting Israel, you know, which was against the Democratic Party? Okay, let's be clear. Biden was not there to support Israel. Biden was forced Israel to invite him, Blinken, showing up immediately in Israel, sitting with the War Cabinet for seven hours, trying to convince them not to go into Gaza, forced them to invite Joe Biden. Joe Biden went there because Joe Biden knew as long as he is in the Middle East, he is basically Hamas's human shield, which will stop Israel from invading Gaza. As long as Biden was in Israel, Israel was not gonna go into Gaza. And the reason why Biden was there is to tell Israel, look, we're not going to give you or stand with you or give you the bunker buster bombs unless you agree on humanitarian aid to Gaza and to allow the humanitarian aid to enter. Biden was not there to support Israel. Biden was there to twist Israel's arm to agree to the Biden handlers, because Biden doesn't have a brain, it's whoever handling Biden, telling Biden that, you know, we need to send support for Hamas. We need to allow these trucks to enter and give gate to Israel. And they told Israel, we are not going to give you bunker busters unless you agree to that. Knowing that they had Israel by the you know what. Israel needed the bunker busters because that's the only way they can bomb the tunnels before they go into Gaza. They needed to be able to block and destroy those tunnels before they enter Gaza on the ground. And that's why Biden was there. Biden was not there because he loves Israel. He wants Israel to be strong. Biden was there for a reason, and the reason was more to benefit Hamas than to actually benefit Israel. We've seen the same from the media initially, as what else could you do, in these pictures from the seventh but then I've certainly witnessed a slow change certainly in the UK looking at the European media all focusing on, well these poor people they're simply living their lives, they're in a hospital that gets attacked by the Israelis and the suffering in the pictures and that's coming out and Israel have always had a PR problem in the media always and you see this beginning to come out again. Yes they still and they still don't know how to defend themselves even though they've got a Hasbara department you know we're willing to get together and give some tips to the Israeli government on how to defend themselves, on how to do PR but they don't and look I have sent emails to Israel I have personally I have appealed to the Israeli government to release the footage, the Hamas footage of the massacres that they have done. Israel has not released it yet. The world needs to see the images just like ISIS. You know, Hamas recorded their atrocities just like ISIS used to record theirs. ISIS used to send theirs to Al Jazeera and Al Jazeera gladly aired it of the beheading of the 20 Christian cops on the shores of whatever they beheaded them, or whatever, massacres, burning a guy in a tank, a pilot. I mean, remember, ISIS used to brag about these things, and Al Jazeera was glad to show all these images. On the other hand, Israel is reluctant to release the Hamas footage. Shooting the rape, shooting the cutting of a mother's stomach and getting the baby out. I mean, it is horrific images that the world has not seen yet. So this is exactly what gives the Palestinian a way out to saying, oh, it's ill horror. It's all hearsay None of this happened. This is all Israeli lies. Meanwhile Israel's killing all these Palestinians, which is absolutely not true. I mean the Palestinians who are the Ministry of Health are broadcasting information out the, exaggerated beyond exaggeration. I mean they're talking about that 30,000 people dead in Gaza so far and all the wounded and injured. Really? There are 3,000 hospital beds in Gaza. So where are the rest? Where are they? Show us images. Okay, so 30,000 people died. Where did you bury them? Where are they? Where did you bury them? I mean, you know, the numbers don't add up. The Gazans are not talking about how many Hamas soldiers have died. So far from the beginning of this war, we have not heard about one Hamas soldier dead. Really? With all the bombing, not one soldier dead? What about the heads of Hamas that died? Not one? We hear it from Israel when they kill somebody, but we don't hear it from Hamas. So we know the numbers are lying. Israel needs to come out and show the world the footage that they have, the monstrosities that Hamas committed against Israel, perpetrated against Israel. And I think if Israel does that, we will see a little bit of a change on the world stage with the sympathy. But Israel is not releasing those messages and all they're hearing is from the Palestinians saying this is all lies, nothing really happened. Otherwise Israel would have showed it. You know, Israel talks about beheaded children. We haven't seen anything yet. They've got to show it. And so that's the problem. And again, the media is always on the side of the Palestinians because the Palestinians scream and yell and talk about feelings while the Israelis are about logic. Israelis talk about legal stuff. You know, resolution, you know, UN article resolution 242, article one and two, they send you these big generals who speak with heavy accents, while the Palestinians, on the other hand, talk about. Oh, the poor old woman sitting in the hot sun in Gaza at a cross point for eight hours. She was about to faint and pass out because the bloody Israelis wouldn't let her pass. So the Palestinians talk about human suffering. They paint images with their words, while the Israelis talk about resolution 242, article one and two. That's how Israel loses the PR relationship, the PR relation. Let me finish off on kind of how this plays out. I mean, can you defeat Hamas? Obviously Netanyahu, this is his third time as PM. He has been a fixture on the Israeli political scene since what, the mid 90s? Probably before then, but Prime Minister since 96 in three spells. I mean, he's fighting for his legacy as well. And I'm wondering, it actually is, is it achievable to destroy an enemy that not only has absolute hatred for you, but also has spent so long preparing for this. And Israel thought when they pulled out of Gaza in 2005, they thought that's it. We're now out of this, but now they've been sucked back in. So, kind of as you look ahead, BB's legacy, but also is it possible to actually get rid of this neighbour that is always on the edge of attacking? You cannot get rid of an enemy that doesn't fear you. Back when Israel actually fought wars to win wars, not caring what the UN thought, not caring about the world media, back when Israel won 67, back when Israel won 73, the whole world was on the side of Israel. Israel fought a bloody war without caring what the UN thinks of Israel. So when Israel fought wars to win wars the people respected Israel when the new Israeli population started fighting wars thinking. Oh is the UN gonna like us? Oh my gosh. We know that you're gonna say bad things about us. Oh my goodness. What is America gonna think about us and the new generation wanted to live in a place? Oh, we don't want to fight wars anymore. We want to leave, you know. We want to have peace with them, this whole new weak generation who thought we can have peace with our enemies because, after all, we're all wonderful, and we all want to have a party, and we all want to go to concerts. And of course, Palestinian children would love to attend concerts as well. And of course, Palestinians want to live in peace as well. The Israeli side forgot what it's like. Because they had moved so far away from the Holocaust, they forgot how much people hated them. And when people hate you so much, I think this was a wake -up call to Israel to realize people really want to kill you, and not only kill you in Israel. They want to kill the Jews anywhere else in the world. They hate the Jewish people. When you see people in America screaming death to the Jews, when you see people in Australia screaming, annihilate the Jews, when you hear people from Europe on the streets, you know, less than 100 years since the Holocaust, screaming, kill the Jews. The Jewish people worldwide need to realize we have to create a country where we have to fight to survive, period. It's about us. It's not about anybody else. People in Australia do not want to kill the Americans. They're not saying kill all the Christians. They're not saying wipe the Buddhists off the map. They want to wipe the Jews off the map. So we need to defend ourselves. And so, for Netanyahu. Netanyahu's legacy is going to be, he fought as hard as he can for Israel. It's the weaklings in Israel who got so distracted and the little minutiae about whatever. And I'm not familiar with the politics inside Israel. You know, obviously I'm an outsider. I have no idea what they were fighting about. You know, we hear on the outside they were fighting over the judges and the judicial system, but obviously we're not members of the country. We do not know the intricacies of the inner fighting or the disagreements within whatever country. But when you look at the big scope, when you look at the world picture, at policies, like I mentioned to you at the beginning of this interview, I don't vote for a man, I vote for policies. Because like I said in the beginning of this interview, when I started my organization, George Bush was in power, Obama came to power, Trump came to power, Biden is in power, Biden's going to go, whoever else is going to come to power. I look at policies, not the man. The man going to come and go. And what Israel needs is a man who is willing to fight for the security and safety for Israel. Forget the name. Look at the policies. Are the policies good for Israel's survival? Is Iran going to fear an Ahud Barak or are they going to fear Netanyahu? Is Iran going to fear a lefty controller of Israel or as a right wing war hawk controller of Israel. You have to think through your enemy's eyes in order to secure your own safety. And so the only way Israel, Israel is going to be judged, not Netanyahu as a leader, but Israel, Israel's leadership in general, because Israel is a democratic nation and it's more than one man. It's a leadership. They elect their representative. And so Israel is going be judged whether the Jews took their eye off the ball and became too weak and too gullible to think they can have peace with people who repeatedly say, we hate you, we want to kill you and the Jews are not listening to those and they are not hearing the lessons of history, believe those who say they want to kill you because they usually follow through that's how history is going to judge Israel, not Netanyahu as a person, but Israeli leadership in general. Brigitte Gabriel, I love having you on. Your insights on not only Islam, but the region in the Middle East is phenomenal. I love the work that ACT for America do, actforamerica.org, one of the premier grassroots organizations in America that will show the viewers and listeners how to get involved and how to really make a difference. So thank you so much for joining us today. Thank you. Absolutely. Thank you for having me with you. And I encourage everybody, If you love Israel, if you agree with my point of view and the way I was discussing, please go to actforamerica.org and join us. We work on national security policy, and we believe Israel is a part of America's national security. That's how we were able to censure Rashida Tlaib. We led the charge in censuring Rashida Tlaib in Congress. We led the charge in isolating the support for Israel from the big bill in finance to make sure Israel gets the support. If you are a lover for Israel, please go to our website, actforamerica.org. Take action on our Act Now National. We have many bills right now to support Israel and the Jewish people and Israeli policies. Please take action. If you are an American watching us right now, anywhere in the world, please take action on our Act Now campaign and go to actforamerica.org. Thank you so much, Peter, for having me with you. It's always such a pleasure to be with you. I love having you on and it's perfect that you've left the viewers with something they can actually do because I think often people feel maybe powerless in situations and it's great that this, at the finishing this interview, they can go and they can go to the website and they can actually sign up and make a difference. So thank you for what you do and Brigitte, thank you for your time today. Thank you, my friend. Have a great day.

Keanu Heydari joins Josiah to discuss the history of Palestine, Zionism, and the state of Israel in light of the war in Gaza. As always, he is incredibly insightful.Follow today's guest on Twitter, and remember to check out his podcast and his website.Find more of Josiah's work hereFollow Josiah on Twitter @josiahwsuttonResourcesThe Israel-Palestine Conflict: A History by James L. GelvinExcept for Palestine: The Limits of Progressive Politics by Marc Lamont Hill and Mitchell PlitnickThe Hundred Years' War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, 1917-2017 by Rashid KhalidiThe Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine by Ilan PappéThe Biggest Prison on Earth: A History of the Occupied Territories by Ilan PappéShell Shocked: On the Ground Under Israel's Gaza Assault by Mohammed OmerOther texts mentionedThe Clash of Civilizations by Samuel P. HuntingtonOrientalism by Edward W. SaidIsrael and South Africa: The Many Faces of Apartheid by Ilan PappéLethal Provocation: The Constantine Murders and the Politics of French Algeria by Joshua ColeMediterraneans: North Africa and Europe in an Age of Migration, c. 1800-1900 by Julia A. Clancy-SmithAge of Coexistence: The Ecumenical Frame and the Making of the Modern Arab World by Ussama MakdisiMusicYesterday – bloom.In My Dreams – bloom.

In this episode, Tudor welcomes David Wurmser, a senior analyst for Middle East affairs, to discuss the complex situation in the Middle East. They delve into the history of Israel, the ongoing conflict with Palestine, and the role of Hamas and Iran in the region. Wurmser emphasizes the importance of Israel's self-reliance in restoring peace and the need for Americans to take their own security seriously, drawing parallels with Israel's situation. The Tudor Dixon Podcast is part of the Clay Travis & Buck Sexton Podcast Network - new episodes debut every Monday, Wednesday, & Friday. For more visit TudorDixonPodcast.comFollow Clay & Buck on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/clayandbuckSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

In this episode, Tudor welcomes David Wurmser, a senior analyst for Middle East affairs, to discuss the complex situation in the Middle East. They delve into the history of Israel, the ongoing conflict with Palestine, and the role of Hamas and Iran in the region. Wurmser emphasizes the importance of Israel's self-reliance in restoring peace and the need for Americans to take their own security seriously, drawing parallels with Israel's situation. The Tudor Dixon Podcast is part of the Clay Travis & Buck Sexton Podcast Network - new episodes debut every Monday, Wednesday, & Friday. For more visit TudorDixonPodcast.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

In this episode, Tudor welcomes David Wurmser, a senior analyst for Middle East affairs, to discuss the complex situation in the Middle East. They delve into the history of Israel, the ongoing conflict with Palestine, and the role of Hamas and Iran in the region. Wurmser emphasizes the importance of Israel's self-reliance in restoring peace and the need for Americans to take their own security seriously, drawing parallels with Israel's situation. The Tudor Dixon Podcast is part of the Clay Travis & Buck Sexton Podcast Network - new episodes debut every Monday, Wednesday, & Friday. For more visit TudorDixonPodcast.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Since Hamas's deadly attack on Israel on Oct. 7, a lot has been said about the militant and political group and whether or not they represent the Palestinian people.Hamas has been declared a terrorist group by dozens of countries, including the United States. And many Palestinians in Gaza think the political party is corrupt. The Palestinian Liberation Organization, which controls the West Bank and is led by Mahmoud Abbas, has condemned Hamas's violence.It's been over 15 years since the last parliamentary election that brought Hamas to power, one that many Palestinians weren't old enough to vote in. We discuss how Palestinian leadership and how war and displacement has shaped the lives of Palestinians. Want to support 1A? Give to your local public radio station and subscribe to this podcast. Have questions? Find out how to connect with us by visiting our website.

TOP NEWS | On today's Daily Signal Top News, we break down: After three rounds of voting, there is still no speaker of the House and there is now no GOP nominee. The war between Israel and Hamas rages on as the two-week mark approaches since the terrorist organization launched its Oct. 7 attack.President Joe Biden's delivers a speech from the Oval Office on Thursday eveningTyler O'Neil reports that The Heritage Foundation's Oversight Project is requesting any documents sent or received by Nejwa Ali, a former spokeswoman for the Palestinian Liberation Organization's now-defunct U.S. delegation, in her official capacity at the Department of Homeland Security. https://www.dailysignal.com/2023/10/19/dhs-hired-pro-hamas-former-plo-spokeswoman-handle-asylum-claims-heritage-demands-answers/Gallup's findings: https://news.gallup.com/poll/512861/media-confidence-matches-2016-record-low.aspxRelevant LinksListen to other podcasts from The Daily Signal: https://www.dailysignal.com/podcasts/Get daily conservative news you can trust from our Morning Bell newsletter: DailySignal.com/morningbellsubscription Listen to more Heritage podcasts: https://www.heritage.org/podcastsSign up for The Agenda newsletter — the lowdown on top issues conservatives need to know about each week: https://www.heritage.org/agenda Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The news of Texas covered today includes:Our Lone Star story of the day: Texas' school choice plan is being called “racist” by Democrats; “too broad” by newspaper editors, as well as a host of other ridiculous things that are demonstrably false. The real question is: Why are Leftist front groups and the government school lobby so afraid that parents will pull their children out of public schools if given a choice? Is not that a tacit admission that something is deeply wrong in the current system these folks are fighting so hard to preserve?And, even though school finance is not on the special session call, Democrats have introduced a whole new school finance scheme. Do you honestly believe that if we funded public education to their standard of “fully funded,” that next year and the next these same people would agree that schools are fully funded? Heck no, they'll make the claim of financial penury forever because they are paying off a political constituency with your money and that never ends.Our Lone Star story of the day is sponsored by Allied Compliance Services providing the best service in DOT, business and personal drug and alcohol testing since 1995.Chicago delegation comes to Texas and begs El Paso and others to curtail sending illegals to their great “sanctuary city.”Homeland Security puts immigration official who worked for Palestinian Liberation Organization (the PLO!) on leave. Why was this person ever allowed to work for, of all things, Homeland Security!?Listen on the radio, or station stream, at 5pm Central. Click for our radio and streaming affiliates.www.PrattonTexas.com

Jewish Diaspora Report - Episode 55  On this episode of the Jewish Diaspora Report, Host Mike Jordan discusses the Israeli-Palestinian Peace Process and how the Middle East became what it is today. We look at why Israel has been successfully making peace with many other countries and former enemies but why the Palestinian leadership has rejected all forms of peace and why they are no longer able to negotiate for peace. 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

Subscribe to Quotomania on Simplecast or search for Quotomania on your favorite podcast app!Palestinian Mahmoud Darwish was born in al-Birwa in Galilee, a village that was occupied and later razed by the Israeli army. Because they had missed the official Israeli census, Darwish and his family were considered “internal refugees” or “present-absent aliens.” Darwish lived for many years in exile in Beirut and Paris. He is the author of over 30 books of poetry and eight books of prose, and earned the Lannan Cultural Freedom Prize from the Lannan Foundation, the Lenin Peace Prize, and the Knight of Arts and Belles Lettres Medal from France.In the 1960s Darwish was imprisoned for reciting poetry and traveling between villages without a permit. Considered a “resistance poet,” he was placed under house arrest when his poem “Identity Card” was turned into a protest song. After spending a year at a university of Moscow in 1970, Darwish worked at the newspaper Al-Ahram in Cairo. He subsequently lived in Beirut, where he edited the journal Palestinian Affairs from 1973 to 1982. In 1981 he founded and edited the journal Al-Karmel. Darwish served from 1987 to 1993 on the executive committee of the Palestinian Liberation Organization. In 1996 he was permitted to return from exile to visit friends and family in Israel and Palestine.Mahmoud Darwish's early work of the 1960s and 1970s reflects his unhappiness with the occupation of his native land. Carolyn Forché and Runir Akash noted in their introduction to Unfortunately It Was Paradise (2003) that “as much as [Darwish] is the voice of the Palestinian Diaspora, he is the voice of the fragmented soul.” Forché and Akash commented also on his 20th volume, Mural: “Assimilating centuries of Arabic poetic forms and applying the chisel of modern sensibility to the richly veined ore of its literary past, Darwish subjected his art to the impress of exile and to his own demand that the work remain true to itself, independent of its critical or public reception.” Mahmoud Darwish died in 2008 in Houston, Texas.From https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/mahmoud-darwish. For more information about Mahmoud Darwish:Previously on The Quarantine Tapes:Fatima Bhutto about Darwish, at 19:15: https://quarantine-tapes.simplecast.com/episodes/the-quarantine-tapes-116-fatima-bhuttoA River Dies of Thirst: Journals: https://archipelagobooks.org/book/a-river-dies-of-thirst/“Mahmoud Darwish”: https://poets.org/poet/mahmoud-darwish“In Memory of Mahmoud Darwish”: https://kenyonreview.org/kr-online-issue/2008-fall/selections/in-memory-of-mahmoud-darwish/

Subscribe to Quotomania on Simplecast or search for Quotomania on your favorite podcast app!Palestinian Mahmoud Darwish was born in al-Birwa in Galilee, a village that was occupied and later razed by the Israeli army. Because they had missed the official Israeli census, Darwish and his family were considered “internal refugees” or “present-absent aliens.” Darwish lived for many years in exile in Beirut and Paris. He is the author of over 30 books of poetry and eight books of prose, and earned the Lannan Cultural Freedom Prize from the Lannan Foundation, the Lenin Peace Prize, and the Knight of Arts and Belles Lettres Medal from France.In the 1960s Darwish was imprisoned for reciting poetry and traveling between villages without a permit. Considered a “resistance poet,” he was placed under house arrest when his poem “Identity Card” was turned into a protest song. After spending a year at a university of Moscow in 1970, Darwish worked at the newspaper Al-Ahram in Cairo. He subsequently lived in Beirut, where he edited the journal Palestinian Affairs from 1973 to 1982. In 1981 he founded and edited the journal Al-Karmel. Darwish served from 1987 to 1993 on the executive committee of the Palestinian Liberation Organization. In 1996 he was permitted to return from exile to visit friends and family in Israel and Palestine.Mahmoud Darwish's early work of the 1960s and 1970s reflects his unhappiness with the occupation of his native land. Carolyn Forché and Runir Akash noted in their introduction to Unfortunately It Was Paradise (2003) that “as much as [Darwish] is the voice of the Palestinian Diaspora, he is the voice of the fragmented soul.” Forché and Akash commented also on his 20th volume, Mural: “Assimilating centuries of Arabic poetic forms and applying the chisel of modern sensibility to the richly veined ore of its literary past, Darwish subjected his art to the impress of exile and to his own demand that the work remain true to itself, independent of its critical or public reception.” Mahmoud Darwish died in 2008 in Houston, Texas.From https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/mahmoud-darwish. For more information about Mahmoud Darwish:Previously on The Quarantine Tapes:Fatima Bhutto about Darwish, at 19:15: https://quarantine-tapes.simplecast.com/episodes/the-quarantine-tapes-116-fatima-bhutto“Mahmoud Darwish”: https://poets.org/poet/mahmoud-darwishIn the Presence of Absence: https://archipelagobooks.org/book/in-the-presence-of-absence/“Mahmoud Darwish”: https://bombmagazine.org/articles/mahmoud-darwish/

​Zak was raised as a Muslim and joined the Palestinian Liberation Organization. But then Jesus showed up in a miraculous way—and changed everything. This week on The Land and the Book, you'll meet this Jerusalem shopkeeper. You'll hear his spiritual journey and learn how his business has adapted to survive COVID-19. Plus, Charlie Dyer helps us understand the role of olive oil in Scripture…on The Land and the Book.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

A New Narrative In the Middle East Began With The 2020 Abraham Accords.The Gulf region of the Middle East is in hyper-change mode.  All due to the Abraham Accords, a treaty normalizing relations between Israel and various countries in the Middle East, was signed in 2020.   Make no mistake, a new narrative is born in the Middle East.  Normalized relations will continue to expand and bring opportunities for business and education.  The Abraham Accords have brought about this rapid change to include: tolerance, acceptance, co-existence.  Meet Rabbi and Doctor Elie Abadie -- a modern-day Jewish Renaissance man who plans to help grow a Jewish community in the Arab world of the United Arab Emirates (UAE).  Born Beirut, Lebanon, Rabbi, and Doctor Elie Abadie's parents were refugees from Syria.  He lived in tranquility in Lebanon until the Palestinian Liberation Organization and its gunmen appeared in the 1960s.  When he was 18-years old, he decided to move to NYC and attend Yeshiva University.  He became a gastroenterologist & Rabbi.  Following the Abraham Accords, the UAE government decided it was time to grow a Jewish community.  Crown Prince saw the Torah and told Rabbi and Doctor Abadie "I'm so happy to see what really kept the Jewish people united for all these thousands of years."  Who better to lead this effort than Rabbi and Doctor Abadie.  Rabbi and Doctor Abadie, who is fluent in Arabic, French, English, and Spanish, was hand-picked for this task at hand.   He gladly rose to the challenge and sees it as a divine call of duty.   Join me for this inspiring story; it's the best twenty minutes you'll spend today. Please do three things: Subscribe to our podcast through your favorite platform.Share this episode with a few of your friends today.Visit our website at http://findinginspiration.lifeIn this episode we cover:Born Beirut, Lebanon, and my parents were refugees from Syria he says. His parents left Syria after Jews were forced to flee due to the establishment of Israel. They lived in tranquility in Lebanon until the Palestinian Liberation Organization and its gunmen appeared in the late 1960s.""The whole region will change soon. All because of the Abraham Accords.  And that's one of the reasons that I decided to take this challenge. The government of the UAE is very clear and adamant about its policy of tolerance and peaceful coexistence. It's under the law. There is an emerging Jewish community in the UAE.  It's going to be a game-changer. There is a momentous change in the Arab world upon us and there are possibilities for greater mutual understanding and acceptance.  Amazing Informative Links:https://www.jpost.com/middle-east/uaes-rabbi-abadie-we-are-opening-doors-slowly-things-will-take-shape-652321https://www.timesofisrael.com/uaes-small-but-growing-jewish-community-to-get-second-full-time-rabbi/https://www.pbssocal.org/shows/thirteen-specials/preview/amen-amen-amen-promo-gjqrcqhttps://hamodia.com/prime/our-man-in-dubai/https://www.israelhayom.com/2021/10/06/peace-with-more-arab-nations-not-a-question-of-if-but-when/

A New Narrative In the Middle East Began With The 2020 Abraham Accords.The Gulf region of the Middle East is in hyper-change mode.  All due to the Abraham Accords, a treaty normalizing relations between Israel and various countries in the Middle East, was signed in 2020.   Make no mistake, a new narrative is born in the Middle East.  Normalized relations will continue to expand and bring opportunities for business and education.  The Abraham Accords have brought about this rapid change to include: tolerance, acceptance, co-existence.  Meet Rabbi and Doctor Elie Abadie -- a modern-day Jewish Renaissance man who plans to help grow a Jewish community in the Arab world of the United Arab Emirates (UAE).  Born Beirut, Lebanon, Rabbi, and Doctor Elie Abadie's parents were refugees from Syria.  He lived in tranquility in Lebanon until the Palestinian Liberation Organization and its gunmen appeared in the 1960s.  When he was 18-years old, he decided to move to NYC and attend Yeshiva University.  He became a gastroenterologist & Rabbi.  Following the Abraham Accords, the UAE government decided it was time to grow a Jewish community.  Crown Prince saw the Torah and told Rabbi and Doctor Abadie "I'm so happy to see what really kept the Jewish people united for all these thousands of years."  Who better to lead this effort than Rabbi and Doctor Abadie.  Rabbi and Doctor Abadie, who is fluent in Arabic, French, English, and Spanish, was hand-picked for this task at hand.   He gladly rose to the challenge and sees it as a divine call of duty.   Join me for this inspiring story; it's the best twenty minutes you'll spend today. Please do three things: Subscribe to our podcast through your favorite platform.Share this episode with a few of your friends today.Visit our website at http://findinginspiration.lifeIn this episode we cover:Born Beirut, Lebanon, and my parents were refugees from Syria he says. His parents left Syria after Jews were forced to flee due to the establishment of Israel. They lived in tranquility in Lebanon until the Palestinian Liberation Organization and its gunmen appeared in the late 1960s.""The whole region will change soon. All because of the Abraham Accords.  And that's one of the reasons that I decided to take this challenge. The government of the UAE is very clear and adamant about its policy of tolerance and peaceful coexistence. It's under the law. There is an emerging Jewish community in the UAE.  It's going to be a game-changer. There is a momentous change in the Arab world upon us and there are possibilities for greater mutual understanding and acceptance.  Amazing Informative Links:https://www.jpost.com/middle-east/uaes-rabbi-abadie-we-are-opening-doors-slowly-things-will-take-shape-652321https://www.timesofisrael.com/uaes-small-but-growing-jewish-community-to-get-second-full-time-rabbi/https://www.pbssocal.org/shows/thirteen-specials/preview/amen-amen-amen-promo-gjqrcqhttps://hamodia.com/prime/our-man-in-dubai/https://www.israelhayom.com/2021/10/06/peace-with-more-arab-nations-not-a-question-of-if-but-when/

Advocates the Podcast looks to Palestine in this episode. We speak to Diana Buttu, a Canadian-Palestinian lawyer and advocate of Palestinian rights. Diana takes us through her experience working in the Negotiations Support Unit of the Palestinian Liberation Organization and describes the legal battles she faces in an occupied Palestine.

Karnit Mandel, a documentarian who specializes in archival work, talks about her new film, “Shalal: A Reel War,” which was recently aired on aired on Israel's Hot 8 cable TV channel which co-produced it with Israel's New Fund for Cinema and Television. Mandel's documentary examines the audiovisual material that was part of the Palestinian Liberation Organization's archive in Beirut and was confiscated by the Israeli military during the 1982 Lebanon War. Haaretz ran this magazine piece about the documentary To contact Ori: onir@peacenow.org To donate to APN: https://peacenow.org/donate

For more than 50 years, we have witnessed unrest in the Middle East as people of many different nationalities and ideologies have attempted to take Israel away from the Jewish people. But our guest on this episode, Tass Abu Saada, has a unique and important perspective on this struggle. Tass was born in Gaza and raised in Saudi Arabia and Qatar in the Muslim faith before fighting for Fatah as a teenager. As a young man, Tass moved to America to study at the University of Missouri, later becoming a successful restauranteur and marrying his wife, Karen. In 1993, Tass experienced a powerful conversion to Christianity, and would go on to found Seeds of Hope and Hope for Ishmael. In this episode, our host Helen Todd talks with Tass about his experience in the Palestinian Liberation Organization, his conversion to faith in Christ, and what we can do to see Muslims come to Christ in the same way that he did.3:45 - Tass's upbringing and early life.5:30 - The perspective of Palestinians on what is happening in their land.10:45 - Tass's experience fighting for the Palestinian Liberation Organization.17:20 - How should we pray for Muslims?25:45 - How Tass's organization helps to build a relationship between Christians, Jews, and Muslims.29:45 - Tass's upcoming podcast.Tass Saada's website is : hopeforishmael.orgTass Saada's books :  Once an Arafat Man on Amazonhttps://www.amazon.com/Once-Arafat-Man-Story-Sniper/dp/1414334443/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&keywords=once+an+arafat+man&qid=1635942583&qsid=141-6482994-5492422&sr=8-1&sres=1414334443%2CB012HTZBBY%2CB00QO6MF4I%2C1496411870%2CB001DXESX8%2CB004HYHAG2%2CB07TL9VBRP%2C0982888422%2C0349120897%2C184867175X%2CB00242W1ZO%2CB00JRMKIA4%2CB00K5RV3I6%2CB00GURS7AW%2CB00BJ640B4%2CB001U961C6The Mind of Terror on Amazonhttps://www.amazon.com/Mind-Terror-Explores-Motivates-Extremist/dp/1496411870/ref=pd_bxgy_img_1/141-6482994-5492422?pd_rd_w=cTljT&pf_rd_p=c64372fa-c41c-422e-990d-9e034f73989b&pf_rd_r=41VV32QDVFGJQ71M4AQ9&pd_rd_r=8576516b-8109-48de-895f-4108d0377fae&pd_rd_wg=UOscU&pd_rd_i=1496411870&psc=1 After you listen to this episode, go to our host website: www.rfwma.org and find out how World Missions Alliance can help you connect to your greater purpose.If you are interested in becoming a sponsor of the Limitless Spirit Podcast, click below:Support the show (https://rfwma.org/give)            Email us your questions and comments at podcast@rfwma.orgWMA is 501(c)(3), donations are tax deductibleSupport the show (https://rfwma.org/give)

The Cukurs operation barely scratches the surface of what Mossad has done over the years. Mossad has been, “involved in special operations and activity in the service of the State of Israel, such as the pursuit of Nazi criminals.” This episode explores some of the most important operations the agency has carried out. Stephan Talty describes missions you've probably never heard of but that shaped the Middle East and the whole world. The episode contains interviews with Robert Baer, accomplished former CIA agent, intelligence expert and security analyst, bestselling author of several books including *See No Evil: The True Story of a Ground Soldier in the CIA's War Against Terrorism* which was the basis for the film Syriana, in which George Clooney's character is based on Baer and H. Keith Melton, intelligence historian and expert on espionage tradecraft. Good Assassins: Hunting the Butcher came out of author Stephan Talty's work on a book called *The Good Assassin.* Click here to Buy the book THE JET discusses an operation in which the target wasn't human. In 1963, the Israelis decided they had to have a MIG. At the time, the MIG was the most advanced Soviet fighter plane, and the latest model, the MIG-21, had been purchased by Israel's neighbors — and enemies — Egypt, Syria, and Iraq. THE ENGINEER tells the story of Yahya Ayash, the No. 1 bombmaker for Hamas. Ayash was a master of building explosives. Ayash built bombs for Hamas suicide attacks: the Mehola Junction bombing in 1993, the Afula Bus massacre in 1994, the Dizengoff Street bus massacre also in 1994 — at the time, the deadliest suicide bombing in Israeli history with 22 civilians killed and 50 injured — Ayash was also behind the Hadera central station massacre, again in 1994, and many more. THE SCIENTIST is about the Israeli government's operations to find out if Syria, which had been hostile to their Jewish neighbors for decades, had a nuclear program. Was there anything going on? Were they building plants? Were they thinking of building bombs? There was no evidence on the ground that anything was happening. Israel's spy satellites were picking up nothing. Still, some people at Mossad had an uneasy feeling. THE WRONG MAN explores Operation Wrath of God. In 1972, Mossad was thrust into the spotlight when members of the faction of the Palestinian Liberation Organization known as “Black September” took Israeli athletes and coaches hostage at the Munich Olympic Games. A botched German ambush resulted in the murder of nine Israelis, as well as the deaths of the terrorists. It was a catastrophe - for the Olympics, for the Germans, and for the Israelis. Prime Minister Golda Meir quickly approved Operation Wrath of God, a covert Mossad operation to hunt down and kill the planners of the Munich massacre. SPIES NEVER FORGET tells the story of a Lebanese man named Imad Fayez Mughniyah, the mastermind in a series of terror attacks against Israelis. He was believed to be the chief of staff for Hezbollah and was a link between Iran and terrorist groups. Mossad and Mughniyah were involved in a cat and mouse game for decades. Mossad wanted to kill him and Mughniyah knew it. THE GENERAL is about a man named Mohammed Suleiman, a general in the Syrian army and one of the main contacts to Iran and Hamas. Israel wanted him gone.  • Written and Hosted by STEPHAN TALTY • Produced and Directed by SCOTT WAXMAN and JACOB BRONSTEIN • Executive Producers: SCOTT WAXMAN and MARK FRANCIS • Story Editor: JACOB BRONSTEIN • Editorial direction: SCOTT WAXMAN and MANGESH HATTIKUDUR • Editing, mixing, and sound design: MARK FRANCIS • Theme Music by TYLER CASH • Archival Researcher: ADAM SHAPIRO • Thanks to OREN ROSENBAUM Learn more about “Good Assassins: Hunting the Butcher” at DiversionPodcasts.com  Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com

President Donald Trump hosted Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and foreign ministers of two Arab Gulf states on Tuesday.They were at the White House to sign an agreement called the Abraham Accords, which will normalize relations between Israel and the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain.Since the deal’s announcement, Israel appears to be backing away from annexing the West Bank. At least for now. But for many Palestinians, that’s hardly a victory, prompting many to consider that it's time for new leadership. Related: Israel hoping to boost regional security with Abraham Accords“We’re here this afternoon to change the course of history,” said Trump, who helped broker the deal, addressing a crowd on the South Lawn. “After decades of division and conflict, we mark the dawn of a new Middle East.”Even before Tuesday’s ceremony, Abu Dhabi, the capital of the United Arab Emirates, was preparing for new tourism opportunities.Last week, hotels in Abu Dhabi got a letter from the Department of Culture and Tourism that advised them to start including kosher meals on their menus and to designate a separate area in the kitchen for the preparation of kosher food.This public statement would have been unthinkable not long ago. And it’s one example of what normalization between Arab Gulf states and Israel looks like on the ground.The UAE-Israel deal will reportedly include direct flights, tourism, economic investments and more.Related: Afghan peace talks set to start despite escalating attacks on politiciansIsraeli relations with some Gulf states is not new, said Khaled Elgindy, senior fellow at the Middle East Institute and director of the Institute’s program on Palestine and Palestinian-Israeli Affairs in Washington.“But in the past, those relationships were kind of under the table. Now, they’re announcing to the world that they’re openly having these relations.” Khaled Elgindy, Middle East Institute “But in the past, those relationships were kind of under the table. Now, they’re announcing to the world that they’re openly having these relations,” he said.Elgindy explained that the Arab states didn’t publicize their dealings with Israel in part because of the Arab Peace Initiative, drawn up by the Saudis in 2002.In that accord, Arab nations endorsed the idea of normalizing ties with Israel, if the Israelis ended their occupation and gave the Palestinians a state of their own.“So, that’s why many Palestinians are upset because they view this as violating the Arab consensus, and for Palestinians, it’s kind of giving away an important piece of leverage that they have," said Elgindy. “It’s a stab in the back to be quite honest," said Diana Buttu, a lawyer based in the West Bank. Related: Iranians share stories of sexual harassment, abuse on social media“The idea that we see countries like the UAE and Bahrain normalizing with Israel, what they’re really, in effect doing, is saying that Israel’s behavior is acceptable when it’s actually not acceptable. International law says that it’s not acceptable.”Buttu, a former spokeswoman with the Palestinian Liberation Organization, added that when the two other Arab countries, Jordan and Egypt, signed peace agreements with Israel, they got back land that Israel had seized.“But in this case, this hasn’t happened at all,” she said.Anti-Iran allianceHussein Ibish, with the Arab Gulf States Institute in Washington, views the Abraham Accords as a major success for the Trump administration.The two Gulf states have a shared interest in forming an alliance, he said, most importantly in an effort to counter Iran and Turkey, their two regional rivals.“The UAE is the proverbial fox that has many many different ideas, many different agenda items,” Ibish said.Related: West Bank annexation would make Israel an 'international outlaw'The country wants to purchase powerful weapons from the US, including the “F35 fifth-generation fighter, the Growler Electronic Warfare plane, reaper drones with precision guidance and other things.”Ibish said that in the past few years, the Gulf states have witnessed the US stepping away from the region. President Trump has repeatedly said he wants the US military out of the Middle East. So, according to Ibish, the UAE, Bahrain and Israel are all looking to forge closer regional relationships “even with countries that a few years ago they would have thought it’s impossible — precisely in the context of a waning US presence.”Intelligence sharing and surveillance technologyAs part of the normalization, Israel and the UAE will expand their intelligence sharing and surveillance technology, Ibish said.That worries Maryam al-Khawaja, a human rights activist from Bahrain who was forced into exile in Denmark.“We have already seen in the past how the Gulf states and other countries in the Middle East and North Africa have benefited from buying surveillance technology and other forms of technology from the Israeli government that they’ve used to oppress their own local populations,” Khawaja said.For example, researchers at The Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto found that the Saudis used Israeli mobile phone spyware to target dissidents, activists and journalists abroad.Khawaja said some Bahrainis have expressed anger about the kingdom’s deal with Israel, knowing that dissent is likely to get them into trouble.“We’re looking at oppressive, absolute monarchies who control everything, and therefore, what the monarchies do represent only themselves and not the populations.” Maryam al-Khawaja, human rights activist from Bahrain who is exiled in Denmark“We’re looking at oppressive, absolute monarchies who control everything, and therefore, what the monarchies do represent only themselves and not the populations,” she said.An inward lookThe Abraham Accords have prompted some Palestinians to question their leadership, according to Dana El Kurd, who teaches at the Doha Institute for Graduate Studies.“People are starting to voice their disgust and anger with Palestinian leadership at letting the situation devolve to this degree and rightfully accusing them of having no strategy,” Kurd said.Buttu, the lawyer in the West Bank, also thinks it’s time for new elections.“If you were born anytime after 1989, you’ve not been able to vote in any Palestinian election,” Buttu said, “and I think really now is the time for us to be looking at this leadership and asking the question not only is this the correct leadership but whether this is the right path.”Kurd believes the Palestinians should walk away from the Oslo Accords that the Palestinian Liberation Organization signed with Israel in the 1990s. As painful as it is, she said, Palestinians should elect new leaders and put forward a new set of demands.“We have a lot of Palestinian expertise out there, we have young leadership, we have a lot of people studying this. They can all help to provide a framework for Palestinian Liberation that’s outside the two-state solution and present that to the international community.”Dana El Kurd, Doha Institute for Graduate Studies“We have a lot of Palestinian expertise out there, we have young leadership, we have a lot of people studying this. They can all help to provide a framework for Palestinian Liberation that’s outside the two-state solution and present that to the international community,” Kurd said.In the meantime, the Trump administration hopes the normalization deals with Israel open the door to other Arab states. The big question is Saudi Arabia — the kingdom hasn’t publicly agreed to a deal yet, but it did allow an Israeli plane to fly over its airspace after the UAE-Israel accord.And, Oman applauded Bahrain’s decision to make a deal with the Israelis, a sign that it could be next.

Bahrain and the UAE set to sign normalisation deal with Israel at the White House, and scientists find potential life on Venus. *) Normalisation deal between Israel, Bahrain and the UAE Delegates of the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Israel are meeting in Washington to sign a normalisation deal. The Palestinian Liberation Organization has condemned the move by UAE and Bahrain, calling it a "stab in the back". The deal has been welcomed by another Gulf country, Oman, leading many to believe it may be the next in line. *) President Trump and Joe Biden clash over cause of wildfires President Donald Trump and Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden have clashed over the cause of the deadly wildfires ravaging the US west coast. Trump has dismissed climate concerns and blamed "poor forest management" as the cause. In response, Biden called Trump a "climate arsonist" whose reelection would be catastrophic for the environment. *) Turkish Red Crescent aid worker killed in vehicle attack A Turkish aid worker was killed, and two others wounded, in an attack on their vehicle by masked assailants in northern Syria. The vehicle, which bore the Red Crescent emblem, was attacked between Syria's Al Bab and the Turkish border town of Cobanbey. The Turkish Red Crescent said the two workers who were wounded were not in a critical condition. *)Blast kills several in Syria’s Afrin Staying in Syria, at least nine people have been killed and 43 injured in a truck-bomb blast in Syria’s opposition-held Afrin city. Afrin was largely cleared of YPG/PKK terrorists by Turkey in 2018 in anti-terror Operation Olive Branch. Local security sources say YPG/PKK terrorists continue to carry out attacks but do not claim responsibility as they end up harming civilians. And finally, *) Life on Venus is a possibility Scientists have discovered potential signs of life in the atmosphere around Earth's neighbouring planet Venus. Telescopes in Hawaii and Chile spotted signs of phosphine gas in the clouds of Venus, hinting at the possible presence of microbes. The discovery doesn't yet satisfy the “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence" standard established by the late Carl Sagan.

Yasser Arafat starts Fatah, a Palestinian militia, to attack Israel. The Arab countries form the Palestinian Liberation Organization (the PLO) to counter Fatah's influence. And Israel finds itself facing a familiar conundrum: what to do about terrorism? A retaliation operation goes awry.

Not long before Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin accepted the handshake offer of Palestinian Liberation Organization chairman Yasser Arafat during a White House ceremony, it had been illegal for an Israeli to talk to a PLO member. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

At a time when the language of diplomacy has been reduced to a 140-character tweet transmitted at 3 am, it’s good to be reminded of the men and women for whom the quest for peace demanded actual thought and personal interaction. J. T. Rogers’ Oslo, now running in its West Coast premiere at the Marin Theatre Company through October 28, is a look at the circumstances and personalities responsible for the Oslo Accords. The 1993 Accords, considered to be a breakthrough in the search for Middle Eastern peace, brought about Israeli acceptance of the Palestinian Liberation Organization as official representatives of the Palestinian people and the PLO’s recognition of the state of Israel. Norwegians Terje Rod-Larsen (Mark Anderson Phillips) and Mona Juul (Erica Sullivan) are a well-connected husband and wife. He runs a think tank in Oslo; she is an official in the Foreign Ministry. They are the unlikely leaders of a plan to try a “gradualist” approach in middle east diplomacy. Issues would be dealt with one at a time, from the smallest to the largest, and they would be resolved person-to-person, not nation-to-nation. As it was the official stance of both parties to never deal directly with each other, this had to be accomplished through secret, back-channels. Those channels, though far from Washington, D.C., led to that moment on the White House South Lawn when Israeli Prime Minister Rabin shook the hand of PLO chairman Arafat. Rogers’ play takes the same approach as the negotiations. We get to gradually know the individuals involved. As they become better acquainted, we become better acquainted. As the process evolves, the audience evolves with it to the point where you would swear you were in the room with them. Director Jasson Minadakis has gathered a terrific ensemble to tell this riveting story. It’s an exceptional cast of fourteen players. Sullivan’s Juul acts as the narrator, providing context and humor and facilitating the initial connection between the audience and the play. Phillips is magnificent as the part strutting peacock, part heartfelt peacemaker Rod-Larsen. His alcohol-fueled takedown at one point in the negotiations by the participants was wrenching. J. Paul Nicholas and Ashkan Davaran as the PLO representatives and Brian Herndon and Ryan Tasker as the initial Israeli contacts are excellent as the across-the-table enemies who soon develop a friendship. While a true peace remains elusive, and regardless of how much of this dramatization is actually factual, Oslo reminds us that when humanity is allowed to enter a political process, there’s still hope. ‘Oslo’ runs through October 28 at Marin Theatre Company in Mill Valley. Tuesday through Saturday evening performances are at 7:30pm. The Sunday matinee is at 2pm. For more information, go to marintheatre.org.

In an address before the Federalist Society, National Security Adviser John Bolton said the U.S. plans to close the office of the Palestinian Liberation Organization in Washington.

Recently, in a case called Sokolow, et al v. Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO), the Solicitor General's Office filed a brief in opposition to the Supreme Court cert petition being sought by the petitioners. The petitioners brought a lawsuit against PLO under the 1992 Anti-Terrorism Act, because of its support for terrorist activities that harmed American nationals. The Second Circuit held that the petitioners case should be dismissed because of lack of personal jurisdiction (PJ) over PLO. While the Second Circuit has held that foreign states do not have due process rights, they ruled that PLO does enjoy such rights because it is not a state. Nevertheless, it held that the facts in the record do not support the assertion of either general PJ or specific PJ over the PLO. David Rivkin of BakerHostetler will join us to discuss the case. Featuring:David Rivkin, Partner, BakerHostetler Teleforum calls are open to all dues paying members of the Federalist Society. To become a member, sign up here. As a member, you should receive email announcements of upcoming Teleforum calls which contain the conference call phone number. If you are not receiving those email announcements, please contact us at 202-822-8138.

Recently, in a case called Sokolow, et al v. Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO), the Solicitor General's Office filed a brief in opposition to the Supreme Court cert petition being sought by the petitioners. The petitioners brought a lawsuit against PLO under the 1992 Anti-Terrorism Act, because of its support for terrorist activities that harmed American nationals. The Second Circuit held that the petitioners case should be dismissed because of lack of personal jurisdiction (PJ) over PLO. While the Second Circuit has held that foreign states do not have due process rights, they ruled that PLO does enjoy such rights because it is not a state. Nevertheless, it held that the facts in the record do not support the assertion of either general PJ or specific PJ over the PLO. David Rivkin of BakerHostetler will join us to discuss the case. Featuring:David Rivkin, Partner, BakerHostetler Teleforum calls are open to all dues paying members of the Federalist Society. To become a member, sign up here. As a member, you should receive email announcements of upcoming Teleforum calls which contain the conference call phone number. If you are not receiving those email announcements, please contact us at 202-822-8138.

Gov't Approves 176 Jewish Homes In E. Jerusalem   The Israeli government has just approved a hundred and seventy-six new homes in Jerusalem. This enormous expansion means the neighborhood of Nof Zion is about to become the largest Jewish sector in all of East Jerusalem.   Russia Vetoes Probe Into Syrian Chemical Weapons   Russia used its veto power to officially end the probe into Syria's suspected chemical weapon attacks. Nikki Haley slams Russia for aiding “dictators and terrorists” at the U.N.   What To Do With All The ‘Infiltrators'   May Golan, Conservative activist & CEO of Hebrew City speaking at ILTV studio about the new agreement the Israeli government signed with African countries that would allow the government to sidestep court decisions and forcibly deport African migrants to the nations that have agreed to absorb them.     Iran Sentences Alleged “Mossad Agent” To Death   Iran has just given a death sentence to a man accused of being an Israeli Mossad spy. Israel has a firm “no comment” policy on accusations like this but Iran has convicted the man of leaking intel to Israel, which led to the death of at least four scientists.     Hamas Reverses, Says Army Should Obey P.L.O.   Hamas's leader is now saying that all its soldiers should fall under the umbrella of the Palestinian Liberation Organization. Qatar set to build new government headquarters in the Gaza Strip.     Anti-Semitic Anne Frank Stickers Get Circulated   Italian soccer fans have just posted anti-Semitic slogans at a soccer match to psych out a rival team, along with stickers of a photoshopped Anne Frank.     Israel Raises Minimum Wage By Around 6%   The Israeli Labor Committee has just raised the monthly minimum wage by 6 percent. Starting on December first, the Israeli minimum wage will stand at 5,300 shekels per month, or 1,513 dollars. That's a 300 shekel boost from 5,000 shekels.   Explore The World Of Tal Slutzker's ‘Now'   Tal Slutzker, artist behind the “Now” solo exhibition speaking at ILTV studio about the "Now" solo exhibition that is hosted by the Herzliya Museum of Contemporary Art.     Israel Feeds Thousands Of Migrating Pelicans   Israel is feeding thousands upon thousands of pelicans that are making a pit stop as they migrate towards Africa. Agriculture Ministry makes this move to protect local fisheries & breeding grounds.     Jerusalem's Open Restaurants Festival Is Back   ILTV's Emanuelle Kadosh speaking about the Jerusalem's Open Restaurants Festival that will see restaurants all across Jerusalem open their doors for dinners, special events and workshops.     Hebrew word Of The Day: HACHNASAH | הכנסה = INCOME   Learn a new Hebrew word every day. Today's word is "hachnasah" which means "income"     The Weather Forecast   Tonight will be clear to partly cloudy with a low of sixty-six or nineteen degrees Celsius. Tomorrow is expected to remain clear to partly cloudy with a slight rise in temperatures with a high of eighty-five or twenty-nine degrees Celsius. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Sons of Lincoln LiveOn this episode:“Interview with an Ex-Jihadist”Ex- Jihadist, Kamal Saleem, joins us to discuss his incredible story. Kamal was born into a Sunni Muslim family in the Middle East. He was recruited and completed missions for terrorist organizations like the Palestinian Liberation Organization and the Muslim Brotherhood. He moved to the United States to complete missions in “cultural” Jihad, converting as many Christians and Jews to the glory of Allah. Until a terrible tragedy completely changed his perspective on life.  Kamal tells his amazing story and helps us better understand our enemy, Islamic Fundamentalism.Obama Gate, Media Gate. We discuss the collusion between the media, Obama and the Deep State. People need to go to prison! We'll unpack and breakdown the mess Obama left behind!We are not happy with the Grand Ole Party! The GOP has had years to come up with a feasible replacement plan for failing Obama Care, unfortunately, they failed miserably! We discuss the Republican healthcare replacement bill, and critical changes that must be made to the bill!We pull Bernie's Boiler Room out of retirement. The boiler room is here to stay! Find out what's got Bernie North's blood boiling this week. Plus we add a new segment called “Lib Lines”. Lib Lines looks at some of the most ridiculous liberal headlines in the week that was!Plus much more!!

Last week, Texas Republican Ted Cruz chaired the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, "Justice Forsaken: How the Federal Government Fails the American Victims of Iranian and Palestinian Terrorism". Needless to say, the Palestinian Liberation Organization was none too pleased with this, and, as a result, decided to rip Cruz a new, ummm, orifice through which to evacuate waste products... Cruz, being Cruz, did not take it lying down, and responded strongly... On today's show, I share some of what went on at the hearing, as well as the ensuing aftermath...

Is radical Islam the most broadly disguised present danger to Christians, Jews and non-Muslims? From a young age, Kamal Saleem was recruited by the Muslim Brotherhood, the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) and other radical Muslim groups. His world was turned upside down when a Christian surgeon treated him following a very serious automobile accident that could have killed him. Kamal has since become a man with a mission—an Ambassador for Christ. Join Rabbi Jonathan Bernis as he and Kamal discuss his new DVD series that unveils the threat of Islamic extremism and the hope for Muslim's redemption.

In May, President Barack Obama reiterated calls for a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, saying "the status quo is unsustainable." Several days later in an Oval Office meeting with Mr. Obama, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called those lines "indefensible," and further outlined his country's position during a speech to Congress. On this episode of World Views, Zach Messitte, Suzette Grillot, and Joshua Landis interview Michael Oren, Israel's ambassador to the United States. The American-born envoy grew up in New Jersey before immigrating to Israel in the 1970s, where he served as a paratrooper in the Israeli Defense Forces. He earned his doctorate in history from Princeton University, and is the author of two New York Times Bestselling Books on the history of the Middle East. The panel also speaks with Maen Areikat. Mr. Areikat has served as the Palestinian Liberation Organization's chief representative to the United States since he was appointed to his post by PLO Chairman and Palestinian National Authority President Mahmoud Abbas in 2009. A graduate of Arizona State University, Mr. Areikat began his diplomatic career in 1993 in Jerusalem, and has long been involved in negotiations with Israel and the United States.

Dr. Stephen Zunes, Professor of Politics and International Studies and Chair, Middle Eastern Studies Program, University of San Francisco; H.E. Dr. Hussein Hassouna, Ambassador of the League of Arab States to the United States of America; Member, United Nations International Law Commission; H.E. Maen Rashid Areikat, Ambassador and Head of Mission, Mission of the Palestinian Liberation Organization to the United States; Dr. Thomas Neu, Executive Director, Friends of UNRWA - the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine; and Mr. Robert Malley, Middle East and North Africa Program Director, International Crisis Group; at NCUSAR's 2009 Arab-U.S. Policymakers Conference. Visit www.ncusar.org to learn more.