So much going on in the war between Israel and Hamas. A feature interview with Joel Pollack, senior editor-at-large at Breitbart, on what's going on, including the missile that struck a Gaza hospital. And Joe Biden is set to arrive in Israel as the violence heats up.
00:01:19.760There's a lot of news in foreign affairs, and it does affect us here at home.
00:01:24.540A war overseas, we are no longer immune to those things,
00:01:27.940especially since we have so many people in Canada cheering for a terrorist group.
00:01:33.380That's not an abstraction. That is the reality of every big city in this country.
00:01:38.580Of course, Canada does have a liberal democratic ally in the region, Israel,
00:01:43.340but Justin Trudeau has never much been a fan of Israel, and he courts the pro-Hamas vote.
00:01:49.180We're going to go through the news of the day and the news of tomorrow
00:01:52.140with our first and only guest today, Joel Pollack, senior editor-at-large at Breitbart.com.
00:01:57.580He recently joined me and about 40 rebel enthusiasts on a trip to Israel, a peace trip.
00:02:03.700We called it a trip to celebrate the Abraham Accords.
00:02:06.860We started in Israel for a week, then we went to the Muslim country of the United Arab Emirates,
00:02:11.600and we celebrated the peace deal that Trump made, a peace deal that is unraveling, I fear,
00:02:17.160although the United Arab Emirates seems to be standing with Israel.
00:02:20.800And joining us now is Breitbart senior editor-at-large, Joel Pollack, who joins us from the L.A. area.
00:02:27.920Joel, very momentous day-to-day, a tremendous controversy.
00:02:31.880Just before we decided to film this interview, what was called by Hamas an Israeli attack on a hospital in Gaza
00:02:41.700was widely reported around the world as that, as if Israel would deliberately attack or even accidentally attack a hospital killing hundreds.
00:02:52.040Within moments, every mainstream media outlet picked that up, including Justin Trudeau,
00:02:57.080who thought before even verification he would immediately opine on the subject.
00:03:01.200Here's Trudeau making an instant appearance, not even waiting for confirmation. Take a look.
00:03:07.740The news coming out of Gaza is horrific and absolutely unacceptable.
00:03:15.380International humanitarian and international law needs to be respected in this and in all cases.
00:03:23.040There are rules around wars, and it's not acceptable.
00:03:41.400On the eve of Joe Biden's visit to Israel, joining us now again is Joel Pollack.
00:03:46.400Joel, what do you make of the whipsaw news and then countervailing facts about this explosion at a major hospital in Gaza?
00:03:56.740Well, I'm going to quibble with your choice of the word unexpected or unanticipated or remarkable turn of events.
00:04:07.800There's nothing remarkable about this.
00:04:10.180This happens every time Israel is forced to defend itself against these terror organizations.
00:04:15.360They wait until there's some large number of civilian casualties, and then they cry foul and they appeal to the world to intervene and to stop Israel from fighting anymore.
00:04:27.640And this is part of the pattern we've seen going back decades.
00:04:32.180But the fact is that these rockets fired by Palestinian terror groups often misfire.
00:04:37.920In the 2021 war, or conflict, you could say, between Israel and Hamas, 20% of the rockets fired by Hamas landed inside the Gaza Strip, did not even hit their Israeli civilian targets, by the way.
00:04:52.260I should say that all these rockets fired by Palestinian groups are aimed at Israeli civilians.
00:04:56.900When Israel fires at Palestinian terror groups, they're targeting terrorists, not civilians.
00:05:02.020But 20% of all the Hamas rockets two years ago fell inside the Gaza Strip.
00:05:06.480And in 2022, when there was another exchange of fire, this time with another group also backed by Iran, but it's called Palestinian Islamic Jihad, 30% of all the Palestinian casualties were caused by misfires, rockets that were aimed at Israeli civilians but hit Palestinians instead.
00:05:25.600That is the pattern, because they're firing unguided rockets in the general direction of Israel.
00:05:31.340But they're doing so in a very rushed way.
00:05:33.860They hide these rockets underneath buildings and in tunnels, and then they bring them out quickly, they fire them, and then they run away again.
00:05:39.920So this is a very crude way of attacking Israel.
00:05:43.120Unfortunately, it's been very effective in terrorizing the Israeli population.
00:05:48.300But it is how the Palestinians operate, and they don't care if they kill their own civilians, because the world has the same knee-jerk reaction that Justin Trudeau did, which is that it must be Israel's fault.
00:05:59.760Now, there are many who are going to say that even if this is a Palestinian rocket, it's still Israel's fault, because how can you fire at Palestinian targets in highly densely populated civilian areas?
00:06:13.220Well, first of all, it's a violation of international law for Palestinians to put rockets and to put combatants in densely populated civilian areas.
00:06:23.500So that's not Israel's fault, and that doesn't stop Israel under international law from going after those legitimate military targets.
00:06:30.340It just means that Hamas or Palestinian Islamic Jihad or whoever, those are the responsible ones for the civilian casualties.
00:06:37.840And then the broader question is really this. If you don't think Israel should be fighting back at all, then what would you suggest Israel do in response to 1,400 murdered Israelis, 4,100 wounded Israelis, 200 hostages taken to Gaza?
00:06:51.720Are you then saying that there's no way Israel can fight back?
00:06:55.000Israel is fighting back. It has the right, and as President Joe Biden helpfully pointed out, it has the duty, actually, to fight back, because there are also international legal obligations that require countries to stop genocide.
00:07:05.080And it's clear that Hamas is determined on achieving the genocide of Israelis and the genocide of Jews.
00:07:12.960You can see that from the brutal way that they killed their victims. They didn't just storm a military post, make their point, and go home.
00:07:19.300They spread out far and wide, and they killed as many civilians, men, women, children, young, old, as they possibly could.
00:07:24.560They raped women. They tortured their victims. They took people back to Gaza and are now holding them hostage.
00:07:29.380I mean, this is the kind of violence we haven't seen since the Holocaust or the Rwandan genocide.
00:07:34.380So Israel has a duty, actually, to go after Hamas. And Hamas started this war. They've placed Palestinians at risk in doing so.
00:07:41.960They knew they would. This is the same pattern, war after war, conflict after conflict.
00:07:46.420These terrorist organizations, whether Palestinian terrorists or the Lebanese terror group known as Hezbollah, same modus operandi.
00:07:53.100They basically put their rockets in mosques, next to schools, underneath hospitals, and they hope that if Israel targets their fighters or their terrorists or their weapons and equipment, that they will also hit a number of the civilians that these terrorist groups claim to be representing.
00:08:10.680I think it's pretty clear now that it was a rocket. Originally, there was some question, was it a Hamas rocket or a Palestinian Islamic Jihad rocket?
00:08:19.400We've seen different video released from the Israeli side, but now also it appears that Al Jazeera was filming the rocket that was launched and that went awry.
00:08:30.560And then I just saw more footage from a third angle taken from the ground.
00:08:35.420So I think it's pretty much incontrovertible now, given that you have Israeli sources, Al Jazeera, and other on-the-ground sources.
00:08:43.900But you had a very interesting tweet. I'm going to read it.
00:08:46.460And this was before the facts came out.
00:08:49.660And I don't think anyone could disagree with your stats.
00:09:18.000Simply put, the reason why this is such news is because if it were true that Israel did this, it would be a failure by Israel militarily.
00:09:31.240Israel does not target civilians, but it would be such a win for Hamas because it would lower Israel's morality closer to their deliberate attacking of civilians.
00:09:42.460I just think anyone who thought this was deliberate, I don't think anyone really would.
00:09:49.840I don't even think Hamas, I don't even think the most rabid anti-Semites in the world would think that Israel would do this deliberately.
00:09:57.880They would probably think, oh, look how sloppy they are, or they shouldn't be doing this.
00:10:01.340But I just wonder if we're going to get an apology and a retraction from Trudeau and all the others who immediately thought the worst or the second worst of things.
00:10:10.760Well, the reason that I calculated my probabilities, and it wasn't a very sophisticated calculation, but it's just based on experience having covered these conflicts and watched these patterns for many years.
00:10:25.320The reason is that Israel has zero interest in targeting a hospital.
00:10:29.100We've never seen Israel deliberately target hospitals before.
00:10:31.760They've certainly had many opportunities.
00:10:34.760There's good reason for them to want to go after some hospitals if they were inclined to do so, because the Hamas leaders are known to live underneath one of the biggest hospitals in Gaza.
00:10:46.020I believe it's called Al-Shifa Hospital.
00:10:48.040If Israel wanted to wipe out the Hamas leadership, they could have done so long ago by targeting that hospital, but they haven't done it.
00:10:55.380Hospitals are not legitimate targets, but that's why Hamas hides there, again, in violation of international law.
00:11:00.180But the number one reason Israel doesn't target hospitals, or wouldn't in this case, is that they know that the international community would be outraged.
00:11:07.240And that's the only thing that could stand in the way of Israel defeating Hamas.
00:11:11.360Israel does not want anything to stand in the way of its war effort.
00:11:15.520It has incredible motivation to get rid of Hamas, and there's incredible internal political pressure from the Israeli public that their government should get rid of this terrorist organization as soon as possible,
00:11:27.040given the outrageous and atrocious terror attack that Israelis have endured.
00:11:31.640So there's no reason for Israel to attack the hospital.
00:11:34.220It would stop the Israeli war, potentially.
00:12:10.980And the whole hallmark of suicide bombing is that you're willing to give up your life and the life of Arabs and Muslims around you,
00:12:18.220as long as you can take out some lives of Jews and Israelis.
00:12:21.400And by the way, just to that point, there were some 40 or so Arab Muslims in Israel who were killed by these terrorists on October 7th.
00:12:29.620There were Israeli Arab citizens who were heroes, who saved many lives, driving wounded people away from the music festival that was being targeted by Hamas, for example, rescuing the wounded.
00:12:43.840And some of them paid for that with their lives.
00:12:46.160There are many stories in the Israeli media about Arabs who sacrificed themselves to save the Jewish Israelis.
00:12:53.000Paradoxically, this entire conflict since the terror attack has brought Israeli Jews and Arabs closer together.
00:13:00.760So I think the will to have peace eventually is there.
00:13:03.780But Hamas and Iran need these confrontations.
00:13:06.800And Justin Trudeau may think he's earning some kind of politically correct credibility with perhaps left-wing constituencies by coming out and condemning Israel.
00:13:17.240But all he's doing is making peace more difficult to achieve.
00:13:19.420You know, George Orwell said in the Second World War, and I'm paraphrasing only slightly, he said,
00:13:24.900in the long run, you do more damage to people by calling them names and bringing up children to believe lies than you do by bombing them.
00:13:33.380By bombing your enemy, you're striking against one generation.
00:13:36.720But by poisoning people's minds with lies and teaching children to hate, you're poisoning generations into the future.
00:13:42.860And that's what the Palestinian propagandists have done.
00:13:46.140And that's what, unfortunately, Justin Trudeau is doing when he claims that Israel has bombed a hospital or he lends any credibility to that before there's been an investigation.
00:13:53.920I think he's just trying to show that he has some empathy for Palestinian civilian lives.
00:13:58.920The Israeli government is showing empathy.
00:14:01.080By the way, the most important and most effective thing one could do to save Palestinian civilians would be to get rid of Hamas.
00:14:07.800Israel did not get rid of Hamas in previous conflict because of this kind of international pressure.
00:14:11.900And they lost 1,000 plus civilians as a result.
00:14:16.640They now understand that they have to save their own civilians and they have to save Palestinian civilians because Palestinian civilians are killed in this endless effort by Hamas to kill Israelis.
00:14:27.920And the Israeli response to it, if you get rid of Hamas, then you get rid of these attacks.
00:14:32.420So the most important and best thing in the long run, if you just play the strict crude numbers game, probably the most effective way to save civilians is just to get rid of the terrorist groups that are sponsoring these wars.
00:14:43.580You know, I follow a lot of conflicts, especially the ones where Canada or the United States or other Western countries are involved.
00:14:50.160So that would include, for example, Afghanistan.
00:14:54.000It would include the brief war to depose Muammar Gaddafi that I think was a disaster for the whole world, by the way.
00:15:00.780And I do not recall in those wars or even going back to the 80s, because I'm a little bit older than you, Joel, whether it was the Falkland Islands War or the brief Panama War or when Ronald Reagan struck Gaddafi in the Gulf of Sidra.
00:15:19.360Like, I have been interested in conflict, I suppose, for 40 years.
00:15:25.460Other than Israel, I am completely at a loss for an example where the media focused with great interest and obsession and moral resolve on collateral casualties by civilians.
00:15:40.900I'm not saying that it was heartless, but when, you know, Operation Desert Storm began or when any of the wars I've just mentioned, there were enormous numbers of civilian casualties.
00:15:54.620And I'm certainly not at all saying that America or the UK or Canada deliberately did any of those things.
00:16:01.780But tens of 50,000 civilians at least died in Afghanistan.
00:16:07.040The count for Iraq is estimated over a million.
00:16:09.900Half a million, half a million in Korea.
00:16:12.860And I just, I mean, you can go back to the Second World War, the firebombings of Dresden and Tokyo, the nuclear detonations in Hiroshima and Nekizaki.
00:16:21.680I can't think of any war where the media was so gotcha.
00:16:33.200Even recently in Yemen or other wars in Africa, it's only Israel that is held to this perfect, as if war in 2023 is perfectly harmless to civilians other than the 1,400 Israelis who were killed.
00:16:50.500Can you think of another war where even America is held to these standards?
00:17:07.060So you have over 1,400 Israelis murdered and America's leading intellectuals have signed a letter in the New York Review of Books describing it as Palestinians breaking out from Gaza.
00:17:21.660That's how they describe this terror attack.
00:17:24.180The deliberate murder of over 1,000 Israeli civilians and soldiers is described as perfectly okay within the context of resistance.
00:17:39.960People march in the streets and on college campuses shouting, free Palestine.
00:17:43.440And they don't pay any real price for that, except lately at Harvard, there are some donors pulling out and there are some efforts to name and shame those who signed letters supporting Kalmas and blaming the murder and rape on Israel when Israel, of course, was the victim.
00:17:58.000There is an anti-Semitism here, and it's just this idea that Jews are okay as victims but are not allowed to defend themselves.
00:18:04.700And so the Jewish right of self-defense is actually conditional, and that's why Israel has to be perfect.
00:18:10.020We're okay if you defend yourself as long as that doesn't involve killing anybody.
00:18:13.300Well, according to the laws of war, it's a war crime to put your military assets, in this case Hamas's rockets and weapons and so forth, in a heavily populated civilian area.
00:22:41.200And I know that sounds absurd to say, but that's Biden.
00:22:43.260Well, we don't know because we've never seen the U.S. involved at this level.
00:22:46.940But the sources I'm talking to say that the United States is taking this conflict very seriously because there are American interests at stake.
00:22:53.020And they're there to support Israel, but they're also there to confront Iran.
00:22:56.880And this isn't just about Israel for the United States.
00:23:01.380And Israel is not getting this kind of support just because the United States likes Israel.
00:23:06.060There's a much bigger, there are many bigger interests and goals at stake here.
00:23:11.300And so I don't think they're there to deter Israel at all.
00:23:14.160Although I do wonder whether some of the humanitarian conditions that Biden has insisted on, apparently, might hamper the fight against Hamas in Gaza.
00:23:21.860But I do take the president at his word.
00:23:24.140And I'm glad that he has finally adopted President Donald Trump's policy of supporting Israel strongly rather than the policy Biden came into office with, which was to support the Palestinians, to give them funding.
00:23:56.780How has Biden shown any support for Israel?
00:23:59.560Well, the aircraft carriers, I think, as a deterrent against Hezbollah in Lebanon, deterrent against Iran as well.
00:24:05.120Large plane loads full of munitions and weapons, promises of additional aircraft and other weaponry that Israel can use.
00:24:12.820He's also gone out rhetorically and alienated his own left-wing base by saying that Israel has not only the right but the duty to respond to Hamas.
00:24:21.420We've never really seen a Democratic administration in recent memory come out the way Trump did.
00:24:28.040He's come out in his rhetoric sounding like Trump, saying that basically I'm going to let Israel do what it needs to do to fight.
00:24:34.920And, you know, in terms of Qatar, I mean, I have very urgent questions that I've been asking about why we allow Hamas to be sheltered in Qatar.
00:24:44.380Biden, by the way, declared Qatar an important non-NATO ally of the United States, if you can believe that.
00:25:27.100Netanyahu said that from the very beginning.
00:25:28.860And when the ground invasion starts, and it will start, I think you'll start to see some of the same arguments we're seeing today.
00:25:34.040But I think that it's not going to matter.
00:25:36.220The Israeli people want this fight, not because they like war, but because they know that the choice is being murdered in their homes or risking their lives by fighting Hamas.
00:25:46.380And they've decided to risk their lives.
00:25:48.000Massive response to Israeli call-ups for reserves.
00:25:50.320Something like 120 percent more reservists showed up than they requested.
00:26:51.820You can destroy everyone who's ever had a gun or fired a rocket, I suppose.
00:26:55.260But as Joel mentioned, they've been teaching hatred there for so long.
00:27:00.300They teach it starting in kindergarten.
00:27:03.220And so there is an entire generation of Gazans who have grown up with the diabolical belief that they can, should, and must attack Jews and slaughter them.
00:27:15.380Let me show you a clip from what they teach.
00:28:32.500I don't know how this problem is solved.
00:29:02.480And Joel says that this is about staring down Hezbollah and Iran itself.
00:29:07.560I would believe it if it were Trump, but I also know that Joe Biden, Antony Blinken, and the rest of the Biden and Obama administration before them have been on Iran's side.
00:29:19.300I am not as sanguine as Joel is, but hopefully I'm just being a little bit paranoid about things.
00:29:27.000I'm also worried about the home front in both Canada and the United States.
00:29:31.240I see that in Germany and France, pro-Hamas ralliers and rioters have been arrested in those countries, but not in the UK, despite the statement by Suella Braverman, the cabinet minister.
00:29:43.960And I don't see any move to do so in Canada or the United States as well.
00:29:47.960So I think that the violence of Hamas is being normalized and we're seeing new limits now.
00:29:54.940The woke left, the student left, and the Islamist left are testing boundaries.
00:30:02.120For example, when we showed you Lincoln Jay, our reporter who was in Ottawa, asked Omar al-Gabra, the former Trudeau cabinet minister, still an MP, if he would renounce the violence of Hamas, and he refused to do so.
00:30:16.880Here's the clip from yesterday. Take a look.
00:30:18.960My name's Lincoln Jay. I work with Rebel News.
00:31:47.540In fact, as of now, he has not retracted his glee.
00:31:51.540I think that every Islamist and leftist in Canada and the United States are learning.
00:31:57.940They're learning what they can get away with in the public square, in their institutions, even in parliament and even in the Liberal Party.
00:32:06.580I think that it may be true that we're in a long battle, and I certainly think the worst is yet to come.
00:32:13.900We're covering this because it affects the Middle East.
00:32:16.940We're covering it because it feels like we've never been closer to World War III.
00:32:20.400Russia, China, Iran, Israel, America, all focused on that same piece of land.
00:32:27.360China, a bit from afar, but they've weighed in rhetorically, politically.
00:32:31.820Of course, there are reports yet to be confirmed that China was involved in some communications hacking that allowed the Hamas terrorists to enter Israel in the first place.
00:32:42.380That's yet to be confirmed, but it rings true to me.
00:32:45.060Two aircraft carriers is a lot of firepower.
00:32:50.760We'll try to take advantage while America is focused on Ukraine and Israel to make a move on Taiwan.
00:33:32.040Putting aside the abstraction of foreign affairs, although they can certainly have an impact at home, God forbid if we're drawn into World War III, there are people in our country, in Vancouver, Calgary, Edmonton, Toronto, Ottawa, Montreal, and other places.
00:33:49.660We have shown you with our own cameras, in all of those cities, there are people who fly the flag of terrorism with impunity and chant the chants of terrorism.
00:35:17.920So you may say, why are you talking about a foreign conflict?
00:35:35.020Is this just Ezra because you're Jewish and you have a historical and religious affection for Israel?
00:35:39.680Well, I do have a connection to Israel, as I suppose Italian Canadians care about Italy or Irish Canadians care about Ireland.
00:35:46.260But there are people in our streets by the tens of thousands who are marching for terrorist groups, chanting terrorist chants, and using terrorist violent symbols, even while that's a crime under the criminal code.
00:35:59.000And we have people even in cabinet who abide this.
00:36:02.740So I think it's very much a Canadian issue.
00:36:05.500And I know that we're already having threats and vandalism and threats of assault and minor assaults already in the service of these pro-Hamas ideologies.
00:36:16.260And we see what can come with the terrorism in Brussels, where Islamic terrorists went on a spree shooting people, wasn't arrested for hours.
00:36:25.640Unfortunately, I can see that happening in Canada.
00:36:27.800If you have a million and a half unassimilated migrants to Canada who come from Muslim regimes where they glorify terrorism and demonize Jews, if you have one in a thousand people who take that seriously, and then one in a thousand of them who act on it, well, we've reached that point.
00:36:46.120And we have no attempts to denormalize that violence.
00:36:49.220I still have yet to see an imam or Muslim leader in Canada broadly denounce terrorism.
00:36:55.720We haven't seen it from the so-called anti-hate group.
00:36:59.700I note today that the Canadian Race Relations Foundation has been utterly silent.
00:37:04.780That was actually set up by Brian Mulroney and the Japanese-Canadian community in reflection, historical reflection on the internment of Japanese-Canadians during the Second World War.
00:37:15.760Trudeau appointed an Islamist activist as their boss.
00:37:19.220They haven't said a word about this hate.
00:37:21.520Same thing with the so-called anti-hate network.
00:37:26.160Of course not, because they support Hamas and Antifa.
00:37:30.300I'm worried about what's happening here in Canada.
00:37:32.660What happens overseas is of interest to me.
00:37:35.140Intellectually, it's of interest to me because I fear for World War III and I fear for the violence.
00:37:40.260But it's also of interest to me because Canada is no longer a fireproof home far away from flammable materials, as Senator Dan Duran said almost 100 years ago.
00:37:50.620We are going to cover other things, and we do cover other things.
00:37:54.640I myself have, of course, been focused on this issue.
00:37:57.300But as you know, we have many reporters across this country covering different subjects every day.
00:38:04.040Until next time, on behalf of all of us here at Rebel World Headquarters, to you at home, good night and keep fighting for freedom.