Kay Wilson survived a Palestinian terror attack that left her friend Christine Lucan dead. She discusses the harrowing tale of survival and healing in her new book, The Rage Less Traveled. She's joined me to dissect the first insane week of the Alberta election campaign.
00:07:16.200Yeah. And you were attacked with your Christian friend, Christine Lucan, while you were hiking.
00:07:26.980Yes, it was, you know, on just a perfect winter day, an Israeli winter day.
00:07:33.500And we were on the political map on our side of the line, so to speak.
00:07:38.480And we were accosted by two Palestinian terrorists held at knife point for half an hour.
00:07:44.500And then they found my Israeli ID. They assumed we were both Jewish.
00:07:48.940And they bound and gagged us and started hacking at us with their machetes.
00:07:52.900And I watched my friend hack to death before my eyes, while I myself sustained 13 machete wounds and 30 broken bones.
00:08:00.660Now, I guess not to go into too much detail, but you did touch on it in your book that you did struggle with some, not just physical, I mean, 13 machete wounds, but PTSD that affected you quite strongly.
00:08:17.740Yeah, that would be like saying the Second World War was a bit inconvenient.
00:08:23.280Yeah, terrible PTSD, not just because I myself was attacked, also because of the longevity that we were held at knife point, which is half an hour, where our fate is swinging in the balance.
00:08:38.660And then, of course, to witness this most, it's kind of a sacred sight to hear somebody pray to their God and watch them die.
00:08:46.780So to witness the death of my friend, the murder, the brutal murder of my friend, while I myself was playing dead, yeah, the fallout of PTSD was, it was off the charts.
00:09:02.000And I can tell you, I'm glad we're talking about this, actually, Sheila, because I haven't spoken much about PTSD, and that takes a good chunk of the book.
00:09:09.440I mean, in the beginning, I was so traumatized, I was like dead in my soul, I didn't feel happy, I didn't feel sad, my voice, it just sounded like I was reading out a menu.
00:09:20.800And then over the course of months of therapy, you know, it's like getting an onion and peeling it off.
00:09:27.540And I started to be in touch again with who I am, or what I was left of as a person.
00:10:10.500I mean, I did, for people who are interested in psychology, or just people who've been traumatized, I'm sure.
00:10:16.180I mean, it doesn't have to be an attempted murder.
00:10:18.280But I'm sure many of your viewers have had their own trauma in their life.
00:10:22.260And for me, I did three kinds of therapy.
00:10:24.580One was something called cognitive behavior therapy, which is where you exercise the power of your mind to the sense that your thoughts determine your feelings.
00:19:02.060But I think it's a reflection of your country, my country, your country.
00:19:05.440If you, you know, it's a reflection of the state that England is in now.
00:19:09.360Well, it really is the state of Canada, too.
00:19:14.280I mean, our previous government under the Conservatives cut off funding to these UN organizations where the money ends up back in the hands of Hamas or other terror groups.
00:19:25.700They cut off funding and Justin Trudeau and the liberal government reinstated it.
00:19:29.900I wanted to ask you your opinion of like the Americans are really leading the charge to cut off funding to these UN organizations that are just acting as money launders to terrorist groups, to be honest with you.
00:19:45.060But the Americans have gone one step further.
00:19:47.820They say not only do we need to cut off the funding to these UN organizations, but they want them abolished entirely.
00:19:55.300For example, Donald Trump has called for the end of the UN Relief Agency for Palestinians in the Near East.
00:20:16.380I'm actually for all everything that happened to me.
00:20:19.300I'm very well thought of in the Arab Muslim Palestinian world.
00:20:23.460I've risked my own life to protect young Arabs who have been under death threats from Muslims who want to murder them.
00:20:31.060I've crowdfunded through my social media several small projects for any Palestinian who wants to take responsibility and start a business, you know, and that's what we're doing.
00:22:13.400Well, and I think, too, if we if, you know, that these terror groups who are in charge are keeping the Palestinian people poor, it makes the idea of terror a smart economic choice.
00:22:28.820Because then your family, even if you are a suicide bomber, then at least your family is taken care of.
00:22:34.300So I really admire the work you're doing by addressing the economic problems that are that outside of religion.
00:22:50.560And it's a money making proposition to go and kill some Jews.
00:22:54.560It is money making, because, first of all, a lot of this, I mean, I don't know the exact figures now, but three years ago, the amount of foreign aid that the Palestinian had received was sixty nine billion dollars.
00:23:09.140OK, now you look at Mahmoud Abbas, you look at all this leadership, look where the money is going.
00:23:14.660And it's right to say that a lot of the Palestinians are poor.
00:23:17.740But I'm telling you, I've been in Palestinian houses, also in the refugee camp, which are far more grandiose than where I live.
00:23:51.860Palestinian media is full of incitement to murder Jews.
00:23:57.140And there's an amazing organization, a nonprofit called Palestinian Media Watch, who monitor what goes on in the school curriculums, on the television.
00:25:37.520I think there's another facet, too, in all of this is not just the Palestinian propaganda, but I think the role the mainstream media plays in perpetuating the narrative of the oppressive Israeli occupation versus these just gaggle of Hamas and Gazan protesters at the border.
00:26:02.660And you often see the images of children face-to-face with Israeli soldiers.
00:26:15.840But you never see just how moral the Israeli army really is.
00:26:20.060When we were there, that was one of the things that really stuck with me is how moral the Israeli army is.
00:26:27.320What they do to mitigate the civilian loss of life versus the other side that uses civilians as propaganda tools.
00:26:37.260A dead civilian is a million dollars in free advertising for Hamas and for, you know, the leadership in Gaza.
00:26:46.760So they encourage parents to bring their children to these protests because that child standing facing an Israeli soldier, that is the kind of propaganda that money can't even buy.
00:28:41.660And I'm proud that many of my good friends are Muslims.
00:28:45.420And despite my so-called charitable work I do with Arabs and Muslims and Palestinians, not one major news outlet will ever have me on their show.
00:28:56.640In fact, the BBC turned me down in March this year.
00:29:01.880They were looking for a survivor of terrorism and they were going to do a program that addresses what you've been talking about, the pay to slay.
00:29:11.380So the BBC man called me here and then he says, I'll get back to you.
00:29:15.440So he gets back to me and you know what he says?
00:29:19.540And I thought, how disgusting is that?
00:29:21.880What they want, they want somebody who looks brown, somebody who looks estranged, somebody who struggles with their English.
00:29:28.340And therefore, it will break the commonality that there is between the Israeli being interviewed and the people who are watching the program.
00:29:36.500I mean, they are going out their way not to portray any survivors of terrorism or any Israeli really as a human being.
00:30:20.280Is it because, you know what, if I'd have been a Muslim, trans, black, Palestinian, happened to be stabbed by white Jewish settlers, would that have warranted me a place on the media?
00:31:47.200And, you know what, that needs, I mean, obviously, anti-Semitism, it's riddling the Labour Party and all kinds of echelon in the United Kingdom.
00:34:18.120All the things you want to hear from the top New York publishers, no one had the courage to publish my book.
00:34:24.380And I'll summarize in one rejection letter.
00:34:27.680It says, because Wilson, I mean, they make me sound like a tennis ball, but because Wilson did not speak about her charitable work with, wait for it, the young and impoverished Palestinians, end quote, we're going to pass on this one.
00:34:52.720Secondly, to speak about young and impoverished Palestinians on the back of my butchered back, over the body of my dead friend, to virtue signal.
00:35:06.360You can find it on Amazon, The Rage Less Traveled, or my website, the ragelesstraveled.com.
00:35:11.980And just to confirm what Sheila is saying, you know, when I actually read the book, I realized I don't have a particularly radiophonic voice.
00:35:20.300It's like I've got a face for radio, and you know, you can't do everything, you can't do everything.
00:35:25.040But when I read it, you're absolutely right.
00:36:53.600In the three weeks, we're all going to get called a lot of names.
00:36:57.040It's going to be a dirty, sleazy campaign from the very people who spent the last four years scolding conservatives as mean and out of touch with normal people.
00:37:08.100I think Albertans have had enough of being talked down to and lectured by Rachel Notley and her perpetually inept MLAs.
00:37:21.580And they don't care about things someone said 20 years ago.
00:37:25.340Now, it might be hard to stay hopeful as a conservative for the next three weeks as the mainstream media continues to act as attack dogs for Rachel Notley and the NDP.