In this episode, I chat to singer-songwriter, activist and musician Yitzchak Avinu about his life, his music and his views on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. We talk about how he got into the music industry, why he supports boycott and divestment and why he's in support of the BDS movement. We also talk about his new album 'Another Brick in the Wall: Part 2' and what it means to him to be pro-Palestine and anti-Zionism. And we talk about what it's like to play pool with someone who doesn't know how to play. I hope you enjoy this episode and that it makes you feel a little better about the situation in the Middle East and around the world. Thank you so much for listening to this episode of the podcast, it was a real pleasure to record it and I hope that you enjoy it as much as I enjoyed recording it. Thank you for supporting the podcast and supporting the cause of peace and justice for Palestine and the Palestinian people. I appreciate it very much and look forward to doing more in the future to bring you more interviews with people who are as informed and informed as you are about the issues that matter to you. I appreciate your support and your support. Raffi and Rachael - Thank you, Raffy and Raffie Rachie - Rachit (Raj & Rachita , and Rania of course, thank you for coming to my show, Rachai I really really appreciate it. I really appreciate the support and appreciate the love and respect that you have shown me for my music and support my music, I really do appreciate it, so much. - thank you Rachira thank you, I m so much Rachir love you, appreciate you. - Raghu Love you, bye bye, bye Rachio . -Rachael & Raffael - Rachel <3 - Mimi Rachel - Yitzhak :) - Raffai - Rafael , Rachel , Rachiv ? ~ Rachiro + Rachim // Rachimi , Rosh | Rachima etc. , etc. - CHAD
00:00:30.000Well, it is true that if you start playing pool against somebody you don't know and you discover that they do understand that control of the cue ball is everything, then that's something.
00:00:40.000You think, oh, well, maybe we could have a game.
00:00:42.000Well, as soon as you looked at the table and said, these are very unforgiving pockets, I was like, oh, you know.
00:01:00.000You've got a lot of controversy going on.
00:01:03.000I really enjoyed that conversation that you had with CNN because that kind of conversation is rare to see on air and see someone as informed as you are to have these opinions and express them so honestly and bravely.
00:01:20.000It was a very interesting conversation.
00:01:23.000Well, I've known Michael a bit for a year or two.
00:01:28.000And actually, my last kind of engagement with him, with Michael Smoconish, I'm talking about, right, the interview, was when I was playing in Miami a few years ago.
00:01:39.000And the local Jewish community decided that I shouldn't be allowed to use local school children to sing Another Brick in the Wall, Part 2, because all during the war...
00:01:52.000The tours that I did, I always used local children, preferably from, you know, undernourished communities, to come and sing with me, between 8 and 12 of them every night.
00:02:09.000And they would come in, having listened to the song a bit, and I would rehearse them at 5 o'clock in the afternoon.
00:02:15.000And then, boom, at 8, they're on stage singing.
00:03:17.000It's a movement that was started in 2005 in Palestinian civil society and it stands for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions.
00:03:28.000And so it's a movement to try and shine a light on the predicament of the Palestinian people, particularly in the occupied territories, but also, I guess, in Israel itself.
00:03:42.000Using boycott and divestment from companies like Caterpillar or Hewlett-Packard, people like that, who deal in the illegal settlements in the occupied territory.
00:03:58.000Sanctions, well, there's not many people out there who are powerful enough to impose sanctions on other people.
00:04:06.000And most of those with that much power are allies of the Israeli government and so wouldn't do so.
00:04:14.000But anyway, that's what it is by and large.
00:04:17.000And since then, we have made great strides in that movement, and it's a much bigger movement than it was.
00:04:23.000And in consequence, the sort of battle lines have been drawn, but it's got more intense.
00:04:32.000And it's slightly less gentlemanly sport than it was 16 years ago, in my experience.
00:04:39.000So 16 years ago, you were allowed to have different opinions about conflicts.
00:04:46.000Well, no, but nobody knew about the conflict.
00:04:50.000It was largely unknown that there was a problem at all in the Holy Land, certainly by most of the public in this country, and where I'm from, in the UK as well, and in me.
00:05:04.000I mean, I had accepted back in 2005 or 6, one of those years, to do a gig in Tel Aviv.
00:05:13.000I was asked in the middle of a European tour, hey, Raj, they want you to go and do a gig in Tel Aviv.
00:05:24.000So I'm not blaming people for not having known about the Zionist project since 1948 and everything that had happened.
00:05:32.000Although I was vaguely aware of the Yom Kippur War, the 67 War and the 75 War and so on and so forth, I knew a little bit about the history but I wasn't really au fait.
00:05:46.000And that's how I learned, because as soon as I said I would do that gig, I started to receive emails from supporters of BDS, although it was only five or six months old at the time, mainly from North Africa to start with.
00:06:01.000But then I got an email from Omaba Guti, who was one of the sort of founding forces behind the beginnings of BDS. And he tried to persuade me to cancel the gig, which had sold out,
00:06:19.000of course, in a few minutes, you know.
00:06:22.000And eventually I was persuaded to cancel that gig.
00:06:26.000But as an act of compromise, as I thought, I feel as if I'm repeating myself.
00:06:34.000A speech that I've all made already, which I am.
00:06:39.000Anyway, so I moved the gig to an ecumenical agricultural community called Wahat Asalem in Arabic, and translated into Hebrew, it's Nevis Shalom, so something about peace, where...
00:06:58.000Muslims and Christians and Druze and atheists all live together in a community and all their children all go to the same school and they all mix together and they live peacefully and grow chickpeas mainly.
00:07:11.000As an example to the rest of us, if you like.
00:07:14.000So we did a gig there in the open air.
00:07:24.000What I didn't realize at the time, of course, was, of course, they were all Israelis, because Palestinians aren't allowed to travel.
00:07:29.000So there couldn't be any Palestinians there.
00:07:32.000They would need special permission, you know, to cross through checkpoints and things, which they wouldn't get.
00:07:38.000So we did this gig, and at the end of it, and it was lovely, they were extremely enthusiastic, they knew the work very well, and it was very...
00:07:54.000And lovely food backstage, and it was a warm summer evening.
00:07:57.000At the end of it, I thought, I'm going to say something.
00:08:01.000It was euphoric at the end of the gig.
00:08:03.000And I said, so I made a little speech, and I went, you are the generation of young Israelis who need to make peace with your neighbors, start talking to the Palestinian Authority, and the blah, blah, blah, and whatever.
00:08:18.000And they went from Pink Floyd to nothing.
00:10:36.000And in those days you couldn't use the word apartheid in relation to Israel.
00:10:40.000It was completely verboten in 2006. You could not use the word.
00:10:47.000You would have been strung up in the press and everywhere else and accused of being a Holocaust denier and this and that and Hitler and whatever.
00:10:56.000Now it's very difficult for anyone to have a conversation about Israel and Palestine without using the word apartheid because it is in the lexicon and the problem is far more in the light and we are looking at it more and there's more information for all of us about it than there was then.
00:11:21.000It's the work that BDS has done and so it has made progress and I'm glad it has because what I desperately hope to live to see is a holy land, I don't care what it's called, from the River Jordan to the sea where the people all have equal religious and political and social rights,
00:12:07.000For those reasons, for the fact that they're a different ethnic group.
00:12:11.000So the South African model clearly applies, except that the South Africans who survived the South African model all say that the Israeli model is far worse than the white South African model was.
00:12:26.000The white South Africans at least tried to build Well, they've poured money in for a start, trying to keep the black population quiet, which they failed to do.
00:12:36.000But both Desmond Tutu, before he sadly died, and Mandela, obviously, as well, both came out completely and said, this is a lot worse than our conditions were in South Africa before apartheid.
00:12:49.000So just discussing this and having compassion for the plight of the Palestinian people, that made them categorize you as anti-Semitic?
00:13:16.000That's why they label anyone who criticizes the apartheid policies of the state of Israel without criticizing the Jewish religion or any Jewish person.
00:13:27.000I mean, the fact that a lot of the people who are in the government are of the Jewish faith means that they can somehow feel they can conflate criticism of the apartheid policies without With the general criticism of an anti-Semitic criticism of the Jewish people or people who...
00:13:46.000Well, nice try, fellas, but it won't wash.
00:13:52.000And most of us who get labelled as anti-Semites are not.
00:13:56.000And like Jeremy Corbyn, for instance, the guy who was removed from the Labour Party in England on the grounds that he was accused of being anti-Semitic.
00:14:08.000He's left-wing and he's pro-Palestinian, pro the idea that they should have human rights, the Palestinian people.
00:14:17.000Who, after all, were the huge majority of the indigenous people in the Holy Land back in the start of the 20th century, before the start of the Zionist enterprise, which didn't really get going until 1920,
00:14:39.000The idea was happening in the late 19th century, in the 1880s and 1890s.
00:14:46.000I can't remember the guy's name now, but he was a Russian who thought up the idea of a return to the promised land, as it's called.
00:14:56.000Out of all the people that perform music and travel and are as prominent as you are, you're probably one of the most outspoken and informed when it comes to issues on foreign policy and human rights.
00:15:11.000When did this become a big part of your life and when did discussing this publicly become a big part of your life?
00:15:20.000Well, it became a big part of my life the day my father died, I think.
00:15:25.000I mean, I wouldn't know because I was only five months old.
00:15:28.000My father, as you might or may not know, died at Anzio on the 18th of February, 1944, and I was born September 1943, so I was only a few months old.
00:15:40.000But when I started to understand some of this, Was when he didn't come home and start picking me up from school when I was a little kid.
00:15:54.000And then, all through my childhood, I was brought up by my mother, my brother, and my big brother John and I were brought up single-handed by my mum, who was a schoolteacher, but she was also very left-wing.
00:16:11.000She's an interesting woman because she came from a very kind of middle-class family in London.
00:16:19.000Funnily enough, they lived in Golders Green, which was sort of well known for being a Jewish community in North London.
00:16:27.000Her father ran a business that was sort of middleman in fancy goods, toys and things like that.
00:16:35.000So there was a big warehouse in London.
00:16:38.000But my mother went off to a boarding school, girls' school, so she was brought up in a fairly straight-laced, English, Christian, middle-class way.
00:16:49.000She then trained as a teacher, and her first teacher training was in a town called Bradford, which is in the north of London.
00:16:58.000Not north of London, north of England, far north of England, in Yorkshire.
00:17:31.000And she started to look into social conditions there in the industrial north.
00:17:37.000And even then, in the mid to late 30s, she understood that there were inequalities in the context of the society that she lived in that she felt a personal need to do something about.
00:17:59.000So our front room was always a Labour Party committee room and she was always off in the evenings canvassing at elections and dragging me and my brother to British-China Friendship Association meetings in the evening.
00:18:14.000But she was always very careful and clear with us that she would I remember one day she said to me and my brother, when we come back from a meeting, interestingly enough, at the Friends Meeting House,
00:18:30.000which is the place the Quakers meet, you know, wherever it is in the world.
00:18:34.000It's always called the Friends Meeting House.
00:18:36.000And we've been watching films of K-pop-clad Chinese, you know, soldiers fighting against Chiang Kai-shek and the nationalist puppet government and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
00:18:47.000And she said, you know where we've been tonight, don't you, Roger?
00:18:50.000And she said, we've been at the Friends Meeting House, that is where the Quakers meet.
00:18:54.000She said, well, as you know, I'm an atheist, so I can't subscribe to their religious beliefs, but I will say this, they are very, very good people.
00:19:07.000I can still recount that story now because it's so important.
00:19:11.000You don't have to subscribe to people's beliefs.
00:19:15.000I can be a radical atheist and you can be a Hindu.
00:19:19.000The important thing is that we're good people.
00:19:23.000That we have hearts and that we care about our brothers and sisters.
00:22:03.000Like it sounds, it resonates, it sounds so powerful and true and yet rare.
00:22:08.000Yeah, but what happens then, if we're sitting down the pub and I tell you that story and we've got all night, one of us will have another drink and then we might start talking about the philosophical implications Of how you decide what's the right thing to do.
00:22:27.000Because some bloke listening to this wherever, it doesn't matter where they are, who's Zionist and who believes in the Zionist enterprise in Israel and in the occupied territory, in fact in the whole of the palace.
00:23:12.000Should we start talking about now and what's going on in the world now and what the right thing to do might be?
00:23:21.000I mean, you said a few minutes ago that I've been a bit controversial, particularly recently.
00:23:28.000And part of the controversy is about the Ukraine and what's the right thing to do.
00:23:35.000All I've done about the Ukraine is to try to lend what little weight I have to put that tiny bit of power I have in my shoulder To the wheel of encouraging anybody I can get to listen to stop the war,
00:24:14.000If you took my mother's advice, you would before you expressed an opinion about what's the right thing to do.
00:24:23.000And also, when you're thinking about it, if you want my advice, you will constantly put yourselves in the position of that young Ukrainian man or woman on the front line and that young Russian man or woman in the front line and their parents and their uncles and aunts and their brothers And sisters and the misery and pain and the lack of anything good at the end.
00:24:48.000And the more it escalates, the more we send arms, the more Putin...
00:24:54.000The only thing that they can do is start to talk to one another, just like JFK and Nikita Khrushchev did in 1962 during the Cuban Missile Crisis.
00:25:08.000Which was kept secret for years and years afterwards because JFK didn't want to look like a wimp.
00:25:17.000He didn't want to look as if he'd look, but he did.
00:25:20.000He and Nikita Khrushchev spoke on the telephone often.
00:25:24.000And at the end of it, they did a quid pro quo deal where JFK said, I'll take all our medium-range missiles out of Turkey and wherever else it was.
00:25:49.000And that led on to the later conversations between Reagan and Gorbachev and the non-proliferation treaties and all the other things that made our planet a little bit safer from the possibility of nuclear catastrophe.
00:26:38.000I'll tell you one thing I said before I pull it up, because it'll take a minute, was that I said some friends of mine, because I have a guitar-playing friend in England who wrote to me, why are you trying to suggest peace and a ceasefire?
00:27:04.000So one of the things I said to Putin, a friend of mine thinks that you're going to invite Poland and the other Baltic states and that you're then going to influence on Europe and blah, blah, blah.
00:27:13.000If that's true, please tell us now so we can all just say, all right, and blow ourselves to smithereens because that's what's going to happen if you do that.
00:27:26.000If you do that, you will start World War III. We know that the Ukraine situation is complicated and it's been 20 years in the making and it's...
00:27:38.000Well, I won't go into the American end of it.
00:27:42.000I mean, I will, if you've got a minute.
00:27:51.000And we discussed this very thing and we discussed the United States when they orchestrated a coup in Ukraine and how NATO has been moving their weapons closer and closer to the Russian line.
00:28:11.000And they've been saying all along you're breaking the agreement that was made between Baker, who was Secretary of State in 1990, and Gorbachev, where Gorbachev said, okay, I will agree to the reunification of Germany so long as NATO doesn't move one inch closer to the Russian border than the eastern borders of Germany.
00:28:33.000And they've reneged on it completely since then.
00:28:35.000I think what was very important in the conversation that you had with CNN is not that Russia is good and that, you know, we should support Russia.
00:28:45.000What you were essentially saying was that we have to be honest about what the United States has done.
00:28:50.000And that narrative is never discussed.
00:28:53.000When he was talking about the dangers of China and you brought up the fact that China hasn't invaded anyone in over a hundred years.
00:29:00.000Like, how can you say that when you know about all the interventionalist foreign policy decisions that the United States has made overseas, and then you look at what China's done?
00:30:14.000It's water, which is hugely important.
00:30:18.000The Himalayas, all the glacial streams, they feed water, not just to India and Pakistan, but also to the northeast of the whole of China as well.
00:30:33.000Plus, apparently, and not surprisingly, It's packed with everything that you make chips out of.
00:31:05.000I mean, yeah, but to their credit, they didn't invade and kill everybody like the Europeans did back in the, you know, 15th, 16th, 17th, 18th century.
00:31:16.000They actually went, you know, would you like to borrow some money?
00:31:39.000They should be allowed to do business with whoever they want.
00:31:42.000I believe in the idea of what's called free trade up to that point.
00:31:48.000There has to be a fair crack of the whip of everybody.
00:31:52.000And by and large, when multinational corporations want to invest in underdeveloped countries, they want to do it on their terms.
00:32:02.000And they don't want the people who live there to get anything out of it.
00:32:05.000I mean, I've been involved in a court battle for at least 10 years now with Chevron.
00:32:11.000Because of the pollution that they caused in the Amazon, in northeast Ecuador, with a friend of mine called Steve Donziger, who was sent to prison for acting on behalf of these people.
00:32:52.000Obviously, the right thing to do if you were the law in the United States would be to look at the facts of the matter and come to the conclusion that Chevron should give the $9.5 billion to the people whose lives they've destroyed making money or Texaco was the company who actually did it.
00:33:14.000But, things being what they are, that's not the way the law works.
00:33:18.000The law operates to support whoever can afford it, actually, which in this case is Chevron.
00:33:24.000They still haven't paid a penny, and they're still fighting, and they will go on fighting.
00:33:29.000And speaking as somebody who's supporting the other side, who doesn't have bottomless pockets, it's hard.
00:33:35.000It's hard to find the amount of money that they spend on it.
00:33:42.000Because they're worried of a domino effect, that if they lose this case, then they're going to lose the case in Nigeria, and they're going to lose the case in Australia, and suddenly they can see the whole pack of cards beginning to collapse.
00:33:57.000You've made enough profits out of the indigenous people all over the world.
00:34:02.000It's just a scary precedent that they were able to arrest Dawson Girl like that, that they were able to keep him in jail, the way they did it.
00:35:57.000But I did a gig a few weeks ago in D.C. and played to, I don't know, 16,000 people or something.
00:36:03.000And the next day I dragged myself out of bed and pushed over to the steps of the DOG. Knowing full well what I would find, which is my friend Randy Craglico and a van with a sign on it, and about 40 of the same activists I've seen at every gathering in support of Stephen Donziger and his freedom for the last 10 years.
00:39:30.000So, dear President Putin, since the Russian Federation invaded Ukraine on February the 24th this year, I've tried to use my small influence to encourage a ceasefire and a diplomatic settlement that addresses the security needs of both Ukraine and the Russian Federation.
00:39:47.000In that endeavor, I've written two open letters to Mrs. Elena Zelenska, the wife of the Ukrainian president.
00:40:33.000So, if you were to come out and say, oh yeah, if you were to come out and say, also the Russian Federation has no further territorial interest beyond the security of the Russian-speaking populations of the Crimea,
00:40:49.000Donetsk and Luhansk, that would help too.
00:40:51.000I say this because I know some people who think you want to overrun the whole of Europe, starting with Poland and the rest of the Baltic states.
00:41:02.000And we might as well all stop playing the desperately dangerous game of nuclear chicken that the hawks on both sides of the Atlantic seem so comfortable with and have at it.
00:41:13.000Yep, just blow each other and the world to smithereens.
00:41:18.000The problem is I have kids and grandkids and so do most of my brothers and sisters all over the world.
00:41:23.000And none of us would relish that outcome.
00:41:26.000So please, Mr. Putin, indulge me and make us that assurance.
00:41:58.000I know, I know, the USA and NATO invade other sovereign nations at the drop of a hat or for a few barrels of oil, but that doesn't mean you should.
00:42:08.000Your invasion of Ukraine took me completely by surprise.
00:42:11.000It was a heinous war of aggression, provoked or not.
00:42:16.000When Mrs. Zelenska replied to me via Twitter, I was very surprised.
00:42:22.000If you were to reply to me, I would mightily respect you for it and take it as an honorable move in the right direction towards a sustainable peace.
00:42:34.000So what did Putin say in terms of wanting a resolution?
00:42:40.000Well, you're going to have to look up his succession speech because I'm not going to start trying to quote Putin in translation without some words in front of me because I could get it wrong and blah, blah, blah, blah.
00:42:52.000He said one thing that could be seen as combative, which I can remember, he said.
00:43:02.000I want to negotiate peace, not dictate peace, negotiate peace.
00:43:08.000With the Ukraine, with Zelenska, he said, but the will of the people in the Donetsk, Lubansk, Kirshen, and whatever the one is whose name I can't remember, is inviolate.
00:43:56.000There's nothing unites people more than an existential attack upon what they consider to be their sovereignty.
00:44:03.000And let us not forget, anybody who would like to join this conversation with me or John Mearsheimer or any of the other people who are pro-peace and pro-diplomacy and pro-negotiations and pro-learning to get on with all our brothers and sisters in Russia who are very good people.
00:44:24.000As my mother would say, my mother used to say that about the Americans, because she came here for two years on an exchange when she was a student, and she spent the summer near Akron in Ohio at a Girl Scout camp,
00:44:39.000and then she spent another few months in Texas.
00:46:43.000In caucuses across the land, deliberate they'll always stand, defenders of the Rosenbergs, symbolic of that yearning to be better than before.
00:46:54.000They never will give up their brother to the grocer's cold machine, belt welts livid from the strong arm of the law.
00:47:03.000On campuses, in boardrooms, over giving thanks and pumpkin pie, on hustings in committee rooms, whenever tyrants loomed, we always held in our esteem the ones who hold on to the dream,
00:47:20.000unflinching while the bullies pose and fiddle on the hill.
00:47:26.000Has commerce so reduced the free that, blinded like a tot, contaminated by the dogshit in the grass, we blunder, slaves to humbug and this Texan dynasty?
00:47:42.000Beyond the grip of trade, the young strain beautiful and proud, the hoar-frost breath of new blood needs but nudges from the old forgotten guard to scale the moral high grounds in the clouds.
00:48:02.000It makes me almost emotional to read that because I wrote that 18 years ago now.
00:48:08.000But the idea of a younger generation coming up and saying, enough with this bullshit.
00:48:40.000That people just sort of lose interest in it, except for the very few that are very driven and very disciplined and really do spend the time to look at things.
00:48:49.000And those people ultimately usually wind up becoming activists or very involved at least.
00:49:29.000Sometimes it doesn't feel like it does, but that signal does get out there.
00:49:35.000And the people that have that signal, as small as their audience might be, occasionally that signal will reach someone else and they'll spread it.
00:49:53.000Which is huge, because that jogs a bit of my brain that wants to say, go on then, if you could paint a picture of the future, what might it include?
00:50:28.000That's the number one reason why we get involved in wars that we have no business in.
00:50:34.000I mean, Eisenhower warned us about that when he was leaving office with that speech about the military-industrial complex.
00:50:40.000I don't know if you noticed, because I sent you a stick of my show, but before we do the song Sheep, the last thing, it says, Orwell was right to warn us in Brave New World in 1984, and Aldous Huxley was right to warn us of the coming dystopia in,
00:50:55.000yeah, no, Aldous Huxley in Brave New World, and Dwight D. Eisenhower was right to warn us in his military industrial speech.
00:51:05.000I was right to warn us in my song Sheep.
00:51:12.000Well, I'm really excited to see your show tomorrow night.
00:51:15.000But one of the things that's so cool about your show is that you have all of these messages that are tied into the music.
00:51:24.000And you have this incredible visual accoutrement to this gigantic thing that goes along with your show.
00:51:32.000Yeah, there's no question that visually and sonically it's impressive and also I use my almost, that's not my whole body of work, but a small bit of things that go back to the beginning of when I started writing songs and things.
00:51:49.000So we play about half of Dark Side of the Moon and blah, blah, blah.
00:51:53.000Of course, all the stuff from Dark Southern, it was all about the same stuff that I'm banging on about now.
00:51:59.000So it's all kind of, it's all very relevant.
00:52:04.000But I'm very interested in what you said.
00:52:06.000I'd like to pursue that because you're so right about that.
00:52:11.000Well, money in politics is number one, right?
00:52:14.000So the only reason why people would get involved in politics without money is to try to make the world a better place.
00:52:21.000And I think you would recruit more people that have good intentions, and you would make it less attractive to people that are just looking to make money.
00:52:32.000I mean, you look at what's going on, like Nancy Pelosi just shot down this thing where it bans Congress from trading in stocks.
00:52:40.000She shot down something to ban insider trading.
00:52:42.000Well, there's only one reason to do that, because you want to keep making money insider trading.
00:52:46.000You're talking about a woman who's on the last days of her life, who's worth hundreds of millions of dollars.
00:53:18.000I gather you spoke to Zuckerberg a few weeks ago.
00:53:21.000Zuckerberg, Bezos, Gates, I don't care who they are, the hugely rich American oligarchs, I'm sure it's true of Russian oligarchs and Chinese oligarchs, they amass the huge amounts of money because it gives them power.
00:53:35.000Then they buy newspapers and television stations and whatever, so they become part of the system of propaganda to keep us all in line.
00:53:48.000And I actually wrote a sketch about...
00:56:09.000Well, I don't know because I don't know the history well enough.
00:56:12.000Well, he created this social network and it became wildly popular.
00:56:16.000Yeah, and he's now in cahoots with the FBI and the CIA and has some cozy meetings with them deciding who to allow to communicate with their brothers and sisters and who to censor.
00:56:26.000Well, we discussed that on the podcast.
00:56:30.000Well, because I brought up the Hunter Biden story because I brought up censorship in social media.
00:56:34.000He said that the FBI had contacted Facebook and told them to be wary of a lot of Russian disinformation that was going to happen right before.
00:57:15.000It was an actual real laptop from a man who is, at the time, the vice president's son, who had a serious drug problem and was kind of off the rails.
00:57:25.000And he left this laptop at a repair station, and it turned out inside that laptop was a bunch of crazy shit.
00:57:33.000And they were saying that this was Russian disinformation, which would be the most wildlessly slanderous thing, wildly slanderous thing that Russia has ever done.
00:57:44.000Like create a laptop and fill it with the son of the vice president, like pornography and bribery and all this crazy shit that's supposedly in that laptop.
00:57:55.000So the FBI contacts I don't believe he specifically said that that laptop was a part of it,
00:58:11.000but they certainly were insinuating that.
00:58:13.000And then they decided to limit the engagement that people had with that.
00:58:19.000I don't know what he was saying when he said that.
00:58:23.000My perspective was, now imagine if you are him and you're running something like Facebook.
00:58:28.000You are, first of all, you're insanely busy.
00:58:31.000And if you have trust and faith in the FBI and the intelligence agencies, you definitely don't want to be distributing disinformation from a foreign company.
00:58:42.000Or a foreign country that's trying to undermine our election.
00:59:03.000They don't tell you what's involved in whatever, at least, limited engagement protocol they have.
00:59:10.000Whether it's censorship, or I don't know what you want to call it, because you could put that story on your page.
00:59:17.000It would just limit the amount of people who see it.
00:59:20.000But I don't understand how you're doing that.
00:59:22.000And I don't think they want to reveal that either.
00:59:24.000Well, the fact is, in my view, what's really dangerous is that this prick has any hand at all in deciding what any of us read about anything.
00:59:36.000He should not have his finger on the delete button, on anything that goes through Facebook, in my view.
00:59:54.000But certainly anything to do with foreign – for instance, anything to do with the Ukraine war, you can't have Meta deciding what we should believe about that.
01:00:04.000It's bad enough that the whole of the print section of mainstream media and all television has decided what we should believe about the Ukraine.
01:00:13.000So they're all completely happy – To tell us that Russian soldiers have been raping babies to death.
01:00:21.000And then three days later, you find out that it's unattributable.
01:01:18.000I wonder how many people say things like that just to get attention and likes and just to get views because I think that's a big part of what Twitter is.
01:01:42.000Which is the whole, if you think about it, all of this, if it all developed from the beginnings of Facebook and for whatever that site was that Zuckerberg started with, grading co-eds, that's sort of the beginning of it and the FOMO and the this and that and sending pictures of yourself to your friends and caring what your schoolmates think about and all of that and it blowing up into something that is far,
01:02:06.000far, far More important than your mother telling you, read as much as you can, get educated, make sure you know what you're talking about, and do the right thing.
01:02:18.000Because none of them are telling us to do that.
01:02:30.000Because she'd go, Roger, if you think I'm going to waste my time with something as flimsy as Facebook, you've got another thing coming, darling.
01:02:37.000But what I tried to get from him and what I wanted to try to understand is like, what is it like when you create something that literally is just a social network?
01:02:46.000You're just supposed to be socializing with people and sharing photographs, which is pretty innocuous.
01:02:51.000And then it becomes something that can influence elections and foreign policy and the way the world is viewed and the way narratives are spun.
01:02:59.000And, you know, it's a daunting task, and especially when you didn't set out to do that in the beginning.
01:03:20.000Should we just limit that information?
01:03:22.000And that's what they've decided to do.
01:03:24.000They've decided to take this moral and ethical position and impose their own ideas on what should or should not be said.
01:03:33.000But all based at some point on their position that they want to go on getting richer and richer and richer and they want Meta to be the biggest company in the world and to own everything else and then they really will rule the world.
01:03:51.000Well, that's the problem with every technology, or excuse me, every corporation.
01:03:55.000They want to continue growing and getting bigger.
01:03:58.000And you have shareholders, and they demand that you make more money next quarter than you made this quarter.
01:04:03.000And if you don't, you are not doing your responsibility.
01:04:06.000Funnily enough, there's groups of Chevron shareholders who are going to the AGM now and telling them to pay the indigenous people of the Amazon rainforest in Ecuador the money they owe them because they don't sleep at night.
01:04:32.000I've never been to Davos and I never will because the World Economic Forum seems to me to be a can of worms that I don't want to get within a hundred miles.
01:04:58.000What he is is almost like a character in a movie.
01:05:02.000If it was a movie, you would go, well, that's too over the top.
01:05:05.000There's no way there's a guy with a German accent that's telling the world how to live, and they get all the billionaires to come and meet with him and decide what to do with the future of food and healthcare.
01:06:27.000And this is going to sound like boasting and it is.
01:06:30.000The reason I'm there is because I've just been to northern Iraq and been across to northeastern Syria and picked up two kids from Trinidad with their mother and flown them to Zurich and then we're flying them back to Trinidad because their father joined ISIS and stole the children and took them there and then obviously he was killed.
01:06:49.000And my friend Clive Stafford-Smith said, what are we going to do about these two kids in Camp Roche in northern Syria?
01:08:11.000Otherwise, why is he going to visit George Bush?
01:08:16.000Anyway, I know that I probably shouldn't have told you that story or said any of that stuff.
01:08:21.000I think, I mean, if you really wanted to find out what a person like that is like, that would be an incentive to go visit George Bush to find out like whether or not that does hang on his conscience.
01:08:55.000Yeah, they're weird and it's like, I mean obviously I'm armchair psychologist here, but I'm looking into him like that's a man that's very troubled.
01:09:04.000That's a man that, I mean, the weight of the world and the deaths that were caused by the decisions that he made as a president and the amount of American lives that were lost, the amount of Iraqi lives that were lost, the way the world has changed.
01:09:21.000The way the world thinks of America post 9-11 is so different.
01:09:26.000There was a window of time right after the attacks on the World Trade Center where the whole world was united with America.
01:09:40.000That was squandered when we invaded Iraq.
01:09:42.000That was squandered when people had this Real, true understanding of what the motivations really were and the fact there weren't really weapons of mass destruction and that we saw the devastation and the lost lives and the way the world looks at us is incredibly different.
01:10:02.000From September 11, 2001 to today, it's just a complete polar shift.
01:10:09.000Yeah, you're completely right, of course.
01:10:11.000And the interesting thing as well is that on February, I believe it was Valentine's Day or the 15th or something, there were over 20 million people all over the world in the streets.
01:10:24.000Saying there are no weapons of mass destruction.
01:11:09.000Yeah, well, he probably had a meeting in advance and assured them of his intentions and just kind of go over there and sing Ordinary Love.
01:11:16.000Well, my theory would be that he never escaped from the dynasty, you know, from his genes, whatever, from that family because it's a supremely toxic background to come out of.
01:11:30.000All that bullshit about getting rid of the Vietnam Syndrome.
01:11:37.000That's why Desert Storm, or whatever the first one was called, happened.
01:11:42.000All of that history is fascinating reading, but it's also It's completely insane.
01:12:08.000And this is where, during my show, I touch on this occasion, because in my show, as well as you will see tomorrow night, I sing two bits of a new song called The Bar.
01:12:21.000And I make absolutely certain that the audience understand what the song is about.
01:12:27.000It's about this place that I carry around inside me.
01:12:30.000And I said, we all have it, if we can find it in us, in our hearts or in our soul.
01:12:35.000And it's a place where we can converse with others and share opinions.
01:12:58.000I tell you what I'm telling you, because what I've discovered doing these shows, and I've done about 30 of them or a few more in the United States, is that people get it.
01:13:10.000And in a way, what is good about it is that singing those three verses that I do of that song, it gives them permission to disagree with me and yet not feel they have to stand up and wave their fists and walk out.
01:13:26.000Because they've understood what I'm saying.
01:13:29.000It's alright to disagree about things and have different opinions about it, but we have to allow one another to express our opinions.
01:13:37.000And it may be that we'll meet somebody who understands more about things.
01:13:44.000You know, if you meet the Dalai Lama, you're going to learn something from them.
01:13:48.000I'm not saying I'm the Dalai Lama, but there are things we can learn from other human beings without going on Facebook or picking up our phone and whatever.
01:14:04.000No, you are making sense, but I think that's one of the great things about your show is that you combine this amazing music that has this incredible history to it with All of these messages and with all of these visuals.
01:14:17.000I think you got a lot of attention during the Trump administration because of the flying Trump pigs and all the other visuals that you did.
01:14:36.000Yeah, well, let's see what happens, shall we, before we come to a final conclusion about Biden.
01:14:40.000As I said in the Shmokonish interview, I said there's something criminal.
01:14:46.000It is criminal not to be trying to end the war in Ukraine, but just by trying to pour weapons into it, just pouring weapons into the Ukraine.
01:14:57.000Ukrainian people can't beat Russia in a war on the ground, however many weapons you give them.
01:15:04.000That policy shows that Joe Biden and Antony Blinken and the administration and whoever is pulling their strings to go all conspiracy theory for a minute couldn't give an F about the Ukrainian people.
01:15:18.000They couldn't care less how many of them.
01:18:22.000He says, there's nothing new that way.
01:18:24.000They've just made the decision to go to war with Iraq.
01:18:27.000He said, I guess it's like we don't know what to do about terrorists, but we've got a good military and we can take down governments.
01:18:34.000And he said, I guess if the only tool you have is a hammer, every problem has to look like a nail.
01:18:41.000So I came back to see him a few weeks later, and by that time we were bombing in Afghanistan.
01:18:47.000I said, are we still going to war with Iraq?
01:18:48.000And he said, oh, it's worse than that.
01:18:50.000He said, he reached over on his desk, he picked up a piece of paper, and he said, I just got this down from upstairs, meaning the Secretary of Defense's office today, and he said, this is a memo that describes how we're going to take out seven countries in five years, starting with Iraq and then Syria,
01:19:07.000Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, and finishing off Iran.
01:19:53.000There's a lyric in another new song of mine, one of the other songs I wrote in lockdown that talks about I'd say in Timbuktu or in the Republic of the Congo and other states where something's...
01:20:48.000I've written another letter to somebody, which I haven't posted yet.
01:20:53.000Oh, I know, it's to a councillor in the Ukraine who has declared me persona non grata in Krakow, which is a big town very near the Polish-Ukrainian border, because he claims I'm a Putin apologist.
01:21:10.000And so all my asking everybody that I can get to listen to me to make peace, to stop the war, to start negotiation or whatever, for them I'm a...
01:21:21.000All they want to do is kill every Russian that they can get their hands on.
01:24:05.000But you never sit down intentionally to write like that.
01:24:10.000I never sit down like, you know, professional writers, sometimes they say, I get up at 6 every morning, have a cup of coffee and a piece of bacon, and then I go to my room and I write until 12, 30. Right.
01:24:21.000And then I have a bottle of champagne and pass out in line.
01:27:01.000I told this to Chris Hedges the other day, but I'm going to tell it to you as well, because that's what's jogged my memory.
01:27:06.000You know that thing when you're reading a book, okay, and you've got it on your bedside table or whatever, and you read it, or any time, you could be lying on the beach, and it's a great book.
01:28:03.000There is a magic in some books that sucks a man into connections with the spirits hard to touch that join him to his kind.
01:28:14.000A man will eke the reading out, guarded like a canteen in the desert heat, but sometimes needs must drink and then And then the final drop falls sweet.
01:29:17.000I mean, we're starting to put it in a proper order and figure out, you know, whether I need to write anymore or what I need to do.
01:29:26.000And when you wrote that, did you have a process like a writer does, where you just get up every day?
01:29:30.000Or did you just do it whenever the spirit moved you?
01:29:31.000No, because I was in lockdown, so I was in the same household every day.
01:29:36.000If I wasn't sort of doing anything else, which most of the time I wasn't, I'd go...
01:29:42.000Where was I? I'd just pull the laptop over and write another chapter about something different or leaving all the Pink Floyd stuff to last, obviously, for obvious reasons.
01:29:56.000Hard things to write about stuff, so you just leave it alone for a bit.
01:30:00.000What's the biggest breakup in probably rock history?
01:30:28.000Neil Young, but I won't start a long list because I probably could, but it's that end of the spectrum that I'm more interested in.
01:30:38.000I'm not really interested in loud rock and roll, which some people are and they love it, but I couldn't care less about ACDC or Eddie Van Halen or any of that stuff.
01:33:06.000So I sing a song unashamedly about nuclear war at the end of the show when everybody's just watched the second half of Dark Side of the Moon and they're all, you know, really happy.
01:33:20.000And quite rightly, because my band is really good and so everybody's very moved.
01:33:28.000I take the risk of saying, you know, there's something that is a lot more important than any of this.
01:33:34.000We are teetering on the edge of annihilation.
01:33:37.000And they've arrived at a point in the show then where they go...
01:33:42.000But they also go, let's listen to what he has to say.
01:33:47.000And some of them even know the song, which is from the final cut, which was the last record I made in 1983 with Pink Floyd.
01:33:55.000And then we do it, and a lot of the audience respond.
01:33:59.000They want to show me that they understand and that they care, and they stand up, and that when everybody's being blown to bits and it's the end of the world in the song, and it's visual as well, it's a beautiful animation that Sean Evans has made,
01:34:14.000who's my collaborator in all things visual in these shows.
01:34:19.000And the people sort of get it, but still it's pretty sombre because there's nothing really rah-rah or rock and roll about nuclear war.
01:34:35.000And when I say, you know, if you run into Joe Biden in the street, you might just tap him on the shoulder and say, hey, Joe, shouldn't we get rid of nuclear weapons?
01:35:46.000You certainly can't do it over here in the United States, whether they could do it in Russia or, you know, Russia's an autocratic state, so who knew?
01:35:54.000When people bring up, yeah, Russia and or China with me, you know, I say, you're talking to the wrong bloke.
01:36:05.000I know a little bit about the United States and about the United Kingdom and less, but a little bit about, I speak Greek, so I know a bit about Greece and And, you know, we learned French when I was at school, and there are neighbors who we hate across La Manche.
01:36:21.000But I can't, without speaking Russian and Mandarin, How can you possibly know what's going on?
01:36:28.000And also, how could you know in the context of their culture?
01:36:31.000Like, you don't totally understand their culture unless you speak their language.
01:36:39.000That's why it's no surprise that Chomsky, you know, his work in linguistics was the thing that brought him to the notice of other academics and intellectuals back in the 50s.
01:36:51.000And he's right because, you know, linguistics has always been hugely important.
01:36:58.000Linguistics is the basis of all philosophy and unless you speak the language that the philosophy is being described in, you can't begin to take part in the conversation.
01:37:09.000One thing I have to ask you because I can't forget this.
01:37:14.000The synchronization With The Wizard of Oz.
01:37:44.000So it's a coincidence of some time and maybe it's cosmic coincidence.
01:37:50.000I do like the story though of the cop in Louisiana following a bus and it was weaving about the road a bit.
01:37:59.000And so he pulls it over, young motorcycle cop, puts the bike up on the stand, opens the door, nearly falls over, there's so much smoke coming out through the bloody door.
01:38:10.000He goes in, it goes through, and he's trying to find people, you know, with dope, because it's...
01:38:18.000Eventually he gets to the back of the bus where there's a private compartment and he opens the door and goes in and there's Willie Nelson.
01:38:25.000And the story is that Willie Nelson is listening to Dark Side of the Moon and watching The Wizard of Oz on the TV. And I don't believe it for a minute, but I like the story.
01:38:37.000Yeah, I don't even want to investigate that.
01:41:41.000I don't think it impinged on my burgeoning writing career, if you like, when I was, you know, starting to write songs because Sid went crazy in 19...
01:41:57.00067. And so by 69, we weren't seeing him anymore.
01:42:12.000Yeah, that's the narrative, or one of the narratives.
01:42:16.000It may be because he was mixing with people who were doing acid on a regular basis, I think, in 67. And And I'm sure he did too much of it.
01:42:31.000Was he teetering on the edge of what might be called schizophrenia at the time?
01:42:38.000A lot of the things that he was saying, and it was right at the beginning of us getting our first record in any chart, which was Arnold Lane.
01:45:01.000It's like I actually mentioned one of the periods, one of the moments is in the show because it's in when we play Wish You Were Here and I do wish he was here and I mean it's partly what that song's about and Shine On You Crazy Diamond is just completely about Sid.
01:45:21.000But we were, I tell the story in text in the show and it goes, we'd been to a meeting at the Capitol Tower in Los Angeles and Sid and I were walking down the street after it and we stopped at the traffic light at Hollywood and Vine,
01:45:38.000Hollywood Boulevard and Vine Street in Los Angeles and he looked at me and smiled and he said, it's nice here in Las Vegas, isn't it?
01:45:47.000Well, we were in LA, so he already had no idea where he was, even like that.
01:45:54.000But then he, I say in the thing, you'll see at the show it says, then his face darkened, and he looked down at the ground and spat out one word, people.
01:46:06.000And that sort of encapsulates what it was like.
01:48:14.000I've got a bike, you can ride it if you like.
01:48:16.000It's got a basket, a bell that rings and things that make it look good.
01:48:20.000I'd give it to you if I could, but I borrowed it.
01:48:23.000That's so quirky in terms of its meter, the way the lyric attaches both to the melody and to the time signature and the tempo of the thing is remarkable.
01:48:40.000And it wasn't just, you know, there were lots of quirky little songs like that, all in a very English romantic tradition and whatever.
01:50:13.000Two strangers passing in the street, by chance two passing glances meet, and I am you, and what I see is me.
01:50:24.000And will we something, will they call us to move on and whatever, but that's the important couplet, is to recognize your connection with your brother or sister, whoever they are,
01:51:43.000And one of the beautiful things about art, and particularly music, is that you can get a message like that across, and because people love the music and they'll listen to it over and over again and they'll remember your concert, it'll resonate.
01:51:57.000It becomes a part of the way you think.
01:52:13.000It's a bit like when I sing Us and Them now, I stop playing my bass when we get to With, Without, and Who'll Deny It's What the Fighting's All About.
01:52:37.000Forward he cried from the rear and the front rank died.
01:52:41.000So that's like, that's another version of The Bravery Being Out of Range, which I wrote in 1990. So I wrote, 1990, I wrote The Bravery Being Out of Range.
01:52:50.000So that's 20 years after I wrote Us and Them.
01:52:54.000And Us and Them is only about two strangers passing in the street, because there is no Us and Them.
01:53:02.000But the people with the money, who by the elections that you were describing in the Citizens United conversation, they own all the newspapers and the TV state, and they would have us believe that the Us and Them is real and that we are good and they are evil.
01:53:22.000That's why we've got to kill them all.
01:55:17.000And one of the beautiful things is that it unites people with different political philosophies, different religious backgrounds, different...
01:55:24.000If you enjoy music, you enjoy art, it brings people together in a very unique way because they have the connection to this work.
01:55:36.000They have a connection to this thing that this band or this person has created.
01:56:10.000I was thinking how unbelievably handsome and elegant Dirk Bogard is, sitting there with his knee crossed over like that, you know, with a cigarette and whatever.
01:56:35.000Well, at the opening of Death in Venice, he's sitting in a deck chair on the Lido.
01:56:43.000And it's Mahler's Fourth Symphony, or is it his fifth?
01:56:48.000Fourth, I think it's the adagiato from Mahler's Fourth Symphony.
01:56:52.000And it's just like, you just go, when you hear that music with those shots, him on the Lido and there's a boat going across the Grand Canal or something like that, you just go...
01:57:03.000So I find classical music often more moving than almost any of the pop music that I'm attached to.
01:57:13.000But if it's popular music, for me anyway, it's more likely to be Billie Holiday than anything contemporary.
01:57:26.000I was reading about God Bless the Child and I read for the first time the story about her because she wrote the lyrics to God Bless the Child and it's a true story.
01:57:39.000Billie Holiday goes to borrow money from her mother Who won't give her any, because she's skint.
01:59:28.000But there's also a lot of stuff that is open absolutely to interpretation.
01:59:35.000One of my songs that I like to hear people talking about, or don't, but I would notice, is like...
01:59:41.000The second verse of Wish You Were Here goes, did they get you to trade?
01:59:46.000Your heroes for ghosts, hot ashes for trees, hot air for a cool breeze, cold comfort for change, and did you exchange a walk-on part in the war for a lead role in a cage?
01:59:56.000Well, there's so many ideas all wrapped up in those words.
02:00:02.000I know what they mean for me, but a lot of people sometimes either misinterpret or they interpret them in ways that mean something to them, I think.
02:00:12.000I think also they attach it to meaning that applies to their own life.
02:00:35.000It's funny that, hey teacher, leave them kids alone, which is now being taken up in Iran in all the protests in the streets because of the beating to death of, what's her name?
02:00:55.000Amini is the girl's name who died in...
02:00:59.000For incorrectly wearing her headscarf.
02:01:27.000It's a tricky situation because obviously I'm against the idea of a theocracy under any terms.
02:01:36.000Just as much of the Iranian mullahs, the ayatollah, as I am against the Israeli state, which is another theocracy and whatever.
02:01:48.000But I'm also very wary of, and not that it hasn't stopped me making videos and sending my support to the protesters and saying, because it's separate from the politics of the thing.
02:01:59.000Because there's a lot of talk that is encouraging people.
02:02:39.000And it was, you know, it started off, I was, all my work was banned in apartheid South Africa because the kids in the townships were singing, leave those kids alive.
02:03:49.000It would be nice to see, to allow a bit more leeway, particularly say in Latin America, to the new Colombian administration or the new president of Chile or the whatever, if we leave them alone and let them get on with it.
02:04:05.000Whether or not they might develop societies where they don't feel that they need the heel of the jackboot to maintain control of her.
02:04:18.000So it's hard to know because we, the West, the UK and the United States and the rest of NATO have interfered mightily In experiments in other ways to address social responsibility of governments in other economic models,
02:04:38.000say, like in Venezuela or in Chile or places where we attempt to depose the duly elected democratic government of the country.
02:04:48.000Isn't it almost ironic that the one country that was founded within the last few hundred years to escape from the control of a dictatorship became the country that intervenes in more countries' government than any?
02:05:16.000But if you read the Constitution, you've probably read your Constitution more carefully than I had and the Bill of Rights and the whatever.
02:05:23.000And the way the Electoral College was set up.
02:05:25.000It was sort of set up so that the people never really have a chance to have any power in it.
02:05:32.000It's set up to be ruled by the elite who created and wrote the Constitution.
02:05:59.000It gets ignored that the United States of America has interfered in more elections and have been involved in more coups and invaded more countries and deposed more democratically elected.
02:06:11.000Not least the government of the Ukraine in 2014. And it's like none of it ever happened, you'd think.
02:06:20.000We wave the flag and, no, everything's great.
02:06:29.000We just have so much momentum in this country for the dissemination of propaganda that to like put a halt to that and start objectively analyzing the United States role and all these foreign conflicts and where money has played a part and what are the motivating factors for us to get involved in this and who stands to profit and what are the forces behind this?
02:06:53.000To expect that from Mainstream media at this point, they're almost like, well, that's just not what we do.
02:07:02.000Well, the unfortunate thing is, and without wishing to decry all journalists everywhere, but most of them in the mainstream media, the problem is that if you speak up against the story that they're selling on behalf of the ruling class,
02:08:30.000It's about Syria, and it's about false flag, and it's about chemical weapons, and it's about Duma, and it's about April the 13th, and it's about the OPCW, and it's about the inspectors, Ian Henderson and Inspector B, and it's about the whole narrative,
02:08:45.000and about how it was taken eventually to the Security Council by Aaron Marte from Grey's own and others, and blah, blah, blah.
02:09:01.000It was a false flag by al-Nusra and al-Qaeda who were in Duma, in control of the place on the day it happened, but left the next day because they'd already given up.
02:09:13.000And the Assad government actually sent the buses to take them all away, saying, let's not fight in the streets.
02:09:22.000Anyway, so this kid started accusing me because...
02:09:29.000I've done so much reading and research into this particular subject and I've been in a lot of trouble since 2018 because I stood up on stage in Barcelona and expressed my misgivings only because the United States and the UK and the Republic of France were about to go and bomb Syria in reprisal for a chemical weapons attack that there was a huge amount of Why
02:11:17.000There's smacks of Bellingcat and Elliot Higgins and all of that stuff and the intermingling of the security services both in England and probably in Russia and God knows where else.
02:11:35.000You really do have to read everything, and you have to read the small print, and you have to look in if you want to know the truth about things that happen.
02:11:45.000When you're doing something like that, you're reading both sides, and you're trying to get an objective assessment of what actually happened.
02:11:55.000Well, you have to read everything, and particularly you have to read the documents that are leaked by whistleblowers.
02:12:04.000There were new documents as late as 2020 from the OPCW from a further person who came out and said, I'm going to give you these documents now because they show that what you're saying is true and they show that Ian Henderson's misgivings about the official OPCW document...
02:12:27.000The guy who runs the OBCW now is called Arias, okay?
02:12:32.000And they produced a final report on Duma that said it is likely that these people died of chlorine poisoning from a canister drop from a helicopter or whatever.
02:12:46.000It all points to the fact that nobody quite knows who killed these people, but the evidence all points to the fact that the canisters that were found at the site were put there, were placed there, were left there.
02:13:05.000Anyway, I don't want to go through the whole thing.
02:13:07.000You know, again, if you want to know about it, or if anyone out there wants to know about it, you should read Aaron Marte's articles in The Grey Zone.
02:13:17.000And then you should read, I've forgotten his name, but the guy who actually started the OPCW, who was fired because he started asking questions.
02:13:27.000You should read what he has to say about it.
02:13:30.000This is the guy who started the OPCW, something for protection of chemical weapons.
02:13:40.000I can't remember what the O stands for.
02:13:42.000Anyway, I'm going to stop talking about it.
02:13:44.000So this person who shouted you down, they had not read all this?
02:13:50.000So they had this narrow-minded perspective, this one-side perspective, which is the mainstream narrative.
02:13:56.000Yeah, and if you question it, they say you're a conspiracy theorist and a Putin apologist and a Russian bot, and they just call you names and laugh at you as if...
02:14:09.000You're an idiot, you know, which obviously I'm not.
02:14:14.000And I had read an awful lot more than this, which is why we couldn't have a conversation about it, because he hadn't read any of this stuff.
02:14:44.000yesterday, they recorded a conversation between the two of them before playing a recording of the conversation I'd had with the little prick.
02:14:53.000And that conversation they had was 10 minutes of hatchet job.
02:14:59.000I can't believe he said that about the Jews.
02:15:12.000Do you think they do that to just support their own argument, to try to make it look like it makes more sense what they're saying, and then calling you a conspiracy theorist?
02:16:22.000But that is just me criticizing the policies of your government.
02:16:27.000And I'm afraid the Star of David does represent the nation that is committing the crime of apartheid every day and murdering Palestinians every day.
02:16:38.000Men, women and children every single day.
02:18:43.000If you want anti-Semitism to mean criticism of the Israeli government, you have to say this isn't like the anti-Semitism that we talked about, which is where you're down or criticize or say bad things about Jewish people or the Jewish faith.
02:19:01.000That's what anti-Semitism means to me and to everybody else.
02:20:26.000We had these kids who were a bit older than usual, and they were in Oakland, up in the Bay Area.
02:20:33.000And they were black kids, all black kids.
02:20:39.000You know, and the boys had sort of almost had moustaches, and they were surly and uncooperative and really, you know, very difficult to work with and didn't want to...
02:20:54.000You know, and it was hard work and I can remember feeling a bit negative towards these people.
02:21:01.000Anyway, they did it and they did the show and they were fine and whatever.
02:21:07.000And like a week later, there was a phone call came in another city into the production office and it was a guy on the phone and he was talking to one of the girls in the office.
02:21:19.000And he wanted to talk about these kids.
02:21:22.000And she was busy and went, yeah, what?
02:23:49.000But he happened to be in Chicago and came to the gig in Chicago.
02:23:53.000And when I heard this news about these kids in Oakland, so I said, you should send them some money, Steve, you're rich, to this group of kids in Oakland so they can maybe do something theatrical and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
02:24:42.000You touch those lives, however briefly.
02:24:45.000And you brought it up because you talked about the kids in North Miami who weren't allowed to sing with me because some prick had told the mayor that I'm an anti-Semite.
02:24:56.000Some probably very worthy feeling, you know, local Jewish community association.
02:26:00.000You know, if you're going to be a settler-colonialist nation and subjugate the indigenous people to death, well, okay, but you can't do it under the cloak of your religion.
02:26:16.000And so you can't criticize this because of my religion.
02:26:19.000As I said to you before, how would that be if we suddenly decided that the United States was a theocracy and only Christians could have rights?
02:26:48.000And I've had friends that have gone over there, and Abby Martin in particular, who's come on the podcast and said...
02:26:54.000Talked about the atrocities that are committed there and even attacks on journalists and murdering of journalists over there by Israeli troops.
02:27:04.000And, you know, she just gets mercilessly attacked for talking about this.
02:27:09.000She even interviewed people on the street in Israel and asked them questions about Palestinians and got these horrific responses, dehumanizing the othering of those people.
02:27:21.000I know Mike and Abby very well, and I believe you, and I've heard those stories from her as well.
02:27:29.000Well, it's a small country, and they're a long way away, and the press is completely...
02:27:38.000Funnily enough, there's one independent paper called Haaretz in Israel.
02:27:43.000And a close friend of mine, who is an Israeli Jew, writes articles for it, and they're very humane.
02:27:50.000But somehow they just get brushed aside.
02:27:53.000His name is Gideon Levy, if you ever want to look up somebody who's making sense from, you know, that side of the tracks or that part of the world.
02:28:09.000It's very hard to shine a light brightly enough that people go, oh, I get it.
02:28:15.000And particularly if the leader of your great country is going, I don't want to hear anything, I'm not interested, I will be the greatest supporter of Israel.
02:28:28.000Three million percent that there's ever been ever in the whole history of everything, whatever they do, I don't care.
02:28:37.000There's no political consequences for saying that, though.
02:29:06.000Regardless of how their policies impact individual human beings, through no fault of their own, just happen to be born Palestinian and been stuck in this apartheid state.
02:29:18.000And the other thing is that they, you know, it's very binary in that way.
02:29:24.000It's like you're either with Israel or you're with Hamas.
02:29:27.000You're with this terrorist organization that puts its people in danger purposely and uses them as cannon fodder.
02:29:34.000So they can gain support internationally and does all these human rights atrocities and launches missiles at Israel.
02:29:48.000Well, they're also the democratically elected government of Gaza, Hamas.
02:29:54.000And there is an armed wing and whatever.
02:29:57.000But if you actually read international law at all or the Geneva Conventions, an occupied people have an absolute legal and moral right to resist the occupation.
02:30:09.000And this is a fact that is not bandied about when they talk about firing rockets into Israel, which almost never do any damage because they're very ineffectual.
02:30:22.000And another thing that is a great worry to the Palestinian community is that...
02:30:30.000The Israelis seem now to have a policy of pushing them, murdering so many of them that they are absolutely trying to create another intifada so they can make it an armed conflict where they're a thousand times,
02:30:45.000ten thousand times more powerful than the Palestinian people who they are hoping will arm themselves and the young people gather together in bands and try and have an insurrection, an armed intercept, so they can just kill them all.
02:30:59.000When you say that Hamas is the democratically elected leaders of Palestine, how corrupt— I didn't say of Palestine, I said of Gaza.
02:31:26.000The Israelis control who comes in and goes out.
02:31:29.000They opened fire on Palestinian fishing boats again yesterday.
02:31:34.000So I can't really answer that question because I'm not there and I don't know.
02:31:39.000Does anybody have a clear path of resolution that makes sense for that area where they could sit down and come up with some sort of humane, logical, compassionate way to mitigate some of these problems?
02:31:58.000You give equal human rights to people, but you would have to stop the occupation and stop one group of people oppressing another group of people.
02:32:08.000You would have to accept the principles of Paris 1948. And everything would develop from that.
02:32:57.000All they want is for Liz Truss to move the UK Embassy to Jerusalem and compound the problem, just like Donald Trump did when he did that.
02:33:08.000And he exacerbated the problem beyond all measure.
02:33:12.000Because it's like, oh look, The President of the United States has said it's alright for us to annex the Golden Heights and occupy the whole of what was left of Palestine in 1967 and establish an apartheid state.
02:33:30.000Even though the whole international community up until that time had said, no, Jerusalem cannot be all combined under the control of the state of Israel.
02:33:45.000That is not what we all agreed in 1947. And so the occupation in 1967 of East Jerusalem was illegal and still is.
02:33:57.000All the settlements in the occupied territory are illegal, not just under international law, but under the Fourth Geneva Convention as well.
02:34:09.000And it's also illegal not to allow the refugees to return into Israel as well.
02:34:18.000But international law, as we know, because the United States isn't a party to the Treaty of Rome, they said, well, we didn't sign any of those treaties.
02:34:30.000So we're not subject to international laws.
02:34:37.000The United Nations Charter is a wonderful document, but unfortunately, the United Nations came in the ashes of the Second World War and included within its charter is the fact that the five permanent members of the Security Council,
02:35:00.000the United States, France, England, China, Russia all have the power of veto of any resolutions.
02:35:13.000And so the United Nations actually has no teeth if you have the power of veto.
02:35:18.000So you get anything to do with Israel is always vetoed.
02:35:22.000Any resolution that says they better stop behaving badly and do the right thing, as my mother would say, is always vetoed by Israel, the United States, the Marshall Islands, Australia, and a couple of other odds and sods.
02:35:37.000It's always the same five or six people.
02:35:41.000Well, who support, or rather who don't support resolutions in the General Assembly that say Israel should behave better.
02:36:16.000They can't exert pressure, so it has no teeth, but it is a great forum still for discussion.
02:36:23.000I actually spoke, not to the General Assembly, but I spoke to the Human Rights Committee of the General Assembly of the United Nations on the 29th of November 2012. Really?
02:36:41.000I put a suit and tie on, and I called them Your Excellencies.
02:38:33.000Well, the problem is, or a big problem here, as I've said many times before, is that that group, including Wolferwitz and Rumsfeld and Cheney and Bill Kristol and the rest of them, the whole neocon cabal,
02:40:33.000By Boris Johnson and the whole of the English judicial system and with the connivance of or at the behest of the US government who want him dead.
02:40:43.000They want him hung up like a magpie in a hedge.
02:40:55.000Don't leak anything that's very important.
02:41:27.000Think about all the things that people have gotten away with.
02:41:30.000I mean look at this fucking Ghislaine Maxwell thing.
02:41:34.000Ghislaine Maxwell, I've said this before I'll say it again, she's the only person ever to be tried and arrested and put in jail for sex trafficking to no one.
02:43:41.000There has to be a large group of people that were involved in this, and there's none that are being exposed, which is quite fascinating.
02:43:49.000Because I guess if you did get exposed, if someone said, hey, you know, blah, blah, blah, head of this bank, we have evidence that you were having sex with underage girls...
02:44:00.000That person could say, okay, what about Bill Clinton?
02:46:50.000And there are so many people that are putting Ukraine flags in their Twitter bio and causing for an escalation, calling for an escalation rather.