A story that has been incredibly difficult to tell is getting even more challenging today, as the fog of war and, to put it kindly, irresponsible reporting leads to chaos, violence, and canceled diplomatic meetings that actually could have helped prevent more death and destruction.
00:13:12.460Because the media took the Hamas claim that Israel did it and killed 500 suffering civilians and ran with it, ran with it.
00:13:23.000President Biden expected to speak by phone with the Egyptian and the Palestinian leaders who canceled on him as he headed out to the Middle East.
00:13:31.720In the meantime, the fighting continues.
00:13:34.520And Israel is said to be amassing some tens of thousands of soldiers preparing for a possible ground invasion into Gaza.
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00:14:25.400This is, I mean, things are getting, it's a powder keg right now in these Arab countries, which don't give a damn about after the fact corrections or daytime pictures showing it was a parking lot.
00:14:42.780And oh, by the way, it was Islamic Jihad, not the Israelis.
00:14:46.120Yeah, the truth doesn't matter to the so-called Arab street when it comes to incidents like this and anything that involves the Israelis.
00:14:56.100They believe what they want to believe, and they've been essentially trained, you could argue, even brainwashed by their own media and some of their own regimes, depending on which Middle Eastern country we're talking about, to blame a whole range of things on the Israelis.
00:15:11.340The conspiracy theories stretching back for, well, longer than I've been alive in the Middle East about Israel are widely believed.
00:15:22.240And what you have here, I think, is a situation where there's a desperate attempt to try to create some immediate moral equivalency between Israel and Hamas, given that Hamas just murdered 1,400 people.
00:15:38.060I mean, it wasn't a military operation.
00:15:41.280They just decided to kill as many civilians as they possibly could.
00:15:45.420So this is a moment of, I think, clarity for the world.
00:15:49.660I do think this is civilization versus barbarism.
00:15:53.260But you're also seeing the depths of the anti-Semitism that exists in the Middle East and around the world, for that matter, and the desire on the part of the Western media as well, not just sort of, you know, Arab satellite TV.
00:16:07.360Nobody to find some reason to look at Israel and say, you know, you're on a similar moral plane to Hamas or look at what you do here.
00:16:18.440It was all based on Hamas sourcing initially, and that should have been the first red flag.
00:16:24.920Also, if Israel wanted to blow up hospitals in Gaza, it could blow up all the hospitals in Gaza in a matter of minutes.
00:16:33.320There's nothing that they would be able to do to stop it.
00:16:35.700In fact, they could blow up all the buildings in Gaza if they wanted to.
00:16:39.220They're trying to do strikes against Hamas and Hamas militants and leadership.
00:16:42.920There is no reason it's implausible that the Israelis in the opening moments before they've even got the ground invasion going would hit one of the most sensitive civilian targets in all of Gaza City.
00:16:55.000But the media ran with it and they ran with it because of their own ideological biases.
00:17:15.280I mean, this this is a dereliction of duty that's going to cost lives.
00:17:19.820They took an already powder keg to region and lit lit a match.
00:17:26.520And there's there's almost no accountability for it.
00:17:28.920Even the corrections that we're now seeing today are quiet and don't acknowledge the previously wrong reporting explicitly.
00:17:35.340It's the quiet scrubbing of the wrong headline and replacing it with one that's closer to right.
00:17:41.200Meanwhile, these citizens are our staffs at the U.S. Embassy in Beirut and the consulate.
00:17:48.980Our the Israelis staffs at these consulates and embassies throughout the world, not to mention actual Israelis in our country and elsewhere are in real danger as a result of all of this.
00:18:01.480I mean, there's a there's a recklessness to this kind of reporting.
00:18:05.660And you're seeing that, I think, with the further inflamed tensions in different cities around the world where people are obviously deeply passionate about this issue.
00:18:17.380I mean, one thing that I that hasn't changed, you know, Megan, I actually started my national security career, if you will, working in Middle East policy think tanks when I was in college.
00:18:31.120And I spent a summer working for Clinton's negotiator for the Camp David Accords, Ambassador Dennis Ross, as a researcher.
00:18:38.860So this was my my first experience with all of this stretching back now.
00:18:44.020Well, over 20 years was what was then called Arab Israeli conflict.
00:18:47.220Now people usually say Israeli Palestinian.
00:18:49.140And what you see is that the narratives haven't changed at all.
00:18:55.920You have a lot of Middle Eastern countries use this issue and a lot of Islamic communities around the world use this issue both as an excuse for anti-Semitism and also as an excuse for their own failures as states.
00:19:11.300Speaking specifically in the Middle Eastern context, they all pretend to care so much.
00:19:15.920There's these endless lamentations on behalf of the Palestinians in moments like this.
00:19:20.800But what you also see is what have those states been doing?
00:19:23.980I mean, Gaza is is a is a desperately poor and nasty place to live.
00:19:32.800All these countries, all these places where there are protests, you'd want to ask, where were these regimes, where were these individuals, these groups trying to do anything to help the Palestinian people beforehand?
00:19:43.100No, it's when it's useful for their hatred of Israel and Jews that all of a sudden you see this massive increase in concern for the Palestinians.
00:19:53.520You have all these other regional actors decide, oh, my gosh, well, Israel needs to be proportionate.
00:20:08.720People walking around saying you better not overreact.
00:20:11.920We were looking at them like we're going to war because that's the reaction that this demands.
00:20:17.220And that's exactly the mentality of the Israeli people as it should be right now.
00:20:21.600So they're putting these artificial constraints, this idea that that the Israelis are going to be able to fight a battle against a terrorist entity that isn't going to have any civilian casualties, that isn't going to cause any humanitarian issues.
00:20:43.720They're not just trying to punish Hamas and say, stop it.
00:20:47.180If you don't, you know, if you don't knock this off, we're going to blow up all your arms caches.
00:20:50.760We're going to come after your leadership.
00:20:53.180I think this time around it has to be a war of Hamas elimination, meaning destroying it as an entity, making it effectively so enfeebled that it can no longer threaten the state of Israel.
00:21:04.420So that's the escalation from the Israeli side.
00:23:37.700This is so dishonest and dangerous, Buck.
00:23:39.880Well, they wanted to use it in the moment, and it doesn't matter to the people who ran with it as an attack, as a cudgel, a weapon to bludgeon the Israelis' reputation with.
00:23:56.540It doesn't matter that it was false to them.
00:23:58.880I mean, we often see this even with far more minor reports of terrorist attacks, let's say in the U.S.
00:24:06.600You know, they'll they'll say we can never know the motives if they're concerned that it's, you know, a jihadist, a Muslim conducting an attack.
00:24:15.100If they think that it's possibly a white guy who's a Republican, they run with that right away.
00:24:21.420And it doesn't matter when they have to change the story later on.
00:24:24.100Right. Meaning that if they have an opening to try to effectively jump to a conclusion that's useful politically to defame a whole group of people.
00:24:35.920Right. It's it's always about, oh, it's not just this person.
00:24:43.120That's the whole notion that they were trying to push by running with this right away.
00:24:48.660And and they still feel entirely entirely justified in a making because they've already convinced themselves that Israel here is the really bad actor that to understand the true toxicity of the leftist thinking around all things Palestine.
00:25:04.060You have to know that they blame the Israelis for everything, meaning every action that the Palestinians or that Hamas or Palestinian Islamic Jihad or Hezbollah or any of these groups take is the fault of the Israelis in the minds of these people.
00:25:19.140Right. So no matter what Hamas does, it is Israel's fault.
00:25:22.960That is the basic formulation that a lot of people on the left, in the media, around the world, including here in America, including here in Congress, approach these issues with.
00:25:32.620So. It isn't about accuracy, because to them, there's a greater truth.
00:25:37.180The truth about who actually bombed this hospital, right, you know, isn't isn't what's relevant to them.
00:25:43.260The greater truth is that Israel is the bad actor.
00:40:38.540This is the left red stamp fired over the hospital, which is the right, and you can see the blast.
00:40:45.300So that is proof of the fact that it came from the Gaza Strip, our cameras, Channel 12's cameras.
00:40:51.540The President of the United States has already said it appears it was done by the other team, meaning he also realizes that it was shooting from inside Gaza over the hospital.
00:41:02.300Israeli reporting on what we've been telling you all day, which is this rocket came from the Palestinian side, not from the Israelis, notwithstanding what you may have read in the press.
00:41:17.760So the military situation, as far as the U.S. is concerned, 2,000 Marines and sailors heading closer to Israel, non-combat personnel, non-combat, who are waiting to help.
00:41:28.220They've been given notice to prepare to deploy at any moment.
00:41:32.660The Pentagon's been delivering weapons to Israel on a near daily basis.
00:41:36.160We've got five C-17s that have landed in Israel, fulfilling Israel's munitions requests, ASAP.
00:41:42.500We've got the Ford strike group already in the eastern Mediterranean, the Eisenhower strike group on its way to two of our biggest and best aircraft carriers.
00:41:52.660And the ground invasion hasn't yet happened.
00:41:55.420Some said that was because they were waiting for the American president to leave.
00:41:59.780The Biden administration has said they did not make any such request of Netanyahu.
00:42:04.300So we do expect the ground invasion to happen, we think, at some point soon.
00:42:08.700In the meantime, Iran, Buck, is saying they're warning a preemptive action against Israel, quote, in the coming hours as Israel gets ready for this ground invasion.
00:42:20.460The Iranian embassy in Syria tweeted out, time is up.
00:42:24.320They've repeatedly warned that if Israel goes in on the ground in Gaza, this will be met with, quote, a response from Iran on other fronts and saying the resistance fighters will not allow Israel to do whatever it wants in Gaza.
00:42:44.820They let's say, well, that's that's enough for now.
00:42:48.840Iran threatening that if Israel does what it needs to do, they're going to get involved.
00:42:52.940And so far, what President Biden has said is don't don't.
00:42:57.840So what what is the actual likelihood of Iran getting involved?
00:43:02.820Because that's a totally different ballgame.
00:43:05.820I don't think that Iran is likely to be a direct combatant in this.
00:43:12.560I don't think that you'll see a major escalation from the Iranian side of this.
00:43:17.660The rhetoric is to be expected and, you know, that they will raise their sword against the Zionist entity and all this stuff.
00:43:24.200I mean, that's just the way Iran is going to react to anything that involves the state of Israel at a moment of elevated tensions or honestly just in general.
00:43:33.040You will see there have already been some clashes in the north with Hezbollah, which is a proxy, a proxy arm of Iran, effectively.
00:43:42.320There's also Iranian militias operating in Syria, really kind of military or paramilitary groups.
00:43:49.140So you'll probably see something, some show of resistance with Hezbollah firing rockets, something along those lines in the north.
00:43:59.560But I don't think you'll see anything that would raise to the level of a major Iranian or major Iranian involvement here, direct military action.
00:44:10.320And that's why we have U.S. carrier groups in the region, because we could be able to deploy airstrikes with devastating effect if need be.
00:44:18.500But obviously, that would also be a whole other ballgame.
00:44:21.700I mean, now you're talking about Iran and the Strait of Hormuz and global oil supply.
00:44:27.340And, you know, things get very, very scary, very quickly if you were to see this become a broader conflagration.
00:44:37.580So that's why I understand the elevated anxiety about it.
00:44:40.360I understand people having the concerns that they do that this could become something that is considerably worse.
00:44:50.560I find that is unlikely because, you know, the one of the, you know, the Iranians, I don't think, want to really get into it with it with the U.S. and the Israelis right now.
00:45:01.460And I think that there is a sense that this I think the outcome here is largely, I would say predetermined, but the Israelis are going to go into Gaza.
00:45:11.580They are going to take certainly the northern portion of Gaza as an area that they're going to clean out of Hamas to the greatest possible degree.
00:45:21.660And then there'll be some efforts to help with the it is already a humanitarian disaster in Gaza.
00:45:28.340And the question that I can't answer right now is who's in charge of Gaza when all this is over?
00:45:37.080This is something that I haven't really heard many compelling answers other than some fractured maybe version of Hamas or some other group comes along and says, OK, well, we'll take over for a little while.
00:45:49.940You know, if you're going to remove the leadership, which I think is the mission and should be the mission of the Israelis in Gaza, what goes into that vacuum next?
00:46:00.360I mean, isn't the leadership in Qatar and these five star hotels in Qatar, the Hamas leadership and the ones like calling all the shots?
00:46:07.080There's leadership and then there's the on the ground, you know, calling the calling the shots, so to speak, on the military side of things, on the militant side of things.
00:46:16.000I mean, they have something like 25,000, 30,000 fighters, you know, armed combatants in Gaza.
00:46:23.560So they have a command structure for them.
00:46:26.580But yes, I mean, they're putting trying to put pressure on the Middle East countries that play host to Hamas leadership.
00:46:37.160The problem is those countries all use the Palestinian issue as a as a pretense that they care.
00:46:44.240I mean, this this is where their motivations, if anything, their sympathies are with the Palestinians, not sympathies, but they're more aligned with what the Palestinians and Hamas would like to do to Israel than they are with Israel.
00:47:40.120They have brought two aviation groups to the Mediterranean Sea.
00:47:42.560I would like to say that this is not a threat, which I will now announce and inform you about.
00:47:54.740But according to my instructions, the Russian Air Force and the Russian Space Force are constantly patrolling the neutral areas of the Black Sea airspace.
00:48:03.280So that's his answer to our aircraft carriers in the Mediterranean.
00:48:12.020And is that just Putin looking for attention, trying to flex a muscle?
00:48:15.900Yeah, I think that unfortunately, one of the outcomes of what we've seen here is going to be a change in.
00:48:26.500Well, Putin has a freer hand to do whatever he wants to do in the meantime in Ukraine.
00:48:32.700And he feels like he has stood up to he has stood up to the forces, you know, arrayed against him.
00:48:41.000They're quite well up to this point, including all the Western backing and everything else.
00:48:44.640So, you know, Putin is not going to play a major role in whatever unfolds between Israel and and the Palestinians.
00:48:51.860That said, he does have deep ties to Iran and was quite involved in keeping the Assad regime in place in Syria.
00:49:00.720So he thinks that he has racked up some victories in the region and thinks of himself as a as a as a power player.
00:49:09.300So, yeah, he's going to he's going to flex muscles and and take this as an opportunity to try to say, you know, look, look, the U.S.
00:49:17.040and its and its proxies and its allies are making a mess of things.
00:49:22.080Yeah. And there's no winners in any of this.
00:49:23.900But, you know, politically speaking, he's as close as we're going to get to winning this thing because we've you know,
00:49:29.840it's just changed the calculus of what America is going to be focused on and what the world is going to be focused on.
00:49:35.500Yeah. Buck Sexton. Always a pleasure, my friend. Thanks for coming on.
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00:50:16.940Now for some of the disturbing anti-Semitism that we are seeing around the world and here at home and particularly, of course, on our college campuses.
00:50:27.580Very, very happy to be joined on this issue by a man who's well versed on it.
00:50:32.180Dennis Prager, host of The Dennis Prager Show and co-founder of Prager U.
00:50:39.340I haven't had a chance to hear your take on anything that's happened over the past 11 days in the wake of this volatile evening that we've just experienced.
00:50:48.020And these protests around the world now calling for the destruction of Israel here at home, support and sympathy for those calls on too many college campuses, all elite.
00:51:11.640And about 10 years ago, I made a video for Prager University on the Middle East.
00:51:17.680I was a graduate student at Columbia at the School of International Affairs at the Middle Eastern Institute.
00:51:23.920And I remember the foolishness that I was taught by very knowledgeable and bright men—it was men then—and it was that the dispute in the Middle East was over land, that it wasn't theological, and that it certainly wasn't existential.
00:51:47.400They just—they had a predisposition to believing that the issue was land.
00:51:53.020So in a nutshell, everything that I had been exposed to and wrote and spoke and spoken has unfortunately come true.
00:52:05.940And the best way to put it is from a 2,000-year-old prayer in Jewish liturgy, which is stated in every Passover Seder in Hebrew, but I'll say it, of course, in English.
00:52:19.340In every generation, someone arises to annihilate us, not just to kill us, not to persecute us, not to enslave us, to annihilate us.
00:52:31.140There are massive numbers of animosities on Earth—religious, ethnic, racial, national—but only one is exterminationist, and that is vis-a-vis the Jew.
00:52:43.640When they chant, from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free, what they're saying is, no Israel.
00:52:53.340And no Israel means no Jews in Israel.
00:52:55.860And the fact that there are so many people who believe that, who chant that, who wish that, is one of the most frightening phenomena of our fairly dark time.
00:53:09.840At the Sydney Opera, they had a demonstration.
00:54:46.100The Art Institute is spectacular, and the Art Institute of Chicago is one of the most respected art and design schools in the nation.
00:54:52.820There is a teacher there named Mika Toska, associate professor, who posted on Instagram in the wake of this savage attack on Israeli children, elderly and civilians.
00:55:08.760Israelis are pigs, savages, very, very bad people, irredeemable excrement.
00:55:14.680The propaganda has been downright evil.
00:55:17.680After the past week, if your eyes aren't open to the crimes against humanity that Israel is committing and has committed for decades and will continue to commit, then I suggest you open them.
00:55:32.500That's what's being taught, I guess, at the Art Institute as they swing by.
00:55:38.520Then you've got Princeton National Review just releasing an exclusive with audio tape of Princeton professor Jeff Dolvin, who invited someone named El Kurd, a Palestinian activist, a couple months ago, on campus.
00:55:56.020El Kurd accused Israels of organ harvesting and of having an unquenchable thirst for Palestinian blood and land.
00:56:02.360The guy who invited him, Jeff Dolvin, refused to answer when a student audience member asked at that event whether he supports Hamas terrorism.
00:56:13.900These are just updates to the horrors we've been hearing out of Harvard and Yale and elsewhere.
00:56:19.900At UPenn, which has been ground zero for a lot of what we've been seeing on the anti-Israeli rhetoric, last month they held this pro-Palestinian festival.
00:56:28.560And this is what's gotten a lot of the donors mad about some of the rhetoric we heard there.
00:56:35.160One of the people who do appear was author Aya Ghanama, who has called for death to Israel, and writer Randa Abdel-Fattah, who has said Israel is a demonic, sick project, and that she can't wait for the day we commemorate its end.
00:56:55.680It's new big reveals about how the professors and always the Students for Justice in Palestine group, not to mention the Muslim Student Association, comes out siding with the terrorists and making very clear they want Israel and Jews eliminated.
00:57:29.260Only one-third of the Germans voted for Hitler and the Nazis in the last free elections before the Nazi takeover in 1932.
00:57:37.440You just need a certain number that is enough, and you need a certain number of others who have been intimidated by these evil folks.
00:57:48.820One of the messages of my life has been to warn non-Jews that to dismiss Jew hatred, a.k.a. anti-Semitism, as the Jews' problem, is to truly commit suicide.
00:58:07.280Anti-Semitism is the canary in the mine.
00:58:11.480Anti-Semitism, almost everybody knows what that is, so in a nutshell, canaries are taken down to mines.
00:58:19.060They're more susceptible to noxious fumes.
00:58:22.880The canary dies, the miner knows, fight the fumes or you will die.
00:58:27.180The Jews are the miner's canary, and the miner has two choices.
00:58:32.860The Nazis either say, oh, the fumes only kill canaries, or we better kill the fumes, or we're next.
00:58:41.940And they dismissed Hitler and the Nazis as the Jews' problem, and it ended up with tens upon tens of millions of non-Jews slaughtered as a result of allowing Hitler to take power.
00:58:53.940We are seeing, as I keep using the term rerun of all of this, this is coming from within largely the Muslim world, but not only.
00:59:05.080The left is either silent or defends these people.
00:59:10.580For all these years that I and others, you, I'm certainly not alone in this, but warning the degradation, the moral degradation of our universities, now people are awakening to it.
00:59:28.460We had an article by the head of the Wharton School Board of Trustees, the head, the president of it, saying, don't give money to universities.
00:59:38.420This is the head of the University of Pennsylvania Wharton School.
00:59:59.480But if there is a silver lining, it will be that liberals wake up to the threat that Islamism, not all of Islam, but Islamism, and the left pose to Western civilization.
01:00:14.800That, to me, would be the one, that would be a good thing to come out of all of this.
01:00:21.300Will the liberal awaken to the threat of the left and the threat of the Islamists?
01:00:30.640We'll talk a bit more about some of the feedback, because as we get new reports from the campuses every day, we get new reports of mega-bucked donors withdrawing their funds by the day.
01:00:42.500I was saying yesterday, Dennis, that I know a very wealthy donor in New York who got this thing started sort of in an underground network of donors that we were connected to, and it was an internal hashtag, not another cupcake.
01:00:55.760Not a cupcake at a bake sale to support these schools when they're teaching this radical ideology, whether it's on race, gender, Israel.
01:01:07.340You know, they don't respond to pretty much anything except dollars.
01:01:11.620And even dollars may not do the trick.
01:01:13.720Mark Rowan, head of Apollo Group, wrote this letter to UPenn saying, this is insane what you're doing.
01:24:11.920It requires asking very hard questions.
01:24:15.000It requires clarity about the objectives and an honest assessment about whether the path you're on will achieve those objectives.
01:24:22.700You know, Dennis, I've been thinking about President Biden.
01:24:29.140You can't deny that he helped get us into this mess with his policies and his weakness.
01:24:33.620And yet, you also, I think, can't help but root for the American president to handle this crisis with intelligence and care and savvy and a long-term view toward what is best for the United States.
01:24:50.600You know, you've got to be, I'm sure you are, I'm praying for him.
01:24:56.980These are not people who I support as politicians, but in the role they're in, I want them to do well, and I want them, given the power they have, to make good decisions.
01:25:07.260It just seems like we're on the precipice here, as you see the protests emerging in all of the Arab world.
01:25:15.060You know, we're on the precipice of something potentially very, very dangerous, and he's going to be responsible in large part for how this plays out.
01:25:28.080What do you make of his warnings on be careful?
01:25:30.780Well, first of all, I want to just comment on your wish that he do well, that Secretary Blinken do well, and I share your wish, by the way.
01:25:43.020And I was thinking, did people on the left ever say, in something with as large an audience as you or I have, that, well, you know, we may differ with Donald Trump, but we certainly pray for his success in whatever X, Y, or Z issue it might be.
01:26:04.080And the imbalance is quite apparent that I just thought I would note that for a public edification, if you will.
01:26:15.240Well, there is no parallel other than pain, and that is a parallel, between 9-11 and October 7th.
01:26:30.240First of all, in terms of population, the Jewish population of Israel lost not 3,000 as the American population lost horribly on 9-11, but about 30,000 in equivalent terms to American population, probably even more.
01:26:49.940However, the Israelis that I have had on my radio show have noted that there is no Israeli who is more than one degree away from knowing someone who was killed or someone who was kidnapped.
01:27:11.660Obviously, there was no parallel in 9-11.
01:27:17.800This does not minimize the horror of 9-11.
01:29:04.500The trick is to call evil, evil while it is happening.
01:29:10.660And that people are often not prepared to do.
01:29:14.180The shoots of green that we referenced, you know, the silver lining, even though you I think you once put it this this way when we talked about this.