The Tucker Carlson Show - Journalist From the Frontlines Responds to Israel’s Attempt to Assassinate Him on Camera

00:00:00.000 When the weather cools down, Golden Nugget Online Casino turns up the heat.

00:00:05.180 This winter, make any moment golden and play thousands of games like our new slot, Wolf It Up,

00:00:11.340 and all the fan-favorite Huff and Puff games.

00:00:14.480 Whether you're curled up on the couch or taking five between snow shovels,

00:00:18.820 play winner's hottest collection of slots, from brand new games to the classics you know and love.

00:00:24.860 You can also pull up your favorite table games like blackjack, roulette, and craps.

00:00:29.660 Or go for even more excitement with our library of live dealer games.

00:00:34.440 Download the Golden Nugget Online Casino app and you've got everything you need to layer on the fun this winter.

00:00:41.480 In partnership with Golden Nugget Online Casino.

00:00:44.980 Gambling problem? Call Connex Ontario at 1-866-531-2600.

00:00:50.980 19 and over. Physically present in Ontario.

00:00:53.540 Eligibility restrictions apply. See GoldenNuggetCasino.com for details. Please play responsibly.

00:01:04.160 Last month, about two weeks ago, a British journalist called Steve Sweeney, who lives and works in Beirut, Lebanon, was in southern Lebanon attempting with a cameraman to document what the Israeli military is doing to the southern part of that country, which is leveling it. 0.83

00:01:22.460 moving people wholesale out, including Christian villages across the area.

00:01:28.780 And as he was preparing his report, he was targeted by an Israeli-owned American-made

00:01:34.940 aircraft that fired a missile at him in an attempted assassination.

00:01:39.160 Here's what it looked like.

00:01:39.960 Further rocket attacks were reported against Nahariya and admitted. 0.99

00:01:52.460 fucking fuck that wasn't an accident it was intentional the jet that fired it had flown 0.99

00:02:09.120 over his position attempting to assassinate him as the israeli government has assassinated on 1.00

00:02:14.720 purpose not accidentally assassinated murdered so many journalists including western journalists

00:02:19.660 trying to cover its atrocities, atrocities that are spreading even now under the cover of the Iran

00:02:26.460 War, a massive land grab across the region, killing of Christians, desecration of Christian

00:02:32.860 holy sites. That's all happening. It's all real. And one of the reasons you may not know about it 0.56

00:02:37.980 is because the people trying to record it, to chronicle it, have been assassinated. But Steve

00:02:43.200 Sweeney was not assassinated, by luck or the grace of God, by a quirk of the landing of that

00:02:49.780 missile, he survived. He joins us now to explain what happened. Steve, thanks very much for doing

00:02:56.040 this. I'm grateful you're alive. Can you, we just played the tape of the moment where you were

00:03:00.920 almost killed. Can you add context to that and describe what was happening? Well, yeah, you've

00:03:07.960 seen the footage, we were incredibly lucky to come out of that situation alive. It was only

00:03:15.400 purely by luck that the missile ended up, as you see on the footage, it went through the hole and

00:03:21.920 the bridge had already been destroyed. So just to give you some context of why we were there,

00:03:27.320 Israel had issued these evacuation orders. It said that it was going to bomb every single bridge

00:03:32.640 in south Lebanon.

00:03:34.440 So the bridges that cross the Litani River,

00:03:37.140 this connects the south of Lebanon

00:03:38.620 to the rest of the country.

00:03:39.820 So this was a hugely important news story.

00:03:42.600 This is essentially cutting off

00:03:44.100 a whole swathe of the country.

00:03:48.460 And they'd started the bombing the night before.

00:03:51.240 It was a Thursday when we went to the bridge.

00:03:53.340 On the Wednesday evening

00:03:55.060 and into the early hours of the morning,

00:03:56.540 they'd started targeting the bridges.

00:03:58.280 So, you know, as a journalist

00:04:00.320 and as a war correspondent,

00:04:01.480 we were there to report on this huge news story

00:04:05.760 so we drove down

00:04:07.040 this is in Sur district or Tyre district

00:04:09.140 as other people will probably better know it

00:04:11.960 and as we approached

00:04:14.160 the Lebanese army have a base there

00:04:16.740 just ahead of the bridge

00:04:18.960 so we approached them

00:04:20.160 and we said to them

00:04:20.960 okay is it safe to film

00:04:23.020 and they assured us

00:04:24.980 it was perfectly safe for us to go on that bridge

00:04:27.600 and they would know 0.69

00:04:29.440 because if Israel is about to bomb a bridge,

00:04:31.740 which they had already bombed it the night before,

00:04:34.180 then they would get a message to the Lebanese army via UNIFIL,

00:04:38.860 the United Nations Peacekeepers.

00:04:40.280 They don't have direct communication.

00:04:42.620 So there was no pre-warning that this bridge was about to be struck again.

00:04:45.820 There was no military objective in striking the bridge again.

00:04:48.520 It was already destroyed.

00:04:49.400 You could barely even walk across it, let alone take a vehicle across it.

00:04:53.200 So this was the Kazmier Bridge.

00:04:55.720 This was the smaller bridge.

00:04:57.300 So these kind of link villages and settlements in south Lebanon together.

00:05:03.160 So, okay, we approached the bridge, we set up our camera, we started filming.

00:05:08.240 There were fighter jets roaring overhead.

00:05:10.940 And again, this isn't uncommon in the south of Lebanon,

00:05:14.720 but we knew that the fighter jets were flying away from us.

00:05:17.340 So they were roaring overhead, but they were heading further south

00:05:20.840 and they were bombing what they would describe as Hezbollah positions around that area.

00:05:25.300 so we weren't still unduly concerned and we went onto the bridge and we started filming so it wasn't

00:05:31.580 live some people have said it was live it was what we call an as live so we were um filming that um

00:05:38.160 ali reader who is my colleague was at the moment um we arrived on the bridge i was doing my piece

00:05:45.100 to camera he went to uh film some b-roll he went to film uh in the hole uh where the bridge had

00:05:51.580 been struck and it was i mean we talk about luck and we talk about the you know chance and we talk

00:05:57.560 about um god's will but as he was filming there was a gust of wind on the camera uh and the tripod

00:06:04.420 was shaking so i called him over and i said ali yala yala please come the the camera's shaking

00:06:10.440 i need you to steady it as he came over i i guess around 15 seconds later then we heard this

00:06:16.960 tremendous roar and the israelis struck the bridge again and um i mean the immediate aftermath i mean

00:06:25.280 i remember just thinking god we're dead that was it it was it was uh it was like this earth

00:06:33.420 shattering sound the explosion was it was an almighty blast and then there was just dust and

00:06:39.280 i couldn't really see anything and you're uh from the footage you can hear the soldiers maybe they

00:06:44.040 started saying to me yalla yalla and i couldn't see anything so i was where where and they took

00:06:50.940 me into their um their barracks they put tourniquets on my arms i thought again with

00:06:56.060 adrenaline rush i just thought i've got some minor cuts um you know i couldn't really feel

00:07:02.020 too much pain but then i looked uh when they put the tourniquet there was blood coming down my arms

00:07:07.400 There was blood on my clothes, but I was alive, and it's, again, completely by chance that we were alive.

00:07:15.020 This was a very heavy munition that they'd used, a GBU-38 missile that we believe was used, and it was fired from an F-16 fighter jet.

00:07:24.820 So after the Lebanese army were, you know, they put these tourniquets on and gave us some water, then they called an ambulance.

00:07:33.140 and the ambulance came and they put me on a stretcher

00:07:37.220 and off they took me.

00:07:39.160 And I should note, really, that the paramedics

00:07:43.800 and the emergency workers and the doctors and the nurses

00:07:46.340 and all of the medical team that attended to us

00:07:49.260 are the real heroes of this story.

00:07:54.020 As we were traveling from the bridge to the hospital,

00:07:56.780 I'm not sure, the distance may be about 10 minutes,

00:07:59.220 probably less than that, but they had the blue lights on.

00:08:01.840 Now, in any normal country anywhere in the world, having the blue lights on and being transported somewhere by ambulance, you would be safe, right? 0.61

00:08:10.060 Not in Lebanon, because the Israelis are now targeting medical staff.

00:08:15.840 More than 50 have been killed.

00:08:17.900 Hospitals, including the one we attended, the Jabal Amor Hospital, part of that has been destroyed in Israeli airstrikes.

00:08:27.080 And we've been working in the field for many years now.

00:08:30.600 We're very experienced journalists, and we take safety very seriously.

00:08:35.260 We've spoken to a lot of medical workers,

00:08:37.360 and they told us that the logo on the top of the ambulances,

00:08:43.040 which is supposed to give them protection under international law,

00:08:47.260 under the Geneva Conventions and this kind of thing,

00:08:49.720 instead of giving them protection, it now places them at risk.

00:08:53.360 So many of them have removed those logos from their emergency vehicles.

00:08:58.600 Now, barely a day goes by now that when we don't hear of a medical worker being struck, the IDF, the Israeli Defense Force, soon after they carried out a massacre of 12 emergency workers in the south targeting their station, they put out a statement saying that Hezbollah is using medical facilities and ambulances for military purposes.

00:09:27.220 Now, of course, they didn't back that with any kind of evidence.

00:09:29.640 This is a statement that they've reissued again quite recently.

00:09:33.700 But we've been on the ground.

00:09:35.580 We've been in the back of the ambulances.

00:09:37.040 We've been in the hospitals.

00:09:38.180 We've met the civil defence workers.

00:09:40.940 We've met the paramedics.

00:09:42.000 And we've been to these stations.

00:09:43.780 And all that you can see there are the kind of things that you would find in any hospital,

00:09:48.900 in any medical station, in any ambulance, anywhere in the world.

00:09:52.220 These are medical facilities, and they should be protected under international law.

00:09:58.000 Of course, targeting these deliberately is a war crime, but it's just one of many that we're seeing here on the ground in Lebanon.

00:10:05.820 You're probably thinking about where to shop for Mother's Day Cozy Earth. 0.99

00:10:08.480 Obviously, the answer, designed for moms who make houses feel like homes. 0.78

00:10:12.440 Cozy Earth creates comfort for the entire day between bedding, sleepwear, towels, loungewear, and a lot more.

00:10:17.560 You will find a great Mother's Day gift there.

00:10:20.780 You could wear the Cozy Earth Bamboo Pajama Set,

00:10:24.460 which is hilarious, but also great.

00:10:26.740 It's literally made out of bamboo,

00:10:27.920 and it's a huge upgrade over what you're probably wearing.

00:10:30.220 It's light, soft, doesn't overheat.

00:10:33.740 Right now, Cozy Earth is doing something they never do,

00:10:36.200 a buy one, get one deal.

00:10:37.720 These pajamas are so good that they sold out during Christmas.

00:10:40.140 They are back now.

00:10:41.160 This deal goes from April 6th to the 12th of April.

00:10:45.220 Visit CozyEarth.com today.

00:10:46.680 Use the code TuckerBOGO.

00:10:48.280 It's Tucker, B-O-G-O, to get these pajamas for you and a loved one.

00:10:51.960 Plus, there's a 100-night sleep trial and a 10-year warranty, so there's zero risk.

00:10:56.020 By the way, if you get a survey after, feel free to mention you heard about Cozy Earth here.

00:11:01.480 So you're a Westerner.

00:11:02.680 It's by your accent you sound Irish.

00:11:06.280 You live and work in Lebanon.

00:11:07.900 How long have you been there?

00:11:11.340 I came to Lebanon in October 2024.

00:11:15.060 So this was during the period we call the 66-day war.

00:11:18.160 So it was a week or so after the assassination of Saeed Hassan Nasrallah, the former Secretary General of Hezbollah.

00:11:27.480 So I came then.

00:11:28.920 We quite often joke and say that if Steve Sweeney arrives in your country, then it's not good news.

00:11:35.500 But I came during that period.

00:11:39.600 Now, Lebanon, as you know, and I think I've heard you say, Tucker, if I'm correct, it's a beautiful country.

00:11:47.280 Oh, the most.

00:11:47.980 It's a wonderful place. You look at the rich culture, tradition, and history of this country.

00:11:54.400 Even in the south now, which is the area coming under heavy bombardment, this is the area of Jesus.

00:12:01.220 Kana is where Jesus performed what I believe was his first miracle, turning water into wine.

00:12:08.640 There's the tomb of Shemun al-Safa. This is Peter Simon, St. Peter, who I think for many Catholics,

00:12:16.380 They believe that he was the first pope.

00:12:18.040 Now, that's where some Christians believe that that's his burial site.

00:12:22.960 Of course, this has been destroyed by Israel.

00:12:24.640 They bombed it.

00:12:25.880 This is an important site, actually, Shemun al-Saffar, for both Muslims and Christians.

00:12:30.680 So that's been bombed.

00:12:32.400 Wait, let me ask you to stop for a second, and I'm ashamed by my ignorance as usual.

00:12:37.320 The Israeli military bombed St. Peter's burial site?

00:12:42.320 Yes.

00:12:43.560 When?

00:12:44.040 Yes, they did.

00:12:45.000 Yeah.

00:12:46.080 This was back in 2024.

00:12:49.100 I mean, they went to, this wasn't an accidental bombing,

00:12:52.400 the Shemunar Safar.

00:12:54.560 I think it's protected under World Heritage law as well.

00:12:59.680 And it's a very important site.

00:13:01.700 It's, you know, of course, the burial place of St. Peter.

00:13:06.600 It's also a holy site for Muslims. 0.98

00:13:09.940 What they did during that period was they brought an Israeli,

00:13:12.940 what they call a researcher the Israeli defense force brought him in and the purpose of that

00:13:19.060 really was to I guess reinvent history and the aim of it was to say well this is a Jewish holy

00:13:28.660 site and this land belongs to Israel this was the kind of narrative that they were trying to spin

00:13:34.940 that researcher who was actually a very well-known settler activist was killed during that time so

00:13:42.740 We visited the site in early 2025 after the ceasefire period and missiles have gone through the domes, the whole area was destroyed, bullet marks across all of the buildings there, including the area of the Shrine of St. Peter himself.

00:14:03.980 So this is, so it wasn't like accidentally targeted.

00:14:09.180 It wasn't kind of collateral damage.

00:14:11.040 This was a deliberately targeted attack on the tomb of St. Peter.

00:14:15.300 It's not the only church or religious building that has been attacked.

00:14:21.500 Of course, we were in a place called Derdegaya, and this is a Greek Catholic church.

00:14:28.660 And again, that was destroyed during the 66-day war.

00:14:33.320 They killed eight people that had taken shelter inside there.

00:14:36.940 A lot of those were emergency workers, the civil defence team,

00:14:40.860 and they'd taken shelter in there and they bombed it to oblivion.

00:14:43.580 It was completely destroyed.

00:14:46.240 And again, in Yaron, this is another border town,

00:14:51.320 and there are two buildings there.

00:14:54.040 There's the Imam Ali Mosque, which is a very well-known mosque

00:14:58.260 in the south of Lebanon, but there was also the Church of St. George

00:15:02.500 and St. George, of course, the patron saint of England,

00:15:06.560 and this was a Catholic church,

00:15:07.820 and they're very close by each other.

00:15:09.920 And you may have seen the footage circulating on social media,

00:15:14.140 but there's footage of an Israeli soldier, I guess,

00:15:17.040 with a body cam or something, a helmet cam,

00:15:20.340 destroying the statue there to St. George,

00:15:24.420 but both of those were completely destroyed.

00:15:27.400 So what's interesting is that...

00:15:28.840 This is a pattern across the Southern Revenant. 0.98

00:15:30.280 Hezbollah is, and I'm not defending Hezbollah,

00:15:32.500 Well, it's not my fight, but they're designated, I believe, by the U.S. government as a terror group.

00:15:36.940 They've controlled big parts of Lebanon for many, many years, more than 20 years.

00:15:41.980 And has Hezbollah blown up Christian holy sites?

00:15:45.820 Has Hezbollah targeted ambulances?

00:15:49.340 I mean, maybe they have. 1.00

00:15:50.140 You live there.

00:15:50.800 You tell me.

00:15:51.540 No, they haven't.

00:15:53.300 In fact, the opposite.

00:15:54.680 And again, there's plenty of footage of this that people can check for themselves online. 0.51

00:16:01.820 But Hezbollah was, in fact, protecting the Christian churches

00:16:05.220 and protecting these kind of symbolic areas of religious importance to Christians.

00:16:13.040 There's footage of them going into churches and cleaning up and tidying up

00:16:16.440 and standing around, you know, protecting the Christian faith.

00:16:19.800 If you listen to the speeches of Hassan Nasrata,

00:16:22.520 again, he said the Hezbollah are the main defenders of the Christian faith in Lebanon. 0.51

00:16:28.500 So no, they're not destroying ambulances, they're not destroying churches, they're not destroying mosques, they're not destroying people's homes, but Israel is, and it's doing it with American and Western-supplied weapons as well.

00:16:43.100 And it's happening without anybody, pretty much anybody in the United States even noticing. 0.59

00:16:49.700 I think people's attention is drawn to what's happening in Iran and the unfolding disaster there, and they don't even know that this is happening.

00:16:55.140 So back to what happened to you specifically, you said that the missile that almost killed you and your cameraman was launched from an American aircraft, an Israeli-owned American aircraft.

00:17:06.280 Yeah.

00:17:06.600 Do you believe – was that one of the planes that had flown over you?

00:17:10.540 Do you think it was targeting you?

00:17:15.080 Undoubtedly, we believe it was targeting us.

00:17:17.520 There could be no other explanation for what happened.

00:17:21.680 Now, of course, because people have asked this question, you know, one, why were you on the bridge and were you deliberately targeted?

00:17:28.960 And we're unequivocal about that. 0.80

00:17:31.180 This was an assassination attempt by Israel to silence the voices on the ground, to silence the truth. 0.61

00:17:37.620 Now, the reason we say that is because, like I said, we've been working in the field for the last two years.

00:17:44.880 So our vehicle is very well known in the south of Lebanon.

00:17:49.660 We were in a clearly identified press vehicle.

00:17:52.340 We had, as you can see in the footage, we had our press jackets on.

00:17:56.480 Israel has the most advanced military technology anywhere in the world.

00:18:00.600 It has the most advanced surveillance technology anywhere in the world.

00:18:03.980 It knows everything that happens in the south of Lebanon.

00:18:07.960 It knows every vehicle.

00:18:09.060 It knows every number plate.

00:18:10.620 It reads our messages.

00:18:11.660 It listens to our conversations.

00:18:14.240 This is why we say it was deliberate,

00:18:15.820 because there's no doubt that they knew we were there.

00:18:19.280 And the other issue, as has been raised by the Russian Foreign Ministry,

00:18:22.760 Maria Zaharova said that this can't have been accidental.

00:18:25.920 There was no military objective in targeting that bridge.

00:18:28.220 It was already destroyed.

00:18:30.100 So we believe it was a deliberate assassination attempt, absolutely.

00:18:34.080 And it's only by luck, really, that we survived.

00:18:37.940 There was a lot going in our favor that day.

00:18:40.540 Let's say, had the missile not entered the hole in the bridge,

00:18:43.960 had it exploded on the bridge.

00:18:46.160 We've spoken to military experts, weapons experts,

00:18:48.720 who have told us that if it had been maybe a few inches or a foot the other way,

00:18:54.840 then there wouldn't have even been bodies to recover.

00:18:59.000 We'd have just been incinerated.

00:19:00.460 These are incredibly powerful munitions that they were using.

00:19:04.180 And there was no military objective, as I've said, in targeting the bridge. 0.99

00:19:08.460 So we say that we were deliberately targeted by the Israelis, without a doubt. 1.00

00:19:12.940 You go into the grocery store and there are endless snacks and protein bars. 1.00

00:19:18.040 Paleo Valley Superfood Bars are, we think, the best.

00:19:21.460 Most nutrition bars seem healthy, but then you read the labels and it turns out they're

00:19:24.780 packed with all kinds of bizarre stuff, processed syrups, ingredients you can't pronounce.

00:19:30.760 They're essentially candy, masked by marketers pretending they're healthy.

00:19:35.080 If I've eaten a lot of them, I would know.

00:19:37.020 Paleo Valley Superfood Bars are different, though.

00:19:39.180 So Paleo Valley makes its products with real ingredients like organic fruits, vegetables, nuts, seeds, or no seed oils, soy, gluten, other weird additives.

00:19:47.800 And you know when you finish eating one because you're not bloated and you feel good.

00:19:54.320 And that is the measure.

00:19:56.280 These bars are sweet, filling, genuinely good tasting.

00:20:00.000 Flavors include red velvet, apple cinnamon, chocolate chip, plenty more.

00:20:03.840 They're all great.

00:20:04.360 If you're trying to clean up your diet but need something convenient to grab, these are a solid option.

00:20:10.260 Give them a try at PaleoValley.com.

00:20:12.680 Use code Tucker at checkout for 20% off your first order.

00:20:15.720 PaleoValley.com, code Tucker, 20% off your first purchase.

00:20:21.000 Visit BetMGM Casino and check out the newest exclusive, the Price is Right Fortune Pick.

00:20:26.980 BetMGM and GameSense remind you to play responsibly.

00:20:29.740 19 plus to wager.

00:20:31.060 Ontario only.

00:20:32.120 Please play responsibly.

00:20:33.080 If you have questions or concerns about your gambling or someone close to you,

00:20:36.520 please contact Connex Ontario at 1-866-531-2600 to speak to an advisor.

00:20:42.520 Free of charge.

00:20:43.480 BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with iGaming Ontario.

00:20:50.320 Got PC Optimum points?

00:20:52.420 Visit Shoppers Drug Mart for the bonus redemption event and get more for your points.

00:20:57.020 Friday, April 10th to Wednesday, April 15th.

00:21:00.200 Valid in store and online.

00:21:03.080 so what i mean because you are a westerner you do have a certain advantage i mean you're an

00:21:09.900 english-speaking westerner from the british isles and you're on television so you're the subject of

00:21:15.780 an assassination attempt by a supposedly western government one that's armed by western governments

00:21:20.500 what's your recourse what do you do after they try and kill you but they fail

00:21:24.340 well that's a that's a very good question obviously i am uh an english-speaking white

00:21:32.380 Westerner, which gives me a certain advantage, a certain privilege. I mean, I have to say that

00:21:36.780 just over a week after our very close shave, our dear colleagues and friends in the field weren't

00:21:43.500 so lucky. Fatima Fatouni, Ali Shoaib and Mohammed Fatouni were killed in a targeted strike by the

00:21:52.280 Israelis just after they'd been reporting in the South. So, I mean, this is the kind of the

00:21:58.260 conditions that journalists are working in on the ground. In terms of the recourse, well,

00:22:03.980 I work for Russian state television, which of course means that my own government, the British

00:22:10.040 government, don't like me. In fact, they have already, instead of supporting me, they've

00:22:16.260 persecuted me. I was detained on a family visit last July at Heathrow Airport. I was met by

00:22:25.340 counter-terror police off the airplane. They took me away for interrogation. They quizzed me over my

00:22:31.100 relations to Russia, the Russian state, working for Russian state television, also about my work

00:22:39.200 here in Lebanon, my associations or connections to Hezbollah, my connections to Ansarala in Yemen

00:22:44.580 because I reported from Yemen, Hashdol Shabi, and my work in Donbass. I spent two years in the field

00:22:51.280 in Donbass on the Russian side.

00:22:53.420 So they were very interested in that.

00:22:55.640 And they're still now currently investigating me

00:22:59.400 for potential terrorist activity based on my journalism.

00:23:04.820 So I don't expect anything from them.

00:23:08.300 And some friends of mine at Declassified UK,

00:23:12.980 a British media organisation, well, they inquired.

00:23:16.560 They asked the British government for comment

00:23:18.560 after this assassination attempt.

00:23:20.440 And they just simply said, and I'm summarizing here, paraphrasing, that they said something along the lines of the Foreign Secretary has given Britain's position on the Middle East in a statement to the Commons on Tuesday.

00:23:37.880 That was all they said.

00:23:38.700 They didn't address the specifics of my case.

00:23:41.180 They haven't commented on it.

00:23:42.580 They haven't offered any kind of support whatsoever.

00:23:44.860 Even the British embassy here in Lebanon hasn't contacted me.

00:23:49.140 The only support that I've had, I've had lots of love and well wishes from individuals and organizations across the world for which we're incredibly grateful and thankful for.

00:24:00.680 But the only people, the only country that's actually given me strong and solid support has been Russia.

00:24:06.680 Are you a British passport holder?

00:24:09.700 I'm a British passport holder, yes.

00:24:11.440 So you're a British subject.

00:24:13.060 So this is, even though you don't live there most of the time, you have family there.

00:24:17.040 You are a citizen, but the British government is taking the side of the Israeli military over its own citizens?

00:24:25.320 Well, that's how it seems to me, yes.

00:24:27.220 Not only taking the side of the Israelis, but they're helping provide the weapons and the ammunition and the political and military support to carry out such strikes.

00:24:36.780 So, you know, somewhere along that chain, I mean, we know it was an F-16 and a GBU-38, American-made, American-supplied, but Britain is involved in that supply chain.

00:24:46.560 So some of the some of the kind of the add on equipment that enabled them to carry out that strike against me is almost certainly provided by the British government without a doubt.

00:24:57.080 How does that I don't understand? I don't understand since, you know, both Britain and the United States fought against the Nazis and lost hundreds of thousands of their own men doing it.

00:25:07.060 But I don't really see where the moral culpability is here. 0.64

00:25:11.280 Why would Britain and the United States have some duty to become subjects of the Israeli government? 0.53

00:25:18.040 Where does that come from?

00:25:22.120 Well, I mean, there's a long history of, you know, the two biggest supporters of Israel have traditionally been the United States and Britain.

00:25:31.300 And, you know, you can trace this back to the formation of the state of Israel.

00:25:34.100 Now, of course, they have their own interests in the region.

00:25:38.260 They use Israel as a proxy force for its colonialist imperialist expansion plans for the region. 0.78

00:25:45.660 If you look at what's happening on the ground now, the reason that we reported on the bridges is that what you're seeing now is the fourth expulsion of 1.2 million Lebanese people that have been forced from their land, forced from their homes.

00:26:02.500 and they're now forcibly displaced.

00:26:05.140 We describe this in Lebanon. 0.90

00:26:06.760 We talk about it as an ethnic cleansing operation 0.93

00:26:09.160 on a scale far larger than the Nakba. 1.00

00:26:13.960 That's, of course, the hundreds of thousands of Palestinians

00:26:17.740 that were forced from their homes

00:26:19.660 on the creation of the State of Israel.

00:26:21.560 So the situation here is simply astonishing.

00:26:26.700 And 370,000 of those forcibly displaced are children. 0.64

00:26:31.260 But behind that is this attempt by Israel to grab that land.

00:26:36.780 Now, not only are they forcing people out of that area south of the Letani River, 0.62

00:26:41.880 they've extended that now to south of the Zorani River.

00:26:44.400 So we're talking some 40 kilometers from the Israeli border that they've pushed people out of that area. 0.91

00:26:49.720 Now, the Israelis have been very open.

00:26:54.100 Israel Katz, the defense secretary, has said that we want the land.

00:26:56.840 We're going to, you know, they've said that they want to create a security buffer zone or whatever terminology they use to describe it.

00:27:05.020 But these plans have been long in the making. 0.68

00:27:06.600 You go back in history and Israel has invaded and tried to take that area. 0.95

00:27:11.220 They think it's their biblical right.

00:27:12.760 We're talking about the Greater Israel Project, which I know you know full well about after your conversation with Ambassador Huckabee.

00:27:20.620 And, you know, it kind of reappears in different guises over the years.

00:27:25.160 the most latest was the Trump Economic Zone.

00:27:28.160 This was announced back in, I think, August last year.

00:27:32.040 Around that time, Tom Barrack, the U.S. envoy,

00:27:35.300 arrived here in Lebanon.

00:27:37.740 And you might remember this soundbite from him

00:27:44.180 because he spoke at the presidential palace

00:27:46.520 to a group of journalists,

00:27:47.900 and there was a bit of a melee,

00:27:49.180 and he described them as animalistic.

00:27:51.760 And he was condemned for, you know, this was seen as an incredibly racist comment to make towards Lebanese journalists

00:27:59.020 who were doing their job in the field, holding people to account, questioning him.

00:28:03.860 But behind that, he laid out this plan for a Trump economic zone,

00:28:07.820 which meant that hundreds of thousands of people would be forced from their homes permanently.

00:28:12.980 Now, he was dressed up, this is going to be a regeneration project.

00:28:17.300 We're going to create new homes.

00:28:19.580 We're going to create jobs.

00:28:20.600 we're going to create roads, we're going to create infrastructure, we're going to make the

00:28:24.000 area safe. But it meant that people that have lived on this land for generations, these are

00:28:29.540 their homes. These are not just dots on a map. These are homes where people have lived on that

00:28:35.380 land for generations are going to be turfed out. And nobody really paid attention to it at the time.

00:28:41.920 Of course, we did as journalists on the ground. And people talk about, they say that the Gaza

00:28:49.580 model is now coming to lebanon they've spoken about it in terms i think smotrich said we're

00:28:55.640 going to turn dahia the southern suburbs of beirut into kanunis and then they've used beit hanun and

00:29:01.000 and rafa israel kat said that they're going to destroy all of these villages that they call

00:29:05.220 frontline villages and i can tell you now we've been here for two years those villages are largely

00:29:10.720 already destroyed the south of lebanon already looks like gaza whole villages completely um

00:29:17.820 lie in ruins, no reconstruction plan. And over the last 15 months, we've seen Israel break that 0.68

00:29:23.360 ceasefire. And we talk about a ceasefire from November 2024, but there was never a ceasefire.

00:29:29.540 You can't have a ceasefire when only one side stops firing. And okay, 15,000, more than 15,000

00:29:36.660 violations over the last 15 months. And this has included the rigging and destroying of homes,

00:29:43.240 the drone strikes, targeted assassinations,

00:29:46.140 the use of chemical spray to destroy crops.

00:29:49.940 And we witnessed and filmed all this,

00:29:51.900 the use of white phosphorus.

00:29:53.880 There's a place called Bleeder,

00:29:55.580 a village very close to the border.

00:29:57.160 Now during olive harvesting season,

00:29:59.760 we went to make a film there. 1.00

00:30:01.300 The Israelis refused to allow the farmers

00:30:03.280 to tend to their land

00:30:04.280 unless they gave them all of the contact details

00:30:07.000 and the names of who was going into the fields

00:30:08.880 while we were there.

00:30:10.000 And they started bulldozing the olive groves.

00:30:11.900 These are olive groves that are older than the state of Israel.

00:30:15.620 So this isn't something new.

00:30:18.720 What we're seeing now, the escalation on March 2nd has been going on for a very, very long time.

00:30:24.520 Now, you asked me why Britain and the United States would support that.

00:30:27.340 Well, they use Israel as their kind of proxy force in the area they refer to as the Middle East. 0.93

00:30:33.180 We call it West Asia here, and they use it to grab the land. 0.76

00:30:39.060 The Greater Israel Project suits Israel, but it suits Britain and the United States because this is a land of great wealth and resources. 0.88

00:30:46.960 And they want to extract that wealth. 0.93

00:30:49.600 They want to extract the resources and use it for their own gain.

00:30:54.000 And, of course, they want strategic control across the whole of the region. 0.74

00:30:57.980 We've seen that with what happened in Syria.

00:31:01.040 We can see now with the bombing of Iran.

00:31:05.280 We can see what happened in Gaza.

00:31:07.540 all of these have taken place not just with the connivance of the united states and britain but

00:31:13.960 with that active involvement so this is the kind of you know this is what we're happening now we

00:31:18.900 you can see signs along the airport road here in in beirut that um yeah they say made it made in

00:31:25.440 the united states made in the usa and that's how they see the the bombs that are falling on them 0.87

00:31:30.360 here they're made in the united states they're made in britain and they're causing that you know 0.97

00:31:34.760 They're the root cause of the death and destruction that's taking place across this region. 0.82

00:31:40.160 Israel fires the bullets, but the guns weren't truly loaded by Britain and the United States. 0.95

00:31:45.380 So what's in your toothpaste?

00:31:46.760 If you're using the brand you grew up with, you probably don't want to know.

00:31:49.060 The ingredients likely include fluoride, something called SLS, glycerin, foaming agents.

00:31:54.880 It's a chemical cocktail.

00:31:57.280 Van Mann's toothpaste is different.

00:31:59.940 Their miracle tooth powder is changing everything, and people are ditching traditional toothpaste

00:32:04.740 He's filled with chemicals by the thousands.

00:32:07.300 Fan Man's tooth powder uses ingredients

00:32:08.840 with the same mineral structure as your teeth

00:32:11.020 that remineralizes them and strengthens your enamel naturally.

00:32:14.780 No fluoride at all and totally edible.

00:32:17.320 You could put it on toast.

00:32:19.160 Not that you'd want to, but you could.

00:32:21.100 People who use it report wetter teeth, less plaque.

00:32:23.300 They wake up without that gross film on their gums.

00:32:25.900 And here's the amazing part.

00:32:27.500 Vivid dreams are back.

00:32:29.800 You dream clearly when you stop coating your mouth

00:32:32.020 in fluoride every night.

00:32:32.960 Did you know that?

00:32:33.600 Pretty amazing.

00:32:34.180 It tells you a lot.

00:32:35.580 So make the switch.

00:32:36.800 Visit vanman.shop slash Tucker.

00:32:40.000 Use the code Tucker for 15% off your first order.

00:32:42.780 Vanman.shop slash Tucker.

00:32:44.340 Use the code Tucker.

00:32:45.320 15% off.

00:32:47.700 Vanman, real ingredients, zero exception.

00:32:51.180 Where's your playlist taking you?

00:32:54.060 Down the highway?

00:32:55.100 To the mountains?

00:32:56.520 Or just into daydream mode while you're stuck in traffic?

00:32:59.680 With over 4,000 hotels worldwide,

00:33:02.320 Best Western is there to help you make the most of your getaway,

00:33:05.840 wherever that is.

00:33:07.200 Because the only thing better than a great playlist

00:33:09.200 is a great trip.

00:33:13.060 Life's the trip.

00:33:14.000 Make the most of it at Best Western.

00:33:16.640 Book direct and save at bestwestern.com.

00:33:21.960 Since you mentioned it,

00:33:23.020 I have to ask you about a small point

00:33:24.380 that has bothered me for many years,

00:33:25.820 and that's the Israeli policy of cutting down olive trees, 1.00

00:33:29.360 some of which are hundreds and hundreds up to a thousand years old and of course they're right

00:33:35.280 they're central to the ancient economy of the levant but they're also beautiful yeah they're

00:33:40.560 revered almost by the people who are actually from they're not the ones from poland to pretend

00:33:45.200 they're from there but the people who actually are there why would the israeli government chainsaw or

00:33:51.360 bulldoze olive trees that seems evil to me i don't understand the explanation for it

00:33:57.680 well that's that's the only way to look at it of course it is it's evil but i think

00:34:03.540 you know these like you said these olive groves some of them are thousands of years old i think

00:34:08.760 the oldest in lebanon is is something like 6 000 years old but it's the lifeblood of of lebanon it's

00:34:14.360 a symbol of of um lebanese cultural heritage identity and the people here are very very

00:34:21.460 connected to their land they're deeply connected to their land and you know this is the lifeblood

00:34:27.300 not just for the south of Lebanon where the farmers will harvest their olive groves.

00:34:33.800 Tobacco is a big, a huge crop here, but this is the lifeblood for all of Lebanon. 0.83

00:34:39.080 Now, if you can disconnect people from their land and their culture, 0.99

00:34:43.440 then, of course, you can take it over. 0.98

00:34:47.240 And that's what they've been doing, not just by bulldozing it, bombing it,

00:34:51.560 but by spraying these chemicals that will make sure that these crops

00:34:55.000 will never be able to grow on the land again,

00:34:57.000 and they can just brush them aside.

00:34:58.980 They can build houses.

00:35:01.060 They can build settlements there,

00:35:02.700 just like they did on the formation of the State of Israel. 0.95

00:35:06.280 They're building these illegal settlements everywhere, 0.99

00:35:09.040 and that's exactly what they want to do here. 0.97

00:35:11.120 In Lebanon, they're building settlements?

00:35:14.960 Well, they want to. That's their aim. 0.91

00:35:17.120 Yeah. I mean, you look at the Greater Israel Project itself.

00:35:20.280 Now, I mentioned Yaron earlier.

00:35:23.480 This is the place where the mosque and the church were destroyed.

00:35:28.060 Now, earlier this year, a few months before the escalation on March 2nd,

00:35:35.360 this group of settlers came in across the border into or very close to Yaron,

00:35:41.120 and they planted trees.

00:35:43.200 And the message was this, I can't remember the exact terminology that they used,

00:35:47.280 but this was them planting their roots in Lebanese territory.

00:35:50.800 and they believe that Lebanese territory

00:35:53.820 biblically belongs to them.

00:35:55.680 Now, you look back a few years ago

00:35:58.180 and this could have been seen as a conspiracy theory

00:36:00.320 or a fringe kind of movement,

00:36:03.800 but this is now right at the heart of the Israeli government.

00:36:07.060 Smotrich and Ben-Gavir are advocates

00:36:08.900 of the Greater Israel Project.

00:36:10.980 Benjamin Netanyahu himself is a supporter

00:36:13.260 of the Greater Israel Project.

00:36:14.580 This isn't kind of like a fantasy.

00:36:17.940 This is happening now.

00:36:18.860 It's unfolding in real time in front of our very eyes.

00:36:23.280 So that's, you know, and they have some rabbis in Israel that justify this religiously as well.

00:36:31.220 They will say that this is a land that belongs to them according to holy scripture.

00:36:36.680 And this is why we're seeing this whole scale destruction.

00:36:41.320 That's what it was around over the last 15 months. 0.76

00:36:43.640 They say it was about destroying Hezbollah.

00:36:45.740 But it's not, it's not, you're seeing whole kind of settlements lying under rubble.

00:36:52.560 My beloved is from a village in the south and her entire village has pretty much been reduced to rubble.

00:37:01.480 Her family home rebuilt, destroyed, rebuilt, destroyed so many times.

00:37:06.220 And this is, you know, very common for the people in that part of the world.

00:37:11.780 And again, Israel has occupied Lebanon, and after the ceasefire in November 2024, it built five military bases inside Lebanese sovereign territory.

00:37:23.560 We filmed them, and rather than scaling them back, Israel was expanding the construction of those military posts illegally.

00:37:32.820 In breach of UN Resolution 1701, in breach of international law,

00:37:37.780 the Lebanese government asked them to leave Lebanese sovereign territory.

00:37:41.940 And of course, they just simply refused and they pushed further and further into Lebanese sovereign territory.

00:37:47.180 Now, the interesting thing, and I don't know whether your viewers will be aware of this,

00:37:52.620 many people don't know, but there isn't really an official border between Israel and Lebanon.

00:37:58.000 There's no officially agreed border.

00:38:00.660 We have the blue line, which was established by the United Nations.

00:38:04.800 This was after Israel was forced out in 2000.

00:38:09.480 And this line is supposed to be the demarcation point that Israel is not supposed to encroach further upon,

00:38:16.120 you know, further across this line.

00:38:18.220 So Israel sees a lot of this land as belonging.

00:38:23.500 You know, there was a 1923 mandate line when it was the British mandate of Palestine.

00:38:28.440 There was a kind of border drawn up then, which Israel inherited in 1948, but has never really agreed to. The armistice in 1949 didn't again agree those borders. So Israel sees fit to push forward at will, and it's done so with total impunity, of course.

00:38:49.580 There's no kind of international outcry about the destruction of these villages and settlements

00:38:54.560 or the use of chemical weapons, the use of white phosphorus or the assassination of individuals

00:39:02.060 in drone strikes or the killing of paramedics, the murder of journalists.

00:39:05.960 All of these things have been happening for many, many years.

00:39:10.180 The world is maybe paying more attention to it now.

00:39:13.420 We've had the Western journalists arriving in the country since March 2nd, of course.

00:39:18.140 the major news networks have arrived and they're kind of surprised at what they're seeing they're

00:39:23.060 seeing this for the first time um but this has been going on for a very very long time and i

00:39:27.580 say this is a bit of a failing i would say of the major media organizations because had they been

00:39:32.760 on the ground in lebanon for the past 15 months they would have seen this unfolding and you know

00:39:37.820 maybe the situation would be very different from what it is now as it as it is they weren't there

00:39:43.460 and the Lebanese journalists were reporting

00:39:46.000 the people that live on that land

00:39:48.100 were, you know, crying for help

00:39:50.560 and nobody was listening.

00:39:53.260 I have to ask,

00:39:54.660 so you are covering this on the ground in Lebanon,

00:39:57.940 living and working at the center of all this

00:40:00.060 and as noted, almost got killed for it,

00:40:02.340 but you're working for a Russian news agency.

00:40:04.640 You've clearly been a journalist a long time.

00:40:07.200 You look over 40, so probably a long time.

00:40:09.860 How did you wind up working for a Russian news agency?

00:40:14.280 Like, why aren't you a BBC reporter?

00:40:16.000 How did, what was your path?

00:40:19.480 MI5 would never clear me to work for the BBC.

00:40:21.360 No, they wouldn't.

00:40:22.200 No, it's true.

00:40:24.080 There's no chance, no chance.

00:40:26.300 I mean, I wouldn't work for the BBC on a personal level.

00:40:30.120 We've met some BBC journalists here

00:40:31.560 and they've been very pleasant, very nice.

00:40:33.440 And I have all the journalists from, you know,

00:40:35.660 the major networks as individual journalists.

00:40:38.020 you know I have no problem with them but how I ended up working for RT for Russia today is

00:40:44.720 I was working for a newspaper before I entered the world of broadcast journalism I was the

00:40:51.260 international editor of a national daily newspaper in Britain for many years when the Ukraine

00:40:56.220 conflict started the special military operation I was covering that and I went to the western

00:41:04.180 part of ukraine to um to pick up there was a couple of stories i was chasing there i ended up

00:41:10.440 in nevov the ukrainians tried to um to kidnap me and i managed to make my escape from from there

00:41:18.100 back out um back out through poland and then to germany i'm gonna ask you to pause why why did

00:41:23.460 they do that why did they try to kidnap you the ukrainians but well because simply because i'm uh

00:41:29.880 I was a journalist that wasn't towing their narrative.

00:41:33.940 And the Ukraine conflict is the most propagandized war in history, in my view.

00:41:41.460 I mean, you look at what happened, even the Iraq war,

00:41:44.360 there was kind of that space within the media field to criticize your government's policy.

00:41:49.900 When it came to Ukraine, that window or that gap narrowed to the point where it was impossible

00:41:58.260 because there was no space to offer anything

00:42:02.280 that was different from the narrative

00:42:03.620 of the Western governments,

00:42:05.440 the British government,

00:42:06.340 the Ukrainian government.

00:42:07.560 So if you were going there

00:42:08.560 to actually do some proper journalism,

00:42:10.500 and I say that because, you know,

00:42:12.440 with all due respect to those organizations,

00:42:17.320 the BBC, CNN, Sky News,

00:42:21.620 you know, the Times,

00:42:22.740 the Telegraph, Channel 4,

00:42:23.680 they were doing these kind of,

00:42:25.140 And they were all saying the exact same thing.

00:42:31.200 They were taking it in turns to stand on the top of the same hotel roof

00:42:34.380 in Kiev or Lvov and repeat the line, repeat the line.

00:42:37.660 But they weren't actually seeing what was the reality on the ground.

00:42:42.780 They were just stenographers, essentially,

00:42:46.380 these kind of copy and paste reports.

00:42:50.620 And it reached kind of insane levels in Britain,

00:42:54.780 I'm sure it was the same with the United States, but Britain was, you know, they started demonizing

00:42:58.940 Vladimir Putin. One of the craziest reports I saw was that Vladimir Putin has an assistant that

00:43:06.700 follows him around with a briefcase, and every time he goes to the toilet, they collect his

00:43:10.980 feces and urine, so his opponents can't run any kind of tests on them. I mean, it got to, you know,

00:43:17.360 completely insane levels. And any time you were reporting, so I ended up at Russia Today after

00:43:23.860 that because I saw that my independence as a journalist and my ability to report on the truth

00:43:31.500 had completely disappeared. It was impossible. The only way to do that was to go to Russia and

00:43:39.060 work for RT. Now we have one of our logos, Question More, and that's what we do. And I

00:43:46.120 always say, yeah, question more, question us. That's the role of a journalist. So I ended up

00:43:51.120 working for RT. I ended up working for two years in Donbass on the Russian side. And I was seeing

00:43:57.180 something completely different from the narrative that was being played out in the West. I was

00:44:01.780 seeing war crimes committed daily by the Ukrainians against a civilian population. When I was there,

00:44:07.700 they called it Donetsk Roulette. You never know when a missile might strike you. And I was seeing

00:44:13.000 attacks on marketplaces, for example, 27 people killed body parts everywhere. These were like

00:44:20.180 babushkas, dadushkas, old men, old women, the poorest people in that part of the city

00:44:27.440 selling homemade fruit and vegetables from their home, just obliterated, arms and legs

00:44:33.920 everywhere.

00:44:35.100 I was seeing hospitals that were struck, bus stops that were being attacked.

00:44:40.460 I could talk about that for a long time.

00:44:42.560 I spoke about it at the United Nations Security Council.

00:44:45.600 I gave testimony of what I'd seen

00:44:47.780 and the failures of Minsk 1 and Minsk 2

00:44:50.400 and, you know, the path to peace.

00:44:53.800 So what we're seeing and what I always say

00:44:57.880 is what we were seeing in that part in Donbass 0.94

00:45:02.340 is the same playbook that we're seeing in Gaza,

00:45:07.660 the same playbook that we're seeing here in Lebanon.

00:45:10.120 These are the most powerful countries in the world

00:45:13.220 waging war using the most sophisticated technology the most powerful weapons against some of the

00:45:19.700 poorest most vulnerable people in the world they can't fight back that's you know this they you

00:45:25.080 know they don't have the um they don't have the arms they don't have the weapons they were they

00:45:29.500 the people of gaza the people of lebanon they weren't sent climards or storm shadows or um

00:45:35.620 you know these advanced weapons these were sent to their oppressors to massacre them you know this

00:45:42.920 is what's happening. And it's the very same forces. In Donbass, it was very simple for me

00:45:48.260 as a journalist. It was a people that wanted peace, a people that wanted to be able to speak

00:45:53.380 their own language, Russian, people that wanted to be able to practice their own culture and

00:45:58.680 traditions if they identified as Russian. And pretty much that was it. You could put it really

00:46:07.500 as simply as that.

00:46:08.900 But then the Ukrainian government

00:46:11.400 decided to wage a war

00:46:12.880 against its own people.

00:46:14.560 I know for some,

00:46:15.340 this went back to, you know,

00:46:16.480 the start of the SMO,

00:46:17.500 but this has a much,

00:46:18.780 much longer history,

00:46:20.060 starting way back in 2014,

00:46:21.920 the Maidat coup.

00:46:24.540 You know, all of these things

00:46:25.720 people forget about now.

00:46:28.040 Conveniently, including the media.

00:46:29.380 The media has actually

00:46:30.400 made them forget about it

00:46:31.640 because, you know, one day

00:46:32.620 there was a neo-Nazi problem

00:46:34.340 in Ukraine.

00:46:35.380 You know, the Azov

00:46:36.180 and the right sector 0.72

00:46:37.040 were um carrying out these horrific um actions uh these horrific killings they were terrorizing the

00:46:43.840 people and the next day all of a sudden ukraine is a paragon of liberal democracy you know it's

00:46:51.520 it's incredible um but people aren't getting the truth so this is why i ended up at rt because

00:46:58.480 the space to do proper journalism just wasn't afforded to me anywhere else none of the british

00:47:02.800 press um like i said i kind of semi-joked but mi5 would never allow me to work for the bbc or for

00:47:09.840 any of the other major news organizations and you know i have to say with with um russia today with

00:47:16.520 rt i have complete freedom to report exactly uh what i want and nobody tells me what to say

00:47:23.520 nobody tells me where i can film nobody tells me who i can speak to who i should speak to

00:47:28.720 um you know i have total journalistic freedom so and i'm very happy working for rt i'm very proud

00:47:35.100 to work for rt and um we always say that here on the ground because you know obviously i came

00:47:42.940 kind of sprung into the into the limelight after what happened to me and um but it's not about me

00:47:48.860 journalists should never become the story unwittingly um i did but we always say that you

00:47:54.240 our job is to raise the voices of the people of this land.

00:47:59.600 And we always say that our mic is a tribune for the people

00:48:03.740 and it will continue to be a tribune for the people

00:48:06.240 as long as we remain in the field.

00:48:09.440 It must be such a strange experience for you

00:48:11.800 since you've been in the British,

00:48:13.460 it sounds like you're in the British media

00:48:14.420 for a long time, conventional media,

00:48:16.080 a newspaper in a country that reads newspapers famously.

00:48:21.360 All of a sudden to have this perspective

00:48:23.580 where you have more freedom to do journalism,

00:48:28.580 to straightforward journalism at Russia today

00:48:32.220 than you had at a British newspaper?

00:48:34.620 I mean, what is that as someone who I assume

00:48:36.660 you were raised in the UK, right?

00:48:39.780 Yeah.

00:48:40.100 What is that like?

00:48:43.420 Well, you know, the media field in Britain,

00:48:48.940 and I think it's not just in Britain,

00:48:51.560 but I think if you look at the Western countries,

00:48:53.160 And it's very concentrated.

00:48:57.520 It's owned by a very small group of people who own and control the media.

00:49:02.700 They control what you say.

00:49:03.860 They control the narrative.

00:49:04.840 But I think the change was that the owners of these media organizations are now more and more forcefully pushing their view and their narrative.

00:49:16.240 And you see it permeating through every word that's spoken on British television.

00:49:22.140 You see it written in every single word in every single newspaper.

00:49:27.100 There's no divergence.

00:49:29.440 They're all uniform.

00:49:31.280 So, you know, of course, Russia, people in the West think that Russia is some kind of authoritarian dictatorship, that we're living under the jackpot of Vladimir Putin.

00:49:42.460 But you've been to Moscow.

00:49:44.600 You know anything but the truth.

00:49:47.720 It couldn't be further from the truth.

00:49:49.200 You know, you see people, I mean, there are very educated people.

00:49:53.660 They have, you know, rich, again, we were talking about Lebanon earlier,

00:49:57.080 having this rich culture and history.

00:49:59.440 I mean, Russia, come on.

00:50:00.780 I mean, I don't know any other nation on earth that has such a rich culture and history.

00:50:05.880 You know, Shostakovich, Dostoevsky, Prokofiev, Yuri Gagarin,

00:50:11.380 they put, you know, the first human being in space.

00:50:15.320 mendeleev the founder of the um you know the the table of the elements um huge these huge figures

00:50:23.480 in the field of science of literature of art of music and you go to any bar in in in moscow and

00:50:32.400 and you can sit down there within five minutes you've had one of the most intelligent political

00:50:38.780 or cultural conversations that you've ever had

00:50:41.900 sitting over a cold pint of Guinness.

00:50:44.520 And for those that think that people are too afraid

00:50:47.500 to criticize Putin, let me tell you, they're not.

00:50:50.920 They're not.

00:50:51.500 I've heard it myself.

00:50:52.920 And the same kind of criticisms you hear

00:50:56.020 in every country anywhere in the world,

00:50:59.080 they're not afraid to express those issues.

00:51:01.040 They don't necessarily hold them.

00:51:02.400 Vladimir Putin is incredibly popular

00:51:04.020 and he's incredibly popular for a very good reason

00:51:06.700 is that people remember the days before Putin became the president.

00:51:11.540 And they remember it was a very, very dark time in the country.

00:51:14.840 And after the collapse of the Soviet Union,

00:51:16.880 up until Vladimir Putin came to power,

00:51:19.660 there wasn't really that kind of national stability.

00:51:22.520 I mean, Russia is obviously a huge country, 11 time zones, I think it is.

00:51:26.260 So to hold it together is incredibly difficult.

00:51:29.780 But Vladimir Putin bought that stability.

00:51:31.840 He made Russia into what it is today.

00:51:33.460 And this is a strong, economically thriving, independent country that is actually, despite what the West says, you know, it still has these good relations with other countries on the world stage.

00:51:47.640 It's not isolated by any stretch of the imagination.

00:51:50.860 It's only isolated if you think the world is the Western powers.

00:51:54.600 So, you know, there is this freedom to criticize.

00:51:59.540 But, of course, it's hugely popular.

00:52:01.880 And, you know, I think people in the West find that very difficult to understand that just how popular Putin is in Russia.

00:52:14.660 Everything you're saying is true. I've seen it multiple times.

00:52:17.420 Even, for example, RT is banned in the United States. It's banned in Europe.

00:52:23.940 in russia you've probably seen but vladimir putin holds a every year he holds a q a for

00:52:31.080 journalists for members of the public every year the bbc is there steve rosenberg asks a question

00:52:36.520 he tries to get a gotcha every year he fails every year but he keeps giving it a go but the bbc is

00:52:43.480 allowed to operate freely inside uh inside russia i couldn't do the same in britain they'd try and

00:52:48.880 arrest me they would they would arrest you about freedom of press if you tried if you practiced

00:52:55.180 what you're doing now in your home country if i tried if i took it yes if i took an rt microphone

00:53:01.480 into uh into london and started trying to interview people or if i stood in front of a camera with an

00:53:08.180 rt microphone and started trying to give a report i would be arrested we're banned we're you know

00:53:14.860 We're treated as, I don't know, like foreign agents.

00:53:19.240 So it would be unlawful for us to work there.

00:53:22.060 We could be jailed, sanctioned, a whole host of things could happen.

00:53:26.760 So we don't have that freedom to operate inside Britain.

00:53:31.020 This is something that always amazes me because the Russian state television was banned in Europe and America because we're propagandists or whatever,

00:53:41.020 the kremlin media machine or yeah these kind of tired old tropes that we hear this you know which

00:53:46.440 is deeply rooted in in russophobia but what they're really saying is the people of europe and brit 0.98

00:53:52.360 and america are stupid right you know people people um are able to disseminate fact from 0.99

00:54:01.180 fiction they're able to watch a news report and decide whether it's propaganda or whether it's 1.00

00:54:05.880 true they can make that decision themselves and they should be able to make that decision

00:54:09.880 themselves in a free and democratic country that operates with freedom of speech and freedom of

00:54:16.480 the press. So, you know, it always strikes me as quite bizarre that they keep saying, well,

00:54:22.680 we uphold freedom of the press. Well, in fact, the European Union has sanctioned a journalist,

00:54:29.420 someone I know, Hussein Doiru, who is a journalist for Red Media. They sanctioned him

00:54:35.700 because of his work.

00:54:38.460 They said he's closed doors.

00:54:39.720 I think they accused him of something to do with the Russian state,

00:54:42.340 but it was because of his reporting on Palestine.

00:54:46.040 So there's no way that they uphold freedom of the press.

00:54:48.580 I myself am being investigated for potential terrorist activities

00:54:53.000 based on my journalism, nothing else.

00:54:55.420 That's it for my journalistic reports.

00:54:58.840 So where's the press freedom?

00:55:02.400 Can I walk into the United States?

00:55:06.640 Can I freely walk around and start interviewing people?

00:55:10.300 Can I interview Donald Trump?

00:55:11.500 Can I sit down and speak to the people on the ground?

00:55:14.140 Of course not.

00:55:14.960 We're banned.

00:55:16.320 It's an absurdity.

00:55:17.740 It is an absurdity.

00:55:18.500 But press freedom is alive and kicking.

00:55:20.400 And it's also a little bit bewildering.

00:55:23.720 It's surprising for me, and it's an ominous sign, I would say, as an American,

00:55:29.320 to see people arrested in Britain for criticizing Israel,

00:55:33.600 why would it be illegal for a Briton to criticize Israel?

00:55:37.440 What does Israel have to do with the UK?

00:55:39.600 And by the way, it was Israeli terror groups

00:55:41.440 who murdered British citizens, British soldiers, British diplomats.

00:55:44.600 Exactly, the King David Hotel.

00:55:45.920 That's exactly, and many others. 1.00

00:55:47.020 And they murdered a lot of Brits 0.92

00:55:48.520 and murdered them with their hands slowly. 0.95

00:55:50.660 In some cases, blew them up with bombs. 0.91

00:55:51.840 But true terrorist acts.

00:55:53.360 And the guy who did it later became the prime minister, Menachem Begin.

00:55:55.540 So actually, Israel owes a great debt to the UK, which is responsible for its formation in the first place, as you know.

00:56:04.560 So why in the world would British citizens be banned from criticizing Israel? 0.51

00:56:09.980 They owe nothing to Israel. 0.53

00:56:11.300 What is this? 0.76

00:56:14.440 Well, it's a bizarre, dystopian situation.

00:56:18.160 you've probably seen but but in britain um i guess maybe six months ago the government moved

00:56:26.120 to ban a group called palestine action and these were these were protesters that were throwing paint

00:56:31.980 airplanes or whatever they were trying to stop a genocide and britain prescribed it as a terrorist

00:56:37.100 organization i think against all the legal advice that they were given they ignored that and they

00:56:41.760 went ahead and it became illegal to even support or hold up placards saying i support palestine

00:56:47.840 action so they were arresting like 80 90 year old women they were dragging them away and charging

00:56:55.800 them as as terror as terrorists under terrorism offenses so i mean britain has a obviously it's

00:57:02.860 invested in israel heavily invested in israel clearly because you know it was britain really

00:57:08.600 that was behind the formation of the state of israel in in the first place you can trace it

00:57:12.600 back to the balfour declaration where you know they drew a line in the sand and gave a land that

00:57:17.140 didn't belong to them to another people whose land it wasn't you know they gave away the land

00:57:22.020 that belonged to the people indigenous to that land so i think you know they talk about this

00:57:26.640 historical debt owed to israel of course you can go to germany and some of the european countries

00:57:32.640 and of course they talk about the the holocaust and you know they bear a heavy burden and

00:57:38.120 responsibility for that or or they feel that and again there's this kind of historical debt that

00:57:43.620 they feel but in in britain now it's it's kind of you know moved way beyond uh way beyond that and

00:57:50.120 and like you said they were in the early days in the formation of the state of israel they were

00:57:55.440 attacking um brits killing brits blowing up hotels um so this kind of unravelled support where you

00:58:04.560 can't even criticize israel you can't there's no space any criticism of israel is now deemed

00:58:10.760 either anti-Semitic, an

00:58:13.120 act of terror, unlawful

00:58:15.140 and

00:58:16.920 it can mean that you're

00:58:19.040 ostracised from society

00:58:21.000 you're labelled an anti-Semite, you're 0.54

00:58:23.060 labelled a racist and

00:58:24.500 I mean the Britain's objective is 0.79

00:58:26.440 Israel is an outpost for 1.00

00:58:29.180 Anglo-American 0.65

00:58:30.960 imperialist

00:58:31.880 what they want to gain out of

00:58:36.920 the region so it acts as this

00:58:39.000 kind of Anglo-imperialist outpost. 0.91

00:58:41.280 And it will back Israel militarily to their hilt. 0.83

00:58:43.900 It will back them politically to their hilt. 0.82

00:58:46.200 But of course, you know,

00:58:46.980 they're using it to strategically control 0.55

00:58:49.240 the entire of the Middle East. 0.85

00:58:52.160 I mean, this is their historical myth. 0.89

00:58:55.040 I mean, everything that happens in this region

00:58:58.540 is because of the historical mess 1.00

00:59:00.600 of the British and the French. 1.00

00:59:03.440 You know, back in the time of the Sykes-Picot, 1.00

00:59:06.940 carving up of that part of the world, 0.99

00:59:08.500 just arbitrarily drawing lines okay you can have this part you can have this part um and you know

00:59:14.240 the the legacy of that lives on uh today which is in fact why as a british um journalist i say of

00:59:20.800 irish origin but you know as certainly as a western uh a western journalist i have a historical debt

00:59:28.900 to the people of of this land um because of what my country has inflicted upon them and you know i

00:59:34.620 see that as part of my duty as a journalist, not to just fall in line behind my own government,

00:59:41.360 not to be a stenographer for power, but to expose to the world what's happening here on the ground

00:59:47.080 in Lebanon and in other countries. And for every bomb that falls on Lebanon, and there have been

00:59:54.580 many of them, I can tell you, but every bomb that falls on Lebanon is a bomb that is supplied by 0.80

00:59:59.940 the united states yes a bomb that is supplied by britain israel just simply fires the bullets 0.59

01:00:05.380 that they're supplied and it's been you know it's carrying out these actions with the support and

01:00:10.060 complicity of of britain and the united states and other western countries do your former colleagues

01:00:16.640 in the british media feel shame as they continue their stenography and see you speaking freely and

01:00:21.900 risking your life to do it they should do yeah they should they should feel a great sense of

01:00:28.620 shame but now i don't know whether that whether they do like i said on a personal level i've met

01:00:33.440 the individual journalists from the major news organizations and they've been very very gracious

01:00:38.900 and very pleasant as individuals but um you know they all fall in line with the same narrative

01:00:44.980 even the journalists that are coming here they'll describe dahia which is the southern suburbs of

01:00:49.680 beirut that entire area has been evacuated we're talking an area between 500 and 800 000 people

01:00:55.460 And that whole area has been evacuated.

01:00:58.700 It's bombed every single day without fail.

01:01:01.800 Fighter jets roaring overhead, drones overhead, civilian buildings being destroyed.

01:01:06.180 Now, for them, this is the southern suburbs of Beirut.

01:01:08.960 They call it a Hezbollah stronghold.

01:01:11.420 Now, okay, that use of language is not an accident. 0.98

01:01:16.080 It's deliberate. 0.92

01:01:17.140 They call it a Hezbollah stronghold because it justifies the bombing of that area.

01:01:21.500 But this isn't a Hezbollah stronghold.

01:01:23.720 This is where we live.

01:01:27.200 These are the coffee shops where we meet our friends.

01:01:29.640 These are the places we go shopping.

01:01:31.780 This is an area vibrant, full of life, people's homes, this kind of thing.

01:01:37.300 And the Western media play a very pernicious role, in fact, in what I believe is this manufacturing of consent.

01:01:46.980 Because outside of that, that here is just a place on a map that gets bombed.

01:01:50.980 Lebanon is a war zone.

01:01:52.380 That's how they describe it.

01:01:53.540 Lebanon isn't a war zone, as we already discussed.

01:01:56.320 Lebanon is a land of rich culture, rich tradition, rich history,

01:02:00.260 full of the most amazing people you could ever meet anywhere in the world.

01:02:06.520 The same with the south of Lebanon.

01:02:07.900 They say, well, all these areas south of the Latani,

01:02:11.380 they're all Hezbollah supporters.

01:02:13.620 I mean, of course there's strong support for Hezbollah in those areas

01:02:17.900 because they see them as the only organization

01:02:20.100 that is standing up and fighting against Israel,

01:02:22.860 that is defending their land, their territory.

01:02:26.380 Hezbollah was only born in the mid-1980s.

01:02:31.820 Now, the people of Lebanon don't have a dereliction

01:02:35.820 or a fantasy or a predisposed to using weapons and guns.

01:02:41.900 It's not that they enjoy going around shooting people.

01:02:45.420 They were formed as an armed militia exactly to defend their land,

01:02:50.280 The same as in Ireland, the same as in, in fact, you can pick any country that's come under attack from the Western powers, from Israel, from their neighbors.

01:03:01.520 That's the origins of these organizations. 0.77

01:03:04.020 But to call it Hezbollah land, which is some of the description that we're finding, this is, as we said, the land that Jesus walked in.

01:03:11.180 It's a land rich in culture and history, but the Western journalists are kind of seeing it very much or speaking about it or writing about it very much in those terms.

01:03:23.160 We hear the same kind of, it's not like these dog-whistled trigger words, you know, Iran-backed, the Iranian-backed militia, you know, the Hezbollah strongholds,

01:03:34.180 strongholds or you know these kind of things that they'll the terminology that they use and 0.53

01:03:38.540 it's absolutely deliberate to justify Israel bombing those lands that's um yeah that that's

01:03:44.800 all it is so whether they're embarrassed about writing that or not I don't know um I think it's

01:03:49.560 very difficult to get a job in the British media if you don't write those um um those kind of lines

01:03:55.800 or you don't speak them into a camera now um Noam Chomsky who um back in I guess the 90s

01:04:04.060 was interviewing a British journalist, Andrew Marr,

01:04:07.380 and I think he hit the nail on the head when he said,

01:04:09.980 okay, I'm not necessarily saying you don't believe what you're saying,

01:04:14.860 but if you didn't believe what you said,

01:04:16.360 you wouldn't be sitting where you are now.

01:04:18.660 And I think that's true, right?

01:04:22.520 I mean, you know, you're not going to get a job

01:04:24.540 unless you believe those things,

01:04:25.700 unless you're prepared to say them or write them.

01:04:28.380 So whether they're embarrassed or not, I don't know.

01:04:31.820 And to be honest, I don't care very much.

01:04:33.540 They may not be capable of it. So my last question, I know you don't like talking about yourself, but it is about you. So Israel tried to assassinate you. They failed, just barely. I can't imagine interviews like this make them less inclined to assassinate you to try again. Are you going to stay in Lebanon?

01:04:54.320 absolutely 100 without without doubt i'll stay in lebanon um lebanon is my home um i have my

01:05:03.660 you know my my beloved is here in lebanon my life is here in lebanon i i always say look

01:05:09.360 lebanon isn't my country but lebanon and the lebanese people belong in my heart yes and um

01:05:16.560 yeah i'll forever be in the service of the lebanese people they've been good enough to host me

01:05:22.020 in their country and I hope that my journalism does them justice and I hope my presence

01:05:28.040 does them justice. I always remember and it's always important to remember that I'm a guest

01:05:33.940 in this land. So no, I have no intention of leaving. I have no intention of stopping reporting.

01:05:40.120 We've already been back to the front line. Just two days after the attack, we made sure that we

01:05:45.220 went out because we're not going to be silenced and if they think that we're going to be leaving

01:05:50.300 the field, then they're very much mistaken. What a remarkable conversation. It is one of

01:05:56.880 the great countries and most beautiful countries in the world. Top five, in my opinion, top three.

01:06:02.680 So I'm grateful you're there to chronicle what's being done to it in our name with our weapons.

01:06:08.040 It's really evil. So anyway, Steve Sweeney, thank you very much for doing this. I appreciate it.

01:06:13.840 A pleasure. Thank you.

The Tucker Carlson Show - April 10, 2026

Journalist From the Frontlines Responds to Israel’s Attempt to Assassinate Him on Camera

Episode Stats

Summary

Transcript