Verdict with Ted Cruz - November 04, 2025


BONUS POD： Safe in the Holy Land-A Firsthand Look at Life in Jerusalem Today

Hosted by
Ted Cruz
Mentioned
Donald Trump Ben Ferguson Cruz Warns Tucker Carlson Candace Owens Nick Fuentes Biden Obama
The Wit & Wisdom of Sen John Kennedy One-on-One Election Disaster： Wipeouts in VA, NJ & NYC plus Ben on the ground in Israel

Episode Stats


Length

10 minutes

Words per minute

175.34

Word count

1,896

Sentence count

122

Harmful content

Toxicity

2

sentences flagged

Hate speech

1

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

Ben Foglou joins the show to talk about the latest developments in the situation in Gaza, including the return of the remains of three missing Hamas hostages, and the lack of progress in reaching a cease-fire between Israel and Hamas.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 This is an iHeart Podcast.
00:00:02.660 Guaranteed human.
00:00:05.800 Have some of these raids gone too far?
00:00:08.100 No, I think they haven't gone far enough
00:00:10.120 because we've been held back by the judges,
00:00:13.180 by the liberal judges that were put in by Biden and by Obama.
00:00:17.120 You're okay with those tactics?
00:00:18.860 Yeah, because you have to get the people out.
00:00:20.480 You know, you have to look at the people. 0.96
00:00:22.040 Many of them are murderers.
00:00:23.480 Many of them are people that were thrown out of their countries 0.59
00:00:26.300 because they were, you know, criminals.
00:00:27.880 You're listening to the 47 Morning Update with Ben Ferguson.
00:00:32.200 Good morning.
00:00:32.780 It's nice to have you with us on the 47 Morning Update.
00:00:35.800 And we are live in Jerusalem right now.
00:00:38.800 It is actually Tuesday.
00:00:40.680 Well, where we're recording this with my producer, it is Monday.
00:00:44.000 Eight hours ahead of where he is right now.
00:00:46.420 And I got to tell you,
00:00:47.560 trying to figure out the times to do these connections,
00:00:50.600 the U.S. has been comical.
00:00:52.260 This show is going to have a little bit different feel than normal
00:00:55.600 as we are going to be in Israel all week.
00:00:58.160 And we're going to start with one of the incredible stories
00:01:01.160 that is on the front page of the Jerusalem Post.
00:01:04.340 But first, right now, all of us,
00:01:07.120 our help is needed with the people in Israel.
00:01:09.840 The International Fellowship of Christians and Jews
00:01:12.860 has supported and will continue to support the people of Israel
00:01:16.900 with life-saving security essentials.
00:01:19.980 And your gift today will help save lives by providing bomb shelters,
00:01:25.500 armored security vehicles, ambulances, firefighting equipment,
00:01:30.340 flak jackets, and bulletproof vests, and so much more.
00:01:33.940 Give a gift to bless Israel and her people by visiting right now,
00:01:38.480 ifcj.org.
00:01:40.820 That's ifcj.org.
00:01:44.240 The psychological torture that is taking place on the Israeli people by Hamas.
00:01:51.420 The headline is simple.
00:01:52.720 The three partial remains that Hamas returned to Israel on Friday night
00:01:57.340 do not belong to any of the hostages still in Gaza.
00:02:01.300 DNA tests conducted at the Greenberg Institute of Forensic Medicine
00:02:05.300 have concluded late on Friday,
00:02:07.360 the IDF was preparing for the return of the partial remains
00:02:10.880 of three slain Gaza hostages.
00:02:13.340 The Red Cross, acting as intermediaries,
00:02:16.980 handed over the remains to the IDF troops overnight.
00:02:20.420 But Hamas had not specified whose remains it was handing over.
00:02:26.020 Hamas said in a statement on Saturday
00:02:27.960 that it initially offered three samples from unidentified bodies
00:02:32.640 to Israeli authorities for, quote, testing.
00:02:35.760 In order to not impede the handover of the bodies,
00:02:38.780 we offered to deliver three samples from a number of unidentified corpses.
00:02:43.340 Hamas stated on Telegram, saying, quote,
00:02:46.200 Israel refused to accept the sample
00:02:48.380 and demanded to receive the bodies for examination.
00:02:51.700 And we handed them over to preempt the enemy's claims.
00:02:55.520 Again, Hamas still referring to Israel as their enemy.
00:02:58.920 A statement from the International Committee of the Red Cross
00:03:02.280 said that the organization, acting as a neutral intermediary,
00:03:06.880 assisted this evening at the request and with the approval of both parties
00:03:11.900 in returning the remains of three bodies to Israeli authorities.
00:03:15.780 The identification process is the responsibility of the relevant authorities in Israel
00:03:21.340 and will be carried out by then.
00:03:23.020 The reality is these bodies did not belong to any of the hostages.
00:03:28.820 And this goes back to what I have been witnessing since I've been in Israel.
00:03:33.060 This has been an incredible trip as I have, for the very first time on my pilgrimage,
00:03:37.180 been able to see where Jesus walked,
00:03:39.200 see where he carried the cross for his own death,
00:03:42.920 and to see exactly what life is like in Israel.
00:03:46.720 There are a couple of things that I want to be clear about.
00:03:49.140 Number one, on this trip, it has been a spiritual journey for me.
00:03:53.820 I will never shy away from talking about that.
00:03:56.440 I will also tell you that if you're thinking about coming to Israel,
00:03:59.760 now is the time to do it.
00:04:01.280 It has been incredibly safe, especially in Jerusalem.
00:04:05.140 And I can tell you that there are so many people that want to come to Israel,
00:04:08.720 and they haven't felt like it was the right time.
00:04:11.000 After being here, I would feel incredibly safe bringing my entire family.
00:04:16.060 This ceasefire and the leadership of Donald Trump to get this peace in the Middle East
00:04:22.100 and the Abraham Accords is truly historic, but it's also very real.
00:04:26.540 But there's also another aspect of this trip that I think is as important to tell you about,
00:04:31.640 and that is witnessing the torture.
00:04:34.160 Just like the story I told you about Hamas and the partial remains sent to Hamas
00:04:38.960 that they said were the hostages were actually not at all.
00:04:42.900 What we are witnessing right now is truly psychological warfare.
00:04:47.520 It's psychological warfare by a terrorist organization that still refers to Israel as the enemy
00:04:52.540 in their own statement on Telegram today.
00:04:55.320 What we're also witnessing is something else that's extremely concerning,
00:04:59.280 and part of the reason why I decided to take this trip to Israel.
00:05:02.260 And that is the rise of anti-Semitism on the right in America.
00:05:06.760 I had the privilege this evening of speaking with and hearing the story
00:05:12.180 of the mother of one of the hostages that was just returned to Israel.
00:05:16.140 You may remember the video that went viral of a young lady on the back of a motorcycle
00:05:21.900 sandwiched between two men holding her hand out begging for help from her boyfriend.
00:05:26.620 You may remember that he moved that camera to the right,
00:05:30.520 and you could see the boyfriend pleading and wanting to grab his girlfriend.
00:05:35.600 They were taken hostage, and they were separated.
00:05:38.900 That story I was able to film tonight of a man by the name of Mr. Orr,
00:05:46.260 the mother of the hostage, told the story of her son,
00:05:50.320 of how she found out about when he was taken,
00:05:53.220 and how he was kept underground without being able to see the son literally for years.
00:05:59.120 That story I have put up on social media so that you can hear it.
00:06:03.540 I have put it up on my Facebook account, the video.
00:06:08.300 And I hope that every one of you will go look at it on Facebook so that you can hear that story.
00:06:12.920 But what you learn when you are here and you talk to the hostage victims and their families
00:06:18.000 is that their stories have not been told by the media.
00:06:22.220 Their torture has not been told by the media.
00:06:24.820 And in fact, what we've seen by the media is for them to imply on every opportunity they get
00:06:29.700 that Israel is somehow evil, that they are committing genocide,
00:06:32.860 that they are the ones that are hurting innocent people, which is not the case at all.
00:06:37.200 I go back to this partial remains that were sent by Hamas, 0.96
00:06:42.540 knowing that it was not actually the hostages' bodies.
00:06:47.100 This is torturing the families.
00:06:49.540 They know this is psychological warfare.
00:06:51.680 We also know that because of the leadership of President Trump,
00:06:55.020 we got to the point where all living hostages were given back.
00:06:58.600 And there is incredible gratitude in Israel right now for the President of the United States of America
00:07:03.340 and him accomplishing something very quickly that the prior administration couldn't do
00:07:08.400 or didn't do on purpose.
00:07:10.360 You can decide.
00:07:11.420 Which brings me to the other point,
00:07:13.200 and it's something I'm going to be focusing on on this show the next several days.
00:07:16.800 There is definitely a rise in anti-Semitism in America in the right right now.
00:07:22.240 It is being led by names that I'm sure you know about.
00:07:25.100 Candace Owens, Tucker Carlson, Nick Fuente, and others who have decided
00:07:30.040 that Israel is not important as an ally of the United States of America.
00:07:34.380 It is also giving incredible help to the terrorist group Hamas.
00:07:39.140 And there is many that are concerned in Israel about this happening in America.
00:07:44.640 In fact, it's been the number one thing I've been asked about as I've been in Israel,
00:07:49.400 is what is happening with Republicans and conservatives.
00:07:52.600 There was a warning on the top page of the Jerusalem Post yesterday.
00:07:55.980 The headline read,
00:07:56.820 A Growing Cancer.
00:07:58.020 Senator Cruz Warns of Anti-Semitism Spike on the U.S. Right.
00:08:02.420 The senator says issue is accelerated by online normalization of fringe figures.
00:08:07.420 He also said the church is asleep.
00:08:09.340 I couldn't agree more with that.
00:08:10.700 And he called on Christian leaders to act.
00:08:13.060 Senator Cruz delivering a dramatic warning that anti-Semitism is spreading
00:08:17.460 on parts of America's right and urged conservatives, pastors, and lay leaders
00:08:23.620 to draw red lines and confront it head on.
00:08:27.340 After being in Israel, I couldn't agree with this more than what I've witnessed since being here.
00:08:32.260 And the danger is very high.
00:08:34.480 The danger, as President Trump has put it, and Senator Cruz has put it,
00:08:37.940 is that you now have hardcore conservatives that are turning a younger generation to be anti-Semitic.
00:08:44.900 There's real anti-Semitism on the right now.
00:08:47.860 And there are a lot of conservatives that are now believing that it's somehow okay to say to Israel,
00:08:54.340 you're not our ally.
00:08:55.840 I also want to talk about national security issues.
00:08:58.500 And it's something we'll focus on tomorrow.
00:09:00.700 And that is just how important Israel is when it comes to fighting ISIS, Al-Qaeda,
00:09:06.520 and Islamic extremism in the Middle East.
00:09:08.920 And how much intelligence they give to America that allows us to stay safe.
00:09:13.240 That is going to be part of what we're going to talk about.
00:09:15.620 We're also going to talk about what I see on the ground,
00:09:18.280 as I am going to visit the site of the terrorist attack, where that festival was.
00:09:22.660 I'm going to meet with more families tomorrow that loved ones were killed,
00:09:27.060 and some that were able to come home.
00:09:28.980 And the leaders that are having to deal with the fallout of the war that has happened for far too long.
00:09:35.040 So we're going to take a moment this week to talk about Israel and the politics of it.
00:09:39.660 So what I'll tell you is this.
00:09:41.320 Go on Facebook and watch the video of the mother tell the story of her son who has just returned.
00:09:46.460 And listen to that story and tell me,
00:09:48.060 Why on earth would we not stand with these people that were attacked in a horrific way?
00:09:53.020 The worst attack on the Jewish people since the Holocaust.
00:09:55.740 Listen to her words.
00:09:57.320 And we'll talk more about anti-Semitism on the right as well.
00:10:00.780 Finally, what I'll tell you is this.
00:10:02.620 The people of Israel, they are so thankful for Donald Trump becoming president yet again.
00:10:08.160 They love that we have a president that is standing with them.
00:10:11.000 And also understands there's a difference between right and wrong and good and evil.
00:10:14.980 That there is clarity in the world now of where America stands with Israel.
00:10:19.220 And it's part of the conversation I'm happy to be having while I'm here in Jerusalem.
00:10:24.160 I'll see you back here tomorrow for more from Israel.
00:10:27.560 Thank you for listening to the 47 Morning Update with Ben Ferguson.
00:10:31.720 Please make sure you hit subscribe wherever you're listening to this podcast right now.
00:10:37.020 And for more in-depth news, also subscribe to the Ben Ferguson podcast.
00:10:41.460 And we will see you back here tomorrow.
00:10:44.980 This is an iHeart Podcast.
00:10:47.860 Guaranteed human.