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Why are we blaming Israel?
2023-11-01 (#072)
Donny Deutsch says Israel seems to be on trial. On October 7th every inhumane thing that can be done was perpetrated by Hamas whose only mission is to eliminate Israel and all Jews. Israel is forever under scrutiny and asked to use restraint. On the college campuses, the rhetoric was elevated after Israel was attacked. One of the several messages on the Cornell bulletin board: "if you see a Jewish person on campus, follow them home and slit their throats. Rats need to be eliminated from Cornell." It's about the Antisemitism that is surfacing in America. Holocaust studies are part of the school curriculum and children usually ask how it happened. Here we have a tangible illustration of how it happened. Jews feel it and are terrified. It's everywhere. Faculty members of Columbia endorsed students who said the militants had a right to do what they did. Evil is not graded the same way when its against Jews and Israel. It's simply Antisemitism. Silence is complicity but it's not just silence: it's the marching for Hamas, for terrorists. University presidents aren't coming out and saying it's wrong. You can have empathy for the Palestinians and also say that slaughtering, beheading, burning babies and murdering is not humanity. But there's a bias against the plight of Israel even after 1400 civilians were slaughtered over an 8 and a half hour period on October 7th. Since then Israel has been on the defensive. In wars, innocent civilians get hurt and Hamas, just like the Nazis and ISIS, has to be taken out. The dislike for Jews makes their being hurt or slaughtered different, they "have it coming to them". Why can't the media simply lay things out evenly, report fairly? Israel is not perfect but it is a civilized democracy and Israelis want to live in peace. Hamas doesn't.
Video Transcription:
Related to the permission structure.
It's not just silence.
And I'm confused about this.
I'm going to get to this in a second.
Is that Israel seems to be on
trial, which I don't understand, that Israel.
People are saying ceasefire, and of course, none of us
want violence, but there was a ceasefire on October 6.
And since that time, we know what happened October 7.
Beheading, raping, every inhumane thing that you can
do, ripping babies out of mother's wombs.
And since then, it's eight and a half hours
of sustained violence against a civilian population and by
a group whose only mission is not real estate
and it's not protecting Palestinian people.
They put their own people in harmway.
They use them as shields.
They've stolen billions of dollars of aid
from the humanitarian aid from them.
Their only mission is to
eliminate Israel, eliminate all Jews. That's it.
That's their mission.
And yet, constantly, Israel seems to be on
the defensive about explaining what they now, obviously,
Israel has to be very careful and it's
got to do things surgically.
But no other group goes through this scrutiny.
I mean, Joe Scarborough, our dear friend, had an
amazing talk the other morning where he said, can
you imagine if Mexico came in and Mexico had
just did the same thing to us?
Would people be saying, Restraint, restraint?
And I also wonder this is going to
bring me back to the college campuses.
All the pro Palestinian where were
the pro Palestinian chants when Palestinians
have been oppressed in other areas?
Is this pro Palestinian or is this
simply anti Jewish and anti Israel?
Which comes back to the campus and what's happening
at the same time after Jews were attacked?
It's elevated.
And I need to read the
things because it's not just rhetoric.
This is what was on the
Cornell bulletin board last night.
If you see a Jewish person on campus,
follow them home and slit their throats.
Rats need to be eliminated from Cornell. Another one.
If you see another Jew on campus, if you see a
pig male Jew, I will stab you and slit your throat.
If I see another pig female Jew, I will drag you
away and rape you and throw you off a cliff.
And it goes on and on and on.
There's a level of hatred.
And I want to draw the line back to why
Israel is in the defensive position after being attacked.
Because it's about anti Semitism and it's about the hate
towards Jews that is now surfacing in this country.
So I have a school age child who's
learning about the Holocaust, and I think the
Holocaust is taught as part of this commitment,
right, that it should never happen again.
And it usually lists questions, and it's usually
part of a curriculum, usually makes people ask,
especially young people, how did this happen?
How did people not do anything?
I think we have this real
tangible illustration of how it happened.
It's so heartbreaking.
Every Jew I know is calling me and
terrified for the first time in their life.
Being Jewish.
They feel it.
When you are a generation away from the
Holocaust, from the annihilation of 6 million Jews
being Jews, there's something that goes from generation
to generation, and people are feeling something in
their stomachs in this country they've never felt
before, and they're terrified.
And I mean, just on the way here, somebody
sent me a SWAST sticker that was drawn on
a little candy store, a little shop in Montauk.
It's every day. It's everywhere.
Columbia just came out, and there are hundred
faculty members endorsed students who said the militants
had a right to do what they did.
They didn't even call them
terrorists that are mosque militants.
There is something that for some reason, evil
is not graded the same way when it's
against Jews and it's against Israel.
And I don't understand that. I do, actually.
I do understand it. What is it?
Antisemitism.
There's something about that.
For some reason, Jews as a group, as a minority.
There's 15 million in the world.
There would have been 250,000,000 without the Holocaust,
for some reason, since the beginning of time.
And I'm actually getting upset.
It's somehow okay to go after these people
in a way that no other people.
I'm not a history student.
I just know the history.
We talk a lot about silence as complicity in
our politics, and the weakness and cowardice of Republicans
to call out someone who isn't just far to
the right, but lurching toward autocratic tools and toolkits.
In some ways, the silence here
is more shocking to the system.
It's not just silence.
It's the marching for Hamas, marching
for terrorists, and it's just endorsed.
And university presidents have a hard time
coming out and saying that's wrong.
There are two truths at once.
You can have empathy for the
Palestinian people's plight, and also unequivocally,
say, murdering and slaughtering and beheading
and burning, burning babies beheading.
This is not humanity.
And yet there is this dance, this thing.
And whereas I don't understand why absolute
evil well, let me just pull back.
I mean, I think everyone's struggling with it, right?
Because I think there is a feeling
that I showed the pictures of the
baby because they influenced US policy, us.
Foreign policy.
Tony Blankham saw them on his trip.
The Israeli government released the photos.
I will never unsee the photos.
I've had nightmares about the photos since I saw them.
There's a couple levels of this.
There's a horror of that.
And there's also what you're talking about.
There's such an anti Israeli bias
because their domestic politics under Netanyahu.
Netanyahu needs to go, by the way. Correct.
And I think US foreign policy experts think that
he may not be there, but there is this
real bias against the plight of Israel even in
the wake of 1400, primarily civilians being slaughtered over
an eight and a half hour period.
Mutilated, slaughtered, raped in front
of their children and husbands.
And what has Israel since then been on
the defensive, explaining every move they make.
And obviously, like any human, we want to
do everything we can to protect every life. Of course.
But they're in a war, and innocent civilians are going
to be hurt, just like innocent Germans were hurt.
But you still got to take out the Nazis.
You got to take out ISIS, and Hamas has
to be taken out, and there's no other answer.
You can't live next door to people whose entire
mission is to annihilate you and destroy you.
And people in this country are cheering, and the
media is just kind of tippy toeing around it.
People are scared.
People are scared of being canceled.
People, you can cancel me.
Cancel me, all right?
I got nothing to be canceled.
I'm just saying there is a climate where
I haven't touched the college campus story.
It's been going on for three weeks.
There is a chill.
I'll just say it. There's a chill.
Why is that?
Because people feel the hatred and they see it, and
the chill is why are people not talking about it?
That's a question for scholars over time.
I'll tell you.
The answer is that Jews are treated different than
other groups, that there's a dislike, that there is
somehow that Jews being hurt or being slaughtered is
different than other people being hurt, that somehow they
have it coming to them.
Yeah, I said it.
That's what this is about.
It's sick, and it's sad.
And I feel like until I'm sorry that I pressed, like,
until it's all out there, we can't and I don't know
why The New York Times and CNN, who are so quick
to blame Israel, and you know what their source was?
Hamas.
They're getting their information from Hamas.
And I don't know why the media
just can't lay things out evenly.
Nobody's asking you to side with either side.
Just report it fairly.
Report honestly, and report one group that is
pure evil and the other group, like us.
Israel is a civilized they're very imperfect,
just like we are, but they're a
civilized, human, value driven democracy.
Every mother of a hostage that
I interviewed said, I'm not political.
I want to live in peace next to my neighbors.
They didn't have political agenda.
Israelis want to live in peace.
Hamas doesn't.
Hamas is not fighting for peace.
They're fighting for death.
They don't want peace for their own people.
This is just so black and white stuff.
There's no gray areas here.
And the media is like, well, not anymore. Not here.
Thank you. Thank you.
I think you gave voice to something that I've
heard a lot for the last three weeks.
Thank you very much.
A quick break for us. We'll be right back.
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