 One of the least helpful ways of understanding the world, in my view, is asking, like, which people has the moral right to a particular part of land? I don't think it helps you understand reality. More important question to ask is, you know, which people have the will and the ability to fight to seize a particular spot of land for their people and then defend it? I don't look at the world in terms of, oh, Israel belongs to the Jews and Japan belongs to the Japanese, right? Land belongs to those who can seize it and take it. And a great deal of nation-states are created precisely through violence. The United States of America was created through violence. Americans had to fight for their freedom to emancipate themselves from the British. And at the end of the American Revolutionary War, there was effectively an ethnic cleansing. Right? Supporters of England, right? Supporters of the Tory approach to life, they up and left the United States. They were strongly encouraged, if not forcefully expelled, to leave the United States of America. And they moved instead to Canada or they went back to England or they might have, you know, ended up elsewhere. But the United States of America was no longer a safe place for them. Israel was created through violence. It was protected by violence. And Israel was created in large part through ethnic cleansing. And historian Jonathan Otto Paul has often been on this show pointed out that Israel's founders in large part emulated the ethnic cleansing strategies of Joseph Stalin. After World War II, Germans were ethnically cleansed from all sorts of parts of Eastern Europe and forcefully repatriated back to Germany in the process. About two million of them died, which is obviously horrible. On the other hand, it did pave the way for a tremendous amount of peace. So if you give me a choice between mass genocide and relatively low levels of violence accompanying ethnic cleansing, I would support ethnic cleansing over genocide, right? It's better to move people than to kill them. So I got stuck into it with some people on Twitter today. And I like this tweet by HistorySpeaks. So Matthew, he's a PhD student at London School of Economics. He's been on the show several times. And he is commenting on Jeff Jacobi, a conservative columnist for the Boston Globe. And Jeff Jacobi says, the plight of innocent civilians and guards are suffering in this war course by their leaders is terrible. So why aren't Arab nations offering to evacuate refugees? During Syria Civil War, millions of them fled the country. They were admitted by Turkey, Germany and other countries. Hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians are found haven in Poland, Hungary and elsewhere. Why don't Arab nations, Muslim nations want Palestinians? And HistorySpeaks has a good rejoinder because they know this is a trek to permanently enable ethnic cleansing by a country, meaning the Jewish State, Israel, the Nakba, the expulsion of Palestinians with the creation of the Jewish State in 1947-48. In the 1950 law on property expropriating homes of ethnically national myths that Palestinians aren't indigenous, present-day reality, settlements on occupied territory, which are war crimes. So I don't know how exactly is it a war crime if a nation attacks you, you defend yourself, and then you take back, you take land that once belonged to them, and then you establish settlements there. If that's a war crime, then war crime has no meaning. But I think this is a good point. Arab Muslim nations in part don't want to take Palestinian refugees because they want to keep them as a permanently explosive threat to the Jewish State of Israel. On the other hand, if these nation states saw they would be enriched by the presence of Palestinians, if Palestinians had so many valuable skills and gifts to their host nations, then I am pretty sure that host nations would act in their own best interests and invite them in. No nation wants to take in large numbers of Palestinians because there's no rational reason, as I understand the world in 2023, why would any host nation want to take in Palestinians? What exactly have Palestinians contributed to the world? What are their unique skills that host nations could not get elsewhere? So it says something about the Palestinian people that nobody wants to take them in. Now, you may have a great rejoinder. Look, what about the Jews, 1930s Jews trying to flee Europe, and nobody wanted to take them in? Does that not tell us something about Jews? Yes, it does. In that time of place that says something about Jews, particularly in the 1930s, there were very high rates of unemployment in the United States, in England, in Australia, in all sorts of First World nations. And so they were not looking to take in refugees, period. And they particularly did not want to take in Jews because they feared it would lead to an ethnic cleavage in society, that their societies would become more divided. That just as Jews will sometimes choose to exclude Gentiles to enjoy their own in-group preferences. So too, Gentiles at times will choose to exclude Jews. Right, I was getting stuck into it on Twitter, right? Yeah, it's just amazing that no nation wants to admit Palestinian refugees because they don't see it rationally in terms of their own best interests. Another perspective on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, right? Another example of diversity plus proximity creates tragedy. I mean, this happens again and again and again and again. Now, you also, again and again, have examples of diversity plus proximity equal prosperity. So sometimes the diversity in some times in some places creates tragedy, not other times in other places and other types of diversity. It creates tragedy. You get tragedy, you get prosperity. So not all diversity is created equal. You get different results from different combinations at different places. So ethnic cleansing, right? Sounds horrible, but you have to ask in the particular situation, what is the alternative? And you forced me to face an alternative between ethnic cleansing and mass slaughter, I would prefer ethnic cleansing. And Israel would prefer like the Gazans to move to Egypt would prefer the Palestinians to move to some surrounding Arab Muslim nation. And so that they can be done with this threat. Now, a lot of horrible sounding things such as ethnic cleansing often lead to relatively great things such as peace, while beautiful sounding things like diversity often lead to horrible things like slaughter. So you can't judge a policy just by its term and just because someone says, oh, that's a war crime or a violation of human rights. So when I just pointed out that ethnic cleansing frequently leads to peace, while nice sounding things like diversity frequently lead to slaughter, Ricardo snapback on Twitter, genocidal, dignitary, eliminationist rhetoric for me, but not for thee. I didn't say anything about any particular group there. So he's just very quick to read this through his own particular lens on life. And I don't recognize how noting that sometimes ethnic cleansing is preferable to the other alternatives such as mass slaughter. I don't see exactly how that's eliminationist rhetoric. In fact, it's the opposite of eliminationist rhetoric and saying that there are better alternatives than mass slaughter. And dignitary. That's a new term just started hearing this week. And it refers to the violent cause for retribution coming from many Jews in reaction to the Hamas slaughter of over 1300 Israelis in southern Israel nine days ago. So Ricardo, I snap back to him. Ricardo, you love dead Jews or you love dead victims, but you despise live Jews who want to keep living. So sometimes if your group is going to keep living, it's going to have to take very stern measures with regard to outgroups that are slaughtering it. And Ricardo says, I have compassion for murder people of all backgrounds, but the ethnic cleansing you propose is as a least bad option could go either way and lead to the same results. Would Jews evacuating to Europe or America be just as acceptable to you as the evacuation of Muslims from Gaza? So I don't propose ethnic cleansing here. I simply noted that in certain times, certain places it's better than some other options. So would Jews evacuating to Europe and America be just as acceptable to me as the evacuation of Muslims from Gaza? What do you think? I'm a Jew. You think, oh, let's give up 3,000 years of historic claims to the land of Israel and that's just as acceptable to me as expelling Palestinians to another Arab Muslim nation where they get to speak the same language, have a pretty similar culture, practice the same religion? No. I don't want Jews to give up their ties to the land of Israel. And as Israel has the strongest military in the Middle East, it is going to largely set the terms of this conflict. It's good to be strong. Ryan says, Christian nationalism is the biggest threat to the Jewish people. Perhaps one day, no signs of it right now. Israel poisoned hundreds of wells so Palestinians could not return to their homes. I'm not aware of that, but I do know that Israel tried to expel and in rare cases like Yerdesin, they slaughtered Arabs, women, children, just slaughtered them in a village. I think something like 50 during the War of Independence. But Israel did try to cleanse the land of Arabs. It was stopped by an international al-Qarai. So certain parts of the land of Israel, Israel had to accept the presence of Arabs because of an international al-Qarai. If there had not been an international al-Qarai at the Israel War of Independence, they would have effectively cleansed the what is now the land of Israel from all Arabs and Muslims. Which would be completely in their best interest. Why would they want the presence of people who hate them and want them dead? Palestinians are not exactly a tremendous reservoir of elite human capital. America will bribe Egypt, then they will all go to Europe thanks Israel. If Europe takes Middle East refugees, that's not primarily because of Israel. That's because Europeans have lost the will to defend themselves and their land. If a Jew, Lucroft tells you to go suck off a dog and you go suck off the dog, is the Jew really responsible or are you responsible? And you say, oh, look, the Jew, he's just got such a high verbal IQ. He's just so persuasive in his rhetoric. I'm the victim here. I couldn't help but go suck off a dog. European nations are responsible for their own welfare. It's not the fault of Israel that Germany decided to take in two million refugees from the Middle East. Goyi countries are not intended to be a dumping ground for the Israelis. Right. And Israel is not intended to be a dumping ground for other countries either. Why would any country want to be a dumping ground? You should only take in those people who are in your best interests. Does the West exist as a dumping ground for Middle Eastern wars, largely caused by the presence of Israel? Right, because without Israel, people in the Middle East, they would just live together in peace and harmony. The region would just flourish. Where on earth you come up with this fantasy that without Israel, Iraq would not go to war with Iran, that Sunni and Shia would not be at each other's throats. Where do you get this idea that the Middle East without a Jewish state in its midst would just be a flourishing site of peace and prosperity? You have absolutely zero empirical rational reason to believe that, but you believe that because it's a magic key to believe that the Jews are responsible for most of the world's problems. That Israel's responsible for the low level of Arab-Islamic civilization in the Middle East and how they're constantly at each other's throats and they can't seem to produce much to the world that is of benefit. That's somehow, I don't think that's really Israel's fault. I can't stand the center-right slavish worship of the Israeli cause. Well, I agree with that. I mean, I primarily had Fox News on in the background over the past week and I haven't seen one spokesman for the Palestinian cause or for the Hamas cause or for the people of Gaza. I mean, they probably had them, but I just haven't seen it. That the courage has just been completely one-sided on Fox. Obviously, different groups have different interests. Why don't they just implement a final solution for Palestine? They could. If they wanted to, they could slaughter every Palestinian. Israel shared a remarkable restraint. They don't have the stomach for it, try to send them elsewhere. People don't want outsiders forced on them. So, yeah, Israel is currently stuck for the problem. Now, why do people not want outsiders forced on them? Because they didn't see the outsiders as being in their best interests. There are occasions when people want to invite outsiders to come live among them and that's when they see those particular outsiders as being in their best interests. It's good to have valuable skills. How will the world react if Israel cuts Gaza in half? There will probably be vociferous condemnations at the United Nations. Why are we expected and even forced by law to live with people who hate us, but Israel is not? Where on earth you get the idea that Israel is not forced to live with people who hate them? Israel contains two million Arabs who hate it. Israel contains tens of thousands of illegal African immigrants, invaders, who don't have a high opinion of it. So Israel is forced by the same set of circumstances to house millions of people who hate it just like the United States and Europe. And it's in the final analysis, it's a lack of wealth by the people of Israel, by the people of America, by the people of Europe to defend and maintain their own civilizations. If Germany, the United States, England, France, Sweden, Spain, Poland won't defend their own civilizations. How exactly is that the Jews' fault? Luke, you are deluded to think that Israel can win the war on two fronts. Yes, totally deluded. I mean, when has Israel ever won a war on two fronts? Oh, wait, there was the 1973 Yom Kippur War. Oh, there was a 1967 war. There was the 1948 war. So yeah, Israel has repeatedly won wars on two fronts. But maybe this time will be different. All right. Overwhelmingly has the strongest military in the Middle East, but maybe this time will be different. Israel may not be able to pull it off against the formidable fighting forces of Hezbollah and Hamas. Remember, the average IQ of the nations that surround Israel is by and large in the low 80s. The average Mexican American IQ is something like 88. No, it's something like 90. The average African American IQ is 85. The average IQ of the nations that surround Israel is lower than 85. They are not exactly formidable. Now, there are tens of millions of them, so there are some smart people, but overall, not exactly formidable people. Based at the Middle East would be a lot more peaceful if Israel had not come into existence. And your evidence for that is what? Where do you see Sunni and Shia living peacefully side by side? I mean, you don't have any empirical basis for saying that, but I realize it meets an emotional need in you because you got that magic key that the Jews are responsible for most of the problems in the world. Look forward. That's a gambler's mindset. Yeah, I'm sure Israel would rather not fight a two-front war, but if you don't think that they're capable of both dealing with Hamas and dealing with Hezbollah at the same time, I think you're wrong. Israel would be devastated if Hezbollah sets off all its rockets. Hezbollah has rockets that can reach all of Israel. They would kill if they wanted to. Thousands of Israelis on the first day of attacks. But then when it was over, they would be out of rockets and Israel would slaughter them. And it would take them many, many years to accumulate such an arsenal and such power again. And Hezbollah is just barely hanging on in Lebanon. Does it really want to risk its standing in Lebanon? The Lebanese people certainly don't want war with Israel. Israel's IQ is declining. Yes, it does, but it's nowhere near the low 80s that is the average in the countries that surround Israel. So have you guys seen the 1966 movie, The Battle of Algiers? Great movie. The French colonel, Colonel Mathieu, who takes over the French operation in Algiers, is asked a difficult question in a press conference. And here is his response. Should we remain in Algeria? If you answer yes, then you must accept all the necessary consequences. So do Jews want to live? If you answer yes, then you, Jews have to accept all the necessary consequences. Do, does the Jewish state want to survive? If Israelis answer yes, then they have to accept all the necessary consequences, including going to war, right? If a people wants to live, they have to accept the necessary consequences of you're often going to be in a fight for survival and you'll be strongly incentivized to be as strong as possible, which will then create incentives for your neighbors to be as strong as possible. And so as we never know what other people are going to do, tensions would just ratchet up, right? This is the inherent tragedy of life on earth, the power politics of if you want to survive, you want to become as strong as possible, which will then threaten other peoples, who will then try to become as strong as possible. So I'm wondering, why did Hamas seemingly take attractive Israeli women hostage? This is a disturbing part of their assault. They took the attractive Israeli women hostage and they slaughtered the less attractive. Isn't that a violation of international law? I mean, you're not really allowed to slaughter fat and unattractive women and take the beautiful ones as sex slaves. I mean, isn't that against human rights, international law, some protocol in the United Nations? Now, if I were a beautiful woman, I would rather have been slaughtered by Hamas than taken as a sex slave back to Gaza. Do religious Jews serve in the military? Modern Orthodox Jews do. They are religious Jews, by and large, Haredi Jews for an increasing proportion of Israeli's population and of Israel's government do not serve in the armed forces. They lack secular education. That's a large reason why the Israeli government response was so incompetent because Israel's government is dominated by people who despise secular education. The Haredim in Israel, by and large, are not productive citizens. They act as leeches and parasites on the welfare state. So if they provided for their own, instead of sucking down government welfare, that would be one thing. But they just suck down enormous amounts of government welfare and contribute very little back. They don't put their lives on the line to fight for Israel. They don't work in large numbers and pay nearly as much in taxes as they suck out in welfare payments. So as the number of Haredim proportionally grow in Israel, it engages the Israeli state. They have corrupted the Israeli government. They have produced the most incompetent Israeli government in memory. Not a good sign. One, how do you really not know? Israel supposedly is the gold standard for intelligence. And there aren't a lot of things in the area that honestly they need to worry about all that much. If you look at the big picture, Lebanon is a known quantity. Yes, Hezbollah there is a problem, but Hezbollah is a political party in Beirut. And so there are lines of communications, there's phones you can tap. And while they're always worried about fighters in the hills of southern Lebanon launching attacks, whether rockets or missiles or artillery across the border, it's kind of a known quantity and there are avenues to gather information. So it's an issue, but it's not a critical one. Syria is in civil war. There hasn't been a problem on the Syrian border in over a decade. Actually, honestly, it's been a problem on the Syrian border in three decades, especially since the Israelis literally control the high ground in the Golan Heights. So that's an issue. Jordan's a satellite state that is dependent upon Israel for economic support. So that goes away. Egypt is functionally an ally and the bulk of the Egyptian population is on the other side of the Suez Peninsula. So there's just not people there that can theoretically cause problems. That just leaves the Palestinians and there is no one thing for the Palestinians. Palestinian territories are broken into two chunks. The first one is on the West Bank of the Jordan River in kind of a crescent around Jerusalem. And here you've got the PLO, who is basically calling the shots. And while the relations between the Israelis and the PLO are a Palestinian liberation organization, for those of you who don't drink kool-aid, while relations aren't ever good, it is a semi-functional local government and there are relations, and that means there's ways to monitor what's going on. And so that area has been relatively quiet. And then there's Gaza, where Hamas took over, what, it's been about 15 years now? Gaza is basically an open-air prison that houses three million people. It's about twice the size of the District of Columbia. So it is one of the most densely populated places on earth, heavily industrialized lifestyle, but no industrial inputs. All the food, or 90% of the food, 90% of the energy is imported along with all the liquid fuels. So to think that this zone could create a industrial power that could challenge Israel is of course laughable. But to think that people living in a prison camp knowing that the height that they could aspire to to be mayor of the prison, that's as good as it gets, you can understand why some less than savory ideologies might bubble up and why people might think that the situation is hopeless and when I go kill a bunch of people. I don't mean that as justification, just as explanation. Anyway, this is the one, the one, the one thing that the Israelis have always been obsessed about. That's where all of their microphones are pointed. And so the fact that they missed this is just mind-boggling because there were hundreds of fighters involved, dozens of vehicles using six different transport options and the Israelis missed it all. Which leads into the second point. In Israel, there will be political connotations here and it will lead to the fall of the Israeli government. Now the Israeli government was never particularly popular and so they're enjoying at the moment a bit of a rally around the flag moment and Netanyahu was smart and reached out to all the opposition parties to create a national war council to prosecute the conflict. He really needed to do that, he did do that. But the civilian government underlieeth that. That's someone that's in trouble. Part of its demographic, the Israelis have some laws that protect basically people who commit themselves to Judaism. So if you're studying to become a religious scholar and all you do is study the Torah, you don't have to pay taxes and you don't have to serve in the military. And that means that you can have lots of kids and don't have pay for them, which you know encourages people to have a lot of kids. And that means somewhere between 10 and 30% of the population based on the very draw the line of the population basically doesn't work but can still vote. And think of that relative you have who's on disability insurance and doesn't work and just sits in his lazy boy all day and bitches about how people are screwing up the world. And they are arising demographic because of population growth. I mean their demographic. And that means that they have been the kingmaker in any number of governments in recent decades and they are a strong, strong minority within the Israeli system. And there's no way to get rid of that. One of the many, many outcomes of being Jewish in a post-lawlicost world is that you value the opinion and you refuse to silence the voices of anyone within your community. So the political system in Israel works on something called proportional representation where you vote for a party. And if the party gets 10% of the vote, they get 10% of the seats. Normally, if you're going to have a political system like this, you want to have a war so that the real WAC jobs don't get into government. In Israel, there really isn't one functionally because they don't want to silence anyone's voices. So you have this whole rainbow of WAC job right-wing parties, right-wing's probably not the right term, which is called religious fundamentalist parties who are supporting the current government. And they're not very good at what they do because they're coming from a stock of people that doesn't value secular education at all. So here in the United States, we've got Matt Gaetz, Getz, the Florida guy, who caused the downfall of Speaker McCarthy and basically made the American Congress non-functional. Take him, take his awesome hair away, and clone him. And that is roughly 40% of the Israeli government right now. People who are absolutely mind-numbingly incompetent but have very firm ideas on how the war should work. And they're the ones... That is a great analogy. That's a great point. All right, you got to tip your Yawaka to Pete's eye in there. ...who are now having to explain how they have presided over the greatest intelligence debacle in the world in the last 50 years. That will have consequences. So let's do Iran next. At the moment, there are no smoking guns indicating that Iran is behind this, but I would be shocked if they didn't put their finger on the scale, at least for the timing. Also considering the various ways that the Hamas fighters launched into Israel that required non-standard supplies, which had to come from the outside and Iran is the most likely suspect, but really it's about the timing. The Saudis and the Israelis were working on a normalization process that if it would have completed, you would have taken the most powerful country in the air. Wait, why the Saudis and the Iranians at each other's throats? Why did Iraq invade Iran? I thought that the Middle East would just live in peace and prosperity if it wasn't for that dastardly Jewish state. Not got it. Seems like there's a lot of tension between Sunnis and Shia. Basically, they hate each other, these two branches of Islam. Sunnis have had the numbers and the power and are basically subjugated and kicked the heck out of the Shia for about 1,300 years now, for 1,000 years now, and still a great deal of animosity between Sunnis and Shia. Even when there's a Jewish state in their midst that they can focus their hatred on, which they sometimes do, but then it comes down to Sunnis and Shia just fundamentally loathe each other. George Friedman had a great analysis here. In intelligence, there's constantly data flowing in. The data congeals itself in what I call the concept. The concept in 1973 was that the Arabs would not attack except under certain special conditions. A similar thought was made here that there was no force large enough to engage the Israeli army and pass such a widespread thing. Now, when you're sitting there doing intelligence and you get contradictory points, you're human. The tendency is that the thing you believed is the truth of God, and you start dismissing things like the idea that maybe you're wrong. At the same time, what's in comprehensive is this. We saw in Jordan a buildup of troops moving to the border. Israeli aircraft were certainly monitoring the situation. Israel has satellites that we're watching very clearly. Israel is a very powerful nation. It's a nuclear power. So what I think happened was that it was so deeply embedded, if not in intelligence, then in the office of the prime minister, that there is no way this is happening, that they demanded more intelligence, more intelligence until by the time it happened, there's nothing new. This is not only an Israeli problem. This is the built-in problem of intelligence. How do you abandon basic things you believe to be true built up over a career and suddenly say, okay, it's wrong. You'll cling to that idea. And that's what makes that a dangerous way to run a government. You've got to remember these are human beings. And I think that was the mistake that they did. And it was the same mistake they made, if we call it a mistake, in 1973. They did not, the concept said there was not going to be an attack. And even though Mossad, human intelligence, was bringing in reports that they were preparing for one, in this case, the prime minister simply could not fathom that that was the case. Yeah, some great analysis there by George Friedman. We developed these concepts about how the world works. Then when it doesn't occur that way, we try to deny it until reality absolutely kicks our ass. All right, let's get a little bit more here from Fox News and how it goes. Journalists were covering the unspeakably brutal attack on Israel by Hamas and now the wider war among the best and bravest in the business. They have seen death and devastation for decades. And yet some of them have choked up and having to report the absolutely gruesome details of the atrocities carried out by the Hamas terrorists from Gaza. My Fox News colleague, Trey Yinxed. You see scenes of parents showing up to, sorry, it's difficult, but parents showing up to give hair of their kids to the authorities to see if they can match the DNA to the bodies. Yeah, just horrific. Anderson Cooper after a woman described the kidnapping of family members. I'm sorry, I'm so emotional. Seeing as Nick Robertson on talking to an Israeli military official. And I asked him, how are you going to get these hostages back? All right, Nick Robertson, thank you. And what he told me was... Go ahead, Nick, tell us what he told me. I'm sorry, Abby, and how he told me that they were going to do everything in their power to get them back. And by putting themselves in harm's way, many have had to take cover. NBC's Richard Engel. Well, I can tell you right now, we are in the town of Sterot, and there has been a lot of incoming fire here. With the death toll in Israel over 1,300 Hamas is claiming more than 2,300 killed by Israel's retaliatory airstrikes. But the Israeli military at least tries to avoid civilian casualties. What has been so heartbreaking for Western journalists to witness and report? More than 200 young people slaughtered at a music festival. Many women raped. Families with children taken hostage. Israeli soldiers and babies decapitated. The media business is unpopular and for good reason. But a bloody crisis like this reminds us not just that journalism can be risky, but that reporters are human beings who grapple with their emotions in dealing with unimaginable terror. I'm Howard Kurtz and this is Media Buzz. Thousands of civilians slaughtered. I just go slaughtered in Israel. Israel is fighting back against what is a savage enemy that wants to wipe them off the planet. They want Israel to occupy Gaza, get it meshed in a door to door house to house fighting there. Kill a lot of Palestinian civilians and completely erode the moral high ground that it has right now. These are animals committing atrocities against civilians. They're raping women, kidnapping children and butchering corpses and parading them around like a savage ritual. If you can't take the right side on this war after hearing these repugnant tactics. Okay, I'm not someone who focuses much on moral high ground, but it certainly does affect the psychology of people who are participating. If you believe you're on the moral high ground, if you believe that you are doing God's will, that's likely to give you greater strength than people who are ashamed of what they're doing. Also, media world opinion, media opinion doesn't count for zero. It's not determinative, but it does count for a little bit. It does count for something. There's something wrong with you. On the view, sharper criticism of Israel fighting back. And when you look at that law, part of it is retaliation against innocent civilians collectively is also terror and is also a war crime. Joining us now to analyze is the coverage Ben Dominic, at a large spectator and in Los Angeles. Okay, we'll skip that commentary. But it's funny, some of the smartest commentary about Israel versus Hamas comes from the comedy website, The Onion. Here is its op-ed. The Onion stands with Israel because it seems like you get less trouble for that. The past week has shown humanity at its worst. In moments of turmoil such as this one, some believe it is the responsibility of a newspaper of record like The Onion to delve fully into the nuances of a complex and multifaceted conflict that stretches back not just decades but centuries. These people are wrong. It demands incredible sensitivity and strict adherence to journalistic standards of objectivity. And this isn't something we are willing to do. Rather, we're just going to say The Onion expresses its steadfast solidarity with Israel and leave it at that. Why? Because this editorial board doesn't like getting yelled at. They're going to be way fewer people with way less power mad at us. We don't want to go up against the entire US government, which President Biden has expressed its unwavering support for Israel. Finally, it's because we don't want to and you can't make us. You can't. You seriously can't. You cannot make us do all of this hard stuff ever. Seriously. That sounds like an enormous headache. Even worse, a reward for that would be mobs of people screaming at us online. Why would we do that? Alternatively, we could simply say Israel must be fully supported in its military campaign to root out evil in all of its hiding places. That 19-word sentence would save us the trouble of engaging with this difficult situation. So we are going to go with that one. Does that make sense? We think it does. Our stance becomes increasingly compelling when one considers some alternative scenarios. For instance, The Onion could theoretically say that it stands in solidarity with the bombing victims in Gaza. What would happen then? People would get mad at us. They could threaten our careers. How about if we said we believe the loss of innocent life is wrong, no matter what the nationality? That would also result in people getting mad at us. Sometimes these would be different people getting mad, but that doesn't really change things on our end. Most significantly, it could hurt our quarterly revenue, which is the worst tragedy imaginable. Perhaps some would call on us to point out the obvious moral hypocrisy of those far-left Americans who bend about terms like war criminals while turning a blind eye to what amounts to an unconscionable war crime on the part of Hamas. We are also not going to do that. Why? Because people will get angry at us, extremely irritating people. And we just don't want to deal with it. We have enough going on without them getting on our case. The water main broke in our office last Friday, and dealing with the super has been a whole thing. It keeps avoiding our cause, because obviously it's going to have to eat the cost of the sub pump. So why would we add defending ourselves against online criticism over one of the most incendiary topics in human history to the list of headaches we're already dealing with? Why? The answer is that we won't. That was a really sharp commentary there by The Onion. Okay. Fat Elvis Jr. writes on rumble. If you love Israel so much, why don't you move there? That's a great point. Obviously I love living in America more. There are about 6 million Jews in America, and by definition their presence here shows that they're America first. Now, they may make some decisions, use some rhetoric that for some of them may indicate an Israel first attitude, but if they're living in the United States, their feet indicate that they are America first. Because all Jews have the right to get up and move to Israel. So if Jews choose to stay behind in Argentina, or Brazil, or Australia, England, France, Germany, the United States, Canada, or Mexico, it's because they are primarily most comfortable in those particular host countries. Fat Elvis says the Hamas are trying to boost their IQ by breeding with the women with the best genetics possible. Okay. Kathy Newman. Remember her fiery interview with Jordan Peterson? She's a lefty journalist on Times Radio. Here she's talking to someone from former national security advisor to BB Netanyahu, Yakov Amidroh. Hamas to the end. We will do to Hamas what you did with the Americans to ISIS. Hamas is not an organization. It's a terror, barbarian group, which is worse than ISIS. Well, the UN has urged Israel to withdraw its order for people in northern Gaza to evacuate warning of. Whoa. We got Jonathan Greenblatt here. Wonder what Jonathan Greenblatt has to say. I'm sure he's expressing solidarity with the oppressed people of Gaza. Here's growing criticism, as you know, of Israel. For not just the bombing, but for ordering one million Hamas civilians, excuse me, Gaza civilians to move from the north to the south. There are shortages there, a food, a fuel, many don't have shelter. Don't you worry that world opinion will turn against the Israelis? Well, I certainly worry about world opinion turning against the Israelis. And I certainly wish the Israelis didn't have to undertake such a massive exercise of force. But the truth is, Howard, this could end today. It could be stopped if the Hamas would give up the hostages. Yeah, it could end today if Hamas would just change their hero system. Guys, why don't Muslims change their religion? Why don't Arabs change their hero system? If all these hundreds of millions of Arabs and Muslims would only just change their hero system, just modify their religion, this conflict could end today. Yes, you could say that about any conflict. And say they were going to put down their arms and work out a means to live in peace with Israel. The organization with the power to stop this is Hamas. This is Hamas' war. They started it. Hamas can finish it by returning the hostages. They can finish it by laying down their arms. Hamas has a particular hero system that is shared by tens of millions of Arabs and Muslims. That is, they find it in a front that an alien Jewish state was created in their midst through the ethnic cleansing of their pharaoh Arabs and Muslims. It's hard to blame them for having this hero system. It makes perfect sense from their point of view. Why would Arabs and Muslims just be at ease with, hey, yeah, these Jews came largely from Europe and they established a Jewish state in a land that was being dominated by Arabs for, I don't know, 1,000, 1,500 years. And they expelled most of the Arabs and set up a Jewish state in our midst on land that had been ruled by Arabs for over 1,000 years. But hey, we're cool with that. You don't have a problem with that. And yeah, this Jewish state is flourishing and we remain backward, but we're okay with being humiliated by the ongoing success of the Jewish state. What kind of people, what kind of hero system would just be at ease with that? So who's responsible for displacing these Palestinians? Hamas. Who's responsible for the pain and suffering in Gaza? Hamas. It started with Hamas, but it will be finished by Israel if Hamas doesn't do the right thing. All right. Oh, gosh, just rhetoric. It's not going to be finished by Israel. And it's going to have nothing to do with doing the right thing or the wrong thing. There are no solutions here. There are only trade-offs and tremendous suffering on many different sides. So you can win a battle, but it doesn't necessarily mean you're going to win the war. So Luke Kraft, you sent me a link and it's got a particular time stamp. I assume this is the right time stamp that you want me to show. Well, that's precisely the reason why I mentioned that Russia may be dragged in, because it's one hell of a way for Russia to divert attention from the crisis in Ukraine and to fight the West by proxy. Russia would have a vested interest. China already made noises in support of Hamas, which is a bit unusual even for China. So now China and Russia and other BRICS members, they begin to consider themselves as an alternative to the West. I'm telling you, this is not a local conflict. It appears to be a local conflict. It's not. Hamas would have never attacked Israel, never in a million years, had it not been guaranteed to have support from outside forces such as Iran, possibly Russia as well, but definitely Iran. Something is going on here, which is much bigger than 600 dead Israelis. Although there's been a major intelligence failure, for example, the Hamas has acquired special boats and special paragliders, military paragliders and even drones. And Israel was not aware of this, to shock him. It's absolutely shocking. And they didn't buy only one boat. Israel has already intercepted seven boats. Now, these boats, I mean, the international market is true, but they're not too many sellers of military boats. You know, they're like, you know, I don't know. Israel should have been aware that the Hamas is buying military boats in commercial quantities. And there's massive intelligence failure. And that is also the, let's say, the religion factor. Yes, of course, there's history, the symbolism, there are cultural elements. There's a lot of baggage that goes with this ostensibly geopolitical coffee. It's not merely a geopolitical coffee. The whole thing started with Al Aqsa, the mosque in Jerusalem. The attack of Hamas on Israelis was called the Al Aqsa flood. Hamas said that it is attacking Israel because too many Israeli tourists and visitors are trampling on the sacred grounds of Al Aqsa. The pretext, the excuse was religious. But there's still many, many people, there's a majority of people who are motivated by such, may I say, nonsense. They still can be aggravated and become suicidal if they're confronted with some religious infraction or some religious transgression. And it's not only religion because I think one thing that the West does not understand, and the East does not understand. Is that Judaism is not only a religion, it's a nationality. There, Islam is the same. Islam is not only a religion, it's a nationality. It's called umma. Umma means nation. So these particular religions are not only, they don't only possess the power of religion, they possess the power of the nation state. They're also cultural spheres. So it's a clash of civilization. So traditionally religion and state just went hand in hand. All right. The separation of religion from state was something that developed in Europe after the devastating 30-year war in Germany. So they're increasing moves to neutralize the power of religion to set people at each other's throats. And so European political philosophy and European practical politics developed ways to separate, increasingly separate religion from the state to depoliticize religion, to neutralize religion as a force of setting people at each other. Now that's the exception in the world. Usually religion and state go hand in hand. The Protestants develop something different. Huntington was right. It's not a clash of religions because we have had clashes of religion. For example, we have the Crusades, Christianity against Islam and so on. That's not the same here. It's total in the sense that it's a clash of national interests, cultural spheres and religion. When Judaism is fighting Islam, it's a fight about the definition of the world in every possible way. Culturally, socially, religiously, nationally, you name it. No element is left. You know when compromise is possible in international affairs? When there are elements where you can be in agreement with your enemy. If you have something in common with your enemy, you can make peace. The Germans and the French had something in common, European identity, European culture. They had something in common. They had a clash about nationalist interests. The German Laban sound and so on. Yeah, there was a clash about nationality, but there was no clash about culture. There was no clash about civilization. There was a clash about music. Mozart was very popular in trance. They had a lot in common, but the Jews and the Muslims have nothing in common, nothing in principle in common. They are the fight. That's right. Generally speaking, generically speaking, Jews and Muslims have as little in common in general as two peoples in the world, just like European Americans and African Americans have almost nothing in common. The conflict cuts across every possible dimension. So there is no ground for compromise or divorce or consensus. So you think that in the next century, we might have the same problems? Is it true that the Israeli army is filled with women? Yes, but they've usually been kept far away from the actual fighting. Natural conflict. And yet we haven't seen any space war between Russia and the United States over the moon. Ah, when I say that Jews and Muslims, generally speaking, have almost nothing in common, the chat responds. This is patently false. There is considerable overlap between Judaism and Islam. There is some overlap between Judaism and Islam, but because there is a theoretical similarity in elements of Judaism and Islam, doesn't filter down to Jews and Muslims just have so much in common. First of all, the average Muslim IQ in the Middle East is around 85. Muslims in America, Great Britain, not exactly high achieving group. And so people with a 120 IQ are not going to hang out with people with an IQ below 105, let alone 85. So theoretical similarities don't mean that in the real world, people who are designated by these theories of Judaism and Islam as being practitioners or adherents or members of this group, therefore have a lot in common. There is theory and there is reality. Sometimes theory sheds light on reality, but just as often theory obscures reality. Now, there is no escape from using theory. We have to use theory to try to make sense of the world around us. And you are so lucky, I devoted a blog post to this last night. I was inspired by that George Friedman discussion. So there's no alternative to using models to simplify reality. The world is far too complex to live without them, but if you use a false map of reality, you won't get where you want to go. Now, you have to have a theory about how the world works. The world is infinitely complex. And I'm looking at a terrific 2013 paper published by John Jay Mirsheimer and Stephen M. Walt. Mirsheimer at University of Chicago, Walt at Harvard. And this is on the importance of theory and international relations, but theory is not just important in international relations. It's also important in reality at work, dating, love, sex, marriage, culture. We need theories. We need mental maps, meaning here from Mirsheimer, to identify what is important in different domains of human activity. We need theories to identify the causal mechanisms that explain recurring behavior and how they relate to each other. So, for example, IQ has tremendous predictive and explanatory power for explaining life results by large groups. The coughness critique has more explanatory and predictive power than the culture of critique by Kevin McDonald. The well-crafted theories enable us to test hypotheses. So theories are just simplified pictures of reality. They explain how the world works in particular domains. The world around us is one of blooming, buzzing confusion. It is infinitely complex and difficult to comprehend. To make sense of the world around us, we need theories. Then we need to decide which factors matter most. We need to leave a lot of factors out from our theories as they are deemed less important for explaining what we want to study. So theories make the world comprehensible by only zeroing in on the most important factors. So theories are like maps, both aimed to simplify a complex reality so we can grasp it better. A highway map of the United States might include major cities, major roads, rivers, mountains and lakes. But it might leave out many less prominent features such as individual trees, individual buildings, or rivets on the Gordon Gate Bridge. So like a theory, a map is an abridged version of reality. A map is not the reality. A map is not the street. It's a map. Like maps, however, theories provide a causal story. A theory says that one or more factors can explain what is happening. So theories are built on simplifying assumptions about which factors matter the most for explaining how the world works. So realist theories of international relations hold the balance of power considerations will largely account for the outbreak of great power wars and that domestic politics has less explanatory power. And personalities of politicians similarly has less explanatory power than balance of power politics. Many liberal theories of international relations argue the opposite. So theories have components that are often called concepts or variables. So a theory says how key concepts are defined. And a theory usually depends upon making assumptions about the key actors. There's a prominent assumption in economics that I learned very early on. Ceteris paribus, if we change one thing, Ceteris paribus and leave everything else the same. Of course, in the real world, you change one thing, everything else doesn't stay the same. So a theory explains why a particular hypothesis should be true that identifies the causal mechanisms that produce the expected outcomes. And these mechanisms, which often are not observable, will reflect at best what is happening in the real world. So theories provide general explanations. They are meant to apply across space and time. But they are not universal. They only apply to particular realms of activity or specific time periods. So the scope of theory can vary significantly. So no social science theory explains every relevant case. There will always be few cases that contradict even the best of theories. All right, so I'm thinking about we all have concepts that obscure more than they reveal reality. So one common concept that people get wrong is, it won't happen to me, right? There's no inherent reason that bad things won't happen to you. That's magical, delusional, false thinking. The world around us is usually a far more dangerous people than we place, than we consciously are aware of. To live in such a reality that the world around us is incredibly painful is too painful, so we ignore it. One concept that I've consistently gotten wrong over the course of my life is the importance of religion in explaining reality. So I grew up a Seventh Day Adventist and I thought anyone outside of the Seventh Day Adventist Church was lost. But that was not a concept that helped me thrive. Around age 18 I became an atheist and I thought atheists were just far smarter and more realistic than the religious. Again, that's not a concept that helped me thrive. At age 22 I re-embraced God, I converted to Judaism and for years the main thing I wanted to talk about was ethical monotheism. This assembly was not an approach to life that worked. Only in my 40s did I concede an obvious reality that secular societies such as Japan is far more law abiding than any Jewish or Christian society that I know of. So it's hard to argue that belief in God is essential for creating a good community. Now I tend to understand religion as a subset of culture. That seems to have more explanatory power. Culture is the creation of a particular people in a particular geography. So from an empirical perspective, not a faith-based perspective, seems like most of the time a particular people with a particular religion have more in common with secular members of their people than they do with foreigners who share their religion. For example, Norwegian Christians in many ways seem to have more in common with secular Norwegians than they do with African Christians. Japanese Christians seem to have more things in common with secular Japanese than they do with say Peruvian or African Christians. I've gone through much of my life thinking that religious people are more likely to be moral than secular people. Now I have to concede that there's not much evidence for that. I have to concede that a person's ability to bond with other people has more predictive power about his decency than his religiosity. So an atheist who enjoys good relations with his family and friends is more likely to be a decent person than a religious person without such bonds. Another bogus concept I've had about life is the transcendent importance of sex. Sex has had such transfixing power over me at times that it has diminished and spoiled everything else in my life. I spent much of my life thinking that women are lying, see you next Tuesdays. This did not serve me. I spent much of my life assuming the vegetarianism was a healthy way to go. As a result, I had a lifetime of poor health. June of 2021, I started swallowing six beef organ capsules a day and all my health problems disappeared. I've gone through much of my life just despising people I offended. I thought they were weak. I failed to recognize that they simply had a different hero system from me. My lack of interest in hero systems different from my own has not served me. I had a concept that I could be tough on myself and easy on others, but I learned reluctantly that I tend to treat others the same way I treat myself, which for much of my life has been badly. I failed to recognize the limits of my willpower. I thought I could accomplish anything through my wealth. Didn't realize it consistently ran down throughout the day, except for brief bumps up after eating. So I failed to create a life that worked because I was trying to create a life that depended upon the considerable exercise of willpower, which I could not consistently muster. Now I try to create a life that uses a minimum of willpower by putting myself in situations that are most conducive to what's good for me. Another bogus concept I've held about life is an exaggerated sense of my own talents. By desperately hoarding onto this false concept, I pursued celebrity in my 20s and 30s and 40s while failing to assemble the building blocks of a good life suited to my abilities, such as finishing my university education, developing a profession, such as law, marrying young and having children. Thinking I could solve my problems on my own was frequently another false concept that I've held to. My exaggerated sense of the importance of right wing politics, another false concept that I've held to, something wrong with being right wing. But I failed to recognize that our political predispositions are rooted in our biology and our early imprinting and that what makes a particular politics, whether right or left or centrist, whether it makes it adaptive depends upon circumstance. I used to think that moral character was of the greatest importance that I read John M. Doris' 2005 book, Lack of Character, Personality and Moral Behavior. And I came to recognize the transcendent power of situation. Situation frequently has more influence over our behavior than our purported moral character. Came to recognize that moral character, to the extent it exists, is domain-specific. So some people may be honest in business and dishonest with their families. Other people may be honest in sex but dishonest in accounting. And if you want a walking, talking, thesaurus of false concepts about reality, one would have a hard time outdoing gurus such as Dennis Prager. And I've talked about his false concepts with regard to reality many times. Mars, this teaches us that it is possible to reach an accommodation, a peaceful accommodation between powers and even superpowers regarding specific territories. The problem is never territory. The problem is the symbolic sphere. We are fighting over symbols because we are creatures of dreams. We are storytellers. We die for fiction. We never die for reality. You die for the nation state. What the hell is a nation state? It's nonsense. It's a story. You die for a piece of cloth known as the flag. What the hell is a flag? And yet you die for it. We die for symbols. We never die for reality. And in Antarctica, it was a virgin territory so there were no symbols there. There was no heritage. There was no culture. There was no religion. No past. When we are embedded in the present and with an outlook to the future, we collaborate very well as a species. Another example is Australia. Australia is a continent. I didn't see China invading Australia in order to counter the British Empire. I didn't see war there. There's no war there. Why? Because Australia has no history. There's no past. I know Australians will be very angry with this. But that's the truth. There it's a totally present society. There's no past. When we don't have a past, we don't fight. We collaborate actually. Unfortunately today, we have a movement, especially in the West, but not only a reactionary movement, back to traditions, back to symbols, back to religion, away from enlightenment, away from science, away from knowledge. We have this reactionary wave which will drive us into belligerence and war and conflict. In periods of uncertainty, you revert to religion, to symbolism, to tradition, to... And then this provokes, somehow, aggressive, violent, primitive, atavistic instincts. I'm not quite sure what is the connection, but I know there is a connection. Because where there are... There's no tradition and no history, like Antarctica, like the moon, like the space station, like science. No tradition in history and science. You know what is science based on? No past. And no nation, no specific nation. No nation, no organization present. No nation, no tradition. What is protesting is the power of the non-rational. But the non-rational certainly is responsible for a lot of bad things in life, but it's also responsible for a lot of great things in life. Inordinate love for your friends, or your spouse, or your girlfriend, your kids, right? There may frequently be a large, non-rational component of it, but it's what makes life worthy. So I really enjoy his critique there, but he is ignoring the nature of the non-rational to give meaning and purpose and joy and depth and all sorts of wonderful things to our lives. Religion and no past is very important. Science is no past. You don't say, for example, I am never going to accept Albert Einstein because I have Newton. You know, there's no past. Albert Einstein came through Newton to the garbage. We don't have an adherence to the past. We don't have loyalty to the past. We live in the present in science, 100% in the present. What's the latest? What's the latest discovery? What's the latest theory? We don't care about the past. So of course, Russians, Ukrainians, Israelis and Palestinians are working in perfect harmony in science. Even to some extent in media, you know, I'm a columnist in Brussels morning. The managing editor of Brussels morning and my direct boss, so to speak, he's a Palestinian from Gaza. I never had any problem with that. Okay, Sam Backman. So here's an interesting discussion between former foreign policy adviser to BB Netanyahu and Kathy Newman, who had that combative interview with Jordan Peterson a few years ago. The devastating humanitarian consequences. Israel, though, has masked soldiers near Gaza ahead of this expected ground offensive. So speak now to Yakov Amidro, whose former Israeli major general and national security adviser to Benjamin Netanyahu is on the line now. Good afternoon to you. We've seen the scale of atrocities carried out by Hamas have been laid out in graphic terms, not least in these pictures, astonishing pictures that have been released on the official Israeli government Twitter accounts. Given that, how would you be advising Mr Netanyahu to respond? Look, you know, we made mistake in the past. In some operations, we heard the international community. We heard friends who urge us to take into account the humanitarian issue. And the result is 1400 Israelis butchered by a barbarian organization. Instead of going a few years ago to destroy the organization, we heard the voices from all around the world. We stopped the operation and the result is very clear. So this time, we are not going to hear or to take into account the voices from the United Nations and other organizations. We are going to crash Hamas to the end. We will do to Hamas what you did too. Okay, so when you have to spend so many words, talk about how this time we're not going to listen to the United Nations, we're not going to listen to world opinion. But we all live in the world. We're all affected to varying degrees by world opinion. So even Israel's incredibly nationalistic, right-wing government is going to be affected by world opinion. I understand trying to psych yourself up. Oh, this time we're not going to listen. This time we're really going to get it done. But Israel lives in the world and world opinion will have an effect on Israel. The Americans to ISIS. Hamas is not an organization. It's a terror, barbarian group. Israel, right? Jews had to use terror to establish the monstate of Israel. Americans had to use terror to establish the United States of America against England. So terror is just a tactic. All right. So with regard to those Harvard students, right, who were coming out in support of Hamas, and there's been a great deal of controversy about that, they weren't really primarily coming out in support of the horrible things that Hamas had done. They were siding with their team. The reason that American universities are supposedly so anti-Israel is because they are the least nationalist part of the United States and the most internationalist and the Israel lobby has the least power over discourse in universities. So those various student unions coming out in support of Hamas, they're really just siding with their hero system, their team. They're not really saying that we think that slaughtering women and children is great. That was just a tactic that their team used to try to achieve its own hero system. And at the same time, I don't have any problem with Bill Ackman and other billionaires saying we need a list so that we can blackball these students. I would not do that. If I were an employer, and I thought that one of these students could be a good employee for me, and just because you support Hamas doesn't...