 Basam Yusef, the renowned Egyptian comic, delivered a remarkable speech during the Indian Today 2024 conclave, leaving his audience in awe. He eloquently addressed pressing issues in human affairs, highlighting the worsening state of the world, despite claims of civilization progress. He criticized the use of distorted justifications to perpetuate the subjugation of the weak and the rule over people. The speech resonated deeply with many, leading to speculation that the BJP party in India may have secretly sought to suppress the video due to its perceived anti-Western stance and commentary on domestic issues. Throughout his address, Yusef skillfully blended comedy with poignant criticism, directing his ire at those who exploit novel justifications to perpetuate human suffering. His critique particularly targeted nations like the United States, which have employed subtle tactics to invade and destabilize unfriendly countries in the Middle East. He cited the destruction of Iraq under false pretenses, emphasizing the ongoing struggle the nation faces in rebuilding after being decimated by fabricated claims of nuclear weapons possession. Yusef also condemned Western exceptionalism's impact on Libya, once a thriving Arab country now plagued by lawlessness and reports of open-air slavery. He highlighted these as failed experiments from which the world should learn to prevent similar tragedies such as the ongoing conflict in Palestine, in urging humanity to live up to its intelligence and aspire to less barbaric behavior, Yusef challenged individuals and nations alike to practice what they preach about fundamental rights and civilization. Human stories across our history with their pain, struggle, grave injustice are all connected. The stories might come from different parts of the world, different errors of our past, but at the core they are more or less the same story. It's a story of who writes the story, who owns the narrative and who manipulates the truth. Winston Churchill was a hero to the British Empire. He is even considered by many as the greatest Britain that ever lived, but for India and for many other ex-British colonies he was a racist, colonial and hateful enemy. Same goes for many European and American politicians, leaders and military commanders all through history. Someone's hero is another one's colonial nightmare, but we don't write the story. They do. It is also a very old and repetitive story throughout history. Humans killed other humans, conquered humans, enslaved humans, exploited humans. From an evolutionary point of view, we are animals, but we don't want to feel like animals. I won't just get up and kill you in the morning, who do you think I am? An animal? No, I'm human. I am evolved. I only kill if I absolutely need to. So I need a justification. You are a threat. You are a danger. You brought it on yourself, but most importantly, you are not as human as me. Under the Nazis, Jewish people were called rats. It's not that easy to put a human in a gas chamber, but a rat, put 10, put 100, put a million, just a rat, an animal, a sub-human lower than me. You can't just take another human, put him in chains, enslave them, torture them, and feed them like animals. You need to see him as an animal, as a savage, as someone who doesn't deserve to be human. It's their color. It's their primitive culture. They are less than me. You can't just starve or kill whole population. You need to see them as unworthy of living. Killing humans is difficult, but doing it because of feeling superior, entitled, that's easy. In short, humans have been consistent about one thing and one thing alone, being assholes to other humans. Throughout our history, we killed people because they had the wrong religion, the wrong color, the wrong ethnicity, but they don't even have to be different. Even with people who looked, sounded, and believed the same, we, like the assholes, we are, managed to find something, anything to excuse ourselves for our shitty behaviors towards others. Maybe we can't help it. Maybe human nature is my nature, a shitty nature. But there is a problem. Humans actually believe that they can do better. After World War II, with the formation of the UN and the new Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and the spree of nations' independence around the world, and the civil rights movements, and the fight for equality and prosperity for all, we thought that we could evolve into better humans. That the atrocities that happened in the past will never be repeated, never again. We are not primitive anymore. We are not in the dark ages anymore. We have defeated colonialism, racism, and injustice. We can do better and finally become human. How embarrassingly naive we were. We maintained our brutality, but we became more creative in justifying the shit we do to other humans, all because we became more connected to reality. You see, a long time ago, we weren't aware of what's happening far away from us. If you were a resident of ancient Athens or Rome, if you lived in Spain or Portugal in the 1600s, if you were a citizen of England or France in the 1800s, you would have enjoyed a good life under the power of those empires, but this quality of life was made possible through the exploitation of other nations and people. But the people of these empires were too far removed from the process. They enjoyed the fruit of their nation's dominance without having to know how it happened and what, at what human cost. A hundred years ago, you would have never heard this in London. Let's have some tea. It's fair trade. No Indians were harmed in the process. No. People were like, oh, spices. I don't know how we got them, but yay. Same is true today. I now live in America, which in its spare time invades people here and there. And because of that, we enjoyed great discounts at Costco. But now we are not that remote because of the technology that is available in our hands. We now have a first throw seat to the killing, the abuse and the exploitation necessary to provide a life of comfort, wealth and prosperity for the mighty and the powerful. So now we as humans need even better justification, more effective distractions and more bullshit reasoning so we don't feel bad about ourselves. Now we need a better constructed reality to make us feel okay with all of this. An alternative reality or in layman terms, propaganda. But despite our progress and despite our elaborate propaganda, our justifications to kill others remain the same. They are savages, terrorists. They are coming for us. They have WMDs, boom, let's invade Iraq. Or like how ISIS decided that the rest of us are infidels, heathens, and that God gave them the right to kill other men and enslave their women. Or when Israel is feeling that because they were God chosen people, they can kill others that God didn't choose. Here is the thing with propaganda. You cannot refute propaganda with just facts and truth. Propaganda is meant to make you emotional, to make you have a visceral reaction. The lies have to be so elaborate in order to prevent you from using common sense. They distract you, throw you off balance, ignore reality, and make you focus on what they want you to focus on. Before I took the stage, they played a video of my interview with P. S. Morgan talking about the war in Gaza. I was put in a position to defend people who were vilified while being slaughtered because the Israeli propaganda made millions believe that these people deserve to die. They did it through lies, propaganda, twisting facts, and emotional blackmail. In these situations, the truth doesn't work, facts don't work. You need to destroy propaganda in a way that is slick and effective. Suddenly, satire comes in handy. How many people should we kill? As many as we can. But Israel is warning civilians before bombing them. Very, very cute. All I did was regurgitate their talking points to them to make them see how stupid they are. Propaganda is not just about lies, it's about distraction. Let's take a small sample of the clichés they use in order to divert the conversation. I'm sure you heard these one after the other. What is a proportionate response? Does Israel have the right to defend itself? Do you condemn Hamas? Does Israel have the right to exist? October 7th, decapitated babies, babies, babies, women were raped. Babies were put in the oven. They are killing babies October 7th, October 7th. Why don't the Arab take in the Palestinians? Where is the outrage when Muslims kill other Muslims? Why don't you talk about Syria? Libya? Sudan? Yemen? October 7th. You are anti-Semitic. You are a Jew, a hater. You are a terrorist sympathizer. Do you condemn Hamas? October 7th, October 7th. We will talk about everything except the killing that is happening every day as we sit here discussing bullshit talking points. This style of distraction is inspired by a very old debating trick called gish galloping. Gish galloping is a way where one side throws distraction, lies and have truth at you in order to confuse you, distract you away from the real issues. We have seen this on display every day since the war started. History only started on October 7th. We are not allowed to talk about what came before. You criticize Israel. You want he sees fire. You hate the Jews. What about the decapitated babies? So now they shut down the conversation. They turn it emotional, visceral. But I don't blame them. They do what other countries do. They lie. They lie and they lie and they lie and they lie. And when you think they are done, they go like DJ Khaled, another one. No, I don't blame them. I blame the Western media, the same media that gave us lectures and history lessons about transparency, honesty, journalistic integrity and holding people accountable. The decapitated babies, the gang rape stories, the babies in ovens, these were lies that have been refuted by the Israeli media themselves. None of the Western media outlets retracted any of those stories with the proper apologies. Hours, no, days. Days were dedicated to the most obscene, outlandish stories and no one said, sorry guys, we messed up. The Israeli media talked extensively about the Hannibal Directive and how a huge portion of Israeli civilians were killed by not-so-friendly fire. CNN, BBC, nothing. They were busy publishing headlines like 15 people were killed in Gaza. Killed by who? We don't know. How are they killed? We don't know. They have been doing this forever. One of my favorite headlines by The New York Times is from 2014. In Israel fired a missile killing five people in a coffee shop in Gaza. And the headline came as, missile finds patrons at cafe. How did it find them? We don't know. What would have happened if it never found them? We have no idea. Or when the Wall Street Journal, just a few weeks ago in October published this headline. Blast goes off at Orthodox Church in Gaza. Yes, there was a miracle blast that miraculously happened. You don't believe in miracles? Come on. It actually happened in a church. Miracles do happen. The Western media that has been lecturing us about the dangers of using religion and Holy Scripture to justify political actions and launching wars, those same people have no problem talking about the historical claims of the chosen people and their indisputable right in the promised land. Really, chosen people, chosen by whom? Promised by whom? God? Your God? My God? Who's God? We don't know. It is funny how the West uses religion as it pleases. They ridicule and criticize brown people religions at will. Your religion is violent. Your religion is nonsense. Your religion is ridiculous, savage, primitive. You can't take political decisions just because your Scripture tells you so. And yet, they openly talk about God choosing certain people to do whatever the hell they want. And this is where I get confused. If they really believe in this, this whole thing about chosen people, then why don't they just all convert to Judea? If you believe that they are the chosen people, won't you feel left out? Won't you feel unchosen? I mean the hypocrisy. We are the West. We are secular. We are liberal. We don't care about religion. But when it comes to Israel, suddenly it's biblical. By the way, the lies and the false justification that have been used to kill other people and wiping out whole communities have been recycled over and over again. 1898, the Wilmington Massacre, 1906, the Atlanta Massacre, 1912, Forsythe Country Massacre, 1921, the Tulsa Massacre, 1922, Perry, Florida, 1923, Rosewood, Florida, 1931, the Scottsboro Boys' Trial in Alabama. These were massacres against black people in America, and all of them started the same way, a rumor, an allegation that some black people raped or assaulted white women. That gave white Americans an excuse to kill, torture, lynch, and even burn down whole communities, displacing them, destroying their homes, hospitals, and schools. Collective punishment, gendered accusations, and displacement based on false rumors. Sounds familiar? They even still use the same kind of accusation whenever people speak against injustice. When some people tried to support the black community in their plight for justice and equality, they were called race traitors, self-hating whites, self-hating Americans. Same as we see today, when Jewish people stand up against Israeli war crimes, they are called self-hating Jews, and it doesn't matter how Jewish you are. The co-author of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Stephen Hethel, was a Jew. He was a Holocaust survivor. He was part of the French resistance against the Nazis. When he stood up for Palestinian rights, he was called an anti-Semite, just like that. Together with many Jewish people, including politicians, comedians, actors, ex-IDF soldiers who rejected Zionist lies, and even rabbis. They too were called self-hating Jews and anti-Semites. It's the best way to shut down the conversation. I got a taste of that myself, because my position against them, they now call me a Jew-hater, an anti-Semite, and a secret member of the Muslim Brotherhood. But I'm used to that. In Egypt 13 years ago, when I hosted my political satire show, and because of my views, I was called an infidel, a traitor, a free mason, a secret Jew, an underground Musaad agent. My absolute favorite, I was called a CIA operative who has been recruited by John Stewart to use satire to bring down the country. As Bassem approached the crux of his speech, the point where it became imperative for the video to be removed from all platforms, he courageously delved into the moral quandaries faced by the world under the dominion of modern empires. Drawing parallels between the barbarity of ancient civilizations and the present era, he highlighted how the opulent lifestyles of ancient empires were built upon the exploitation and subjugation of conquered peoples. Bassem eloquently juxtaposed the ignorance of ancient peoples who lacked mass communication mechanisms to understand the suffering behind their prosperity with the willful blindness of modern societies. Despite having access to information, they choose to ignore the plight of others while proclaiming their civilization and enlightenment a charade in his view. His reflections ran deep, requiring a nuanced understanding to fully grasp his message. Through constructive criticism, Bassem shed light on the hypocrisy of exceptionalism, dismantling notions of racial superiority, and advocating for a world where justice and fairness prevail. With his masterful presentation, Bassem left an indelible mark on the discourse of exceptionalism, urging for peace and equality to reign supreme. And yet, his address was not concluded. There was more to come from his profound insights. They look like a typical narcissist every time you expose them, when they're like, how dare you ruin my reputation by telling people what I actually do. Americans did that with black people. Britain did that with Indians. The West did that with Iraq. Lies, propaganda, and dehumanization. But to be fair, it is not just white people doing it to brown people and black people. Brown and black people dehumanized others too. At certain point of history, we were cruel and violent against other people. Human history is just one big abusive toxic relationship. But it just happens that now, white people rule the planet. And they do that with the very advanced technology and very scary weapons. So the destruction and the decimation are much more pronounced, and the killing is much more effective. Today, I don't have to drive my sword into your body to kill you. I can just sit behind the screen, push a button, and blow your whole block up. Advanced technology allowed humans to be more removed and more lethal while being conveniently away from the bloodshed. How many times did you hear them brag about bombing their enemies back to the Stone Ages, killing them like animals? But there's a problem. When you treat people like animals, animals is what you're going to get. When someone attacks another one with a knife, it's terrorism. But if I fly comfortably in my $64 million F-16, pushing a button to drop a 16,000 A-84 multi-purpose bomb on a residential block, killing 200 people, that's not terrorism. That is war. Those are just collateral damages, sad, and inevitable outcome of war. We have gotten so comfortable killing people from afar, from behind screens, treating them like savages that they roam behind fortified walls. It's easy and convenient. But here's the problem. When that screen is removed, when the fortified walls get breached, you will find yourself face to face with what you have created. You bomb them to the middle ages, then middle-aged brutality is what you're going to get. You treat them like savages, they will attack you like savages. Despite all that, I still consider myself very fortunate. Living in today's world, I often marvel at our human ability to innovate and create a better life that is easy, convenient, and even at sometimes very entertaining. But I'm also scared of our own ability to hate, discriminate, and self-destruct. I hope that we truly evolve to understand that we are all the same. I wish that we can understand that no matter how much we think we can be powerful enough to abuse, exploit, and kill other people, what we are really doing is killing our own humanity. I wish that the leaders we celebrate would be leaders who help lift all humans, help all humans, be good to all humans, not just leaders who acquire their fame and status from using and abusing a group of people from the benefit of their own. And speaking of leaders and in closing, there is just one thing left for me to say. Winston Churchill, thank you very much. This speech is truly remarkable because it emanates directly from the heart of the comedian himself. It's raw, unscripted, yet delivered with such finesse. Bassam's brilliance shines through as he tackles a wide array of subjects leaving no stone unturned. From ISIS to Israel, America to the United Kingdom, he fearlessly exposes the primitive justifications used to justify the subjugation of people. It's a comprehensive address that deserves to be shared widely for its sheer honesty and undeniable truths. Thank you for joining us today. To broaden our impact and spread our message, we encourage you to like, share, and subscribe to our channel. Together, let's raise awareness and advocate for peace. Until next time, stay informed and engaged. Peace.