#424 – Bassem Youssef: Israel-Palestine, Gaza, Hamas, Middle East, Satire & Fame

Speaker 1 following is a conversation with Basam Youssef, a legendary Egyptian-American comedian, the so-called Jon Stewart of the Middle East, who fearlessly satirized those in power, even when his job and life were on the line.

Speaker 1 Basam is a beautiful human being. It was truly a pleasure for me to get to know him and to have this fun, fascinating, and challenging conversation.

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And now, dear friends, here's Bossum Yusuf.

Speaker 1 Your wife is half Palestinian, and I've heard you say they've been trying to kill her, but she keeps using the kids as human shields. So, have you considered negotiating a ceasefire?

Speaker 1 Well, the thing is, every day, every minute of the day in a married life is a negotiation. Everything can blow up into a full-scale war, starting from a simple sentence like, Good morning.

Speaker 1 What should we do with the kids today?

Speaker 1 What should we do with that piece of furniture?

Speaker 1 Any sentence can lead you to heaven or to hell in the same time. So you do negotiate with terrorists.
Oh, yeah, yeah, 100%. You must.
Yeah. And for her, I am her terrorist too.
So it's equal.

Speaker 1 Terrorists on both sides.

Speaker 1 On a more serious note, when you found out about the attacks of October 7th, what went through your mind? If I'm allowed to use a curse word,

Speaker 1 I was like... As many as possible.
I was like, oh, shit.

Speaker 1 Part of my stand-up comedy is I describe a situation where I was in a restaurant with producers and there was a bombing two blocks away in Chelsea, New York in 2016.

Speaker 1 And of course,

Speaker 1 this is like, damn, what's going to happen to us now?

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 there's like two different reactions. There's like the white reaction, which is like, oh my God, I hope nobody is hurt.
This is terrible. I hope everybody is okay.
And there's the Arab reaction.

Speaker 1 What's his name? What is his name? What is the name?

Speaker 1 Because you know what's going to come. It's going to go.

Speaker 1 I was scared what's going to really happen in that area. And it's like, oh my god, it's gonna be horrible.
And the way that it was reported,

Speaker 1 I didn't know how to handle this. So I basically went into hiding for a few days, three, four days.
And I talked about Piers Morgan

Speaker 1 team talking to me two times, three times. I was like, no, I can't.
How can I defend that? How can you defend the rape, the decapitated babies, and whatever.

Speaker 1 And then I started kind of looking in the news a little bit.

Speaker 1 And then I started seeing people coming on the shows and saying things that I know as an Arab, as a Muslim, as someone from that region, that it's not true.

Speaker 1 But I didn't know

Speaker 1 what to say, how to say it. So I said, by the third time, when they asked me, I said, like, fine, put me on.
And I went there. It was more of a,

Speaker 1 figuratively speaking, a suicide mission. And

Speaker 1 because it's a lose-lose situation. I can lose stuff in Hollywood.

Speaker 1 I remember my manager is like, Bessim,

Speaker 1 be careful. I mean, are you sure you want to do it? My manager was like, please don't do it.
Please don't do it.

Speaker 1 And on the other side, if I don't perform well, whatever well means, I'm going to be rejected by my own people. So it was a lose-lose situation because whatever I say, it will never be enough.

Speaker 1 And whatever I say will not be good enough. And I was going into there and I felt that I was going into a trance for the 33 minutes that I was on

Speaker 1 that interview for the first time. You blacked out.
I blacked out. I blacked out.
And a lot of people ask me, is the earpiece, was that a bit when the earpiece kept falling?

Speaker 1 It's like, no, it was really falling off and it disconnected and I had to save it because I cannot see them. All I can hear, I can just hear them.
And I could expecting at any time.

Speaker 1 Okay, Basim, thank you.

Speaker 1 I was fighting for every second to say words, to put stuff in there. Yeah, for people who don't know, this is your conversation interview with Piers Morgan.

Speaker 1 and you couldn't see i couldn't see i was just like the lens of the camera and i was just like a real dream or nightmare yeah hello bossum i was like hello bossum's like hi

Speaker 1 and it could end at any moment your career and everything everything yeah yeah so what was the drive that got you to actually do it to overcome that fear multiple things first of all

Speaker 1 I don't want to say it's just my wife's family because my wife's family has always been there, but this time it was different.

Speaker 1 The bombing, the attack they they usually one of those people that they are aware of everything when whatever happened in gaza they are always in safe places but this time it seems that there was no place safe and already we heard about like two three of the of the cousins and the uh uncles already lost their home so this was too much so i i i i wanted to say something for those people because I know that, you know, I made one of the jokes that I made about like, oh, you know, it's Hassan, her cousin, he's a a loser.

Speaker 1 He's a doctor. He's a doctor.
And he, every time a hospital was bombed, we were worried about him.

Speaker 1 So I wanted to say that because I felt that these are, this is a family that I have never seen in my life.

Speaker 1 I have never, she, she actually hardly saw an uncle or two because, you know, they cannot leave.

Speaker 1 But I said, like, I need to speak. At least I do something for those extended family that I have never known.
But also because

Speaker 1 when

Speaker 1 Piers Morgan team called me a couple of times, said, okay, let's see what's going on in the show. And I just watched the stuff and the lies and the one-sided reporting that made my blood boil.

Speaker 1 And then I thought,

Speaker 1 what am I afraid of? I'm afraid of

Speaker 1 if I say something, I can lose my curious. Like, wait a minute.
But that was the reason why I left Egypt. And I said, wait, I left Egypt.
I came to the United States.

Speaker 1 I came to the land of the free where I can say anything I want. And yet I have limitation of what to say.
I mean, I thought we left that shit behind. I mean, what's happening?

Speaker 1 And I understand, I understand the connection of like how sensitive it is when you speak about Israel and all of the ready-made accusations.

Speaker 1 But as an Arab, as a Muslim, I don't react the same when you talk about Saudi Arabia or Iran or Egypt or any of them. It's like, hey,

Speaker 1 you want to diss some of these countries? I'll do that with you because I have strong opinions about what happened. And I've already been expressing them.

Speaker 1 But when I talk, that's why I and I speak, and there's a lot of Jewish people who come to my show, and they understand that. They understand the separation.

Speaker 1 But that kind of grouping of blackmailing people and saying and not saying what they have in their mind, it is that kind of like one of the things that kind of like

Speaker 1 pushed me to go on the show. The thing that was bothering you, was it what was being said or how it was being said? Both.

Speaker 1 Because there are lies, which is usually in the media, but there was the total disregard of humanity. You talk a lot about in your show about human suffering.

Speaker 1 And I felt that here the human suffering was not equal. I felt that's why I came up with this, like, what's the exchange rate today? What's the exchange rate today?

Speaker 1 There's, there's,

Speaker 1 of course, it's terrible to see anybody die, but

Speaker 1 I feel that like, is it, isn't our life not worth anything? Yeah, you had a chart

Speaker 1 akin to crypto. Yeah.

Speaker 1 You analyze it from an investing perspective, of course, in the dark times. ROI on that.

Speaker 1 And you were saying that a certain year was a good year. Yeah,

Speaker 1 2014 was a good year for investment purposes. And also to refer to a family member that you called a loser, you were saying that

Speaker 1 you called him, had a conversation with him, and he keeps saying that he's not using anybody for human shields. And you called him a loser.

Speaker 1 what do you he can't even give a job he's a liar he lied to us because i have to believe but this is what the one thing it's like it's also one of the things like how it was said it was stuff that i've been hearing i'm i don't know what what turned on on my head but it's stuff that i've been hearing all my life from the media israel warns civilians before bombing them and that's okay but that's not okay

Speaker 1 Israel is trying to minimize the civilians but killing them anyway. And that's okay.
But that's not okay. So it is kind of like the indoctrination that we've been hearing as if it is okay

Speaker 1 and then suddenly it's not yeah there's a kind of

Speaker 1 several layers of

Speaker 1 almost sometimes hiding the obvious horror of the situation

Speaker 1 with kind of politeness and all this kind of stuff just the basic value of human life that said it's a difficult situation It is. It is.
What would you do if you were Israel? BB called you. Awesome.

Speaker 1 Big fan, big fan of your comedy.

Speaker 1 First of all, would you hang up right away? Would you hear him out? No, I'll definitely hear him out.

Speaker 1 That was like, wait a minute, that's material. That's material.

Speaker 1 That's material, man.

Speaker 1 I was like, so Netanyahu called me.

Speaker 1 I was sitting with my family. I was just like, I've got my phone and he's like, oh, Netanyahu.

Speaker 1 Yeah, it just shows up that way. I mean, what would you do? What would you do in this situation? To answer this question, we need to understand how Israel thinks.

Speaker 1 There is an incredible speech given by Gideon Levy the famous Israeli reporter and

Speaker 1 Hertz.

Speaker 1 And he describes a situation where he was in the West Bank and there was a checkpoint. And in that checkpoint, there was an ambulance with a Palestinian patient.

Speaker 1 And it was there sitting for an hour and a half, not moving. And then he went to talk to the soldiers, like, guys.

Speaker 1 Why are you not letting them go? It's like, ah, I let them go.

Speaker 1 And then he told them, imagine if he was your father. And the soldier stood up.
He was like, what?

Speaker 1 These are pigs.

Speaker 1 These are not humans. So when you tell me what would you do if Israel would do, it really needs to, we need to ask how does Israel look at the Palestinian and view the Palestinians?

Speaker 1 Because they do look at them less than human. And there is an incredible talk by Mihor Meyer.
He was a Holocaust survivor.

Speaker 1 And he said, I learned in Auschwitz when I was there in the concentration camp that in order for a dominant group of people to dehumanize another group they need first to dehumanize themselves

Speaker 1 and Israel looks at Palestinians as lesser people as lesser beings as some people who are dispensable

Speaker 1 and the way that they treat them is that they don't really care about like that's why that the exchange rate thing So for me, if I am Israel, it will be like, what would you do if you're the United States in the time of the Native Americans?

Speaker 1 They were killing people with the millions. When you dehumanize a group of people, you really don't care.

Speaker 1 So if I was Israel, I would do exactly what Israel is doing right now because there's no one holding me accountable. There's no one stopping me.

Speaker 1 And I can get whatever I want throughout my history through violence. I think a lot of the things you just said are a tiny bit slightly exaggerated.
So let me let me try. Let's

Speaker 1 try. So not everybody in Israel.
Of course. So let's look at

Speaker 1 several groups. So people in government, IDF soldiers, and

Speaker 1 citizens that are neither of those.

Speaker 1 And not everybody of any of those

Speaker 1 sees Palestinians as less than human, just some percentage. So what percentage is that in your sense? It's the people who have the power.
So it's mostly the focus.

Speaker 1 of your commentary when you say people in Israel you really mean the people in power people having power but but but as much as like I of course, I mean the people in power, because when I speak about, even when I speak about America, I speak about people in power.

Speaker 1 When I speak about Egypt, I speak the people who are in power, because you can't really talk about the 100 million people in Egypt or the 11 million people in Israel.

Speaker 1 Of course, now there are people who go in and they demonstrate against Netanyahu and they want him out of the government.

Speaker 1 But we have to admit that the Israeli society at a whole have moved quite a bit to the right and has been like many extremes.

Speaker 1 And you know what happens when you go to the right or you go to the most extreme, the other person goes to the most extreme. And extremism breeds extremism.
So, thank you for the clarification.

Speaker 1 But, like, I really meant with the people of power. When people criticize the United States for going in Iraq, of course, I'm not criticizing citizens.

Speaker 1 But you made another point, which is an interesting point, and it's very difficult to see in the heart of people.

Speaker 1 But I wonder if you look at the average Palestinian and the average Israeli, and when they look at the other, do they have

Speaker 1 some hate in their heart? Well, everybody probably has some. What is that amount? You know, when you look at a person that looks different than you, how much hate is there?

Speaker 1 It depends on what is the living situation of each person. So in the Berlin Film Festival, just like a few couple of weeks ago, there was an Israeli and a Palestinian receiving an award together.

Speaker 1 And the Israeli director said, we're going to go back to Israel. He's going to go to the West Bank.
He will have no rights. And I will have full living rights.

Speaker 1 These people manage to work together and be friends and they have empathy to each other. Now,

Speaker 1 the average

Speaker 1 Palestinian,

Speaker 1 it's a very difficult question because is it the Palestinian in the diaspora or the Palestinian in Gaza or the diaspora in the West Bank or the one in the citizen as a citizen of Israel who still have less right than a Roman citizen of Israel, a Jew.

Speaker 1 And it really depends. If I am, there are people in Arabs in Israel who are having a great life.
And there are people, Arabs, who are having a miserable life.

Speaker 1 But definitely people that live in Gaza or in the West Bank is kind of like on the lower tier of their living conditions. Now, let's talk about the hate.
What does that Palestinians see with Israeli?

Speaker 1 The Palestinians see oppression, limitation of movement, limitation of freedom.

Speaker 1 And then when there's something happens, you see the full force coming in,

Speaker 1 destroying their home, taking away members of his family. There would be absolutely no reason for him to love the other.

Speaker 1 The Israeli, because he, you know, he doesn't have the power, but he lives under his government, all he sees is the rockets or whatever, but like he sees the reaction and he doesn't see what happened to those ones.

Speaker 1 And as humans, we are selfish. We see what really affects us as humans.

Speaker 1 And I cannot even imagine what it would be like to live as a Palestinian and not even talk about Gaza because everybody talks about Gaza. But let me give you an example.

Speaker 1 And I'm not going to talk about the 12,000 kids killed in Gaza. Let's talk about just like the four weeks in the West Bank.

Speaker 1 March 4th,

Speaker 1 Amr Najar, age 10, sitting next to his father, shot in a, while he's sitting in a car next to his father by the IDF soldiers.

Speaker 1 Mohamed Ziyad, 13 years old, March 3rd, shot in front of a Yuan school while sitting with his friends.

Speaker 1 Mohamed Ghanim, age 15, March 2nd, he shot while standing in front of a storefront during a night raid.

Speaker 1 February 23rd, Saeed Radal, he was killed by a drone fire. February 22nd, Fadius Suleiman, killed while standing in front of the top of a Red Cross building.

Speaker 1 Nihil Ziyad, February 14th, Valentine's Day, killed a shot in the head while leaving school.

Speaker 1 February 11th, Mohammed Khattur, U.S. citizens, killed while being in a parked car.

Speaker 1 And Muaid Shems, February 9th, killed right in front of his home because a military car came reversing back to him and then somebody opened the door, shot him, and leave.

Speaker 1 This is a daily life of people in the West Bank. What is the justification that IDF provides?

Speaker 1 Terrorism.

Speaker 1 Terrorism. Or, I don't know, I mean, you cannot really say like human shields, but they would say like they were throwing rocks.

Speaker 1 There was a guy who went on Chris Rock and he said, like, his son, a U.S. citizen, would kill.
And it's like, well, they were throwing rocks. So we killed him.

Speaker 1 Even when they were throwing rocks, you kill him. But the thing is, you see, this is how easy for them to get rid of Palestinians.
I mean, I love, like,

Speaker 1 I was, I had to say, I prepared a little bit for the podcast because you are in tech.

Speaker 1 So, and I am ignorant in tech. There is a movie called The Lab.
It is directed by an Israeli director called Yutam Feldman. And he talks about how

Speaker 1 the military industry in Israel is very advanced. And what is really mind-boggling is in that movie, he shows how the military tests its weapons in the field in urban areas on Palestinians.

Speaker 1 It is heartbreaking. You know, as a doctor, there are five stages of trials.
There is like there's discovery, pre-clinical, clinical, and then

Speaker 1 market, and then post-market evaluation by the FDA, the FDA

Speaker 1 approval, and then the FDA post-market. Five, just to take a pill.

Speaker 1 And you go in, and he interviews people as like, where did you test this? They test it in the field.

Speaker 1 So

Speaker 1 when you just like, when human life is

Speaker 1 so cheap and it is so indispensable,

Speaker 1 it made me,

Speaker 1 it gave me a visual reaction. Because you know, we as human this has been actually the the

Speaker 1 the state of humanity humanity have lived and

Speaker 1 survived and thrived by actually killing each other but there was kind of a we were remotely remote we were removed from it people in greece didn't know what the alexander the great was doing he was killing a pelaging we call him the great because but he was killing

Speaker 1 he was conquering he was invading julius caesar all of the greats he was doing but killing was difficult killing had to have some sort you have to be with your enemy then you go back catapults then cannons then a little bit back from and then you're kind of like sounding remotely now you're killing people behind the screen with a button with a push of a button you know a lot of people say terrorism they killed you with a knife killed one person with a knife shot you that's terrorism but if you fly a 64 million dollar f-16 and you drop up an a84 bomb that costs 16 000 that's not terrorism because it's remote you're behind the screen so what happened what israel is doing?

Speaker 1 It is removing selfishly, like America to drones.

Speaker 1 And then, when you push someone to be in, they always brag about bombing them to the stone ages.

Speaker 1 What happens when the screens and

Speaker 1 all of the obstacles that you have been put between you and those people that you have treated them this way?

Speaker 1 When this is a breach and you come face to face, you will come face to face with what you have created. Yeah, there's a lot of interesting things you just said.
So, one is the methodology of killing.

Speaker 1 If you want to look at some horrific large-scale killing, people often talk about the Holocaust, but that's visceral. You can look at Hollimore by Stalin, where the murders through starvation.

Speaker 1 By Churchill in India.

Speaker 1 Churchill in India.

Speaker 1 And the Great Leap Forward

Speaker 1 by Mao. Yep.
So starvation is a thing we don't often think of it as murder because it's quiet, it's slow.

Speaker 1 And the interesting thing about starvation is that the people don't complain as they're dying because they're exhausted.

Speaker 1 That's one. And the other is the value of human life.

Speaker 1 It does seem that every culture has a unequal valuation of human life. So those two things combine create a complicated

Speaker 1 military landscape of the world. Yes, but the thing is, is that how we look at technology as the savior, as we talk about how AI disrupt will disrupt, will disrupt, will disrupt.

Speaker 1 And now, if you go, you talk about like going to the West Bank, the people in the West Bank walk and they don't see humans.

Speaker 1 They see people shouting them from towers or behind the screens or doing, and they have like biometrics that is developed by Basel system, like that's done by HP or Google and Amazon, who are like part of Project Nimbus and and you see Indivision

Speaker 1 developing all of this like metric and surveillance and all of that stuff and then you have like something like the gospel that like people have actually said that like the gospel can actually create a target list using AI and give you a green yellow or a red whole go ahead and now AI is not just disrupting the market, it's disrupting our humanity.

Speaker 1 And it is, we became so comfortable killing people from afar killing people with a push of the button and now it is it is like

Speaker 1 it's like dating apps you know when you when you swipe left and right and it's like oh right it's it becomes so like cheap it's not like meeting someone it's like oh it's like a lot of fish in the sea same with ai boom 500 people killed boom they're killed it's so easy it's so easy it's so easy and then it's so far removed from you so when you put these people in this condition

Speaker 1 you have literally put them in a different universe than yours.

Speaker 1 You are behind in your condition screens, like pushing them, blowing up a university. It's amazing.
But then you meet

Speaker 1 what you have done, that you meet the Frankenstein that you have created. And then people are like, oh, look what they did to us.
You just gave me this image of

Speaker 1 a dating app from hell where leaders are just sitting there and kind of swiping left,

Speaker 1 invade,

Speaker 1 destroy.

Speaker 1 Board,

Speaker 1 puppet government.

Speaker 1 Yeah, and then turn off the phone and go to sleep.

Speaker 1 So I got, you know, I traveled to the West Bank and I mentioned to you offline that I really loved the people there.

Speaker 1 Just,

Speaker 1 you know, I've met a bunch of people like that in Eastern Europe, where I grew up.

Speaker 1 Yeah, like the flamboyant, the big personalities, all of that.

Speaker 1 I also met

Speaker 1 a person who's in charge of a refugee camp who was shopping IDF soldier.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 I'm not sure the words he said are important

Speaker 1 as

Speaker 1 the consequences of the thing that you mentioned, which is the deep hate in his eyes.

Speaker 1 That didn't feel repairable at all. It was pain.
It was like a foundation of pain. And on top of that, a hatred.
And I was like, wow, this is what you kill, you kill one person.

Speaker 1 This is what you create.

Speaker 1 Because we have kind of like a front row seat to what's happening, we think we're in it, but we can't really grasp it.

Speaker 1 I mean, people are like, oh, we're just going to go in, get Hamas out, and we're going to get them back in.

Speaker 1 And what about the people to get back in? How do you think they would look at you?

Speaker 1 What have you created?

Speaker 1 What have you done?

Speaker 1 My show in Egypt was all about propaganda. It's all about the use of words.
Words are very important. The decapitated babies were not chosen

Speaker 1 randomly. Because you see, it plants a certain image in your brain.
Imagine if you're going in, what a baby can do. It can smile, cry and poop.
That's it. It's absolutely no threat.

Speaker 1 So when you tell people 40 decapitated babies, they are so animalistic they didn't see the babies. Women raped.

Speaker 1 Of course he's an animal to do that. And they would go through that.
And they would.

Speaker 1 What was

Speaker 1 frustrating about the conversation is the gish galloping, the gish galloping, throwing you see the distractions. You see what happens? Like, it's like, what's the proportion response?

Speaker 1 Can Israel defend itself? Do you condemn Hamas? Does Israel have the right to exist? Decapitated babies, raped women. Why don't the Arab countries take them? Why don't the Muslims kill Muslims?

Speaker 1 Look what happened in Yemen, in Syria, in Iraq.

Speaker 1 See how they kind of distract you? They throw little things at you. So you don't know what to to do.
Oh, the ONRWA, the UNN, anti-Semitic, October 7th, October 7th, October 7th.

Speaker 1 And then suddenly, you are

Speaker 1 distracted and pulled into discussing all of these little things. And you're not discussing what's happening right now.
It is basically stalling, giving them time to do what they do. So

Speaker 1 there's some degree to the propaganda, the beheaded babies, and all this kind of stuff

Speaker 1 that

Speaker 1 is so over the top that it shuts down actual conversation about actual wrongs war crimes on both sides so it's overstating it to where everyone on social media and everywhere in the press and everywhere is arguing almost become desensitized to actual horrors of death which are more mundane they're not so dramatic as beheaded babies yeah because people people a baby is shot but decapitated babies there's like a knife blade that goes into the skin the trachea the flesh the spine decapitated like how that you can just like he's dead no you go in this is the hate so much hate and you know that's why you have made me laugh

Speaker 1 at the darkest shit you're such a beautiful person your dark humor is just wonderful but but you see this happened to jews before remember blood libel where did the blood libel come from it come from these rumors that jews suck babies blood this is what they did to them what's in the cup exactly

Speaker 1 that's a very delicious baby delicious baby but but this is what you do you you tell people something and it happened with the native Americans when they were here, when they went in and they wipe a whole tribe.

Speaker 1 So, and and and Jewish people, one of the like the minorities that were persecuted and had this used against them for a very long time, and it is terrible and it's terrifying that's been used again.

Speaker 1 So, I just did a very lengthy debate on Israel and Palestine,

Speaker 1 and a really painful thing from that.

Speaker 1 There was two historians, and it was deep, it was thorough, it was fascinating.

Speaker 1 But

Speaker 1 in constantly asking about sources of hope or solutions, there was none. There was a there was a sense of like a really dark sense of it's hopeless from both sides.
It's hopeless.

Speaker 1 So, you know, I look to you

Speaker 1 for

Speaker 1 a source of

Speaker 1 hope. Do you have, is, is there any hope here? Solutions, short term long term obama have kind of summarized this beautifully in his book he said

Speaker 1 the reason why the israeli palestinian conflict is so chronic is one side have so much power and the other side have absolutely no power

Speaker 1 and that's onebody said he said like you have israel that basically don't listen to us Because they're supported by people who are bigger than the president, bigger than the administration.

Speaker 1 They know that they can.

Speaker 1 I mean, like, you, Oba, like Netanyahu was caught on tape many times saying like he's basically like belittling americans like i we we control 80 of the population we don't care they this has kind of like non-challenged like uh we have them

Speaker 1 and

Speaker 1 there's nothing really that compels israel to give up anything because at the end of the day what is compromise compromise like i give something you give something israel is not giving anything And they project that on you.

Speaker 1 So for example, how many times have we heard like, oh, Palestinians were giving like four, five, six, seven, chances and they said no to them.

Speaker 1 And yet, when you read the history, that's not the case at all. Like, for example,

Speaker 1 in 2000, the whole idea about like Arafat walked away from Oslo, that didn't happen. And there is an incredible video by, you know, what's his name, Joe Scorborough, with Misha.

Speaker 1 And they were hosting her father.

Speaker 1 Brzezinski, he was the national security advisor. And Joe Scarborough said, like, well, you know, like, Arafat left the Oslo court, and the Palestinians left.

Speaker 1 And then Brzezinski said, like, this is like embarrassingly shallow. It's like, listen, what happened was

Speaker 1 there was a lot of catches on the Oslo Court. It was very unfair to the Palestinians.
So Arafat said, like, I agree, but I need to take it to the Arab capitals.

Speaker 1 And what and to, and they went to inside, and they went to Sharmesh Sheikh, they came to Egypt. And he and Ihil Barak went to there.
And then Uh Barak left because there was election and he lost it.

Speaker 1 The Iril Shrong came and it was destroyed. This is one of the reasons why people,

Speaker 1 it's kind of like

Speaker 1 facts don't matter as much as what is the narrative that has been controlled. But what were the biggest barriers to peace there?

Speaker 1 Do you think it's fundamentally leaders don't want a two-state solution? Or

Speaker 1 was there nuanced small differences that if solved could have led to a

Speaker 1 two-state solution? I mean, maybe there was a certain point when the Israeli leaders were more

Speaker 1 open to compromise but i can't say that because each time israel gives back land it has to be after some use of force the the 1973 war the intifad of the first and second the the the the the the the casualties in gaza they never give up land willingly and because of peace because if i have that much military and can do whatever i want

Speaker 1 why would i give up anything i have that much power why would america or China give everything if they're so powerful? And especially if they have this kind of open check from the United States.

Speaker 1 So it is really about

Speaker 1 what can push Israel to give up something. Because you are so much stronger than me.

Speaker 1 What could compel you to give up something?

Speaker 1 And this is why the whole thing about like trying to equalize Palestinians

Speaker 1 and the Israeli state and government, it doesn't make any sense.

Speaker 1 So what is the source of hope? You know, Jon Stewart, who will talk about it from many angles, somebody you admire, a friend,

Speaker 1 he proposed a two-stage solution.

Speaker 1 Look to the comedians for hope. Yes, well, everybody's talking about the two-stage solution, but Israel has said many times on Netanyahu and Benito, like there's going to be no state solutions.

Speaker 1 In the past, it's like even Naftali Bennett, he came in on

Speaker 1 hard talk. It's like, yeah, maybe in the past we wanted to say solutions, but like, look, every time we give them land, they kill us.
So no state solutions. And they are openly saying it.

Speaker 1 But that's perhaps rhetoric. Rhetoric that is supported by action.

Speaker 1 Because look at what they're doing in the West Bank that you said. They are cutting it,

Speaker 1 illegal settlement,

Speaker 1 piecemealing it. So how is if you have an intention at all to give them anything, why do you keep doing this? And you've called it a bunch of little gazas.
Yes.

Speaker 1 It's a nice little picture of what's happening.

Speaker 1 Piecemealing it, thumb, thumb, thumb. Because it is

Speaker 1 what happened in the past four months, the Palestinians have been micro-dozing on it for a very long time.

Speaker 1 Little by little, little by little.

Speaker 1 And we would shout every time when it gets too much, and then we shut down, and then little by little. But this time it was hard.
It was hard to see the blatant

Speaker 1 oppression. And the word said,

Speaker 1 maybe the Hamas Ministry of Health are giving us the bad numbers. Maybe it's just human shields.
And I laugh. There's 13,000 babies killed.

Speaker 1 Does that mean that there are 13,000 military targets hiding in their diapers? Because it is so,

Speaker 1 it doesn't make any sense to kill that baby. It's like, oh, oops.
It is out of our head.

Speaker 1 It's hard to know what to do with those numbers. I mean, I it's just one baby is enough.
But you know what happens? When you hear so many numbers, numbers become numbers.

Speaker 1 And you become so desensitized. And this is why there's a difference between saying

Speaker 1 13,000 Palestinian kids did this, like Mila Kohan, an Israeli baby, 10-month-old. She was killed in her crib.
And this is what we hear from CNN. We never hear a story about a Palestinian kid.

Speaker 1 That's why thank you for giving me the space for saying the names of the Palestinian children that were killed just for four weeks.

Speaker 1 Because

Speaker 1 humans need context. They need depth.
They need like a 3D look at what they can look at. But if you just get them numbers, oh, they don't mean anything.

Speaker 1 Is there some degree to where both leaderships, Hamas,

Speaker 1 PA, Palestinian Authority, Israel, all want war?

Speaker 1 Like perpetual war to remain in power?

Speaker 1 There is, that's, that's an interesting interesting question.

Speaker 1 But,

Speaker 1 I mean, let's admit something. The Arab regimes in the area have actually used the problem of Palestine in order to stay in power, in order to get excuses to have this enemy.

Speaker 1 And Israel, the Israeli government has used that too. And maybe the Palestinians.

Speaker 1 But my problem when going into discussion is that the two sides are not equal. They're not equal in power.
They're not equal in influence.

Speaker 1 And they're not equal in international support, especially with the United States.

Speaker 1 So

Speaker 1 Palestinians can,

Speaker 1 the people who have made changes in history were the people with power, the people who would have the ability to change things. And the Palestinians cannot really change it.
What can they change?

Speaker 1 Well, is that true, though,

Speaker 1 with

Speaker 1 how much support the Palestinian people have?

Speaker 1 So, just like you said, there's a lot of Arab states

Speaker 1 that will voice their pro-Palestinian position in order to distract from the own corruption and abuses of power in their own countries. But,

Speaker 1 you know, I don't think if you look globally, there's a complete asymmetry of power and public opinion here. Maybe in the press in the West.

Speaker 1 But if you look globally, but do they have the same kind of weapons that the Israeli have? So, literally power? No, there's a major asymmetry of literal power. Some money to their leaders.

Speaker 1 Does that make any difference? I mean, and also when you say Palestinian authority, which authority are you talking about? Hamas?

Speaker 1 Or the Palestinian authority who has been kind of a domesticated kind of like a puppy for the Palestinians, who basically have been an informant

Speaker 1 on their own people.

Speaker 1 And this is the thing also that kind of like really pissed me off when I was hearing the thing about these things. Like Hamas, Hamas, Hamas, Hamas.

Speaker 1 Like, we have Netanyahu on tape confessing that he supported Hamas, giving him money in order to cause factions

Speaker 1 between the Palestinians. So it's just like, it doesn't make.
You just told me this. You just told me this.
You just told me Netanyahu supports Hamas. It's like, but Hamas is like, what?

Speaker 1 I mean, to which degree does Netanyahu represent

Speaker 1 the Israeli people?

Speaker 1 Is a real question.

Speaker 1 To which point does Trump or Biden represent the American people? And to which degree does Hamas represent the Palestinian people? Does.

Speaker 1 None of these represent it, but who have the power in order to make the the decisions? It really comes down to that.

Speaker 1 Well, who does have the power?

Speaker 1 You're giving a lot of power to Israel. Yeah.

Speaker 1 But

Speaker 1 the Arab League...

Speaker 1 What should Hamas do? What do you think would Hamas do? Continue doing what a charter says, which is trying to destroy Israel.

Speaker 1 And the role of the Palestinian people is to overthrow Hamas and get a more moderate leadership, probably.

Speaker 1 And the role of the Israeli people is to vote out this right-wing government and elect a more moderate leader so that there's a chance at peace with two moderate leaders.

Speaker 1 So before Hamas even got to control 2006, Gaza, there was Eril Sharon in 2000.

Speaker 1 And we all know what happened. And Ariel Sharon kind of like had made the came up with this amazing policy of like breaking people's kids' bones in the intifada.
So

Speaker 1 Hil Baraki was also like, I mean, which one is moderate? I mean, I think is Hamas is a product of what happened. I mean, we can,

Speaker 1 if there was no apartheid in South Africa, there would be no NFC. There would be no Nuslimandalah.
If there was no Nazis in Paris, there would be no French resistance.

Speaker 1 And I'm not saying that, and again, I'm not, I don't want to be put in a position to defend Hamas or anybody because you know what that entails. But

Speaker 1 those are, like, Hamas,

Speaker 1 again, not defending them. They went into October 7th.
What was their,

Speaker 1 why did they do that? Like, release our hostages, the people in prison. Because if you're talking about people who are kidnapped, Israel kidnaps people every single day.

Speaker 1 And when they had the first exchange in November 4th, Israel released 400 people, three-quarters of them were women and children. Why are those people in prison? There's one in four kids.

Speaker 1 that are imprisoned that stay in solitary confinement, which is by international law a form of torture. And you're putting kids through that.
Is it possible? So first of all, ceasefire. Yes.

Speaker 1 And longer term. Is it possible for Arab states and the United States to get together and with power

Speaker 1 through diplomacy enforce a solution? It's a very, very ideal solution. But you know, and I know that Arab states don't really have the power.
All of the powers are in the hands of Americans.

Speaker 1 They have the power. See, I think they have the power.

Speaker 1 Maybe they don't want to use it. They don't want to.

Speaker 1 Maybe they don't use it. Because there's a benefit.

Speaker 1 Maybe there's a benefit.

Speaker 1 The dark sense I have is that a lot of people win from the suffering that Palestinians are going through because they can... point to that and distract from

Speaker 1 corruption in their own states. And then obviously Iran can benefit also from the same kind of dynamic, distracting from

Speaker 1 the

Speaker 1 authoritarian nature of their regime. Definitely, but what is the core of the problem here? Is it the Arab states using the suffering or actually

Speaker 1 the suffering itself? And the suffering comes from people being displaced. Their homes were taken away.
There are 7 million Palestinians in diaspora.

Speaker 1 7 million. 7 million went out there and now they're living in Canada and America and Europe.
They had homes there. They cannot go back to

Speaker 1 1.7 million people of the people in Gaza don't belong in Gaza. They were pushed from other places.

Speaker 1 The piecemeal thing of people are being you know

Speaker 1 in in Germany

Speaker 1 I'm gonna shift gear a little bit, it's gonna be a little bit of fun. There is a there is a book that I bought the rights to and I want to turn it into a movie.

Speaker 1 And I bought I optioned the right for two months for for two years in March of last year, before October 7th. After October 7th, I bought the permanent right.

Speaker 1 That book is called

Speaker 1 The Muslim and the Jew.

Speaker 1 And it is written by an author called Ron Ensteinke. I read an article about this book in 2016, and I chased that book for rights for seven years.

Speaker 1 I didn't have that much money, but I wanted that book. And that book was translated into English called Anna and Dr.
Helmie. And that book tells the incredible story under Nazi Germany,

Speaker 1 where Arabs went in droves to Berlin in the 1920s after the First World War in the Weimar Republic. And they became doctors and engineers and journalists for two reasons.

Speaker 1 Number one, it's they're cheap, very cheap, because of the inflation.

Speaker 1 And two, a lot of the Arab nationalists didn't want to send their kids to jer to England or France because they were the occupiers.

Speaker 1 And Doctor Helmi was the hero of that. He's an Egyptian doctor.
And that's why I kind of like personally kind of connected with him.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 he went to medical school,

Speaker 1 didn't find a place to live. So he lived in the Jewish ghetto, like many Arabs.
He didn't find a school to work, a hospital to work in, so he worked in a Jewish hospital.

Speaker 1 So these are, there was a lot of Arabs who lived with the ghetto. And actually, the first director of the Berlin Mosque was a Jewish convert who converted to Islam and he was a gay activist.

Speaker 1 I'm telling you, this is like a crazy story.

Speaker 1 And this is all, this is not a fiction story. This is actually like a non-fiction.
It's written actually based on the statement, the documents of the Nazis in Gestapo.

Speaker 1 Dr. Henry,

Speaker 1 he was in this hospital, and the Nazis came in, and they killed and tortured and beat up the Jewish doctor. And they made him the head of his department.
Then now he is surrounded by Nazi doctor.

Speaker 1 They didn't touch him because he was an Arab. There was kind of like a thing between Germany and the Arabs because they wanted to appease to them in order to have kind of a

Speaker 1 grassroots base in the Arab world where he wanted to go next.

Speaker 1 And this is why 1934, 1935, the racial laws of Nuremberg, they had a name change. First they were called anti-Semitic.
Then they changed into anti-Jewish because also Arabs were Semitic.

Speaker 1 So they wanted to appease the Arabs. Now, what happened, Dr.
Helmi, when that happened to him? He would go back to the ghetto

Speaker 1 and he would see the apartments next to him, the Jewish apartment, become more and more and more flooded with people because they were moving Jews and pushing them and putting them together.

Speaker 1 pushing them to the side and each

Speaker 1 each plat each flat each apartment instead of one family, it will have three, four, six, seven families. And he was there when it home.
And he looked,

Speaker 1 he was there. This is where the people he grew up with,

Speaker 1 he lived with. And now he's seeing that kind of discrimination just because he was an Arab.
And then

Speaker 1 he started to kind of like atone for...

Speaker 1 like because he felt responsible because he wasn't treated the same way and he started to go and treat Jewish people in their homes because they couldn't go to hospitals.

Speaker 1 And then one family gave them his daughter. It's like, this is Anna, save her.

Speaker 1 He took her, pretended that she's his niece, put a hijab around her, taught her Arabic, called her Nadia, my daughter's name, by the way.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 he hid her in plain sight for seven years in front of the Nazis as his nurse. It's an incredible story.

Speaker 1 And then not just that, he went to prison, and then he went out and he formed with the Arab people that was in prison with him a network that saves 300 Jews.

Speaker 1 You see that kind of story?

Speaker 1 This is the Jews that were living in the airboard. I'm not saying that the Jews living in the airboard was living like an incredible life.

Speaker 1 Of course, as a kind of a minority, they did not have like the full power of their full

Speaker 1 advantages of the ruling. That's normal.
But

Speaker 1 we had this

Speaker 1 kind of a relationship

Speaker 1 before

Speaker 1 Israel was

Speaker 1 erected in 1948.

Speaker 1 And then of course, everybody looked at Jews at the time as fifth column. And of course, the nationalistic regimes used that.

Speaker 1 And this is why what Biden said

Speaker 1 was very dangerous when he said, if there is no Israel, no Jew in the world will feel safe. You are the leader of the free world.
You are the president of the United States.

Speaker 1 Do you mean that you are telling me that the Jews in your country, in the United States of America, are not safe? That is wrong on two levels.

Speaker 1 Number one, America, historically and right now, is more safe to Jews

Speaker 1 in the world than anybody. They are safer than the Jews in Israel.
They never had pogroms or the Holocaust like Europe. They live here a good life, not perfect life, but they are better.

Speaker 1 Second of all, if you are the president and you're telling that a group of people will not feel safe unless there is a different one, you are already feeding into their fifth column.

Speaker 1 They're like, you're Russian. You come from there.
And there is a group of laws in the Russian Constitution that says that Russia will protect its citizens everywhere in the world.

Speaker 1 What happens if the president says like, oh, you're Russians, you're protected by your own country, you you don't belong here. This is terrible.
Yeah, you're right. That's actually an indirect threat.

Speaker 1 Yes.

Speaker 1 You know, even saying Muslims cannot feel safe in America or something like this.

Speaker 1 That means like that's a threat. But what would a Jewish person in Beverly Hills or

Speaker 1 in Brooklyn feel if he hears that? You are already telling people you need to be loyal to Israel.

Speaker 1 I mean, Israel is a foreign country. I am sorry, but Israel is a foreign country.

Speaker 1 Israel is a client country that we sponsor and it should actually be responsible and held accountable for what they do.

Speaker 1 You mentioned 1948, the NACBA, but before that, 41, 39, 41 to 45, the Holocaust. What do you do? What do you do with the Holocaust?

Speaker 1 How do you incorporate into the calculus

Speaker 1 of what's

Speaker 1 terrible? Of morality that leads up to the displacement of 700,000

Speaker 1 Palestinians from the land. How do you work that out? Well, it is terrible, but like, I mean, what the

Speaker 1 systemic annihilation of Jewish people under the Nazi, that is like

Speaker 1 a carefully engineered, thought for, planned. It was terrible.
It was like kind of like the human ingenuity put into like something that is very evil.

Speaker 1 But also, it is not just not just that happened. We need to remember that Otto Frank, the father of Ana Frank, has his visa, refugee visa rejected by the United States.

Speaker 1 There's a lot of people that were rejected by the United States, rejected by other European countries, and then they were pushed into Palestine.

Speaker 1 So you have to put yourself between, like, and that the Arabs are like, okay, we're sitting here. Okay, come.
And then, all right, you don't have a home or a country anymore.

Speaker 1 That kills you. I mean, you see, if I'm not an Arab,

Speaker 1 And you give me that kind of piece of like terrible human tragedy, like, oh, my God, that is terrible.

Speaker 1 but then i'm an arab's like yes i'm so sorry but what do i have to do with that what why is that my fault

Speaker 1 the the persecution of the jewish people have started since the eighth and ninth century because they they were like they were first anti-christians

Speaker 1 they were like with criminal immigrants they were like conspirators this this is this is this is this is the the anti- like people kind of like it as if europe kind of like throw anti-semitism on us

Speaker 1 you understand that like Henry Ford, Henry Ford is one of the biggest anti-Semitism.

Speaker 1 He was the inspiration for Adolf Hitler.

Speaker 1 This is how anti-Semitic Henry Ford was.

Speaker 1 And you

Speaker 1 kind of like

Speaker 1 gloss over that. And then suddenly we as Arabs have to pay the price.
Why?

Speaker 1 Several questions I want to ask there. But one, just zooming out, why do you think hatred of Jews

Speaker 1 has been such a

Speaker 1 viral kind of idea throughout human history? Oh, it's very easy. It all started from Christ.
They killed Christ. They killed Christ.
They killed Christ. They're the killer of Christ.

Speaker 1 That's a very sexy story. And that was so, yeah, that was, and that stayed for years.
That stayed for centuries. I'm sorry.
Centuries. They're the killer of Christ.
And then

Speaker 1 the Catholic Church did not allow usury, but they would work in usury. So they become rich.
Now the people that we hate, that we accuse them of feeling Christ, are becoming rich. So that's envy now.

Speaker 1 And that's hatred. I mean, when you talk about ghettos, ghettos were not just as secluded parts in cities.
Sometimes those ghettos were outside the cities.

Speaker 1 Jews were not even allowed to work a lot of professions. They were not allowed to get into the syndicates of certain

Speaker 1 professions. So they had to go work usury and they got rich.
So people hated them more.

Speaker 1 The first crusade didn't kill a single Muslim. All they killed were Jews.
And when they finally arrived to Jerusalem, all they killed were Jews. They almost annihilated the Jews.
So it was all this.

Speaker 1 And of course, you have the Dark Ages. Who do you need as an enemy? The Jews.
Right?

Speaker 1 They're the killer of Christ. There is nothing bigger than this.

Speaker 1 And then

Speaker 1 you fast forward.

Speaker 1 I mean, one of the things that I found out that was very, very, very, very crazy when Henry Ford imported

Speaker 1 the protocols of the elders of Zion.

Speaker 1 By the way, in the Arab world, protocols of the elder of Zion is so popular. And

Speaker 1 for obvious reasons. And for the people who don't know it, it's kind of like a bunch of stories.
And basically, it's like

Speaker 1 the Jews saying, like, we're going to control the world and we're going to do this and we're going to do that and whatever. What people don't know

Speaker 1 that they that is a work of plagiarism it was plagiarized from a satirical play called

Speaker 1 conversation in hell between machiavelli and and montezicio and it is just it it it is and it is kind of like based on one chapter or one scene or something it's crazy but it's crazy how sticky it is like yes that's weird yes because if i if i hate you that's great but if i have a story to support that hate that's even better.

Speaker 1 But it's like one of them, one of the best stories, one of the stickiest stories about hate. Of course.
It's probably the most effective. Because

Speaker 1 a lot of peoples hate other groups of peoples, but that's just like the sexiest story of them all. Because humans

Speaker 1 need to concentrate their hate, their insecurities, and their shortcomings into one thing that they can practice that hate on. on.
If it's a it's a person, great. If it's a group, even better.

Speaker 1 How do you, into this calculus, incorporate that that group is pretty small? There's 16 million Jews worldwide.

Speaker 1 And you mentioned, how is that the responsibility of the Arab peoples? You know, everybody should be to blame for not taking in Jews after the Holocaust.

Speaker 1 But, you know, the reality of the situation, if we look at the religious slice of this, there's 16, let's say million jews and there's i don't know how many muslims but 1.8 billion yeah yeah how do you do you

Speaker 1 that difference that uh 100x difference do you incorporate that into the sense that uh jews in israel might feel for

Speaker 1 you know the existential dread that we might this this small group might be destroyed jews in israel have every right to feel afraid because of everything that they see and everything they've been told, everything.

Speaker 1 But

Speaker 1 I would say that the calculus or the numbers doesn't

Speaker 1 like, of course, like being small,

Speaker 1 it is, of course, a factor, but it is never an excuse in order to take something that's not yours. It's saying like, hey, you have 300 million Americans and we have 50 Susis, give one state 100.

Speaker 1 There's too many of them.

Speaker 1 Too many of you. Just give them something.
You know? It's like the fact that I have something and you don't, and there are too many of me and there is little of you.

Speaker 1 And then you come in and it's not really

Speaker 1 Israel against the Arab world or the Muslim world because we have to say, we fucked up big time. But it is

Speaker 1 the Palestinians that are in and they are being subjected to that. So it's not really like the 1.8 billion and the 16 million Jews.
And the 1.8 billion, if you look at them, some of them don't care.

Speaker 1 Some of them live in two regimes that have been oppressed.

Speaker 1 And those regimes are supported by the united states in order it's easier for me as a as a as an empire to to take what i want from this country if i control the dictator and i tell them that his power is linked to my ability to to to my my desire to keep him in power so that's why you have a total disconnect between people in power in in the arab and the muslim countries and the people themselves

Speaker 1 can you speak to the 1948

Speaker 1 you know because you mentioned taking land that's not yours,

Speaker 1 maybe parallels with Native Americans.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 There was a war.

Speaker 1 The Jewish minority fought that war against several Arab states and won that war.

Speaker 1 How do we incorporate that into the Catholics? Yeah, well, that's also a misconception, like a misinterpretation of the event, because it seems that it was

Speaker 1 like the small, small,

Speaker 1 it's kind of like a David and Goliath kind of story.

Speaker 1 But, and I was always like,

Speaker 1 how did we not do that? But

Speaker 1 in reality, with numbers,

Speaker 1 I can't pull it up right now, but if you look at the numbers, the number of tanks, the planes, the

Speaker 1 trained officers, because those many of those Jewish fighters came from World War II. They were seasoned fighters.
And they actually

Speaker 1 had

Speaker 1 more

Speaker 1 planes, more tanks, more artillery, more pieces of weapon, more all of the other combined because

Speaker 1 the people that really fought was Egypt.

Speaker 1 And you have to, in 1948, many of those Arab countries didn't even have their independence. So they would kind of send a cavalry or like a people and horses.

Speaker 1 But in fact, the whole idea was like we won against seven nations.

Speaker 1 The numbers were totally in Israel's favor. They were better equipped, they were better trained, they had like more tanks and

Speaker 1 artillery

Speaker 1 and aeroplanes. And they planned better.
So yes, they deserve the win because they planned and we did it. So to you, there was an asymmetry of military power even then.

Speaker 1 But what do you do with the fact that the war was won? So like if you look at the history of the world,

Speaker 1 there is

Speaker 1 wars fought. over land.

Speaker 1 I agree with you. This has been the history of humanity.
Humanity was not living peacefully. It's all about people taking people and killing people, taking their land.

Speaker 1 But there's two differences here. Mostly, usually,

Speaker 1 the conquering power, like for example, England, they had England and they conquer you and India. And after the occupation finished, they go back to England.

Speaker 1 France,

Speaker 1 Greece, Persia, Egypt, they will go in, expand and shrink, expand and shrink. It's always been there.
What is different here is exactly what happened in Australia and the United States.

Speaker 1 A group of people came in, not just to conquer and take the land, but to completely change that, to replace them and get them out or kill them.

Speaker 1 It was very easy with the Indians because they had smallpox, there was no social media, they did it over 400 years, they had time.

Speaker 1 The problem is, what is happening right now, I agree with you, it might not be that new, but we are there and we're watching it happen.

Speaker 1 And so now we have to confront the realities of war and empire and conquering.

Speaker 1 Because you know what's the problem? We told ourselves we can be better.

Speaker 1 After 1948, there was the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Speaker 1 It means that we are going to be better humans. We're not going to kill and take land.
We're not going to displace people. We're not going to take people for what they are.
There's now laws.

Speaker 1 There's international law. There's international court of justice.
And now Israel is giving the middle finger to all of them.

Speaker 1 So isn't in some fundamental way this whole thing that we're talking about is us as a civilization on social media,

Speaker 1 in articles and books, in

Speaker 1 newspapers. We're just trying to figure out who are we as a people.
I think the shock came from the fact that we thought that we as humanity have evolved and now we are

Speaker 1 What have actually changed is that we became more advanced in effectively eradicating a group of people because of the technology that we have.

Speaker 1 And the fact that we can do that under the eyes eyes and ears of all the world, and we are watching it under a phone, we have a window. We have a window to the war.

Speaker 1 You know, 1945, people didn't know what was happening in Japan.

Speaker 1 Well, we heard about it on the radio. Like, oh, today our forces came in and they launched.

Speaker 1 We don't know. We heard it.
We maybe we saw pictures after that. And it's quite edited.
But now we see it. We're into it.
And it is so much for

Speaker 1 our psyche. And we can't get it.
And it's like, and then the Arabs say, like, guys, you told us we came to the West because we were told that we were equal.

Speaker 1 You know, the Universal Declaration of Rights? One of the co-authors, his name is Stefan Hessel.

Speaker 1 He's a Jew.

Speaker 1 He is a survivor of the Holocaust.

Speaker 1 And you know what happened to him?

Speaker 1 He died, by the way, a couple of years ago, but he, before he died, he was canceled by so many people and he was called anti-Semitic because he joined the BDS movement and he spoke about Palestine.

Speaker 1 That is the author of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights that we value so much and we think that that would define our humanity. But then we go in and we are

Speaker 1 shocked. It's like maybe we were sold something.

Speaker 1 Maybe that was a false advertisement.

Speaker 1 You shared a tweet by an account called Awesome Jew.

Speaker 1 It reads: Islamo-Nazi, comedian Bossam Yusuf, comedian in quotes, by the way. Yeah, yeah, yeah, of course, because I'm not funny.
So Islamo-Nazi comedian Basam Yusuf is now denying the October.

Speaker 1 I love that you retweeted this, like twice. Yeah.

Speaker 1 I guess suppose because it's advertising some upcoming dates.

Speaker 1 He's now denying October 7th massacre. The Muslim radical Bossam Yusuf is notorious for his radical radical set twice, for his radical hatred of Jews in Israel.

Speaker 1 In a recent clip, he claims that the atrocities committed on October 7th are fabricated.

Speaker 1 We're looking for all information regarding any of his upcoming shows, as well as the venues which host the scumbag where Jews feel safe around this Nazi

Speaker 1 Nazi. Yeah.

Speaker 1 I've never, this is my first time interviewing a Nazi.

Speaker 1 It's the first time I actually get called a Nazi. First time.
First time. I have been called so many things in Egypt.
So, in Egypt, I was called

Speaker 1 a CIA operative, a Mussad spy,

Speaker 1 secret Muslim Brotherhood,

Speaker 1 a secret Jew, secret Jew.

Speaker 1 There was also an article that was published about me in the state run media saying in details how Basim has been

Speaker 1 recruited by CIA agents using Jon Stewart in order to use satire to bring down the country. I was a Freemason, an infidel,

Speaker 1 a member of

Speaker 1 the Knights of the Temple, something like that.

Speaker 1 And there is actually people, the Muslim Brotherhood on their show, they would say, like, he is actually an Israeli, and they have forged an Egyptian ID for him to come here.

Speaker 1 So it's kind of like when I get,

Speaker 1 I said, I had, I left all of that behind, and I come here, it's like, boom, anti-Semitic Nazi. Damn.
I mean, I really covered everything. I don't know what else.

Speaker 1 I mean, I think I have, it's kind of like I'm collecting PhDs. I'm just like getting like all of these credits.

Speaker 1 How do you deal with that? How do you deal with the attacks?

Speaker 1 I mean, this goes back to the decision to

Speaker 1 do the interview with Piers Morgan.

Speaker 1 Like how

Speaker 1 how do you like psychologically do all of it? These kind of attacks,

Speaker 1 at the beginning it's fun.

Speaker 1 But when they evolve into something else, so for example, I was like laughing off all of the stuff about calling me this, calling me that, but then when people would come and and thread the theater, because it's not the people who are making those accusations that that would come to you.

Speaker 1 It's the people that will hear and see those accusations and act on it.

Speaker 1 And there's always the fear of like, I mean, we have in the airboard a lot of things that somebody would hear something about someone else and go kill him and whatever, like anybody else.

Speaker 1 So there's this,

Speaker 1 but somehow I want to make fun of it.

Speaker 1 And it is to be called

Speaker 1 an Islamazi, it must been the funniest thing ever. Because does it Islamo

Speaker 1 wow, how did you, how did you, and a radical Muslim, me, a lot of Islamists hate me, they will call me a secular infidel.

Speaker 1 So it's kind of like, who am I? Maybe I have an identity crisis and I need the people to tell me who I am.

Speaker 1 Let's go to the beginning. Let's go to your childhood.
You grew up in Egypt, Cairo, Egypt.

Speaker 1 Well, let's figure out how you came to be who you are.

Speaker 1 How did you become an Islamazi? Yeah, exactly. It's a long journey.
I do like the swastika tattoo on your ass, which I didn't.

Speaker 1 How did you see my ass?

Speaker 1 You know what you did. I know I did it.

Speaker 1 It was very inappropriate. You're also obviously a sexual harasser of me.

Speaker 1 This is like a me too. Yes.

Speaker 1 This is like 2020.

Speaker 1 Someone would come up as like, okay,

Speaker 1 flip it. This is your Me Too moment.

Speaker 1 All right. So,

Speaker 1 Cairo,

Speaker 1 what's a memor defining memory, positive or negative, from your childhood?

Speaker 1 My memory in general was, was cool. It was cool.
I went to a Catholic

Speaker 1 school until the for primary school, elementary.

Speaker 1 And by the time I'm done,

Speaker 1 uh, there was kind of like a start of a decline into the public education. And my parents, they're like middle-class working officials.
My dad was a judge, my mom was a business professor.

Speaker 1 And she's, and they were like one of the people who's like, they didn't have that much luxury my dad like drove like a regular like car a fiat which is like the equivalent for the ladder in uh

Speaker 1 in russia yeah thank you for speaking to the audience

Speaker 1 and um well so would that be a good car no no it's kind of like kind of like the minimum and my dad was not like a man of of of showing off whatever money they would do they would put it for us education give everything to their kids.

Speaker 1 This is kind of like a very,

Speaker 1 very typical mentality. And I'm sure it's in many cultures, but like we grew up with this, like everything that we have is like for kids.
So they would put us into education. So

Speaker 1 middle school,

Speaker 1 that was the big, 1986 was the beginning of the explosion of like international schools, private schools. And these schools were...
relatively expensive.

Speaker 1 Of course, now with today's currency, it's ridiculous. But at that time, it was very expensive.
So I went to that school,

Speaker 1 and from there was this moment was like you feel less right away. I mean,

Speaker 1 of course, there's the regular bullying and stuff, but

Speaker 1 it's not that. It's kind of like you always feel less.
You don't have that much of like purchasing power that can allow you to go to the same outings or travel with them.

Speaker 1 And even like how you dress, it will be modest compared to them. So I was always an outsider.
I was,

Speaker 1 and I compensated with that by two things: being good at school and being good at sports so I was not like the typical nerd was just like I was like I was playing football basketball uh creating field and I was like one of the people who would like to have me on their team so I wasn't like kind of like ah he's a nerd get him away but I never had a girlfriend I never had any kind of like I was not like I was not boyfriend material

Speaker 1 so that's kind of like it it leaves remnants in you that you're not good enough but psychologically you're always like when you're by yourself you felt like an outsider yes all the time And that's why it's kind of like I'm more of a loner.

Speaker 1 I don't have a lot of what you call friends. I have acquaintances, people that I do stuff with, but I don't.
I have like the people that I tell them everything.

Speaker 1 When I went to medical school, now medical school is a different animal. Medical school is where all of the people from the public schools go.
Public schools are very, like,

Speaker 1 they are not, they don't have like, they don't have English language as like a strong. partner, but they are brilliant people.

Speaker 1 So because they would mostly study in Arabic, but they are brilliant and they are very, very, very smart, very sharp.

Speaker 1 But I go there, now I am the sissy boy from the private school that comes into medical school. Now, I'm an outsider again.
And

Speaker 1 I go into residency and I pick up salsa. So, now I'm a salsa teacher while being a cardiothoracic

Speaker 1 surgery resident. And I'm an outsider for the third time because in salsa, I'm kind of like the respectful doctor.
And in resident, I'm the guy who is just dancing.

Speaker 1 So, and everything, of course, as a medical resident, you will mess up a lot.

Speaker 1 So, they would always like, oh, because you're a dancer, oh, because you don't care about medicine, you just like want to go there and dance with women,

Speaker 1 which is true.

Speaker 1 And so, all of my life, I felt that I'm an outsider, I'm not part of the team, I'm not part of the core group.

Speaker 1 So,

Speaker 1 and I have a story that you would love.

Speaker 1 Right before my presidency, I was so much into salsa, so

Speaker 1 I had all of the moment you saved that. And I was working in summers and I was doing extra jobs.

Speaker 1 And I took that money and I went to Miami in order to learn Rueda de Casino, which is the Cuban kind of like circle salsa kind of thing.

Speaker 1 And I went there in the summer of 2001.

Speaker 1 And my return ticket was 9:12,

Speaker 1 2001.

Speaker 1 The universe has a sense of humor, I gotta tell you. No, no, no, but

Speaker 1 9-12, I was supposed to be on a plane coming back to Egypt. What happens? Thank God, I ran out of money 10 days before that.
It's like, all right, I changed my ticket and I came back.

Speaker 1 9-11. I'm kind of like, see,

Speaker 1 my mom, wake up!

Speaker 1 Wake up! What? What? It's like, and I see like the two-tower phone. It was like, I'm almost like, oh, you're here, you're here, you're here.
It's like, you're here. that and i was like

Speaker 1 i was like i should i could have been in guantanamo right now yeah

Speaker 1 flying on 912. and but by the way i was in miami they were they when they went to the the flying school in miami so i mean i i had i i had like 9 11 written all over my face you'd be all over the news

Speaker 1 and my almost like what he went there to 10 salsa i didn't know that salsa is like a name for terrorists

Speaker 1 Why salsa?

Speaker 1 Why did that attract you? And what, like, can you explain what salsa is? So, I mentioned to you offline that I've been doing a little bit of tango trying to learn that. Yeah,

Speaker 1 like, you know, samba, salsa, pachata, meringue, it's kind of like Latin dances. Uh, and uh, it's like, um, you know,

Speaker 1 I don't know how you describe salsa, a couple dance on Latin beat.

Speaker 1 And uh,

Speaker 1 I

Speaker 1 did it because

Speaker 1 I once I, and I talk about that about my in my Arabic stand-up comedy, not the English, I talk about like how I was, you know,

Speaker 1 I didn't have like really like a great like

Speaker 1 social life. And I, my friends went there one day and then I go into a place which called it's, it was called El Getunegro.

Speaker 1 No, no, it was called Big Fat Black Pussycat. And then I think they, they, they thought it would be like racist or something.
So to change it to El Getunegro. Anyway, so.

Speaker 1 Great, great. I know.
Great decision. I know.
So I went there. I was like, damn, Music and women.

Speaker 1 And I'm a doctor. A doctor dancing salsa.
That is a cheat magnet. Yeah.
100%.

Speaker 1 We do everything

Speaker 1 for that. All of human beings.

Speaker 1 Even power, even money. All the wars we've been talking about.
Women.

Speaker 1 At the end of the day. The approval from the other sex.

Speaker 1 We are babies.

Speaker 1 We are terrible people.

Speaker 1 So of course, like, I mean, that was like, that was like great. But then,

Speaker 1 as a nerd, I went in so hard and now I became a salsa teacher. Yeah.

Speaker 1 And I earned more money from salsa more than I did as a doctor.

Speaker 1 I didn't know this part of you. That's hilarious.
I know. I was, I was making, I was making a killing amount of money, like huge amount of money.

Speaker 1 And I was just like, you know, I would go finish my shift and I go to the salsa class. And sometimes I would have like 70 people in my salsa class.
Oh, wow.

Speaker 1 I had like the biggest salsa class in Egypt in the beginning of the 2000 and it was fantastic and it was an outlet because you go there and there's the shifts and people dying damn and you go salsa

Speaker 1 escape

Speaker 1 you must have been good i was okay i was cool i was fun there were people better than me but i i i i have a thing about teaching i like teaching people so you you mentioned heart surgery so what what motivated you to become a doctor it was a choice of exclusion i mean there's nothing else you can do with these high grades other than doctoral engineering i hate math so go be a doctor.

Speaker 1 This is the Middle East. What do you expect? It's either

Speaker 1 like in my joke, in my show, I said, like, there's, it can be one of three things in the Middle East, a doctor, an engineer, or a disappointment. It is that that is the choices that you have.

Speaker 1 So, years after, I'll be disappointed.

Speaker 1 You're damn good at it, though.

Speaker 1 That's a hard path, though. Yeah.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 it's a fascinating one.

Speaker 1 Can I tell you something? Yes. Actually, I was thinking about why did I actually go into medicine? And why did I always choose the hardest thing, although I didn't love it?

Speaker 1 And I have to tell you, I had an epiphany only two weeks ago.

Speaker 1 And I don't know if that's actually related or not. You know, remember when I told you I went to this school and I didn't have that much money.

Speaker 1 And I didn't have the luxury of time or money to be with those people and do what they do.

Speaker 1 So by the time I finished school and everybody was going to university, all everybody in my school went to the AUC, the American University in Cairo, of course, private,

Speaker 1 like American Education, party time. Like, I mean, of course, they're brilliant and everything, but they have, yeah, they have a different, you know, social life.

Speaker 1 And part of me, now I kind of like

Speaker 1 I realize that just like very, very recently,

Speaker 1 maybe I went to the hardest school ever, so I don't have space to use other than studying. Because if I have that much space, what I'm going to do with it, I don't have that much freedom.

Speaker 1 I don't have that much money. I can't compete with those people going out.
So maybe I need a solid excuse that I'm in a place where I don't have that much of a spare time.

Speaker 1 Is it also possible? I like how this is a therapy session where we're psychoanalyzing it. Is it also possible that you always just pick the hardest thing you could possibly do?

Speaker 1 Maybe.

Speaker 1 Maybe that's the Piers Morgan thing, too.

Speaker 1 Maybe, but like when I left Egypt and I came here, I still had the choice to go back to medicine. Sure.
But I hated it. I hated it.
Medicine traumatized me. The amount of like you give up.

Speaker 1 You know, my brother in Egypt, he had a daughter. She's a brilliant basketball player.
She is in the national team, amazing.

Speaker 1 I used to play basketball also in the Egyptian League, but I never, I was kind of like my favorite position in the court was the bench. and

Speaker 1 I was not as good as her, but she, and then, and then he, he, it was time for her to go into into college, yeah, and he he didn't talk to me for six weeks.

Speaker 1 I said, Mess, Tamir, what's happening to Farida? Which college? Like, I didn't want to tell you, she went into medicine. I said, What? Medicine? Why did he do it? Because he knows how I hated it.

Speaker 1 I was traumatized.

Speaker 1 And I said, like, dude, she's a basketball player. Make her go like to an easy school.

Speaker 1 So that's kind of inspiring. You still did it.
You still did it. I still did it, but I don't know.
Is it because of the difficulty or because

Speaker 1 of what I told you? Maybe I needed something. Maybe because I was not very confident in my social life.
So I needed a distraction not to be to have that much of a social life. Oh, wow.
Okay.

Speaker 1 You understand? Yeah. Uh-huh.
So it's kind of loud because I will always have an excuse. I'm studying.
I have something. I have exams.
And I don't know.

Speaker 1 I kind of like self-sabotaged my own thing because I couldn't compete with

Speaker 1 those people on the outing and the money and whatever. So I need an excuse to be like, oh, he's a doctor he's studying.
At least in your own mind, you couldn't compete. Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 1 I always felt as less because, I mean, I didn't have any girlfriends in school. I had very late in life.
Everything to me came to life. So I always felt

Speaker 1 even stand-up comedy. It came very late to me in life.
So I always feel that I'm not good enough. I feel that I didn't spend the time to build the foundation that other comedians do.

Speaker 1 So I always feel that I am too lucky. I always feel that this is a fleeting thing.
And when I went had

Speaker 1 the height and the fall in Egypt, when I was like the top of everything, I was like, so

Speaker 1 famous. And then everything was taken away from me.
And that's like, ah, you see? I told you. That happens when you don't build foundation, you fall.
So I always feel that

Speaker 1 I am not good enough. Or if I am in a position where where people think I am, deep inside I am not.
Do you know that I have a speech impediment that I was not meant to be a TV presenter?

Speaker 1 In Arabic, it's very obvious. I cannot roll my R's.

Speaker 1 I cannot say

Speaker 1 I cannot roll it. So in Arabic, like Spanish, it's very obvious.

Speaker 1 So when I did my first video on the internet that made me famous, and then I got my television deal back there in Egypt, my partner at the time, he took the video and he went to a producer.

Speaker 1 I said, like, are you giving me a guy with a lisp?

Speaker 1 He couldn't.

Speaker 1 That's why when I came on television, I was the first ever guy with a lisp. I had two things going for me: the lisp and the big nose.
And I was always bullied for these two all the time.

Speaker 1 So I always felt less. See, but that's the foundation of like creating a great person.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 Because if you're pretty,

Speaker 1 you don't need to do much.

Speaker 1 I probably wouldn't recommend it, but it is

Speaker 1 true. So if you are pretty, do disfigurement

Speaker 1 find the flaws and and uh be extremely self-critical about them.

Speaker 1 So, you saw Jon Stewart on TV for the first time in in uh 2003, I believe. How did that change your life?

Speaker 1 I was in a gym and I was running on the treadmill, and at that time, CNN was coming out on like on cable

Speaker 1 and uh I was watching, and there's this studio. I don't know what it is.
So I put

Speaker 1 the earphones on and I started watching. And I was so taken by this that I stopped the treadmill and I just like

Speaker 1 stood for the 20 minutes like this on the treadmills. And then I left, and I was just like standing there.
I didn't know what

Speaker 1 he was saying. I didn't understand what is Democrats, what is Republicans, what is

Speaker 1 those names that he's saying, what is Fox News. I don't understand.

Speaker 1 But I was fascinated. There was something, you know, when you don't understand the music, but you get the rhythm? It was that.
I wonder what that is that you saw. It's like the timing of the humor.

Speaker 1 I mean, there is, Jon Stewart is one of a kind. Like

Speaker 1 his biting

Speaker 1 criticism of power, I would say, and also ability to highlight the absurdity of it all. But you understand, I didn't understand any of that.
But I didn't understand any of the references.

Speaker 1 But it is the

Speaker 1 rhythm. Yeah, the rhythm.
You know, sometimes when you even see like a comedy that that is that's a language you don't understand, but there's a rhythm.

Speaker 1 Boom, boom. There's something.
There's something in the music.

Speaker 1 So there's something with the videos and the pictures and he and the face and people reacting. Yeah.
What is this?

Speaker 1 What is this? Yeah. What is this? And we had the global edition.
So I went to the YouTube and I just started to kind of like watch every single episode that I can.

Speaker 1 I said, like, do you think we can have this in Egypt? I thought, ah, never.

Speaker 1 And then 2011,

Speaker 1 like, I had a friend of mine who was also a YouTube partner. It was something new at the time.
He said, let's do something on the internet. Let's do something.
I said, I want to do John Stewart.

Speaker 1 It's like,

Speaker 1 do Ray William Johnson. Jon Stewart will not work.
It's like, ah, I want to do John.

Speaker 1 So that was in there. Yeah, it was in there.
And

Speaker 1 I did it. And

Speaker 1 it worked. Can you talk about 2011? I mean,

Speaker 1 what is the Arab Spring? What is it?

Speaker 1 People here in America, you know,

Speaker 1 depends on which side something happened or what?

Speaker 1 Depends which side of the equation you are. Because for a lot of people, it's a conspiracy.
It's American-made. It is the Muslim Brotherhood.
It's the Islamists. It is Israel.

Speaker 1 It is everything else other than people. But it's a pure revolution.
It's a pure.

Speaker 1 I think we put too much weight on the conspiracies. I think it is normal human behavior that then become, get maybe used or abused or taken advantage of by other powers and then the conspiracy starts.

Speaker 1 But at the time,

Speaker 1 the Arab Spring didn't start in Egypt, it started in Tunisia. Boazi is a fruit vendor,

Speaker 1 burned himself up,

Speaker 1 like the American soldiers who did that a few days ago. And that kind of sparked protests in Tunisia.

Speaker 1 And Ben Ali was a dictator in Tunisia for about like 20 years and they removed removed him so suddenly it was kind of like a domino effect so and then egypt started and and it just took 18 days and you know people hindsight is 2020 saying said like you know just bubari became like a burden on the military because the military are the real rulers of the country you may you might have a president that kind of like have certain powers but at the end of the day when the military sees that a certain president is like too much of a burden too much of like a you know so like they cut him off and mubarak is the leader of egypt at the time he was there for 30 years.

Speaker 1 30 years. By the way, speaking of which, because it was a joke in your Mark Twain speech, I got teary-eyed just watching that.
That was great. You're like fucking great.

Speaker 1 Like what you did with Mark Twain Awards for Jon Stewart. It's great.
I mean, your comedy is great in general. And I wanted to go to your show.
I definitely will.

Speaker 1 But that's like a little stroll in the complete tangent of just a masterful introduction and celebration of Jon Stewart. Anyway, Mubarak.
Yeah, so I guess.

Speaker 1 And it's a joke that I say also, like, Mubarak had, like, was a president for 30 years. Like, oh my God, you had a president for 30 years.
Like, it's the Middle East. It's a very short first term.

Speaker 1 It's like, we're still warming up, baby.

Speaker 1 And I thought, like, we need to plan ahead. We need to plan

Speaker 1 our vacations, our careers, our jail time. It's just like we need to.

Speaker 1 It's great.

Speaker 1 So

Speaker 1 we had kind of like the shortest, nicest revolution. 18 days.
And we thought, oh, 18 days, we can change the country in 18 days. But of course, we were naive and we had this kind of hope.

Speaker 1 So Mubarak was removed. There was an interim period by the military.
It took it for one year. Then they did elections.
Muslim Brotherhood came to power.

Speaker 1 They stayed for

Speaker 1 one year and then the military removed them. And in these three years, my show started.
It started by kind of like a YouTube video. It became famous overnight.
Overnight.

Speaker 1 Five to six videos, boom, went out.

Speaker 1 And at that time, I was waiting to get get my clearance to go to Cleveland.

Speaker 1 I was accepted in a fellowship as a pediatric heart surgery in a hospital in Cleveland.

Speaker 1 And I said, All right, I'm just going to do a couple of videos. Maybe I'm going to put it in the internet.

Speaker 1 And maybe after a year or two, after I come back from the fellowship, somebody will come, hey, why don't you write a show that looks like John Stewart? That was my mind. Took five weeks.

Speaker 1 I had my first contract of

Speaker 1 television. And overnight,

Speaker 1 the exposure. And over the next two, three years, I had 30 to 40 million people watching, 30 to 40 million people watching every episode.
A lot of this, like, wow, that's too much. That is terrifying.

Speaker 1 Yeah. Because it means that there are 30 million people who have an opinion about you.
Yeah. You said there's a lot of aspects of that sudden fame that were just holding.
It's toxic. It's toxic.

Speaker 1 It's unnatural. It's unnatural.
When people started to recognize me in the street and take pictures, I was awkward. It's like, why do you want to have a picture of me? Why? Why is it?

Speaker 1 Because I didn't feel that I'm worthy enough to be like a reward for someone to have a picture? And I didn't understand it.

Speaker 1 I was actually, I was kind of an ass sometimes because people thought it was arrogance. No, it was confusion.

Speaker 1 And I remember, like, my director and my producers and people around, they always saw me in a very bad mood. It's like,

Speaker 1 why are you not enjoying this? It's like, because this is not natural. This is not natural.
This adoration, this love, and this have to end somehow. And it did.

Speaker 1 And in, because at a certain point, you are a human. You, and people kind of the adoration and the fun and the love comes because they see you saying stuff because you do your job.

Speaker 1 Basically, political satire is basically us making fun of politicians in the media. And a lot of people have a lot of really strong opinions about politicians and the media.

Speaker 1 So, we came that we articulate that and we give it them and we make them laugh. So, for them, we made a great job.
So, why don't you do more?

Speaker 1 But you are limited. and at a certain time, you can't.

Speaker 1 And at a certain time, you're afraid because we're humans because you're afraid about like if I continue speaking up, not like something will happen to me.

Speaker 1 I'm kind of like, maybe have some protection because I'm

Speaker 1 people see me, but what are the people around you?

Speaker 1 And we, I've seen that, so that's why at a certain point, it's like, that's it.

Speaker 1 I can't. I mean, there's a lot of things to say there, but one of the difficult things of fame in your situation is you're not just having fun, you're criticizing power.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 And it is loved by the people, but it comes with a price because at a certain price, if the power is too strong and you're not into a situation

Speaker 1 or a system that allows that, that gives you that kind of safety. So what happened?

Speaker 1 What happened? I

Speaker 1 was...

Speaker 1 So when, so the height of my fame, when the Muslim

Speaker 1 Brotherhood was in power. And at that time, they had their media.
And I had one show. I had like one hour per week.
And they had five channels, 24-7.

Speaker 1 And they were like, you know,

Speaker 1 Jon Stewart said it beautifully once. It's like, we say shit, and you say shit, and we just say shit better than you.

Speaker 1 This is exactly what John Stewart was. Like, we're just better, we're just better at saying shit back.

Speaker 1 So, so basically, I had one hour, and they had like the five things that they were like, you know, they're calling me all kinds of names, not just me, like all their enemies, you know.

Speaker 1 And then I just had one hour and I would kind of like annihilate them in one hour a week.

Speaker 1 So at a certain point, they would, they would even like kind of be the side with the army against the

Speaker 1 kind of the liberal sectors, whatever you call it. And at a certain point, the army kind of like flipped everybody.

Speaker 1 Like, kind of like they made, they made, they, they, they, they,

Speaker 1 yeah, they removed the Muslim Brotherhood, they came to power. And we, I, I, I have to say, I admit it, I supported that in the beginning because I had daily threats.

Speaker 1 I was actually interrogated and arrested under the Muslim Brotherhood. I was in an interrogation for six hours, and they were asking me about my jokes.

Speaker 1 And I used that in my stand-up comedy describing exactly what happened in the six hours. And it is so funny.
Okay, well, it's

Speaker 1 hilarious.

Speaker 1 But what?

Speaker 1 Slow down. You were interrogated by the

Speaker 1 general prosecutor, the general prosecutor. And it was based because of complaints by

Speaker 1 the officials and the government, because in order to generate prosecutor to do it, it has to have a high-up mandate to bring that person to questioning.

Speaker 1 So, they went through kind of official channels. Oh, yeah, yeah, absolutely.
So, it's all

Speaker 1 very legal. So, I went there

Speaker 1 and I asked,

Speaker 1 and it's kind of like a bunch of like insulting Islam, insulting president, spreading false rumors.

Speaker 1 And I went there and it was funny because I go into the building where there's police officers and their judges, and all of them are big fans of the show.

Speaker 1 And some of them were taking pictures of me and then i'm sitting there and it was the most ridiculous interview ever because he was asking me about my jokes it's like what did you mean by this joke and it's like nothing

Speaker 1 and it was there for six hours he's just reading he was reading my jokes and he's reading the jokes and the junior judges sitting there

Speaker 1 like cracking up it's like i remember that it's like

Speaker 1 that's dark it is it's kind of like and i'm laughing but in the same time it's like the whole situation is ridiculous. But then at the end, I was released on bail.
So I went back to my show.

Speaker 1 And I make fun of that.

Speaker 1 And you have to be honest, the Muslim Brotherhood were in power, but Egypt were like right out of the revolution. There was kind of like an equal

Speaker 1 spread of power between the people. There was not like someone who would come in and just like the Muslim Brotherhood, we didn't have that power yet, but they were kind of...

Speaker 1 people saw that they were moving towards that. And then the tension rose and then there was like a kind of a confrontation between them and the army and then a lot of people were killed in the street.

Speaker 1 It was a terrible massacre. And

Speaker 1 then suddenly I am blamed for all of that. It's like you made fun of us.
So now it made it easier for people to kill. It's like, dude, come on.
You're doing that to me too.

Speaker 1 I just did it better than you. And the fact that you sided with the same people that flipped against you, that's not my fault.
Did you criticize the army at all?

Speaker 1 Yeah, so after that show, I did like one episode against the army and I was cancelled the next day.

Speaker 1 And then I went to another channel, did 16 episodes in a different season and it was I was walking on eggshells. And then that was cancelled again.

Speaker 1 And then my, the production company that was doing my show that we severed ties because we didn't have the show. They had their offices raided.
I have people like having death threats. So I

Speaker 1 woke up one day, 11th of November 2014, and my lawyer said, like, leave the country right now. There is this legal case that we, that, that they kind of like, they're coming for you.

Speaker 1 But I said, like, you cannot, it was an arbitration case, and I lost against my the channel that basically canceled me. And I said, like, I don't know, but there's no jail time in arbitration.

Speaker 1 It's like, yeah, tell that to the judges, leave.

Speaker 1 So I jumped on a plane. The verdict was 12 noon, 11 November, 5 afternoon.
I was on a plane, left Egypt, and I never came back since then.

Speaker 1 Was there a worry of

Speaker 1 non-legal

Speaker 1 things like assassination?

Speaker 1 I can tell you something.

Speaker 1 I was so stressed because of the show because of everything I sometimes I would wake up in the morning and I hope that my bullet will come and finish everything because I was so stressed it's like I would love because I'm too much of a chicken to kill myself so I would like rather have someone else do it for me so

Speaker 1 I I I I was I was so under so much pressure and I remember the day that like my show was canceled indefinitely the second time under the army and I was like

Speaker 1 I don't have to worry about what kind of script I have to write next week.

Speaker 1 Because this is, you know, remember when you asked me about like that tweet, about like all of those, these accusations don't bother me. Infidel spy, secret Jew, Zionist, Islamo-Nazi.
That's bullshit.

Speaker 1 What is really...

Speaker 1 What really leaves a mark is the criticism to your craft and your work.

Speaker 1 So you're not funny. Goes deeper.

Speaker 1 Yeah, certain certain things get to you uh better than others especially if you have like a secret suspicion that you are like maybe not funny maybe i'm not because i was put into that it's like because that toasts your insecurities like i know but you shouldn't say it out loud

Speaker 1 you shouldn't say the truth out loud you shouldn't say that out loud

Speaker 1 but what about the weight of the responsibility of speaking truth to power? So like walking on eggshells. Like, what did that feel like? Well,

Speaker 1 after

Speaker 1 the Muslim Brotherhood were removed, you have to understand, like, when the military coup happened, it was a very popular coup. Like, people loved the army.

Speaker 1 In Egypt, the army is more sacred than the religion. People love the army.
The army can go wrong. So, me going against the army was, I mean, the Muslim Brotherhood was not very popular.

Speaker 1 They were popular for their own bases. But people accepted the fact that, like, we make fun of them.
But Sisi at that time, he was a god.

Speaker 1 and i used to go to this high class club called gizira club and this is basically kind of like the

Speaker 1 kind of upper middle class upper class kind of people

Speaker 1 and i during the that year of the muslim brotherhood i was the most popular ever people come yeah

Speaker 1 when the military came in people were walking to me like pointing their fingers like don't speak about cc don't speak about the army huh we love you now but don't you they would like that so i called jon stewards like like, I don't know what to do.

Speaker 1 I don't know what to do.

Speaker 1 And at that time, all of the channels were like closed down. All of the independent, I was the only one left because it was difficult for them to get rid of me very quickly because I was too popular.

Speaker 1 It was kind of like

Speaker 1 piecemealing, kind of like going.

Speaker 1 And I remember, I don't know what to do. He said, like, you don't have to do anything, just your safety comes first.
And I said, but I can't. I mean, I've been doing that for two years.

Speaker 1 And I kind of just like like say bye-bye guys I have a responsibility I have a team I have people working for me

Speaker 1 and I also I cannot just like

Speaker 1 disappear

Speaker 1 and he said the most interesting thing ever and say if you're afraid of something make fun about the fact that you're afraid of it instead of talking about that something brilliant yeah so there was like a whole episode that we did not even mention CC we did not even mention it but the videos did all the thing.

Speaker 1 And the whole episode was me trying to avoid talking about him.

Speaker 1 And that, that, that, how the comedy was created. The fact that I don't want to be here, and I don't know.

Speaker 1 So he said, like, if you will be surprised how people can relate to that, because there was a lot of kind of like, oh, we love him, but we feel we cannot speak.

Speaker 1 So just by doing the simple thing about be mirroring the society,

Speaker 1 that goes a long way.

Speaker 1 And I kind of tried to do what I can under the military. I mean, they came up with

Speaker 1 a machine that treats AIDS

Speaker 1 and hepatitis C virus and basically every single and I went to town

Speaker 1 with that.

Speaker 1 Because people think it doesn't really have to go in, to go to the bigger powers, like you're an asshole. No.

Speaker 1 You talk about their propaganda. You talk about what they want people to perceive them at.

Speaker 1 And it's a failure. And for that, that kind of hit them even more.
Because

Speaker 1 what do authoritarian figures do? They work on two things, fear

Speaker 1 and propaganda. And from that, it gets the respect.
So when you go into their propaganda and expose them, they have nothing else. That's brilliant.

Speaker 1 So like you are walking on eggshells, but you're doing it masterfully. That you're revealing sort of the flaws in the propaganda, the absurdity of the propaganda, and so doing or criticizing them.

Speaker 1 And this is why comedy is very specific because people say, You were not as hard on him as you were in the Muslim Brotherhood.

Speaker 1 Like, yes, because under Muslim Brotherhood, we were just like saying shit for each other. Yeah.
But now

Speaker 1 the ceiling was like here. So it's kind of like, how can you do something from here? Yeah, exactly.
That's the art form. Yeah.
In the Soviet Union, under Stalin,

Speaker 1 a lot of the criticism came from

Speaker 1 like children's stories and

Speaker 1 children's cartoons double meaning double in window stuff that means other stuff that is the

Speaker 1 brilliance

Speaker 1 but everyone knows everyone knows

Speaker 1 because you are like putting a mirror like you're mirroring the society it's fascinating and that's why i was canceled twice

Speaker 1 and that is a scary one the army you see that in ukraine yeah everybody supports the army that's why uh zelensky getting rid of getting rid of the head of the army was a big big deal it's a really dangerous thing because

Speaker 1 everyone's afraid to say anything negative about the army, especially during war, in that case. And in this case, maybe there's a civil war, that kind of thing.
But think about it.

Speaker 1 Actually, an army during peace is much more dangerous.

Speaker 1 Because think about it. I don't really have an enemy to fight, but I have all of this power, all of this tank.

Speaker 1 Why is this actor have more money than me? Yeah.

Speaker 1 I'm protecting him. Why does this businessman think that he can get onto his private plane and go to Paris?

Speaker 1 Why I'm here sitting, like, not having all of these things. So, and there's a lot of time on your hand because your

Speaker 1 job is to go fight. When you don't go fight, and when you have the lack of, that's why that's one of the things

Speaker 1 I love the United States about, is the fact that the army cannot really get power, but the kind of like the army is, the power is actually in the military-industrial complex, which is a different issue.

Speaker 1 It's kind of like a different kind of issue. But if you have all of that power, like why am I sitting around just like playing guard for you guys?

Speaker 1 That's why Iran is terrifying because you have this military that it just becomes a police force that turns against its own people. Yeah.

Speaker 1 So

Speaker 1 you're a famous guy talking shit in the middle of all that. Yeah.
And when I left, I went through a very dark side. Dark, dark, dark.

Speaker 1 Because all of the insecurities, all of the stuff that had been like working on my head now came to life. And now I'm in America and I'm a nobody.

Speaker 1 i'm a nobody and now it's like i have to do something i have to earn some money so i started to stand-up comedy five years ago yeah and i sucked because it was my second language and i was new and now i would go to these comedy clubs with like kids and 21 22 people and then i'm there with a family to support that i'm going there to doing it for 15 20 and and i was bad you're bad you're you're bombing bombing big time eating shit waiting big time dying up there big time and i would go back home and I would cry.

Speaker 1 And then what made it worse is sometimes like a fan, like not a fan, a bunch of fans from Egypt. It's like, oh, Bessie Museum, you know that they come.

Speaker 1 Yeah, that disappoints me. So

Speaker 1 that kind of like face of adoration that goes into.

Speaker 1 And I could see it in their face. I think he's going to drive an Uber in a couple of weeks.

Speaker 1 That's so good. That kind of pressure.
And I would go and I would cry and

Speaker 1 then Los Angeles, oh, you left.

Speaker 1 You gave up. You were a sellout.
You're a coward. Why don't you speak from abroad? You're safe now.

Speaker 1 I already spoke.

Speaker 1 I don't want to be

Speaker 1 because I don't want to be an activist. I was doing that for comedy when it was good for everybody.
But now they want me to go into YouTube and just like throw rocks from outside.

Speaker 1 And you know, I understand. I have family there.

Speaker 1 and, and it was this kind of like thing, like that I am being

Speaker 1 like attacked for not doing what I should do in their face and attacked for not being funny and not doing what being, and now I'm afraid like maybe it was wrong.

Speaker 1 And I was, I didn't know, I, I really, it was so traumatic that I don't know actually how I went through these years. And I blocked so many details from my brain.
because

Speaker 1 I have been using this technique for a while now that I have been erasing a lot of my, there is a lot of memory gaps in my brain.

Speaker 1 And I'm trying to suppress it because it was very, very, very traumatic. And a lot of people told me you have to go to therapy, but

Speaker 1 I don't know.

Speaker 1 I'm worried to open the floodgates. And I'm thinking, as if as I'm functional and I'm not killing anybody, I'm okay.

Speaker 1 I think Elon tweeted, never went to therapy. It's going to be on my headstone.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 Two of your best buds. Okay.

Speaker 1 I mean, that is like terrifyingly difficult to

Speaker 1 like after being a surgeon, after being a superstar, super famous, going to eat shit at local tiny clubs in the United States. I mean, eating shit, period.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 Like bombing is really, really, really difficult. Really difficult for 20-year-olds.

Speaker 1 Imagine when you're 45, 46,

Speaker 1 and then people's like, is this his midlife crisis? What is this?

Speaker 1 I went through a lot of pain and a lot of the doubts. And it was terrible.

Speaker 1 I mean, how did you survive? I know you bought most of it, but what gave you like strength through all that? Because I didn't have any other choice. Because I started that.

Speaker 1 And the only reason that I could is a continue i i i i i i don't know what else to do i don't want to go back to medicine i don't want to do go i don't i don't want to do that and i don't i don't know i was and bit by bit bit by bit i started to kind of like be better be better be better

Speaker 1 and i was at a certain time a year ago a year ago this is where i started to kind of like hone the craft and kind of sell more tickets and sometimes even sell out some shows and sometimes sell a theater so like it was going and the money was flowing and it was good

Speaker 1 and then i was like

Speaker 1 why didn't i i want it faster i wanted more i want it now i want to i want netflix deal and whatever and then the piers morgan thing happened and then i blew up and then suddenly i'm selling out everywhere it's like ah if those people came if that that the the war happened two years ago i will not be ready so now they come to the show and by the way my show had nothing to do with October 7th.

Speaker 1 My show is my thing that I've been crafting and working on. You know, how difficult it is to do the first hour,

Speaker 1 the hour that I've been working on for five years. And it's all my personal story.

Speaker 1 All about what happened to me in Egypt, me as an immigrant coming here to the United States, finding Trump as a president, finding myself in the middle of a guns rally, finding myself in the middle of a bombing, kind of like talking about how I got my citizenship.

Speaker 1 It's all like funny stories about like my origin story. So they come in and they expect me October 7th and all of this isn't my personal story, but it's good and it kills and they love it.

Speaker 1 It's like if that, if that kind of like blew up in America happened to me two, three years ago,

Speaker 1 I would not have people who come and be. So

Speaker 1 I gotta say, the timing of October 7th is very suspicious. Oh my God, please don't say that.

Speaker 1 I'm just asking questions.

Speaker 1 I'm telling you, one of the funniest things, a guy, I was in Dubai and like a TV anchor came to me, Passim Yusuf. He flourishes during revolutions and wars.
Like, wait, wait, wait, what, what, dude?

Speaker 1 You're making me sound like a bad omen, a very bad omen.

Speaker 1 Yeah, you hamas and bibi together orchestrated all those oh my god that's the the the that's the trilogy

Speaker 1 you guys should go on the road together telling you that phone call is coming yeah but hamas has to open

Speaker 1 and they would really bomb right they would really bomb

Speaker 1 oh

Speaker 1 i love dark humor you do a show like you were saying in English and in Arabic.

Speaker 1 So, and the story is very different. totally different.
Two different stories. I would love to just the language difference because it's the music of the language is also different.

Speaker 1 So, like, what, what's, I don't know, how can you convert it into words, but what's the difference in the music of the languages? I'll tell you. Because I thought about that a lot.

Speaker 1 All right, all right. Okay.
So, when I was doing the English first,

Speaker 1 I was I actually had good jokes, but I was missing the delivery because the cadence and the music and the rhythm is different. The way that an English-speaking American

Speaker 1 member of audience will receive it, it will be different than how I receive it. The energy, everything is different.

Speaker 1 So when I kind of like got it,

Speaker 1 I didn't know how to switch back to Arabic.

Speaker 1 Oh, wow. Yeah, fascinating.
Because here's the thing, with English stand-up comedy, English-you have a huge library. You have like a legacy.

Speaker 1 You have like years and years and years and years of people doing comedy. But in Arabic, it's a very new, very new to us.
And most of the Arabic stand-up comedy, especially in Egypt, is very

Speaker 1 tamed.

Speaker 1 This is kind of like imagine the stand-up comedy scene in America 1960s before Lenny Bruce.

Speaker 1 So no swearing, conservative, carefully nothing conservative, everything that I was like, no, yeah, it's kind of like very.

Speaker 1 So

Speaker 1 I didn't know what to do with Arabic.

Speaker 1 So I broke the barriers. I became Lenny Bruce.
I became George Collins. So I went in and I went and I I changed the whole thing.
15 words, you're not allowed to say whatever. For me, 15 words.

Speaker 1 There's a lot.

Speaker 1 Arabic is a very rich language.

Speaker 1 So

Speaker 1 when I did, here's the difference between the Arabic and the English show.

Speaker 1 The English show, surprise, surprise, is a unifying language. Even for a group of Arabs.

Speaker 1 So if I give the same exact show to the same 1,000 audience members in the same same theater and they're the same people same

Speaker 1 makeup of like Lebanese Egyptian Syrian Saudis English will be a unifying language Arabic is a dividing language because you have 22 dialects and the dialects are vastly different and like maybe Egyptians understand a little bit of Lebanese but not that much but the references Algerian Moroccan Tunisian totally different animal that's like a totally different language Saudi Emirati Kuwaiti totally different people understand the Egyptian dialect because it's the dialect of most of the artwork and the movies, but the reference and the everyday street talk might not be understood by them.

Speaker 1 So now I have to go in

Speaker 1 and talk to all of these dialects together. So I formed my big part of my show is like,

Speaker 1 what are you guys expecting of this?

Speaker 1 This is what, this is, we're gonna, when I'm gonna do profanity and you're gonna like it.

Speaker 1 This is the problem with the show as a dialect. And

Speaker 1 I construct all of these sentences formed of so different, different

Speaker 1 words. For example, an iron

Speaker 1 in any in any in any Arab dialect is an iron. In Saudi Arabia, it means ass.

Speaker 1 That's one example. That's one example.

Speaker 1 So imagine if you can actually construct sentences having all of these things in one sentence. So I would construct like a whole section of my show about that.

Speaker 1 So it's really very much about like self-reflective on language and the limits of language that's allowed. And the limits of language.

Speaker 1 And I tell them part of the show is like, I know what's the problem with me doing Arabic. It's like, if this was an English show and I was telling you, fuck and shit and bitch you'll be haha.

Speaker 1 But if I do one swear word, all of you will scringe. Yeah.
It's like, why? That's

Speaker 1 it because we are ashamed? Yeah.

Speaker 1 So it's kind of like, it's not just like about swearing. It's about like, there's a lot of philosophical pathways in this.
Yeah, there's profanity and

Speaker 1 people have fun, whatever, but like, it is about like, what does it, how do we treat our language? And I tell them, we speak Arabic as Arabs, but it's not the same Arabic.

Speaker 1 It's crazy, right? And you're doing the show in America also, which is another level of upset. Oh, yeah.
Actually, the Arab diaspora in America is some of the best audiences I have.

Speaker 1 They are like wonderful. And they come from,

Speaker 1 and

Speaker 1 I did it also in the Middle East. And maybe I'll do like an Arab tour in the Middle East in the fall.
Which countries would you go to and not? I already did Jordan, Lebanon. I'm doing UAE.

Speaker 1 I'm doing Kuwait, Egypt, Bahrain, Egypt, I don't think so. I don't think so.
Is it personal? Is it worry about your safety?

Speaker 1 Well, I have the American citizenship right now. So I am relatively safe.
There's a block. Sure.
Honestly, there's a block.

Speaker 1 There's so much that happened. And I don't, and I never, and I will never badmouth Egypt.
It is my country. It is some, like, it has all of my marriage.
40 years of my life I lived there.

Speaker 1 But when you get hurt so much,

Speaker 1 instead of trying to kind of

Speaker 1 I don't want to take revenge, I don't want to like that, I just want to avoid

Speaker 1 because Egypt gave me so much fame and so much love and so much hate and so much rejection. It is a very, it was a very tumulous

Speaker 1 relationship. Very, very difficult.
And it's

Speaker 1 and a lot of people tell me, well, don't you miss Egypt? And I tell them every time, the Egypt that I miss is not there anymore. It's not bad or good, it's not worse or better.

Speaker 1 It's just I'm different, and the places are different, and the people are different, and the circumstances are different. Whatever image you have of what you love is not there anymore.

Speaker 1 That's why a lot of immigrants, especially Arab immigrants,

Speaker 1 they live here, but they're there. And then when they go back for a vacation, they get disappointed because they didn't find what they want.

Speaker 1 And then they come back here and they're disappointed because

Speaker 1 this is what they want to come back, but it's not there anymore. Yeah,

Speaker 1 their view of that place is from a different time i have that you know my parents but everybody that left the soviet union

Speaker 1 i mean it's such a complicated relationship with that it's sometimes borders on hate disappointment

Speaker 1 in the uh in the case of the soviet union perhaps similar to egypt is the promises sold when you were younger and the the promises broken by the possibility of what it was supposed to be.

Speaker 1 With the Soviet Union, I'm sure with Egypt is the same.

Speaker 1 Iran is the same.

Speaker 1 So they have a very complicated relationship with that. Yeah.

Speaker 1 That's why, like, for them, people from Iran, you know, I remember, I remember quite well the World Cup that was made done in the United States. And the Iranian team will play in America.

Speaker 1 And there were people, people.

Speaker 1 in the audience all wearing Iranian sh they hate the regime, but they have this kind of connection with the country. Yeah.
And this is this is the whole thing.

Speaker 1 You can actually love the country and you not have to agree with the regime

Speaker 1 would would

Speaker 1 Would you ever perform in the West Bank? No, Gaza. Because if I go there, I have to go to the Israeli checkpoints and I don't want to go through this.

Speaker 1 I don't want to have an Israeli soldier telling me what to do. Yeah, there's a demeaning aspect to that whole thing.
Very. Even in subtle ways.

Speaker 1 Yeah, yeah. I mean, I have so many Palestinian friends.
with an American passport, U.S. passports, living here.
They are born here.

Speaker 1 And they talk about the humiliation and the intimidation and the harassment that they go in it's like

Speaker 1 do you want me to try yeah that little bit of a humiliation

Speaker 1 a little bit

Speaker 1 oh sometimes it's major but i know i noticed that you know even the little bit is uh has a after a lifetime of that

Speaker 1 it can turn to uh

Speaker 1 it can turn to hate towards the other yeah and resentment resentment and then how do you do anything with that resentment i have a friend of mine he is from Palestine, from the West Bank, he's American here, he's born here.

Speaker 1 And we talk about,

Speaker 1 you know, we have, of course, all of this discussion about what happened. And he tells me, you know, in October 11th, in the West Bank, in

Speaker 1 there was a village called Kosra Khosra.

Speaker 1 And on that village, like the settlers went in around the village and they sent a message on Facebook as like, you rats going, get out of your sewers, and we're going to be waiting for you.

Speaker 1 Intimidation through technology. And then they went,

Speaker 1 it is, Kosra have like another settlement next to it called Eshkodesh. Eshkodesh, they have people there who were training something called Meshmereti Yisha, which is basically the guardians of Yisha.

Speaker 1 And it's like a paramilitary group that trains other settlers on military comb. give them weapons and do like military drills.
And they went there like militarized and went there.

Speaker 1 And it was actually co-founded by a Jew from Brooklyn. Not even

Speaker 1 like an Israeli. And he is like one of the disciples of Meher Kahana.

Speaker 1 I'm sure that you know who Meher Kahna is, who was the Jewish defense lead, the people who assassinated Alex Aouda here in the United States.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 they were there with their weapons outside, intimidating people. Now, this story carries everything that is wrong with the situation.

Speaker 1 You have people from Brooklyn from outside, just because they're Jewish, they can't come and they they can claim the land from the people there.

Speaker 1 Anyone from Paul, just because he's Jewish, he can come and take the land from other people. They're using technology to intimidate Palestinians, they have unchecked military power.

Speaker 1 These are not IDF soldiers, these are settlers, and they have free reign in order to intimidate and to kill the people.

Speaker 1 And you understand, this is the daily life of Palestinians, not in Gaza, in the West Bank.

Speaker 1 What do you do from your, what do we do? What do people do

Speaker 1 to

Speaker 1 nudge this towards

Speaker 1 peace, towards flourishing? Here's the thing. I want to talk to the people of Israel.
What is Israel doing right now is not just

Speaker 1 unfair to the Palestinians. It's unfair to the Jewish people in Israel.
No, it is unfair to the Jewish people around the world.

Speaker 1 Because the way that Israel links itself to

Speaker 1 Judaism, at a certain point, remember like ISIS and Qaeda and when everybody hated Muslims?

Speaker 1 Sometimes

Speaker 1 humans are simple. They cannot have the nuances to separate.

Speaker 1 So anybody with a Muslim name, with a Muslim face, with a beard, who looks Muslim, he would do it because of that actions of those atrocities. You have the power as a person to separate yourself from

Speaker 1 an abusive power, a horrible power, and be yourself. I am really worried because the rise of anti-Semitism and the rise of hate against Jews is not because of the Jews.

Speaker 1 It's because of the actions of a government.

Speaker 1 Jews do not have to be on the side of apartheid. Ronnie Kestrels, he is a Jewish South African and he fought shoulder to shoulder next to Delson Bedella.

Speaker 1 He was part of the African National Conference ANC.

Speaker 1 And he had an article saying, like, I know what apartheid is, and I saw Israel, and this is what they have.

Speaker 1 And the thing is,

Speaker 1 Israeli government. should listen to other people.
You cannot call anybody who criticizes you either an anti-Semite or if they're already Jewish, you call them like a self-hating Jew.

Speaker 1 You cannot do that, you cannot continue doing that. Because we did that when I would go in and criticize the Islamists, it's like, oh, you're a self-hating Muslim.
You're not really Muslim.

Speaker 1 You're an infidel, you're a secret, you're a secular, whatever.

Speaker 1 We have the power in order to

Speaker 1 reform

Speaker 1 the course by holding people in power accountable. And the thing is, it is very stupid to actually call this anti-Semitism.
Like,

Speaker 1 my idol is Jon Stewart. I voted for Bernice Anderson.

Speaker 1 Sarah Texler, the one who did this amazing documentary about me tickling giants, she's a Jew. She is married to an Israeli Jew.
We have a good ratio because we know what the right is.

Speaker 1 They don't have to associate themselves with the action of the Israeli government.

Speaker 1 One of your favorite words, jihad?

Speaker 1 That's my favorite hobbies. It's his favorite hobby.

Speaker 1 It's my shoes. Like, what's your favorite?

Speaker 1 I talk about how when a white shooter does something he talks about all of his family and all his hobbies like what if we took this like for air for for arab terrorists what are his hobbies jihad

Speaker 1 you see you should be a comedian

Speaker 1 wow you're making me feel good okay

Speaker 1 sam harris uh has done several episodes on jihad and uh People should go listen to it, even if you disagree with it. But the basic idea that he's proposing is that this idea of jihad,

Speaker 1 in the negative connotation of it,

Speaker 1 of martyrdom is a thing that gets

Speaker 1 counterproductive,

Speaker 1 is destructive to the possible future flourishing of Palestinian people.

Speaker 1 What do you think of that? There's just the idea of martyrdom. I totally agree, but like people don't wake up in the morning and say, I want to declare jihad.

Speaker 1 Think about it. Why would anybody choose to end his life by taking other people with him and end that life? His life must be miserable.
He must be pushed into that.

Speaker 1 Nobody chooses death over life willingly. One of the first suicide bombers in the Palestinian resistance were Christians.

Speaker 1 We don't talk about that.

Speaker 1 I think he would say that the presence of a story that you can tell yourself when you're in a really shitty place, that you can go to a much better place by sacrificing your own life.

Speaker 1 Just the fact that the presence of that story is there is harmful. Of course.

Speaker 1 But

Speaker 1 here's my problem with Sam Harris and

Speaker 1 usually people they have free range talking about the Islamic faith and nitpicking the stuff that makes it put

Speaker 1 in a bad light. I can go and nitpick every single religion.

Speaker 1 There are Jews there like Ben Ghafir who openly say spitting on Christians is not a hate speech. All right? They are, I mean,

Speaker 1 you can bring me like all kinds of videos of Islamic jihadists saying horrible things on YouTube. And I can bring you Jews who live there.

Speaker 1 They are like, we're going to have the whole world enslaved for us. And everybody would love to be slaved for the Jews.

Speaker 1 You know, I can use the Talmudic argument that if you...

Speaker 1 tie a man to a tree and he dies of thirst and hunger, you didn't kill that man. And this is kind of the same arguments like, ah, we're not killing Palestinians.

Speaker 1 It's just like killing They're dying by themselves, you know.

Speaker 1 So it is the nitpicking of a certain narrative, religious narrative, that is separate from the political context and what's happening right now. It's very, very unfair.

Speaker 1 Because I can read, if you want to have a deep dive into religious texts, nobody will be happy. And I can bring stuff from that al-Mud and the Torah and stuff that is horrible.

Speaker 1 But like, you know, this is a way, again, of

Speaker 1 like distraction. I dare you to talk shit about Buddhism and Jainism, though.
Try. Well, you know,

Speaker 1 the people who killed the Muslims in Myanmar, weren't they Buddhists? Yeah. Well,

Speaker 1 let's go, Jaden. Okay, I'll find the religion.
I've got to get back to you. I'll have to find it.
Yeah,

Speaker 1 the flying monster,

Speaker 1 the church of the flying monster, spaghetti.

Speaker 1 As a person who tries not to eat carbs, I'm deeply offended by that. I mean, they're Scientologists.
All they do is actually buy real estate.

Speaker 1 I think there's a few books written about the fact that they do other stuff as well.

Speaker 1 So, even there,

Speaker 1 Mormons sometimes, they're some of the nicest people I've ever met, but I'm sure there's also darkness there, too.

Speaker 1 Oh, boy, religion.

Speaker 1 There's soaking in Mormons.

Speaker 1 There's what? Soaking. What's soaking? Okay, so I don't know how much.

Speaker 1 So, soaking basically, like,

Speaker 1 if you get into the woman and you don't move,

Speaker 1 that's not adultery. That's not like.

Speaker 1 Oh, interesting. So you go in and you just say there's a loophole.
The loophole. This is the thing of religion.
Religion has a loophole.

Speaker 1 Yes. And Muslims, we do that the whole time.
We pick and choose our sins, the stuff that we enjoy. It's just

Speaker 1 72 virgins waiting for all of us. Maybe if I converted you as a Jew, I'll get you 80.
I don't know. You know, like we can negotiate.
All right.

Speaker 1 But I also have questions about whether.

Speaker 1 And maybe I'll throw there a Camry. I have a

Speaker 1 camera. It's pretty good.
What year? I don't know. 1998.
All right. Best year ever.
Well, they last a long time.

Speaker 1 So

Speaker 1 I'm not sure I want 70. 72.
Well, I'll throw five in the mix and see how it feels.

Speaker 1 Yeah, can we... If you want to upgrade.

Speaker 1 Can we do a trial period?

Speaker 1 But in January, if you just zoom out,

Speaker 1 do you think religion

Speaker 1 is, in what way is it good for the world in what way is it harmful if there was no religion humans would have invented religion because think about think of think of like the early humanity you're like you're like a caveman or whatever and then like you see your family members killed and then you say like what I'm gonna be like the the cheetah or the gazelle that just like ends and perish

Speaker 1 I need to have important I am more important I think I think with the development of consciousness humans

Speaker 1 like thought that they are much more precious and important than the other animals because they have now intelligence. So,

Speaker 1 my life will not end like that.

Speaker 1 My death will be even more important. There's consequences for that.
There's consequences for what I do. And then

Speaker 1 the early man was like there in the desert and all of these natural phenomena. They didn't know what to do.
They were afraid. So they need to have refuge.
They need to have something to take care of.

Speaker 1 They need to have a reason for everything. Because if there's no reason,

Speaker 1 it's chaos.

Speaker 1 It's chaos. It's terrifying.

Speaker 1 It's terrifying it's terrifying there's nothing it's there there has to be a reason there has to be a reason there has to be a purpose it has to be like a cause something it's it's just i'm not just gonna be like die like like a cockroach being stepped on and that that's kind of like part of this ego the whole world rotates around you in a way it's the ego so religion actually got a lot of it from humanity itself, like me, like us being humans.

Speaker 1 And there's, and, and, and many religion is a collection

Speaker 1 of stories. And those stories based on things that humans did themselves and they attributed it to gods.

Speaker 1 And there's an aspect of religion where you humble yourself before a thing that is much greater than you. So that has a,

Speaker 1 I would say, a very positive effect of humbling. It will be great if it stopped there.
But here's the thing. If you humble.

Speaker 1 in order that your ego kicks in and feel that you are better than someone else who's not humbled in front of the same god.

Speaker 1 That means that I will have all of that train that I can use. That because now, what does it mean being humble? I'm divine.
Yeah. But

Speaker 1 I'm way more humble than you. Ah, but you're not.
So you see how they kind of like the oxymoron. I'm humble and I'm surrendering, but in the same time, I am better than you and I'm more entitled.

Speaker 1 Isn't it crazy? Yeah.

Speaker 1 It's beautiful. It's crazy.
I mean, look at look, look at like the Muslim Christians and Jews and everyone. It's like, all right, Muslims, we surrender.
I mean, I'm talking about the extreme ones.

Speaker 1 I mean, like, people, it's like, I surrender to God. Good.

Speaker 1 Keep it that way. Yeah.
Like, if you go there, I surrender to God, that means that I am closer to God than you, then you should die.

Speaker 1 Okay, Christians, Christ is love, and he loves me, and we're going to be together. But you don't get into his kingdom and you die.
You see, it's the same thing. Yeah.
Yeah. It's just if you stop it.

Speaker 1 Like, stop, stop there. Stop where you are humble and you feel that you're a piece of shit and you are a worthless human being and you are there.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 stop there yeah but once you say like oh that makes me a better person than you and it makes me more with god than you so that would give me the entitlement to kick your ass yeah we always ruin a good thing don't we

Speaker 1 that ego uh you've been outspoken you know with piers morgan but just on this topic uh and you

Speaker 1 uh

Speaker 1 talked about the Superman story,

Speaker 1 which I would love it if you were in a Superman movie.

Speaker 1 But have you lost job opportunities because of this?

Speaker 1 There was other a couple of things that were going on, but they stopped. Again, I don't know if October 7th.

Speaker 1 The Superman stories yourself. Yeah, yeah.
What role were you?

Speaker 1 Okay. What did you audition for? Yeah, it's okay.

Speaker 1 So in June, I was traveling to Dubai.

Speaker 1 And right an hour before I get into the car and go there, my manager is like, Bess, I'm going to send you a script, read it it's the for superman it's like oh superman you know i i i'm not really good in auditions i'm not an assembly actor so i was like okay i'm just gonna do it send the tape

Speaker 1 i do the tape i send it i go to the airport and and i read i and i can i think i can talk about it now because they said they changed the script so basically what i found it interesting in that new script is that there is like a a dictator in a country that invades another country and Superman interferes politically.

Speaker 1 That's the first time we ever see Superman interferes politically. So basically, it was like Russia and Ukraine, but because of me, it was like

Speaker 1 it couldn't be Russia and Ukraine. So it had to be something kind of like with a flavor.
So I read the role as if, as a mixture of Trump and Mubarak.

Speaker 1 I did this mix like, you know,

Speaker 1 like the kind of the middle piece, but also like kind of like the

Speaker 1 essence of Trump into it.

Speaker 1 I went to the airport. It's like an hour.
It's like James Gunn saw it. He loves you.
It's like, what? I never had an audition that fast. I mean, I had a few roles, but not that fast, not like that.

Speaker 1 And then I said, well,

Speaker 1 the strike starts like tomorrow, and we need to be on the phone. But after the strike, we cannot talk the seg after strike, like where the writers and the actors strike.

Speaker 1 So like, well, I'm going to be on a plane right now. It's like, wait, once you land, you can have a Zoom call with James Gunn.
I have a call with James Gunn.

Speaker 1 I am a huge fan of him. The guy took like something like Guardian of the Galaxy, nobody knew about it, made amazing trilogy.
And he is like a really cool guy. I like what he did.

Speaker 1 And it was like really nice. And he started to talk to me about the movie.
And you know, like, I talked to people before recasting them, so I know that everybody is on set, have a good chemistry.

Speaker 1 It was amazing. So, in your mind, if you're an actor, what does that mean? You got the part.
And he told me, you got the part.

Speaker 1 Month goes by, strike goes by. October 7th happens.
I do Piers Morgan one and two.

Speaker 1 And then I go to my Australian tour. My manager called me, pass him, the circle's over.
It's like, you don't get the part anymore.

Speaker 1 I was sad, very sad, but for three days and said, like, I need to stand up with it.

Speaker 1 I'm actually doing very well. Alhamdulillah.

Speaker 1 And then

Speaker 1 when I went

Speaker 1 to Chris Como,

Speaker 1 I...

Speaker 1 After I finished the show, he told me, did you lose any opportunities? And that was off record after the show was like we concluded.

Speaker 1 And I said, I talked about Superman and I found myself when I was talking, I was angry. I was bitter.

Speaker 1 And I went home. I was like, why was I angry? Why was I bitter? It wasn't meant to be.
And I'm living a good life now.

Speaker 1 I don't need to.

Speaker 1 So when I was asked again the next day in two different interviews, the BBC and

Speaker 1 another one was alone with my friend, you know, with Allah,

Speaker 1 I said the story in a different way. I said, I don't have any anger.
As a matter of fact, maybe if I was Wander Brothers, I didn't talk about James Gunn, I thought it was the studio.

Speaker 1 If I was Wander Brothers and I'm a Muslim, I wouldn't have like a Zionist or a pro-Israeli in my movie.

Speaker 1 But I want to tell them that, like, when I criticize Israel, I am not a threat to you as a Jew and we can actually have more in common. So I was more of a kind of empathic.

Speaker 1 So when I said that, the internet went crazy. And, you know, James Gunn have haters because, you know, the Snyder verse and all of the that just, it's a word that I don't understand

Speaker 1 and James Gunn

Speaker 1 like

Speaker 1 had all of these attacks on him

Speaker 1 and I was pissed of how it was handled I wasn't angry at James Gunn but I thought it was handled so my public system manager is like Basim stay calm don't speak it's better like to to like not talk about it I said okay So as I'm, there's nothing wrong about me, but I see the heat is rising against James Gunn.

Speaker 1 And that is a guy that I had a personal connection with, even through Zoom. And I didn't like what was happening.

Speaker 1 And then he called me and he explained to me, as I passed him, you know, I actually use, like, have camera tests before people before. Finally, I didn't know that.

Speaker 1 And I, and then we changed the script and it was the strike, so I didn't call.

Speaker 1 And also, I thought to myself, I'm small, I'm a small actor, I'm not that important for him to call me to say, we're going to change the script.

Speaker 1 So I still think that like the timing sucks and everything. But then I went and I did a video explaining exactly what I'm telling you because I didn't want to be famous for the wrong reasons.

Speaker 1 Because that would be unfair. Because that was already people were and I was having like interviews.
Can you come about the supermarket? I was like, guys, that's it.

Speaker 1 I'm not going to talk about it because this is an issue. And I didn't, and I, when I talked to James on the phone, I felt how sincere he was.

Speaker 1 So I didn't want someone to, because of me, will have that kind of attack because I know what it means to be on the other side of that kind of attack. It's terrible.

Speaker 1 And it ruins your life and it ruins your day. And nobody deserves to be doing that.
And I don't want to be the reason for somebody else to go through that pain.

Speaker 1 And you also said that you don't want to be a victim.

Speaker 1 I don't want to be.

Speaker 1 I'm doing great. I'm selling out everywhere.
I'm having a wonderful, loyal audience is coming to me. Why would I be angry about the role of it? Superman.

Speaker 1 Yes, it's great to be in a superhero movie, but so what? You know, but you know, there's a

Speaker 1 wisdom in that. Even if you weren't doing great, that's a choice a lot of people can

Speaker 1 come to, which is like, do I play victim here or not? It's greed. It's greed.

Speaker 1 They want more attention. They want to be more into the thing.
They want more and more. And there is so much to go around to be enough for all of us, but it is greed.
It is ego. Ego.
Ego. Ego.

Speaker 1 I need to be in the center. I need to be victimized.

Speaker 1 I need to be people feel sorry for me and love me.

Speaker 1 And it is not the right way. It is not because it is fake.
It is fake. It is up.
And I did not victimize myself when I left for Egypt. I mean, in the time that I was, now I speak about it now.

Speaker 1 But in that dark times, I was detained in airports. I didn't have my American passport yet.
I was still traveling with my Egyptian passport. And I was detained in an Arab airport.

Speaker 1 And I was going to be delivered to the Egyptians. I had shows when I was still starting.

Speaker 1 I had hecklers being sent to me by the Egyptian embassy and the Egyptian consulate in New York and in London to curse me and to take videos of that and then send it to state-run media in Egypt.

Speaker 1 And I didn't speak about that because I felt that, like, if I speak about that, I feel about what was going on to me, I would be victimizing myself.

Speaker 1 It's like, if I'm going to be good, I'm going to be good because of what I do, not because of what people's perception of what I'm going through.

Speaker 1 Yeah, and that becomes a slippery slope. And somehow, victimizing yourself goes to more victimizing.
Yeah. And then you cannot leave that habit.

Speaker 1 You can only exist and thrive if people feel sorry for you. Yeah.
I mean, Israel and Palestine currently both have that temptation.

Speaker 1 I would always push back when you do the comparison because one of them is not really in the same kind of power. I mean, yeah, for sure.
So

Speaker 1 it's very easy to say why Palestinians would victimize themselves, but Israel with all of that military might, man, it's

Speaker 1 too much.

Speaker 1 What Israel is doing is that they're victimizing the Jewish experience.

Speaker 1 And I don't think a lot of other, and I don't think it is fair for a lot of Jews.

Speaker 1 I don't think that they should use the Holocaust and the persecution that happened to Jewish people all through history in order to push an equally oppressive agenda.

Speaker 1 That is not fair and it's not good for the Jewish people living. And it is basically a disrespect to the memory of the Holocaust.

Speaker 1 I told you, I want to make a movie about the Holocaust.

Speaker 1 I do, because what happened was that kind of engineered torture should never happen again, and it should not be happening now.

Speaker 1 So to you, what Israel is doing is leading to more anti-Semitism in the world. 100%.

Speaker 1 And I think, and I know, can I be a conspiracy theorist for a second? Please, the head is flat. We all know that.

Speaker 1 Part of me thinking, maybe they are doing that intentionally, because if there's a rise of anti-Semitism in Jews, there will always like points like, see, they hate us so we can do whatever we want.

Speaker 1 Because if because

Speaker 1 you see, if we

Speaker 1 let go of our might and our strength, we're going to go back to the concentration camps because because you see how the world hates you.

Speaker 1 And again, when you say they are people in power. Yeah.
Oh, yeah, absolutely. Listen, it's always the people in power.

Speaker 1 I believe that humans are easily corruptible and easily repairable, but the corruptible part is much easier. But

Speaker 1 people could change, but power, people in power are very dangerous. Very, very dangerous.

Speaker 1 Especially if you have religion, which is power by itself, military might political support and money dude that's the

Speaker 1 that's a very very very dangerous recipe that you know all that said i i do believe in the power of the little guy the individual to overthrow the government you know i don't know if you heard but the arab spring

Speaker 1 uh you know happens but but but but okay here we are

Speaker 1 we are here it's among friends we're americans right we're americans yeah allegedly

Speaker 1 we're americans and

Speaker 1 How funny is that? Like, just given our two backgrounds.

Speaker 1 We're Americans.

Speaker 1 We're Americans. It's like.

Speaker 1 We're Americans.

Speaker 1 There's one thing about the power of the little guy that I am very sad about.

Speaker 1 Because, you see,

Speaker 1 I love America, by the way.

Speaker 1 I consider it my new home. And I want my kids to grow up here.

Speaker 1 I'm very grateful for the opportunity that I have in the United States.

Speaker 1 And I criticize the United States politics and I criticize it out of love, the same way that I was criticizing what's happening with Egypt out of love.

Speaker 1 What is worrying for me

Speaker 1 is how the power of the little man is diminishing.

Speaker 1 It doesn't matter now who do you vote into power. They will not listen to you.
They would listen to the people who paid them to be there.

Speaker 1 And it is very concerning because I can see the American democracies turning not even slowly, very rapidly into into an oligarchy.

Speaker 1 I'm sure that all of the millions of people who are voting, they don't vote for the NRA. They don't

Speaker 1 vote for APAC. They don't vote for the pharmaceutical companies.
They don't vote for the military industry complex.

Speaker 1 And yet, the people in power, they come in, they take your vote and my vote, and they are loyal to those people, not to us. And it is very, very,

Speaker 1 very concerning. Very concerning.
And this is the danger of

Speaker 1 American policies, American politics and American democracies. It is dangerous because basically the vote becomes just like a ceremony

Speaker 1 that

Speaker 1 someone with the more

Speaker 1 funding will get to power, and then he's not loyal to you.

Speaker 1 So the fire, I mean, we are in Texas.

Speaker 1 Everybody's armed to the teeth here. Yeah, but what are these arms going to do in front of tanks?

Speaker 1 Well, you said the American military is unique in this way. I know, but

Speaker 1 for now, the tanks are...

Speaker 1 First of all, I believe Russia has more tanks than the United States. Tanks, I don't know.

Speaker 1 You know, I'm not an expert in military strategic deployment of arms, but the United States uses different kinds of weapons.

Speaker 1 They have drones and they have the lasers and they're sitting comfortably behind the screens. It's kind of like it turns like a big Xbox game.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 And they sell a lot of those things to everybody.

Speaker 1 It's crazy because the defense budget is 68% of American military. It's like almost $850 billion each year.

Speaker 1 And most of that weapons, we don't even need it.

Speaker 1 We just do it because of the contracts. There was like an incredible 60 minutes.
I'm sure that you saw it, the one about like the gouging of the prices of the Department of Defense.

Speaker 1 It was one of the most fascinating things that I've ever seen. They said, like, a valve, a safety, a safety oil valve that used to be sold for $329,

Speaker 1 now it is sold for $9,000. Why? Because there's only five

Speaker 1 weapon companies and they can control the prices.

Speaker 1 And in 2006, the whole Apache fleet of the American army in Iraq was grounded because there is one valve that they were like gouging the price and didn't want to give them. The Stinger missile.

Speaker 1 That's just like the missile,

Speaker 1 the one that you carry and then and it's like the anti-aircraft it used to be sold for twenty five thousand dollars now it's sold for four hundred thousand dollars and nobody is doing doing that you know why because the dod has fired thirty one hundred and thirty thousand people including engineers and negotiators so now in order to cut expenses now we're paying more money and the thing is we do not have a say in this We do not have a say in how my tax money and your tax money is being spent.

Speaker 1 Because I'm sure you don't want your money to be sent to Israel like that. I'm sure.
Even if you're Jews, I'm sure.

Speaker 1 I'm sure that, like, I don't want my money to be given to some Muslim countries who kill other Muslims. I'm sure.
But it is, it is not.

Speaker 1 Here's the thing: what kind of power do we have other than speaking? So, what is left for us is free speech. And now, when you speak, they call you anti-Semitic.
You see why I'm angry?

Speaker 1 But still, I mean, America is holding pretty strong despite the criticisms on the free speech front.

Speaker 1 But if you look at the

Speaker 1 freedom of the press, freedom of the speech index,

Speaker 1 America is not at the top. It is not.

Speaker 1 And this is why, for example, it is very disheartening for me to see that the Western media, Western press, that used to be the beacon of freedom is now using as mouthpieces.

Speaker 1 And it is funny how the New York Times,

Speaker 1 Nixon got angry in the New York Times in 1971.

Speaker 1 when they found leaks about him lying about the Vietnam War since the beginning.

Speaker 1 And now he hired the plumbers, you know, the special unit in order to go in and find the leaks. This was Watergate basically, because he was angry to see who leaked that instead of fixing the problem.

Speaker 1 Now the New York Times have published this story about the rape that was a hoax that was written by Anna Schwartz who was someone who had no experience.

Speaker 1 And now

Speaker 1 when it was leaked, instead of them correcting themselves, they went in and they had their own investigation to see who leaked. The New York Times in 2003 became the mouthpiece of George W.

Speaker 1 Bush of the WMD. And now, as an American, I see that the New York Times becoming a mouthpiece of a foreign country.
Why do you do that?

Speaker 1 One of the things that's really difficult to know is where to find the truth.

Speaker 1 It does seem that both sides use propaganda and both sides lie a lot.

Speaker 1 Both sides, as in both Israel and Palestine, pro-Palestine, pro-Israel. There's a lot of lies.
I know, but

Speaker 1 it's a lot of inequality, man.

Speaker 1 There is like a lot of people on the internet, but like who have the mainstream media siding with? Yeah, but you know, thanks to the people. And I'm talking about media.

Speaker 1 Yes, thank God for social media because now it's individuals. There are people.
Yes. There are people.

Speaker 1 You're comparing BBC, New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal with just people with a TikTok account. Yeah, you get more power in your view.

Speaker 1 Now, it is actually very, very fascinating to see the little man having that power over the media. And because to speak portion of, like,

Speaker 1 this is my.

Speaker 1 But you cannot call people with TikTok propagandists while people being paid to give you the news and they deliberately lie to you. Yes, I can.
They're both propagandists. Well,

Speaker 1 yes, yes. But like, but the mechanism and the intentions are different.
Because

Speaker 1 here's the thing. I'd rather have the TikTok guy and then the guy.

Speaker 1 The TikTok guy is a TikTok guy.

Speaker 1 But if you have the New York Times being told that they're being exposed to be lying, and then they get this like UN report, which is like a disgrace, and you just put the title and you don't talk about it.

Speaker 1 It's like, I'm fine with CNN and Jake Tapper and all of those people like spreading the rape allegations for years. They didn't, I don't even want them to refute them.

Speaker 1 I want them to bring the Israeli reports saying that it didn't happen. The Israeli media themselves, they didn't even bother, not once.
Is that balanced? That's not.

Speaker 1 So that's why people in TikTok, and because they have to take matters on their own hand. Yeah, but the problem with the people in TikTok is the drug, the dope immune rush of getting a lot of likes.

Speaker 1 So instead of talking about the death of civilians, they'll talk about beheaded babies or the equivalent.

Speaker 1 They're going to actually make up stories because the made-up stories are going to be more viral. And so now we're just in this sea in this muck of lies.

Speaker 1 And there's a lot of people who actually expose those lies on TikTok. So you have both.

Speaker 1 Yeah, you have both. And it's kind of like the democracy of the social media, as we always call it.

Speaker 1 But if you have the street run media that is the legacy media seen in BBC, New York Times, Fox News, all of those people, and they are like spreading lies and they're not even doing their journalistic job in order to at least bring the other side.

Speaker 1 Yeah. That's problematic.
And that's that's worse. You're supposed to be journalists.
Yes.

Speaker 1 It's supposed to be reports. Report.

Speaker 1 You know, report. Yeah, but you know, I see that this is like a catalyst, an inspiration for the citizen journalist to rise up.
This is what you're doing. Oh, this? Yeah.
This is what you're doing.

Speaker 1 No, this is what you're doing because you go into a deep dive. This is like a no-filter thing.
There's no spin. The long form.
Long form is going to save us.

Speaker 1 I see why you hate the TikToks like a Dupa Mean Rush. You know what I'm saying? Stupid TikTok.

Speaker 1 Five hours later. I saw the resentment in your face.

Speaker 1 I can't look away. For like those 30 seconds, I do do four hours.

Speaker 1 I mean, both have a place. Both are exciting.

Speaker 1 But I can't, it is very dangerous. Like, you can't look away.
And I almost never,

Speaker 1 maybe I'm doing it wrong, but I almost never feel better ever after having used TikTok. Mix two of us.
I can't. I cannot.
I cannot. I have a team.
By the way, I give

Speaker 1 my password to like a team. I don't even go there because I went.
I once in a dark night

Speaker 1 very late at night i went tick tock and it was like

Speaker 1 two hours what yeah

Speaker 1 what i said no no no no no this is dangerous i'm i'm i'm already like an instagram and facebook guy i don't need that

Speaker 1 and i barely get out of twitter i mean like x i don't i can't x is a cesspool x is just like too the concentrated hate and x is too much it's too much i can't so you you don't check it at all you try not to check it at all it is very intense.

Speaker 1 I don't, I don't, I don't, I don't, I can't, I can't. I just like, I post something and I run.

Speaker 1 Posting ghosts.

Speaker 1 Uh, so you're you're doing comedy here in the United States right now. Yes.
Joe Rogan has the comedy mothership, which is an incredible club. Have you considered doing that club? I would love to.

Speaker 1 I mean, I. Do you know Joe? Of course no.

Speaker 1 Who does a new Joe? I feel like it's a small world of comedy. That's why I.
No, I think like Joe, Joe's story was like

Speaker 1 what he did and the stuff that he

Speaker 1 did in the UFC and his podcast. And it just,

Speaker 1 it's very impressive. The fact that he is there and he's bringing all of those people, whether they're in comedy or his podcast, is very impressive.
And

Speaker 1 this is what the media is all about. What is like the internet is all about to give you the experiences of stuff that you might never experience.

Speaker 1 And that is very important. I mean, you do it with people with like you go into their brains.

Speaker 1 He goes, take people and they they take their experiences and their lives and their story. It is very interesting.
And this is the beauty of that art form because

Speaker 1 you have all of these experiences at the tips of your hands and it is there for you to learn from.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 what he's doing, like when he moved to Texas and we did the comedy mothership,

Speaker 1 anybody who would like push comedy forward, That is the most difficult art form and the most demanding.

Speaker 1 And the fact that you do that, and he might not even be making money out of it, but he's doing that because of his passion. That is enough.

Speaker 1 Yeah, he's he's the he really believes in creating this like uh

Speaker 1 place where comedians can be really free. And one of the cool things about uh the comedy mothership is like comedian is king there.
Yeah, like there

Speaker 1 we have to like you have to bow down to the

Speaker 1 because you know the comedian who came there came after like eating shit, yeah, dying out there everywhere else. If you pit, you are basically you're a saint.

Speaker 1 I have eaten shit from every

Speaker 1 now. I'm going to give you shit.

Speaker 1 Ah, it's great. You already told me what you think about the state of politics in the United States, but now tell me what you really think.

Speaker 1 What do you think of the choice of Trump versus Biden? How do we end up here? I don't know, man. I mean, like the fact that you have two people over the age of 90.
Yeah. It is.

Speaker 1 I think it's over 100, but that's all right. All combined, like 170.

Speaker 1 It is so sad. it is so sad that this is what we can produce as as a society like

Speaker 1 like a demagogue and

Speaker 1 a sleepy joe

Speaker 1 he's too he's he's not there man he's he's gone he's gone i mean

Speaker 1 he could you know like when old people could be like a danger for themselves He's a danger for the whole world. I mean, like the whole world.

Speaker 1 Like, if

Speaker 1 an old person would die, he would would, like, you know, have like a hip replacement. We can need them and like a new planet because of one decision.

Speaker 1 But it's not just that. It's not it.
It's

Speaker 1 what are, when I came here, listen, I am, I'm a, I'm a Democrat. I always like, and I told you, like, I vote for Bernie Sanders.
I, I, I, like, I, I supported him like 2016, but I couldn't vote then.

Speaker 1 And of course, a huge fan of Obama.

Speaker 1 And one of my things

Speaker 1 is like, he's the first Muslim president. It's like, but he killed Muslims.
Like, ah, that's things Muslims do. But, anyways,

Speaker 1 I love that line.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 it just,

Speaker 1 I think

Speaker 1 the whole idea, like, my shock is

Speaker 1 I told you about like what Biden said about, like, I'm a Zionist. Okay, we are a Zionist.
But then, like, Jews are not safe anywhere other than Israel. It's like, dude, what the hell are you saying?

Speaker 1 And if you don't care about me and you don't care about my misery,

Speaker 1 why would I care about you winning or losing? You know, and I have a joke that I told people, like, why would even Biden listen to us?

Speaker 1 He just raised $145 million in California alone from pro-Israeli groups. I mean, what can we Arabs working in the vape business do to him?

Speaker 1 It's like, we cannot compete with that. I mean, like, practically, I mean, it's like,

Speaker 1 life is unfair. The guy is a politician.
He needs bills to pay. He needs a campaign to run.
He needs money. He will go to the people who will give him money.

Speaker 1 Joe Biden is the highest paid politician from Israeli lobbies, $4.6 million

Speaker 1 over the years. Yeah, but I also believe in

Speaker 1 great leaders that go against all of that. But unfortunately, Bernie Sanders was like that.
Bernie Sanders.

Speaker 1 Yes, but also age. I don't want to be age.
Of course, of course. No, no.
But even with like, because I remember listening to Bernie Sanders 20 years ago on Tom Hartman Show.

Speaker 1 And I don't want to say anything against Bernie, but like he was sharper then. Of course.
There's a thing with age.

Speaker 1 Of course. No,

Speaker 1 I think I'm a huge fan about putting a limit.

Speaker 1 on your working years because you don't want to have like a Mitch McConnell moment every now because now the whole thing I'm like what is this is not like a house by scare home it just it it it is unfair it is unfair and that the whole idea that you have like unlimited, like you have a limit for the president, but you don't have a limit for congresspeople and senators.

Speaker 1 That's what do you mean? This is basically you can go in and be in governance for forever. And you know, the longer that you can get, the more corrupt you will get.

Speaker 1 Yes, that and that is very concerning for Americans. Everybody, everybody becomes corrupt after.

Speaker 1 I mean, that's why two terms is a good limit for everybody. Yeah.
And, you know, maybe half a term for the Egyptian leaders.

Speaker 1 Well, you know, our half term is 15 years.

Speaker 1 Quarter term.

Speaker 1 You should come back and run for office there. Oh, my God.
No.

Speaker 1 No, there's a curse in the

Speaker 1 Egyptian presidency.

Speaker 1 Nobody comes there. Is that dead or in jail? Yeah.

Speaker 1 It's not the most appealing job. They might make a statue of you, though, make you look good.
After my death.

Speaker 1 I

Speaker 1 very good, Dad.

Speaker 1 Yeah, when you look at

Speaker 1 what happened with Navalny,

Speaker 1 since you kind of really thought about this in Egypt, what happened with Navalny in Russia? What do you think about that? Yeah, but what happened in Navalny in Russia is not something new in Russia.

Speaker 1 I mean, Putin have like this whole history of poisoning and killing people. And it's kind of like pretty much

Speaker 1 he's, I would have to credit Putin, he's like bringing us the essence of the dark ages, the middle ages.

Speaker 1 It's like, you know, we know, like, basically, Putin is like, is the living example of what happens if Game of Thrones was reality?

Speaker 1 It's like death by poison, like a blow-up a plane. It's like mysteriously disappears.
It is so

Speaker 1 it is very dark, but it's like, wow, it's like a, it's, it's, it's a, it's a, uh, it's a television show.

Speaker 1 Maybe that's what attracts us to that part of the world is that it's so much on display this game of

Speaker 1 of power of geopolitics Yeah, of war. No, but the same happens in the West, but I'm behind closed doors.
It's not that open.

Speaker 1 It's not that pronounced. You know, it's like ooh, poops.

Speaker 1 Epstein.

Speaker 1 It's like, oh, blah, blah, blah. We just like, I think, I think because of the West is more advanced, like in movies and cinemas, we kind of direct it better.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 I think the outcomes, like the way that you kind of like set the scenes, like, scene, and scene. That's why people are like landing on the moon.
They're like, oh.

Speaker 1 I get it, but we haven't gone back.

Speaker 1 The Earth is flat.

Speaker 1 All right. If we zoom out, do you think there will always be war in the world? Yeah.
Always be suffering? Yes. Yeah.

Speaker 1 But here's the thing. I don't think for long.
I don't think that will happen for long. Wait a minute.
Yeah. Yeah.
Because here's the thing.

Speaker 1 Humanity is destined to have war, especially like it will have war. But

Speaker 1 something happened in the last 50 years.

Speaker 1 Now we have much more lethal weapons.

Speaker 1 The problem is, the beginning, it's like swords against swords, horses, cavalry, like cannons, catapults, medium-missiles,

Speaker 1 but now we're like, you know, like a press of a button, you can annihilate the whole planet.

Speaker 1 And this is the problem. Wars will all continue.
The problem is when is going to be the tipping point where we are actually going to destroy ourselves. And it is so easy now to destroy ourselves.

Speaker 1 The amount of weapons and the quality of weapons that we have,

Speaker 1 it is designed to kill more effectively,

Speaker 1 it is crazy. It's like we can create our own destruction on ourselves.
And I think we're not that far away from it.

Speaker 1 Just looking at nuclear weapons, the fascinating thing about nuclear weapons, as I've gotten to learn recently,

Speaker 1 just how few people are involved in a full-on nuclear war that kills,

Speaker 1 basically kills everybody.

Speaker 1 Well,

Speaker 1 three plus billion people right away. And the consequences

Speaker 1 of the nuclear winter,

Speaker 1 it's unbelievable. But all it takes is, I mean, one president can do it.
So it could be even a false alarm misunderstanding like what happened in the cuba missile crisis but again

Speaker 1 and now there's

Speaker 1 uh more nations are prepared and ready to launch yeah

Speaker 1 and and and and you have a media and a 24 hours kind of like thing that makes you like at edge the whole time that's crazy There's a dark perspective on this where there's certain members of the media that would kind of

Speaker 1 enjoy the prospect of nuclear war, like a little bit, just let's get as close to it as possible. You have another factor that will contribute to that:

Speaker 1 religion.

Speaker 1 And remember how, like, uh, the radical Islamists talk about like the end of time and whatever, but like, most of the Islamic countries don't have that much power.

Speaker 1 Problem is with Christian Zionists now being on the top of the world with America. They have been pushing for that kind of conflict to kind of escalate.
Escalate. Listen Listen to Sarah Palin.

Speaker 1 It's like, God wants us here.

Speaker 1 Like Carl Roe of all of the new gods, the dispensationalist Reagan.

Speaker 1 There's an incredible book called like Forcing the Hands of Gods. Oh, beautiful book.
I read this, like, it's published in 1998, but it still matters today.

Speaker 1 The whole idea about like, especially the Zionist Christians who love Israel, but they hate the Jews. They're anti-Semite, but they love Israel because of its role.

Speaker 1 This is all basically formed because of the interpretation of the Bible of Schofield and how they talk about the end of time, then Armageddon, and then the late great planet Earth, and then left behind Sirius, and all of that.

Speaker 1 It's all about like we're heading to Armageddon.

Speaker 1 And the problem is, Islam has their people that believe that the end of time, and then we have the Christians that believe in the end of time, and then you have Israel happy that those people are using it for the end of time.

Speaker 1 And then the whole idea about them pushing as many weapons and troops and people in the Middle East to be there for the nuclear holocaust.

Speaker 1 And John Hagee, one of the pastors, talked about that, about the brimstones, and it's not going to be a nuclear holocaust.

Speaker 1 All that people, it's crazy how people are so despising life that they are wanting death.

Speaker 1 So now you all would have these revelations, but these revelations mean nothing if you don't have an effective weapon in order to make it happen. And this is the crazy thing.
And I'm worried that

Speaker 1 the end is going to be by someone that wants to meet God a little bit earlier.

Speaker 1 Somebody who's really in a hurry.

Speaker 1 Well, I have good news for you. Maybe we'll become a multi-planetary species.
Maybe Ellen Musk will lead us the way to get out in space. Maybe he's one of them.

Speaker 1 He's a secret lizard.

Speaker 1 I asked you offline to not mention the lizard people.

Speaker 1 There's like a whole people that believe in the lizard people. It's crazy.

Speaker 1 I actually have to be honest, I haven't fully looked into the lizard people i probably should you should yeah well maybe i'm afraid of the truth

Speaker 1 uh then

Speaker 1 then then then yeah

Speaker 1 removing my face

Speaker 1 i mean what so let's say let's say you're wrong about the end of the world and and we it all turns out

Speaker 1 great

Speaker 1 and humanity flourishes

Speaker 1 why would that happen What gives you hope for that trajectory for humanity?

Speaker 1 Younger people,

Speaker 1 the people of TikTok that you don't like.

Speaker 1 Yeah, there is a lot of like bullshit there. You know, after you saying this, people just keep sending you TikTok videos.
These younger people,

Speaker 1 this woman showing her boobs, that woman. That's going to save all that.

Speaker 1 All right, bossum. Thank you.

Speaker 1 No, there's, like, I think

Speaker 1 there is a wealth of, you know, remember like the joke that said, like, we thought that, like, when we have internet, we're going to have, like, be more, you know,

Speaker 1 more informed. And now we're watching Twerking videos.
And that is true. But on the other side, the fact that you have the availability of information.

Speaker 1 I'm learning a lot. And there's people who are using that platform from that.
It's not the majority because, you know, it's not very interesting and exciting.

Speaker 1 But I think there might be a tipping point where there's enough people that will be aware and maybe they would collectively do something in order to bring back the power to the small man.

Speaker 1 And maybe it sounds very naive.

Speaker 1 But we don't know. We don't know.
Because you have already seen the legacy media and the legacy politicians shaking in the past few months. They're getting nervous.

Speaker 1 They're getting nervous because people are calling them out. And those people were like hiding behind their desk, behind in their offices, and not like not holding accounts for that.

Speaker 1 But like people now are calling them out. And it is not going to happen like this year or next year, but I think it's something.
What advice would you give to those young folks?

Speaker 1 I will never give advice to those people.

Speaker 1 Get off TikTok.

Speaker 1 I will never because their input is different than mine.

Speaker 1 But there's one thing I learned when people told me, did the revolution fail in Egypt? Did people, that the people are like, listen, the revolution is not an event.

Speaker 1 It's not like, hey, we go in, we topple the government. It's not a revolution.
A revolution is a process. It's a very long process.
And maybe

Speaker 1 that process, I mean, as much as we don't like what happened in the Arab world, but the people there, the awareness that happened and the discussions that have been opened that were you didn't even imagine what happened in the Middle East is happening.

Speaker 1 And maybe the beginning of any

Speaker 1 hope of change is that people start talking, speaking out, talking about stuff they were not allowed to speak about. Like, for example, Israel.

Speaker 1 The revolution continues. Ah, yes.

Speaker 1 Basim, you're a beautiful human being. It's truly a pleasure and honor to meet you.
I could just feel the love radiating from you. I hope I get to see you perform live.

Speaker 1 I hope to get to see you many more times. Thank you for being who you are.
Thank you so much. And I would love to invite you for my new special, De Islam Unazi, Basimi.

Speaker 1 That should be the title of your autobiography.

Speaker 1 Thank you so much. Thank you, brother.

Speaker 1 Thanks for listening to this conversation with Bossum Youssef. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description.
And now, let me leave you with some words from Jon Stewart.

Speaker 1 The press can hold this magnifying glass up to our problems, bringing them into focus, illuminating issues heretofore unseen,

Speaker 1 or they can use that magnifying glass to light ants on fire and then perhaps host a week of shows on the sudden, unexpected, dangerous flaming ant epidemic. If we amplify everything, we hear nothing.

Speaker 1 Thank you for listening, and hope to see you next time.