Veteran's Day and the Yom Kippur War

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Hello, America.

This is the Victor Davis-Hansen Show.

You've joined our weekend edition where we look at a few news stories usually, but then we also take up a historical topic.

And today will be the Yom Kippur War.

So we'll see that in our second segment.

And we'll start first with a few stories from the recent news.

Stay with us and we'll be right back.

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Welcome back.

This is the Victor Davis Hansen Show, and Victor is the Martin and Neale Anderson Senior Fellow in Military History and Classics at the Hoover Institution and the Wayne and Marcia Busky Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College.

You can find Victor at his website, VictorHanson.com, and come join us for get a free subscription and get our newsletter three to four times a week with the recent stuff on the website.

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Well, Victor, we've got a lot on the agenda today.

This is the weekend and it's November 11th, so I was wondering if you had some thoughts on this Veterans Day.

The 11th day

on the 11th hour of the 11th month.

And that was the armistice in World War I.

And it was a great thing to end, you know,

the meat grinder that killed 17, 18 million Europeans and people in the Middle East as well.

But it was an armistice.

And the German army surrendered inside France and Belgium.

And so there was no comprehensive settlement

from November all the way to the next summer, June, July, August, at the Versailles Treaty.

And by then, half the Allies had gone home.

And so

Germany never fully accepted the idea they had been beaten soundly and the ingredients for World War II were established because there was not an unconditional surrender, which should tell us something that the way to end wars is to defeat and humiliate the enemy and then being magnanimous but clear about the enemy's defeat.

And ever since then, we have commemorated these wars.

I grew up, you know, on this farm where I'm speaking, just imbued, because my earliest memory is maybe 1959, 58.

And the war was over just 14 years earlier, World War II.

And I mean, all of

victory at sea, submarines, battleship shows on Saturday morning, Bill Halsey would narrate submarine warfare, World War II.

We watched 12 o'clock high, the gallant men, combat.

Everything was World War II.

For Christmas, we got little GI uniforms.

We had models.

We made glued

B-17s, B-26s, B-25s, 24 models.

It was just imbued.

I think for most of my high school, I was outfitted in World War II surplus P jackets or bomber jackets or something like that, or combat boots.

It was just, we were so...

It was so immediate.

And in my particular family, I was reminded every

Veterans Day that my Swedish grandfather had been severely wounded in World War I with mustard and phosphine gas.

He was a machine gunner.

He was a teamster, and they put him in a combat unit.

And he was kind of disabled the rest of his life.

And then I was named after Victor Hansen, who was the first cousin, but then kind of adopted by my family when his mother died in childbirth.

He died on Okinawa on the last day, last hour of Sherido Hill on May 19, 1945.

My uncle, Vernon Nilsson, fought in the Aleutians.

My father flew 40 missions as a central fire control gunner on a B-29, had to make emergency landings, I think, twice on Iwo Jima.

And he got the highest medal that the Air Force could give, except for the Medal of Honor for removing an incendiary that was burning in the the Bombay over Japan.

And then

my mother's first cousin, Holt Cather, was killed during the breakout from Normandy as an infantryman.

My other cousin, Robert Hansen,

was in a very dangerous job as transporting war material to the Soviets by truck through Iran, supervising that.

And so that's all we grew up with.

I could go on and on, but everybody in the family was severely impacted.

I think my father was never quite the same because of, you know, I think of a squadron of 16 planes.

Only two or three made it

to the end of the war.

And then Vietnam came, and then, well, the Korean War was the first war we didn't win, then Vietnam.

We've talked about all these wars since antiquity, but

the veteran changed because they were no longer existential wars, but they were perverted by the Cold War dynamic of nuclear Armageddon,

where Americans had to go into god-awful places where they could not achieve

incontrovertible success, victory, because of the threat of the Soviet Union's clients appealing to the nuclear umbrella of Moscow.

And then, of course, Gulf War I, and then the

tragedy of Afghanistan, the 20-year,

I don't want to to get into it, Nick, gets me so angry, and then the Iraq war.

So,

but through it all, there's been these people who, throughout our society, come out of nowhere and they go to God-forsaken places and they die.

And we in the United States live this very comfortable life and we're dependent on their duty and courage and

resourcefulness and ability.

So it's been very,

the American military has really saved the country on a number of occasions.

Yeah.

Well, speaking of that, there have been at least 47 soldiers wounded in the Middle East since October 7th, and we really haven't heard any response from the Biden administration.

Did you have thoughts on that?

Well,

I mean, they claim they're minor injuries, but who knows what the Biden administration classifies as minor, but there shouldn't be any of them.

Why do they continue?

Because we know what Iran is doing, it's losing face in the Middle East, that after all this ragadachio, that was going to destroy Israel, destroy the United States, kill American leaders.

That was someone basically said that at the UN.

The deputy foreign minister of Raddick said the leaders will not escape

responsibility.

Given all that, I don't know why we don't retaliate.

And we should just tell them, if you attack, or your surrogates and attack American, we're going, Americans again, we're going to do this.

We're going to take out this, this, and this.

And it's not going to be limited to Syria and Iraq.

It may be directed at Iran, and then you'll have to do your worst, and we'll do our best.

Otherwise, you're going to have no deterrence.

And that will also instruct Hezbollah not to get involved.

And it will...

silence the idea of the braggadah.

The whole thing is so surreal because all of the venom, all of the bragging, all of the threats come from Hezbollah and Hamas and Iran, the chest beating.

They are the people who wear the mask.

They are the people who shout.

They are the people calling for genocide here and abroad.

And yet when it gets down to it, they never are the people who say, you know what, let's go at it.

Let's go at it.

Hamas, we're going to come out of the tunnels and we're going to beat the idea.

That was one thing I admired about Sadat in the Yom Kippur War.

He didn't really say much.

He just attacked Israel.

It was a surprise, sneaky attack, and I'm glad he lost.

But the point was it was out in the open.

And he challenged head-to-head the IDF.

But this rhetoric is so virulent and so threatening.

And it's so weird to see all these people in the United States be so pro-Hamas and unapologetic.

And yet, when they're called called on it or Talib is threatened with censure or people in the university are said you know what we may we may not hire you if you're if you're calling for the destruction they start crying we can't believe this is happening to me who are you to do this I just saw the news and Talib was up there

she didn't say that

You know, she didn't say that she'd called for the destruction of Israel on various occasions, publicly, on social media, from the river to the sea.

She didn't want to say that she stirred up

a mob that went into the rotunda, which was sort of defined as an insurrection as it pertained to January 6th.

But she was crying, and all the squad and all the people around her were crying.

And you think,

you're crying after you called for every Jew to be killed, and we're supposed to sit here and take this?

It was pathetic.

You know, and

did any of them think, well, I'm going to be even-handed.

So, Hamas, that was genocide.

That was an attempt at genocide to kill every Jew you could get your hands on on October.

And I condemn it without equivocation.

No, they didn't say that.

No.

They wouldn't get cut off from all of their stealthy funds in the Middle East.

They went back to, if she said that and damned Hamas and she went back to Palestine, She would be persona non grata at best.

And somebody would try to kill her if she did that.

And she knows that.

But she knows in the United States as a U.S.

citizen, she can damn this country, she can call for the genocide of Jews with complete impunity.

And she should.

That's the way our system works.

But she should have some,

at least some character in saying, you know what, I'm talking in an asymmetrical fashion, and I will not mention anything about Hamas, even though they beheaded, they put infants in ovens and baked them, they committed necrophilia, they dismembered people, they engaged in mass rapes, looting civilians tagged along,

and I'm going to condemn them.

And she won't do that because the moment she flies back to see a family member into Oman Jordan and drives into the West Bank or whatever she does, she will be in danger if she does that.

Yeah.

And you have to find her calls for our humaneness absolutely ludicrous since she will not condemn what Hamas does.

You know, I have a a lot of friends that are Palestinian and Arab and I fear for them.

I don't fear for their safety, but I fear for

their public

relations because they have no idea that when they occupy the Brooklyn Bridge or they go in and try to take over an entire street or they

try to shut down a city or they march at Harvard Yard and they say these things,

that most people understand what they're talking about when they say,

Palestine Palestine shall be free from the river to the sea.

That is, we want to get rid of all the Jews and Israel in it.

And if they say, well, we just want to get rid of Israel and Jews can stay there.

Can she tell me one country in the Middle East where Jews are safe?

Because there was 900,000 of them.

And they were in Syria.

They were in Iraq.

They were in Egypt.

They were in Morocco, Algeria.

And guess what?

Between 1947 and 1973, they ethnically cleansed all of them.

They stole their property.

They killed them.

They got rid of them.

They're all in Israel or spread all over the the world.

Yes.

So we know what it means.

And so

it's, I don't think they understand how they appear to most people.

And I know everybody says, well, Joe Biden is in a rock in a hard place.

He's worried about the Michigan electoral votes.

He will lose more electoral votes if he panders to that radical pro-Hamas clique.

The people in Michigan who are of Arab ancestry make up between one and a half and two percent of the electorate.

That's it.

And I can tell you, as someone who spends every summer in Michigan, especially rural Michigan, the number of people who are offended by listening to these death-curdling chants coming out of that community versus the people who are empowered,

it's not even close.

And yet they're pan.

And when she says, you know, Joe Biden, this is it.

She doesn't understand.

He's already pandering to you.

He's already taking a big hit.

He's low in the polls when he calls for a ceasefire.

Basically, he's saying to

the Israelis what he could have said to the Americans, maybe.

Why didn't he say right in the middle of Fallujah, just stop, end the cycle of violence, hey, you Marines?

And they did it once.

They did pull out.

And that was a mistake on the part of George W.

Bush.

And then they had to come in after the election and go back and retake it at greater cost.

But if somebody, right when they were on the edge of getting rid of ISIS and the Baathists and the Saddamites out of Fallujah, if somebody had said, if Israel said, you know, this is really bad, you guys are leveling Fallujah, and it reflects poorly on us as your ally, you think we would have listened to them?

No.

No.

No.

Not at all.

To continue in this line, maybe, but in

our domestic politics, I was wondering your thoughts on

really the Obama administration and its

supporters weighing in on this now as much as they are doing.

So, for example, Obama just gave an interview and he was in the midst of his, on the one hand, Hamas' actions were bad, on the other hand, Israel had an occupation, or even

David Axelrod weighing in that maybe Biden should step down in the next.

I thought that was even the more extraordinary insertion of an Obama administration official.

I was wondering what you had thoughts on all of this new stuff.

Well, we have to get the background down.

You can see what's happening.

And all of these states, the deadlines are looming for the elections coming up in a year.

So they are getting in a state of panic

because Biden's support is collapsing.

It's a quad facta.

Quad facta.

It is the growing corruption charges that cannot be denied.

And even Politico now on the left has a lever, not because they have any integrity, they don't, but they think he's expendable and they want to get him out before it's too late.

You can't get anybody else on the ballot.

So they are pressuring him on the corruption angle.

Then there's a cognitive decline and most voters, 75% of people don't think he can do the job.

It's pathetic, it's sad, it's tragic.

He has no business.

And

third, of course, is his agenda.

It's not popular.

Everything's failed.

He keeps talking about Bidenomics, and you just go to the store and prices are 30% higher than they were two years ago.

Gas, who can make it paying, you know, I bought a little thin rib rib eye steak.

It was $25.

Wow.

It was like $17, $18 a pound.

And I bought gas at $5.98 a gallon.

I was down in Southern California teaching at Pepperdine.

It was $6.60 a gallon.

Who can live like that?

No one can.

And so the polls show that.

The fourth thing is he's collapsed in the polls.

So the puppeteers are coming out now, Barack Obama.

They sense weakness on the part of Biden and they're thinking, you know what?

We got to get rid of him.

We've got to get rid of him.

Maybe he wants Kamala Harris, who knows?

But he's no longer an effective vehicle for the Obama third term.

Obama's, that's his term, not mine.

He said this is his virtual third term.

So now we understand he's taking credit.

Do you notice, Sammy?

He's bragging that he's writing the agenda for artificial intelligence, make sure that's going to be left-wing dominated in its propagandistic efforts.

So he's doing that, and now he's weighing in, as he always does, about the Middle East, because he sees that Biden's very unpopular.

And what does he say?

He does the typical Obama.

You said on the one hand, on the other hand, or what we say in classics is men de.

Men de.

The terms in Greek for that.

But

what he's really saying is typical Obama as well.

He says, we're all guilty.

We all are part of this.

No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.

Our listeners, all of you people out there are not guilty.

You didn't dream up this suicidal Middle East pact.

One person is guilty.

One person brought the Russians in in 2011.

And that was Barack Obama, because he was scared to enforce his own red lines in Syria.

So he brought the Russians in after 40 years.

And they've they've done nothing but create mischief.

One person was president when a million Iranians hit the street in the Green Revolution.

He didn't say a word for two weeks almost because he wanted them to fail because he was pro-theocratic Iran.

One person got out of obscurity, Robert Mali, who was completely unfit and a pro-Iranian zealot.

And he made

Obama made him his Hamas,

Hamas, and ISIS Tsar.

One person yanked everybody out of Iraq without warning and created ISIS that gobbled up half the country until Trump bombed the crap out of him.

One person started the Iran deal and had, as Ben Rhodes said,

he made an echo chamber and he got some Rhino Republicans to go along with circumventing the treaty obligations.

He didn't get two-thirds approval from the Senate for that crazy Iran deal that guaranteed them a pathway until Trump got rid of it.

One person, one person,

that was Obama.

He had the idea of the Shia Crescent.

If you have Tehran and you have Damascus and Beirut and Gaza City, then you, East Jerusalem, you've got yourself a foil to the Saudis, the Kuwaitis, the Emirates, the Israelis, the Egyptians, all of our so-called friends.

We'll just play them off against each other.

They're morally the same.

That was a disaster.

One person allowed all all this money to go to Lebanon that came into Hezbollah's hands and all this money to the PA in Gaza.

That was Besai.

One person lifted sanctions and gave $50 billion

war chest for Iran to sprinkle deadly weapons all over the Middle East.

That was you, Barak.

You did that.

You created the foundation of this mess that we're in.

So don't blame anybody else.

As you always do, you always blame people for your own self-created miseries.

It's despicable.

And he thinks he's going to get resonance because he thought he was going to be

so cool dialing in the presidency.

And believe me, listeners, I didn't make that up.

He said that.

He said he, in an interview in December of 2020, as I recall, they asked him, Would you like to be president again?

Well, you know, I wouldn't want all the work and the ceremony, but if I could just kind of work out my sweats, kind of dial in the instructions to a surrogate president?

Yeah, that'd be great.

What was he saying?

That was just code for

Joe Biden had no business being president.

We put this guy here because you guys were scared of Spartacus and Bernie and Elizabeth Warren and Buttigig.

So we put him there and he's an empty suit and I'm going to be dialing it in.

And that's what he's been doing.

And now he can't dial it in because the guy on the other end doesn't know who he is.

So what he has to do, he has to go out in public now.

And he's so self-unaware.

He's so narcissistic and arrogant.

He doesn't understand that the reason that Joe Biden is polling below 40%

and being beaten by 10 points in Nevada and six points in Michigan by Trump, who's facing a jail sentence, the reason is that Joe Biden continued his bankrupt policies.

And he doesn't understand that until the last year of his presidency, he was polling where Joe Biden was.

And then he got smart.

And he said, if I just abdicate and cut my neck flicks and memoir deals, I can make 200 million bucks while I'm president.

And then I'll waive everybody from the golf course with my cutoffs and my shades.

And I'll let the two most unpopular people in the United States, Hillary and Trump, just dominate the news as they tear each other down and then I'll be above it all.

And sure enough, he left office with over 50% approval.

It was brilliant what he did, but he made a mistake.

He mistook that phenomenon as if they liked what he did.

They didn't.

So now he's coming back.

What are you saying, Barack?

You gave us the border?

Yeah, you did.

You gave us the decriminalization idea?

Yeah, you did.

You gave us the appeasement overseas?

Yeah, you did.

You gave us Stephen Chu and their new Green Deal, and we want gas prices at European.

Yeah, you did.

You did.

You wanted to turn up the racial animosity.

Traybon's a son you never had that would have looked like you.

The whole beer summit.

We remember all of that.

You did it.

You did it.

Yeah.

Not us.

Well, Victor, let's go ahead and take a break and then come back and we'll talk about the Yom Kippur War.

Stay with us and we'll be right back.

Welcome back.

So Victor, the Yom Kippur War is

kind of a fascinating war in the sense that it only went on for less than 20 days and they fought on two fronts, with Egypt and then with Syria.

And I was wondering, you know,

what's the assessment of that?

I just, I remember, you know, they just came back from the 1967, you know,

destruction of all the Arab powers by Israel, and yet they're trying again, and it seems like the same thing resulted in this, although there was some resolution at the Camp David Accords.

But what is your view of this war?

Well, you start with the idea that everybody should remember that the October 7th massacre was 50 years and one day

from the Om Kippur surprise attack.

And you know what Iran and Hezbollah and Hamas were doing.

They're trying to say on the 50th anniversary of the surprise attack, when we caught the Israelis unaware and we ended up killing 2,500 of them.

We can do it again.

It'll be iconic, just like 9-11 is, you know, 9-1-1, 9-11, same thing.

And why did they pick the Yom Kippur War?

Because after the 67 war, for six years, the Israelis had been forecast before 67 they were going to lose.

They were facing 10 to 1 odds.

They not only

won, they won in six days.

And they not only won in six days, they obliterated the Egyptian Air Force in three hours.

And they destroyed the Jordanian armored assaults, and they destroyed the Syrians.

But what they didn't realize was

that

there were two things going on in the subsequent six years.

As they got lax and complacent and a little bit arrogant, What happened was the Soviets were massively, they were like the Iran of 1973.

They were just sending everything they could into Syria and Egypt.

And what they were sending was, we were in the post-Vietnam doldrums, and we were really depressed.

And so they were sending top-flight MiGs.

They were sending T-70, the precursors to T-72 tanks.

They were sending artillery shells, but most importantly, they were sending SAM surface-to-air missile sixes that were...

you could use on your shoulder and shoot down a jet.

And they were sending these sophisticated anti-tank weapons.

They had little wires on them.

You could shoot it and then guide it like almost a video game with a wire all the way to the target.

Those were the first smart, smart weapons.

So what happened?

They surprised attack

and

they wiped out over 1,200 tanks.

Israelis.

They killed like 2,000 Israelis in that first five days and then they shot down over almost 100 planes.

For a brief second, it looked like Israel was in trouble because remember this was 67 Israel.

They were still negotiating the fate of the Golan Heights, the West Bank, and the Sinai that had all attacked them in 67, lost, and Israel was in occupation of the strategic space.

But they were spread too thin.

At that time, it wasn't even 10 million, you know, it was like 6 million Israelis.

And they were being attacked simultaneously from the West Bank Jordan and from the Golan Heights, Syria, and from Lebanon, and from the Sinai.

And nobody thought they could get across the Sinai because they had the whole Sinai, and they were, you know, they looked over there

to the west, and they said, the Egyptians can't get across the Suez Canal.

There's no way they can do it and get into the Sinai.

And the Egyptians were talking with European engineers and everybody, and they created these huge water cannons, and they blasted this huge, it was kind of like the Game of Thrones ice wall.

It was a big sandwall.

And they just blew it apart.

And they came in on October 7th.

And of course, they didn't have the wherewithal to take all of Sinai.

That wasn't the point.

They kind of,

for a brief 12 to 15 hours, they sent commandos, they sent 20 or 30,000, and they just overran these thinly held Israeli lines and forts.

And then they were free to go into Sinai.

Big mistake.

One thing we forget about the

Yom Kippur War is, yes, they were surprised, yes, they took grievous losses, but by day five,

it was turned around and

the Israelis let the Egyptians come further and further into this vast expanse of the Sinai.

Then they just entirely circled the Third Army.

They had a quarter million people finally completely surrounded.

The same thing happened in the Golden Heights.

They had sophisticated tanks.

They went up the Golden Heights.

They blasted these thinly...

I think at one time they were down to two beefed up Sherman tanks, World War II vintage.

And then of course they rebounded, they were resupplied, and they went downhill and they obliterated the Syrian armor.

And guess what?

There was nothing between them and Damascus.

You get up in the Golden Heights and you look down, you can see Damascus in various places.

So there was nothing stopping them from taking out, I think they took out some of the electrical grid and they warned Offic Assad that we can take out your whole city.

So by day five, the whole world that was cheering this on was now stunned.

And

how did they rebound so quickly?

And then we got into the geopolitics of the war.

And that was the Soviet Union kept supplying and supplying and they were flying over, Sami, they were flying over NATO countries.

Can you imagine that?

to get to the Middle East.

And

we,

our allies, would not not let us fly over, except for the Netherlands.

I think Netherlands and Portugal, they let us use the Azores.

Those are the only two NATO.

Imagine that.

NATO says to their patron, the United States and partner, you can't use it, but we're afraid the Soviet Union, you fly over.

And

it was,

it was very controversial.

It's still controversial what Henry Kissinger and Nixon did.

There were people who said when

12 hours before the attack, the Israelis knew it was coming, and they started to mobilize too late but they knew it was coming and they told Kissinger we can still stop it if we unleash the Air Force and let them preempt just like we did in 67.

We can take out the Egyptian and Syrian air forces

and they said no if you do that we're not going to resupply you.

And they had a much less tenuous arms industry then.

They didn't have the surpluses and stocks that they do now.

And they're still dependent on us.

And so

they took the first blow, big mistake, and then Kissinger was using, supposedly, he's denied this, so I'm not going to get into the back and forth, but he was using the specter that the Israelis were completely

shocked that they were running out of frontline tanks and planes, Phantom jets and A-4 Skyhawks.

They were really down after losing almost 200 of them.

And we were not going to resupply them unless they accepted certain conditions.

And then Nixon blew his stock.

Remember he kind of went crazy, supposedly he pushed people around and said, get anything that flies and give them to the Israelis.

And his point was, we're going to look weak in the Cold War if Russia is supplying their patrons and we're not doing anything.

But the point is that we were completely surprised.

American intelligence, CIA, once again had no idea the attack was coming, just like they had no idea.

of the October 7th.

Completely fooled.

And then we hesitated,

we went back and forth.

And finally, we did the right thing and gave them overwhelming support.

And within five days,

they had the Arabs.

And of course, in typical Middle East fashion,

after Radio Damascus, Radio Cairo, Radio Amman, we're all saying, we're going to kill you, we're going to kill you, we're going to do this.

Oh, we're going to be in Tel Aviv.

We're going to kill every Jew we can.

And believe me, that war would have ended up like October 7th had they got into Israel proper.

And then all of a a sudden, when the Israeli rebound came and it was successful, and I think they did tragically, they killed 20,000 of the attackers.

I think

it was 10 to 1 asymmetry and losses.

And I think

they took out about 3,000 tanks, 300 or 400 aircraft.

So they were very successful.

Then it was call them off, call them off.

And we told the Israelis, if you let the third army, if you destroy the Egyptian army, you're through.

So we put pressure.

And then we said, wow,

this worked out well for the United States because

the Soviets had gotten out of Egypt and now we'll supply Egypt and will supply the Israelis and will force the Israelis to give back the Sinai even though they won the war.

And that will look magnanimous.

And then Sadat will be able to say, because of the effective gallantry of the Egyptian armed forces, they surprise attack and they broke through the invulnerable Israeli IDF and they'll have their pride again and they'll get to Sinai and then we'll have a comprehensive settlement.

It didn't quite work like that until the Camp David Accords, which they kind of turned over to Jerry Ford, but then Jimmy Carter.

Egypt got back to Sinai eventually, and the Israelis, it was really too much territory to administer.

And then Egypt dropped out of the anti-Israeli coalition.

And then...

Did they start breaking off with the Soviet Union at that point?

That was what was so strange about it.

They did, but they did a very funny thing.

They got angry at the Soviets because the Soviets said, don't fight.

We don't want to get into a coal power collision.

You're going to lose again.

You're going to lose all our equipment.

So what they did was they cut all ties with the Soviet Union.

And that made everybody think, wow, they're helpless now, they'll have no...

But what they didn't tell everybody, they didn't cut ties till they got a lot of Soviet supplies.

So they stockpiled anti-tank, anti-aircraft missiles.

And they were armed to the teeth with sophisticated tanks, planes, everything.

And then they cut the Soviet Union off, don't supply us.

But then they said, if we do attack, and if we are successful, will you resupply us?

And the Soviets said, said, if you're successful, if you attack, and it's like the 67 warrior on your own, and we're going to say you're stupid, and that's why you kicked us out.

However, if you go in and humiliate the IDF and its suppliers, NATO and the United States, yeah, we'll supply you.

We went into DEF CON,

I don't know what it was, DEF CON 3 or 4 maybe, to warn the Soviet Union.

Because when they started losing, Brezhnev was threatening to intervene with Russian airborne forces.

And we said, if you do that, you're going to be be in big trouble.

And

we had, at that time, vast

naval superiority.

So they backed off.

And then,

you know, it's, I was 20 years old and I was a student in Greece at the time.

And one of the backdrops of that war was the Saudis said, we're going to punish anybody who helps the Israelis.

We're going to have an oil embargo.

And

our only ally was Iran, the Shah.

And he gave us oil, but the price scored, it went from 25 cents a gallon to nearly a dollar.

There was no oil.

There were lines, you know.

And my parents were writing me that, you know, they were in line for, I don't know what it was, hours to get gas every morning.

And then they cut off all fuel to Greece, which has no oil.

So you couldn't drive a car.

I think it was every other day you could dry a car.

And then there was no heating oil.

And there was only lignite-supplied electricity in Greece down in the Peloponnese, that big plant near Megalopolis.

And we were freezing cold the whole time.

It was winter in Greece.

It's like Oakland.

It's

cold in the winter.

To paraphrase, she was talking about

Oakland.

Yeah.

The coldest summer I ever spent

was in Gertrude Stein.

But my point is this, is that it was very hard on the Greeks.

And then they didn't know what to do because that was a dictatorship, and it was allied with the United States, and it was illegitimate, and it needed American support, but it cut off all airspaces.

But then secretly, that big NATO base at Ceuta Bay and Crete, they said, well, you can use the facilities around it.

as I remember.

And there were planes that were landing on carriers and taking off.

And then I think at night, sometimes they snuck in and refueled at Ceuta and went to Israel.

because they needed 200 planes and we supplied them from Europe.

But a lot of us that weekend

we

all took a boat to Crete and we went to Hanya and then we stood out in this little foothill and we watched the whole thing all night long and drank beer and we just watched every two to three minutes you could see this American fighter plane coming into the Ceuta airspace.

We couldn't quite see if it was going on a carrier.

Carriers were launching planes all the time.

I don't know if they were going to Israel or they were just providing air support, but they were landing.

And I mean, big C-5s, all these planes were coming into Suda Bay to supply Greece.

And

then we were so excited about, you know, what was going on, even though we were freezing cold, we all went to the Egyptian embassy when the war was over and see if we could get visas to get into Cairo to see what had happened.

So we went in there, and it was, you know, every, they were, because remember Ariel Sharon, preemptively, why the Egyptians were in Sinai,

he crossed the Suez Canal and he had a lightning patent-esque armored attack on Cairo, and he got to within like 50 miles.

And all of Cairo was paranoid.

And when you went to Cairo, we went there in late March, just a few months after the war.

They all had built

the doorway of almost every store or house, there was a brick wall to stop a blast because they thought the Israelis were going to bomb them.

And then we went into at the Egyptian Museum in that great circle in Cairo.

You know what there was?

They towed in all from the desert, every

Phantom jet that

they had shot down, and they piled them in a big stack.

And we went and I just walked around there for hours and looked at all these destroyed Israeli-American planes.

Wow.

And they were trophies.

And then everybody would come up to you and scream about

the Jews.

But they they were a little careful because if you were an American, they were, Sadat was in the process with Kissinger and Nixon of getting stuff.

And so we became the supplier of

Egypt.

What do you make of Golda Maier's?

They say that she

decided against a pre-emptive attack, even though the Egyptians were amassing at the borders.

So what did

the thing about that is all the heroes of 67 didn't

account themselves well.

Moshe Dayan kind of had a breakdown.

I don't want to say a breakdown, but

he was not the earlier dashing hero.

The person who really shone was Sharon,

because he didn't really obey the traditional doctrine of hold and repel.

He said the only way to shock these people in is to cut off the supply of Egyptians inside Sinai.

And the only, he was like Patton at the bulge.

Patton had been given his way of cutting off that bulge.

So he just took off across the Suez Canal.

People were flabbergasted.

And then

he kept going southward, or actually

straight across into the vicinity of Cairo and cutting off the supply lines.

And that was one of the reasons that the Egyptian effort collapsed.

But she didn't account herself well because when they came to her and they gave her overwhelming evidence, and there were people in the Arab world who were feeding the information to her, and Americans didn't know about it.

But she did know, and she thought if they preempted,

she said that Henry Kissinger said, you're done.

We're not going to give you anything if you start the war.

But I think she could have preempted in a way that would have been clear as in 1967 that they were going to start the war.

And they just jumped the gun a little bit.

But they were caught napping.

She did

call up, I think, 100,000, 150,000 reserves a little bit too late by the time that happened.

I guess kind of counterfactually, it was during the Yom Kippur holidays.

And that was the point that the Arabs thought they would surprise everything, as they did.

Remember, October 7th, just think of the massacre.

Every aspect of that massacre was patterned after the Yom Kippur attack 50 years earlier.

But it may have been had the opposite effect that unlike people going to a rock concert or in bed and during during a holiday, a lot of people had been let out of work and IDF reservists were easier to call up because they were not at work.

And so they mobilized very quickly up to almost a half a million people.

And they had rates of mobilization that nobody's ever really seen as a percentage of the population, maybe what you saw in Germany during World War II.

I mean, they had incredible ability to turn out from a very tiny population, population.

Everybody who was of 20 to 40,

even above, was in the army within two weeks.

And

they did very well.

But after that, I don't think she ever recovered her reputation.

And Diane did not recover.

And of course, Sharon would eventually become president.

And that was part because he was considered a hard-nose

warrior that had done very well in that war.

Yeah.

You know, we rarely hear about Syria.

We always talk about what happened with Egypt one way or the other and sort of analyze Egypt's army at various times.

But I was wondering what your thoughts were.

I mean, the war didn't go so well against Syria at the beginning.

And so their forces must have as well have been quite strong.

But I don't know anything about that.

They had specialized in armor.

And they had late model Soviet tanks.

And they outnumbered the Israelis had made the choice that once they took the Golan Heights in 1967,

that

it was, remember they had it,

and they were coming downhill in 1967, and they could shoot into the areas around Tiberias or the Sea of Galilee.

But once they went uphill and took it, They figured that no one would ever try to take it because you'd have to go uphill with a line of fire.

And that's exactly what Assad did.

They had individual Syrian companies with anti-tank weapons, these sophisticated Soviets going ahead of the tanks and engineers blowing roads, clearing mines at dark, and then taking out Israeli machine gun nests and tanks.

So when they finally got close to the ridge,

There was only 10 or 12 tanks left.

And then a lot of heroic Jews, Israelis, just came in and mounted these old

upgunned Shermans and Pershings and blew them apart at the last moment.

And they stopped them.

And then as soon as the Sinai front was isolated and stable, and of course the Jordanians didn't do much,

I think they actually phoned in and said, you know, to save face, we're going to have to fight you, but we're just going to come across into the West Bank a little bit.

So just just lob a few shells and then kill a couple of our guys.

And please, but do not bomb Amman and do that.

And

I'm exaggerating, but that was King Hussein's kind of, I don't even know if, I think he was,

he had been traveling and it was kind of a joke.

It was basically Syria and Egypt and then all the other Arab countries.

Saudis, Morocco, they beat their chest.

They said they were going to kill the Jews.

And they sent a couple of tanks and maybe a couple of planes, and then they bragged that they were this,

that the, you know, it's a typical Middle East fabulous.

Yeah, and if they had actually had shown any signs of victory, they would have piled on like a package of people.

If they had won, I mean, we talk about the...

Well, they fought, I had said, well, they fought openly in uniforms, they were very brave, but believe me, if they had won...

And they had gotten in the suburbs of Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, they would have done exactly what they did on October 7th.

No doubt about it.

Don't fool yourself.

And that's true of any war that Israel's in.

Yeah, that's true.

I don't understand, you know, I've been to Israel a number of times and I've been to all those countries, Egypt, Libya, Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco, Jordan,

Iraq, Saudi Arabia.

I don't understand the...

this disconnect in America that we have these people on campuses because if you go to this country and you just don't know anything about it, nothing about it, just say you don't know anything about it,

you see Arabs

with lifestyles that you don't see in Jordan or the West Bank or Egypt or Syria or anywhere.

They're free, they're prosperous,

you don't see it.

And then when you see what the Israelis have done with these cities and the agriculture,

it's an art and music and whatever you think about the causes of the difference, it's just different.

And it's not racial at all.

It's cultural.

It is.

Yeah, it sure is.

It's got a lot to do with radical Islam, to tell you the truth.

It really does.

Or Islam in general compared to what you see in

the Judeo-Christian tradition.

It does.

It does.

And I'm not ashamed to say it.

It's true.

And to the degree that you see countries in the Gulf that are prosperous and doing well, it's because of two reasons.

One, oil money that allows them to hire Western architects, engineers, etc., financiers,

medical doctors, and the degree to which the more that they say their doctrines are Muslims, the more in their private life they are not.

They're acting more and more secular.

And so,

but

that's why I think all these people I see on the Stanford campus when I walk from my apartment to

work are just,

they don't know what they're talking about.

And I think the people in the Middle East, and many of them are, that are students here on visas, I don't know what they're thinking, but I just say to myself when I see them yelling and screaming and their signs and their literature, and I read what they write, I look at the graffiti

squald on the, I just say, could you do this in another Arab countries if this was directed at the government?

In other words, if you are Arab and you were doing this in an Arab country, what would be the reaction?

And would it be analogous to you as a guest, if you're a foreign student,

a guest

attacking the host?

Would you be able...

Are you even aware of that disconnect?

And the answer is no.

No, of course not.

Take down the Brick of Bridge.

You let a person come in on a student visa and he participates in a demonstration that takes down the

Bricken Bridge.

I had a friend that had a priceless manuscript.

I mean, it was his.

He had to get it FedExed.

And we were in Greece.

He was a professor and he called up and said, I've got to get this FedEx.

And he went to the local post office.

And the guy was in there, right?

And it was like 15 minutes till closing time.

And he wouldn't, oh, he closed down and wouldn't let this person mail it.

That was on a Friday afternoon.

I won't mention the professor's name.

He was a wonderful, great scholar of epigraphy.

Anyway, he closed down the post office.

And this professor, you know what he got?

So angry?

He kicked the door and it cracked the glass door.

That's all that happened.

And this guy called from his little phone, the police, in five minutes they came and arrested him and they put him in jail and they were going to charge him for a long prison term for doing that to his host.

And he got out of it because the people authorities understood this and they, you know, that

he was an American and it was a dictatorship, etc.

But my point I'm making is

when you're a guest in a host country, you have to be very careful about their protocols.

And these people come over here and they act like they own the United States.

Yeah.

And that's crazy.

You know, I just, I don't understand.

I don't understand that.

Immigrant.

I know my grandfather would always say about his family that came over from Sweden.

You'd say, well, was your dad happy in Sweden?

No.

They farmed rocks.

It was cold.

Only the wealthy had money.

People who were farmers farmed rocks.

It was cold.

You had no chance to get ahead.

They came to Kingsburg, California, thought it was heaven.

You could do what you want.

It was free.

It was fertile.

All you had to do was work.

It was the best country in the world.

And that was their attitude.

Yeah, and they supported that and they supported the United States.

Everybody's ancestors did that until it became until the American left told them not to do that, basically.

Yeah.

Help us hate our country.

Well, Victor, let's take a break and we'll come back and talk a little bit about Donald Trump and the court case.

Stay with us.

We'll be back.

Welcome back to the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

You can find Victor or follow him on his ex-account at VD Hansen.

And he also has a Facebook Hansen's Morning Cup.

So try either one of those.

He also has an unofficial group and not affiliated with us, but

there is a Victor Davis Hansen fan club, and they do a great job of finding all sorts of stuff, old and new.

Well Victor I was wondering if you had thoughts on Donald Trump's court cases and how he's doing in them.

It seems to me that he has a gag order on him but he's using the

courtroom for a bully pulpit of sorts and it's getting the judge very angry.

I guess there's two schools.

There's one school that says that he's 76 years old and he's human.

And when he looks at Jack Smith's gag orders and Letita James with his judge

Ngorgon, or whatever his name is, his gag orders, and then Fanny Willis in the wings trying to flip over his closest associates to rat him out, so to speak, and then Alvin Gregg trying to get into the fray that he's worn out and he's just not, he's just incoherent.

He's just baying at the moon.

He's screaming, he's yelling, he's not.

Or, or

he's saying, okay,

every time they've indicted me, every time they put me on the witness stand, every time they've taken a mugshot of me, my polls go up.

And if they want to have this miscarriage of justice, and they're going to put these gag orders, which we know they don't apply to anybody else, and we know that no one has ever been tried, I think, in New York City for overvaluing real estate assets.

Of course not.

Nobody's done that.

And of course, Mar-Lago, he's right about that.

It's probably close to a billion dollars.

So, and people said, well, he counted the square footage in the attic, in the basement, or in the garages.

Well, so what?

A lot of people do.

Every time I bought a house or I was looking at a house, I would say, what's the square footage?

And they would give me all these figures.

And I said, does that include the garage or not?

And they would, and the patio and stuff, enclosed patio.

So there was always people fudging.

And so anyway, they know that this, he knows that the American people know this is a farce, and he's just going to go wild.

And he's basically, they fined him for gag orders, and he's basically now just attacking the judges.

And his argument is putting the judge,

this N-Gorgon, Gorgon or whatever, Gorgo is, whoever he is, whatever his name is.

He's a Democratic hack, and he's in an impossible situation.

So he said, I have a gag order on you, and I find you $10,000.

And if you keep doing this, I'm really, really, really this time going to really really put you in jail and Trump's smiling like a Cheshire cat and mouthing off so what does he do he pounds the table he gives him grimaces he gives snide remarks and in the entire process he's belittling the office of a judge and he's showing himself to be a rank partisan, a hypocrite, an immature, the very things he's saying that Donald Trump is.

And what Trump wants is a brief jail sentence, apparently.

I think this is planned.

I think he's trying to play the campaign, get attention toward him, get it off the debates, and it's working like a charm for now.

The $64,000 question is

every time we've said anybody, we collectively in this country said it's not sustainable, that finally the voters will go into a fetal position and say, I can't take it anymore, they don't.

do that.

So what is the shelf life if he keeps doing this?

And they do put him in jail for five days and ten days and 15 for these violations of gag orders or witness tampering or obstruction of justice, whatever they cook up, will the people rally to his cause, the independence and everything?

And we'll see.

It's very strange that we're right in the middle of racially polarized times and everybody's...

Letita James, as Trump has been calling her, a racist, and every time he calls her a racist, everybody says, you can't, this is an obstruction of justice.

You cannot

attack a prosecutor.

True.

But then, guess what?

A video appears.

And what is she saying?

The people in the Trump administration were too pale, too male, and too stale.

So basically, she's saying, if you were a white male, you were stale.

You were inert.

Meaning you were no good.

And

she's racially stereotyped two-thirds, what, 33% of the population?

Just like that.

Just what he said she was.

And so when you superimpose that of the four indictments, three

are being

championed on very dubious legal grounds, because they're not federal, but by African-American prosecutors who are counting on inner city or big city, New York, Miami, and Atlanta juries, and you may have hardcore Democratic, if not African-American judges, then you would would be very careful not to suggest that there was a racial component to that because Donald Trump would capitalize on that.

But what do they do?

She's campaigned again and again, ad nauseum, about, I'm going to get Trump, I'm going to get Trump, he's pale,

he's male, and it's racist.

So she proves what she doesn't want to be proven.

No, I know.

And I may say she's also sexist saying that as well.

She's saying that.

Of course she is.

And she does it because she thinks there's going to be exemption.

So what do I mean by that?

Let's just take a little time travel experiment, thinking of this.

It's 2012 right now.

Barack Obama is up for re-election.

Let's say that there is some

southern Illinois, old, good old boy, prosecutor in southern Illinois, okay?

Down near the border with Kentucky or something.

And he wants to make a name for himself.

And he knows that Barack Obama is the darling of the left.

But he also knows that as a candidate in 2008, Barack Obama had a phony

sweetheart land deal where he bought a lot to add on to his own backyard for less than market value.

And he claimed it wasn't, but it was.

And the person he bought it from, Tony Resco, who was soon going to be a convicted felon, as a lawyer he had done legal work for, his firm that he worked for.

And he had got private loans from Tony Resco.

And he had gotten donations from Tony Resco for his

political ambitions.

And so,

put that in context, this, let's say, white conservative,

careerist prosecutor in a conservative area of Illinois who wants to get a name for himself announces that Barack Obama isn't pale

and he's a male and he's stale and I'm going to make my career in getting that SOB and I'm going to impeach him.

I'm going to do this to President Obama.

And then he files a suit and he says, you know what?

Nobody ever looked at all this stuff from years ago, years ago.

But he was in bed with this felon Tony Resco and he got quid pro quos, just like any crooked politician.

And he just tried to tie Obama up during election year.

You know what we would all say.

This guy is a racist, incoherent hack.

And all he's trying to do is get attention for himself because he wants to run for Attorney General of Illinois or governor or something.

And he's going after

a president or at least a candidate for president, but in this case president, just like Trump is an ex-president, and it's trying to warp the election.

And just imagine one further thing that why this guy is doing this, other right-wing states are saying, you know what?

Barack Obama is a crook and he's got all this felony exposure.

We're going to get him off the ballot.

We're going to try to get him off the ballot in our state.

Well, you know what would happen.

Oh, yeah, absolutely.

It would be considered what it was.

It would be considered, rightly so, a racist attack by some die-hard racist that wants to destroy the

choice of the American people so they couldn't vote for one of their own candidates by cooking up an old charge and fortifying it with contemporary political context.

And it wouldn't work.

But this is what she's doing.

It's an old, old charge.

Nobody's ever been charged before.

She's trying to have a racial component.

She's on record of using Trump to campaign for office and

using the prosecution of Trump to just like you see in so-called Trump was right about that, just what you see in third world countries.

Yeah, they've dialed us all the way back to the pre-Civil War era.

Yeah, and it's just, it's all predicated on the

left-wing idea that the Republicans are going to play by the Marquis of Queensbury rules.

They're in the House right now.

It's very clear that Joe Biden is utterly corrupt, that he's lied demonstrably so about his relationship with his son and his business and foreign money, and they haven't impeached him.

And Mjorkis has not closed the border.

In fact, he won't even testify honestly.

And they haven't impeached him.

So the Democrats think, you know what?

They will never do what we do.

They won't impeach a president in his first term.

We did it twice.

We tried the SOB as a private citizen.

We had no special counsel report.

We cooked up the Russian disinformation laptop stuff.

We did the, they'll never do anything like that.

We took over the Facebook, we did Twitter, we had the FBI paying people to suppress news that was favorable to Republicans.

Gosh, we went after Carter Page, we did all of this stuff.

We got Zuckerberg to absorb the work of registrars in key districts.

They're not going to do this, so we can keep doing it.

It's all predicated on that.

And if

they do impeach Joe Biden or they do do what has been done to them, I think they'll be shocked and they'll recreate deterrence again.

Let's hope so.

Well, Victor, now that you're talking about all those things, I have a reader who has said that he really appreciates your podcasts and your articles because Dr.

Hansen has the guts to stand up to modern popular cultural mobs and tell the truth in a very self-evident way.

The truth will eventually be uncovered.

But with people like him standing up to falsehoods, our culture has a much better chance of surviving.

And I think that that's kind of a message.

Thank you, Kyle.

Sorry, Chip Kyle.

That was from him.

But I think that's a message that we're trying to tell our listeners, that they really need to make the effort, I think, to stand up when they are faced with a bunch of lies.

I hope so.

I think all of this have to do

sold as reality.

but go ahead.

You know, I get demoralized because I know that I both put on our

ultra, our latest Angry Reader, which is just full of F you and just horrible stuff.

But I have another two that came by the same person, some guy named Adam Jacobs in Boulder, Colorado.

He just

a bottomless pit.

Yeah,

it's just, I've never seen such a foul mouth.

I'm going to put it in there.

And people are going to say, well, why do you do that?

It's not about me, it's about all of us because these people are unhinged.

And someone's, every once in a while, they'll write to me or they'll leave a message.

Why do you do this?

Why don't you publish

sane or logical intelligent critiques?

There is none.

I swear to God, nobody writes me and says, on this particular column, you were factually incorrect.

They say you're a blank, blank, blank, blank, blank.

And I'm going to do this blank, blank, blank to you.

That's what the left is.

It's Jacobin party.

I think everybody from time to time, has to realize and be exposed to what they're doing.

They're just engaging in suppression of debate, threats, vulgar invective.

That's what they do.

And

I will put an angry reader the moment it comes, it's analytical.

I'm perfectly willing to debate.

And this one person said, well, you won't debate.

I have debated it my entire life.

I went into Dartmouth to debate the peace studies director when there were like five people on on my side in front of the whole about

200 or something.

I've debated on NPR.

I have debated Ariana Huffington and a hostile

audience under Grand State where everything I said I think was booed.

I have debated libertarians on the border.

I have debated so many people.

I've been booed at Oregon State, at the University of Southern Alabama, University of Tennessee.

I was attacked.

I was attacked at Washington Lee.

So I have a whole record of that.

But I'm 70, and I don't feel like I'm going to, I particularly want to keep doing that.

Well, for everyone, or the one or few that wrote that they would rather have somebody intelligent and not a cursor as your critic,

there were about 10 that wrote that said, no, this is our favorite thing, and we pay a good money on the blade of Perseus for that.

Well, if it means anything and you look at traffic, if you look at the traffic for the angry reader, it's among the highest.

It's weird.

The highest response are stories about animals and people in 19th-century farm life that I grew up with.

Kind of a window into where it used to be and their values and what type of people they were or who you met or

the thin margin of survival by farming.

They liked that and the readers like the Angry Reader.

Yeah.

And not that they don't like the other stuff, but that from time to time they get kind of wearied about all of the Middle East and the election, you want to break from it.

And this guy provides break.

And by the way, it's not doxing listeners.

If somebody writes to me and they call you horrible names and they put their name there,

I have a right to put the name there.

It's not considered private correspondence.

No.

And

I don't...

Even though I have their email, I don't put their email on.

You could Google the name and I'm sure you can find the email.

But I don't put it out there for you to do that.

And they wouldn't do the same.

Yeah.

Because I've had people, you know, show up at my office.

I've had people show up at my farm.

So they have the ability to find me.

Well, Victor,

we also appreciate our listeners to the podcast.

So thanks, each and every one of you for joining us this weekend.

And thank you, Victor, for all of the wisdom, especially on the Yom Kippur War.

I haven't ever read that much about it, but it was interesting.

It was a very, it changed the course of history.

It removed Egypt as a belligerent, but it almost destroyed Israel in the first 72 hours.

I'm kind of being hyperbolic, but it really shocked the Israelis.

And I thought, just as an end note, I thought, and everybody thought, after going through that, They're never going to be surprised again.

Never.

And yet, on October 7th,

they were surprised.

And I think it's because they were so successful.

The amount of wealth and sophisticated civilization that they have developed since Yamak in the last 50 years is just overwhelmingly.

It's amazing to see a city like Tel Aviv or Haifa or

the degree of sophistication and desalinization or farming projects or power generation.

or the port at a Haifa.

But in addition to that, I think there was a a lot of pressure on the Israeli government, the military population

to normalize, quote-unquote,

relations with the Palestinians.

And they came up with certain doctrines that were acceptable to Washington.

And one of them was

try to normalize your situation with Gaza, maybe even play them off against the PA and you'll be nice to Gaza and then Gaza and then the PA will say, well, be nice to us.

Then you'll be nice to them.

And Gaza says, well, how about us?

We want more water.

We want more power.

And it was as if they couldn't have stopped tunnel building and

direct their own fraternity.

I mean, I ever heard of a sovereign autonomous state saying, you have to provide my electricity and my water and all my utilities so I can kill you.

Nobody does that.

But they got, I think, with the guest workers who are coming in, and they wouldn't map out kibbutz, come back and slaughter us in our sleep.

They're here to fraternalize and it's going to be wonderful.

That was the idea and we pushed that in Washington.

Because what's the alternative, Sami,

for an Israeli to wake up and say, these people harbor an existential hatred of Jews, A, and the more successful

and the more free and the more prosperous and the more secure we are, the more they're going to hate us because they're going to envy us and they're going going to despise us for being what they're not.

And they're never, ever going to accept us.

And the only way we can live side by side is internal deterrent vigilance.

And that requires all of us for the rest of our lives and our children's lives to be on guard 24-7

and never let down your guard.

And that also entails us being slurred and smeared and slandered as

Islamophobic and unkind and not trusting and paranoid and suspicious and xenophobic.

And yes, you're going to have to be slurred like that.

And that also means that you're going to be very dependent on sophisticated weapons and munitions from the United States.

And they are going to try, as a price of that dependence, to go in and tell you what to do.

and order you what to do.

And sometimes those orders and what those instructions are are going to be contrary to your own security.

And that's what that's a hard thing to live with.

So naturally people say, I just, I don't believe in human nature is like that.

I don't believe people treat magnanimity as weakness to be exploited.

I know they'll reciprocate and kind if I'm just a little bit nicer.

Sorry.

You were on a kibutz and you had a worker that twisted his ankle and you drove him all the way to a hospital and fixed it.

And everybody was surprised how much time and care and consideration you took for a person who was employed.

That person was perfectly capable of coming back on October 7th and doing what?

Tag along to get in on the killing and raping.

And so

that's the situation.

I wish it weren't true, and I wish until the condition of mankind changes or human nature is altered by,

I don't know what, Sermon on the Mount

reboot or something, but until then,

Anybody who feels he's going to be utopian and is responsible for the security and safety of the vulnerable and

exposed, they have a duty and an obligation to protect them.

And when they virtue signal and perfect, not that the Israelis did,

but if you get into that mode, that's not morality.

No.

Well, Victor, thank you.

And this is the end of the Victor Davis-Hansen Show.

Thanks to everybody for joining us this weekend.

This is Sammy Wink and Victor Davis-Hansen, and we're signing off.

Thank you, everybody, for listening.