Israel at War: a Hard Rain Will Fall

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Hello, and welcome to the Victor Davis-Hanson Show.

We have a special edition today.

This should be coming out sometime on Monday.

This weekend we saw the attack of Israel, and so we're going to talk with Victor on all sorts of things about Israel, the attack, and the regional politics.

So stay with us, and we'll be right back.

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Victor, so we've seen some horrific scenes coming out of Israel since Hamas has attacked Israel.

And I was wondering just to hear the narrative from you, what's going on in Israel.

Well, it's 24 hours plus since the war broke out, Sammy.

And we

know the short-term catalyst, what caused it.

We know the long-term.

Short-term,

everybody knew that after the Biden administration scoffed at the Abraham Accords and let it die because it had Trump's fingerprints on it.

It quickly saw that there were advantages to the United States, which it even had to concede.

So it was pursuing that.

And Iran knows that Shia populations among the Sunni Gulf kingdoms are volatile.

They try to stir them up.

They've sent missiles into Saudi Arabia.

Saudi Arabia has all of its own development agendas.

They're pro-Western, so is Kuwait, others in that region.

And they want to divorce themselves, A, from the Palestinians who always beg them for money and then get into never do anything with it.

Gaza is still a mess.

They could just say, I'm not going to think about a Jew or an Israeli for three years, and I'm just going to copy what Singapore does, or Hong Kong, or anybody, free communist.

They would be fine.

But they can't do that.

And Saudis don't want anything to do with them.

And Iran is is afraid that this new nexus of a nuclear Israel with Saudis' money,

it bodes ill for them.

So they wanted to kill as many Jews as they could in the street.

They wanted to make sure that Hamas desecrated the corpse and make it so embarrassing on the world stage that Saudi Arabia and its Gulf compatriots would have to endorse that.

And by endorsing that, that would alienate them from Israel.

And if they didn't endorse them, then they would be sell out to the so-called pan-Arabic cause, or pan-Islamic, I should say.

So that was one catalyst.

The other catalyst is they've never had a successful attack on Israel unless it's been a surprise attack.

And that usually means it has to be a Jewish holiday.

So one day before the Yom Kippur 50th anniversary, they thought, just like 9-11 was supposed to be 9-1-1.

So they thought, wow, this will be really neat.

We killed

2,500 Israelis on Yom Kippur, so we're going to do the same.

And they may do it.

And so that was another catalyst for it.

Another one was

they sensed that whenever there is any daylight between the United States and Israel, then they see an opportunity to attack Israel.

And what would that daylight be?

Can we count the ways?

Number one.

And before I preface number one, I am getting so sick of Anthony Blinken, the Secretary of State, who says, if any of you dare say that this $6 billion that we had South Korea released from sanction relief and it went to

Iran and has anything to do with helping it,

that's misinforming.

No, you're misinforming, Mr.

Blinken,

because you greenlighted that, and they know it is coming.

And when they know it's coming, they know it's going to replace $6 billion in their fungible budget.

And

they don't make any claims that they're not going to do it.

So you know when you gave them the okay

that a check for $6 billion is on the way, they're going to spend billions to arm Hamas.

And we think now they've sent 100,000 rockets into the Damascus airport that made its way.

And these are much more sophisticated rockets and beyond the ability of Hamas to make on their own.

So that's just a fact.

And in addition to that, there's a psychological element, Mr.

Blinken.

When you greenlight that you're dealing with this theocratic, murderous regime, people look at that and they say, wow, the Americans are giving them $6 billion.

They must not care about Israel.

So maybe that would be a catalyst.

And then we go into some other darker things about this administration.

Why did they select Robert Malley as their Iran deal envoy?

I mean, think about it.

This guy was the Obama ISIS advisor.

Remember that?

Remember what he did

as the advisor to the ISIS problem?

There was a huge problem when he came into office after he got done.

ISIS took over half Iraq, and it was going to take over the entire Iraqi nation had not

Hillary Clinton lost the election, the Biden administration, the Obama administration was over with, and Trump bombed the proverbial SHIT, as he termed it, out of ISIS.

And then Mali, go to his

Wikipedia page.

He advertises himself as the expert in Hamas rapprochement.

In other words, what we see now is his doing.

And before you think I'm trashing him and you're anti-Iranian American or anti-Arab, whatever.

He got his wish.

He is the envoy.

And what did he do when he had that prerogative?

He began to disseminate classified information to a degree, and that's hard to do in the Biden administration,

to the degree that the FBI is now investigating him for leaking classified information about our national security.

If I were to paraphrase somebody, that is treasonous.

And then in addition to that, Semaphore and other magazines have now suggested that he recruited pro-Iranian and pro-Iranian American activists and used his influence to insert them into the State Department.

Now, in addition to all of that,

Donald Trump canceled $700 million of aid because of what we're seeing in Hamas.

He knew that they had been doing that, so he canceled it.

The first thing they did when they came in is they restored that money going through the UN

to

Palestine Authority and Hamas.

Now, this is interesting because Mr.

Blinken, who's accusing everybody today of misinforming people about the Iranian money, he bragged to Mr.

Abbas that they had given,

I think he did it not too long ago, a few months ago, they had given an aggregate $1 billion to the Palestinians.

And nobody in the so-called moderate Palestinian Authority ever renounced their bonuses to martyrs.

And the money is fungible.

So if you give them a billion dollars and they're corrupt, they're going to use some of that money to pay the families for their children killing Israelis.

That's what we're doing.

And then you deny it.

You deny it, you deny it.

And that sends a message, another third, fourth, fifth message.

And that's what we did.

We gave money to Hamas.

And you know what?

The left-wing State Department, when we did that, issued a warning.

We have the text.

And they said,

be very careful.

Giving money to Hamas will end up supporting terrorists.

And this administration completely ignored that.

Now, if that's not enough for you, in the first 24 hours of this attack, there was

something

called

the U.S.

Office of Palestinian Affairs in the in the State Department.

And what did it say?

We deplore the violence.

And

the violence in a reaction to terror solves nothing.

So we have to ask the...

And

I have beginning, I got so angry, I started tweeting really for the first time.

I haven't been doing that.

But

I said on a tweet yesterday, it was going to come down.

It was so outrageous.

And of course, it mysteriously went into the rabbit hole.

Nobody knows where it is.

They just took it off.

And why did they take it off?

Because we knew what it meant.

It basically said, you've taken maybe 1,100 dead Israelis.

We suggest you take another two or three or four or 5,000 dead Israelis and not, what, promote the cycle of violence, using, quote, violence to terror.

What does Joe Biden think of the State Department?

Is that the advice they take for Ukraine?

So Joe Biden is going to say, you know, Mr.

Zelensky,

I've talked to our U.S.

Office of Palestinian Affairs, and they've come with an official statement about Israel, a democratic republic, unlike yours, who declared martial law and suspended elections.

But they have said that when you're faced with terror of Vladimir Putin, then you don't respond with violence.

It solves, in their words, it solves nothing.

So we suggest that you just stay there and let Putin do what he wants and don't get into that.

Do you think they're, well, how would that go with the left?

So what is the subtext about all of this?

The subtext about it is that the Democratic Party has mortgaged its soul to a hardcore constituent, which is very ironic because Hillary and all these people said the MAGA people, the MAGA people are standing with Israel, not the AOC.

And anybody read the tweets from AOC and Ms.

Talib?

And what are they talking about?

Moral equivalence.

They're not condemning Hamas.

And if you look at the Democratic Socialist of America, which AOC claims that she's a proud member, they're in the streets of New York slandering and smearing the dead Israelis and promoting Hamas.

And that core,

Democratic Socialist of America, the Bernie Sanders Corps, the squad, Talib, Omar, etc., AOC, the fusion media, the academics.

Mr.

Tribe at Harvard Law School had to take his tweet down because he was right out of the gate saying that, you know, this was all Netanyahu's, he he fabricated it because he's got domestic problems.

That's who runs the Democratic Party.

And that fact reflects why they give money

to Iran, why they lie about it, why they give money to Hamas, why there is a U.S.

Office of Palestinian Affairs who tries to tell Israel not to react, and why you pick some miscreant like Robert Malley.

We could go on, but that should be enough.

And so that's why this attack happened.

They wanted to disrupt the Saudi Abraham Accords 2.0 that Biden was embarrassed that he had to admit was working, so he reenacted it and put his brand on it.

Number two,

they were very, very

conscious, the Palestinians were, that this was a holiday and they could go across the border and it would be iconic like the Yom Kippur War.

And then they got a sense that either the United States would not or could not do anything.

And believe me, if there were not people in the United States screaming to high heaven on what they're saying and doing, they would have left that U.S.

Office of Palestinian Affairs advice on their official State Department website.

They only took it down, not because they wanted to, but because of pressure.

Joe Biden has even met with Netanyahu in an official visit, maybe at the UN.

And we know what they really want to do.

It's what their base wants to do.

But they can't do that because of overwhelming public opinion.

Just like the border, just like the economy, just like Kabul, just like crime.

This is the foreign policy correspondence to their crime policy.

And just as they believe that letting criminals out makes people safer and will not destroy deterrence, which they don't even believe in deterrence, so too if you coddle the Hamas and give them money and tell

the Israelis to adopt the Sermon on the Mount, turn the other cheek, therefore there'll be peace.

So

that's the alpha and the omega of

the whole thing, yeah.

Victor, let's go ahead and take a break and come back and talk a little bit about

what's going on in the war and what we can tell from the way it's being fought and things like that.

So come back and we'll listen to these messages first.

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Welcome back.

So, Victor, I have some questions for you.

Is there

things that we can discern by the way Hamas is fighting this war, the

weapons that they have, or the

military material that they use.

Well, Iran is bragging that they helped organize it.

And I suppose Mr.

General Suleiman that we took out,

I suppose his successors have gone to Damascus, through which they sent 100,000 rockets.

advised them and they cooked up a glider attack, a sea attack, a land attack through the wall.

They knew there was a concert right across in Israel.

There would be hundreds, thousands of young, attractive young kids.

They knew that if they shot and murdered them and desecrated their bodies, it would cause outrage.

They knew that they had not one or two thousand primitive rockets, but four or five thousand guided missile rockets.

And they could do a lot of damage.

And more important, they could cause a distraction as they sent a thousand killers into

Israel and I guess the expectation was that the Israelis would be so horrified by these thousand thugs these modern counterparts 78 years after the end of the Holocaust

acting as if they were either Gestapo or Gestapo hired goons that went into Eastern Europe and took Jews out of their home and shot them and let them rot.

That's what they're doing.

We haven't seen anything like this, I think, in the world since the 1995 Rwanda killing of Utu.

It's the same methodology.

And so that is the strategy.

And what was the point of it?

They thought the Israelis collectively would get, they would put their hands over their ears and they would say, I can't take this anymore.

This is primeval.

This is pre-civilizational.

Make it go away.

And they didn't read the Israelis wrong.

So

they have only they sowed, to use Chuck Schumer's words that he accused the Supreme Court, they sowed the wind and they're going to reap the whirlwind because there's no restraints now.

For the first time in Israelis history, there's not going to be anybody saying, please don't do that.

Oh, that bomb that you dropped, CNN just said that some Palestinian was a collateral damage.

You're a war.

They don't care.

I mean, they don't want to do it.

But what's the alternative?

The alternative is death.

These people deal in death.

That's what Hamas does.

They're killers.

They're Hutus.

That's who they are.

They're Gestapo.

They're SA.

They want to kill people.

They want to desecrate them.

And now the Israelis are going to have to go into Gaza.

And we're going to see how brave these killers are because they keep bragging and bragging and bragging.

And they're going to have a chance to fight the IDF on their home turf.

And I don't think it's going to be pretty.

Another thing is

Hamas has popular support.

Everybody says, I get so sick of this.

Well, you know, the people don't want Hamas.

They're just, they're captives.

No, they're not.

When they had that poor girl and they put her in there and they were trying to get at her, and when they had her corpse, they were showing, there were people trying to spit at it, at a corpse.

There was rape.

There was mutilation.

There was not one person who said, stop it.

That is what they want.

And

before anybody says, well, it's because they're oppressed.

No, it's not.

They're getting billions, billions of dollars from the Saudis, from the Americans, from the UN.

And all they have to do is say, take a breather.

We're going to put a Marriott here and a Hyatt there, and we're going to have an antiquity sector.

And they could be booming, but they don't want to because they cannot stand the idea.

that a bunch of European refugees and Jews from all over the world, who, by the way, were ethnically cleansed by Arabs in Damascus, in Cairo, in Amman, and they all came to this god-forsaken place and they made it into paradise.

And they just can't watch it every day.

So they're going to go out and kill people.

And the idea that the United States can't see that or a large segment of our population

is really scary because I predict the hard rain is going to fall.

The hard rain is going to fall.

We've got a war going on in Ukraine.

We have created a new alliance of Ukraine

in the Ukrainian war, of Russia, of China, of North Korea, of Iran, and of Turkey.

We have a NATO alliance that we keep bragging about.

We're told by all of our bipartisan, this is really good what happened in this Ukraine war.

We have crippled Russia.

And by crippling Russia, we've got Sweden and Finland.

And NATO is stronger than it ever is.

No, it's not.

We've got the largest army in NATO, other than the United States with nuclear weapons on its soil, which it thinks it has proprietary rights to.

Turkey, which is an active ally of Russia and which is siding with these killers in Hamas and is a member of NATO.

And if you think I'm exaggerating, about a year ago, Mr.

Erdogan told the Greek people, one day you're going to wake up.

If you keep arming yourself, you're going to wake up and a whole missile storm is going to come from us and it's going to go down in Athens.

So whether we like it or not, you can talk all you want about NATO, but Turkey at some point will have to either leave NATO

or NATO won't exist.

You cannot have a member of NATO with its largest army that is anti-European, anti-American, anti-democratic.

and wants to fight one of its own members and is pro-death on the West Bank.

And that's what it is.

Yeah.

Do you know what Qatar has to do with this?

I know that they're sending millions of dollars every month to Hamas in the Gaza region.

Well they're an illegitimate nation, the government, and they're very wealthy and they've carved out a niche, a very brilliant niche.

They offer us basing rights and they say we're not a medieval country like Saudi Arabia and we're going to be neutral.

And what that means is they're pro-Shia and pro-Iranian.

And all of the Hamas

dandies, and that's what they are.

They're very wealthy people.

They suck up all this money.

And they live in enclaves that are protected in the West Bank or Gaza.

And they live in gutter.

And that's where they are.

And at some point, I don't know when it is, the United States has got to, as I said, it's a hard rain going to fall.

We're going to have to confront Turkey with some honest talk.

And then, first of all, we shouldn't have any nuclear weapons whatsoever at Insular Air Force Base.

We should get every damn one if we haven't already.

I'm sure we're secretly trying to take them out, but these are old big, big bombs.

And we have that coup in Turkey.

It was unclear who owned them.

They tried to put the whole thing under a lock and key.

They're very dangerous.

And we need to talk to Gutter.

And we need to say, look,

You're either on the side of the West

or you can deal with the Chinese and the Iranians and be considered an enemy of the United States, but you're going to give up those Hamas people.

We're not going to let you

subsidize and host people that kill Americans and kidnap them in Israel.

That's what happened.

There's Americans that are dead and desecrated and kidnapped.

And Hamas is bragging because they have over 100 hossi.

We're going to put them in the tunnel.

We're going to use them as human shield.

We're going to trade them for 5,000 of our.

I don't think that's going to happen.

You don't?

I don't.

No, I don't think they're going to negotiate with them.

They can't.

They have no choice.

This is an existential war.

I think they're going to kill them.

I don't want that to happen, but you can't deal with these people.

And

if they kill American hostages, there's going to be a lot of pressure.

Yeah.

Do you think they've already killed some Americans?

I know.

I think they've killed Americans already.

I don't know whether they've executed the hostages they took.

They have a weird,

it's a very strange culture for all this machismo and raggedacchio and bravado.

They have an odd propensity.

They love to kill.

They just love to kill old women.

They had that older woman that they were berating, and she was giving the victory sign under gunpoint.

They love to kill children.

They love to rape women.

But they don't like to fight the IDF.

They don't like to do it.

They like to blow them up when they're not looking, but they don't ever say, we're going to go fight the IDF.

Because when they've done it, in the the Yom Kippur War, when it finally got going or the Six-Day War,

they'd lose.

They lose.

And they know it.

What do you think happened here that the IDF was so surprised by this attack?

I think there's a sense.

When you go to Israel and you see what's going on,

it's not the Israel that I remember 20 years ago.

It's opened its economy and it's got rid of the kibbutz socialism and it's

got one of the most sophisticated tech sectors.

It's found a lot of natural.

What I'm getting at, it's wealthy.

And when you went there 20 years ago, it was a marked difference between the lifestyle in Israel and the lifestyle in the United States.

If you go to Haifa today and you compare it with San Francisco,

there's no comparison.

It's a clean, safe, prosperous city.

There's no homeless people, there's no carjacking, there's no smash and grab.

It's beautiful.

My point is, they have created a whole generation since 2000 and the suicide bombing period, 2001, 2003, and the Arafat and all that, that have grown up in prosperity and security.

And I think they let down their guard.

I think that that new generation thought, you know what?

We've reached a new peak.

We're cutting a deal with the Arabs.

Everything is great.

We don't have to worry about.

And then they had this domestic

conundrum where the Netanyahu effort

to reform the Israeli Supreme Court.

And by the way, if you look at that very carefully, the Israeli Supreme Court has extra legal powers that you would not even dream of our Supreme Court having.

And that...

effort at reform created a whole leftist backlash to the degree that recruits in the IDF were not going to show up for their duty or even the reservists.

They were so angry that the country was split in two.

And that's yet a fourth catalyst, along with our appeasement and along with the Saudi deal,

and along

with the anniversary of Yom Kippur, that might have precipitated, they may have made the wrong conclusion that this generation is so interested in fighting itself and it's so prosperous that it wouldn't react if we did something as the older older generation surely would have.

But to your question,

I think prosperity created Enoi, and they weren't, just like before the Yom Kippur War, and they were not paying attention to the signs.

And by the way,

we brag that we have the most sophisticated intelligence services, National Security Agency,

CIA, FBI.

Where were they?

Every time you look at a Hollywood movie, there's some guy sitting in Langley with a big screen and he can hear anybody in the world.

They brag about that.

I think the answer is very clear.

The CIA is more interested in hunting down Catholics at Latin Masses, at

schools to go after parents, to go after James O'Keefe, to go after anti-abortion protesters, to get involved with

U.S.

campaigns that they don't do what they used to do.

Neither does the FBI.

So a hard rain is going to fall, and this country is going to be very vulnerable.

There's millions of people coming across that border.

The Iranians have already said that would be an ideal place to insert terrorists coming across.

It's going to get an intercontinental missile very soon.

Turkey's going to get one, too.

And I think it'll be nuclear in five or six years.

And we don't have any comparable missile defense.

Our military is woke.

It's full of dissension.

Our officers, like Millie, are politicized.

They have no moral bearings.

They call their Chinese counterparts.

They interrupt the chain of command unlawfully.

Our retired officers break the uniform code of military justice.

They cashiered thousands of brave American soldiers because they wouldn't get a vaccination.

And then they let in 8 million people without even asking if they were vaccinated.

So it is in big trouble, and the recruitment shows that.

And then when you add into that equation Kabul and that disastrous humiliation, by the way, there have been reports that the 50 billion, if that's the exact number, of

goods that we left, military weapons and munitions, have been making their way through the terrorist world thanks to the Taliban, who, by the way, in addition, have bragged that they would like to fight and aid Hamas.

And we'll see.

Right now we're at the cusp because we're waiting, waiting, waiting on this Sunday night.

And we're going to see what Hezbollah does and what Iran does,

Turkey does,

what the other Arab states, Iraq does, Egypt does, an Egyptian policeman today shot two, killed, murdered two Israelis, because they're going to look at what the IDF does in Gaza.

Right now they think, wow, it'd be a great idea.

Hezbollah did some shelling.

But whether they do anything will depend on whether they want to share the fate of Hamas.

If they think Hamas is now the Romanic leader of the Arab world that kills Jews with impunity and they want to pile on, they will start to pile on.

If they look at what Gaza looks like in three weeks, they're going to say, not this pig.

I'm not going to do that.

Because if you

cause an existential war with Israel, they will go after us in Beirut.

And they'll go after us anywhere.

So we'll see.

Yeah, and we're already seeing.

It's very important.

People are listening, whatever your views of Israel

are.

And you might not agree with mine that he was a staunch supporter, but it's a democratic, humane society, and its neighbors are not.

They're just not.

Nothing to do with being Arab or not Arab.

They're just not.

I have been to almost every country in the Middle East.

Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Iraq.

Jordan, and I can assure you that in terms of humanity of the society, the way they treat their own people, the work ethic,

degree of medical services, the degree of infrastructure, it's just not the same.

It's not.

And there is a reason for that, because they're corrupt.

And

they're not transparent.

And they're not consensual societies.

And they don't respect market capitalism and private property.

They don't have an independent judiciary.

They don't have a constitutional system in the Western sense of the Enlightenment.

And so I'm sorry.

And then

they, in various degrees, are theocratic.

And so whether you like Israel or not, there is a difference.

And it is an outpost of sanity.

It's an atal of sanity in a sea of misery.

And it didn't cause that misery.

That misery is self-inflicted.

Well, Victor, let's go ahead and take our last break and then come back and talk about the implications for things that have been going on in the region.

So stay with us and we'll be right back.

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We're back.

This is the Victor Davis-Hanson Show.

And Victor, I wanted to, I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about, I know that

we are, or sorry, Israel was making inroads with the Saudis.

And I was wondering, how do you see will this impact

their deals?

I think the Saudis are Saudis.

They don't do anything unless there's a 51% advantage to it.

The Saudis are very shrewd.

They understand that they rule as a monarchy without the consent necessarily of the people, although they may be popular, who knows.

But the point is they don't do anything unless they, after careful consideration, believe it's in the interest of the royal family, which is quite large.

So on the plus side, they look at Iran

and they say, this is an existential enemy that wants to destroy us, and we don't have the capability or the technology or the anti-missile defense to stop them.

And when they get a bomb, we're either going to have to be submissive, a hawk onto the talon of an eagle, or we're going to have to cut a deal with the United States and Israel for deterrence.

And they're trying to decide, on the other hand, if we go pro-Western, it's contrary to fundamentalist Islam and we will be attacked by terrorists because they'll feel that we're illegitimate in the sense of being non-pan-Arabic and non-pan-Islamic.

So they're trying to see who's going to win.

That's what they're looking at right now.

So Saudi Arabia looks at the United States.

They see that we ran from Kabul.

We left billions of dollars of munitions.

We're back and forth with the Saudis.

Joe Biden said that they were illegitimate and they were corrupt and he didn't want to talk to them and then when he needed oil before the midterms he begged them, he begged the Venezuela.

And so they look at all this volatility and they think, hmm,

what is in our interest?

And they can't decide yet.

So it's incumbent upon us to do what?

To get back to that theme of a hard rain is going to fall.

It's going to fall.

We need to secure our border.

We need to drill and frack like we've never done before.

We need to be self-sufficient so we don't don't need one drop of natural gas or oil from that god-forsaken Middle East.

We need to put the Russians out of the business, the Iranians out of business by pumping as much as we can.

We need to take a look at this military and say, you're woke,

you're running a commissariat, and we're going to unwake you.

And you've got to go back to merit and you've got to go back to all those people who left and appealed to come back.

We're not going to cut special forces.

We are going to cut out drag shows and diversity, equity, inclusion stuff and all this riff-raff, fluffy stuff that has endangered our military revenues.

And we're going to have a rule that the next officer who calls an enemy counterpart

or goes beyond his legal statutes and interferes with the chain of command, or as a retired officer subject to the Uniform Code of Military Justice starts slandering publicly the commander-in-chief with words like Nazi and they're going to be reprimanded and fined and court-martial and get that stuff straight and ditto the FBI and ditto the CIA and get ready for some very and get our physical house in order.

We're going to have to have a spending freeze and we're going to have to get lean and mean because when you look at the world, you've got China, you've got Russia, you've got North Korea, you've got Iran, you've got this

mole, this Trojan horse in NATO called Turkey, you've got radical Islam on the move again, you've got the president of Mexico telling us

you're not going to build the wall.

And by the way, if

you're going to vote, you vote, all you Hispanics, you vote against Republicans.

He's interfering in our elections.

He's a captive of the cartels, who kill 100,000.

And this is Jimmy Carter 1980.

So we better have a Reagan-esque figure.

And we need to get the house and the son.

I say we, I mean traditional America.

Because the woke

experiment has almost destroyed the country.

And we've got to react very quickly because the world is hoping that we don't.

And the world is hoping that we continue down this woke pathway.

and they will take advantage and destroy us if we don't wake up.

The

squad, as they're called, they'd say out of one side of their mouth,

we support Israel.

This was horrific.

And then out of the other side, they are calling for a ceasefire.

And I was wondering what you thought about that.

Well, that's just a euphemism.

They know that if they express their true sentiments, Yay, Hamas, kill more Israelis, they'll be pilloried.

Because every time they've done that, when Omar said, it's all about the Benjamin baby or Talib had a map on her office wall with no Israel or AOC went right out of the gate started lecturing people that Israel took over Palestine

meaning Israel proper

they get

they get laughed at so now they're more careful so they say let's have a ceasefire and stop the cycle of violence that means

Let's just call it quits.

They killed a thousand Israelis, They mutilated their bodies.

They raped the women.

They took hostages.

But let's just forget that because if you retaliate, that's fine.

And everybody knows what that is.

And it's, again, that's what the Democratic, that squad is not in isolation.

They represent, Talib represents a huge constituency in Michigan.

And AOC does

in New York.

And Omar does in Minneapolis.

And Presley does, I guess, in Massachusetts or New York.

And there is a large segment, what I'm getting at, of the Democratic left that controls that party.

So they always project when they say Maghamb, as Hillary did this week, they need to be programmed.

No, the people who control in a very radical fashion are a hardcore constituency on the left.

And that's why Biden appoints Mali.

That's why Biden gives $6 billion

release for South Korean money back to Iran.

That's why Biden Biden gave money to Hamas and the Palestinian Authority.

That's why Biden, as I said, picks people like Mali, because this constituency runs the Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren squad, and Tifa, BLM, Democratic Socialists of America.

That runs the Democratic Party, and they've terrified everybody in it.

This is not Bill Clinton's Democratic Party.

What I find interesting is that on the streets we see their followers and they are in protests.

They're anti-Israeli protests in New York City.

And the Daily Mail had this picture of one of them holding up his cell phone with a Nazi symbol at the center, a picture at the center of it.

And it said everything.

These people who are out protesting, they might as well just be Nazis, right?

Well, yeah, I mean, I've dealt with them my entire life.

I was asked to give a lecture at UC Santa Cruz.

I had to deal with Palestinian radicals.

I gave a talk at the University of Santa Clara about, I don't know, 15 years ago.

And

it wasn't a partisan talk.

It was an analysis of the labyrinth of the Middle East.

And this student got up and said to me, this is very important because it typifies the mentality.

She got up and said, I am a Palestinian.

And do you know what your country has done to me?

Now, remember.

She's talking to a U.S.

citizen while she is a foreign national in the United States.

She She said, you made me

have to go all the way over to Amman, Jordan to fly to the United States.

I can't go into Israel and fly out of Tel Aviv.

And I said, well, why would you want to do that?

You just told me it was a Zionist entity.

And she said, well, you people need to respect my rights.

And all I said was, I'd make a deal with you.

If you promise to go home and leave our God-forsaken country, I promise that I'll never go to your God-forsaken country.

How's that?

She started crying.

And then she got a dean to come up and say, how dare you say that?

So I had the same experience at Cal State.

Whenever you are on a campus and you talk about the Middle East, a small but vocal and hardcore contingent appears and they show their real colors.

They're fascist and they want to destroy Israel and kill every Jew in it.

And they're in the United States.

And that group is empowered by the diversity, equity, inclusion agenda.

And they think that they're immune from criticism and especially symmetric or reciprocal.

You cannot say to them what they say to you.

And when somebody does it, they don't like it and they go berserk.

But they're just like Hamas.

They love to go in and do all of this stuff and then they cry to high heaven and

I was watching this building with Hamas headquarters being floated by the IDF Air Force and you could hear see people screaming as they were filming.

Well yeah they told you it you know they have a preliminary little flash bomb that gives you I don't know a minute or two to get out and then they were going to blow it up because it was one of the headquarters that planned the killing of other citizens.

But they were horrified.

You can't do this to us.

The UN loves us.

Your left loves us.

We've got Palestinian intellectuals in every university.

How dare you do this to us?

We get to kill with impunity.

There's people like Robert Malley and the squad will defend us.

So shame on you.

That's their attitude.

Yeah, it sure is.

Well, you already said a few things about Turkey, but I did notice that the U.S.

shot down a Turkish drone over Syria, and I thought that was kind of odd.

Do you know what's going on there?

And what's the problem?

Well, they had no choice.

It was just

getting close to American

deployment.

And why was it doing that?

Obviously, it was going to give that intelligence to its newfound friends.

I don't know if that's Hezbollah

or,

I don't know, Syria, Iran.

That's what.

So my point is this.

Not trying to be hysterical, but if you have a NATO alliance,

And you have Turkey that is run by an Islamicist neo-Ottoman government, and it tried to stop Sweden from joining the alliance, which is about as liberal and progressive a nation that you can imagine, and more importantly, one of the best equipped and armed for its size.

In other words, it's the ideal NATO member.

It's on the front line with Russia.

It's got a superb military, and it presses all of the globalist buttons.

And you're opposing that?

And then you are confronting the United States and Syria, and you threaten Greece with missiles, then if you came from outer space, you'd say, well, why is this country here?

It illegally occupies northern Cyprus.

Not one country in the world has recognized Turkish Cyprus as an independent entity.

So by every definition of an enemy, and I just got back from Turkey.

I like the Turkish people.

And Istanbul is the largest city in Europe.

It's 15 million people.

But when you've got a government that takes that UN historical shrine, Hagia Sophia, that for almost a century has been a UN ecumenical site, celebrating the greatest cathedral in Christendom until the 17th century, built by Justinian in

538.

And he makes it into a mosque,

then you've got problems.

And it doesn't belong in NATO.

And I know the argument for keeping in NATO, which Victor, would you rather have it outside of NATO as an enemy?

No, but I would rather have not sending one dime of U.S.

military aid and no F-35s and just cut it off

and keep it in NATO and see how it likes that.

Just try that first.

And get out of that Turkish Air Force base.

You don't need it.

I know you say, well, you have to have it.

Well, you gave up a much better one in Balad.

Excuse me, in Bagram.

We had one in Balad, too, in Iraq.

But you gave up Bagram in Afghanistan.

So don't tell me that you can't give up bases.

Yeah.

Because you've got nuclear weapons.

As I said, I think they're still there.

We don't really talk about it.

But in a time of crisis, I would assume that the Turkish Army would immediately surround that base.

and they would have anti-aircraft missiles surrounding it and they would tell the United States those bombs are not your own.

So, one last question, Victor, and I'm not usually very excited about hypotheticals, but do you think any of this would be happening if Trump were our president right now?

No,

because

they thought he was crazy.

He may have been crazy, but he was unpredictable and he was unafraid.

So, just as in 2008,

Russia went into Georgia over Ossatia

because George Bush had a 23% approval rating and we were bogged down during the surge.

And just as he went in in 2014

into the Donbas and Crimea because Barack Obama had basically said, I'll cut a deal with you and dismantle missile defense.

And then you have to be flexible.

And they both kept their bargains.

And after Obama got re-elected, as he promised,

he got rid of missile defense and

Putin behaved and then he went in.

He knew nothing would happen.

And then he went in again under Joe Biden.

He sized Joe Biden up.

He thought, wow, let me take a look at this guy.

Oh, he asked me if I'm going to keep doing the cyber attacks, not to attack hospital.

Okay.

Oh, he got out of Kabul and just left everything.

and just pulled out and gave the country over to terrorists with their pride flag flying and their George Floyd mural and their gender studies program.

And he went in.

He said, this is no deterrence.

And so did he go in?

From 2008 to 2023, there was one period in which Russia did not move.

It was 2017 to 2021 January.

And he didn't do it because he thought Donald Trump was unpredictable, crazy, and just might do something to him.

And the same thing thing is with Hamas.

They didn't try this because they looked at Trump, they saw that he did not want to go to war in the Middle East and get bogged down as they wanted us to, but they noticed that he destroyed ISIS.

He just bombed the crap out of them.

And then

he killed General Solomani, which you were told you could not do.

You just couldn't do that.

And then he told Iran if they kept it up, he would hit them.

And they believed him.

And I think I did too.

I think everybody did.

And the left always said that he was, and North Korea was the same thing.

He kept saying, I have a button.

Kim Jong-un said, I have a button and I'm going to send a missile to Portland.

And Trump just said, I got a bigger button and mine works.

And all of a sudden, he was writing letters to Trump, can we be friends?

Yeah.

It worked.

He sounded like the envoy and

wild bunch.

We're friends.

As they're negotiating their death.

So, I mean, that's what, I hate to say that, but he was very successful in that.

And I think all of them would be.

If you listen to what Haley said and DeSantis said, they were the same thing.

And I think the cartels,

they're acting because when DeSantis said he would go into Mexico, All of a sudden the cartels are now saying they're going to put a hit out on their own fentanyl dealers.

I.e., hey, you guys, we're going to make a lot of money smuggling people into the United States.

It's not even smuggling anymore, just transporting them.

And we make a lot of money on cocaine, we make a lot of money on dope and marijuana, we make a lot of money on meth, but we kill too many people with fentanyl.

And if you keep killing them, these crazy people will come after us.

And it's...

It's true.

Yeah, it stopped us.

It's human nature being what it is.

I don't want to sound like the Athenians at the Melian dialogue, but there there are certain laws of the universe that exist beyond us.

They're age-old and they can't be changed because they're based on human nature.

I wish it weren't true.

I wish the world worked according to the Sermon on the Mount.

Blessed are the meek.

But the meek were slaughtered this week in their homes in Israel.

And they were slaughtered by cowards and cutthroats and murderers who have a lot of support.

among the global left.

And not just the ignorant global left, the most sophisticated, wealthy, educated of the left.

Yeah.

Well, I was surprised to read Daniel Pipes wrote that he thinks the Israelis are going to take care of Hamas completely.

That was how I interpreted what he said in the Wall Street Journal.

Does that surprise you from Daniel Pipes?

I know he's a...

I know him very well.

Yeah.

I think he's probably right about that because

there's no alternative.

They have done this now for 20 years, since

almost almost 17 years since Sharon got out of Gaza.

And we know the script.

They got out of Gaza because George W.

Bush told them to.

They elected a mosque in their absence.

They left those beautiful hot houses.

And I think an American, Jewish-American guy gave them $50 million to continue that lucrative export to Europe market.

And they destroyed it.

They looted it.

They took out stones in a sewage dam, and the whole thing collapsed and flooded it.

So it's a criminal-run country

and it's been that way and this IDF has gone in there I think three times and that's because they send rockets and they send terrorists and they end up, I think they've killed a couple thousand of them.

They've lost three or four hundred of their own and it's a messy dirty business and it's like I wish I could say it's like mowing the lawn, but it doesn't even mow the lawn.

They keep doing it.

And this time they went too far.

And by that I mean we we haven't seen, like, I haven't seen anything like that in the world.

This is something,

even Milosevic didn't do this, quite like this.

And the Hutus did, but we all said, well, it's in Africa.

It's a third world country.

They went into people's homes,

raped them, macheted them, let them rot like they were

animals.

Well, that's what they did.

They went in and tried to shoot and kill as many people as they could.

We don't know how many people are dead, but today

I hear 700, 800, 900, 1,100, 1,200.

We're getting close to, I think we're going to get close to all of the Israelis that were lost in the Six-Day War

in one day.

One day.

So this is unlike anything.

I disagree with the Israelis who say it's their 9-11.

9-11

was

a conventional terrorist attack.

This was a pre-modern, pre-civilization orgy of violence.

I know that what they did on 9-11 was an orgy of violence, but

the sheer, I don't know,

it was, this, you know, it reminds me, I

got this book, The End of Everything, I'm doing the copy editing, but it reminds me, and I was checking some of the footnotes today and rereading Prescott, Hugh Thomas,

Warren Treadgold, some of the books on Byzantium and Constantinople and the Ottoman.

It really reminds me, when I was looking at that,

what they did in Constantinople the day that the city fell.

And even the Aztecs,

when they were fighting on so-called ritual flower wars, one of the reasons that the 1500 conquistadors won is that the Aztecs, in many cases, were not trying to kill them.

They were trying to swarm them and knock them over and then bind them and pass them through the ranks so they could go up at Templo Major and be sacrificed to one of their two gods and have their bleeding hearts and they would shave their heads and paint them and go through but it was the idea of taking captive so when you saw these people screaming and yelling and these jeeps and golf carts as they were

Not killed even as the others were that were mutilated and desecrated, but they took these people as if they were Aztec captives and put them on these carts and headed back through the hole in the fence, back into the gates of hell.

And there they're going to be used as shields and negotiations, and they're going to be tortured and killed as if they're ritual sacrificial lambs, just like the Aztecs did.

But the difference is the Aztecs were pre-modern.

500 years.

Yeah, they've gone back 500 years in history.

Yeah.

And I think part of our problem in this country is that we all live in a climate of fear.

We're all afraid of the woke, the politically correct, the bicoastal elite that says you can't talk like that.

And we have to realize these are very amoral people.

Those people out in the street of New York that thought they were so sophisticated, what they were really saying to America was, we like it.

thugs go into people's homes and shoot them in the forehead, rape their daughters, kidnap their children, kidnap their elderly, and take them back and they can be properly mutilated and tortured.

We like that.

And that's the truth.

And this administration

rests on that constituency.

It has to have that constituency.

And that's why they keep talking about MAGA, MAGA, MAGA, the MAGA, the semi-fascist, the MAGA Hillary.

They must be,

because they know that that projectionist thought applies to themselves.

They are hostages.

And these people aren't like MAGA.

These are the 120 days of rioting, $2 billion,

1,500 officers injured, 35 killed.

Not a day of buffoonish rioting in the capital.

They burned down a courthouse.

They tried to swarm the White House lawn.

They burned down a priest, police.

They burned down the St.

John's Episcopal.

They tried to burn it down.

So this is who their constituencies are, and they're captive.

They're emasculated by them.

That's why Robert Malley is there.

That's why they gave money to Hamas.

That's why they released this money to Iran.

That's why they have something called

the U.S.

Palestinian Affairs Office in the State Department.

That's just the truth.

Yeah.

Well, Victor, thank you very much for doing this special report.

We'll get this published or produced for Monday, and so your listeners can hear it.

Thanks to everybody for listening.

And thank you for this special report.

I hope I wasn't too blunt, but these are blunt times.

Yeah, they sure are.

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

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