Glenn Greenwald
Politics • Culture • Writing
Is Israel’s War a US War? “Free Speech Advocates” Demand Silencing of Israel’s Critics. Is War w/ Iran Inevitable? & Israeli Media Calls for Restraint
Video Transcript
October 12, 2023
post photo preview

Watch the full episode here: 

placeholder

Podcast: Apple - Spotify 

Rumble App: Apple - Google


Good evening. It's Wednesday, October 11.

Tonight: The war between Israel and Gaza is now in its fifth full day, and each day brings new escalation, new forms of violence, and extreme levels of civilian deaths on both sides of the border. It should not be surprising that virtually the entire political class in Washington sides with Israel – as we documented on Monday night show, support for Israel has been a centerpiece of bipartisan U.S. foreign policy for decades, and numerous politically influential groups in the U.S. feel a strong affinity for Israel for all sorts of political, geostrategic, cultural and religious reasons. 

While this pro-Israel sentiment is not surprising, it is most definitely necessary to discuss this question. To what extent are Israel's wars in general, as well as its new war in particular, also America's wars? Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley said on Sunday, one day after this war began, “This is not just an attack on Israel. This was an attack on America.” Today, her fellow South Carolinian Senator Lindsey Graham, who treats every actual and proposed American war exactly the same way, he vocally cheerleads every last one of them went even further. Then, Governor Haley, in a Fox interview today said “We are in a religious war.” Is this true? When Israel is involved in a war, does it automatically mean that the U.S. is also involved in this new war as a participant? Is it possible as an American citizen to oppose U.S. government involvement in an Israeli war without being guilty of being “pro-Hamas,” similar to the way that Americans who opposed our government's role in the war in Ukraine are called pro-Putin, or how Americans who oppose their government's role in Syria were called pro-Assad, or how those who dissented from any parts of the Bush-Cheney War on Terror were accused of being on the side of the terrorist or pro-al-Qaida? Given the emergence of these kinds of statements from people like Lindsey Graham and Nikki Haley, it is more vital than ever to ask what the proper U.S. role in this war is.

Then: Many media careers have been built over the last several years, very thriving and lucrative media careers based on a professed belief in free speech and opposition to what is called “cancel culture”,” which – we have long heard – has been typically practiced by the left: an attempt to suppress or punish the expression of views they like, dislike and rregardedas dangerous, hateful and likely to incite violence. We're now hearing it, it seems, from the other side. Yesterday, the quite conservative British home secretary, when speaking about pro-Palestinian protests in London, declared the following: “Waving a Palestinian flag or singing a chant advocating freedom for Arabs in the region may be a criminal offense.” Waving the Palestinian flag or chanting about freedom for Arabs in the region – If you do that in the UK, you may be committing a criminal offense. In Canada, the mayor of Toronto accuses pro-Palestinian protesters of having broken the law by failing to obtain necessary protest permits. The same argument Canadian officials invoked last year, to argue that those trucker protests against COVID mandates were also illegal. Oh, they didn't get the right permits. Meanwhile, in the United States, many prominent figures, including ones who have long denounced the evils of censorship and what they call “cancel culture”, meaning punishing private citizens for expressing widely unpopular views, especially when those views are declared to be hateful or inciting of violence, have spent this week compiling the names of students, a list of students at American universities, who signed pro-Palestinian statements and have devoted themselves publicly to pressuring companies, private companies, sometimes successfully, to fire those people for having signed those statements or announcing and committing to the fact that they will refuse ever to hire such people. Is this a violation of their previously stated opposition to censorship and “cancel culture”? Or is there something special and unique about this particular debate when it comes to Israel that renders such threats of criminalization from government officials or campaigns to have people fired for their views uniquely justified? 

And then: The Wall Street Journal on Monday purported to have confirmed that top Iranian officials directly planned and helped organize Saturday's attack on Israel, a claim that has been repeated by numerous presidential candidates and officials, including both Nikki Haley and Lindsey Graham and others as well. This is obviously quite inflammatory claim. Recall that similar claims about Saddam Hussein's participation in planning the 9/11 attack are what led many Americans to support the regime change war against Iraq because they thought Iraq had helped attack the United States. 

Even U.S. and some Israeli officials have quickly denied knowledge of any such linkage between Iran and this attack. But some vocal anti-Iran voices, while some are also calling into question the veracity of this report, others have started to beat the drums of war against Iran. It illustrates how there are a lot of influential sectors in American political media circles that crave conflict with Tehran. This raises the question, I think, how many wars with how many different countries is the U.S. supposed to be fighting? The U.S. government is already heavily involved in one dangerous proxy war by using Ukraine to fight against and weaken the world's largest nuclear power, which is Russia. The U.S. is already heavily involved in this new Middle East war in similar ways by feeding Israel the money and weapons to wage this war and has even deployed major aircraft carriers to the region. At the same time, a non-trivial number of influential people in the U.S. see China as the gravest American enemy. And there is open talk in many key circles about how the likelihood of ending up in a hot war with Beijing is very real, especially if they harass or invade Taiwan. Most Americans in positions of influence, including the president, say they would go to war against China if that happened. There are a lot of wars already, serious, dangerous wars against countries with serious militaries. Should Iran a country three times the size of Iraq with a much more sophisticated military, be added to the list of the countries the U.S. is supposed to be considering, not just an enemy, but one that we should be preparing for a possible war against? The Wall Street Journal article made that possibility much more likely by announcing, seemingly with very little proof, that Iran was the key organizer of this attack on Israel. 

Finally, it is a notable paradox that the Israeli media contains many voices urging restraint in how Israel uses military force in Gaza to avenge Saturday's attacks by Hamas. They argue, and we'll show you a couple of representative voices that there is a crucial distinction between Hamas on the one hand and Palestinian civilians on the other. They argued the lives of Gazans, ordinary Palestinians have value, especially given that half of its 2.2 million population is composed of children, people under the age of 18. They further argue that Israel must observe basic humanitarianism and long-standing laws of war to avoid indiscriminately extinguishing massive amounts of innocent Palestinian lives.

This is a view heard, paradoxically, I think, more by the Israeli media than in the U.S. media. So, I think it's worth asking, especially as we examine the latest wreckage and death and destruction in Gaza, whether that argument that some Israelis are making is correct while there are a few people who have done so, there is nobody of any prominence in the United States who is cheering or defending or justifying the horrific atrocities committed by Hamas against Israeli civilians, including children on Saturday. Any decent person, by definition, values innocent civilian life of all kinds, including obviously Israelis, and reacts with horror and disgust when seeing those videos from Israel on Saturday and believes it's always morally reprehensible to deliberately target civilian lives. The question, sadly prompted by our current discourse in the United States, including calls for the complete eradication of Gaza, is whether this basic humanitarian principle that innocent lives have value, whether that applies to Palestinian as well as to Israeli lives. 

For now, welcome to a new episode of System Update, starting right now.

Only for Supporters
To read the rest of this article and access other paid content, you must be a supporter
12
What else you may like…
Videos
Podcasts
Posts
Articles
SPECIAL AFTERSHOW - SYSTEM UPDATE 500
01:07:46
Answering Your Questions About Tariffs

Many of you have been asking about the impact of Trump's tariffs, and Glenn addressed how we are covering the issue during our mail bag segment yesterday. As always, we are grateful for your thought-provoking questions! Thank you, and keep the questions coming!

00:11:10
In Case You Missed It: Glenn Breaks Down Trump's DOJ Speech on Fox News
00:04:52
Listen to this Article: Reflecting New U.S. Control of TikTok's Censorship, Our Report Criticizing Zelensky Was Deleted

For years, U.S. officials and their media allies accused Russia, China and Iran of tyranny for demanding censorship as a condition for Big Tech access. Now, the U.S. is doing the same to TikTok. Listen below.

Listen to this Article: Reflecting New U.S. Control of TikTok's Censorship, Our Report Criticizing Zelensky Was Deleted

While it is true that Charlie Kirk had some odd views, and said some rude, insensitive things (particularly about Arabs) -- as the clip shared by one user in the live chat last night showed -- it is also true that his words have been twisted, and taken completely out of context all over the Internet. (Democracy Now! did this a few days ago.) Anyway, here is the Cartier Family discussing some of the charges of RACISM directed at Charlie Kirk. As George Carlin might have observed, they "happen to be black," and their informed responses offer more clarity on the issue:

Is it true a Florida Congress member tried to pass a bill 3 hours after Charlie Kirk died that says if someone criticizes Israel, they will take that person’s passport away?

Hello Glenn I am really hoping you will be able to take this question during your mailbag segment.

Firstly I want to state that you are a remarkable man who has been instrumental in the life of me and my family. I am quite grateful for you, and you make the world better. I really hope you read this live, both for the sake of receiving some heartfelt appreciation and I know you sometimes have difficulty with praise (even when it is deserved), and it is admittedly quite enjoyable to see you slightly uncomfortable.

The question relates to Charlie Kirk. I have thankfully seen many commentaries (your own included) that have focused on the sacredness of life as a key to approaching the tradgeity, regardless of politics. I was quite moved by his murder for that very reason. I am troubled therefore by my own response to the murder of Brian Robert Thompson. While I was not celebrating it, I certainly had a very different emotional response. A part of me even felt as though some justice had ...

post photo preview
Trump and Rubio Apply Panama Regime Change Playbook to Venezuela; Michael Tracey is Kicked-Out of Epstein Press Conference
System Update #508

The following is an abridged transcript from System Update’s most recent episode. You can watch the full episode on Rumble or listen to it in podcast form on Apple, Spotify, or any other major podcast provider.  

System Update is an independent show free to all viewers and listeners, but that wouldn’t be possible without our loyal supporters. To keep the show free for everyone, please consider joining our Locals, where we host our members-only aftershow, publish exclusive articles, release these transcripts, and so much more!

 

 The Trump administration proudly announced yesterday that it blew up a small speedboat out of the water near Venezuela. It claimed that – without presenting even a shred of evidence – that the boat carried 11 members of the Tren de Aragua gang, and that the boat was filled with drugs. Secretary of State Marco Rubio – whose lifelong dream has been engineering coups and regime changes in Latin American countries like Venezuela and Cuba – claimed at first that the boat was headed toward the nearby island nation of Trinidad. But after President Trump claimed that the boat was actually headed to the United States, where it intended to drop all sorts of drugs into the country, Secretary of State Rubio changed his story to align with Trump's and claimed that the boat was, in fact, headed to the United States. 

There are numerous vital issues and questions here. First, have Trump supporters not learned the lesson yet that when the U.S. Government makes assertions and claims to justify its violence, that evidence ought to be required before simply assuming that political leaders are telling the truth. Second, what is the basis, the legal or Constitutional basis, that permits Donald Trump to simply order boats in international waters to be bombed with U.S. helicopters or drones instead of, for example, interdicting the boat, if you believe there are drugs on it, to actually prove that the people are guilty before just evaporating them off the planet? And then third, and perhaps most important: is all of this – as it seems – merely a prelude to yet another U.S. regime change war, this time, one aimed at the government of oil-rich Venezuela? We'll examine all of these events and implications, including the very glaring parallels between what is being done now to what the Bush 41 administration did in 1989 when invading Panama in order to oppose its one-time ally, President Manuel Noriega, based on exactly the same claims the Trump administration is now making about Venezuela. For a political movement that claims to hate Bush/neocon foreign policy, many Trump supporters and Trump officials sure do find ways to support the wars that constitute the essence of this ideology they claim to hate. 

Then, the independent journalist and friend of the show, Michael Tracey, was physically removed from a press conference in Washington D.C. yesterday, one to which he was invited, that was convened by the so-called survivors of Jeffrey Epstein and their lawyer. Michael's apparent crime was that he did what a journalist should be doing. He asked a question that undercut the narrative of the press event and documented the lies of one of the key Epstein accusers, lies that the Epstein accuser herself admits to having told. All of this is part of Michael's now months-long journalistic crusade to debunk large parts of the Epstein melodrama – efforts that include claims he's made, with which I have sometimes disagreed, but it's undeniable that the work he's doing is journalistically valuable in every instance: we always need questioning and critical scrutiny of mob justice or emoting-driven consensus to ask whether there's really evidence to support all of the claims. And that's what Michael has been doing, and he's basically been standing alone while doing it, and he'll be here to discuss yesterday’s expulsion from this press conference as well as the broader implications of the work he's been trying to do. 

 

Only for Supporters
To read the rest of this article and access other paid content, you must be a supporter
Read full Article
post photo preview
Minnesota Shooting Exploited to Impose AI Mass Surveillance; Taylor Lorenz on Dark Money Group Paying Dem Influencers, and the Online Safety Act
System Update #507

The following is an abridged transcript from System Update’s most recent episode. You can watch the full episode on Rumble or listen to it in podcast form on Apple, Spotify, or any other major podcast provider.  

System Update is an independent show free to all viewers and listeners, but that wouldn’t be possible without our loyal supporters. To keep the show free for everyone, please consider joining our Locals, where we host our members-only aftershow, publish exclusive articles, release these transcripts, and so much more!

 

The ramifications of yesterday's Minneapolis school shooting – and the exploitations of it – continue to grow. On last night's program, we reviewed the transparently opportunistic efforts by people across the political spectrum to immediately proclaim that they knew exactly what caused this murderer to shoot people. As it turned out, the murderer was motivated by whatever party or ideology, religion, or social belief that they hate most. Always a huge coincidence and a great gift for those who claim that. 

There's an even more common and actually far more sinister manner of exploiting such shootings: namely, by immediately playing on people's anger and fear to tell them that they must submit to greater and greater forms of mass surveillance and other authoritarian powers to avoid such events in the future. As they did after the 9/11 attack, which ushered in the full-scale online surveillance system under which we all live, Fox News is back to push a comprehensive Israel-developed AI mass surveillance program in the name of stopping violent events in the future. We'll tell you all about it. 

 Then, we have a very special surprise guest for tonight. She is Taylor Lorenz, who reported for years for The New York Times and The Washington Post on internet culture, trends in online discourse, and social media platforms. She's here in part to talk about her new story that appeared in WIRED Magazine today that details a dark money program that secretly shovels money to pro-Democratic Party podcasters and content creators, including ones with large audiences, and yet they are prohibited from disclosing even to their viewership that they're being paid in this way. We'll talk about this program and its implications. And while she's here, we'll also discuss her reporting on, and warnings about new online censorship schemes that masquerade as child protection laws, namely, by requiring users to submit proof of their identity to access various sites, all in the name of protecting children, but in the process destroying the key value of online anonymity. We'll talk to her about several other related issues as well. 


 

There've been a lot of revelations over the last 25 years, since the 9/11 attack, of all sorts of secretive programs that were implemented in the dark that many people I think correctly view as un-American in the sense that they run a foul and constitute a direct assault on the rights, protections and guarantees that we all think define what it means to be an American. And a lot of that happened. In fact, much of it, one could say most of it, happened because of the fears and emotions that were generated quite predictably by the 9/11 attack in 2001 and also the anthrax attack, which followed along just about a month later, six weeks later. We've done an entire show on it because of its importance in escalating the fear level in the United States in the wake of 9/11, even though it's extremely mysterious – the whole thing, how it happened, how it was resolved. But the point is that the fear levels increased, the anger increased, the sadness over the victims increased and into that breach, into that highly emotional state, stepped both the government and their partners in the media, which essentially included all major media outlets at the time, to tell people they essentially have to give up their rights if they want to be safe from future terrorist attacks. 

Only for Supporters
To read the rest of this article and access other paid content, you must be a supporter
Read full Article
post photo preview
Glenn Takes Your Questions on the Minneapolis School Shooting, MTG & Thomas Massie VS AIPAC, and More
System Update #506

The following is an abridged transcript from System Update’s most recent episode. You can watch the full episode on Rumble or listen to it in podcast form on Apple, Spotify, or any other major podcast provider.  

System Update is an independent show free to all viewers and listeners, but that wouldn’t be possible without our loyal supporters. To keep the show free for everyone, please consider joining our Locals, where we host our members-only aftershow, publish exclusive articles, release these transcripts, and so much more!

 

We are going to devote the show tonight to more questions that have come from our Locals members over the week. It continues to be some really interesting ones, raising all sorts of topics. 

We do have a question that we want to begin with that deals with what I think is the at least most discussed and talked about story of the day, if not the most important one, which is the school shooting that took place in a Catholic church in Minneapolis earlier today when a former student who attended that school went to the church, opened fire and shot 19 people, two of whom, young students between eight and ten, were killed. The other 17 were wounded, and amazingly, it’s expected that all of them are to survive. The carnage could have been much worse; the tragedy is manifest, however, and there is a lot of, as always, political commentary surrounding the mass shooting attempts to identify the ideology of the shooter in a way that is designed to promote a lot of people's political agenda. So, let's get to the first question.

 It is from @ZellFive, who's a member of our Locals community. He offers this question, but also a viewpoint that I think really ought to be considered by a lot more people. They write:

 

So, I'm really glad that this is one of the questions that we got today because this is a point I've been arguing for so long. So, let me just try to give you as many facts as I possibly can, facts that seem to be confirmed by law rather than just circulating on the internet. 

So, the suspected killer is somebody named Robin Westman, who is 23 years old. After they shot 19 people inside this church, killing two young children, they then committed suicide with a weapon. The person's birth name is Robert Westman, and around 16 or 17 years old, he decided that he identified as a woman, went to court, changed the legal name from Robert to Robin, and began identifying as a trans woman, so that obviously is going to provoke a lot of commentary, and there's been a lot of commentary provoked around that. We will definitely get to that. 

 

The suspected killer also left a very lengthy manifesto, a written manifesto which they filmed and uploaded on a video to YouTube, along with showing a huge arsenal of guns, including rifles and pistols and some automatic weapons. I believe various automatic rifles as well. I don't think they used any of those weapons at school. I believe they just used a rifle and a pistol, if I'm not mistaken. But we'll see about that. 

It was essentially a manifesto both in written terms, but then they also wrote various slogans on each of these weapons and various parts of the weapons. And we're going to go over a lot of what they put there because there's an obvious and instantaneous attempt, as there always is, to instantly exploit any of these shootings before the corpses are even removed from the ground. And I mean that literally. The effort already begins to inject partisan agenda, partisan ideology, ideological agendas to immediately try to depict the shooter as being representative of whatever faction the person offering this theory most hates or to claim that they're motivated by or an adherent of whatever ideology the person offering the theory most hates. And it happens in every single case. 

Oftentimes, there's an immediate attempt to squeeze some unrelated or perhaps even related agenda in and out of it instantly. Liberals almost always insist that whenever there's a mass shooting, it proves the need for a greater gun control without bothering to demonstrate whether the gun control they favor would have actually stopped the person from acquiring these weapons in the first place, whether they were legally acquired, whether they could have been legally acquired, even with gun control measures, it doesn't matter, instantaneously exploiting the emotions surrounding a shooting like this to try to increase support for gun control. Whereas people on the right often do the opposite. 

On the right, they typically will argue that more guns would have enabled somebody to neutralize the shooter more rapidly, that perhaps churches and schools need greater security. We need more police. So, there's that kind of an almost automatic and reflexive exploitation again, almost before anything is known, but there is an even more pernicious attempt to instantly declare that everyone knows the motives of the shooter, that they know the political outlook and perspective of the shooter. They know their partisan ideology and their ideological beliefs in an attempt to demonize whatever group a person hates most. 

This is unbelievably ignorant, deceitful and ill-advised for so many reasons. The first of which is that every single political action, every single ideological movement, produces evil mass shooters. For every far-leftist mass shooter that you want to show or white supremacist mass shooters that you want to show, you can show people who have murdered in defense of all kinds of causes. And so even if you can pinpoint the ideology of the shooter on the same day the shooting happened, I mean, you can develop a clear, reliable, concise and specific understanding of the shooter that you never even heard of until four hours ago, but you're so insightful, your investigative skills are so profound, that you're able to discern exactly what the motive of this person was in doing something so intrinsically insane and evil as shooting up a church filled with young school children. 

The idea that anyone can do that is preposterous on its face. I mean, the police always say, because they're actual investigators, actual law enforcement officers who want to collect evidence that stands up for public scrutiny and also in court, “We don't know yet what the motive is; we're collecting clues.” But almost nobody on Twitter or social media or in the commentariat is willing to say that. Everybody insists immediately, no, the killer was motivated by the other party, the opposite party of the one I'm a member of, or this ideology that's not mine, or in this religion that is the one I like the most to demonize. It's just so transparent and so blatant what is being done here. And yet it's so prevalent. 

I mean, you could go on to social media and principally the social media platform where the most journalists and political pundits, influencers and the like congregate, which is X, and I could show you probably 40 different theories offered definitively with an authoritative voice. Not like, hey, this might be possibly the case, but saying clearly, we know that the killer was motivated by this particular ideology, this particular set of beliefs. And I'm not talking about random X users, I'm talking about people with significant platforms, people who are well-known. 

I could probably show you 40 different theories like that, where every person is purporting to know definitively exactly what the motive of the shooter was and by huge coincidence they all have latched on to whatever ideology or faction or motive most serves their own political worldview to demonize the people with whom they most disagree, or whatever ideology or group of people they most hate. That's always what is done. And I guess in some cases, if a shooter leaves a particularly clear and coherent manifesto, and we have had those sometimes, we have had Anders Breivik in Norway, who made it very clear that his motive was hatred for Muslim immigrants who shot up a summer camp in Norway. We had the Christchurch, New Zealand killer who attacked two mosques and mass murdered dozens of Muslims at a mosque and made clear he was doing so because it was viewed that Islam is a danger. We had the mass shooter in a Buffalo supermarket, who made manifest their white supremacist views. We've had mass shooters who are motivated by hatred of Christianity, as happened in the Nashville shooter attack on a Christian school there, I mean, I could go on and on. 

As I said, every single political faction produces mass shooters, mass killers, evil, crazy people who use violence indiscriminately against innocents in advance of their beliefs. But most of the time, and you might even be able to say all of the times – I mean, maybe I don't like the phrase all of the times because you can conceive of exceptions, but close to all the time, most of the time, people who go and just randomly shoot at innocent people whom they don't know are above all else driven by mental illness and spiritual decay, not by political ideology or adherence to a political cause. That often is the pretext for what they're doing; that may be how they convince themselves that what they are doing is justified. But far more often than not, the principle overriding factor is the fact that the person is just mentally ill or spiritually broken, by which I mean just a completely nihilistic person who has given up on life and wants to just inflict suffering on other people because of the suffering that they feel or their suffering from delusions. 

And this isn't something I invented today. This is something I've long been saying. And I just want to make one more point, which is, even though there are sometimes manifestos that are extremely clear and say, “I am murdering people in a supermarket that is African-American because I hate Black people and I don't think they belong in the United States,” or “I believe that white people are the sole proper citizens of the United States and I want to murder and kill inspired by those other mass murderers” that I mentioned, even then, it may not be the case that the person's representation of what they're is the actual motive because it could be driven by a whole variety of other factors, including mental illness, or all kinds of other issues to be able to conclude in six hours, even with a crystal-clear manifesto that the person did it for reasons that you're ready to definitively assert are the reasons is so irresponsible. It's just so intellectually bankrupt. 

Only for Supporters
To read the rest of this article and access other paid content, you must be a supporter
Read full Article
See More
Available on mobile and TV devices
google store google store app store app store
google store google store app tv store app tv store amazon store amazon store roku store roku store
Powered by Locals