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
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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.

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Should Obama Admin Officials Be Prosecuted for Russiagate Lies? Major Escalations in Trump/Brazil Conflict
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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!

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Trump Admin Unleashes More Policies That Prioritize Israel Over American Citizens; The Smear Campaign Against Gaza Aid Whistleblower with Journalist Mel Witte
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That the U.S. government and multiple state governments are devoutly loyal to Israel is hardly a secret. Anyone who pays even minimal attention to American politics knows that. The Trump administration has severely escalated this framework. The administration does not just send billions of dollars and massive amounts of arms to Israel, but they go much further: they have been routinely punishing American citizens and jeopardizing American interests to serve and protect Israeli interests. 

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Foto editada de homem de terno e gravataO conteúdo gerado por IA pode estar incorreto.

I don't think people realize how many policies there are already in place in the United States that punish American citizens and deprive American citizens of certain benefits and certain rights if they'd refuse to either sign a loyalty oath to Israel, where they agree never to boycott the state of Israel, even though they're allowed to boycott every other country on the planet, even other American states, you just can't boycott Israel. 

There are also many programs that will dismantle crucial programs beneficial to American interests in order to shield Israel from criticism or to claim that, by allowing protest against Israel, an institution is being antisemitic. And it doesn't matter how valuable these programs are, if they're associated with an institution that Israel supporters dislike for having allowed some protests against Israel, they will dismantle and defund the program. Let's start with the second policy that happened on Friday night as an example, just to illustrate how extreme this has become. 

Here's Paul Graham, a very successful investor in Silicon Valley, who has been very supportive of Republican and conservative policies, but also quite outspoken about the Trump administration's financing of Israel. On August 3, 2025, he said this:

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 Terrence Tao is probably the most important and accomplished mathematician on the planet. Maybe there are two or three people who compete with him. He's an Australian American citizen. He works inside the United States, on research programs funded by the U.S. government, which the government funds because applied mathematics is one of the most crucial fields to all sorts of programs that the United States needs to compete with China, from AI and cryptography to detecting financial fraud or managing financial transactions. 

The Allies were able to break Nazi codes using cryptography because of mathematicians during World War II. That's the equivalent of who this person is and what this program does. Yet, the Trump administration just announced that they're defunding it, not because they say that it's wasteful or that it's not producing benefits. And it's no part of some broader attempt to defund research programs at universities. The Trump administration is funding all sorts of research. Instituting programs at universities is something the U.S. government has always done for its own benefit. 

The only programs they're defunding are ones that they claim are attached to institutions like UCLA, which they claimed are antisemitic. They claim that about Harvard, filled with Jewish students and Jewish administrators, five of the last seven presidents of Harvard are Jewish, yet somehow the Trump administration decided that's an antisemitic institution because they allowed protests against Israel. Same with UCLA. Anyone who knows UCLA knows how robustly represented Jewish students and Jewish faculty members are. 

Read here what Terence Tao said on his social media account about why this was done. This was on August 1. 

 Again, this is so ironic. The conservative movement spent a full decade mocking claims of racism, mocking claims that people on college campuses need anti-discrimination protection, then the Trump administration gets in and makes it one of their very top priorities to declare that there's a racism epidemic in the United States, but only against one group. There's only one genuinely marginalized, true victim group in the United States, and that's American Jews and the Trump administration has been doing everything, no matter how much it harms American citizens or American interests, to purge the world of this one form of bigotry that it claims has pervaded all American institutions. And it will sacrifice anything to do so. This is not new. This is just how extreme these things can get in the framework of American politics. 

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Stephen Miller's False Denials About Trump's Campus "Hate Speech" Codes; Sohrab Ahmari on the MAGA Splits Over Antitrust, Foreign Wars, and More
System Update #495

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 as a podcast on Apple, Spotify, or any other major podcast platform.  

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One of President Trump's most powerful advisers, Stephen Miller, last night claimed that I had posted what he called "patently false" statements about the Trump administration’s policy. Specifically, earlier in the day, I had pointed out – and documented, as I've done many times – that the Trump administration has implemented a radically expanded "hate speech" code that outlawed a wide range of opinions about Israel and Jewish individuals and, even worse, that they have been pressuring American universities to adopt this expanded "hate speech" code on campuses to restrict the free speech rights, not of foreign students, but of American professors, American administrators and American students. It's a direct attack on the free speech rights of Americans on college campuses. 

I also pointed out – as I have covered here many times – that the Trump administration has also adopted a policy of deporting law-abiding citizens, not for criticizing the United States, but for criticizing Israel. All of my claims here are demonstrably and indisputably true. Yet after I pointed them out yesterday, and various MAGA influencers began responding to them and promoting them, White House officials began contacting them to convince them that my claims weren't true. When that didn't work because I was able to provide the evidence, the White House late last night dispatched one of its most popular officials – Stephen Miller – to label my claims “patently false." 

The policies in question, adopted by the Trump administration, especially these attacks on free speech on American college campuses through hate speech codes, are of great importance, precisely, since they do attack the free speech rights of Americans at our universities, and the actual truth of what the Trump administration should be demonstrated. So that's exactly what we're going to do tonight. 

Then: The emergence of Donald Trump and his MAGA ideology in the Republican Party led to the opening of all sorts of new ideas and policies previously anathema in that party. All of that, in turn, led to vibrant debates and competing views within the Trump coalition, as well as to all new voices and perspectives. One of the most interesting thinkers to emerge from that clash is our guest tonight: he's Sohrab Ahmari, one of the founders of Compact Magazine and now the U.S. editor for the online journal UnHerd. We’ll talk about all of that, as well as other MAGA divisions becoming increasingly more visible on economic populism generally, war and foreign policy, and much more. 

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Sometimes, government policy is carried out with very flamboyant and melodramatic announcements that everyone can listen to and understand, but more often it's carried out through a series of documents, very lengthy documents, sometimes legal documents, that have a great deal of complexity to them. 

Oftentimes, when that happens, the government, if it has a policy or is pursuing things that are unpopular, especially among its own voters, can just try to confuse things by claiming that people's descriptions of what they're doing are untrue and false and trying to just confuse people with a bunch of irrelevances or false claims. A lot of people don't know what to make of it. They just throw up their hands because most people don't have the time to sort through all that. Especially if you're a supporter of a political movement and you hear that they're pursuing a policy that you just think is so anathema to their ideology that you don't want to believe that they're doing, you're happy to hear from the government when they say, “Oh, that's a lie. Don't listen to the persons or the people saying that. That's not actually what we're doing.”

Yet when that happens, I think it's very incumbent upon everybody who wants to know what their government is doing to actually understand the truth. And that is what happened last night. 

I've been reporting for several months now on the Trump administration's systematic efforts to force American universities to adopt expanded hate speech codes. Remember, for so long, conservatives hated hate speech codes on college campuses. They condemned it as censorship. They said it's designed to suppress ideas. 

Oftentimes, those hate speech codes were justified on the grounds that it's necessary to protect minority groups or that those ideas are hateful and incite violence. And all of this, we were told by most conservatives that I know, I think, in probably a consensus close to unanimity, we were told that this is just repressive behavior, that faculty and students on campus should have the freedom to express whatever views they want. If they're controversial, if they are offensive, if they are just disliked by others, the solution is not to ban those ideas or punish those people, but to allow open debate to flourish and people to hear those ideas. 

That is a critique I vehemently agree with. And I've long sided with conservatives on this censorship debate as it has formed over the last, say, six, seven, eight years when it comes to online discourse, when it comes to campus discourse, free speech is something that is not just a constitutional guarantee and according to the Declaration of Independence, a right guaranteed by God, but it is also central to the American ethos of how we think debate should unfold. We don't trust the central authority to dictate what ideas are prohibited and which ones aren't. Instead, we believe in the free flow of ideas and the ability of adults to listen and make up their own minds. 

That's the opposite of what the Trump administration has now been doing. What they said they believed in, Donald Trump, in his inauguration and other times, was that he wanted to restore free speech. Early on in the administration, JD Vance went to Europe and chided them for having long lists of prohibited ideas for which their citizens are punished if they express those views. And the reality is that's exactly what the Trump administration has been doing. 

I want to make clear I'm not talking here about the controversies over deporting foreign students for criticizing Israel. That's a separate issue, which is part of this discussion, but that's totally ancillary and secondary. I've covered that many times. That is not what I'm discussing. 

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