Glenn Greenwald
Politics • Culture • Writing
New Documentary On The Destruction Of Gaza: Interview With Director Richard Sanders
Video Transcript
October 15, 2024
post photo preview

Watch the full episode HERE

Podcast: Apple - Spotify 

Rumble App: Apple - Google


Good evening. It's Friday, October 11. 

Tonight: The total Israeli destruction of civilian life in Gaza is now more than a year old. Even those who have been closely following the devastation and indiscriminate killings of tens of thousands of civilians by Israel have a hard time, I think, truly synthesizing the scope and magnitude of the barbarism, sadism, and decadence that has driven Israel's behavior. Fortunately, a new and genuinely great documentary produced by Al Jazeera and directed by the longtime British journalist Richard Sanders has just been released and is available to watch. That fully provides a complete and sometimes difficult-to-endure historical record of what has really been done to the people of Gaza – all with the direct, vital, indispensable support of the West in general and the U.S. in particular – entitled “Investigating War Crimes in Gaza.” 

The one hour and 20-minute film heavily relies not simply on the words of the Palestinians or even on the videos that they recorded, but very much so on the words of IDF soldiers in Gaza, including many of the repulsive and degenerate videos, so many of them routinely posted, of what they were doing to civilian infrastructure in Gaza and why they were destroying it. What has been done by Israel and the U.S. in Gaza and to Gazans for a full year should never be forgotten or even minimized and watching this documentary will ensure that never happens. 

The documentary can be seen in full on both the Al Jazeera English site and their YouTube channel. We asked the director, Richard Sanders, to come and talk about how and why he made this film, what evidence it relies upon, and also discuss some of the revelations that will be new to many people – It was to me, even to those carefully following this attack on Gaza day by day, such as, for example, the incomprehensible horrors endured by Gazans every time the Israelis ordered them to, quote, “evacuate” one area of Gaza and move to another. What makes Sanders such an interesting figure to have directed this film is that he has spent much of his career not working on the fringes but working in the heart of mainstream British media. Our interview with him contains some truly interesting insights about what both this documentary reveals and how it was made. 

As soon as our interview with him ends, we will show you the first 15 minutes of the documentary with the permission of Al Jazeera – not in the hope that this will satiate your interest in the film, but the opposite. Well, we do it with the hope that it will motivate you to watch the whole thing, which I promise you is very well worth your time.  

For now, welcome to a new episode of System Update, starting right now with my interview with Richard Sanders about his great new documentary. 


Interview with Richard Sanders


G. Greenwald: Richard, thank you so much for taking the time to talk to us. Congratulations on this very important documentary. And we are excited to talk about what went into it and everything else. So, we're delighted to have you. 

 

Richard Sanders: Thank you very much. Thank you for having me. 

 

G. Greenwald: Sure. So, as a journalist, there have been a lot of things I've covered that have been really excruciating and awful to write about, but then also to witness. And I know in the past, once I felt like I had an understanding of the extent of the horrors and suffering entailed by whatever I was writing about, I always found myself wanting not to look anymore just because it almost seemed like gratuitous suffering. And there have obviously been a lot of people watching and talking about and reporting on the atrocities that have been taking place in Gaza over the last year. This film, I think, does a remarkable job of synthesizing it, putting it into a whole narrative. But a lot of it is extremely difficult to watch. So, what is it that you feel that this documentary adds that people who've been following all along maybe haven't quite gotten yet? 

 

Richard Sanders: Well, if you've been following it all along on Western media [laughs], I think it adds an awful lot. I mean, for people who've been following it on the sort of sites and news outlets that you and I perhaps follow, then as you say, I think it synthesizes it and brings it all together. I think it was inspired by two things: one is the desire simply not to leave the space to Western media outlets to cover this because they do it so appallingly but also, this realization that there was this extraordinary resource out there. You have this extraordinary phenomenon of Israeli soldiers posting videos of themselves continuously which were completely candid. They seem to have no sense of shame and a complete sense of impunity. It struck us this was quite an extraordinary and unique source for being able to tell the story of a conflict. 

 

G. Greenwald: Yeah, and I want to get into that a lot because, obviously, I know when defenders of Israel hear that Al-Jazeera has any role in anything, they immediately dismiss it as unreliable or antisemitic. You know, all the accusations that are hurled. But in this particular case, so much of what your reporting relies not upon even necessarily Gazans or critics of Israel, but what IDF soldiers themselves have said and shown about their own conduct in the war and I want to get to that in just a second. But before I get to that, there was a woman in Gaza who is a journalist with Al-Jazeera, and she described the last year as being, quote, “the first-ever live-streamed genocide” and I think clearly beyond what the IDF has shown, one of the differences in this war as compared to almost any other is the Israelis tried to keep journalists out. The ones that were there, they tried to kill but they couldn't prevent real-time videos taken by the people there. How much of that did you rely on and how were you able to confirm that what you were seeing was, in fact, what was purported to be shown? 

 

Richard Sanders: We relied heavily on Al Jazeera footage when Al Jazeera has been in there all this time. And so, we rely very heavily on that footage. You're right, we do rely on stuff shot by Palestinians in Gaza. I mean, unlike the BBC and ITV, I think here, in Britain, we don't start from the presumption that they're trying to get one over on us. You just have to look at the footage. And they've set up the most extraordinary movie sets if it is false. Now, there are one or or two videos you sense are a little bit contrived and we have you know, we have Palestinians working on the team who are very tuned into these things, and we filtered out a few. But on the whole, I mean, if you're looking at a ruined landscape and shredded bodies, I don't know what else you're looking at but the truth. 

 

G. Greenwald: Before we get into the substance, let's talk a little bit about the film, how it was produced, who was behind it, who financed it because whenever there's a report or any kind of document that in any way reflects negatively on Israel, there is immediately an attempt to discredit it as some kind of propaganda against Israel. Can you talk a little bit about who worked on this project, who financed it, where it came from, and who kind of oversaw it? 

 

Richard Sanders: Okay. So, I made it. I'm a freelance journalist. I've made about 60 films for British television, primarily for Channel 4, but also for the BBC. I've made a lot of dispatches for Channel 4 and the people who worked on it are the superb team at the investigative unit at Al-Jazeera. So, Al Jazeera funded, its Al-Jazeera production, specifically the investigative unit, and some excellent freelancers we've brought in as well. 

 

G. Greenwald: One of the things that caught my attention about your work in particular, to your involvement in this, is that a lot of times people who are willing to be so harshly critical of the Israeli military or Israeli policy are people who are in some sense already kind of marginalized. They're people who are already on the fringes. They don't have a lot to fear. One of the things that's so notable about your work, your body of work over many years, is that as you just got done saying, you've done a lot of your work for some of the most mainstream and well-regarded media institutions in the U.K. For those who don't know, Channel 4 News is among those. Obviously, the BBC, The Daily Telegraph, and many of these institutions that are among the most mainstream and established in the U.K. are ones with which you've had a relationship. What were your thoughts on possible implications on your career or your standing inside the British media world by having overseen a documentary of this kind? 

 

Richard Sanders: It is true if you step out of the frankly very peculiar consensus there is about Israel in the West, you do come to be regarded as a marginal figure and it's quite tricky when you're trying to pick people to interview because you attract people down and you talk to them and think they're very interesting. Then you suddenly discover they're regarded as very marginal. When we interviewed Andreas Krieg in our film, in a fascinating moment, a security expert; he was on the BBC last week saying the same sort of things he said to us, just sort of rational analysis and it provoked an absolute firestorm. It was, you know, and he was heaped with abuse and so on. In terms of myself, Al Jazeera is continuing to employ me for the moment. So, we'll see how it goes. 

 

G. Greenwald: One of the things that I'm always interested in is sort of the idiosyncrasies of British political culture because it goes back so many years. It has a lot to do with centuries-old animosities between various countries, a residue of the British Empire in a way that I think a lot of people outside the U.K., certainly in the U.S., don't quite fully understand. And there have been over the last several years things involving Jeremy Corbyn and other incidents like that, very clear expressions of just how strong the pro-Israel consensus in the U.K. is, not just in the Labor Party but in the Tory Party and just in the general media establishment as well. Why is that? Why is the U.K. so devoted to and intense about defending Israel or justifying what it does? 

 

Richard Sanders: I mean, it's interesting you put that point. I don't think it's worse than America. It's certainly not worse than Germany. I think it's a broader question, and I think it's a fascinating question: why is the Western media-political establishment so enthralled with this very small and very questionable country? And I think one of the fascinating things here – and here I can speak for Britain specifically – there's a problem in Britain generally at the moment that the media-political class, which is very much a club in Britain at the moment, is very out of touch with the general public. You just have to analyze the figures in elections and so on. There's a real problem there, but it's massively out of touch on this issue. So, you watch British media, you listen to British politicians, and yes, you would think Britain is a slavishly pro-Israel country. You look at the opinion polls and that's not the case at all, and what support there is for Israelis is deteriorating sharply. 

 

G. Greenwald: I just want to ask you, on that last question, obviously, there have been books written about what's called the Israel Lobby, including by very respected scholars like John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, who were the first to, I think, really kind of have the courage to document it, one at Harvard and one at the University of Chicago. But there's been a lot of revelations about the ability of pro-Israel activists to kind of influence political parties in mainstream political parties in the West far beyond what their numbers might suggest they're able to do. Oftentimes, this is a taboo topic, people like to write it off as antisemitic. And it can actually, I think, fall into that trap at some point. But in terms of the U.K. and other places, what role do you think that plays in that question you raised? Namely, why is it that the West is so enthralled with and so devoted to this kind of tiny little country on the other side of the world? 

 

Richard Sanders: Well, the first of the three films I made for Al-Jazeera was the second episode in the Labor Files, where we picked apart this whole extraordinary antisemitism crisis around Jeremy Corbyn, who was a radical left leader of the Labor Party. And there I very much came to the conclusion that, yes, the Israel lobby is very powerful. The thing was it tapped into the vested interests of a whole range of groups. I mean, there was an enormous range of groups, most particularly the security establishment, that really, really didn't want Jeremy Corbyn to be a prime minister. And the Israel lobby is powerful but it ain’t that powerful and these groups all came together essentially. And it was the perfect weapon to beat him with because it left him, you know, it was a man who spent his life combating racism and it rather left Jeremy Corbyn disarmed. He appeared to be totally powerless to fight back against it and it proved an immensely effective weapon. Not that I think an awful lot of people were very puzzled by it. They didn't really get why Jeremy Corbyn was supposed to be an anti-Semite. What they did get, though, was that the Labor Party had this problem. It was being criticized day after day and it wasn't pushing back. It was doing this makeover and sort of squirming around. And what people got was there was a problem and the Labor Party couldn't solve it. It was a very effective weapon to destroy Jeremy Corbyn. So, it's yes, you have the Israel lobby people who are intent on pushing the interests of Israel and delegitimizing the Palestinian cause, very often because the people they are targeting are the radical left and increasingly just the broader left. Then, there are other people who have a very vested interest in jumping on the bandwagon.  

 

G. Greenwald: Yeah, I think the way Jeremy Corbyn responded, instead of being very aggressive and rejecting the idea or even showing of great offense that he is antisemitic or would tolerate antisemitism, instead constantly feeding into it, like, yes, there's a problem, but I'm fixing it, I'm working on it unintentionally, but very much in line with Corbyn's character, which I think is a big part of what enabled that to succeed. But that's for another day. 

All right. Well, let's get to this documentary, and some of the more specific aspects of it although I began by saying I think people paying attention to this intently and not just through the Western press might have known a lot about it, even though this documentary, watching it all at once kind of gives you a newfound sense of just how extreme these sufferings and atrocities have been. One of the things that I felt like was new was a lot of the information about what these, quote-unquote, “evacuation” orders entail. We were constantly hearing almost as though it was like a humanitarian thing that the IDF would order civilian populations to evacuate the area they were about to attack. And in the West, that got depicted as look, the IDF does something that no other military does, which is it warns the civilians about where the bombing is coming and it tells them to leave. And yet a lot of these, quote-unquote, “evacuations” were not just extremely arduous, but themselves very violent, very deadly, very brutal. Can you talk a little bit about what it is that this film was able to reveal about just that part of it? 

Only for Supporters
To read the rest of this article and access other paid content, you must be a supporter
1
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

I share your views on the sanctity of human life. I go a step further And believe In the sanctity of all life. The problem that America has is one of constructed distraction. The whole left/right conflict is the Distraction. The powerful are very good at keeping the public sight off of them. When the sites do get turned on them as it did when Luigi Mangione shot a CEO whose company caused endless suffering, (allegedly) they absolutely lose their minds. Keep the sights on them. We are fighting ourselves otherwise, distracted, as these powerful sociopaths pillage the last scraps of wealth from America before it completely collapses and then retreat to their luxury bunkers in Hawaii or Brazil (😬) or their summer Estate in New Zealand.

Also, I think the term “sanctity of life“ is too closely linked to the church. This term needs a rebranding in my opinion.

I also believe that Charlie Kirk was wearing body armour and the bullet hit centre mass and deflected into his neck. I think the ...

RE: Charlie Kirk ... I appreciated Glenn's comments tonight. It reminded me of the Clint Eastwood quote from Unforgiven: "Its a hell of a thing, killing a man. You take away everything he's got and everything he's ever gonna have."
That thing "he's gonna have" might be a change of mind about something you disagreed with him about. I just thought it was important that Glenn emphasized the point that we are all much more than our opinion about any one particular issue and even our opinion on that issue will often change over time.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_aPs9HFX0Cs

It appears that someone in the crowd knew, in the least, that there was a shooter - he saw him - that was about to commit the premediated murder of Charlie Kirk. And after the person in the crowd turned around and saw that Charlie Kirk wasn’t there he cheered as if it were a sporting event.

I came across this from sweetmojo at the duran locals page. An important find in bringing the murderer to justice.

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