The following is an abridged transcript of a segment from System Update’s most recent episode, lightly edited for clarity and readability. 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 that is 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!

Three stories this January 13:

First of all: now that the 2024 election is over and Joe Biden is on his way out, it's becoming acceptable in previously silent sectors of the media to document what a complete disaster Biden's Israel-Gaza policy really has been not just for Gaza but for the United States. “60 Minutes” – which has been solidly pro-Israel for many years – presented a decent segment on Sunday night detailing just how disastrous this has been and how it's an open secret in Washington that the Israelis are acting both criminally and adversarial to the United States and its interests. We’ll show you this important sea change.

Also: today Joe Biden announced that he was christening a new American nuclear-powered aircraft carrier as the George W. Bush aircraft carrier, an aircraft carrier George W. Bush gave his notorious speech in which he declared “mission accomplished” about a month into the Iraq war. These are all the same people George Bush, Dick Cheney and Liz Cheney, whom Democrats just a couple of decades ago, really even just a decade ago, were calling all the things they now call Trump: a fascist, a Nazi, a war criminal, etc., etc. This is not just morally twisted but very illuminating about the character and ideology of the modern-day Democrats. 

In our last segment: there's a bizarre yet revealing tennis in the world of women's professional tennis. I know this seems like the sort of thing that we would not normally cover – and it isn't: this is not exactly a sports show – but the whole thing is really indicative of a certain kind of liberal cultural identity-ism that ends up patronizing women and treating them like fragile children in the name of protecting them. So, I want to tell you about this scandal. It's a really fascinating one to see the dynamics at play. 

There's a big sea change with a lot of different issues and how they're being discussed in mainstream American discourse. Now that the election is over, there's no longer a need to work so hard to try to defeat Donald Trump or to help push two lame candidates, Joe Biden and then Kamala Harris, over the finish line.

The following is an abridged transcript of a segment from System Update’s most recent episode, lightly edited for clarity and readability. 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 that is 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 speak today to the president of the Hind Rajab Foundation, Dyab Abou Jahjah, about the work of the group in tracking IDF admissions of war crimes, the legal proceedings this group is bringing against them around the world and the very serious and credible threats of violence and murder that they are predictably enduring from Israelis as a result. 

There was a fascinating case in Brazil last week where a federal judge, unbeknownst to anybody, had a case before the court that urged the court to detain and criminally investigate a soldier from the Israeli Defense Forces, an Israeli citizen who had traveled to Brazil in December to vacation in Brazil. The court accepted that request and ordered that soldier be criminally investigated. As it turned out, though, before the court could issue that order, either the police or the prosecutor or someone inside the court leaked to the Israeli government that this was about to happen, and they were able to smuggle the soldier out in the middle of the night to Argentina. 

Obviously, it's pretty interesting that the person charged with war crimes was in Brazil and then fled to Argentina given that's where most Nazi war criminals went after the Nuremberg trials and after World War II – to hide. That's where all the Nazi hunters, the iconic Nazi hunters, like Simon Wiesenthal and others would find all the Nazis, including Adolf Eichmann in 1961, he was hiding in Argentina. So, that symbolism shouldn't be lost. 

The reason this is happening is that Israeli soldiers have been endlessly posting on social media –they even got criticized by Donald Trump for doing it – incredibly sadistic and obviously criminal and illegal actions that they're proud of and that they feel when they post on their social media and celebrate with music and dance and jokes and fun. 

The Hind Rajab Foundation was created in the wake of the absolutely horrific murder of a six-year-old Palestinian girl in Gaza that you're about to hear about. That was her name Hind Rajab. 

This foundation was created to track down and create dossiers on the war criminals in the IDF who are publicly boasting about their war crimes and then use the force of the law – nothing else – to go around the world in order to make sure that countries that are signatories to the International Criminal Court, the Rome Statute, and therefore duty bound to investigate war criminals on their soil actually do so. And that's what just happened in Brazil and that brought the attention to the work of this group. 

We spoke to the president of this group, Dyab Abou Jahjah, about the group's work in tracking these IDF admissions of war crimes, the legal proceedings the group is bringing against them around the world, including the one they just brought in Brazil. There are many others, and also the very serious and credible threats of violence, or terrorism that they are getting, not from anonymous Israelis, but from top-level Israeli officials, in public, all as a result of the success that they are now having in scaring Israelis about whether or not they're going to be able to travel freely if they participated in war crimes and publicly documented them. 

I find this work that he's doing very noble not just because of the obvious need to enforce laws about war criminality, but because of the obvious dangers that he's knowingly incurring and that he knew, obviously before he did it, he would incur. These threats are very real, given the complete sociopathic willingness of the Israeli government to cross any line, which they've demonstrated over and over. I found the interview very affecting and very enlightening and I strongly believe that you will, too. Here is our conversation with Mr. Jahjah. 

The interview: Dyab Abou Jahjah 

G. Greenwald: Thank you so much for taking the time to talk to us. It's great to see you and I appreciate your coming on. 

Dyab Abou Jahjah: My pleasure. Thanks for having me.

G. Greenwald: Absolutely. So, the organization of which you're a part is the Hind Rajab Foundation. And it made a lot of big news over the last couple of weeks, in large part because of a success that you had in Brazil, where you were able to convince a federal court that the presence of an IDF soldier on Brazilian soil obligated the Brazilian government to investigate that person for war crimes, he was able to end up escaping Brazil, fleeing Brazil but it caused a lot of concern in Israel, a lot of anger in Israel. And I want to get into the details of that. But before we do, can you talk to me a little bit about the Hind Rajab Foundation and how it got that name? 

The following is an abridged transcript of a segment from System Update’s most recent episode, lightly edited for clarity and readability. 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 that is 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!

Independent journalist Lee Fang is a longtime colleague of mine. We worked together for many years at The Intercept, and he's also a friend of the show and a friend of mine. One of the reasons why I ask him to be here a lot is because he does the kind of reporting that has really become increasingly rare, including in all the places that claim that only they are professional journalists. He really has become a specialist in figuring out how to trace the flow of financial information and the flow of money through Washington, and how it shapes the ideology of various groups, how it shapes the willingness of politicians to change their mind, how it makes them go to bat for all kinds of lobbying groups that are shoveling all sorts of money to them. 

He's been particularly digging into over the past month or so both the issue of the debate that arose, the intra-conservative, the intra-right debate, among Trump coalition factions about whether or not H-1B visas should be maintained at their current levels, whether they should be increased as people like Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy have been insisting they should be or whether they should be reduced or eliminated as Trump in his first term wanted to do and as a lot of his longest-term core supporters who are true believers in the MAGA ideology actually want to do it. It seems like a very vibrant debate, a very intellectually spirited debate, which it was. But there was also a lot of lobbying, and a lot of money involved behind it, which Lee really, as usual, delved into and helped expose. 

He also was a long-time resident of California and spends a lot of time focused on politics in places like San Francisco and Los Angeles and so, there's a lot of work he's done and a lot of things he has to say about the fires that are raging throughout Los Angeles as well as the behavior of Los Angeles Mayor, Karen Bass, including the fact that she was in Ghana as the fire broke out, despite having been told, according to his reporting, that these dangers were quite imminent. 

The interview: Lee Fang

G. Greenwald:, it's great to see you, as always. Thanks for talking to us tonight. 

Lee Fang: Hey, Glenn, good to see you. 

G. Greenwald: All right. So, let's start with these fires, because it's kind of remarkable seeing these images of entire communities of a pretty iconic American city, Los Angeles, a very beautiful city, going up in flames. And who knows when this fire is going to get under control. There's been a lot of focus as there would be in this kind of an instance on officials in California, to some extent, California Governor Gavin Newsom, but especially the city's newly elected mayor, Karen Bass. She was elected in 2023, if I'm not mistaken. And she was also someone who was on the short list when Joe Biden said he was going to pick a black woman for vice president. She was one of three people with Kamala Harris, another person who was a possible vice president pick. As these fires broke out, she was nowhere to be found. She was actually on some kind of international trip to Ghana. And there's been a lot of criticism about this. You wrote an article on your Substack, which as usual I highly recommend.

Before reading your article when I first heard about this criticism of her, part of me thought, for better or worse, governors and mayors do go on these kinds of international trips. Usually, they're just opportunities to get free travel to places these people want to go but sometimes there are legitimate reasons and it was this kind of bad luck that she happened to be in Ghana at the moment these fires broke out. She couldn't have anticipated that, she came back immediately when they started to spread and so, this criticism seemed a little bit cheap and exploitative. Then I read your article which suggested that actually she probably had reason to know that she should have stayed in L.A., not necessarily that these fires happened on this day, but certainly reason to know that she had work to do that she didn't do, instead of going to Ghana. What is it that you discovered about all that?