Deep Dive
Shownotes Transcript
This Halloween, ghoul all out with Instacart! Whether you're hunting for the perfect costume, eyeing that giant bag of candy, or casting spells with eerie decor, we've got it all in one place. Download the Instacart app and get delivery in as fast
This Halloween.
Ready to start talking to your kids about financial literacy? Meet Greenlight, the debit card and money app that teaches kids and teens how to earn, save, spend wisely, and invest with your guardrails in place. With Greenlight, you can send instant money transfers, set up chores, automate allowance, and keep an eye on your kids' spending with real-time notifications.
Join millions of parents and kids building healthy financial habits together on Greenlight. Get your first month free at greenlight.com slash wondery. That's greenlight.com slash wondery.
What's up, everybody? Let's try this again. Welcome to a brand new episode of Part of the Problem. I am Dave Smith. He is Robbie the Fire Bernstein, and he is feeling fine today. I don't even have to ask. I already got the info. But now you people know. Yeah, you don't have to redo the introduction. I've got to figure out these camera angles, because if I look directly at it, it feels a little bit like we're filming one of those I've-been-captured-by-terrorists videos. Yeah, I've done that. By the way, that's a theme of today's show. Oh.
But yes, I've done this before, like when Piers Morgan is in New York City and I've gone to the set. I've done that a couple times. He records out of the Fox News building. And they tell you before it, like we're sitting more or less where we are. And then he tells you, he goes, don't respond to me. Just respond to the camera. I'll stare right into the fan's souls. And it's so bizarre. There's something about it that's so just not human to just like, you're right here. Why would I talk to you?
when you're here. Anyway, it's odd, but I can get used to it. I'm going to do, if anyone out there wants to have a blinking contest with me, we will see how long I can go. I will keep this direct pose, but I'm responding to Dave. I'm not staring directly at you. This conversation has nothing to do with you. Please stop listening in on our private conversation, Rob. Yeah.
Usually I blink too much, but not today. Today, I'm laser focused. Let me plug this Thursday in New Haven, getting off a show in New Haven, Connecticut. And then Sunday, about to sell out Chicago. So get your tickets for that porch. And then I've got New York City. And then I've got Phoenix, Arizona. And then filming in Denver, Colorado.
very excited for that. Very excited for Rob's, uh, debut comedy special. It's going to be awesome. I've, I've watched you, you know, work out this material, uh, for, for a while and it's, it's really solid. So I'm excited for everyone to see it. I just saw here in the, uh, in the chat freeze again. Uh, no, no, no, I don't think we froze. I just saw in the chat here. It was, uh, that PBD announced this. So I guess I'm not, I can go ahead and say it then. Uh,
I was I alluded to this on yesterday's episode, but, you know, been a big year, a lot of big shows and another big one coming up. I will be going down to to Florida. I'm going to give you guys a couple of weeks before I do that. Thoughts and prayers, by the way, to everybody just getting a devastated man. This is a real bad timing with these back to back hurricanes. Yeah.
But I will be on November 5th, election night. I will be down there doing the Patrick Bette David show. They're doing a big show. I think it's going to be one of the biggest live shows that day. So that should be fun. I'll be ringing in the election day results with the PBD boys. So I'm looking forward, very much looking forward to that. And yeah, it's been an incredible year and this...
I think we'll have a couple more big ones for you guys before it's over. Do you know who else is on that panel? That's pretty cool. I don't know yet. Patrick just reached out and asked me, and I was like, hell yeah, let's do it. But no, but they're doing like a thing. Like, I think they're going...
He told me the hours of it. All night long. It's like all night. Like he was like, we're going from 8 p.m. to 2 in the morning or something like that. And I was like, oh, all right. And he was like, you could take breaks. I was like, OK, all right. That's a little bit better. He's like, you could like you come on the panel for an hour. You go, you know, eat some food, come back on it. So it'll be like something like a rotating panel type deal. But it'll be it's going to be a big show. And obviously there's going to be a ton of people.
uh, to talk about. Um, okay. So, Oh, also, but, uh, I have Detroit, um, in just a couple of days this weekend, I'll be back at, uh, the house of comedy in Detroit. And then at the end of the month, me and Rob will be in Kansas city, Poughkeepsie, Philly, a bunch of fun stuff coming up. Comic Dave Smith.com for all of those tickets. By the way, I literally, I asked my wife,
earlier today, if this makes me gay. - Yes. - Which is never a good question. - If you're checking with your wife, the answer's already yes. - Is never a good question to be asking your wife. But anyway, I asked my wife if this was gay, that I was genuinely, I'm a little sad that you're not coming this weekend. - Oh, that's so sweet, Davey Smith. - I mean, I'm used to things the way I'm used to them. Just hanging out with strangers all weekend. I need my Rob there.
You know what would be a good bit for Patrick by David? Is that every time you come back, this is more of a me bit than a you bit, but you just show up with the biggest plate of food and sit back down at the table and go, have you guys seen the buffet there? Yeah.
Yeah, maybe Israel's right. I don't really care. Honestly, this food's incredible. Like stained shirt, the bib on, crab legs. All right, all right. So listen, let's get into this because I have a feeling this topic is going to take up the entire show today. I was...
internally slightly debating whether or not I wanted to do this. Um, there, but I, I landed on the side of, yes, I have to cleanse the internet. We, I just feel like we have to, it's listen, these are, we all have our burden in life, you know, our burdens, I suppose. And, um,
Our burden is that we got to go through and respond to videos like this. And I should say, you know, we just did it. We're going to respond today to a Konstantin Kissin video. I know we just did one of his. I don't mean to pick on Konstantin. I like him. As I said in the last episode, we debated Ukraine on Michael Malice's show. And I've watched some of his stuff. I've watched...
a few episodes of Trigonometry, his show. And like, I like the guy and certainly nothing against him, but he did. So he made a video yesterday on the anniversary, obviously, of October 7th. And the video is entitled something like Why I'm Off the Fence About Israel. And so he, I guess,
I don't know if most people would say he wasn't exactly sitting on the fence. He was pretty much on the pro-Israel side, but...
leaving that argument aside, he made this video. It's blown up. Um, I, the last I saw it had like, I think 3 million views on Twitter. I think close to a million on YouTube. And this is in 24 hours. He made the video yesterday. So it's pretty incredible numbers. Um, and, uh, so anyway, so I saw the video yesterday. I was debating, um, responding to it. And then it really was, I saw his tweet, um,
Um, obviously of course the video is, uh, is blowing up as I mentioned. And so his, uh, his tweet, uh,
After the video, he tweeted, I must say that it is tremendously satisfying that of all the vitriolic meltdowns this video has generated, not one has addressed a single argument I made. I wonder why that is. So I think implying that there isn't a response, that all people could have is meltdowns about this and there's really no, you know,
taking it on I Could not disagree more and I was kind I was personally kind of blown away by how weak I thought the arguments were so let's see if we can't Do what we do and rip this to shreds. I'm excited. Let's uh, we're gonna check it out here Here is Constantine Kassin. I'm off the fence about Israel's war. Here's why I
Exactly a year ago, when thousands of Hamas militants crossed Israel's border to engage in an ordeal of medieval violence, I knew little about Israel and had no opinion about the long-running conflict there. I've never been to Israel. I've never been to Gaza. I've never been to the West Bank. It's not a conflict I studied at university or read about extensively. People on both sides who care passionately about this issue find it hard to believe. But in truth, most people are like this.
That's why, for many months after the October 7th attacks, I avoided commenting on the war or even discussing it on our show. Instead, I read, watched, and listened to the endless commentary, debates, and discussions to understand what people on various sides were saying. Having gathered those perspectives, I then did my best to apply first principles thinking to the arguments I heard. Thinking from first principles means stripping whatever you're trying to analyze down to its core and working back from there.
Context is extremely important to understanding. When it comes to highly emotive situations like this one, people often flood you with emotional context which does not support the argument they're actually making. There are some obvious examples in this debate which we will address shortly. First principles thinking helps you see the structure of arguments. The logic of an argument is like the skeleton of a body. You cannot see it from the outside, but it is usually the cause of why the body moves the way that it does.
getting to the skeleton of an argument is essential to understanding it. This was my approach when we had prominent pro-Palestine guests like Bassem Youssef and Norman Finkelstein on trigonometry, as well as pro-Israel guests like Ben Shapiro and Natasha Hausdorff. It was also my approach when I hosted a fiery debate on the subject at Dissident Dialogues,
and when Saif Din Amos invited me to discuss this issue on his podcast. So what does first principle thinking tell us about the conflict? First, the easiest way to understand a complicated problem is to find a comparable situation about which you already know what to think.
For example, if we accept that October 7th was a terrorist attack, as I believe most people do, the obvious approach would be to compare it to other terrorist attacks in recent history. That, as it happens, is impossible, because on a proportionate basis, the Western world has never experienced an attack on this scale. If we take 9/11, the most impactful terrorist attack in living memory, which shook the world's dominant superpower to its very core,
we see that 2,977 people were killed in a country of 285 million people. On October 7th, approximately 1,200 people were killed in a country of just 9 million people. Some keep calling October 7th Israel's 9-11. That isn't remotely true.
If October 7th was Israel 9/11, on a per capita basis, only 100 people would have been killed. In other words, October 7th was at least 12 times as bad as 9/11. And that's before accounting for the fact that Hamas took hundreds of hostages, many of whom have been killed since. So the obvious question is, if thousands of armed Mexicans had penetrated the southern border of the United States, killed 36,000 Americans, and dragged off thousands of hostages, how would America have reacted?
All right. Let's pause. Let's, uh, okay. Let's, so here Constantine starts, um, his so dramatic with the headphones on off. It's not, it's not ideal. It's like pulling off sunglasses and you're investigating. Let's do this. Um, okay. So, uh, Constantine starts by, um,
saying I think some fairly unobjectionable things. Um, but then he, when he veers into his first point, I think he really, uh, gets it all wrong. First off, I would make this point, you know, sometimes like someone's so confident in something that you're almost like, wait, am I stupid? Am I getting this wrong? But I'm like, no, no, no, no. Listen, that's not what arguing from first principles is like, uh,
First principles essentially means like your foundational views that aren't derived from anything else, but that you derive the rest of your argument from. But he just says first principles a bunch and then jumps into a comparison. But a comparison isn't the same thing as arguing from first principles. In fact, he hasn't even stated what his first principles are.
Anyway, that's kind of neither here nor there. I, as I've mentioned before, because it's been a year of this and I've heard this argument quite a bit. I think this whole this argument is just really bizarre and not the right way to think about these things. So, like, number one, this idea that like, well, that would be the equivalent of 20,
9-11s or something it would be 20 times worse than 9-11 I it's on the level of if you like um let's say there was a family that had four kids and you killed one of their kids and then there was a family that had two kids and you killed one of their kids and then you were like yo what you did to that family was twice as bad as what you did to that family
No, not really. Really, you did the same thing to both of them. You killed one of their kids, a really horrible thing to do. It's not exactly the case that you can just calculate this by how many people are in. You know what I mean? Like, it's just like not it's like.
What would you if someone if you were a family of four and someone broke into your house and killed two of the people in the house, you wouldn't be like, this is 500,000 9-11s for me because you killed 50 percent of the population and you killed two people. It's bad enough. You don't have to, like, make it this other thing. I just I think this is a very weak argument. And by the way.
If you're going to use this argument, which I'm saying flat out I reject, but then why the fuck doesn't the same argument apply to the Palestinians? Israel has killed far... Listen, the people in Gaza are a smaller population than the people in Israel. And Israel has killed far more people in Gaza than they've killed in Israel.
So if you're making this argument and forget, forget even in the last year as a response to, you know, October 7th, forget October 7th. Say we're just talking about history from October 6th, 2023 and before. Well, OK, fine.
Israel has killed way more people in Gaza, way more than Gazans have killed in Israel. And they're a smaller population. So I'm just saying, if you're going to be fair about this, this, I think this whole line of argument is ridiculous, but if it's valid, then Israel is still more guilty than them of that. It's again, I don't think like it doesn't, there's no, in terms of like
like philosophically or morally or legally,
Nobody ever thinks of things this way. Like you never get charged with a murder or sentenced to a murder based on how many people were in the family that you murdered. And it doesn't get much worse if you did it to a small family than a big family. And I don't see why that logic should apply to countries either. Look, people were killed. Something in the ballpark of 1,200 people were killed.
It was a I agree. It was a horrific terrorist attack, but no actually more people were killed in 9/11 and I don't think it's it's helpful or accurate to frame this as it's so many times worse than 9/11 because Israel is a small country and
Yeah, there's something inhumane about the proportions of death talk, which is what they keep trying to spin as the arguments with the amount of civilians that are killed to soldier ratios. Like at the end of the even in his example, if let's just say a bunch of people poured over the border and killed 100 Americans. Right. Or a thousand Americans or 5000 Americans. I think the takeaway would be, man, we got to do something about this border. Right.
It's the same thing if 3,000 or 5,000 Israelis were killed. You come to the same conclusion of, well, what's going on in this situation? Why did our intelligence have a failure? It kind of...
However, just to be nitpicky, and I kind of think of the movie Saving Private Ryan, which isn't true of the Israel example, there's something about killing everybody. There's something about, like, if someone killed all of your kids that might change. You know what I mean? If you have three sons. That's a fair point. In this context, I don't really think it's useful at all, but fair enough. Now, to his point, and this is the problem with, like, it...
It's fine to have a discussion about this from starting from first principles. I think that's the best way to, to talk about these things. But, but,
For him to just jump from saying first principles to in obviously apples to oranges comparison to Mexico. So if Mexico people were to break out of Mexico, I mean, we're not really breaking out. We got a pretty wide open border between here and Mexico. But obviously the asymmetry in that example is that.
Okay, but America hasn't occupied Mexico for 60 years. We haven't denied them the ability to form their own government. We haven't denied them the ability to form their own military. We haven't gone on regular bombing campaigns of Mexico for this entire period. And so, yes, it's like if you just assume that there are neighboring countries with...
like normal relations, both with their own governments. And what if one of these people broke into, okay, but it's just, it's a different situation.
Even in that situation, I don't think that the correct response would be that therefore all Mexican people lose their rights and there is no moral issue with slaughtering, you know, like women and children. I don't think that follows, but it's a completely different situation. It's somewhat funny that he's going, let's have a first principles conversation and then jumps to an emotional argument of let's understand the scale of the death, right?
With that said, for us intellectual plebs, can you define, I think like the nap would be a first principle, but maybe you could define. I mean, I would, I think it was, I think technically speaking like self-ownership.
is the would be the foundational first principle and the map is something you kind of deduce from that but it's pretty close to yeah I think that our first principles would be self-ownership private property rights and from that we deduce the non-aggression principle but yeah that's more or less I think that's how we look at these conflicts that it's like look like people are
individuals. I don't, when I say that, I don't mean this, that position gets caricatured a lot. I don't mean to say that we don't, we're not clearly we're social animals and we, we need groups and collectives. However, people,
Act as individuals we they suffer as individuals we punish people as individuals for their crimes and the the fact is that There are a lot of people in in Gaza right now who are not guilty of doing anything that warns them losing their rights and yet they still have
And it's literally the same the same reason why we think October 7th was horrible This is the same reason why we think the response to it is also horrible Okay, let's uh, let's keep playing the video
Mexico to speak of? Whatever your view of the history of this conflict, I believe the logic of this is impenetrable. However, there are some persuasive arguments from the anti-Israel camp which are aimed at contextualizing October 7th. Let's look at them. Number one, history did not start on October 7th.
The crux of this argument, when broken down to its central premise, is that the state of Israel is illegitimate. In this conception, Israel was created because land belonging to Palestinians was taken by Western powers and given to European Jews fleeing the Holocaust.
Palestinians were not consulted, did not give consent and found themselves kicked out of their homes. Israel is a settler colonial state. Two, October 7th was a response to Israeli brutality and oppression. Those of you who watched my debate with Saifedean Amas will recall that he made this argument repeatedly. The people of Gaza and the West Bank are treated so badly, he argued, the response we saw on October 7th was totally understandable. An act of resistance aimed at redressing the wrongs they have suffered.
Three, Israel is killing civilians. The scenes of parents pulling their children out of rubble speak for themselves. Four, Israel is engaged in indiscriminate attacks, which is why so many innocent people are dying. This argument aims to prove that Israel is the bad guy in this war because it is killing lots of people, either deliberately or due to a callous disregard for the lives of Palestinians. These are, to the best of my knowledge, the four principal arguments made by the Israeli side.
This is driving me nuts because his starting point is to try and get you to justify terrorism, which I don't. What happened on October 7th was terrible and they should not have done so. And to have a conversation about what Israel's doing, both sides can be wrong. October 7th was wrong. The fact that the Israel is responding and killing innocent civilians in Gaza is wrong as well.
This seems to try and present the argument that you have to justify that October 7th was okay if you also want to take the attitude that Israel killing civilians is... Or maybe I'm jumping to a conclusion here, but it seems to me like he's trying to force you into a lane where you're actually trying to defend that October 7th wasn't terrorism or wasn't wrong, which I'm not here to say that. Yeah, exactly. Well, there certainly is, like, you can...
Well, look, he's, I think, going to go through all of these that he just laid out. It does feel a little straw manny to me with some of them. None of these are a justification for what happened on October 7th. Well, yeah, sure. But also the idea that, which I'm pretty...
I think I can speak for Safedine when I say this because he's the guy that he mentioned there. But if you say that the treatment, that's the number two. I mean, we'll get into all of this in a sec. But if you say the treatment of someone is so of a group of people is so brutal that that's what led to an attack, that's not justifying the attack.
Like, again, it's like if there's if if it's like saying blowback is not a justification for ISIS engaging in terrorism. It's an explanation, not a justification. Like it's like if you you know, if a guy comes home and finds his wife in bed with another man and kills both of them, that you
you know, to be like, if you were like, why did he do that? And you're like, well, he found his wife cheating on him. That's not saying it's justified to kill both of them, but it is an explanation. It's like, hey, here's what happened. This is what led to that. And like, okay, you can, it's just...
Anybody who's like a third grader should be able to understand that you can keep both of those things in your head at the same time that you can understand that like this like is an explanation for what's happened. And this was a major motivating factor in this horrific crime without going like, therefore, the crime is justified because there was a motivator. In fact, this is literally what detective work is.
Like, means, motive, and opportunity are the first things they look for when they're trying to figure out who done it. Like, that's very basic stuff. But anyway, he kind of laid these all out here. He's going to, I think, go into more detail about them. So let's try to respond to each one. So let's keep playing. All right. If there are others, please let me know in the comments and I will address them in a follow-up video.
Let's go through the arguments one by one, and for the sake of argument, let us accept that every point in each argument is valid and historically accurate. I know many viewers will find this objectionable, but I believe the best way to unpack this entire discussion is to take people's arguments as valid and see if they make sense. The first argument, whose central premise is that Israel is illegitimate, seems to be at the core of every debate. It feels reasonable and logical to many people to contextualize Israel's response to October 7th in this way.
After all, if Israel was created through illegitimate means, it puts the discussion on an entirely different footing, doesn't it? Well, actually, no, it doesn't.
Again, let's think from first principles. If we believe every pro-Palestinian claim and accept that Israel was created through the forced placement of European Jews in a foreign land by Western powers, we must look for a comparable situation in which a country was created through some form of displacement of the native population. Most of you live in such a country. The United States, Australia, New Zealand and Canada are all the products of invasion, colonization and brutal conquest.
If you go back far enough, so is almost every other country in the world. Like it or not, Israel exists. It's home to over 9 million people. The idea that they would, could, or should accept the destruction of what is now their country is absurd. The United States government would not tolerate missile strikes and terrorist rampages from Native American reservations.
neither would any government of any country. - All right, let's pause it. This is too ridiculous. All right, so first of all, again, I just gotta say this,
Let's think about this from first principles and then just make a comparison and go, oh, other people have done it too. So no problem. That's not what thinking from first principles is. That's not what that means. Look, it is, again, I mean, I don't want to spend too much time on this because he said, let's take it...
as, okay, this claim is true. But then he did kind of like shoehorn in there, like, I know a lot of people disagree with me, but we're just going to treat it like it's true. There is no debate about
Like, there's no argument about this. Even the Israelis themselves will tell you, like, what gave them the authority to create their state? It was the UN resolution in 1947, right? Or the UN recommendation, the partition recommendation. Okay, well, who voted for that?
A bunch of European powers. There's not... There wasn't any... I forget the distance of the nearest country, but it's like, I think over a thousand miles was like the nearest country that voted for the partition. Everybody in the area, most of whom just didn't have a seat at the table, but everybody in the area was against it. So, yes, a...
It was the Balfour Declaration that first said that the Jews could have a homeland in Israel. And it was the UN partition recommendation that ultimately they seized on to create the state of Israel. And 750,000 Palestinians got kicked out of their homes and not allowed back. I mean, people, there's some debate amongst historians about what percentage of them were forcefully kicked out versus what percentage of them fled or whatever.
100% of them were not allowed to return to their homes. So again, anyway, there's no debate about that. But okay, me saying that, it's not then, you can't deduce from that, that I go, therefore,
Israel should allow themselves to be destroyed, whatever exactly Constantin is envisioning by that. And while look, I'm not going to say nobody says that because I'm sure you could find, you know, members of Hamas or crazy, you know, like 20 year old people protesting at
college campuses who say some dumb shit. But if your whole thing here is like, I'm not trying to straw man, I'm trying to take on the best of the arguments and please let me know if there's other arguments, I'll do a follow-up video. If you're not just taking on the dumbest argument on the other side and you're actually trying to take on the best arguments,
That's not what anybody is saying. That's not what any serious person who's like critical of Israel is saying, hey, you did an ethnic cleansing campaign in 1948. Therefore, you all have to die.
Therefore, Israel has to be destroyed. There have been lots of different steps along the way. There's been lots of periods of negotiation throughout the history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, starting in the late 70s at Camp David, the Oslo Accords in the 90s, the second Camp David summit in the year 2000, Hebron. There's been like a bunch of these things.
Every single one of them. The starting point has been based around a two state solution. The argument is not. And this, by the way, includes Yasser Arafat and the PLO, the Palestinian Authority. And yes, even Hamas has at different points accepted.
accepted 1967 borders. In other words, the real conversation is not about whether Israel or all the Jews in Israel need to be kicked out or killed or something like that. The conversation is about Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem and whether that the land that Israel is occupying, that is not theirs.
That's what the conversation is about. And so is it, if I were to say that, hey, the way that Israel was founded was really fucked up to a lot of Palestinians. A lot of Palestinians got kicked out of their lands. It was a giant ethnic cleansing campaign. You can't deduce from that, that therefore I think, no, therefore I think the founding of Israel was fucked up. I don't think there's anything wrong with acknowledging that. And like, if you, if you were talking to a group of Native Americans in America, and
Um, I don't think there's anything wrong with acknowledging that like, yeah, you guys, your ancestors were mistreated for sure. You know, does that mean that we're all going to stop being America? No, but it does mean that, I don't know, we could acknowledge that it was wrong. And Hey, guess what? The, if there are still some native Americans around, as we do have in parts of this country, they ought to have their natural rights protected.
just like everybody else. They ought to be given full citizenship. They ought to have the same freedoms as everybody else ought to have.
That's where you know what I mean? You could just as easily draw that from the conclusion from it. It's like yeah, Constantine is not wrong There's nine million people there they have lives there now What are you gonna do ethnically cleanse nine million people to make up for an ethnic cleansing of 750,000 people in the late 40s No, but that doesn't mean you can't recognize that. Hey that was wrong and
And like, so again, we do this all the time. And for him to say, like, all of these countries were started that way. Like, yeah, governments are started in fucked up ways. Okay.
It still doesn't mean we can't acknowledge that. And that's, I don't know what's. And, and, you know, I think that he said something about the, uh, the native American reservation, uh, attack, right? Like if we were attacked by native Americans who were living on a reservation, would we just go, um,
"Hey, we did messed up things to the Native Americans, therefore they have the right to slaughter all of us." No, of course not. But let's say you had a Native American reservation and some people left it and went down and just started gunning people down. And then they went back into the reservation. Would we say, "Hey, this is in the territory of the United States of America, so you know what would happen next?"
The fucking police go in and they try to find the people who did it. What we would not do is call in the fucking Air Force and just start bombing fucking women and children because that's never an acceptable way to police your own country.
Like, governments only do this shit in war, right? Like, governments... I mean, okay, listen, there's exceptions to this. Governments have done some pretty messed up things. But generally speaking, what we all consider to be right, or not only just right, that's like an understatement, but what we consider to not be catastrophically evil is, like, if there was a...
you know, like within the United States of America, even if there was a terrorist, Timothy McVeigh or someone like that, and he, you know, ran into an apartment complex while there was a manhunt for him, and the cops were like, blow up the building. Just blow up the whole building and kill all the women and children who are inside because there's a terrorist in there. We got to get him. We would all object to that because like,
No, that's just totally unacceptable. That's not what you do. You don't like you don't people don't just lose their rights because you got well No, he's using them as human shields. Therefore all the deaths are on him. It's like no, that's I'm sorry We would all object to that now things are different In terms of precedent are not necessarily in terms of morality, but things are different with foreign countries, but okay then it almost leads to the question of like
I mean, if you've been occupying a country since 1967, they're essentially your people.
Like you can't just attack them the way you would a foreign country because they don't have their own military. They don't have their own government. They are a captive people. And so, no, it's like the Native American example. No, I don't. Even in the United States of America and our government's a pretty fucked up government. No, I do not think that if we were attacked from Native Americans from an Indian reservation that we would send in the Air Force.
And now, if you want to add on to this, let's just say that in the you know, one of the things about Indian reservations in the United States of America is that they are free to leave. They can leave. They could go get a place somewhere else like we gave them that land, but they don't have to stay there. It's a little different than Gaza. They're also allowed to order things.
They can do business. They can ship things into their reservations. They can do what they want. They have businesses, right? It's a pretty big difference between Gaza. So what you're talking about with Gaza is an area that's something—it's like 5 by 25 miles wide. It's a small area of land that has been occupied militarily by Israel since 1967 and then since 2006 has had a full blockade around the country. They don't have a lot of land.
They don't have an airport, a seaport. They're not they can't come and go as they play. So like, no, I'm sorry. But like, that's not exactly it's not an apples to apples comparison. And even in your example, no, I don't think we would be like, oh, it's OK to just fucking slaughter people there now.
All right, guys, let's take a moment and thank our sponsor for today's show, which is Monetary Metals. Unlock a 12% return on silver. If you're ready to start building wealth by putting your precious metals to work, you have to check out Monetary Metals. Now, of course, silver isn't just a precious metal. It's a tangible asset and a great way to diversify any portfolio. But with Monetary Metals, you can
You don't just own physical silver. You own silver that works for you to generate more silver, growing your total ounces over time. And right now, you can be a part of the first true silver bond since 1834. You can earn 12% annual interest on silver paid in silver. You must be an accredited investor to participate. It's a three-year term. The bond is financing a publicly traded mining company located in the western United States.
Click the link in the episode description or head over to monetary-metals.com for more information on how to participate. All right, let's get back into the show.
All right. Do you want to anything you want to add? Just state it differently. If you're going to put forward all of these arguments for basically the way Hamas would use them and say, this is why we can engage in terrorism. I go, no, you can't engage in terrorism. If you want to take this same list of arguments and say, here's why Israel needs a different solution than killing civilians in Gaza.
then, wow, we have a really compelling list of arguments for why Israel probably needs a two-state solution and start to do something nice for those people because it's got a bad history that's going to provoke violence. But it's cartoonish to put forward these arguments as if everyone's out there going, this is why October 7th was justified and not as the list of reasons for why Israel's not justified for currently killing civilians. Right. Yeah. All right. Let's keep playing.
circumstances. Peace in the Middle East will not be achieved by attempting to undo many decades of history. The second argument centers on the idea that October 7th was a response to Israeli occupation and brutality. This, again, seems reasonable to many people. After all, what would it take for you to behave the way Hamas did on October 7th? The problem with this argument is that what happened on October 7th was not an attempt to weaken Israel militarily.
It was not an attempt to break Hamas militants out of Israeli jails. It was not an attack on the Israeli Defense Force.
All right, let's pause it here.
Holy moly. Okay. This, I think, is the weakest part of Constantine's entire video. And that, I gotta say, that's really saying something. This is just really bad. So he goes, you know, a lot of people think that the occupation is what led to October 7th. And, you know, that kind of plausibly sounds right. But the flaw in this argument is that
They didn't try to weaken Israel militarily. They just had a terrorist attack. This just doesn't follow. Like this just isn't logic. He goes like he goes, a lot of people describe it as a prison break, but prisoners don't typically go and slaughter a whole lot of people after they break out of prison. Right. Wait. But if they did, then did they not break out of prison?
Are you telling me because they went and slaughtered a bunch of people, then they didn't break out of prison? They were just in prison. They broke out. But because they slaughtered because they don't typically do that, it's no longer a prison break. The logic of this just makes no sense whatsoever. And, you know, he just sneaks in there as an assertion that that's why Israel is justified in responding the way that they responded. Well, look, it seems to me that, OK, the Hamas attack.
Hamas is not a modern military. They're not a government. But they're pretty much like... They're the toughest gang in an Israeli prison, essentially. But it was a fairly sophisticated attack. They hit them by land, air, and sea. It was coordinated. They knew... You know what I mean? They broke into the fortress of the world. And I don't think it's so crazy to go like...
They probably one of their major goals was what most terrorists attacks goals are, which is that the action is in the reaction, right?
And the idea is like, like Osama bin Laden was very explicit about this, right? That he never thought that knocking down the twin towers was going to, you know, destroy America. But he did think he could lure us into a war in Afghanistan. That and that ultimately that could destroy America. Now, we spent 20 years there. You could certainly argue it didn't destroy America. But then again, yeah.
Pretty rough year, pretty rough 20 years for the United States of America. And we certainly certainly did more damage to ourselves than than Osama bin Laden ever could have directly done to us. Right. So it seems pretty likely that the goal for Hamas was exactly what they got.
That they thought they could provoke Israel into an overreaction that would then look, I mean, look at what's happened over the last year. They have turned global opinion against Israel in a way that would have been unimaginable a year and two days ago.
You know, I just you couldn't. So, no, it's not clear that there was there wasn't some type of strategic goal here to weaken Israel. But it doesn't look. First of all, a whole lot of IDF soldiers were killed on October 7th. So it's not as if they didn't go after military targets. They weren't trying to weaken Israel. But regardless of any of that.
The whole argument just has nothing. This is just nothing. Like, look, if you, if I were to, let's say I, I were to, I don't know if you were to, to,
Trap someone in your basement kidnap them and hold them prisoner in your basement and Just abuse them and mistreat them and keep them in the most horrible conditions And then that guy broke out of the basement and killed everybody in the in the house Including the women and children just broke out went crazy on a rampage killed everybody Could I deduce from that?
That this had nothing to do with me kidnapping him and keeping him in my basement? Because he didn't just come out and try to weaken me. He came out and just indiscriminately killed everybody. Therefore, there's no connection to me kidnapping and torturing this guy in my basement. Do you see how ridiculous that sounds? Like, of...
In this scenario, you'd go, obviously, these two things are connected. Now, yes, once he broke out, he did not target the people who were guilty. He just indiscriminately killed a whole lot of people. But that doesn't mean there's no connection between what you put this guy through and what he ultimately ended up doing. Constantine is simply providing no argument here whatsoever. And
And for anybody, for anybody to look at the conflict between the Israelis and the Palestinians and to say that 60 years of occupation is an irrelevant factor that has nothing to do with the beef here.
I mean, I don't know how you could possibly look at it and say that, that there is no factor that you've dominated a group of people for longer than the Soviet Union occupied Eastern Europe. And you think that there's no way that that's a contributing factor, not just to what the
to their popular support, to the fact that they were able to win a plurality of seats in elections in 2005. You think this is irrelevant? Why? Because they went after civilians? Therefore the occupation doesn't count or something? I mean, please explain it to me. Say it's slower so I can understand. But what is the actual argument here? So if they had broken out and just attempted to degrade politics,
Israel militarily, then we could blame the occupation. But if civilians get killed, then we can't. And by the way, as I said in the beginning, do we apply that standard to Israel also? If innocent civilians are killed, does that mean? So like, in other words, it would be the equivalent argument if I were to say this war in Gaza over the last year has nothing to do with October 7th.
And you were to be like, I'm pretty sure that was a pretty big factor involved in it, you know? And like, even if you were to argue that like, well, that's not really what Benjamin Netanyahu and his war cabinet care about. You go like, okay, maybe it's certainly the reason why he's got enough popular support to get away with doing this, right? Like October 7th is a pretty big factor in this. But I was go, well, October 7th was a big factor. They would only kill the Hamas terrorists, right?
They wouldn't kill all these innocent people, right? You would never hear an argument that retarded being made. And yet you're making that argument. You're making the argument that what? Because there happened to be a music festival going on there and they killed a bunch of people at this music festival. Therefore, the occupation was not a factor. Now, listen, don't get me wrong. Like it was hard. It's a horrible thing to do to kill these, these young people at a music festival. Um, and it's totally unjustified, but it's,
They were also having a music festival right by the gates of a prison, which I know these are like young lefties and they don't even think about it. But it is if you're inside, the prison might be seen as kind of provocative. And yeah, when terrorists broke out of it, they they were right there and they killed a whole bunch of innocent people there.
All right. It's horrible. That doesn't at all prove that the occupation was not a motivating factor. And I think it's just so obvious on the face of it that it is. In the same way that the guy who I kept in my basement was like, if he breaks out and kills everyone in my house, he goes like, well, yeah, we're kind of going to look at that as one of the major motives. I don't know how you could not. All right. Here, let's keep playing.
the country would have done the same. The third argument is that Israel is killing civilians. This is the one claim made by the anti-Israel side that is undeniably true. However, this is an example of the emotive but irrelevant context I mentioned earlier. Civilians are always killed in war. The question is not whether they're being killed, but who bears responsibility for their deaths and who can stop the killing. Again, applying first principles thinking, we must reach for a comparable example.
There is no exact. He just paused again. This is driving me nuts. He keeps saying it because of first principles, we have to look for a comparison and he never defines what his first principles are. This is not first principle thinking. It's not to just go, um, to just go like, well, people always die in war. It's like, yeah, that's why war is really, really bad.
And that's why the onus should be on you to only fight a war when you absolutely have to. And that's what, you know, what I've been saying for the last year. And if you're targeting and killing civilians to win a war, you're probably in the wrong. Yeah. I mean, like, anyway, it's all just like the idea that he's going to say, okay, I'm
This is another thing that people do, which I, you know, I don't care for. It's never been my style, but it's the old Sam Harris thing where you go like, you know, a lot of people rely on emotional rhetoric, but I think of things logically and deduce from that. You know, and it's like, okay, first of all, I'm not so sure that it's appropriate to
when you're watching, quite literally, babies suffocate to death to not have any emotion about that? Like...
Don't get me wrong, you don't want to just like be overtaken by your emotions and lose the ability to think critically, but the idea that we're all supposed to have like a value-free, moral-free, unemotional discussion about exactly how many babies you can starve to death and bury under the rubble of buildings, like, no, I think there's actually, I think it actually makes sense to be morally outraged sometimes.
I think sometimes that is an appropriate reaction. I think that's in us for a reason. I think if you were an abolitionist in the year 1840 and you're trying to abolish slavery and you got up there and you were like, um...
Well, let me just make an argument for you guys about how slave labor picking cotton is an inefficient economic vehicle to produce the most cotton. And in fact, if you have a voluntary participant, they're more likely to do a better job because they want to make
more money because they want it's like by the way i believe all of that but if an abolitionist was arguing that way in 1840 i think i'd be like dude you're doing this all wrong like slavery is a moral outrage and you should lead with that and like killing the killing somebody's kid is the worst fucking thing you can do in the world there's nothing worse than that man and like when you're doing it on such a large scale yeah there's gonna be some emotion involved there's nothing wrong with that
It's like, look, I'm fairly, this is one of the things that people criticize me about. I get fairly like worked up about this topic, but I'm still going and winning every debate I do on it because I also still have arguments, but I can have all of my arguments and also still be like, this is a fucking outrage. Like there's nothing wrong with that. Now for your counter to that, to just be, you know,
whatever, like, okay, well that's an emotional argument. Um, but the question is who has, whose responsibility is it? It's like, okay, well,
You have to actually make an argument why that's not Israel's responsibility. Like, and no, just saying, just like I said with the local police example, just because a bad guy, a murderer, a terrorist runs into a building with a bunch of people, if the local police came and blew up the building, they couldn't just get out of responsibility free card their way out of it by being like, he was a bad guy. Human shields. If he had turned himself in, we wouldn't have done it. Okay, well, that might be true.
But you still don't have a right to do that. It's still appalling that you did it. And sorry, there's just, there's not an argument here. Like, I don't know. This is, you know, as, well, whatever. Let's let him finish the argument. We'll respond more. Mind, there is some useful context we can consider.
Hamas has repeatedly stated that given the opportunity, they will repeat the October 7th attacks again and again and again. While this may seem shocking to us in the West, it makes perfect sense given that Hamas believes Israel is illegitimate and would like to see it gone. This means that unless Israel destroys or degrades their ability to carry out their threats, it is likely to experience more terrorist attacks again and again. All right, pause it.
Okay, so there's a lot wrong with that argument, right? And again, this is what the problem, and this is part of why, you know, it's not a coincidence that he's constantly saying first principles while never telling you what his first principles are and never saying, like, how we apply these equally to both sides. But listen, of course, Benjamin Netanyahu, because he's a, you know, corrupt, blood-soaked monster, has never...
never allowed a real investigation into October 7th. And so we are all speculating to some degree that we know what we know. But there's pretty much no question that October 7th was an enormous failure by the Israelis. Gaza is, I believe, the most surveilled area in the world. And Israel is the most fortified. And
And the fact that they allowed this to happen was a monumental failure. My point is essentially just that they could just not fail again. We also know that Israel propped up and directed funds toward Hamas for years before October 7th.
So, no, it's not a given that October 7th are just going to keep happening over and over again if Israel doesn't like destroy Gaza. That's just not true. Israel is more than capable of of protecting its people against Hamas. So that and the fact that.
Hamas has vowed, there's members of Hamas who have vowed to do October 7th over and over again. Well, I mean, first of all, that doesn't really mean anything. What matters, what counts is their ability to actually do it, not whether they say it or not. But again, if this is your standard, okay, what have the Israeli leaders been saying?
You see, you could just as easily use this logic as a reason for why the Palestinians need to embrace terrorism.
To say, hey, look, the Israelis have killed far more of us. Look at all these innocent people over here who have died. And they themselves have said we're Amalek or we're going to continue the bombing campaign. We're not going to stop. We're rejecting ceasefires. You know, I mean, if you want to go look at the South Africa case that they took to the Supreme Court where the excuse me, to the International Court of Justice, I
the UN where they essentially ruled that Israel was plausibly committing a genocide. The entire, I don't know if you saw any of this Rob, but the entire South African case
was quotes from Israelis. That was like the whole thing. I forget, it was like 600 pages of quotes from Israelis. And this is what there's, and not just like, you know, soldiers and citizens, but like the top level guys from the prime minister, all through his cabinet, all through the military, of them just talking about how much they're going to fucking destroy Gaza. And over the last year, they've been doing it. So if you're going to say, well, Hamas said they're going to do more October 7th, therefore,
You're justified in killing innocent people. Well, why the double standard constantly? Why do we always have to have two different standards? Why doesn't in any of these videos, anyone attempt to have one standard and hold both parties to it? Which, by the way, is what we do.
For as much as everybody acts like we're the ones who are biased here, that's what we do every time we talk about this. There is one standard that I'm holding both of these parties to. But this idea that
You know, it's because they pulled off a terrorist attack and because they've said they'll do more of them, therefore Israel can't, you know, has no other option. The logic just falls flat. And then on top of that, the other major point here is that when you just, like...
Because all these things kind of play into each other, right? So when you just did the stupid thing he did on his last point, where he just dismissed the idea that the occupation is a motivating factor based on no logic whatsoever, literally no logic. Just, well, if it was a motivating factor, then they would have tried to degrade Israel military and not killed innocent people, which makes no sense at all. But when you dismiss that away...
It does make it more convenient for you if you want to make this argument, because then you could go, well, they're going to do these terrorist attacks over and over again. And their only way to do to stop that is to go kill a whole bunch of people. And you're like, OK, but what if what if.
Those of us who are saying that like blowback is real and that people don't very much like being dominated. What if you didn't dismiss us with that nonsense? And then you considered the possibility that you're only going to create more people who hate you. Like you think, what do you think the end of all of this is? What do you think the young men in Gaza who have now lived through all of this, what do you think they come out of this loving Israel? Yeah.
You know, again, this is not like I know I'm like a bleeding heart libertarian who's known for being anti-war. But this is it was General McChrystal, like no, no dove. Right. This was the guy running the war in Afghanistan. And he was the guy who coined the term insurgent math. What's 10 minus two? Twenty. Twenty.
And that's this whole thing where he goes up on a blackboard and he goes, what's 10 minus two? And everyone in the crowd is like eight. And he's like, no, 20. Cause that's how insurgent math works. And this was him. And all he was, I mean, he was just a sir. Yes, sir. General. We're going to go win this war. That's my job. I'm going to go win this war for you. Um, and the point he was making was like, look, you give us a list of these insurgents. We take out two. Now there's, there's 12 more insurgents.
Because the two that we took out had brothers and cousins and uncles and all these people who were maybe like on the edge. And now they were like, okay, I'm taking up arms. I'm joining the insurgency. I mean, look, again, the other thing about this is for people who know anything about the history at all, the thing that gets like frustrating with this is like Constantine is trying to pretend that this dynamic doesn't exist, even though...
So many of the top Israeli leaders have admitted this over the years. Like they've admitted, they all know this is the case. None of them at the top levels of the Israeli government really have any questions about why the Palestinians hate their fucking guts. It was Ehud Barak, the former prime minister before Netanyahu, who said, if I was a Palestinian, if I was a young Palestinian, I'd join one of these terrorist organizations too.
And you know why he knows that? Because that's what the Jews did. That's what the Jews did in Palestine under the British League of Nations mandate. They themselves were Jewish.
The terrorists to drive out an occupying force. And so like this, it was also a Moshe Diane had a great quote about like why the Arabs hate the Israelis so much. And he was just like, yeah, because we kicked them all off their land and they're living in refugee camps while we build a society on the land that used to be theirs.
A rocket science? I mean, like, again, that doesn't justify terrorism. That doesn't mean they should be allowed to kill any innocent people at all. But if you want to have a conversation about this thing, you're not even—like, if you're pretending that dynamic isn't there, you're just not really talking about the situation. That's what it is. And, you know, I—
It's not that hard. You know, this is what's so great about Daryl Cooper's whole series on this and people it almost became like a meme because he's like throughout the whole thing. He's always like, what would you do? Like, no, what would you do if you were in this situation?
And one of the reasons why this is just always come very natural to me is why I think part of the reason why I like Ron Paul's whole blowback thing resonated so much with me. It's not, and this is a particularly male thing. I don't know if women, for the female listeners, for all 10 of you, I don't know if you relate to this as much, but for a man, I think it's very natural.
for me it's always just been very easy. And I felt this way before I had kids, but particularly having little kids, like it's just very easy to go like, oh yeah, like if someone did something to one of my kids,
There is no level of evil that I couldn't stoop to. Like I could, it's very, and this, and I can apply this to both sides. If I, if one of my kids was killed on October 7th, I can very easily understand the mentality of going fucking flatten the place. Don't leave one soul alive, kill them all. And also I can understand if you're a Palestinian and one of your kids was killed being like, I'm joining up with Hamas.
That's it. We're going to kill some of them now. Like, it's not that difficult to put yourself in that situation. All right, let's keep playing. ...believe that any government of any country anywhere in the world would or could react to something like 12 9-11s in one day and the threat of more to follow as many times as possible with anything other than all-out war? And who can end the killing? Well, theoretically, Israel could, of course, but for the reasons we just discussed, they can't, won't, and shouldn't.
That leaves Hamas, who could have returned the hostages and surrendered the people who took them. What is more, they could hide their civilians in the vast network of tunnels they've built to reduce casualties. Instead, they refuse to build bomb shelters and do everything they can to maximize civilian casualties. That's not my opinion. It's something Hamas are themselves proud of.
A senior spokesman for the group, Sami Abou-Zoukhri, gave an interview on Palestinian station Al-Aqsa TV the last time this conflict flared up. "The policy of people confronting Israeli warplanes with their bare chests in order to protect their homes has proven effective against the occupation," he said.
We in Hamas call upon our people to adopt this policy in order to protect Palestine. All right, all right. Let's pause it there. So this is like what gets frustrating about this argument. So first of all, in your own example here, even in the quote that you're citing, he said what? It's an effective tool against the occupation. Now, yes, Konstantin, we're not pro-Hamas here.
No matter how much all you guys have to pretend that we are, that's not the argument. Okay. Like, you know, he goes again, it's pretty funny. Cause he actually, I think catches himself at one point where he's like, who could end this? And he's like, well, of course Israel could end this, but they can't shouldn't and won't, you know, because we love what we've previously said, but you haven't made any points yet. No, actually nothing that you've said has proven that Israel shouldn't stop what they're doing. Um,
But yeah, there's no argument, I guess, here from me. Yeah, Hamas could do things differently. That would be better. Okay? But yes, Hamas is a terrorist organization. Like, they're probably not going to do that. We're also not, like...
funding and arming and giving logistical intelligence support to Hamas to carry out attacks like October 7th. But we are doing all of that for Israel while they kill far more innocent people than Hamas did. Okay. So there's a pretty big asymmetry there, but yes,
Hamas could there are things again. This is the equivalent of saying in my example of where the the cops come in and say just blow up the apartment building with all the women and children inside if you were to say Well, the guy could just come out and surrender and then we wouldn't have to kill all these women and children Would anyone accept that if their local police department said that you'd be like, yeah, okay Well, he's not doing that and the answer then isn't we kill all the women and children. I
That's the point and nobody here is saying again There are you I'm not saying you can't find dummies out there who are saying this but to just take on the argument of that as if again like you said it's almost like it's almost as if he's presuming that the other side is Pro Hamas pro October 7th that you're like well Hamas didn't do that. Yes. No, we got it We got it Hamas does not care about innocent Palestinians dying. Neither does Israel and
That that's and then so if you have this dynamic here, right, where you have the Israeli government and you have Hamas, OK, and both of them do not give a shit about innocent Palestinians being slaughtered as an outsider. It kind of feels like, hey, if there's a group here, I'm going to stick up for maybe it's the innocent people who nobody cares about slaughtering.
There's also an interesting dynamic here where he kind of is. It doesn't seem to ever like occur to Constantine that you're like, oh, OK. So if your claim is that Hamas is not building bomb shelters to protect their innocent people when they could, which may be true. I don't I don't know, but maybe. OK, so it's kind of like they want more of those innocent people to die. Why is that?
And why is it that you are on the same side as Hamas right now? Right? Like if Hamas's goal is for more innocent people to die so that the whole world can see how brutal Israel is, wouldn't the person who's against Hamas want to not hand that to them? Doesn't that kind of make sense?
I don't know. He also, he pulls up a bad quote in that, I guess of all the arguments, the game theory of how do I combat an enemy that's going to use human shields and that it incentivized the behavior of using human shields.
But with all that said, I mean, I saw Israel claim, hey, there was a main military base under a hospital and we got to take out a hospital. And then it turned out it was a tunnel that they had built that they were pointing to as evidence. And there's been times that they said, hey, here's a safe corridor. And then blowing up people in the safe corridor. And there's been the daddy's home thing, which is they don't kill a target until he actually returns to his home.
So even amidst the game theory argument of we can't, we have no other way to deal with this enemy, the quote that he's pulling isn't even saying that. It wasn't saying, hey, we need everyone to go out there with their chests and protect Hamas because we need to win this thing. And so you guys have to protect us. It was if you want to protect your home.
Yeah. Which also is understandable. If I own a home and you tell me, hey, we're flattening it. And then I'm like, well, you're going to have to go through me. I understand making that decision. And the Hamas leader is not saying, hey, we need everyone out there to protect us. They're like, this is going to work to protect your home. And I understand that if you have nothing, you've got nowhere to go. And someone just drops a leaflet in your house and goes, you got to leave. We're flattening this thing. And I'm like, well, fuck you. Yeah, I'm not going anywhere. You want to kill me? That's on you.
I understand that decision. And I'm just saying even the quote that he's pulling up from the Hamas leaders not saying, hey, we're all the civilians are protecting us because they support us. And that's how we win. They're saying, if you want to protect your home, don't leave it.
All right, guys, let's take a moment and thank our sponsor for today's show, which is My Patriot Supply. I love My Patriot Supply. I keep their four-week emergency food kits in my home. They've got everything your family could need during a crisis. With over 2,000 calories per day, there's enough to go around during a time of social unrest or government crackdowns or, God forbid, something worse. The food lasts up to 20 minutes.
25 years and it's ready whenever disaster strikes. I don't take my family's safety for granted anymore and neither should you. And right now you can get $50 off the same four week emergency food kits that I keep in my home by going to preparewithsmith.com.
That's the site to go to to save $50 on your four-week emergency food kit from MyPatriotSupply. Plus, MyPatriotSupply will send it as fast as humanly possible. You typically get it in about a day, and it's shipped for free. So get your four-week emergency food kit now at preparewithsmith.com. That's preparewithsmith.com. All right, let's get back into the show. No, that's right. All right, let's keep playing.
So yes, the deaths of civilians are tragic. And in a modern world where you can fill your social media feed with gruesome footage, that tragedy can be broadcast straight into your home 24/7. But the responsibility for their deaths is entirely with Hamas, and the failure to put a stop to the killing is theirs,
and theirs alone. Which brings us to the final argument: Israel's attacks are indiscriminate and designed to inflict civilian casualties. This is actually the simplest argument of the four to address because it is an empirical matter. The war in Gaza is not the first conflict in human history. We can compare the ratio of combatants to civilian deaths in this war to others. What happens when we do?
Historically, urban warfare operations result in a casualty ratio of nine civilians for every one enemy fighter killed. In Gaza, it is two to one. In other words, despite the deliberate attempts by Hamas to increase the number of civilian casualties, Israel has been extraordinarily successful in reducing them. This doesn't mean that there won't be incidents in which innocent Palestinians are killed and, as in any war, there will likely be war crimes committed by both sides.
But overall, the numbers don't lie. If you need further evidence that claims of Israel's indiscriminate attacks are nonsense, just look at the way various commentators reacted to what has been dubbed Operation Grim Beeper. Thousands of Hezbollah pages were rigged with explosives and then detonated simultaneously, killing and injuring thousands of terrorists and a small number of bystanders. The pages in question were not picked at random. Israel specifically selected a batch of senior Hezbollah operatives.
And still, people like Hamza Yousaf, Scotland's former first minister, complain about Israel's indiscriminate attacks. This was definitionally the most precise, targeted and surgical large-scale anti-terrorist operation in human history. In summary, I've engaged with an open mind and in good faith with... We pause again for a second.
The Hezbollah beeper incident is still rather unclear to me because the reporting afterwards did not really from the mainstream sources that I read, they did not really seem to explore to what extent there were civilian casualties from from that attack.
And the media seemed to move on from it pretty quickly. Yeah. I mean, the video that he's showing is in a market in a supermarket. With that said, though, I don't know the blast radius. No, no. I'm saying it's certainly putting people at risk. I mean, you know, look again, like.
No, you haven't. I mean, you really haven't seen the amount of outrage anywhere near the same about that attack as you have about what's been going on in Gaza over the last year. But let me just take on this just real quickly because there's really not much to it. This thing about the ratio of combatants to civilians is just bullshit.
It's all just bullshit. The numbers are complete bullshit. You're going off Israel. I mean, they even like officially say how they keep the numbers, but it's guesswork. Essentially, Israel is dropping bombs left and right. And then they're trying to claim, uh,
how many of the people that were killed on the bottom were Hamas fighters. They've changed the number several different times. Different representatives from the Israeli government have said different numbers simultaneously. The truth is they just don't know. And so to draw the conclusion from that, that, oh, the ratio is better than any of these other urban conflicts. Number one, it's bullshit. They don't know that. And I,
find it to be a highly dubious claim. You know, again, that's like it's one metric and you don't even have the numbers. These numbers are just made up. But it's like one metric. I don't know why that should be the one. Again, just like in the same way that I think it's kind of bullshit to measure
the how awful a terrorist attack is based on your total population size. Um, I also think it's kind of bullshit to measure a war's morality based on a ratio. Um, there's other metrics you could use. Here's one. More kids have died in this war.
More kids have been killed than in any of those conflicts that he's talking about. That one actually means a lot more to me. As I said before, as a parent of two little kids, I just think killing someone's kids, the worst goddamn thing you can do in the world. And like just killing a child, there's just nothing more evil than that to me or a few things more evil. I don't know. Maybe torturing a child's worst, whatever. It's pretty, pretty bad.
And that now part of that is just because there's so many kids in Gaza. It's such a densely populated area and there's a lot of children there. There's over a million kids. But I don't know. Why can't we just use that that ratio or use that metric? And in terms of the word indiscriminate, I don't know. Let's just say Israel is knowingly killing children.
huge numbers of innocent civilians. And they know that that's going to be the result of this. And there is absolutely, it is absolutely reasonable and justified to be appalled by that. You know, Israel has had a terrorism problem,
pretty much their entire history. And they've always before Benjamin Netanyahu dealt with terrorism, with special ops, targeted assassinations, things of that nature. They never treated it as a military problem the way Benjamin Netanyahu is now. And, you know, the idea that you are
committing mass slaughter of a group of people who you have dominated and controlled for nearly 60 years. The idea that people would be appalled by that is completely reasonable. I just don't think I like on any one of these points, I don't think Constantine has landed a blow. You know, like I saw Tim pool tweeted out that he said this video was brilliant and
And I was like watching him like, where's the brilliant part? Like what part of this is like, yo, wow. I never thought of this conflict this way. It's just straw manning the opposition to this and landing no real points. I just thought maybe I'm missing something here. I don't see anything in this. I don't think he's landed a single blow on the critics of Israel. All right. We do. We do have to wrap up. Let's play the rest of the video and then we'll we'll wrap.
arguments presented to me over the last year. On balance, I regard them as disingenuous, irrelevant and designed to pull at my heartstrings in order to obscure the harsh reality of this conflict. We would respond exactly the way that Israel has. The only difference is we would do so with the support of every member of the international community, while Israel has to fight not only the terrorists who want to wipe them off the map, but Western apologists for those terrorists as well.
If you enjoy these videos. All right, let's turn it off. Okay, so I guess I would just say in conclusion, I'm number one, as I've said before, happy to have another conversation or debate with Konstantin about this stuff. I'll host if he'd like, or he could host or whatever. If he wants to do that, I'm more than happy to do that. But I would just say in conclusion that, you know, the argument that we would respond the same way
is kind of an interesting one it is certainly not an argument from first principles um it is simply just saying like we would do it too that's certainly you know look after 9-11 yeah we collectively lost our minds and fought a whole bunch of wars and killed a whole bunch of innocent people and spent trillions of dollars on it and destabilized the entire middle east um
I don't think that was a good idea in hindsight. I think that's pretty unanimous. Now, even John McCain wrote in his memoir that the war in Iraq was a mistake. Right. So even like, but I think there's like John Bolton and Dick Cheney may still be hanging on to it was a good idea. Pretty much everyone else across the world acknowledges that that was a big mistake. And so,
You know, we would do this even if true, which I don't exactly know if that's true. But that that really isn't anything. But I think that the idea that you're going to sit here, this is something I've been saying for the entire last year, but it's worth repeating again. If you're going to essentially make this argument that, hey, we would do that if that happened to us.
Nobody can be expected to tolerate something like that and not respond. Just somebody please explain to me why that only applies to Western countries and not Muslim countries.
Like, like why it's like, okay, if you're like, what is, this is almost why like it would actually be useful to have a conversation from first principles and explain to me what your principles are so we can try to apply these to, you know, equally across the board. But why is it that, you know, like this is the point that I made in my debate with Laura Loomer, um, where, you know, I mean, she just really kind of humiliated herself in that debate, but
You know, it's like she'll be like, well, hey, the Palestinians did this to Israel. And therefore, if their people aren't going to rise up and overthrow that government, you know what I mean? They've accepted the status quo and therefore they're fair game now to be targeted. And it's like, OK, but what about the people of Iraq?
Do they get to say that? Like if they had obviously they don't have the power to do anything to us. But if they did, would Iraq be justified to just come slaughter people over here? Would they be justified to just be like, well, we're going to be about we'll drop leaflets first, but then we're just going to be bombing neighborhoods. Are they justified in doing that? If they were to say, oh, you know, all these politicians, they all live in suburbs of Washington, D.C.,
They're using those people as human shields. They're embedded amongst the civilian population. So, you know, got to just kill everybody. No, by the way, Iraq could make such a better argument than Israel could. Like Iraq could sit there and say, you guys have been bombing us since 1991.
Literally, that's how long we've been bombing Iraq. George H.W. Bush launched a war there. Bill Clinton had a sanctioned regime and years of bombing campaigns. Of course, George W. Bush launched the regime change war against Saddam Hussein. Obama continued it. Trump continued it. Biden has continued it. There's still troops in Iraq right now.
Does Iraq have a right? You know, oh, we can't tolerate this. Therefore, we're allowed to go kill people over there. And again, more relevant to this conversation, why doesn't that also apply to the Palestinians?
Why don't the Palestinians have the right to say that? Like, look, essentially what it all comes down to are two things. And this is what these this entire debate always comes down to. Number one, you value Israeli life more than you value Palestinian life. That's it. Because don't tell me for a second if October 7th happened and.
But the ratio was better, right? Like if they had killed, if they were able to say, hey, we killed two IDF soldiers for every one person at this concert, right?
Therefore, it's OK. Right. Therefore, we should continue to do it. No, you would never accept that because when you're talking about the innocent Israeli life, you actually value that as real human life. OK, you would never make this calculation if we were talking about Americans or Israelis. And number two, the other bias and I got to like coin a term for this. It's like barbaric bias.
So the fact is that Hamas is primitive and barbaric and Israel is rich and sophisticated. And so when Hamas kills innocent people, they do it by grabbing them with their bare hands and murdering them. And when Israel kills innocent people, they do it by pushing a button and dropping a bomb on them.
And I understand there is a bias and to some degree for good reason. There is a bias against the first. There's something scarier to us about Hamas than drone bombs, you know, and I get that. You know, if you if I had the choice of my neighbor either being one of the members of Hamas who stormed Israel on October 7th or an IDF pilot,
I'd pick the IDF pilot, you know, like I think he's can compartmentalize the fucked up shit he does and could be a well-adjusted normal member of society that Hamas guy probably not, you know, so like I get there's a difference. However, if you think about this, right, if somebody killed one of your kids, it probably wouldn't be that comforting to you if you were like, don't worry, they did it by pushing a button.
Don't like to the people on the other end of those drone bombs, to the people on the other end of those bombs. You know, they're to them. The same thing happened to them. It's still their family. It's still their friends. It's still their neighborhood that got destroyed. It's just essentially it all comes down to those two things. Number one, valuing Israeli life more than Palestinian life. And number two, just like, oh, but it doesn't feel so barbaric when you do it with a modern military. Right.
I think that's what this really all comes down to. All right, we got to wrap on that. Thank you guys for listening. Catch you next time. Peace.