Another Day, Another Blood Libel
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Another day, another blood libel against the Jewish state. It seems like just yesterday I recorded a podcast about attacks on Israel by members of the United Nations Security Council and the International Criminal Court. With me for that podcast were FDD's Ord Kittredge, a well-respected international lawyer and expert on lawfare, and FDD's Rich Goldberg, who served in the National Security Council and was a top staffer in both the House and the Senate.

Actually, we didn't record that yesterday. We recorded it two weeks ago. But if you missed it, I urge you to give it a listen. It remains very relevant. What's new, but certainly not surprising, is that Amnesty International, a lavishly funded organization, one that has long been viciously anti-Israeli, has piled on with its own report accusing Israelis of, can you guess, genocide in Gaza. What evidence do they have?

Are you kidding me? They don't need no stinking evidence. Why bother when they knew from the get-go what their verdict was going to be? Today, as we record this, is Friday. Yesterday, I happened to eavesdrop as Dr. David Adesnick, FTD's Vice President of Research, was talking about amnesty and its charges with some reporters. I wanted to hear a little more, and I thought you might find the conversation edifying as well. And this bonus...

David has followed Syria for years. What's going on there now is fascinating, but really complicated. David is with us in studio here at FDD HQ. I'm Cliff May, and I'm glad you're with us, too, here on commercial-free, listener-supported Foreign Policy. David, good to see you. Good to be back on Foreign Policy, Cliff. Look, you've looked at this report and this controversy more closely than I have.

But I'm going to just note the very first paragraph of Amnesty's blood libel report, as I'm calling it, shows how utterly contemptible this organization is. Here's the first, this one sentence. On October 7, 2023, Israel embarked on a military offensive on the occupied Gaza Strip of unprecedented magnitude, scale, and duration. Well, first, something terrible did happen on October 7, 2023. Israel was involved.

But it was Hamas's invasion of Israel and a pogrom and massacre that followed. You'd think amnesty would want to include that high up. Two other points. On October 7th, 2023, Gaza wasn't occupied.

The Israelis had pulled out in 2005 every soldier, every farmer, every synagogue, every cemetery, all out. They left behind some very high-tech greenhouses because they thought this would be good for the Palestinians. They were quickly trashed. And second, Israel's counterattack against Hamas, unless I'm mistaken, its invasion and ground assault of Gaza,

didn't begin on October 7th. It didn't begin for weeks, not until October 28th. So all that, I wouldn't even say is wrong. That's just lies.

Well, one thing I would just note on the question of Gaza being occupied, there has been an effort all the way since 2005 when Israel pulled out to define it as still occupied under international law. And you will see this from other organizations because what it lets them do is insist that Israel has a responsibility to take care of the people there and not just to get out of the way of others as they provide help, but that Israel has an affirmative obligation to

And what's interesting is they ignore the criteria that you really have to exercise some actual control to occupy a place. I think it may suggest that if Hamas was able to build up an army of 20, 25,000 men, Israel was not effectively in control, but they're not dropping this point. And it's been the basis,

of some of the earliest charges of war crimes after October 7th. You know, one of the reasons I wanted to talk, I mean, I love talking to Ord Kittredge about this. He's a lawyer. On this show, we talked to Natasha Haustorp. She's absolutely brilliant. I've talked to Eugene Kontorovich, who's a brilliant lawyer.

The problem is that all the brilliant lawyers say, well, you see, they're defining it this way. They feel that. They think that. They interpret that. I think we got the point now, certainly with the Amnesty Report, where, let's be honest, they're not arguing we have a different interpretation of international law than you do. They don't care what the law says. They have an opinion. They're going to say the law is what we think. They will twist the law. They will...

They distort the law quite openly and it's kind of like a game where an international lawyer says, no, it actually says this and the meaning is this. They don't actually care. For example, genocide has a specific definition. The population of Gaza has been growing. The Israelis could have wiped out the people of Gaza. They didn't chose not to do so.

And whatever Palestinian cultural life, they are not trying to do that. What's clear from the report is they don't care. They actually say, do they not?

We don't think the normal definition of genocide as it's been understood under the Geneva Convention since after World War II. We have a different definition and we're just asserting that's what it is. It's kind of Alice in Wonderland. Alice in Wonderland, genocide, the meaning of the word genocide is whatever we want it to mean. Who is in charge, us or the word?

I think Ord has made that point well in other discussions. And what I'm going to say is it's at least as much about stretching the evidence to mean what you ever, you want it to mean. Um, above all the idea that Israel has genocidal intent, they really have intention is important for genocidal. Absolutely crucial. If you don't have intent, there's really very little to make the case because that, you know, that's really what's behind it. It's the intent to wipe out a particular group. Um, not something that happens by accident. Um,

And wiping out Hamas is not genocide. No, no, it has to be, I guess what they would say is a group defined ethnically, religiously, racially. And to your point about population, right, that's

You know, there's even some indications, as you mentioned, that the population may even have continued to increase somewhat in Gaza. But regardless, even if it's one or two percent in the other direction, that's not what we see in a genocide. Like, if you look at Cambodia and, you know, there is genocide against Cambodia's minorities as well as.

slaughter of much of its majority, you know, those were wiped out at half, two thirds, three quarters. Obviously, you know, the Holocaust in Europe, the Tutsis in Rwanda were devastated. You know, it wasn't just a couple percent. It was a systematic campaign to wipe them out. And, you know, just looking at it on the surface, it should be pretty clear that's not what's happening. But we may just have to go into the evidence.

That isn't there. The evidence isn't there. And if they were going to wipe them out, they would do so through starvation or through just bombing the hell out of every and trying to kill every civilian, which, and by the way, they also, we know because they admit it, that Hamas intends to use and has used civilians as human shields. They built tunnels for Hamas. They wanted civilians to walk on top of those tunnels. Why? Because they wanted civilians to be killed there.

before the Israelis could get to Hamas terrorists. Yeah, that's definitely part of the strategy. An interesting thing is I reviewed all of Amnesty's publications on Israel from October 7th pretty much up to the present. And I can point out many other areas, and it really helps you understand their mindset overall. And one of the interesting things is they never dedicate any of these 80 to 90 publications just to the question of telling Hamas

hey, it's wrong, and we affirm that you have used people in this way or put all of your tunnels. And there's not a lack of incidents they could have built it around, right? When Israel first went into Shifa Hospital, they found tunnels under it. They later found tunnels under the headquarters of UNRWA, or as how we pronounce U-N-R-W-A, the UN Relief and Works Association, who makes us do so much work just to spell out its name every time we mention it.

But right there was a sort of a command center there that was actually pulling electrical power from the main building. There's many other cases where we've seen, you know, militants found in mosques, in schools. Israel publishes footage of it. You can even read them. You know, the major papers will note it when it happens. And the Israel Israelis presented to them.

But really, this barely registers a mention in what amounts to around 200 pages of text from Amnesty. But you know when they did bother to put out a warning that defenders should not use any civilian buildings in the face of an attack? They said that to the Ukrainians.

It was really almost comical that they would devote a particular publication to that. I guess the Ukrainians, as the Russians were trying to smash into their cities, took up defensive positions in civilian homes in some instances, which is, you know, of course, you're going to do what you can to fend off a Russian invasion that has practically genocidal behavior. Another double standard. By the way, the Russian invasion is clearly genocidal in that Putin wants to destroy Ukraine. He's not, he doesn't want to wipe out all the people. He wants to destroy it as a,

as a culture, as a nation, as a sovereign entity, all of that. He's quite open about that. Well, interestingly, right, one of the acts defined as genocide in the Genocide Convention is sort of taking the children of a people and... Which he's doing. Right. Like 20,000 of them.

That's the best estimate we have. They're just taken from Ukraine, right? Because you get all this chaos, kids separated from their parents, parents killed. They send them to Russia to be adopted, et cetera. They say, oh, we're happy to reunite them, but they're there. No, they're going to slap their hands if they speak Ukrainian, not Russian. They'll be taught you are Russian, whatever you actually thought you're not. And partly because Putin does need more Slavic population for Russia. So I tried to find when has amnesty expressed concern or actually said that something is a genocide.

I looked pretty thoroughly at their work on Xinjiang in China, where the U.S. government, both Biden and the Trump administration, has agreed there's a genocide taking place against minority Muslims. I could not find any affirmative statement, let alone a full report from Amnesty. In the case of the Rohingya, the oppressed Muslim minority in Myanmar, formerly known as Burma, again, the U.S. government made clear that's genocide.

And there seemed to be some sympathy to that notion from Amnesty, but again, not an affirmative statement or report. Again, they're not talking much about the current events in Sudan either. Interestingly, the UN's special advisor on genocide has repeatedly warned that there may be genocide taking place in Sudan right now. We're not talking about the previous genocides that people know a little better, like in Darfur. Some of this is also in Darfur, same place, but again,

And interestingly, the UN let her go. They didn't renew her contract. Yeah, they essentially sacked her. They essentially fired her because she said, we don't have evidence of genocide by the Israelis. And at the UN, that gets you fired.

Yeah, the UN has put out other statements, including from Francesca Albanese. They're explicitly anti-Semitic. They have so many special rapporteurs, it's hard to keep track of everyone's title. But it's some rapporteur for the Palestinians. Yeah, she's among the worst of the worst. She's among the worst of the worst, and she keeps her job. Jewish control of this, Jewish control of that. When I talk about human shields, I'm using that phrase because it is a legal term. And the use of human shields is...

is illegal under specifically and no, indisputably under international law and under American law. And yet again, what Amnesty tries to do is say, well, we don't really like that. And we're going to tell the Israelis if they end up killing people who are being used by Hamas's human shields, they're responsible.

under international law as we feel it is, as we interpret it to be, as we assert that it is. Because after all, we're an NGO. We have a lot of money and we have a lot of rich donors who give us money. And-

Therefore, we assert and assume that we have the authority to do this. So the way they do that is to say just because there may be human shield use or use of civilian facilities, it doesn't relieve Israel in any way of its responsibilities. And this feeds into a problem, which is if you set certain conditions and you basically say the other side's use of human shields doesn't change anything, you're saying the other side's war crimes prevents you from waging a war of self-defense at all. And this is something that runs into other areas as well.

with amnesty. You could see from the beginning, the earliest days of the war in Gaza, the ground war, actually even before they would condemn the Israeli evacuation requests or orders. You know, they would tell the population, this is where the attack is coming and you're forcing. And we, you know, if,

better idea to go south or to go wherever else we tell you is going to be safer. There's no perfect safety because, of course, there can be attacks that happen even to the place where you go. But really, amnesty condemn this and they call it forced dislocation. And then you say, well, what possible way would there be for Israel to prosecute its war? Because if it doesn't tell people an attack is coming and says, okay, stay in place, are you going to sort of

go on sort of with pinprick attacks everywhere you can, that it would be possible to go after Hamas without, you know, killing civilians. It's a trap they can't get out of. It's a catch-22. It's a catch-22. It encourages Hamas to use human shields because there's no penalty for that. That means that amnesty is helping get people killed at the same time. And I think what they really have in mind is that Israelis are

maybe Jews, have no right to defend themselves. Whatever way they defend themselves is illegal. They should simply be victims. They should simply die and maybe we'll erect some kind of museum to them afterwards. After all, Hamas is specifically genocidal in its intent. Hezbollah is specifically genocidal in its intent. The Islamic Republic of Iran is openly not only genocidal in its intent, but

is inspiring and instigating genocide anywhere that it can against the Jewish state. Yeah, and that points to another double standard, which is you'll see both in this report and other things by Amnesty over the past year, they'll repeatedly condemn Israel for dehumanization, dehumanization and racism toward Palestinians. And as a broad conceptual point, it's true what precedes genocide and

and killing and massacres is often this dehumanization reduction of people to beneath human status and therefore they're expendable. Um, what's amazing again, as I said, 80 to 90 publications over the past year, there is no condemnation of Hamas for dehumanization, right? And it's not as if there's been a lack of it, right? And perhaps most famously, the Hamas official Ghazi Hamad said, we'll do October 7th again and again and again. Uh,

So basically pledging to rape, murder, massacre again and again and again, I think counts as dehumanization. And Hamas leaders broadly, he's not some sort of outlier who suddenly decided he's pro October 7th. The line across the board from Hamas spokesman is October 7th was a great beginning. They actually, they often will add utterly falsely that in fact, we didn't kill civilians there. Maybe there were some excesses. Some people followed us in. That wasn't our operation, but...

Plans to kill civilians have been found, and there's no question what they did. The footage is out there. And so regardless of how many caveats you add to it, if you're endorsing October 7th, you're dehumanizing a threatening to murder. And it's nothing new. That didn't begin on October 7th, right? The fact that they've engaged in suicide bombings for 30 years is because they see Jewish blood as licit.

And but again, in diagnosing the problem in, you know, between Israelis and Palestinians, that doesn't factor in. And it's with a lot of other NGOs and human rights organizations as well. They are only capable of commenting on what they allege to be Israeli dehumanization. Because it's fashionable, because it's.

I mean, I know it's very hard for me to entirely understand why it's gotten as bad as it has at these various and non-governmental organizations. I guess it's based on the funders and the kinds of people who are attracted to them. I'm not sure you I'm not sure you have insight into that. I'm not sure I do. I mean, I think the best we can say is there is a determination to see Palo

Palestinians always as the victim, even when elements within the Palestinians are engaging in violence and always to see Israelis as the oppressors. And why does the broader intellectual roots of that? In some degree, we can go all the way back to the 60s and we can look at the sort of the Soviet demonization campaigns in concert with the Arab world, right? If you were a person in good standing with the sort of international, you know, socialist communist left, that meant that

by assimilating Israel into your list of enemies and putting Palestinians on the good side, often with explicit support for terrorist organizations. And it's persisted in the whole discourse about settler colonialism. I don't know how many people know this, but many people think that, oh, well, if Jewish people, if we accept that there's also Palestinian roots and we can reach a compromise because we can't think it's just a Jewish homeland because

because of the temple, etc. But it's important to realize these groups deny there was ever a Jewish historical presence from, you know, Yasser Arafat's famous denial during the peace talks in the 90s that, I forgot what he said, there was actually no temple in Jerusalem where it was a fake. And this is in the official doctrine of Hamas, of Islamic jihad. You know, it's not hidden.

It's part of it is they don't see any legitimacy to the claim that Jews are in any way indigenous to this part of the world. So that's why it's not about one side wanting a compromise and the other side wanting a compromise and hammering out terms that are acceptable to both. There is a very large segment on the other side, which just says no compromise. Obviously, there are some Jews that don't want compromise either, but that's not the dominant theme. Whereas

you know, look at what Hamas wants, et cetera. It's they are settlers and therefore their blood is licit because they have taken our land.

You know, I was not long ago talking to an ambassador of a major West European country, and he was insisting to me that, you know, he's very much for a two-state solution. And I said, that's nice, but Hamas is not for a two-state solution. How do you figure that in? And he kind of had no answer. He said, well, I mean, I guess he expects that if they force it, eventually Hamas would say, okay, we'll take it. It's okay. But there's no reason to think that. There's no, it's just,

the idea that there is a two-state solution is sort of an article of faith for a lot of people in america a lot of people in europe and then there are all those who are actually more honest who simply say we don't think there should ever have been a state of israel and we think therefore it should be disestablished and they either understand how it would be established which would be the holocaust

Or they're indifferent to that possibility. They think, well, maybe, you know, they'll get on planes or they'll get on boats or they'll walk out or they'll accept minority status under what would essentially be a Hamas or Palestinian. Well, there's the very popular one-state solution. Well, one-state solution means, yeah. People dream of this comedy between Israelis and Palestinians suddenly living in one state. And even before October 7th, I think you could have looked at the –

and the grievances and said, if you put these two people together in one state, it's not a recipe for peace. Except it is in this sense. About 20% of Israeli citizens are Arabs, Palestinians, mostly Muslims. And actually, they get along better there than minorities do, certainly in any country of the Middle East or North Africa, and better than in a lot of other countries. Now, the question is, if you were to have people from Gaza...

and from Judea and Samaria, renamed the West Bank when it was conquered by Jordan, which is East Palestine, if you were to have them flood in and become the majority, would they say, well, of course, we will have equal rights for our Jewish minority in this country? There is no reason to believe that because there are more than 20 minorities

Arab states, more than 50 Muslim states. And in none of those states do any minorities have equal rights, not any of them, not one, not a single. So the idea that the people from Gaza would say, yeah, we have nothing against these, uh, these people in Israel, the Jews. And now that we rule them, um, we'll be happy to have them work in our hospitals and our school. That's ridiculous. Yeah. Taking this back specifically to amnesty and the question of whether, you know, Israel should exist. Um, there was a,

A semi-high profile incident, you might call it, with Amnesty's U.S. director, Paul O'Brien, a couple of years ago, 2022, where in an extended exchange, some of the questions were asked by Jewish insiders of the publication. He said he doesn't think Israel should exist as a Jewish state. And they pressed him on it. So he says, I'm not against Israel existing. It shouldn't exist as a Jewish state.

And, you know, that is already a call for a radical change. It raises the interesting question, so does no other state have the right to exist as anything but some sort of neutral? Because all the states around it, right, there's the Syrian Arab Republic. And as our colleague, Org Khitri, points out, there are 23 nations whose constitutions make Islam the official religion. They're largely Muslim majority, but again, it's one religion. That's not one that does a lot for the minorities necessarily. And yet somehow...

this is what the head of amnesty in the United States. Now, they effectively tried to walk that back because, yeah, the problem is, right, that is effectively denying Jewish people the right of self-determination. You're effectively going too far to the other end of that Palestinian narrative and saying they have no indigenous rights. So the secretary general, which is the global head, sort of said, no, no, no, we acknowledge the right of self-determination because you'd really be in like

sort of openly anti-Semitic territory. But the problem is the mask slipped. Isn't that what Peter Beinhart says, though, too? And just for people who don't know, Peter Beinhart is Jewish.

I guess he would call himself post-Zionist. He used to be editor of the New Republic. He is now very I would I think he is. I think he is also viciously anti-Israeli. But he'd also say, yeah, it should be a one state solution. Let everybody in Gaza vote for the next prime minister. Let everybody in the West Bank, as he'd called, vote for prime minister. I'm sure it'll work out just fine. And if not, it's not his fault.

I'm not a Bynard expert, so I'm afraid I'm going to have to bow out on that question. All right. Nobody should try to be. By the way, there is a branch of Amnesty International in Israel. So this is a trick question, but I know you know the answer. What role did they play in this report since they're right there on the ground and they know exactly what's happening? What role did they play in writing this report?

Can't speak to the role they played in writing it. I can speak to the fact that they objected to its main finding. They had nothing to do with it. They were not consulted. They contested the report. They claimed that its drafters had a predetermined conclusion. They really all should be resigning right now, but they were excluded from it because it might complicate matters to have Israelis weigh in on what's going on in Israel and across its borders.

Or frontiers. They might have corrected some of the main misconceptions there. I don't know if we want to get back to the heart of the report and some of the evidence issues. Talk about the ones that strike you. So the one that jumped out at me is right. So they need some kind of statement from Israeli leaders with actual responsibility for government policy and military affairs to show that they have this genocidal intent.

And so as various ones, they're really scraping the bottom of the barrel. One that struck me is they said when Benjamin Netanyahu, the prime minister talked about this being a war between the children of light and the children of darkness, I'd say somewhat anodyne, maybe not, you know, you could say his speechwriter wasn't most creative. They call that racist and incitements of genocide. There are other ones when Netanyahu talks about it being a war against the uncivilized. It's like, oh, that's clearly code for killing Palestinians. Yeah.

To the extent that's a reference to Hamas, that seems to me absolutely truthful. Now, as to Gazans, some guys, listen, we know a lot of Gazans have been pro-Hamas. A lot probably still are. Some are probably disenchanted with Hamas because they see the suffering Hamas has brought and wonder why.

Why was this worth it? We had what we do know. I mean, there's we do know that Gaza was a much nicer place than most people understood because and reporters couldn't say that before. People like Marty Friedman explain why. But we can now see pictures of what it looked like before. And there were hotels and malls and pretty, you know, restaurants on the beach and everything.

I mean, there was poverty. It was now sort of acceptable to say it because it only has been destroyed. Because it's been destroyed, right. So there are references in the amnesty report to what was Gaza's thriving agricultural sector. Right. But you could say that now only because you can also accuse the Israelis of destroying it. And the amnesty also, but we should never forget this. Why not at a certain point at least make very clear this war that began on October 7th, 2023 could have ended the day after, could have ended any day since Gaza.

All it would require was Hamas to release the hostages it has taken and preferably put down their arms. But even releasing the hostages, the Israelis, I think, would have said, all right, maybe we've done it. There'd be an argument among Israelis because there are always arguments among Israelis. Maybe we've done enough damage to Hamas. Maybe we just get out of there and

Let the interest certainly lately. I don't know. You know, maybe not on October 8th, but these days with the pressure just to do anything to get them free, they could have done that. Yeah. And then just going back to the question of where that, you know, that evidence is, what they try to claim is evidence.

I've done a lot of work on the question of starvation. I think it may be interesting for readers to know that the starvation claim of deliberate mass starvation is really at the core of all of these attacks on Israel legitimacy. The International Court of Justice, which is the sort of the UN court that deals with disputes between states, the International Criminal Court, ICC that deals with crimes of individuals, and now amnesty as well, right? I think a lot of people just assume it's about the bombing. We're trying to argue about whether the bombing is

is where the genocide comes in, allegedly. But what you actually see is how much of the space. So the summary of charges from the ICC was heavily focused on the starvation claim. And it's the same with amnesty. There's around 70 pages devoted entirely to diagnosing this.

And, you know, what I always come back to is the evidence they don't show you. So there's a famine monitor with the complicated name, the integrated food security phase classification. And despite that, its acronym is only IPC. So they some at least got a simple acronym. I'm not blaming them for that. That's the least of the problems. So they've been doing these quarterly reports. When they first came out, the report that said famine is imminent in Gaza, that really set off alarm bells around the world.

A huge surge in press coverage in the West, surge in UN activity, even claims that famine had set in. They have a technical definition of famine. If it happens, it means you expect hundreds of people are dying every day, literally because they don't have food.

Um, and then a few months later, the famine didn't materialize. Um, and then the IPC still publishes another report and they don't claim there's a famine, but it is, you know, still risk of famine remains no matter what happens. Uh, the, the emphasis remains negative. So another report could have been Israel facilitates surge of aid in concert with the UN because the numbers of truck deliveries just went up.

And then three months after that, they had another one, which again, focused on the negative. But the really remarkable thing that stands out, and this is what I try to push to every reporter if they want to, because you can always find and because there are going to be every day in this terrible situation, which no American would want to live in. There is suffering, but there are five sort of categories or phases of hunger that the IPC talks about with five being the worst.

And initially they said 30% of Gazans were in that phase. That's when they warned of the imminent famine. They said, it's going to go up to 50. The next report, they actually said it went down to 15. They underplay it in the report, but if you know what to look for, you know, you go right to that statistic. And then in the one after that, it went down to six. So we go from 30 to 15 to six and 80% reduction tells us that something's working about the aid response. Uh,

But this is you don't see it in any of the news reports because the reports generally just replicate the spin from the IPC.

And I think amnesty knew it couldn't talk about these numbers because it talks about the IPC. It mentions evidence and then it sort of waves its hand and says, well, their numbers go up and down and it doesn't tell you what the numbers are. So there is a solid 10 pages just parsing various statistics related to famine. But that absolutely crucial one is nowhere to be found. Nor will you find a single line that says 58,000 trucks have delivered 1.1 million tons of aid. Um, that's,

The Israeli number, the UN actually has had trouble since May tracking because they don't have a lot of visibility in certain places because they don't have the same abilities as the Israelis. But before May, the two tracked relatively closely. So it's not as if there's any reason to believe the Israelis were making it up. You might say, OK, adjust it down 15 percent if you want.

But that's what we're seeing, right? So what kind of genocide involves the alleged perpetrator providing these vast amounts of aid? And the point is, it's not just, I'm not just saying, oh, it's a large number, 58,000 sounds big. That's why that other evidence from the IPC is so important. It tells you it was sufficient to alleviate much of the worst hunger. And of course, there are people in Gaza who have been starved and may have starved to death. They're called hostages. Hmm.

I don't know. Maybe somebody can explain to me. I doubt you'll have a why. If the Israelis said, we're going to send in tons of aid, we're absolutely willing to do that.

We want some evidence that the hostages get at least enough to eat so they're not starving at the same time. Can we please have that reassurance before we send the aid in? Would that have been such a terrible thing to say? Do they have to say, okay, we're sending the aid in. We know not our, our, the hostages you've taken from our land. We'll get none of it, but that's okay. I mean, what can we do? We, uh,

I know there were some Israelis who took that view in protest, and I believe they've been sanctioned by the United States for that. So I know you're not the biggest fan of international law, Cliff, but actually I do think the problem that Israel may have run into in that issue is in fact international law, even as they might interpret it, that –

Just because someone else is violating international law, say withholding food from hostages, doesn't mean you can lay aside your responsibility to allow in humanitarian aid and use it as a bargaining chip. And in fact, there's a section in the amnesty report, which basically calls this out as sort of another kind of genocidal conduct of those Israelis who insist there should be no aid to anyone in Gaza whatsoever.

unless there is aid or some release of the hostages or even Red Cross visits, right? That's a real flashpoint. At the Red Cross, at least see the hostages. That's an obligation in international law. Red Cross has not tried very hard from what I can tell.

Yeah, and there's not a lot, you know, in terms of pressure from Amnesty, from Human Rights Watch, from the others on Hamas to do any of these things. You know, it's just sort of interesting. They definitely know they have to mention the hostages and say in principle they should be released unconditionally. But, you know, the same language they talk, you know, the big adjectives, the heart-wrenching parts, they don't do that for any of the hostages. You know, they're not going to tell you, oh, you know, like, for example, Kfir Bibas is

a baby who has been in, you know, and a lot of Israelis feel very emotively. There are billboards even here in Washington, D.C. But there's none of that sort of we will build sympathy by telling you the stories of these hostages in the amnesty material. It's only about, you know, relating probably the real travails of Palestinians. But it's clear they're building sympathy on one side.

I mentioned that you talk to reporters. I know we talked quite a few, and I think it's a usually important thing for you to do because there are plenty of propagandists and people from amnesty and other NGOs talking to reporters and kind of steering them and disinforming them, misinforming them.

Any, does it strike you, any other questions they asked you or things they put towards you that, where you had to really work hard to disabuse them of certain notions and maybe did so, and hopefully, in many cases, were able to do so, not necessarily in all cases.

I think we have a pretty good bunch. The ones who in some ways being willing to have a conversation with FDD to some degree already means perhaps a little more open to going against the congressional wisdom. I've also found that reporters can be somewhat

canning and that sometimes they'll sort of ask questions that suggest they may have sympathies opposite to the ones they actually have when asking you questions. I'd be interested in really engaging in some of the ones who just do the write-ups of, say, those IPC famine reports and would it shock them if I told them that, hey, you're looking at the wrong place. Hey, look at that category five famine figure, compare it to the one from the previous and see what the change is. So

I have a feeling the much bigger problem is the ones that have never even heard the opposing point of view and then would be like, wait, do you have any evidence for what you're saying? I'm like, yes, I'm citing the exact same organization that was the basis for the concern in the first place. All right. Let's move on a little bit to what's happened in Syria because that really wasn't on my bingo card. And I'm trying to understand it. You understand it better than I do. What does strike me, and you can tell me I'm wrong,

Because the Israelis did so much damage to Hezbollah, and because Hezbollah was sort of the foreign legion of the Islamic Republic of Iran, and was being used by Tehran to support Bashar al-Assad, the dynastic dictator of Syria, didn't hold all his country, but he was holding, he still holds Damascus. He was holding Aleppo, the second biggest city. But once Hezbollah had been

Not largely incapacitated by the Israelis. The Sunni jihadis in that country, mostly Sunni jihadis, there may be some seculars. We used to have years ago in FTD good contact with secular anti-Assad revolutionaries, but Obama never would support them and they kind of ended up getting left out. But there may be, I don't know.

Turkey is behind a lot of these Sunni jihadis, Erdogan, I think. So they have moved ahead and taken Aleppo. And now, you know better than I do, they're moving towards the other major cities. It's not a huge number of cities people don't know in Syria. A lot of Syria is desert. It's all kind of on the west. Yeah, at the west end of the country, sort of parallel to the Mediterranean, is a north-south axis along their big highway, the M5. Aleppo in the north.

than Hama and that they've already gone through Hama, right? So just a couple days ago, when they went through Aleppo, the question was, oh, do you think they could take a second as a big city? Like, oh, they rolled right through. The next big one is Homs. And once you get below there, Lebanon comes between Syria and the coast. So you're cutting, because Damascus is at the south end, and Damascus no longer has an outlet to the coast when they lose Homs. So that's a big change. I mean, you're

controlling Damascus itself is still a big deal, but, you know,

And the main Sunni jihadist organization backed by Turkey is HTS. Is that the initials? Yes, Hayat Tahrir-e-Sham, the organization for the liberation of the Levant. No one seems to use OLL or anything like that. Or LOL could be a good acronym. They just go with HTS, the English of the Arabic. And yeah, they're a direct descendant of al-Qaeda.

But there are...

I mean, a couple of things. They're also, some of their leaders are saying, by the way, we have nothing against Israel. We hope Israel will either help us or stay out of it. Israel's not our problem. Our problem is Assad. Our problem is the regime in Tehran, the Shia. And I mean, I don't know that they mean it, but they are saying that. I think there are people in the coalition with HTS that'll say we don't have a problem with Israel. As I understand it, HTS mainly had praise for October 7th.

So they haven't been all that vocally anti-Israel lately. The leader actually just sat down for an interview with CNN in the past 24 hours. And he's sort of prescribing a line we've heard in other cases. He said...

I asked him, you know, are you still committed to Islamic rule? He said, absolutely. And he said, I think people have a negative idea because they've seen Islamic rule implemented improperly. And I think this is something you've seen from others who claim to know we're going to do it right this time. Right. I don't have a ton of confidence in that. But at the same time, I do think it's important for people to understand just.

just the jubilation of many Syrian Americans, Syrians in Syria, because at least for now, for this window, when they roll into new cities, it's not as if they're suddenly saying, you know, put on your headscarf and cover your face, stop listening to music, grow your beard. They're focused on... They're not being Taliban-like. They're letting people... People are getting let out of prisons. Things seem to be actually improving in terms of administration, in terms of bakeries working and cell phones working. So...

And for other people, right, they've been waiting more than a decade for any kind of liberation from Assad's tyranny where you say the wrong thing or you forget to bribe the right person. You're in jail for who knows how long. Right. And there are whole Sunni villages that have been aware of the people. I mean, let's understand Assad has probably killed 500,000, 600,000 people.

of his own people, mostly Arabs, mostly Sunnis, villages, probably five million or so have been displaced, whole villages wiped out. And then the Iranians talk about settler colonialism, they bring in other Shia, maybe from as far away as Uzbekistan or from Afghanistan or other places and give them, turn these villages over to them so that it'll be Shia and pro-Iran and pro-Assad.

should understand this happening. Another group we should talk about for a second here are the Kurds,

I can't help myself. I'm rather a Kurdophile. The Kurds are on land that's been, I would say they have the right to self-determination on their own lands. People who would argue with me, even people that I like would say, yeah, but these Kurds are terrorists. They're very left wing. They're very all that. But they've also been working hand in glove with Americans against ISIS. They've been the backbone of the American effort to fight.

to repress, I would say, ISIS and keep it from reconstituting. So it's a complex thing, but tell us a little bit about the Kurds. It's hard to turn your back on an effective partner. So obviously, you know, the Kurds, their land is sort of at the intersection of four states. You have Kurds in Iran, in Iraq, in Turkey, and in Syria. And these are contiguous. If you look at them, you can do a circle around. It's the parts of these countries. Yes. You could easily...

cut slices of each of those four countries and make a single sort of Kurdistan. Right. Um, for various complicated historical reasons that hasn't happened. Um, one of perhaps the largest, uh, although some people would say that in, um, in Afghanistan also you have the, uh, a group that, you know, of equal size that hasn't been recognized as a national group. Um, but who's in Afghanistan? The name is blank. You got the Hazara. No, not the Hazara. The, uh, the, the main, uh,

Pashtuns. Pashtuns. Thank you. Well, the Pashtuns are the main Taliban group and the dominant group as a result. And the Pashtun lands go over into Pakistan. We're talking about the Kurds. So they have a presence in each of these cases in almost every one of those countries. They've been at odds, often violently, with the ruling forces. They've been the victim of chemical attacks under Saddam Hussein, etc.,

And they have different competing authorities trying to stake out control. And look, in Turkey, the Kurdistan Workers Party or PKK has waged an insurgency against the state and the US considers it a terrorist organization.

There's some debate about whether it should still be on the list. I know some smart people have made the case that it's time to take it off. But the fact is that when we saw there was a problem with the Islamic State beheading Americans, we didn't want to send 150,000 troops back in, so we needed a partner.

And the Kurds were effectively being besieged and specifically, basically the Syrian branch of the PKK known as the YPG. There's a lot of integration. Some people try to defend it by sort of exaggerating the separation, but it is limited.

And we found, I think they were willing to, you know, sort of curb behavior that we found objectionable, but they're not fundamentally separating. They're not fundamentally rejecting their ideology. They said, yeah, well, we will fight with you. And, you know, finding a reliable partner in that part of the world. We've seen the failures we've had with the Iraqi army multiple times over with the Afghan forces we tried to train.

This time we found people willing to fight and die and do it effectively to take ground and dismantle the caliphate. I don't think we have a great...

but the Kurds say they lost around 11,000 dead fighting ISIS when we lost single-digit number of soldiers doing that. So no one wants to turn their back on a success like that. Well, some people do, but I don't. A few people in Washington, in power, want to say, okay, we have them. They're still there helping keep the Islamic State down and out. And so even... And many camps where they're...

being incarcerated ISIS, various ISIS members. And if the Kurds were, I mean, if the Kurds have to let them out because they can't keep them in because they don't have the resources, then you have a lot more ISIS people wandering around the Middle East and wandering into Europe and coming up through Mexico into America.

So we have a lot of reasons, even if it's some way, some would argue it's the fruit of the poison tree. But there's very practical reasons to continue this partnership release and not to abandon them. And the Kurds, by the way, they're not looking to take Aleppo. They're not looking to take Aleppo. They just want their lands themselves. Now, we've got to say, Erdogan in Turkey doesn't want them to. He's genocidal, it seems to me, towards these Kurds and even towards the Kurds.

of Turkey in the sense that he, he doesn't want them to identify as Kurds. He wants them to identify as, I mean, I, who knows? I think if Erdogan, which he won't, were to say to the Turks, you know what? You can have your language. You can have your culture. It's part of the greater Turkey. What can I do to make, you know, it's what can, what can I do to make, give you autonomy? So we have, I think that could work, but,

But he refuses to do it.

And then when he saw that pursuing the coalition that made that possible could lose him leadership in Turkey, he went 180 degrees in the opposite direction. Now he's sort of launched multiple sort of invasions. He cuts off water to Kurdish areas.

Okay. And Erdogan, you would think, wants to control all of Syria, part of Syria. What's his goal there? Maybe his optimal would have sort of Syria as a jihadist client state. So he deeply resents Assad. He was allowing...

huge amounts of support to go to the Syrian rebels, including various jihadi types, just so people, you know, to set the baseline. Erdogan himself is sort of a product of a Muslim brotherhood-like movement aligned with the brotherhood. He's openly pro-Hamas. He has literally said, Turkey is for Hamas. It's not, we're not twisting his words. We are reporting his words.

Hamas fundraisers in Turkey, HTS, the group we're talking about, they fundraise. The U.S. has repeatedly sanctioned individuals based in Turkey, and it's clear they have a permissive environment. If Erdogan wanted to crack down on these people, he could crack down on these people. He's, you know, he's a conspiratorial anti-Semite. He talks about the interest rate lobby controlling the Turkish economy and interest rate lobby is code for the

The Jews. There's not as if there's any that many Jews. There are Jews in Turkey, and they're not treated that well usually, but they're not controlling the interest rates. People also need to know what Assad is because people think, okay, is Assad a Sunni? Is Assad a Shiite? He's neither, actually, I would argue. He's an Alawite.

And an Alawite, if you were an Alawite, it seems to me if you were in Iran, you'd be considered a heretic because Alawite comes from Islam, but it's as distinct almost as Druze are or others in all sorts of ways. And Bashar al-Assad's grandfather made that very clear that some famous letter he wrote to the French saying, don't abandon us, we'll be treated as badly as the Jews are treated. But because he has aligned himself with,

With with Tehran, he's sort of a good enough Shiite right now. He secured Assad's father, Bashar al-Assad's father, Hafez al-Assad, the first dictator in the dynasty, secured a fatwa sort of certifying Alawites as passable Shiites. As passable Shiites. So it's sort of reducing that tension. In a lot of ways, you could see a strong secularist.

thread, which doesn't put them exactly in great standing with Iran, generally speaking. Famously, they tried to reduce, get rid of the requirement that the president of the Republic of Syria be Muslim. There was a huge backlash against Hafez al-Assad in the 70s, or even the late 60s because of that. Um,

But heavily for strategic reasons, there has been an alliance between the Islamic Republic of Iran and the Assad regime in Syria since the 1979 revolution in Iran. They both had Saddam Hussein as a common enemy. And for other reasons, they've had quite a continuing convergence. And now one of the most important is their also relationship with Hezbollah. And they're –

There are those American politicians have been for years who argue, oh, we can pry Assad away from the Islamic Republic of Iran if we offer this or threaten that. I think, some of you think that that's absolutely ridiculous, ludicrous. They can't do it. The only way that could happen is if the, you know, listen, if the regime in Tehran were to fall or become so weakened.

Yes, he'll look for other people to support him, but there's no – but it's a very firm alliance. It's – again, he's been – not abandoned, but there are no – Hezbollah can no longer leave Lebanon and fight for him. They're too weakened. The idea that you can pry Assad away is one of the most popular delusions in the Middle East. And in Washington. Yes, and in Washington. I would –

have hoped that at least a few years ago it would have died. It should have been clear, right? Assad, no one has gone to bat for Assad when he needed it most beyond the Iranians, right? When he, no matter when he committed atrocities that made him a pariah, they didn't flinch from supporting him with oil, with money, with their own troops and with their own troops, commanding militias they raised and with Hezbollah as well. So, you know, I've,

If I were a dictator, you know, who slaughtered half a million people, I would not trust American promises or anyone else saying, oh, just leave your most reliable friend behind. Now, it's true. I don't think in his heart, I don't think Assad cares that much about Islam. I think he's a survivor.

And, you know, he's an alloy more than anything else. He's got a wife who was featured in Vogue magazine for, because she's such a good dresser. Absolutely. They spent, I mean, they were the toast to Paris at a certain point. Um, it was amazing. The Vogue, the Vogue feature was only months before they started slaughtering their own citizen. Yeah. Vogue had to sort of, uh, sort of. Rose of the, uh, the Middle East deserts or something like that. Um, all our Prada, uh,

But the really shocking thing that came out in recent days is that the Biden administration was still pursuing this fantasy. Right. So I think it's entirely incidental that it came out. I don't think the stories are because of the rebel offensive, but talks were ongoing. And we know there's this faction of the Biden administration that has been pushing all the entire time it's been in office.

to sort of have the Arab world quietly rehabilitate Assad. Which they have been doing. Right. Now, whenever the press asks about it, the line is always, we're never going to recognize Assad. Of course not. It's too far gone for Washington to do that. But the message...

to, you know, the Emiratis, to the Saudis who are open to this is let Assad back in. Good things will happen. Well, they were, he was let back into the Arab League when a year ago or so. It may be two years. I'm trying to remember exactly. But, and, but, you know, they, the Emiratis hosted him for a visit in Abu Dhabi. Actually, it was on the anniversary of the outbreak of the protests. It was a real sort of slap in the face.

And people were doing the usual sort of regional thing of, oh, well, he's the winner, he's in control. We may as well make our peace with him. They didn't seem to be learning because the idea is he would behave better in some ways supposedly. And the big promise he made was less drug trafficking. As the things have gotten worse for him financially, he's relied more and more on an amphetamine like drug called Captagon trafficked in the billions of dollars per year.

And made in Syria and Syria, the border between Syria and Lebanon. It's not that hard to make that you could bring in the precursor as you press it into pills and then traffic to other Arab countries. So, you know, poisoning their populations, also causing violence. You know, the Jordanians are having shootouts on their border with drug dealers coming in from Syria. The Jordanians even launched airstrikes on it to kill a drug, a drug lord in Syria. Huge interceptions in ports in the Mediterranean, in the Gulf, in

And they thought they'd get cooperation, but there was nothing. Every, you know, Assad has made clear. He knows every concession to him comes out of weakness and he's going to take it for all it's worth. Um,

Um, and yet the, it just won't stop. The, these Biden administration officials went to talk with the Emiratis about whether lifting sanctions on Assad. And I'll just make clear my preference for years, this entire time is more sanctions, squeeze every dollar out of him. Uh, he steals it many ways. He steals it by, from the UN directly. He just,

alters the exchange rate that you know we're still paying billions uh for aid uh into syria and it's good to help people in any situation but um it's you know we talk a lot about unruh the problems with aid there like it's not as if the un had a clean record on these things besides in gaza right it's been an effort entirely co-opted by assad where he takes a giant cut of everything that comes in plus he denies it to people who don't agree with him politically so

Bad situation.

He said if they do, there'd be real repercussions, real consequences if Assad used chemical weapons against his own people. Why? It's very much against international law.

So what happened? He goes to the Russians and said, can you help us? And the Russians say, of course, we can always help you. And of course, the Russians helped themselves. The Russians have supported Assad and are now, but again, not as well as they used to be because Putin's kind of stretched thin. But I think they are doing things like, oh, bombing civilians, bombing hospitals. Well, it's their specialty. I think you've got to go with your strength. Yeah, I guess so. No, there's continuing reports. That's how they fight. But anyway.

it's not clear they can mount the same volume. And some people are trying to count, do they have the same number of planes, the same number of air defense missiles? Uh, one of our colleagues told me they've definitely have fewer air defense missiles there. Um, but the really, they never had a large ground presence. So it's true. Their air power, I think most people would agree it was decisive, right? Iran was helping a lot on the ground in the early days of the Syrian civil war, but it wasn't enough to hold back the rebels. And it was, that's why Russians, uh, after, uh, Qasem Soleimani, the late, uh,

leader of Iran's Quds Force of the Islamic Resolutionary Guard visited Moscow, coordinated plans because Iran has the people on the ground and Putin has the forces in the air plus some planning that's actually very useful, experienced military hands. And that's really what turned it around. The rebels started losing when Russia intervened. And Russia has a... If you're Putin...

Having a warm water port on the Mediterranean is important if you want to see yourself as an empire, which I argued a few years he does. And it was a Tartus in Latakia. Now, and that's I've heard that that's almost like a little colony of Russia right there. The Russians don't I mean, they're totally in charge of that area. And I.

I don't know how far it extends. I mean, I don't think they have more than a few thousand people. So it's a village. A little colony, like in the old-fashioned way, but from where they can have ships in the Mediterranean. Now, explain this to me. From what I also understand, if the HTS keeps going up north...

At a certain point, they will – that village and that port that's so important to Russia will get kind of cut off. And I don't think HDS likes the Russians terribly well. Well, I mean it will get cut off from the big cities. And obviously it's on the Mediterranean. So I think the Russians could resupply it by sea or –

or at least they could hold out as sort of an enclave until they could, if they had to, I don't, they don't want to evacuate it, but you know, so if they keep marching down the highway all the way to Damascus and eventually to the border with Jordan and Israel and even took everything to the east of the highway, that would still be in the Alawite heartland, right? We talked a little while ago. That's where it is. Yeah. Yeah. So it's that coastal area around Latakia and some of the other cities there. Uh, that's, that's the core of Assad support. It's the places they lived in the past few hundred years. Uh,

So Russia has reason to invest in preventing the loss of this important asset, although the question remains when they're losing half a million casualties in Ukraine, how much can they afford to be diverted by anything in Syria, much as they have no scruples about using whatever means are necessary? Okay, so get some what may be our last question for today, and it's the hardest question. So if you're an American or if you're an Israeli,

Who should you be rooting for or what should you want to see as the end game of what's going on now in Syria? Well, I suppose it's like being a Washington football fan and watching the Cowboys and the Eagles play each other. And you try to root against them both. Maybe you hope the quarterback gets injured. It's a tough one. I mean, in a way, the...

You know, Iran has a plan and has allies in several places across the region. Losing Syria would be a huge blow to everything they've done. If you have to remember, Israel is sort of fighting this seven front war because Iran has been able to build all these fronts and you'd be pulling a critical sort of domino out of the house of dominoes, I guess. Yeah. If they lose Syria, because then they'll be very hard to get weapons from Iran to Hezbollah.

And it's a big break in what we call the Shia crescent that they've been – which is really the empire that Tehran has been trying to build, wiping out Israel and also – Countries with governments that respond to what Tehran wants, not to what their own people want. Right, right, right. And pretty straight up imperialism. Yeah.

And then, but you're right. You equally, you know, you don't really want to take a risk and find out what happens when a sort of a group that has broken off from Al Qaeda. Yeah. Because what's interesting, even the people who are defending it saying it's focused just on Syria, they say, you have to think of it, you know, like Hamas or like the Taliban. Those are not good precedents. If the, if the people who are most comfortable with this group coming to power or making that argument, we have a problem. Um, remember Taliban, of course, are not averse to hosting various terrorist groups that then attack others. Uh,

You know, I think if Hamas had the wherewithal, they would do that, too. I'm not sure other terrorist groups are clamoring to be hosted in Gaza. So and they're not, you know, as I said, they're not rejecting Islamic rule. They're not looking to embrace democracy. You know, they're trying to project an image of tolerance and minorities. We will not erase minorities, but they might just be tolerated second class citizens. And as I said, we're going to see a real dilemma because.

So many millions of people whose lives have been crushed by Assad are now going to see at least a brief period of liberation. I think I would sort of draw the analogy to Iran in 1979, to many, many people who had had enough of the Shah's rule. And there's a big debate about the extent to which he brought progress to the country, but was also an authoritarian and had a secret police that did things that we would totally reject.

Not as authoritarian and not as oppressive, I would say, as the regime that followed. I think that's beyond debate. The executions came by the thousands once the Shah was out. But the point is, early on, there was a lot of belief that this was going to be a good thing. I believe it was Andrew Young, Jimmy Carter's ambassador to the United Nations, referred to Khomeini as some kind of saint.

No, I remember. So you had, it's a similar period where. Khomeini was so misunderstood. As you know, I was in Iran in 1979 as a reporter. And most of the journalists, most of the diplomats there didn't understand who Khomeini was and what he represented. They just didn't understand.

So we could be seeing something similar where in this initial period where they're focused on taking power as being part of a coalition, HTS understands the imperative of continuing to project that moderate face. And then just as Khomeini did, once he was able to take power, it became a much more exclusivist hardline dictatorship. Well, there are more. I mean, I think you have to say that a lot of these groups are likely to be more moderate so long as they are weak. Yeah.

Because they can't do more than that. You don't want them to get their hands on chemical weapons and store them. I can imagine the Israelis coming in and just destroying those weapons if they can. I'm not saying I know that they will or that they have or that they will, but I can see them considering that a threat that has to be wiped out because we never got rid of the chemical weapons in Syria, even though that was claimed. Samantha Power has claimed she got that done. It was all a lie.

And they knew it. Actually, there's been interesting work showing that even before when Obama was still in office, they understood they hadn't gotten rid of it. And they were and the Russians and the Syrians were cheating. And now that's a real risk. We don't I mean, yeah, maybe our government knows exactly where they are. Maybe the Israelis do. Worth noting right before the famous pager beeper attack.

The Israelis mounted a ground raid on one of Syria's advanced scientific weapons facilities. Very unusual, right? Almost everything Israel does from the air. This time they sent guys in on the ground demonstrating that capability. Obviously, no one at the time was thinking, what do we do if chemical weapons are going to be taken by, you know, terrorists with sympathy for Al Qaeda? But it shows the capability. And.

And also, I think, you know, the question is, would the U.S. want to do something from the air? Right. It's very interesting. Right. Trump launched two rounds of airstrikes on Assad early in his first term because he used chemical weapons. And it's be curious to see what the new administration has to say about this change in Syria. Right. It's on the one hand, Trump has, I think, few fond feelings for Iran, which has tried to assassinate him. Right.

And also, I don't think Trump has any fond feelings for anyone linked to Al Qaeda, given that he celebrates his ability to finish off ISIS during his first term. But what happens when those two are fighting each other? The answer may be that we have to support nobody and try to hurt both. What I would say is continue to squeeze. Do absolutely do not fall prey to the idea that you need to start tilting toward Assad.

which is clearly what the current administration has been feeling. You think so, huh? Their idea is we can always peel them off. They somehow can't let go of that. I would say at minimum, make Iran foot the entire bill for Assad if he survives. They probably were putting in $5 billion or more a year to keep Assad in power at the height of that war. And if maximum pressure comes back, as a lot of Trump's people are saying it will. Maximum economic pressure on the Islamic regime in Iran.

make them pay the full cost of supporting Assad while enduring maximum pressure. They haven't had both hit at the same time. They had to pay the most to support Assad. While they try to rebuild Hezbollah, which they're going to try to do. Yeah, absolutely. And make all that impossible. There's a lot of people who still think, I'm sorry, it's naive. Our goal is to make peace with our enemies. No, at a certain point, our goal is to keep our enemies weak.

That's all you can do. The twin of maximum pressure against the Islamic Republic of Iran, maximum support for the people of Iran. For the people of Iran, that's very much what FDG has been saying because we think the people of Iran actually are not our enemies. They're not Israel's enemies. I firmly believe that. I think that with a different regime that's not Islamist. And I think the people of Iran know better than anybody else almost in the Middle East what it means to be ruled by Islamists. I guess they know how awful that is.

Anything else that you want to say about all these situations? Something I didn't ask or something that's important? It's a complex situation. We agree at the end of the day, keep your enemies weak and don't mistake your enemies for your friends. That's just basic realpolitik. That is true.

David, thanks for all you do. Thanks for your service here. It's a pleasure to be your colleague. Same here, Chris. Thank you for having me back on the show. Great to have you. And thanks to all of you who have been with us for this complicated and interesting conversation here today on commercial-free, listener-sponsored Foreign Policy. Thank you.

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