It Could Happen HereGuest host Matt Lieb is joined by Shereen to discuss the phenomenon of Hasbara propaganda.
Recorded January 30th, 2024
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Intercept Article: https://theintercept.com/2024/01/28/new-york-times-daily-podcast-camera/
Also media.
Hey everyone, this is it could happen here and I'm your guest host, Matt Leeb. I'd say most of you probably know me from Robert and Sophie's podcast Behind the Bastards, which you know I've become kind of notorious for the time that I use a jar jar beank soundboard during a series about doctor Mangela. Yeah, I don't have that soundboard with me today. Sorry. Fewer of you might know me from having the world's only sopranos Slash the Wire Rewatch podcast pod Yourself a Gun, But the fewest of you might know me from my brand new podcast, Bad Hasbara, the World's most moral podcast, in which me and some of my other anti Zionist or non Zionist Jewish friends and our other friends and our other guests guests who you know you've maybe heard, like Charene here, we have casual conversations about Israeli propaganda and Israeli propagandists. For some of you, this might be your first time hearing the word has bara, and that's why the homies at cool Zone Media invited me here today. So this episode is all about has barah aka Israel's public relations and propaganda machine, and I am thrilled to be joined by my friend and one time cat sitter, Charine Uness. Hi Scherene, Hi, Matt.
What an intro? Yeah, I'm excited to learn more about this actually also excited to know how you properly say has bara because I don't know to say.
It right ba lah Yeah it's Barra. Yeah, that's I mean, yeah, the law you know, with the with the throat has ba raw.
You heard it here first.
Yes, you heard it here first. I'm not I'm not the greatest at doing you know, Israeli accents or whatnot. So throughout this podcast, I'm probably gonna be butchering a lot of Hebrew words. Uh and you know, just you're just gonna have to deal with it.
Yeah, and that's totally fine. That's just part of the game. I've just pronounced every name I've ever said on this.
Show, so yeah, yeah, I mean you should hear me trying to pronounce Arabic names like I can't do it. I mean I attempt, Yes, that would. If there's any that happened in this episode, please but before we get into talking about has blah blah, I want to start with a quick story, Saren, Are you familiar with the Birthright Trip?
Yes, i am.
It was one of those things where I was very excited to one day do the Birthright Trip, and I didn't really even question. I knew, like, you know, it was a little bit, you know, they were trying to whine and dine me to go there and you know, maybe move or what not. But I didn't know how much they wanted me to move there until I went. So for me, my Birthright trip is kind of why I'm here today talking about Hasbara. It's why I started a freaking podcast about it. It's when I first started clocking Israeli propaganda. So I went in January twenty twelve. If you don't know Birthright, it's pretty much a two week, all expenses paid trip for young Jews from all over the world to go to the Holy Land, reconnect with their Jewish roots, float in the dead seat. It is. It is a propaganda tour of apartheid state. And you know, I'm not going to get too much into the history of Birthright, you know and all the like far right wing funders like Sheldon Adelson and stuff. There's like not enough time for that. But I'm mentioning it because it was the first time I saw how hasbara was more than just propaganda and how in my opinion, it more closely resembles like indoctrination, and the organizers at Birthright did like a masterful job of this. Like I went on a trip of American Jews who were like me, like they were like secular from mixed or like intermarried families, non bar mitzvah. It was all like other matt Leab type Jews, like ethnic Jews, right, And I realized this. I think it was like day two of the trip. One of the Israeli tour guides literally gave us a bar mitzvah like all at the same time we had a group bar mitzvah yeah, And they did it by saying like, okay, well now bar mitzvod. It just means you're a man. Now, everyone here is a man. Now choose an Israeli name, and which was like for me, I remember feeling a little, you know, I was like, wait, there's supposed to be a theme party and fucking like, yah's supposed to yeah, DJ, my dad's gonna buy me a car, or at least me a like a Honda like I thought it was more than that. At the very least, I thought I would have to like memorize a tour a portion, but no, you just go to Israel and you know a tour Guiy does it for you, so like it really works though, like you really you you go there being like you know, I'm European Jew, and you leave there and you're like, I invented falafel. So the Hasbara highlight of the trip for me was this like mega like birthright mega event. It was in Jerusalem and a huge arena in which they had like Israeli speakers, donors, rappers, and there was like a there were rappers at one point who just started rapping about things that they claim Israel invented, like iPhone, computer chips and like the cherry tomato, which was you know like and by the way, a not insubstantial amount of the trip was spent telling us about how Israel invented the cherry tomato. Like we went to places like you know, farms and stuff where they showed us this like drip irrigation. Multiple people were just like, man, we invented the cherry tomato. Here can you believe it? And I was like this seems like a lot of effort for just this one particular thing, which may or may not be true. But yeah, So the headliner of the mega event of that night, the cherry tomato on top, if you will, was a speech by none other than Prime Minister Benjamin Bibi Netanyahu. Straight up, the Prime Minister of Israel was the headline speaker of this birthright event and an arena filled with like twenty thousand teens and like early twenty somethings, which was kind of like amazing, Like, you know, listen, here's the thing I knew. Benjamin netnya who I like, I knew enough about Israeli politics to know that, like he was a fucking right winger and bad. But like I have to admit, even I, you know, as a twenty six year old who kind of was starting to get like woke on Palestine, you know, so to speak, like even I was like kind of like, whoa this is. I'm a little charmed, a little honored to see the Prime minister here. He took time out of his busy schedule of doing crimes, probably to address us. And you know, I actually found the speech of that night. I actually have some clips from it that I want to play.
That is incredible, that's great.
So yeah, he he was like casual, he was off the cuff. They wrote a speech for me.
I'm not going to read it.
Like he even did a little bit of crowd work.
Anyone here named Rachel.
So that right there is what we in the Jewish community call Rachel profiling. That's when you just start in front of a group of Jews and you ask whose name to Rachel. Shout out to Rachel Blumenthal for telling me that joke. In college. It was. It was like a crash course in Hesbara. Like he told us we were from Israel.
At one point, you all come from great countries, great countries. Did you all come from here?
All of you?
That's your birthright.
He was telling us that, like you know, once again, it was everything they invented phone, you know, the cell phone, ships, blah blah blah. He was telling us to make aliat to Israel, which means to you know, move to return, to come back. You know. Essentially what he was vying for was like move to Israel and start a family. It's very like sex based, like the way it works. The big thing I took away was him telling us that he wanted us to go back home and tell people the truth about Israel.
But the most important battle that we have to fight is the battle for the truth. And all of you can become ambassadors for the truth and ambassadors for Israel.
And of course, you know, he then proceeded to tell us what the truth about Israel was.
Go back your respective countries and tell the truth about Israel. The only way to fight a live to tell the truth. Tell him about a country where people are free, free to initiate, free to work, free to speak, the country where you can criticize the Prime Minister although he never makes mistakes. This is a country which has in which Arabs have full right something they've been denied in all the vast lands around us. And a woman in this country can sit anywhere she wants. That's our position. This is a free country.
So him going up there telling me that what he wants from me is to go back home and be an ambassador for Israel and tell the truth about Israel. You know, it was the first time I realized that he was giving me a job to do. And this is a job that I think a lot of Jewish people who may be listening to this podcast can relate to the job of telling the truth about Israel and the job of you know, stopping the slander that is out there about Israel in the media and on the internet, press and all that stuff. And it was the first time I realized that, like, oh, part of the hasbara isn't just you know, some government thing. It's like, my job, My job is to is to tell the truth. And he said something in that clip, the only way to fight allies with the truth. And so I am going to follow his advice. That's what I'm going to do, Shreen. I'm going to tell people the truth about Israel. And I think I think it's time to do it. So let's get into it. Let's talk about the truth. Let's get into talking about hasbara. What is it? What is it? And so loosely, hasbara is it's a modern Hebrew word derived from the word lasbier hasbier meaning to explain or explanation. I say loosely because it's kind of a made up word. So you know, a lot of words in modern Hebrew are sort of made up words. Remember, Hebrew is like an ancient liturgical language, and modern Hebrew was created by like Jewish linguist nerds who wanted to revive the language to be a spoken one, and that's how you got modern Hebrew, which is fine, there's nothing wrong with the reviving a dead language. But because of that, a lot of the words in modern Hebrew are kind of inventions. So, according to Mosaic Magazine, has bara is strictly a twentieth centuryism. You won't find it in Eliezer benu Huda's a monumental complete Dictionary of Ancient and Modern Hebrew, whose second volume, in which hasbara appears only as the first word of hasbarat Panim, was published in nineteen oh two. So it's not something that you see in kind of like the original beginnings of, you know, the creation of modern Hebrew. Like colloquially, his bara like refers to like media pr branding, mud slinging. It's kind of a like a sort of like catch all term for general propaganda used to create a narrative based on Israeli government talking points meant for a foreign, usually American or just generally Western audience. People who deal in hasbara are called has barists or has baristas, which is fun.
That's that's true.
Yeah, yeah, I mean listen, has Barista, I think gives a gives it a little bit more flair, you know, kind of imagine someone kind of like making you coffee, but instead of coffee, it's they make you lies.
So nope, I'm not gonna do that.
Sorry, I like it. I wish I never was born. Well, so there's all sorts of like has bars like. Some of them have like a official positions within the Israeli government, such as the head of the IDF Spokesperson's unit, Daniel Hagari, who you might remember is the guy from that video taken at the you know, the children's hospital, you know, in Gaza, and he's like pointing at what he thought was a list of his Israeli hostages, but was like literally just a calendar, didn't have any names. It was just he was pointing at days of the week thinking they were names because that's what a calendar has. And also it's so fucking weird that they can't read Arabic, like, yeah, you're in the Middle East, you are the spokesperson.
I think something interesting about how Hebrew was revived as well is that a lot of words were taken from Arabic, a lot of words are very similar to Arabic, so it's like even more funny that they were they can't even read the language that they kind of took a lot of words from.
But I'm saying that, like yeah, in Israel, it's almost like the appropriation was just part of the process of the cleansing, you know, just like stealing something, saying it's ours and then not even being able to identify an Arabic word that you yourself say. So, yeah, so there's him. Then there's like everyone if you've been on Twitter, you've seen a lot of Alon Levy who he's His official title is the official Israeli government spokesperson, and that's through the basically the office of the Prime Minister. He's a British guy. Like he raises his eyebrows. It's like the meme, you know, like he goes like, oh, that's what he's famous for. Then there's a lot of these like non governmental like Israeli Civil Society haspara organizations like Stand with Us or like a PAK, the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, the Anti Defamation League, Christians United for Israel, the Israel on Campus Coalition. I mean, they're of them tons of them. And then of course there's people who are just in it for the love of the game, like celebrities, artists, you know, actors, you know, who make like Israel public advocacy part of their thing. It's a fascinating world filled with ghouls and goblins. So the word his bara itself interestingly is hesbara. So early Zionists had no problem calling their pr campaigns and like their branding for a Jewish state and Palestine, propaganda. They would say it's we got to do propaganda, because in the early twentieth twentieth century, the term was generally considered to be neutral, like people said they were doing propaganda when they were doing propaganda. Once the word became a pejorative, they created the word has bara, which is a nicer sounding word with more neutral connotations. And although it's now used as a pejorative by critics of Israel and me and stuff, the word is still used to this day in Israel. It is still a fairly neutral word. There are has Borrow workshops sponsored by Israel. They have has Barrow Fellowships. That's the name of the fellowship. Like you can get merch that says has Barrow Fellowship on it. And the reason is because it doesn't translate. The word isn't translate to propaganda. It just means to explain, which is, you know, seems innocent enough. It's not about doing propaganda. It's not about They don't call themselves liars. They're not saying I'm going to lie. They say they're merely just explaining. And I found this speech from the Middle East Policy Council that goes into depth about what has Barro is beyond. Just like propaganda. Quote has Barrow links information warfare to the strategic efforts of the state to bolster the unity of the home front, ensure the support of allies, disrupt efforts to organize hostile coalitions, determine the way issues are defined by the media, the intelligentsia, the social networks, established parameters of politically correct discourse, de legitimize both critics and their arguments, and shape the common understanding and interpretation of the results of international negotiations. So behind this term is a large, well funded information warfare apparatus dedicated to shaping you know, Israeli discourse in the media and the government and academic institutions everywhere. And they use all of the tools in their toolbox to silence criticism of Israel, and what they can't silence, they soften. Sometimes it's through coordinated letter writing campaigns. Sometimes it's harassment. Sometimes it's doxing. You know, people have been doxed. So before I continue, I want to address that uncomfortable feeling you had when I talked about like Israel and the media. I want to say that is that is not to say that Israel or the Israel lobby or Zionists quote control the media, all right, So they do not. That's why Hasbara exists, you know, That's why the Israel Lobby exists. If they controlled the media, they wouldn't have groups like Camera, for example, constantly day in and day out, harassing the New York Times and CNN and PBS to get them to talk about Israel correctly. Okay, So it's important when people hear these criticisms of Israel that they don't try to see them as like otherizing Israel or like you know, a lot of people they get uncomfortable because a lot of these things will match old anti Semitic tropes. But it's important to remember that these lobbying groups exist in Israel. They exist in the gun lobby, in the big oil lobby. This is not unique to Israel. The unique thing about it is how willing the America in public is and the West in general is to letting themselves be lied to. That's why I'm interested in it. But let's talk about Camera real quick, because this is a recent thing that happened. Some news happened recently about the New York Times and their connection to CAMERA. This is from a recent article in The Intercept. The Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis, or CAMERA, was founded in nineteen eighty two in response to what it claims was anti Israel bias in the Washington Post reporting on the Israeli invasion of Lebanon. Since its inception, CAMERA has successfully lobbied for hundreds of corrections in major media outlets, seeking to streamline a pro Israel line in news reports and editorials at a smere journalists whose work it disagrees with, and launched boycott campaigns against news organizations it believes are not responding with enough deference to its requests. So the way this group operates is that they go through any and every article about Israel looking for sentences, looking for terms, definitions, anything they disagree with and lobby for corrections to be issued. Camera doesn't do this quietly. They openly brag about it on their website. Like recently, Camera successfully lobby The New York Times to issue a correction removing the word occupation from an article, and they wrote this on their website. Quote the mask slipped for the New York Times reporters kum Hamas stenographers this week when they absolutely neglected to done down Hamas's preferred language before passing off the terror organization's talking points as original reporting. Take notice of the framing of The New York Times and their mask slipping and their reporters as being stenographers for Hamas. This is like quite the accusation given the The New York Times is like has and continues to have coverage described as biased in favor of Israel Like. According to an Intercept analysis, it was found that in the first six weeks of the war, New York Times consistently delegitimized Palestinian deaths and cultivated a gross imbalance in coverage to pro Israeli sources and voices. So the exact opposite of what Camera is claiming is the truth here. You know, this is. This is actually a famous has Bara tactic. It is the I am rubber, you are glue tactic, and it's really something to see it in action, Like I don't know seen if you've seen how often you've like read some pro Israeli voices, you know has Baris online and heard them say stuff that you're like, I know for a fact, the exact opposite of this thing is true. You know what I mean?
Yeah, every every accusation is a confession. It feels like that is true all the time when it comes to the stuff. And also the intercept article is very good. I'll put it in the description for those woe to read the whole thing. I'm glad you mentioned that because I didn't know that much about camera until I read that article, and I was just like, what, like I knew that that was a thing that that was done. Like they would change words recently. The New York Times was like a decline of death or life, like they use the word decline to describe.
To describe what was happening in Gaza. They decided the articles headline was going to be like death's actually declining in the.
Gaza exactly, and like the standard ones are always there, like blast or conflict or whatever it is. Those are unfortunately so normal now, But to see it all laid out by the intercept was really I'm really glad I did that article so it will be in the description, and I'm glad you mentioned it. But it does go back to the idea that every accusation is a confession. I think that's something to remember every time you see a headline.
It's true, and it's something that you know. It's almost become a cliche online because you've sa I've seen it so many times people saying that, and I think it's important to remember that this is sort of the tactic of hesbara. Like what makes hesbara particularly notable and like often hilarious is that it doesn't merely just spin narratives, but it inverts them to essentially make like an alternate reality. It's not just that hesbara is information warfare. Hesbara is straight up info wars like Alex Jones level shit. The same way Alex Jones will run the same like fantastical paranoid thread to every major news event that happens in order to reinforce his worldview and prove that he's right and everyone else is wrong, you know, like that's Israel does this, but with like far more money and far greater success, and it kind of makes sense why they're successful at it. Like Alex Jones info wars shit like praise on white Christian paranoia that like the Blacks are trying to take away our guns so they can make our children trans or whatever, like total fantasy in saying shit that you have to be like already far right wing to believe. Well, like Israeli info wars praise on a much more grounded in reality paranoia that of anti Semitism, Like anti Semitism is real, it's historical, it's evil, it's pervasive, it's pernicious. Like this kind of paranoia makes sense, and not just for Jews, but like for anyone of conscience, anyone who has empathy, you know, like that they understand anti Semitism is bad and needs to be fought. And that makes Hasbara very effective. You know, people want to support Israel because people want to support the Jewish people and they want to fight anti Semitism. And when the IDF mantles a children's hospital and says we had to do it to stop Hamas. Look, here's a list of hostages. People want to believe them. It's like Molder from the X Files, like I want to believe, which is the same impulse as Alex Jones believers. Essentially, like you don't want Sandy Hook to be a possibility. You want it to be a conspiracy to take your guns away. You want those children to be secretly actors pretending to be dead. So like when Israel says we aren't killing children, we're killing hamas, people want to believe that.
And yeah, let's just say hate that you compared Fox Mulder to the like you dragged him into this and I'll get over it.
But I'm sorry to you know, to bring him into this conversation. But you know, I'm just saying, Molder, if he wants to believe that stuff, what else does he want to believe? You just hope, you really hope and pray that he's not going to fall for the hesbara, but he might know you really don't. And it's like, you know it's hiszbar is effective because it gives you something like a nice, legitimate sounding explanation for why Israel needed to do something that you might usually think is bad. Like that's how it's worked for decades in the same way that Hasbara serves to explain things for you. To basically take the Israeli government at its word. That's kind of how it works. It gives you a believable explanation and not only sounds like kind of real, but it you know, conforms to your personal beliefs. And yeah, but speaking of personal beliefs, if there's one thing, oh, let's see if I can do this. If there's one thing I'd love to believe in, it's commerce. And so yes, I mean listen, people will have to make money somehow. So it looks like we have some products and services that we have to sell. And yeah, when they sell you these these products and services, please believe them when they say how good they are. And we are back. So we were talking about hespara and how you know, the explanations conformed to your personal beliefs. The interesting thing about hasbara is that they have different types of hespara for a wide range of personal beliefs. It's not one size fits all. It depends on who you are. There's a conservative version and there's a liberal version. Like Israel. Israel has been very successful and their ability to brand themselves is both a liberal democracy and a outpost for Western values fighting the Muslim hoards. Usually, these strategies have been like pretty separated, right, you know, like you can't claim you can't do them at the same time, it'll sound weird. It's like Israel is the only gay friendly, climate conscious, feminist democracy and that's why we got to do genocide. Like that doesn't that doesn't sound right. Like you tell the city dwelling liberal elites about the gay stuff, you tell the conservative Christians about the Western civilization stuff. That's kind of how it works. The basic conservative hasbara doesn't actually interest me all that much because it's I don't know, they don't have to work that hard at getting conservatives to be okay with killing Muslims.
You know.
It's like Muslims Arabs, you know, they're fully willing to You don't even have to like couch it in something.
No, that's just what happens to us.
It's fine, right, And it's interesting too, because like this idea of you know, being a Western outpost, an outpost for Western values is not like that is very much falling into the almost the the whiteness thing of Europeans, where you kind of like because Jews, like European anti semitism wasn't about how Jews had Western values. It was about how Jews represented this other this this thing that you know, they don't they didn't share values. There were some weird other thing. And you know, this was not the the charge of anti Semitism in Europe. And now with like Israeli propaganda towards you know that's aimed towards conservative Westerners, they're like, no, no, we're the most Western, like we're so Western that we're going to be the ones who are on the front lines stopping the evil, you know, Arab ports. And yeah, but it's like the that's interesting, you know in some aspects, but it's the liberal stuff. Sure, liberal hasbara is where the lies get so wild. Like that's the stuff that I grew up with, you know.
Yeah, no, it really you the pink washing in particular is like one, yes, it's just they're they're so egregious in their use of using like the gay struggle for their own agenda. It's really really gross.
Yeah, and it's and it's weird at how effective it is or how effective it has been for so long, because it is something that I think it's kind of like the the first stop on the Hasbara tour. You know, when you are hearing someone kind of like talking about why we need to stand with Israel, they will start right there with the you know, the pro gay rights stuff. And it's like, the reason I find it interesting is like Israel's so effectively been able to like brand itself is representing and supporting all these positive liberal traits. Well, well a lot of it is just not true. Like, for example, liberals are pro LGBT rights, right, you know, they love gays, they love gay rights, and that's a good thing, of course, and yet gay marriage is illegal in Israel. It is illegal. It's also mixed faith marriages are also illegal in Israel. They will recognize those marriages, but they will not perform them. You cannot get gay married. You cannot get Inner faith married in Israel. If you're there performed abroad, then they will recognize them. That's kind of the loophole. Also, by the way, Palestinians from the West Bank or Gaza who mary an Israeli citizen cannot then get Israeli citizenship through that marriage. You also can't get Israeli citizenship if you marry in Israeli and you are from a quote enemy state that read Arab. If you want to know what they states are, they mean Arabs. So you know, I don't know, liberals should hate that. They should look at and be like, well, I don't like that, you'd think, right. Another example, like liberals love democracy and they hate racism, yet believe Israel when they say they are a democracy because they'll be like, we have you know, twenty percent Arab Muslim population, you know, two million and all with the right to vote. Meanwhile, they're like ignoring the five point three million Palestinians who are currently living in the West Bank and Gaza under military control by Israel. Like this is a situation was which has explicitly been called apartheid by most major human rights organizations, you know, human Rights Watch and it's the International, the International Federation for Human Rights and even including human rights orgs in Israel. Yes, Din and but sell them. They have all called this on apartheid state and apartheid to you know, to be clear, is racist And I'm again yes, and I think most liberals would say they're against it. Don't you think, Serene, like it help something you would hope. So that's kind of like part of the thing with the liberal You're like, I don't like bad people, right, yeah, yeah, but you know it's once again, it's this thing where we're willing to be like, oh, they say they're a democracy, and therefore I believe it, and I think it's you know, you have to remember that like Israel's got like a caveat for all this stuff. It's it's usually they'll say, you know, their credentials are touted with this like in the Middle East, the most gay friendly in the Middle East. They're the only democracy in the Middle East. But like, once again, that kind of only serves to implicitly condemn those enemy states, you know, filled with Arabs as being racist and backwards and homophobic and anti democratic and therefore unworthy of liberal sympathies. So it's you know, your liberals will look at it and they'll go like, well, I mean compared to Iraq, and you know that they yeah, of course, it's like forgetting why why the Middle East is the way the Middle East is? You know, they they will there's a complete like vacuum, like everything exists in a vacuum. When it comes to American imperialism, so you don't, but you just want to believe that Arabs are backwards people rather than looking at any kind of like Western imperial imperial complicity.
But also like reinforcing this like racist backwards stereotype also like dehumanizes Arabs and Muslims and Palestinians to such a degree where people can't overlook genocide. Now you know, like it's all part of that, ac it's all part of that. Yes, they're different, they're not like us. They don't like gay people, they don't women stand up or whatever the fuck it is. It's just like it's it really is infuriating because you wonder, like how can this happen? It's because of stuff like this that's not very little when it's all together, and it just reinforces this like barbaric trope. And then people just go on their go about their lives being okay with genocide because to them these people are human anymore.
Right on, you look at this like as part of a pattern of like the delegitimization of the Arab being. In a way, it's like all of this is a pattern of like what are things we can say about Arabs in order to make them so far from us that you just don't care if they live or die, or more so you you more, you're more willing to believe that the people who are like us, the Israelis, are the ones telling the truth that they're you know, they're the ones who have the empathy. They're the ones who you know, let women, you know, sit wherever they want, whatever the fuck that meant from BB's speech, But like, you know, they're more like me Arabs. I don't know them, and I guess, you know, if they say they're bad, they're bad. You know, it's just part of it. And I think what pisses me off about it is the liberal willingness to believe it. And I think it's like, I don't know, it's fascinating to me because especially right now, in the last you know, four months or so, of this brutal incursion into Gaza, it's like so clearly illustrates why people on the left fucking hate liberals. You know, they're just so easy to manipulate if you know the right words, you know, like if it were any other group, if it were any other group instead of Jewish nations nationalists, like if it were Christian nationalists, they'd be like clearly condemning it. Clearly like liberals have such a facile identity and race essentialism that they either excuse the crimes committed by the Jewish state because Israel asked them to do it and they want to be like good allies or whatever, or they ignore them because well, it's not my place to say, I'm not Jewish. I feel like I should like, like, they're just so squishy. It kind of reveals the modern American liberal for what they are, which is like a tiny baby whose self perception is at the root of their ideology. Right, And it's just it's important to remember that Europeans doing atrocities to indigenous populations has always come with the gift wrapping of these savages don't share our values. It's always been like that. So when you see an Israeli soldier flying a Pride flag in the rubble of a raised Palestinian city, like, just remember that's not liberation, that is regular ass by the book colonialism, same shit, you know what I mean?
Oh yeah, I mean, I still am loving the description of an American liberal as a tiny baby.
They are little babies. There's little tiny babies. You got they've got, they can only hold like one sort of political critique in their mind at once, and you know, if they choose this kind of like identity essentialism, then it's so much easier to just kind of go like, hey, you know, I don't really think it's my place to talk about this right.
Now, exactly. It's just it's cowardly and like in retrospect, they're probably going to change their story about what their stance was, like you know what I mean, And it's just, yes, it's really infuriating, and I think it is important to remember that what you're watching Israel do and what it has done for the past seventy five years, over seventy five years, is just colonialism and it was described that way since the beginning. But that was that was really Thank you for explaining all of that, Matt.
Yeah, and you know there will be more in part two. We'll get down to some of these myths. We'll get down to the way in which has Bar kind of works to invert narratives to a degree that you know, are almost so shocking that you have trouble believing the historical truth and are more comfortable believing the ahistorical fiction. But Surene, what do we do now? Plugs? Or yeah? What do I say? Commercial break?
That's that's the end of part one. You did a great job.
Thank you. That's listen. I've never guess hosted a thing here on cool Zone Media, but I'm very happy too. And if you like you know me obviously you know listen about his Bar the World's Most Moral podcast. If you like me and my wife, We're going to be at the Sacramento Punchline March seventeenth at seven pm. That's a Sunday. We're headlining together. I mean, you know, co headlining, so I'll go up showcoa. But it's really good. It's a really good show. We did it in San Francisco. Is so much fun. Please come out to it March seventeenth. That's Sunday, March seventeenth, Sacramento Punchline. Come see Matt Leib Francisca if hearing.
Where can people follow you? Just in case you don't know?
They should If you don't know, at Matt Leib on Twitter, at mattleib jokes on Instagram, and yeah check me out. I'll post all the dates and stuff over there, and all the podcasts over there too.
Awesome.
Oh yeah, great job. Okay, goodbye bye.
It Could Happen Here as a production of cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from cool Zone Media, visit our website cool zonemedia dot com or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can find sources for It could Happen Here, updated monthly at coolzonemedia dot com slash sources. Thanks for listening.
