8/28/26: Norm Finkelstein Returns to Discuss Gaza, Hasan Piker, New Book Gaza's Gravediggers

43:51Take the case of the UK. It calls itself an Anglican state. That's its official title. The Anglican Church is the church of state. It's an Anglican state. But if you asked most British who are not Anglican, does the fact that the UK defines itself as an Anglican state, is that for you an oppressive burden? I think most Brits would say no. they don't much care about it it's there it exists but to use my terminology it's more at the benign as it gets the malignant end of the spectrum and so that yeah if that's what jeremy Ben Ami had in mind, then I think it's tolerable, but I have to have like an infinitude of asterisks when I say that, because there are so many qualifications, leaving aside that you may be right it might be it might be inherently intrinsically incompatible jewish state that is not a jewish supremacist state and and not to get not to get bogged down in this because we want to get to your your book when you know as soon as we can but it also makes me think of you know people's responses when they say well ireland is a it's a catholic country italy is a catholic country right at the same time as you're seeing more and more muslim migration into those countries you have you have a surge of xenophobia and we don't know what the shape of those countries will look like we don't know if the catholic will maintain some apartheid controller yeah you You're totally correct.

46:00The only caveat I would enter to that is it's unclear whether these states are reacting to an influx of Muslims or they're reacting to a collapsing economy in which Muslims have been made the scapegoat. In other words, in times of prosperity, it's quite possible those populations would be much more welcoming, as was the case in my own United States, when there was obviously massive immigration after World War II of 10 ,000 different varieties. but we still embrace the idea there took many forms but the one that just comes to mind was when david dinkins described the united david dinkins mayor dinkins described new york as the gorgeous mosaic and there was a certain pride in that but when times you know when the economic situation significantly deteriorates people become much less generous i see it in my own life i went out to dinner with some people the other night one of whom was from i can't remember well two foreign countries no point in naming them and on the immigrant question they were very tough even though they were immigrants well we came in legally, they're coming in illegally, my taxpayer money and, you know, so on and so forth.

47:42I think it's a lack of generosity, not the born necessarily of xenophobia, but the born of very hard times. Let me actually, let me ask you this, Norm. So I think, You know, we one of the things that we're all grappling with is we all watched what was done in Gaza with our taxpayer dollars. It was not hidden. It's often boasted about. In fact, an Israeli, you know, top military commander just came out and bragged about I would order the strike on the World Central Kitchen aid workers all over again. I have no regrets. They're affiliated with Hamas. Just to give one example of how brazen and how proud they are of the atrocities.

48:28Just one clarification, and I want to hear you. It wasn't that it wasn't hidden. It was that it couldn't be hidden. The Times during that first year, the New York Times, it did everything it could to hide the harbors in Gaza. Well, and you're right. There was a distinction between what the Israelis were saying and what their press was saying and the attempt by Western, quote unquote, liberal media outlets to pretend that none of that was being said and it wasn't being announced very publicly. The Times was still saying after the end of the first year, it was still saying that maybe Hamas had a command and control center under Al-Shifa Hospital.

49:15They wouldn't let go. Oh, my gosh. Incredible. And then, as you know, the rape, the mass, the Hamas rape hoax. The thing is, I'm not a I reckon I'm sort of a technophobe, but I recognize the values of the technology. It was it couldn't be hidden because of the Web. legacy media carried on just as it always did during that first year and then they had to catch up with public opinion because public opinion had been persuaded by what it saw by folks like yourself hearing folks like yourself on podcasts on tiktok and everything else so So we can't say it wasn't hidden. It was hidden, but it was unsuccessful.

50:14On the new podcast, Solita, we share the messy reality of traveling alone as a woman. I can wait four hours for the next bus or this random dude is offering me a ride on his motorcycle. I chose option B. I'm Julie Pinheiro and I travel by myself because it's a rare space where I can say yes without asking anyone else first. I'm on a mission to reclaim the word solita, trading the pity for possibility. Every time I tried to be alone, I kept meeting people and they were like, you smiled at us. Not a lot of people smile around here. It's when you're alone that you're most receptive to the world as it is and not the lies you're sold about it.

50:54It can be a time where you push your limits, change your mind, or wake up to a new version of yourself. So whether you're a solo travel veteran or you're too nervous to book your first trip, I hope you listen to Solita on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. If your bookshelf and your For You page are equally important to your personality, welcome home. This is Prose Society, the weekly podcast that's part book club, part group chat for thought daughters, pop culture obsessives, and anyone who thinks Pride and Prejudice and Love Island deserve the same level of discourse.

51:32I'm Eli Rallo, and every week we're connecting the dots between books, the internet, and the conversations everyone can't stop having. I'm going to have to look up this story. I'm obsessed. I'm obsessed. From bestselling authors and your favorite book talk creators to the latest pop culture moments, Nothing is off the table. It's like if you can hide some real messages inside compelling characters, then that is a Trojan horse. Whether you're looking for literary deep dives, smart pop culture conversations, or a community of readers who love to think a little too much, you're in the right place.

52:06Listen to Pro Society on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. See you between the pages. When I was 14 years old, I was kidnapped. and held captive for nine months. I survived, and I've spent my life exploring how other people survive what should have destroyed them. I'm Elizabeth Smart, and these are the Survivor Files. I just remember this low, taunting voice next to my ear saying, shut up, don't say anything. Every week, I'm with survivors who live through the unthinkable. I knew if he woke up, without a doubt, he was going to hurt me. I started feeling that there was someone at the end of my bed and I just started screaming.

52:55They are abducted, stalked, controlled, and nearly silenced. But these aren't stories about what's taken from them. They're stories about what it takes to make it out alive. Listen to The Survivor Files with Elizabeth Smart on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. So your book tells part of the story of how this was allowed to occur. And you focus not so much on what did occur, which, as you said, they were unable to hide. And you focus a lot on the liberal institutions and the failures that allowed a genocide to be carried out before all of our eyes. Talk a little bit about your approach and also what you see as some of those key failures as having been.

53:45Well, let me begin with the obvious. The main perpetrator of the genocide, obviously, was the state of Israel. Its main enabler was the United States. That, I don't believe, required any special expertise to demonstrate it was in your face. though now they're trying to downplay the role of the U.S. by saying they were helpless. You know, the David Kirkpatrick article in the New Yorker magazine, they did everything they could behind the scenes, which is, of course, completely ridiculous. As the article said, 70 % of the weapons were coming from the United States. If you were so appalled by what was happening, you just pulled the plug.

54:40so that it seems to me didn't require any kind of argumentation on my part it was in your face then there was the question of chronicling the horrors in gaza when i wrote the book gaza and inquest into its martyrdom um nobody had read the human rights reports i referred to they just collected dust, a handful of people. And I was writing, as it were, I was writing for history. I was writing for the ages. I said at the very end of that book, I don't think anyone now is going to read it. I didn't. I had a university press put it out, and it was supposed to be a scholarly book, which I thought maybe in a hundred years, somebody will dust it off the cobwebs, the dust and the cobwebs, and read what happened in Gaza.

55:41It was a record, a historical record, a document, less than a book. This time you didn't need it. First of all, everybody knows what happened. Yeah. You didn't need a book to recall it in detail. The general picture is pretty straightforward and is out there. South Africa, it submitted a memorial to the International Court of Justice. The memorial is basically your statement for what's called the merits phase of the court's proceedings when they decide whether or not a genocide is occurring. And from what I've read, the memorial consists of 750 pages plus 4 ,000 pages of documentation. Wow. Okay?

56:35So I said to myself, I don't think you need me to do this anymore. It's been done. So then, leaving those two things out, there was one other possibility, which is if I had impressive narrative power, a great story of Gaza, what happened to Gaza. There was a great British, I guess he was Irish, journalist named Robert Fisk. And he wrote this book called Pity the Nation, about what happened during Israel's invasion of Lebanon in 1948, excuse me, 1982. And it was just breathtaking prose. It was prose that was poetry. He had that narrative gift, the sweep, the language, the evocation. He was in Lebanon during the Israeli invasion in 82.

57:41It's really a stupendous literary as well as historical document. I don't possess that. I'm not trying to lay the false modesty. I have very powerful

58:02expository power we can't all be Robert Fisk right I can put together a logical argument and there will be no wiggle room left at the end I'm pretty good at that how to compose an impregnable logical argument so I couldn't do the narrative and then I decide, well, there is another area. Namely, it's those people who we have higher expectations of. The UN, not the New York Times, not the Washington Post, God forbid, Atlantic Magazine or the New Yorker, but from officials in the UN, from human rights organizations. we have higher expectations of them. And then the question becomes whether they rose to the legitimate expectations we had of them.

59:10And my opinion was up until November 2025, which maybe we'll get to up until then, I thought the UN record wasn't in general bed. But the statements, the statements now, I'm not talking about the actions, the statements by Secretary General Guterres, Martin Griffiths, Philippe Lazzarini, the head of UNRWA, they were good. They were strong. They were consistent. It was a pretty good showing. but there were also areas where it was unacceptable it was unacceptable and those are the places I look at it I look at how the human rights organizations acquitted themselves when it came to the Hamas rape hoax I look at how the vice president of the International Corps of Justice Julia Sabatindi how she acquitted herself how the president of the ICJ at the time Joan Donahue how she acquitted herself and my goal was to enable facilitate or expedite a house cleaning these people had to be either censured or ousted for how they carried on during the Gaza genocide.

1:00:51By 2025, November, I added a requiem at the end of the book after the UN Security Council passed Resolution 2803, which gave the deed to Gaza. And here I'm not engaging in hyperbole. which gave the deed of Gaza to a retarded ape who happens at this moment to occupy the Oval Office. And he in turn, he in turn, delegated responsibility to a... This malignant twit named Jared Kushner, Steve Witkoff, Tony Blair, the inspiration for the Vampire Diaries, Tony Blair. And they, in turn, chose this vomitatious non-entity named Nikolai Mladenov to execute all of their policies. And at that point, I concluded, this was November 2025, that the UN had turned into a rotting corpse.

1:02:37It was no longer an isolated case here. A Julia Septim, a Pramila Patton, and others. A Joan Donahue. It was a rotting corpse. And had I written that a few months later, I would say that after the most brazen, flagrant breach of international law in the modern world, namely the aggression by Israel and the United States against Iran, after that with the UN Security Council staying absolutely silent on that aggression. It's a corpse. It's a corpse. You could not even condemn an aggression which didn't even bother to pretend it was otherwise You know, in September 1939, when the Nazis invaded Poland, they fabricated a border incident.

1:04:06The German troops got dressed up in Polish uniforms and fabricated a border incident. Because even Hitler, even their Fuhrer understood, you have to pretend that you're acting in self-defense. And self-defense has a very specific meaning. Here I'm fast-forwarding to after World War II. Article 51 says it has to be an armed attack in order to justify self-defense. has to be an armed attack. Now, there is some debate about whether an armed attack, an armed attack which has already been launched, that it's irreversible and inevitable, but it hasn't yet, you know, let's say the planes haven't yet reached the target, whether you're allowed to retaliate.

1:05:14In that instance, what's called a preemptive attack, the planes have already been launched, the missiles have already been fired. Then whether you have the legal option to preempt that attack by firing your own missiles, yeah, there's a gray area. There was no gray area when the Israel and the United States attacked Iran. there wasn't here's the deal the bottom line there wasn't even a pretense of an armed attack that they were responding to it was and I repeat the most brazen flagrant active aggression in the modern world and the security council did nothing so for me leaving aside everything else leaving aside everything else

1:06:15Iran has the right at this point to do anything. Now, I want to underline they have the right to do anything because there's no international law anymore. There's no law regulating state behavior anymore. Moore, you meaning the UN, you meaning the states in the world, you annulled international law. You canceled international law. You didn't respond to what's considered the highest crime under international law, the crime of aggression. you let it pass well then Iran has no obligations any longer to abide by international law if you say why are they targeting the Gulf states well leaving aside the nuances of that why shouldn't they there's no international law If for the sake of their survival, they're going to target the Gulf states, what prevents them?

1:07:40International law? That's not very credible anymore. So I'm not going to go into the details of what's happened during the Iran war. I'm just saying as a legal fact, international law died on November 17, 2025, when the UN gave the deed of Gaza to Donald Trump. I'm just going to read to you for a half second from the International Crisis Group, its most recent report. I'm quoting it now. Trump is set to hold lifetime executive power over the board of peace. You know, the body that's lifetime. A little further down, it says, The Trump administration's proposition is essentially an open-ended U.S.-led protectorate in Gaza.

1:09:02He owns it. and when that malignant twit, Jared Kushner was asked about it, he said, we are going to run Gaza like a private company. Do you get it? Donald Trump is the chairman of the board of Trump Inc. And now Gaza is one more property in his portfolio. That's what the UN Security Council did. And then it proceeded to stay silent in the face of the most brazen, flagrant breach of international law. So it pronounced its own death sentence. It pronounced its own death sentence. At this point, Iran has no obligations whatsoever to abide by international law. It can target who it wants and what it wants for the sake of its survival.

1:10:35You don't like that? Then look in the mirror. You created that situation. So that's what I resolved to do in the book. I started out by trying to point to the pockets of corruption in the international political and human rights organizations. But by the end, by 2025, I decided it wasn't pockets. Yeah. It's a fish rots from the head down. When the UN Security Council did what it did, the whole place now reeks, it stinks to high heaven of rot. When I was 14 years old, I was kidnapped and held captive for nine months. I survived, and I've spent my life exploring how other people survive what should have destroyed them.

1:11:46I'm Elizabeth Smart, and these are the Survivor Files. I just remember this low, taunting voice next to my ear saying, Shut up. Don't say anything. Every week, I'm with survivors who live through the unthinkable. I knew if he woke up, without a doubt, he was going to hurt me. I started feeling that there was someone at the end of my bed, and I just started screaming. They are abducted, stalked, controlled, and nearly silenced. But these aren't stories about what's taken from them. They're stories about what it takes to make it out alive. Listen to The Survivor Files with Elizabeth Smart on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

1:12:34If your bookshelf and your For You page are equally important to your personality, welcome home. This is Prose Society, the weekly podcast that's part book club, part group chat for thought daughters, pop culture obsessives, and anyone who thinks Pride and Prejudice and Love Island deserve the same level of discourse. I'm Eli Rallo, and every week we're connecting the dots between books, the internet, and the conversations everyone can't stop having. I'm going to have to look up this story. I'm obsessed. So obsessed. From best-selling authors and your favorite book talk creators to the latest pop culture moments, nothing is off the table.

1:13:10It's like if you can hide some real messages inside compelling characters, then that is a Trojan horse. Whether you're looking for literary deep dives, smart pop culture conversations, or a community of readers who love to think a little too much, you're in the right place. Listen to Pro Society on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. See you between the pages. Hey, this is Hayes Davenport. And Sean Clements. We host the podcast Hollywood Handbook on the Big Money Players Network. Our show is extremely accessible to first-time listeners. Each week, we talk to someone in show business, a.k.a.

1:13:47the biz, and try to help them with their careers and see what they have to offer us. Everyone has a good time, and no one gets mad at their publicist for letting them do our show. We've had a lot of great guests like Sarah Sherman. Not that great. Actually, can you help me shape this? How about we flip it on his head? How about we flip the script? What if the surprise woman, who actually you think is the straight man, is actually the one who's acting weird? Adam Scott. This entire time, you've been expecting Adam Sandler to come to visit the show. I would never let go of that. I have. I would never set expectations for something like that.

1:14:28Seems like if the universe allows for something like that to happen. I'm open to it. I'm always going to accept, you know, Danny McBride. Fine. Yeah. It's all this fragile masculinity exuding. Exuding. I could smell it walking down the hallway, to be honest with you. I was like, is that weed? Nope. It's fragile masculinity. Ben Stiller, no. Because a lot of times, out of context, people don't get it or even know what a circle is. You know what I mean? They're so stupid. Everyone's so dumb except for you. And fake. Right, fake and also not interested or just like, oh, I've got my life. I don't care about your life.

1:15:07and a lot of other big shots that wouldn't be where they are without us. Oh, and by the way, Will Ferrell told us personally he loves the show and he wants to be a guest on every episode, but he's just so busy. Listen to Hollywood Handbook on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Your analysis of the UN's role in its interactions with the kind of Israeli campaign that you describe in Chapter 1 to produce what your chapter title calls rape fantasies, had another chapter, so to speak, right after your book went to the printer. When a new report came out, they called it the Civil Commission, I guess in some type of effort to give it a governmental gloss.

1:15:57And there's a real trap, and I'm curious for how you went about strategically handling this. There's a trap in this entire reporting project when it comes to examining the allegations that Israel is making about October 7th and Hamas's alleged use of systematic sexual violence. In order to rebut it, you have to repeat a lot of the allegations. You have to get into a lot of things that nobody wants to talk about, Nobody wants to think about. And you have to identify connections between all of the different players that make you feel crazy. And so I'm curious how, because, so you have an essay in your subsect.

1:16:45So what you did is after this commission report came out, you read through it and you analyzed it. And so I consider it sort of an addendum, an appendix or epilogue to your book itself. And hopefully in a paperback, this maybe can be included. So talk to us a little bit about this project, the civil commission project that was described as like the dénouement of the entire project. that this, for once and for all, they're settling the question. And how did you personally, politically, strategically, and as a writer, confront this without kind of losing your mind? Well, there are a series of questions there, and they're all important questions.

1:17:30Number one, I knew that immediately as the book came out, regardless of grave diggers, people were going to say, but he didn't address the new report. And therefore, it would undermine, undercut all of my findings because the findings would seem obviously inadequate in the face of this nearly 300-page report. so even though I knew it was going to be an arduous and agonizing task I felt it had to be done or else chapter one of the book would be rendered obsolete number two it was 300 pages or nearly And the immediate assumption is, if it's of that physical sheer, physical weight, there's got to be something there.

1:18:41There's got to be something there. I remember when I was a young man and I read the book from time immemorial, which claimed that Palestine was empty on the eve of Jewish colonization. And then all these Arabs from neighboring countries sneaked into Palestine and claimed to be indigenous to the land. And the book was a national bestseller.

1:19:09and everybody said, it's got to be true because Joan Peters, the alleged author, she points out that the book has 1 ,857 endnotes. So, as they say in law, prima facie, there seemed to be a case that it couldn't all be made up in the case of from time immemorial i was a young man i was still in graduate school i discovered it was all made up and in the case of this report while you're while you're talking i'll let people kind of see the actual physical product because it it almost makes the case for itself as as you're talking, you'll see it's just a bunch of quotes for the first like 30 pages from Hillary Rodham Clinton.

1:20:06If you scroll down further, you'll see that half the pages are footnotes. Half the pages are footnotes. And so you have to scroll down considerably more because there are several, yeah. We're still at nothing. Like notice that there's still nothing. Yeah, that's correct. yeah yeah that's correct still nothing still nothing still not yet the book yeah we're not still nothing yeah the book yeah so now we're at the forward we're 30 pages in we're at the forward yeah uh more bios like totally correct so more quotes more But I have to say all this, all you're saying being totally correct. Here, now go back.

1:20:59Just go here. These are the footnotes. Yeah. Go to the next page. Just go down to next. Next one. You see the length of the footnote? So everybody, by the way, listen closely, including me. sometimes known as the world's leading forensic expert, which is a nice title, but sort of like on the lines of the tallest building in Wichita, Kansas, how many forensic experts are there? You know, even I was daunted. I have to say, I'm going to speak with complete candor. I wondered whether I was wrong. I did. I'm not going to deny that. and the book had already been published. And that would have been, as you can imagine, a supreme humiliation and would have totally discredited me for the remainder of my life if I were wrong.

1:22:02And I did harbor that fear because, as I said, of the sheer weight or bulk of the report and of what's called its scholarly apparatus, all those footnotes. We're at 70 pages, and now we're doing background and context, by the way, for the record. Okay.

1:22:32So, then I had to read it. On my first reading, I was not as despondent, but I still was concerned. It took me a second and then a third reading to discover that in the immortal words of Brianna Joy Gray, it was a nothing burger. it only had if you if you have my text do you have my text? Yes. I have your your Substack essay. Yeah. So if you go to it scroll down a little you just keep scrolling down I'll tell you when to stop. It's like five pages in. Here. Just here. It's called I I catalog how many times each of their witnesses is mentioned. So the Dibbis family, 13 times, the same testimony.

1:23:47Tali Biner, 10 times. Goldstein Almach, 26 times. They were just recycling over and over. and oh, she, Dr. Kochav Elkayem Levy, if you scroll down a little further, you see the end notes, just the end notes to my chart. This is for each person, how many times they're mentioned. Oh my goodness. Now we know where all those long footnotes come from because they're mentioned even more times in the footnotes. Exactly. It was the classic Hitler technique. You keep repeating, repeating, repeating. That's what Hitler said. If you scroll all the way up to the top, his two classic techniques of propaganda, he talks about it in Mein Kampf.

1:24:49Just scroll down a little. Just here. So I quote Hitler, the most brilliant propagandist technique. will yield no success unless one fundamental principle is borne in mind constantly and with unflagging attention. It, meaning propaganda, must confine itself to a few points and repeat them over and over. And that's exactly what she did. Just repeating it over and over. So, that having been said, and there are many other things to be said about the modus operandi of this report, and time won't allow me to go into important details, but nonetheless details. The question is the big picture. Where do we end up?

1:25:52So, what we end up with is, as many of your viewers will know, there was no forensic evidence of sexual violence or rape by Hamas on October 7th. None exists. There, Israel seemed to have what I would call a plausible, but maybe not a dispositive, a definitive alibi Its alibi was, Israel wasn't prepared for a massacre of this magnitude It had a finite number of forensic pathologists in the state as a whole And it had to process the bodies rapidly for burial, Jewish ritual burial I personally found that, I'm not saying it's true, but I found it plausible. But now we had, so we don't have forensic evidence.

1:26:45Then we have two other possible kinds of evidence. One is testimonial evidence, and the other is digital or photographic evidence. Let me take them in reverse order. Okay, let's start with the digital photographic evidence. The report states that it has 10 ,000, 10 ,000 photographic and digital segment pieces of evidence from October 7th. 10 ,000 photographs and digital segments from October 7th. Okay, that's our first piece of evidence, our first fact. Fact number two, they said it would take 1 ,800 hours to look, to examine all of its digital and photographic evidence. For those of your listeners who aren't able to rapidly calculate it, that would mean if you, Ryan, or you, Crystal, if either of you were to sit down in a room eight hours a day, seven days a week, looking at all the digital and forensic evidence, excuse me, digital and photographic evidence, it would take you more than seven months.

1:28:32More than seven months. We're talking about digital and photographic evidence from a very finite parcel of land called the Gaza envelope. We're talking about CCTV evidence, traffic camera evidence body cam evidence dash cam evidence we're talking about Hamas body cam evidence Hamas dash cam evidence because when the militants were killed their cameras were seized Hamas GoPro evidence Okay? A vast accumulation of technological evidence. Also, not trivially, iPhone evidence. People taking pictures as the massacre is unfolding. Okay? Now, what's the bottom line? Listen, there isn't one photograph, one digital segment of Hamas committing rape or sexual violence.

1:30:06Not one. Not just of rape. There is not one photograph or digital segment of Hamas committing rape or what's the technical terminology or other forms of sexual violence. No, that's very strange. It becomes stranger still when you factor this into it. The main conceit of this report, the main conceit, the main thesis, if you're in graduate school, of this report is that Hamas systematically and methodically committed rape and other forms of sexual violence in order to terrorize, to shatter the esprit of Israeli society. It was a psychological act of terrorism. That's the core thesis of the report.

1:31:28Now, here's the thing. Hamas never posted any images of sexual violence and rape. according to the report, they used the sexual violence and rape as an act of psychological terror. If that's what you're saying, and they didn't post any of the images, would you say they purposely carried out rape and sexual violence in order? This is what they're saying. In order to terrorize Israeli society. Well, if that was their objective, if that was their goal,

1:32:20then they would have posted the images, right? You said that was their goal. Ms. Kolchav Elkayem Levy. Sheryl Sandberg the main endorser of the report Sheryl Sandberg the former COO of Meta Sheryl if you will excuse my familiarity Sheryl if that's the thesis of the report Sheryl The Hamas purposely committed sexual violence and rape in order to post it on the social media so as to psychologically terrorize Israeli society. Cheryl, Ms. Kochev El-Kayim Levy, Why didn't they post any of the images? There's only one possibility, judging from your logic. Crystal, Ryan, if they didn't post any of the images, and their goal was to psychologically terrorize Israeli society with those images, then what's the only possible conclusion?

1:33:58They didn't post any images because there weren't any images. And if there weren't any images, it's because it didn't happen. So as I point out in what I wrote, the most compelling proof to date, listen closely. Ms. Kochev Elkayem Levy, Sheryl Sandberg, another main endorser, Rahm Emanuel. Listen closely. By your own logic, your report is the most compelling evidence to date that Hamas did not commit sexual violence and rape as a weapon of war. In other words, if you read the report correctly, the report is the most compelling proof that it didn't happen. which is, as you can imagine, an irony.

1:35:03I remember my good friend Jamie Sternweiner, he said to me, I mentioned him before, he said, why do you think they did that? It was so stupid. First of all, most of the reports to date said there were about 5 ,000 images, and images, meaning photographs and digital evidence, they doubled it to 10 ,000. So now you have a very high burden to demonstrate why you don't have any images of rape and sexual violence. And then he said to me, Jamie, or he asked me, he said,

1:35:51why do you think they made that thesis about Hamas did this they were purposely posting these images in order to psychologically terrorize why do you think they did that it was so dumb and the answer in my mind with all due regard to Jamie the brilliant fellow the answer was obvious number one nobody reads the reports this report was just mind-numbingly dull. I mean that. You know, there were moments at night when I would say to myself, you know, Norm, you have a finite number of years left. Is this the best, most productive use of your time? Or even the most joyful use of your time in the days that remain to read this crap?

1:36:40So most people don't read it. and number two most people say 300 pages there's got to be something there there's got to be something there you know um Rahm Emanuel says in the report at the very beginning he says he has a blurb and he says for those of you um who don't believe the Hamas did this that and the other he says here's your summer reading. And I'm thinking to myself, Ram, this is your summer reading because you didn't read it. I was going to say, I wonder what percentage of all of those many pages of blurbs of people actually even bothered to read it. Zero. Ryan Grimm said zero. Yeah, zero.

1:37:31So they just figured they would get away with it. That's what happened. And that leaves us So we have already, let's call it two zeros, no forensic evidence, no digital or photographic evidence. And then we come to the third possibility, eyewitness testimony, or as they call it nowadays, eyewitness and earwitness testimony. Earwitness is considered some credible form of evidence for some things, I suppose. Here we have a problem. Let me start with the preliminary, if you'll allow me. The preliminary is, Israel is a very tightly knit society. There are multiple overlapping, to use that idiotic woke word, intersectional loyalties in Israeli society.

1:38:31There is the loyalty, you belong to the same nation state. everybody has what's called patriotism you have the loyalty in the case of Israel you're all part of the same family the Jewish family the same Jewish blood runs through all your everybody you know because Arabs don't count, they don't exist so it's what you call to put it in the most basic terms the familial or blood loyalty So we have the state or patriotic loyalty. We have the familial and blood loyalty. And then you have a third kind of loyalty. And it's in Israel, it's the most pronounced loyalty. It's the loyalty of having everybody served in the IDF.

1:39:28It's a citizen army. It means everybody feels this intense loyalty to the IDF. Why do I mention this? because those compounding, you can call it, those compounding loyalties, it's the midst of a genocide in which the population overwhelmingly supports it. All the polls show that. there's only about 5 % of Israeli Jews who thought Israel was using too much force in Gaza and that was for all three years only about 5 % 40 % thought Israel was not using enough force you know and then you know all the polls about if the IDF enters the city should it kill everybody in the city there was the poll are there any innocents in Gaza and all the polls do not cast Israel in the best light.

1:40:45Having said that, I believe you shouldn't trust the word in Israel, he says. I'm sorry. I recognize that's a high bar. I will then say two things and then get more into the testimonial issue. Number one, the standard used by human rights organizations is witness testimony, and there also has to be some digital evidence. That's what makes the standard in human rights organizations is reasonable grounds to believe. And in order for the report to conclude reasonable grounds, it has to have both witness testimony and some digital evidence. Given that we already know there is no digital evidence, as a matter of fact, Amnesty International stated, we haven't even heard anybody claim there was digital evidence.

1:41:48That's what they said. And given that fact, then the conclusion of every human rights organization per force is or had to be, there's no reasonable grounds to believe rape and other forms of sexual violence occurred. That's by their own legal standard. That's their legal standard. Now, the digital evidence doesn't have to be of an event in particular. It could be, let's take an example. The digital evidence could be Israel photographs all of these Palestinian Gazans who are undressed. You know, you remember the mass scenes of them down to their boxer drawers and things like that? So, if then a witness claims that he or she had been forced to undress, the fact that there was already some evidence that Israel imposed that humiliation, that digital evidence can be used as confirmation of an individual testimony, which may not have been in that particular picture.

1:43:09Is that clear? Have I made myself clear? You just need to demonstrate that the testimony falls into a pattern, P-A-T-T-E-R-N, a pattern that has been digitalized or photographed. But the individual testimony doesn't have to be that picture and that photograph. Well, they don't have that for sexual violence and rape. so that's the conclusion they perforce should have reached that's not a conclusion they did reach and we can get to that let's get back to this report so i said i wouldn't believe a word and israeli said as a default setting for the reasons i set out Now, in the case of this particular report, it uses what it calls survivor-based inquiry.

1:44:17inquiry. If you read the report, you know what survivor-based inquiry means? You don't ask the alleged victims any questions. No, this is literal. Any questions that might hurt their feelings. And they also said quite explicitly, as you discuss in your paper, that they wanted to lead with a therapeutic approach, which is understandable if that's the approach they want to take, but they also separately say they took a legal and academic approach, which is in complete contradiction because it doesn't allow you to say, well, you said that you heard this, but we looked at your cell phone data and it looks like you weren't there at that time.

1:45:09Can you maybe walk us through? because maybe you had a genuine misremembrance and it doesn't go to the core of your testimony, but it's good to probe it because maybe it does. Meanwhile, there's some people in the report that you also flag who have been exposed even by Israeli government officials as having been total fabulists and fraudsters, and they still wind up being central players in the report. Yeah. Yeah. And they'd say that even if this approach compromises, namely the therapeutic approach, compromises our factual findings, we put their feelings first. It says it literally. I don't know if you find it.

1:45:56I italicized it when I was going through that, what they said. Maybe you can find it while I'm speaking. So effectively, what the commission, the civil commission did was it acted as stenographers. It just rolled down whatever anyone said. Yeah, the physical and emotional well-being of the testifier is our highest priority, even if it compromises our documentation efforts, unquote. You have to laugh at that. I wonder if you can read it one more time because I'd like the viewers to hear what she said. Yeah. The physical and emotional well-being of the testifier is our highest priority, even if it compromises our documentation efforts.

1:46:42You know, you have to ask yourself, is this gathering evidence or is this group therapy? What's going on here? So now you have... They also said that the delicate triangle between therapy, documentation, and justice requires constant balance. but I say if you're not going to critically evaluate the testimony then you have yourself upset the balance you put the balance on therapy and not on documentation so now we have two problems number one in my opinion and I know it's not going to be a popular opinion on the other hand I'm not here to be popular It's just how I evaluate. I don't think, I think the default setting is not to trust the word they say.

1:47:38Number two, there was no interrogation. There was no fact finding. There was simply stenography. It was a group therapy session. It wasn't trying to ferret out the truth. Even, okay, I'll grant, I'll grant. Maybe you should be delicate. Maybe you should walk on eggshells. Okay, I'll grant it if people are traumatized. But they didn't do anything. They just sat down, put a microphone, and speak. That was their documentation. She keeps saying, I archived this testimony. I archived that testimony. You know, trying to put it like Ryan said, they called a civil commission, a highfalutin body. Now they archived.

1:48:40I said, this is not archiving. This is the equivalent of a hoarder collecting junk. I have to keep saying to myself, I lived during the war in Vietnam. The ground troops entered in March 1965. about three years later, there were large, I'm not saying a majority, but they were certainly significant. There were significant organizations of Vietnam vets who opposed the war and publicly exposed the crimes committed. There was a famous organization, actually one of the heads, I didn't particularly like him, was John Kerry. It was called VVAW, Vietnam Veterans Against the War. and then they gave what was called testimony, I think was called the winter soldier testimony, in which they described the horrors that the U.S.

1:49:35was committing in Vietnam. Is there anything remotely equivalent to that three years after the Gaza genocide? Maybe two or three people who are quoted in Haritz? So why should I trust that testimony? But let's now get to the testimony, okay? I've now given you, in my opinion, the context, the proper context. Let's now get to the actual testimony. So, on the question of rape, one person, a male, is said to have alleged that he was raped. That one person, he goes by the name D. in the report. that person, number one, he's completely discounted in Israel. Yeah. If you take the most comprehensive report that came out by Israel, it's called the Dina report, D-I-N-A-H, the Dina report.

1:50:40On October 7th, sexual violence on October 7th, they don't even mention him. Hear me? Yeah. They didn't even mention him. So, we have not one, there, listen, not one survivor testimony of rape on October 7th. Not one. Now, number two, their key witness, my memory is, her name is Darren Komarev. I believe that's the name. Darren, K-O-M-A-R-O-V. Darren Komarev. She's listed number one in the report. Okay? She's their star witness, as it were. She's not an eyewitness. She's an ear witness. Okay? Now, let's see more of the details of this ear witness. She was in a caravan, which had no windows or apertures to the outside world.

1:51:50She's sitting in this caravan and she says in her uninterrogated testimony, she said, I heard three discrete rapes. I heard a gang rape. Then I heard a second rape. And then I heard a third rape, all going on simultaneously. I admit I'm an older person but I'm thinking to myself I'm sitting in my apartment when I hear a buzzer I can never tell whether it's somebody at the door or because I live in the parkway whether it's a car passing outside but she she, the air witness, their star witness she managed to discern three discrete rapes going on outside this cubicle in which she has self-isolated.

1:53:01And then she says, in one of the rapes, the fellow, the woman was shot in front of the fellow. I'm thinking to myself, how does she know that she was shot in front of him how would she know that then she says he was her boyfriend yes I saw

1:53:35Crystal her eyes so she was his girlfriend how would you know that from inside your self-isolation in the cubicle. How would you know that? I'm thinking to myself, and she says, I heard it! Here, here, and here. And I'm thinking to myself, did she hear the Boston Pops? The Vienna Boys Choir? And the Beatles reunion? Here, here, and here? It was just so ridiculous. And this is your star witness? Right, if that was one piece. I should also add, in his testimony, the fellow who claimed, you know, the one fellow, you read his testimony in the report. He never said he was raped. he himself I quote the testimony in what I wrote he never said he was raped allow me now to turn to the question of rape of the hostages okay let's begin with the obvious this is a perfect opportunity to film your sexual violence to post on the web so as to psychologically terrorize Israel's population.

1:55:15You have them captive. And your objective is to commit sexual violence, including rape, in order to psychologically terrorize Israeli society. You have them captive. Here's the opportunity. Is there a single image? Is there one? Is there even On the edges of an image, there's nothing. What is the testimony? Well, as you both probably know, and many of your listeners, there's a testimony of the woman, Anad Shoshana. Okay? I won't go into the details, I'll just state, if you read her testimony, she never said she was raped. she did not she said I suffered extreme sexual assault okay what what was it what happened she never says even the report is very careful not to say that she had been raped no Now, somebody asks, well, what could it have been?

1:56:39Well, rape requires, usually, as you know, there are a thousand different definitions, but in general, it requires some act of penetration. I don't know what happened. Maybe the guy said to touch his penis. Maybe. I don't know. But the bottom line is, there's not a single witness who claimed that they suffered sexual rape. Sexual violence is separate now. Right, not a single one. There is one witness who says that he or she heard reports of sexual rape. Heard reports of rape. Doesn't say it happened. There is one witness, her name is Aviva Siegel, who claims that she saw an act of fellatio, coerced fellatio.

1:57:41However, when she was interviewed by Amnesty International, which bent over backwards to validate the Israeli claim, she didn't say it. Now, let's turn to the second tier. We looked at rape. What about other forms of sexual violence? Now there, we have all of this strange evidence by witnesses. Remember, no digital evidence, witnesses. So we know that the witnesses, they did take a lot of digital, they did produce a lot of digital evidence about what happened on October 7. Mm-hmm. Took a lot of pictures and so forth. I should say these were witnesses who were first responders. Okay. So now let's turn to the question of sexual violence.

1:58:51One fellow says, he says, I found a woman with her legs spread. I tried to close her legs. I couldn't because her vagina was stuffed with aluminum cans. not single singular aluminum cans another says if you can quote it Brian all of these household items were stuffed into a woman the only thing they left out was the kitchen sink the toilet bowl and the corner gas station otherwise everything was stuffed into women's vaginas I'm thinking to myself why didn't you take a picture of it you were busy documenting as you know I presume there was one alleged picture of some physical objects thrust into a woman's pelvic area

2:00:17But the forensics pathologists who examined it said you couldn't tell. There's only one picture. Human Rights Watch looked at it. Several forensic pathologists, they said you couldn't tell. But here you have this massive sequence of the most graphic, grotesque, ghastly descriptions of sexual violence. Not one did the first responder document. Now, you may say, well, first responders were too busy, you know, there was so much killing, so much death. Fair, that's a possibility. But there's a problem. The report says that the first responders did take a lot of pictures. just like the report said quote we have extensive digital evidence from hamas cameras then where are the pictures of sexual violence why when you seize those cameras those gopros yeah where are the pictures he said it's extensive and now you have extensive evidence provided by first responders and they're seeing all of these ghastly ghastly commissions perpetrating of sexual violence not one picture how did that happen well and I think that is the I mean, that really is the crux of the thing.

2:02:20If the argument is not there were possibly isolated incidents of rape or sexual assault, the thesis, to your point, is this was used as a weapon of war and of terror. And so, you know, if you can't produce any forensic evidence, if you can't produce any digital evidence, that really, I mean, it really undercuts, destroys the idea that this was used as a technique of terror because that's, you know, you wouldn't then try to hide and try to make sure there was no visual evidence of those acts if they were committed en masse as a strategy on October 7th. And the testimonial evidence is wacky. It simply is.

2:03:06And we know some of those first responders like the, you know, fabricated other later debunked hoaxes as well. And she did not discount that evidence because she's constructing a comprehensive archive. Right. So she won't discount it. Well, Norm, thank you so much for spending so much time with us today. and everybody should go and check out the book, Gaza's Gravediggers. Take a look at the substack, which goes into detail about this report and, you know, case by case, the testimonials and what they said and what you found. And it's always such an honor and a pleasure to get to speak with you, Norm.

2:03:51All right, guys, that's going to do it for us today. Nice to be back from Spain. I left my daughter there. I felt a little weird getting back on the plane without her, but I kept close tabs on what you guys were up to, Ryan. I was really wanting to jump in on the whole Hassan Piker freak out. I was very much missing the opportunity to weigh in on that one. Yeah, we're on day. I just checked out Drudge Report. He's the top story right now on the Drudge Report, which to this day still drives a lot of kind of cable news and chatter kind of inside Washington. Um, in fact, let me see if it's still up there.

2:04:35Yeah, here, let me just, just, just so people who don't understand like what this Drudge Report is like, if you're young, you have no idea what this thing even is, but it's extremely influential. It's still extremely influential. Yeah. At its peak, it was like insane. The amount of clicks and views you would get if you ended up with a Drudge Report link, but it's still all cable news producers. Jet X and boomers get a lot of there. And here's their top headline right now. They make him look so cool in that photo. They do. They pick the good one. And Bret Baier rebutting the Don in any event. Wow.

2:05:15Amazing times we're living in. It's wild. It's wild. All right, guys. Well, we still have the month free subscription going on, breakingpoints.com. Check out the newsletter, all that good stuff. and we will be back to you on Monday. See you then. On the new podcast, Solita, we share the messy reality of traveling alone as a woman. I can wait four hours for the next bus or this random dude is offering me a ride on his motorcycle. I chose option B. I'm Julie Pinheiro and I travel by myself because it's a rare space where I can say yes without asking anyone else first. I'm on a mission to reclaim the word Solita, trading the pity for possibility.

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