Journalist From the Frontlines Responds to Israel’s Attempt to Assassinate Him on Camera

27:34But these plans have been long in the making. You go back in history and Israel has invaded and tried to take that area. They think it's their biblical right. We're talking about the Greater Israel Project, which I know you know full well about after your conversation with Ambassador Huckabee. And, you know, it kind of reappears in different guises over the years. The most latest was the Trump Economic Zone. This was announced back in, I think, August last year. Around that time, Tom Barrack, the U.S. envoy, arrived here in Lebanon. and you might remember this soundbite from him because he spoke at the presidential palace to a group of journalists and there was a bit of a melee and he described them as animalistic and he was condemned for this.

28:24This was seen as an incredibly racist comment to make towards Lebanese journalists who were doing their job in the field holding people to account, questioning him. But behind that, he laid out this plan for the Trump Economic Zone, which meant that hundreds of thousands of people would be forced from their homes permanently. Now, it was dressed up. This is going to be a regeneration project. We're going to create new homes. We're going to create jobs. We're going to create roads. We're going to create infrastructure. We're going to make the area safe. But it meant that people that have lived on this land for generations, these are their homes.

28:59These are not just, you know, dots on a map. These are homes where people have lived on that land for generations are going to be turfed out. And nobody really paid attention to it at the time. Of course, we did as journalists on the ground. And, you know, people talk about, they say that the Gaza model is now coming to Lebanon. They've spoken about it in terms, I think Smotrich said, we're going to turn Dahir, the southern suburbs of Beirut, into Karnunis. and then they've used Beit Hanun and Rafa, Israel Katz, that they're going to destroy all of these villages that they call frontline villages.

29:36And I can tell you now, we've been here for two years. Those villages are largely already destroyed. The south of Lebanon already looks like Gaza. Whole villages completely lie in ruins, no reconstruction plan. And over the last 15 months, we've seen Israel break that ceasefire. And we talk about a ceasefire from November 2024, but there was never a ceasefire. You can't have a ceasefire when only one side stops firing. And, okay, 15 ,000, more than 15 ,000 violations over the last 15 months. And this has included the rigging and destroying of homes, the drone strikes, targeted assassinations, the use of chemical spray to destroy crops.

30:19And, you know, we've witnessed and filmed all this, the use of white phosphorus. There's a place called Bleeder, a village very close to the border, now during olive harvesting season, we went to make a film there. The Israelis refused to allow the farmers to tend to their land unless they gave them all of the contact details and the names of who was going into the fields while we were there. And they started bulldozing the olive groves. These are olive groves that are older than the state of Israel. So this isn't something new. What we're seeing now, the escalation on March the 2nd has been going on for a very, very long time.

30:53Now, you asked me why Britain and the United States would support that. Well, they use Israel as their kind of proxy force in the area they refer to as the Middle East. We call it West Asia here. And they use it to grab the land. The Greater Israel Project suits Israel, but it suits Britain and the United States because this is a land of great wealth and resources. And they want to extract that wealth. They want to extract the resources and use it for their own gain. and of course they want strategic control across the whole of the region. We've seen that with what happened in Syria. We can see now with the bombing of Iran.

31:34We can see what happened in Gaza. All of these have taken place, not just with the connivance of the United States and Britain, but with their active involvement. So this is what we're happening now. You can see signs along the airport road here in Beirut that they say made in the United States, made in the USA. And that's how they see the bombs that are falling on them here. They're made in the United States. They're made in Britain. And they're the root cause of the death and destruction that's taking place across this region. Israel fires the bullets, but the guns weren't truly loaded by Britain and the United States.

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32:48Not that you'd want to, but you could. People who use it report whiter teeth, less plaque. They wake up without that gross film on their gums. And here's the amazing part. Vivid dreams are back. You dream clearly when you stop coating your mouth in fluoride every night. Did you know that? Pretty amazing. Tells you a lot. So make the switch. Visit vanman.shop slash Tucker. Use the code Tucker for 15 % off your first order. vanman.shop slash Tucker. Use the code Tucker. 15 % off. Vanman real ingredients. Zero exceptions. Well, since you mentioned, I have to ask you about a small point that has bothered me for many years, and that's the Israeli policy of cutting down olive trees, some of which are hundreds and hundreds, up to a thousand years old.

33:32And of course, they're central to the ancient economy of the Levant, but they're also beautiful. And they're revered almost by the people who are actually from there, not the ones from Poland who pretend they're from there, but the people who actually are there. Why would the Israeli government chainsaw or bulldoze olive trees? That seems evil to me. I don't understand the explanation for it. Well, that's the only way to look at it. Of course, it's evil. But I think, like you said, these olive groves, some of them are thousands of years old. I think the oldest in Lebanon is something like 6 ,000 years old.

34:10But it's the lifeblood of Lebanon. It's a symbol of Lebanese cultural heritage, identity. And the people here are very, very connected to their land. They're deeply connected to their land. And, you know, this is the lifeblood, not just for the south of Lebanon, where the farmers will harvest their olive groves. Tobacco is a big, a huge crop here. But this is the lifeblood for all of Lebanon. Now, if you can disconnect people from their land and their culture, then, of course, you can take it over. And that's what they've been doing, not just by bulldozing it, bombing it, but by spraying these chemicals that will make sure that these crops will never be able to grow on the land again.

34:56And they can just brush them aside. They can build houses. They can build settlements there, just like they did on the formation of the State of Israel. They're building these illegal settlements everywhere, and that's exactly what they want to do here. In Lebanon, they're building settlements? Well, they want to. That's their aim. Yeah. I mean, you look at the Greater Israel Project itself. Now, I mentioned Yaron earlier. This is the place where the mosque and the church were destroyed. Now, earlier this year, a few months before the escalation on March 2nd, this group of settlers came in across the border into or very close to Yaron, and they planted trees.

35:41and the message was this, I can't remember the exact terminology that they used, but this was them planting their roots in Lebanese territory and they believe that Lebanese territory biblically belongs to them. Now, you know, you look back a few years ago and this could have been seen as a conspiracy theory or a fringe kind of movement, but this is now right at the heart of the Israeli government. Smotrich and Ben-Gavir are advocates of the Greater Israel Project. Benjamin Netanyahu himself is a supporter of the Greater Israel Project. This isn't kind of like a fantasy. This is happening now. It's unfolding in real time in front of our very eyes.

36:24And they have some rabbis in Israel that justify this religiously as well. They will say that this is the land that belongs to them according to Holy Scripture. and this is why we're seeing this whole-scale destruction. That's what it was around over the last 15 months. They say it was about destroying Hezbollah, but you're seeing whole settlements lying under rubble. My beloved is from a village in the south and her entire village has pretty much been reduced to rubble. Her family home rebuilt, destroyed, rebuilt, destroyed. so many times. And this is very common for the people in that part of the world.

37:11And again, Israel has occupied Lebanon. And after the ceasefire in November 2024, it built five military bases inside Lebanese sovereign territory. We filmed them. And rather than scaling them back, Israel was expanding the construction of those military posts illegally In breach of UN Resolution 1701, in breach of international law, the Lebanese government asked them to leave Lebanese sovereign territory. And of course, they just simply refused and they pushed further and further into Lebanese sovereign territory. Now, the interesting thing, and I don't know whether your viewers will be aware of this, many people don't know, but there isn't really an official border between Israel and Lebanon.

37:57There's no officially agreed border. We have the blue line, which was established by the United Nations. This was after Israel was forced out in 2000. And this line is supposed to be the demarcation point that Israel is not supposed to encroach further upon, you know, further across this line. So Israel sees a lot of this land as belonging. You know, there was a 1923 mandate line when it was the British mandate of Palestine. There was a kind of border drawn up then, which Israel inherited in 1948, but has never really agreed to. The armistice in 1949 didn't again agree those borders. So Israel sees fit to push forward at will, and it's done so with total impunity, of course.

38:48There's no kind of international outcry about the destruction of these villages and settlements or the use of chemical weapons, the use of white phosphorus, or the assassination of individuals in drone strikes, or the killing of paramedics, the murder of journalists. All of these things have been happening for many, many years. The world is maybe paying more attention to it now. We've had the Western journalists arriving in the country since March 2nd, of course. The major news networks have arrived, and they're kind of surprised at what they're seeing. They're seeing this for the first time. But this has been going on for a very, very long time.

39:26And I say this is a bit of a failing, I would say, of the major media organizations, because had they been on the ground in Lebanon for the past 15 months, they would have seen this unfolding. And, you know, maybe the situation would be very different from what it is now. As it is, they weren't there. and the Lebanese journalists were reporting the people that live on that land were crying for help and nobody was listening. I have to ask, so you are covering this on the ground in Lebanon, living and working at the center of all this and as noted, almost got killed for it. But you're working for a Russian news agency.

40:03You've clearly been a journalist a long time. You look over 40, so probably a long time. How did you wind up working for a Russian news agency? Like, why aren't you a BBC reporter? How did, what was your path? MI5 would never clear me to work for the BBC. No, they wouldn't. No, it's true. There's no chance, no chance. I mean, I wouldn't work for the BBC on a personal level. We've met some BBC journalists here and they've been very pleasant, very nice. And I have all the journalists from, you know, the major networks as individual journalists. I have no problem with them. But how I ended up working for RT, for Russia Today, is I was working for a newspaper before I entered the world of broadcast journalism.

40:49I was the international editor of a national daily newspaper in Britain for many years. When the Ukraine conflict started, the special military operation, I was covering that. And I went to the western part of Ukraine to pick up... There was a couple of stories I was chasing there. I ended up in Lvov. The Ukrainians tried to kidnap me, and I managed to make my escape from there, back out through Poland and then to Germany. Wait, I'm going to ask you to pause. Why did they do that? Why did they try to kidnap you, the Ukrainians? Well, simply because I was a journalist that wasn't towing their narrative.

41:32And the Ukraine conflict is the most propagandized war in history, in my view. I mean, you look at what happened, even the Iraq war, there was kind of that space within the media field to criticize your government's policy. When it came to Ukraine, that window or that gap narrowed to the point where it was impossible because there was no space to offer anything that was different from the narrative of the Western governments, the British government, the Ukrainian government. So if you were going there to actually do some proper journalism, and I say that because, you know, with all due respect to those organizations, the BBC, CNN, Sky News, you know, the Times, the Telegraph, Channel 4, they were doing these kind of, it was, they were all saying the exact same thing.

42:30They were taking it in turn to stand on the top of the same hotel roof in Kiev or Lvov and repeat the line, repeat the line. But they weren't actually seeing what was the reality on the ground. They were just stenographers, essentially, these kind of copy and paste reports. And it reached kind of insane levels in Britain. I'm sure it was the same with the United States, but Britain was, you know, they started demonizing Vladimir Putin. One of the craziest reports I saw was that Vladimir Putin has an assistant that follows him around with a briefcase. And every time he goes to the toilet, they collect his feces and urine.

43:11So his opponents can't run any kind of tests on them. I mean, it got to completely insane levels. And anytime you were reporting... So I ended up at Russia Today after that because I saw that my independence as a journalist and my ability to report on the truth had completely disappeared. It was impossible. The only way to do that was to go to Russia and work for RT. Now we have one of our logos, Question More, and that's what we do. And I always say, yeah, question more, question us. That's the role of a journalist. So I ended up working for RT. I ended up working for two years in Donbass on the Russian side.

43:55And I was seeing something completely different from the narrative that was being played out in the West. I was seeing war crimes committed daily by the Ukrainians against a civilian population. When I was there, they called it Donetsk Roulette. You never know when a missile might strike you. And I was seeing attacks on marketplaces, for example. 27 people killed body parts everywhere. These were like babushkas, dadushkas, old men, old women, the poorest people in that part of the city selling homemade fruit and vegetables from their home, just obliterated, arms and legs everywhere. I was seeing hospitals that were struck, bus stops that were being attacked.

44:39I could talk about that for a long time. I spoke about it at the United Nations Security Council. I gave testimony of what I'd seen and the failures of Minsk 1 and Minsk 2 and the path to peace. so what we're seeing and what I always say is what we were seeing in that part in Donbass is the same playbook that we're seeing in Gaza the same playbook that we're seeing here in Lebanon, these are the most powerful countries in the world waging war, using the most sophisticated technology the most powerful weapons against some of the poorest, most vulnerable people in the world. They can't fight back.

45:23They don't have the arms, they don't have the weapons. The people of Gaza, the people of Lebanon, they weren't sent high marks or storm shadows or these advanced weapons. These were sent to their oppressors to massacre them. This is what's happening. And it's the very same forces. In Donbass, it was very simple for me as a journalist. It was a people that wanted peace, a people that wanted to be able to speak their own language, Russian, people that wanted to be able to practice their own culture and traditions if they identified as Russian. And pretty much that was it. You could put it really as simply as that.

46:08But then the Ukrainian government decided to wage a war against its own people. I know for some this went back to the start of the SMO, but this has a much, much longer history, starting way back in 2014, the Maid Act. You know, all of these things people forget about now, conveniently, including the media. The media has actually made them forget about it because one day there was a neo-Nazi problem in Ukraine. The Azov and the right sector were carrying out these horrific actions, these horrific killings. they were terrorizing the people and the next day all of a sudden ukraine is a paragon of liberal democracy you know it's it's incredible um but people aren't getting the truth so this is why i ended up at rt because the space to do proper journalism just wasn't afforded to me anywhere else none of the british press i'm like i said i kind of semi-joked but mi5 would never allow me to work for the BBC or for any of the other major news organizations.

47:12And, you know, I have to say with Russia Today, with RT, I have complete freedom to report exactly what I want. And nobody tells me what to say. Nobody tells me where I can film. Nobody tells me who I can speak to, who I should speak to. You know, I have total journalistic freedom. So, and I'm very happy working for RT. I'm very proud to work for RT. And we always say that here on the ground, because, you know, obviously, I came kind of sprung into the limelight after what happened to me. But it's not about me. Journalists should never become the story. Unwittingly, I did. But we always say that, you know, our job is to raise the voices of the people of this land.

47:58And we always say that our mic is a tribune for the people and it will continue to be a tribune for the people as long as we remain in the field. It must be such a strange experience for you since you've been in the British, sounds like you're in the British media for a long time, conventional media, a newspaper in a country that, you know, reads newspapers famously. all of a sudden to have this perspective where you have more freedom to do journalism, to straightforward journalism at Russia today than you had at a British newspaper. I mean, what is that as someone who I assume you were raised in the UK, right?

48:38Yeah. What is that like? it's well i you know i the british the the the media field in britain um you know the and i think it's not just in britain but i think if you look at the western oh yes that it's it's it's kind of it's very concentrated it's owned by a very small group of people um who own and control the media they control what you say they control the narrative so but i think that the change was that the owners of these media organizations are now more and more forcefully pushing their view and their narrative. And you see it permeating through every word that's spoken on British television.

49:21You see it written in every single word in every single newspaper. There's no divergence. They're all uniform. So, you know, of course, Russia, people in the West think that Russia as some kind of authoritarian dictatorship, that we're living under the jackpot of Vladimir Putin. But you've been to Moscow. You know anything but the truth. It couldn't be further from the truth. You see people, I mean, there are very educated people. They have rich, again, we were talking about Lebanon earlier, having this rich culture and history. I mean, Russia, come on. I mean, I don't know any other nation on earth that has such a rich culture and history, you know, Shostakovich, Dostoevsky, Prokofiev, Yuri Gagarin, they put, you know, the first human being in space.

50:15Mendeleev, the founder of the, you know, the table of the elements. Huge, these huge figures in the field of science, of literature, of art, of music. And you go to any bar in Moscow and you can sit down there. Within five minutes, you've had one of the most intelligent political or cultural conversations that you've ever had, sitting over a cold pint of Guinness. And for those that think that people are too afraid to criticize Putin, let me tell you, they're not. They're not. I've heard it myself. And the same kind of criticisms you hear in every country anywhere in the world, they're not afraid to express those issues.

51:00they don't necessarily hold them. Vladimir Putin is incredibly popular. And he's incredibly popular for a very good reason, is that people remember the days before Putin became president. And they remember it was a very, very dark time in the country. And after the collapse of the Soviet Union, up until Vladimir Putin came to power, there wasn't really that kind of national stability. I mean, Russia is obviously a huge country, 11 time zones, I think it is. So to hold it together is incredibly difficult. But Vladimir Putin bought that stability. He made Russia into what it is today. And this is a strong, economically thriving, independent country that is actually, despite what the West says, it still has these good relations with other countries on the world stage.

51:46It's not isolated by any stretch of the imagination. It's only isolated if you think the world is the Western powers. So, you know, there is this freedom to criticize, but of course, he's hugely popular. And, you know, I think people in the West find that very difficult to understand that, you know, just how popular Putin is in Russia. Everything you're saying is true. I've seen it multiple times. Even, for example, RT is banned in the United States. It's banned in Europe. In Russia, you've probably seen that Vladimir Putin holds a, every year he holds a Q &A for journalists, for members of the public.

52:32Every year the BBC is there. Steve Rosenberg asks a question. He tries to get a gotcha every year. He fails every year, but he keeps giving it a go. But the BBC is allowed to operate freely inside Russia. I couldn't do the same in Britain. They'd try and arrest me. They would arrest you? If you practiced what you're doing now in your home country, you'd be arrested. Yes. If I took an arty microphone into London and started trying to interview people, or if I stood in front of a camera with an arty microphone and started trying to give a report, I would be arrested. We're banned. We're treated as, I don't know, like foreign agents.

53:18So it would be unlawful for us to work there. We could be jailed, sanctioned, a whole host of things could happen. So we don't have that freedom to operate inside Britain. This is something that always amazes me because the Russian state television was banned in Europe and America because we're propagandists or whatever, the Kremlin media machine. or these kind of tired old tropes that we hear, which is deeply rooted in Russophobia. But what they're really saying is that the people of Europe and America are stupid.

53:56People are able to disseminate facts from fiction. They're able to watch a news report and decide whether it's propaganda or whether it's true. They can make that decision themselves, and they should be able to make that decision themselves in a free and democratic country that operates with freedom of speech and freedom of the press. So, you know, it always strikes me as quite bizarre that they keep saying, well, we uphold freedom of the press. Well, in fact, the European Union has sanctioned a journalist, someone I know, Hussein Doiru, who is a journalist for Red Media. They sanctioned him because of his work.

54:37They said he's closed doors. I think they accused him of something to do with the Russian state, But it was because of his reporting on Palestine. So there's no way that they uphold freedom of the press. I myself am being investigated for potential terrorist activities based on my journalism, nothing else. That's it for my journalistic reports. So where's the press freedom? Can I walk into the United States? Can I freely walk around and start interviewing people? Can I interview Donald Trump? Can I sit down and speak to the people on the ground? Of course not. We're banned. It's an absurdity. It is an absurdity.

55:17But press freedom is alive and kicking. And it's also a little bit bewildering. It's surprising for me. And it's an ominous sign, I would say, as an American, to see people arrested in Britain for criticizing Israel. Why would it be illegal for a Briton to criticize Israel? What does Israel have to do with the UK? And by the way, it was Israeli terror groups who murdered British citizens, British soldiers, British diplomats. Exactly. The King David Hotel. And many others. And they murdered a lot of Brits and murdered them with their hands slowly. In some cases, blew them up with bombs. But true terrorist acts.

55:52And the guy who did it later became the prime minister, Menachem Begin. So actually, Israel owes a great debt to the UK, which is responsible for its formation in the first place, as you know. So why in the world would British citizens be banned from criticizing Israel? They owe nothing to Israel. What is this? Well, it's a bizarre, dystopian situation. You've probably seen, but in Britain, I guess maybe six months ago, the government moved to ban a group called Palestine Action. And these were protesters that were throwing paint at airplanes or whatever. They were trying to stop a genocide. And Britain prescribed it as a terrorist organization, I think against all the legal advice that they were given.

56:39They ignored that and they went ahead. And it became illegal to even support or hold up placards saying, I support Palestine action. So they were arresting like 80, 90-year-old women. They were dragging them away and charging them as terrorists under terrorism offenses. So, I mean, Britain has a, obviously it's invested in Israel, heavily invested in Israel, clearly, because, you know, it was Britain really that was behind the formation of the state of Israel in the first place. And you can trace it back to the Balfour Declaration where, you know, they drew a line in the sand and gave a land that didn't belong to them to another people whose land it wasn't.

57:19You know, they gave away the land that belonged to the people indigenous to that land. So I think, you know, they talk about this historical debt owed to Israel. Now, of course, you can go to Germany and some of the European countries, and of course, they talk about the Holocaust, and they bear a heavy burden and responsibility for that, or they feel that. And again, there's this kind of historical debt that they feel. But in Britain now, it's kind of moved way beyond that. And like you said, they were, in the early days, in the formation of the State of Israel, they were attacking Brits, killing Brits, blowing up hotels.

57:59So this kind of unravelled support where you can't even criticise Israel, there's no space. Any criticism of Israel is now deemed either anti-Semitic, an act of terror, unlawful, and it means that you're ostracized from society. You're labeled an anti-Semite. You're labeled a racist. And I mean, the Britain's objective is, I mean, Israel is an outpost for Anglo-American imperialist, you know, what they want to gain out of the region. So it acts as this kind of Anglo-imperialist outpost. And it will back Israel militarily to their hilt. It will back them politically to their hilt. But of course, they're using it to strategically control the entire of the Middle East.

58:51I mean, this is their historical myth. I mean, everything that happens in this region is because of the historical mess of the British and the French. you know back in the time of um the sykes pico and carving up of that part of the world just arbitrarily drawing lines okay you can have this part you can have this part um and you know the the legacy of that lives on today which is in fact why as a british um journalist i say of irish origin but you know as certainly as a western uh a western journalist i have a historical debt to the people of this land because of what my country has inflicted upon them.

59:33And I see that as part of my duty as a journalist, not to just fall in line behind my own government, not to be a stenographer for power, but to expose to the world what's happening here on the ground in Lebanon and in other countries. And for every bomb that falls on Lebanon, and there have been many of them, I can tell you, But every bomb that falls on Lebanon is a bomb that is supplied by the United States. Yes. A bomb that is supplied by Britain. Israel just simply fires the bullets that they're supplied. And it's been carrying out these actions with the support and complicity of Britain and the United States and other Western countries.

1:00:14Do your former colleagues in the British media feel shame as they continue their stenography and see you speaking freely and risking your life to do it? They should do. They should feel a great sense of shame. But now, I don't know whether they do. Like I said, on a personal level, I've met the individual journalists from the major news organizations, and they've been very gracious and very pleasant as individuals. But they all fall in line with the same narrative. Even the journalists that are coming here, they'll describe Dahyeh, which is the southern suburbs of Beirut. That entire area has been evacuated.

1:00:51We're talking an area between 500 ,000 and 800 ,000 people. And that whole area has been evacuated. It's bombed every single day without fail. Fighter jets roaring overhead, drones overhead, civilian buildings being destroyed. Now, for them, this is the southern suburbs of Beirut. They call it a Hezbollah stronghold. Now, okay, that use of language is not an accident. It's deliberate. They call it a Hezbollah stronghold because it justifies the bombing of that area. But this isn't a Hezbollah stronghold. This is where we live. These are the coffee shops where we meet our friends. These are the places we go shopping.

1:01:31This is an area vibrant, full of life, people's homes, this kind of thing. And the Western media play a very pernicious role, in fact, in what I believe is this manufacturing of consent. Because outside of that, Dahi is just a place on a map that gets bombed. Lebanon is a war zone. That's how they describe it. Lebanon isn't a war zone, as we already discussed. Lebanon is a land of rich culture, rich tradition, rich history, full of the most amazing people you could ever meet anywhere in the world. The same with the south of Lebanon. They say, well, all these areas south of the Latani, they're all Hezbollah supporters.

1:02:12I mean, of course there's strong support for Hezbollah in those areas because they see them as the only organization that is standing up and fighting against Israel, that is defending their land, their territory. Hezbollah was only born in the mid-1980s. Now, the people of Lebanon don't have a dereliction or a fantasy or a predisposed to using weapons and guns. It's not that they enjoy going around shooting people. They were formed as an armed militia exactly to defend their land, The same as in Ireland, the same as in, in fact, you can pick any country that's come under attack from the Western powers, from Israel, from their neighbors.

1:03:00That's the origins of these organizations. But to call it Hezbollah land, which is some of the description that we're finding, this is, as we said, the land that Jesus walked in. It's a land rich in culture and history, but the Western journalists are kind of seeing it very much or speaking about it or writing about it very much in those terms. We hear the same kind of, it's not like these dog-whistled trigger words, you know, Iran-backed, the Iranian-backed militia, you know, the Hezbollah strongholds, strongholds or these kind of things, the terminology that they use. And it's absolutely deliberate to justify Israel bombing those lands.

1:03:42That's all it is. So whether they're embarrassed about writing that or not, I don't know. I think it's very difficult to get a job in the British media if you don't write those kind of lines or you don't speak them into a camera. Now, Noam Chomsky, who back in, I guess, the 90s was interviewing a British journalist, Andrew Ma, and I think he hit the nail on the head when he said, okay, I'm not necessarily saying you don't believe what you're saying, but if you didn't believe what you said, you wouldn't be sitting where you are now. And I think that's true, right? I mean, you know, you're not going to get a job unless you believe those things, unless you're prepared to say them or write them.

1:04:27So whether they're embarrassed or not, I don't know. And to be honest, I don't care very much. They may not be capable of it. So my last question, I know you don't like talking about yourself, but it is about you. So Israel tried to assassinate you. They failed just barely. I can't imagine interviews like this make them less inclined to assassinate you to try again. Are you going to stay in Lebanon? Absolutely. Absolutely. 100%, without doubt. I'll stay in Lebanon. Lebanon is my home. I have my, you know, my beloved is here in Lebanon. My life is here in Lebanon. I always say, look, Lebanon isn't my country, but Lebanon and the Lebanese people belong in my heart.

1:05:14And, you know, I'll forever be in the service of the Lebanese people. They've been good enough to host me in their country. And I hope that my journalism does them justice, and I hope my presence does them justice. I always remember, and it's always important to remember, that I'm a guest in this land. So, no, I have no intention of leaving. I have no intention of stopping reporting. We've already been back to the front line. Just two days after the attack, we made sure that we went out because we're not going to be silenced. And if they think that we're going to be leaving the field, then they're very much mistaken.

1:05:54What a remarkable conversation. It is one of the great countries and most beautiful countries in the world. Top five, in my opinion, top three. So I'm grateful you're there to chronicle what's being done to it in our name with our weapons. It's really evil. So anyway, Steve Sweeney, thank you very much for doing this. I appreciate it. A pleasure. Thank you.