12/13/16 – Yakov Hirsch on journalist Jeffrey Goldberg and Hasbara Culture – The Scott Horton Show

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And introducing Yakov Hersh.
He writes now over with Phil Weiss and the boys at mondoweiss.net.
And, well, he's got this running series about what he calls Hasbara culture, which includes a lot of picking on Jeffrey Goldberg in personal and professional terms, which I enjoy and is always really good for a laugh.
And, you know, this is important stuff.
This one is called Azaria's Conviction Will End a Totalitarian Ideology.
Welcome back to the show.
How are you doing?
Hi, Scott.
Good to talk to you again.
Hey, so totalitarian ideology, that's Hasbara culture you're referring to there in the title?
Yes, that is what I'm referring to.
All right.
Well, please explain.
I think that a Netanyahu, Benjamin Netanyahu, to remain prime minister as long as he has, has cultivated a culture in Israel.
And that culture is now going to become a it's going to be it's going to become public for the first time until now.
Until now, it wasn't understood what was seen when we looked at these at these things.
But now, because of this unique situation, this video has set up a situation where the whole world is going to see exactly what the issues are.
If you follow the discussion in Israel or the or in America about what's going on in Israel, about the politics, you know, they use a lot of different words.
And they're trying to understand what has happened to Israel.
It seems to be different than it was 20 years ago.
You know, in 1982, we have to stop Rancho Tila, the the massacre committed by Christian Falange in Lebanon.
If the Israeli invasion, which Israel was complicit in to some extent, there was a demonstration in Israel against Sharon, who was considered responsible, was seen responsible.
And 10 percent of the population came out.
Now, Israel is a very different country now.
And there's a lot of, you know, a lot of theory as to why it's a different country.
And I am focusing on one on something that I think is the most important area to think about, why it's a different country.
And that is a culture.
That is what I call the culture.
It's something that Netanyahu has cultivated.
And if you look at the videos, you know, he's he's come out with videos the last couple of months.
And what you see about when you see these videos, you know, just as an ounce, if you look at it as an outsider, these videos are shocking.
And it just shows a particular ethnocentric view of the world.
There's no role taking with with the Israeli enemies.
And the way this has been created is because the position of Israel has been made sacred.
And if you take political positions and you turn them sacred and you turn your opponents into the opposite of sacred and people are free to do this, then suddenly a problem is going to develop.
And that's what's happened in Israel.
You know, they have guns in Israel.
When we discuss these things in America, there are no guns.
And that's why Jeffrey Goldberg could talk about Walter Mersheimer anyway he wants.
He could call Mersheimer a Nazi, which I, you know, I've shown he could call everyone Nazis.
And there's no one to say, hey, Jeffrey, you can't talk like that to people.
And if you do, you've got to prove the guy's a Nazi.
But this is what Jeffrey Goldberg has done here.
And it's what Netanyahu has done there.
What Jeffrey Goldberg has done here is to make the discourse toxic about Israel because he has made himself in charge or the Mashkiach, the supervisor of what is kosher and what's not in the discourse.
And because it's all because he has connected and as far as culture connects, their political position to the Holocaust and to anti-Semitism and people don't understand exactly how to, you know, they don't understand how cynical these people are and they don't understand how ethnocentric these people are.
So this creates a huge problem in our discourse.
And right now I realized when I saw that Azaria video that this was a unique situation where this would play out the way it played out.
Because, you know, when everyone in Israel is told that Palestinians are coming at them at nights are really all that, you know, as Fred Stevens put in his article of the Palestine psychotic stage, if all of Israel believes that all of Palestinian resistance is about Jew hatred, then it's entirely understandable that especially because people are actually trying, people are coming at Israelis with knives.
And so if you believe that this is the motivation of these people coming at you with knives, women and kids and everyone is because they want to kill Jews as Fred Stevens and Jeffrey Goldberg and Netanyahu and everyone and all political leaders have told them and you get told specifically, you know, the terrorists must die, yada, yada.
Then, of course, what's going to happen?
What's going to happen is exactly what happened.
So going back to the video.
But the point of that video is to an outsider.
You see the whole story in the video.
Every child who's watched any TV sees that video.
They know who the good people are.
They know that the guy shooting the person on the ground is bad.
You know, it doesn't matter whose uniform, who's on the ground, whose team, which team, you know, who's who the teams are here, whose uniforms are, you know, the fact that no one has shot the guy yet and someone just shows up and just shoots the guy on the ground.
We know it's a bad person.
But that's for the outsiders.
But in Israel, when you have a culture that that person is not a bad person and that I mean that the kill that the person on the ground actually wants to kill Jews.
And when he gets up and if he survives, you know, he's going to come after us again.
Then when someone acts out, you know, that reality, then, of course, the country is going to be going to be.
Yeah, good job.
You know, we can't do it, but we know we know your heart was at a good place.
You showed more courage than everyone else.
You killed you know, you killed the Jew killer.
Everyone else was like, no, no, you can't do that.
So it's just natural that that this person and especially because, you know, this is what is going on in Israel.
This is how Netanyahu does this thing is by cultivating that us against them.
So now suddenly we have a situation where the whole where Netanyahu and Bennett are agitating about this guy.
And but the IDF are on a different place than the than the politicians.
They have an army and they have to run an occupation right now.
And clearly you cannot have an army where when someone decides to kill someone, we say we're going to pardon you when we.
There are no extenuating circumstances there.
It's just an execution.
You know, and every country in the world, you know, can have the exact same situation if there are any sort of war.
In fact, you could have the same situation in Chicago.
You know, imagine imagine a imagine a cop shoots, comes to a scene, shoots an injured, you know, an injured assailant on the ground who had stabbed the cop.
And the police chief then goes and we have a video of it.
And the police chief comes on and says, you know what?
Our cops, we've been attacked and we've had knife attacks.
And, you know, he starts defending the cop.
And we've been trained in Israel.
But it's inconceivable to have that discussion.
The guy would lose his job.
The mayor would say, I don't know what you know, the guy has mental problems.
You cannot defend the officer who shoots the cop, who shoots who shoots someone on the ground no matter what.
Well, see, I think this is actually my objection to your piece.
I'm not so certain how you're so certain that a Chicago cop or that this accused Israeli soldier would be convicted.
It seems like I'll tell you what.
OK, because in Israel, you know, I am giving you not to Netanyahu.
There are same people.
I mean, when I mean saying there are people who realize that if they are going to have a solution with the Palestinians, they would like.
It's important that people don't hate each other.
You know, it's important, too, that the Palestinians and Israelis should hate each other as little as possible.
Now, that seems to be a good idea, right?
They have to hate each other.
Some, you know, they have a long history.
They're fighting for 100 years.
But after that, it's not.
You know, these things are created.
This is a culture.
This is, you know, the way Netanyahu talks about incitement.
What does that mean?
Incitement is exactly what Netanyahu is doing.
One Palestinian breaks into a West Bank settlement and kills a girl.
Right.
There's a lot of ways to define what happened.
You could say it's one guy who killed one girl and then that will lower the temperature.
But Netanyahu does not do that.
Netanyahu said that guy who killed that girl represents all of the Palestinians.
That he killed the girl means all of the Palestinians want to kill.
And when he says what type of human being, this is the language he talks.
Every video says what type of human being could do something like that?
What type of human being could slit a girl's throat?
You know, think about it's us.
It's look at this.
He has a video of being in the girl's room with blood on the wall with a teddy bear.
Right.
And that's his message all the time.
Us against them.
And this is the message he's telling his people.
Now, there are people in Israel who would like to have a settlement.
But clearly, this is not going to lead to a settlement with the Palestinians.
Even if all the Palestinians turn into, you know, turn into the Dalai Lama all of a sudden.
There's not going to be a solution because what Netanyahu has done is not based on the activity.
What the activity of the Palestinians objectively has done is create, obviously, a lot of suspicion and even hatred by Israelis or Palestinians.
If you have buses blowing up, it's understandable that people are going to say, are going to want their leadership to deal with whatever.
However, you need to deal with the problem.
We cannot have buses blowing up.
But after that, you can still, you know, fly, fan the flames or lower the flames.
And Netanyahu has done everything he can to fan the flames of hatred against not only the Palestinians, against Haaretz, against leftists.
And the way he does that, it's a and it's sacred when he doesn't say, hey, our enemies are this.
There are our enemies are evil, is what he says.
Our enemies are on the side of the enemies of the Jews, of all the enemies of the Jews in our history.
That's the side Haaretz is on.
They want to stab us in the back.
They are on the side of Hamas.
That's the message.
Therefore, when you look at, you know, the ambassador who was named to Israel now, do you know what he said about?
Think about the reality of the world.
The reality of the world is an organization called J Street.
J Street wants everyone to live happily ever after.
Now they could be wrong.
It could be the right wingers are right or Sam Harris is right that the Palestinians just want to, you know, kill Jews.
Right.
But if Jais, but J Street doesn't know that they believe that we can work this out.
Right now, if you listen to J Street, to Jeremy Ben Ami and you listen to him, you say, OK, yeah, this guy's not trying to sell books.
He's not a crazy idiot.
He wants everyone to live happily ever after, according to his values.
Now, look at listen to what this ambassador, you know, the guy that Trump named as Ambassador Friedman.
What does he say about J Street?
He says they are worse than capos.
Capos were the Jews in the concentration camps who who were ordered by the Nazis to help kill Jews.
And this is what Jews tend to call these days, call other Jews who are, quote, self-hating Jews or some who will take with the other side.
You know.
So now.
So what does this guy, this lawyer who's supposed to be a serious person, what does he say about J Street?
He says J Street is worse than capos.
Capos at least have an excuse because the Germans were forcing them to help kill Jews.
But J Street, what excuse do they have?
They are worse than capos.
And if you look at his quotes, this is what how does this come about that this person, if you speak to Jeremy Ben Ami, if you have him on your show, you're like, OK, might be wrong, might be right.
This guy's heart's at the right place.
His mind's at the right.
He's a good person.
Right.
But if you listen to the his opponents and listen, read what Friedman wrote and, you know, this article is making the rounds, you will see that he looks like he believes Jeremy.
I don't know.
It should be shot or so.
I mean, this is this is the language.
He is a traitor to the Jewish people and to Israel.
This is the language that is used in the discourse about Israel.
And that is because of people like Netanyahu in Israel.
But in America, that's because of Jeffrey Goldberg more than anyone else.
With Jeffrey Goldberg.
And what's amazing for Americans and for Jews is that, OK, that's one thing.
But he's not writing for the Jewish press.
Jeffrey Goldberg.
Jeffrey Goldberg is the editor in chief of the Atlantic magazine with his eyes.
Jeffrey Goldberg plans to be the editor in chief of The New York Times soon.
You know, he's a very ambitious fellow.
Now, if you look at Jeffrey Goldberg's writing writings, it's unhinged.
I mean, if you look at what he writes about his enemies, you know, when he you know, he has this article, Mersheim is list.
You know, there's someone it used to be, you know, I grew up really orthodox, but I knew there was another world out there.
And that other world I had, I was known, you know, I knew that I needed to have respect for that other world, you know, on the other side of the bridge.
The Jewish until the famous Jewish intellectuals.
And then I went, you know, I crossed the bridge and I started reading.
And suddenly I'm like, whoa, yeah, there are some Jews who are these famous Jewish intellectuals.
And then I'm reading these other Jews and they are not famous Jewish intellectuals.
And then these not these people who are I mean, it's almost like a scam, but it's not a scam.
I mean, think about Jeffrey Goldberg.
He sells himself as this Jewish intellectual.
I mean, this this intellectual Jeffrey Goldberg has never debated anyone on the opposite side.
I mean, that's a little strange.
People debate, you know, people on the other side.
Sam Harris is looking for people to debate.
Meanwhile, there's a guy, Gideon Levy speaks decent enough English.
He makes good TV.
He makes has a good argument.
And Israel should have a different path is that we can work something out with the Palestinians.
You know, I tweeted.
I gave 50.
I offered, you know, Jeffrey Goldberg's worried about the Syrians.
What's going on?
I said, OK, Jeffrey, I know you have a hefty salary, but, you know, you have two ponies and I don't know what the upkeep of that is.
I will donate 50 dollars to charity if you debate Gideon Levy.
And in the normal world, that would be like, yeah, oh, sure, Jeffrey.
I mean, that would just happen, right?
It doesn't have to if they don't have to go to Madison Square Garden, they can do it from their computer.
But the world that Jeffrey created, that does not happen.
Why?
Because Gideon Levy is evil.
Gideon Levy wants to have if you look at Jeffrey Goldberg's tweets, the way he talks about Gideon Levy, he dehumanizes Jeffrey Goldberg has dehumanized his opponents.
What does that mean?
Dehumanized means the motivation of Jeffrey Goldberg's opponents is never what they claim it is.
Jeffrey Goldberg's opponents motivation is always about Jeffrey Goldberg's Jewishness.
I mean, that's a little this is a this is the big Jewish intellectual.
Now he goes around saying believing he's a big Jewish intellectual and any engagement he has with anyone.
His reaction to it is you are debating me this way or you're taking this position, it's because I'm Jewish.
This is now Jewish.
This is what Jewish intellectual stands for.
OK, so your point ultimately, though, is that this Hasbara culture in Israel and in America basically believe in their own B.S. is the point is the bottom line is that they're screwing themselves, that they're believing their own B.S. to their own detriment.
And that ultimately they're causing more problems for themselves than if they were more honest about who's victimizing who and who's occupying who.
Is that what you're trying to say?
Well, you know, there are other people involved in this story.
You know, I mean, what's happening?
This is what this is what's going to happen in Israel.
OK, so let me answer your question about the idea, which I didn't answer yet.
You said, you know, and this is people have been reacting.
How do you know they're going to?
You know, the IDF have been covering up all these killings.
Over 200 people have been killed over Palestinians have been killed in these the knife and the father.
Right.
And the power and a lot of these killings have been extrajudicial.
And I and the idea has covered them up.
I mean, crazy stories like big, big people.
This guy, you saw Schomer.
But it's like they can't do any whatever.
It's a whole different issue.
But but now look what happened.
The idea.
Think about the people in charge of the army, any army in the world.
You have a video of a soldier of a grunt executing someone.
Right.
And if you're in charge of the army, even if you believe, you know, even if you have some sympathy for the guy killing the guy on the ground, you need to have an army, not a militia.
Right.
You can't have a drug cartel militia running the country.
After all, we're dealing with the most moral army in the world.
So the idea has no choice because there are, you know, usually what does Hasbara do in a situation like this?
They come up with an explanation why this is different.
You know, so they would say as a real is going to be he needs to be pardoned because I don't even because he you know, he's been in a shrink.
You know, he's been in therapy for five years about, you know, he got molested when he was a kid.
OK, and that's why he shot the guy.
That's not what happened here.
Right.
The people are the nothing now is not saying that he's saying he shot the guy and it's OK.
Yeah, we're behind them.
It's OK that he shot the guy because there is no excuse for shooting the guy.
We have the whole story.
If you say it's OK, you're defending the shooting.
That means you're defending an Israeli show soldier executing a Palestinian on the ground.
That is what that means.
And the IDF, whatever their politics are, cannot have an army with that is OK.
So therefore, and as it is, the IDF is very different than than politically than Netanyahu and Bennett.
But I'm saying even aside from that, therefore, they're going to give this guy as harsh a sentence as they can, because they need to have this fight with Hasbara culture.
Now, if they don't have the fight now, let's say they acquit him.
What's going to happen next week if someone shoots a Palestinian?
Clearly, they can't put him on trial.
If there's another video, if this guy gets acquitted and there's another video next week, I mean, it's a joke.
Clearly, they can't put him on trial.
So it's not a question they're going to convict him.
But Hasbara culture has created a narrative.
They've placed that killing in in this narrative of, you know, the Elie Wiesel.
What does Elie Wiesel say about what did he say?
He said, when other people, he says, when other people have a feel feel a need for revenge, you know, they kill.
You know, he's talking about non-Jews.
But when Jews feel that, they dance.
This is what we saw.
This is his perception of himself.
You know, this innocence of Israeli soldiers kill Palestinians.
No, they don't kill.
But if they do, it's only because they really have to.
Of course, there's a bad apple or two.
But he doesn't know he did not have it.
It's not possible.
Do you understand what a social construction of reality?
He does not understand that Jews, that Jewish boys, our children, as Netanyahu puts it, our children are not capable of killing, of killing Palestinians just, you know, because they're in a bad mood.
This is what has been created by Jeffrey Goldberg and Netanyahu.
This innocence, this culture where Wiesel and actually Peter Bainard had this, had a few columns about Wiesel's behavior in East Jerusalem.
And in fact, Yossi Sarid, a former Knesset member, had this article in the Aretz where he said, which was called ethnic cleansing with a prayer shawl because Eli Wiesel was involved in East Jerusalem in trying to remove Palestinians to replace them with Jews.
Right.
But so that's the world we live in.
There is this exemption, which Netanyahu has used, this exemption where basically Israel can do whatever it wants.
And I'm not even talking about the behavior.
I'm talking about just even the discourse.
Israeli discourse is different than everything else in the world.
The way everyone, the people, the politicians speak about Palestinians just is just so unacceptable in any other context, about any other minority.
And there is no explanation by looking at the situation.
Everyone sees there is an occupation going on.
And, you know, I said a few times in my article, you know, even if you approach the subject as if Jews are the chosen people, and even if you approach the subject as God gave the land to the Jewish people, there is still a lot of things wrong.
You understand what I'm saying?
There are a lot of things wrong, even if the positions are right.
Even if you take the extreme positions of Israel, you know, the right wing positions, and you say, you know what, you're right, God gave the land to everyone.
Okay, now what?
Even after that, the behavior, I mean, these people should be in court, some of them, for the incitement against Palestinians, because the Palestinians, you have to understand, they don't know Jews are the chosen people.
They don't know God gave the land to the Jewish people.
They're sitting there minding their own business when this all came about.
And, of course, we have stories.
And, I mean, there's so much to say about this, because we have to ultimately speak about anti-Semitism.
So, if Jeffrey Goldberg didn't say, look, look what the Hamas charter is, right, look, okay, we have to speak about the Hamas charter, because we cannot talk about Palestinian anti-Semitism without addressing there is a document.
We have to think about who wrote the document.
Why did they write the document?
Did they write the document because they studied Jewish history and say, yes, we understand Jews are responsible for everything everyone said they're responsible for?
Or it's like, okay, we're in Palestine.
Israel, you know, Jews have come here.
They said they're connected to whatever a couple of thousand years ago.
And for some reason America's behind them, Jews, whatever, whatever story they tell themselves, the people who wrote that in the document does not mean that they want that they're pushing, does not necessarily mean, it might mean that, but does not necessarily mean that they're ready to push children and Jewish kids into the gas chambers, you know, in Auschwitz.
But this is our understanding of anti-Semitism.
This is what Goldberg has made anti-Semitism.
Anti-Semitism isn't like anything else.
Anti-Semitism is not someone like had some bad experience with Jews and says, fuck Jews.
That's not anti-Semitism.
There's no such thing as like being annoyed at you.
It's all on this Hitler continuum.
If you're an anti-Semite, you're very close to pushing Jews to get into the gas chambers.
So this is a view of the world that's just not true.
It's not true.
Let me ask you, I saw a documentary called Defamation.
I'm sure you're probably familiar with it.
Maybe.
It's by a liberal Israeli Jew who went basically out in search of anti-Semitism.
And really the way he portrayed it was like, you know, the average day in Israel is like America in 2002 at the height of all the hype about terrorism and the Iraq threat and everybody's trying to kill us and everything we're doing is in self-defense.
And really the height of the denial of reality to the amount of popular buy-in to the narrative that America is the poor little innocent victim.
Same kind of thing here.
But like you're saying, everybody knows there's occupation going on.
You can't open the paper without you just see that.
Yeah, they just stole another hillside from some guy.
It was his farm and now it belongs to them.
Even the land where they're going to put the new American embassy in Jerusalem is on stolen land.
I think I read that at Mondoweiss or maybe in the forward.
So again, yeah, everybody knows that, you know, who's occupying who.
Yeah, yeah, knife attack this.
But again, the settlements are there.
People don't.
You know, you don't deny that the settlements are there, right?
You see, you know, I mean, this is what a social construction of reality means.
I mean, you're wrong.
Not everybody knows this.
And you are going to see that very soon that not everybody knows this.
You're going to see the behavior.
I mean.
I mean, I read a quote of Trump's new ambassador, David Friedman, who is not Milton Friedman's son, by the way, totally different.
David Friedman, where he said, who knows how many Palestinians even live in the West Bank?
You know, some say it's millions, but I don't know.
You know, that's the new ambassador.
And it doesn't matter how intelligent you are.
It doesn't matter how sophisticated you are when it comes to this particular story about Jews and Israel and their history and anti-Semitism.
It is it's almost like crack cocaine.
That's what it feels like to believe that there's no other side.
There's no other side.
Well, so then back to Jeffrey Goldberg, because who cares what Jeffrey Goldberg says at least anymore?
I don't know.
I do understand that when he hit Mearsheimer and Walt when they came out, what, 10 years ago now with the lobby, that he hurt them.
That wasn't cool.
He got away with murder there.
But has he gotten away with anything since then?
I think this is not OK.
I think I'm being set up.
I mean, not set up a leading question.
I think this is what I call.
The answer is yes.
If we look at I'm going to write a little writing about the when I write about the Iran discourse, this is everything's going to be clear.
Because we have a real world and the Iran discourse debate was Hasbara culture against the real world.
In the real world, Israel goes to sends assassins to Iran and kills their scientists.
You know, a guy kisses his wife after breakfast.
He goes up.
He goes to his car, gets into his car.
The car blows up.
The neighbors come running TV cameras.
Everyone knows it's Israel.
And what does Iran do?
Nothing.
Because Iran can't do anything.
If Iran were to go and somehow send an assassin to Israel and kill an Israeli scientist or anyone else, you know, there will be there would be severe consequences.
Right.
That would be that would be war.
Right.
But meanwhile, this is the world we live in, that Israel does what it wants to Iran.
And of course, Iran causes a lot of mischief and terrorism and all of that.
But I'm talking about the power relationship between the two.
Is that Israel does what it wants in Iran and Iran just has to bite its lip.
Now, they have a nuclear program or had a nuclear program.
Clearly, it's you know, it's controversial how advanced what they want.
I am not an expert in any of these questions.
However.
We had a, you know, now giving a speech to Congress with Eli Wiesel in the audience, and he points to Wiesel and he says, you know, and he pleads to the two houses, both houses of Congress to save Israel from the new Holocaust threat.
You know, that's the language he used and that's language everyone used.
That is not reality.
The reality of Israel being that Iran being existential threat to Israel is not real.
It's not real.
That means it's never going to happen.
Iran is never going to nuke Israel.
It's just not going to happen.
And the man has nothing to do with how Netanyahu plays it.
You know, it's not like if Netanyahu was the Congress, they will look these for Israel.
If he does, you know, nothing to Iran is not going to nuke Israel because America is not going to let Iran look Israel and Israel is not going to live.
And as the head of the Mossad said, in a thousand years, Iran is not an existential threat to Israel.
So that's the reality.
But that's not what happened.
That's not what the discourse was.
So when you ask, oh, what an influence of Jeffrey Goldberg had.
Jeffrey Goldberg's op-ed in the New York Times about Amalek, this ancient hater of Jews, where the New York Times gave Goldberg the platform to say, oh, I don't know, how should we look at Netanyahu?
If Netanyahu looks at Iran as being Amalek, similar to Nazi Germany, or similar to there's this command that the Old Testament gave Jews to go kill Amalek, there's Amalek in every generation, then we don't know.
Then you have to be careful.
Then Israel might attack.
Then we can't even stop Israel from attacking Iran, you know, from attacking the nuclear reactors.
So Goldberg is saying this discourse is of any other country.
If you have a discourse like that, you know, if you go to Peru, well, it's Peru.
Well, let's see.
You know, 2,000 years ago, they believed this.
They said, what are you talking about?
Who cares what they think about ancient superstitions?
But Goldberg says, no, no, no, we have to take these things seriously.
And Goldberg has played this game, and I'm going to show it, and he can do whatever he wants.
But I am going to show Goldberg, use this discourse that – now, it's not a conspiracy here.
It is not a conspiracy between Goldberg and Netanyahu.
It is Goldberg is – I mean, Goldberg is – I mean, Hasbara culture has created Jeffrey Goldberg, and Jeffrey Goldberg has cultivated Hasbara culture, and the result is Jeffrey Goldberg.
And if you look at every article he writes about the Iran deal, it is him playing both sides.
At the end of everything, he wants to be the mature adult.
He lets all the Hasbara culture crazies be against the Iran deal, and at the end, the mature man right in the middle, Jeffrey Goldberg, you know, says, OK, he's in favor of the Iran deal.
Who made the craziness about the whole – the crazy discourse about the Iran deal?
Jeffrey Goldberg did.
He's the one article after article where he says – and he plays – and I don't know how many other people see what I'm saying, but to me, it's the most – every article Jeffrey Goldberg writes, Jeffrey Goldberg is on the make.
Every article is on the – every sentence, Jeffrey Goldberg is on the make.
He's on the make for himself.
He's on the make for the Jewish people.
He's on the make for the state of Israel.
That's the story.
It's there.
It's everywhere, and if you're not allowed to say this, I'm sorry, but that's just reality.
So when Jeffrey Goldberg talks – when he wrote about Iran and he talks about the nuclear – the Holocaust calculus, he introduced this term.
I mean, you have to read these paragraphs where he introduces the term Holocaust calculus.
He says if Netanyahu makes the Holocaust calculus – and then he goes on to spend sentence after sentence saying how ridiculous it is to make the Holocaust calculus because we're so far away from thinking about the Holocaust.
It's no comparison.
Jeffrey, why did you say Holocaust calculus if that was the case, right?
So this is the game he plays.
He introduces Holocaust calculus, and then he escapes the scene of the crime.
That's Jeffrey Goldberg.
Every article, the same thing.
So what did he do?
Well, if you think about – you know what the reality of the world – on page A9 of the New York Times, there should be an – I mean maybe I'm exaggerating.
The United States and the P-plus-five, they're negotiating with Iran, and why did this – I mean, it's so absurd because the whole – why did this deal with Iran happen?
It's because of Netanyahu's hysteria in the first place, I think.
I don't know.
It's my guess.
He's the one that went crazy about the nuclear – eight years ago, seven years ago, about the nuclear program, and Obama's like, OK, maybe we need to do something about Iran's nuclear program.
Goldberg was the one interviewing Netanyahu and helping him play bad cop to Obama's good cop and getting the deal done.
But what's the truth in the situation?
Netanyahu was just doing this for politics, right?
Because what's the result?
Why is he so upset about the deal?
It's because they – what he really wants from Iran – he's not really worried about the nuclear program, my belief, Netanyahu.
He's worried about their mischief-making.
And what was the result of the deal?
Less threat of a nuclear program, but more probably – or fear of more mischief-making, right?
They'll get more money.
They're going to be welcomed into civilized countries.
But this is not what Netanyahu wanted.
He didn't want a nuclear deal.
He wanted them – he wanted to be agitating about them having a nuclear program with things staying the way they were.
And he's basically – he told Netanyahu, you shouldn't have taken me so seriously.
That's what this is all about.
So the point is Jeffrey Goldberg has created a discourse.
The maskia, the one who's in charge of the discourse, has created – does what he wants.
If Jeffrey Goldberg wakes up – I mean not now.
Things are different now.
But a couple of years ago, if Jeffrey Goldberg wakes up in the morning and says, I'm going to cause a tremendous amount of agitation against anyone in this country, he could do it.
And there's a few – no one can stop him.
Do you know what I mean?
If some guy hit on his wife – I mean I don't know if I can – if some guy hit on his wife and he's like, you know what?
I'm going to fucking get you.
He could next week say – find something the guy wrote in 1975 and have a holy war against this guy and there's nothing anyone can do about it.
And this is what Netanyahu – this is the world we live in.
You know what?
I have to say too that this is also part of no one, including Jeffrey Goldberg, was held accountable for lying us into war with Iraq.
And he was one of the big ones in The New Yorker with all his bogus Saddam and Osama stories.
What's the answer to that question?
Why was no one held accountable for that?
Because he's the supervisor.
I mean Glenn Greenwald wrote this article once and he used Jeffrey – everyone's trying – Jeffrey Goldberg is like this elephant that people have a hand on and they don't know what they're feeling.
Glenn Greenwald wrote this article that Jeffrey Goldberg – I mean how could he be where he is and he said, oh, it's a sign of Washington, you know, what the media establishment – that's what it's symbolic of.
But that's not the case.
That's not why Jeffrey Goldberg is now editor-in-chief.
It is because of our culture.
It's because he has been able to agitate with this Jewish thing and no one has stood in his way and everyone's been afraid to stand – you know, Andrew Sullivan was the only one that gave Jeffrey Goldberg what he deserved.
He said, oh, you want to be treated like a serious person, Jeffrey?
OK, let me ask you a few questions.
Look what – he just spoke to him like a serious person and what did Jeffrey Goldberg – he ran to a safe space.
He says, oh, my emailers are telling me I need to stop talking to Andrew Sullivan.
And what did Wieseltier do?
Oh, Sullivan's raising his voice to Jeffrey Goldberg.
I'm talking about Israel.
That's what I mean by crack cocaine.
Leon Wieseltier considers himself a big intellectual.
He should read that article he wrote about Andrew Sullivan and really be sick because that's – no intellectual writes an article like that because we all know Andrew Sullivan is not an anti-Semite.
So now let's talk about the future here because we've got Trump coming in and clearly he's given a blank check as though it wasn't already there for the Israelis to do whatever they want.
At least that's the perception.
I can't see a single incentive playing the other way in terms of his politics.
I think everyone's wrong with Trump and Netanyahu.
Trump is Netanyahu's worst nightmare and no one's going to stop this.
Think about what's happened.
Israel has a total exemption to do whatever it wants.
And when I say Israel, I mean Netanyahu and I mean Bennett and I mean the settlers.
They have done whatever they want.
And anyone who believes – and those people who believe that Trump wants – what does Trump want?
Stability, right?
You cannot have a relationship with Israel where you give them carte blanche and have stability.
It's just impossible because, as I told you, this is a social construction of reality.
There's constantly going to be problems in the West Bank and terrorism and Israeli reaction and Israeli bombing which affects the stability that Donald Trump is going to create.
So any deal, even the most generous president that Israel can hope for is going to draw a line in the sand wherever that line is.
And that line is you do not bomb Lebanon the next time whatever.
You do – whatever that line in the sand is, Benjamin Netanyahu is going to cross that line.
He does not know any other way.
And people in Israel don't even understand that we're living in an Asbaric culture.
They think it is now a free for all.
That's what Donald Trump represents, a free for all.
We are right and now we are justified and we can do whatever we want.
That's the world we're living in now.
And if Donald Trump thinks he's going to make some – he's going to tell Netanyahu, I don't care what you do.
Just keep it quiet and I have bigger business to deal with around the world.
That's just not happening.
So that's one problem.
There is going to be a confrontation between Donald Trump and Netanyahu, A, because of what's going on on the ground in Israel, and B, think about Netanyahu.
What has Asbaric culture created?
Netanyahu lectures every person he's ever met.
I mean, I don't know how long.
Netanyahu thinks he understands the whole world, right?
And he looks at Trump and what does he – think about what he said in 60 Minutes.
I don't watch this interview, but he said he has five ideas how to help America with the Iran deal.
Think about the people who Trump's putting into his administration.
America first.
Every one of these people, America first.
Is Benjamin Netanyahu America first?
Benjamin Netanyahu is not America first.
And the first time Benjamin Netanyahu crosses that line, which there is going to be, there's going to be a reaction.
The conversation that Donald Trump has with Benjamin Netanyahu, Donald Trump who defeated all – who himself thinks he's a god or a messiah or something like that, right?
Now is dealing with Netanyahu who also thinks he's a god and a messiah.
And this god and this Netanyahu is going to start lecturing Mr. Trump.
Let me tell you about the ways of the world, Donald Trump.
I know you're president, I know you want to do – let me tell you, let me give you advice as a friend.
You're new at this and he's going to start talking to Donald Trump the way he's spoken to everyone he's ever spoken to.
The way he spoke to Clinton, Joe Lockhart, Clinton's spokesman.
You have to read what he said about Donald – about Netanyahu.
He said, there's not one word that comes out of this man's mouth can you believe.
This is not Obama's press secretary.
This is Clinton.
So he's going to talk like that to Trump.
Do you understand Trump's reaction when Netanyahu talks to him like that?
You think Netanyahu's going to have 50 conversations with Trump and talk to Trump the way Trump needs Netanyahu to talk to him?
It ain't happening.
And what's going to happen when Netanyahu starts lecturing Trump?
Trump's going to stop thinking about whatever plans he has.
He's going to say, ho, ho, Mr. Netanyahu, I am not Barack Obama.
Netanyahu, I – you know, you are the client state and you – we all know you've been let – you know, you've run amok.
But now, good, we're going to let you do what you need to do but there are rules.
You know, we are – remember what Clinton said.
That's pretty optimistic, I've got to say.
But you do have a real point about the personality conflict there, these two narcissists.
And you're right, you know.
One actually rules the world empire and the other runs a crappy little client state on the eastern Mediterranean that's about the size of Maryland or something.
Does Netanyahu think that that's the case?
He does not think that that's the case.
He believes he should be president and Trump should maybe run that little state.
Well, that was actually the Bill Clinton quote was, who's the superpower here?
So now, don't we understand every conversation that Netanyahu has with Trump?
He has to keep his fingers crossed that he doesn't speak to Trump the wrong way.
Isn't that obvious that that's the way these two human beings, when they interact, it's not going to be, oh, they're good friends.
Trump is – you know the way Trump is.
He's going to look – he doesn't need – what does Netanyahu mean to him?
Netanyahu means nothing.
There's no aspire culture anymore in America.
I don't know, man.
It seems like they could just golf together and – I mean, I hate to oversimplify it this bad, but look, Netanyahu speaks English.
He's got white skin.
That's close enough.
I mean, obviously, you're saying, OK, repercussions and instability or whatever, but at least on the basic level, do whatever you want to the Palestinians.
You want to push them all into the Jordan River and take the West Bank?
What do I care?
There are other Muslims in the world and other Muslim countries in the world.
And we know the way these things work, right, through our reactions around the world.
Netanyahu wants the call for prayer.
Look what Netanyahu is doing.
Do you know what's going on in Israel?
He's trying to get rid of – I'm just saying, what does Trump care?
He doesn't even read.
He doesn't know anything about this stuff.
And actually, I would dispute that his guys are America first guys.
They're right wing nationalists, but that doesn't make them America firsters.
America first means peace first, not world empire, Pax Americana.
In their mind, they're America first.
The point is, they will not – if Netanyahu stands in their way in any shape or form, if they want something, these people, and they tell Trump, this needs to happen, and Netanyahu – if there's any resistance from Netanyahu, this is the way the world works.
And it did not work like that any time in the past.
Trump is going to tell Netanyahu, this has to stop or you cannot have a settlement here.
This has all been ignored in the past.
As Netanyahu told Saban, I do what I want.
He says, we have done what I want.
This is what he said.
We have done what we wanted, no matter what America says.
And that's all I'm saying.
Whatever America says, at some point they're going to say, nope, not this.
And Israel cannot – Netanyahu cannot control his right wing, his people, to actually control the lines that Trump is going to draw.
Anyway, this is just my theory.
That's all I can say.
Well, it's interesting.
Phil, of course, thinks that this is going to cause a major split among the Israel lobby and pro-Israel groups in America, too, as some of them just absolutely cannot stomach this Donald Trump right wing nationalist government.
And they're not going to be able to stomach his alliance with Israel and basically backing an Israel that's a pro-Trump Israel.
But I guess it depends.
We'll see how it plays out.
Every day these things are happening.
But you're certainly right that he's used to talking to Barack Obama like he's his butler or something like that.
So I don't know if he'll take – I tend to think that Netanyahu, as much of a narcissist as he is, probably would think of Donald Trump as a peer and that they would talk to each other pretty much on the level and golf together and get along okay.
And that's my fear.
I really hope you're right that he talks to Trump the way he talked to Obama because then that would get him a smackdown real quick.
Netanyahu does not have any peers.
That's what you don't realize.
He does not have what?
He does not have any peers.
He doesn't think he has any peers.
Donald Trump is not one of Netanyahu's peers in his mind.
Okay?
Well, good then.
Let the sparks fly, man.
Yes, we live in interesting times.
All right, well listen, keep writing all this great interesting stuff for Mondo Weiss because I like reading it.
Okay.
I appreciate you coming back on the show, Yakov.
Thanks.
All right, so that is Yakov Hersh.
He writes at mondoweiss.net.
This one is called Azaria Conviction Will End a Totalitarian Ideology.
It's part of a series on what he calls Hasbara culture in Israel and in Jeffrey Goldberg's horrible writings.
And thanks, y'all.
That's The Scott Horton Show.
Check out the archives at scotthorton.org and also at libertarianinstitute.org slash scotthortonshow.
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