Concealing The Truth of What is Actually Happening in Gaza Transcript

Disclaimer: This transcript is an edited version version of a transcript created using AI technology and may not reflect 100% accuracy.

The video can be found here.

Sarah:  Good afternoon, and welcome to another very provocative and very stimulating EMET webinar. For the last several weeks, the international media has been a buzz with claims of Israel inflicting a, quote, “famine” on Gaza. Although militarily Israel has been winning the war on a great many fronts, in terms of international public opinion, we’re quite severely losing. This has very dangerous repercussions for continuous military support for the state of Israel. Unfortunately, on July 30th, more than half of the Democratic Senators, a full 27 out of 45, voted to block weapons sales to Israel. This resolution was led by Senator Bernie Sanders, and unfortunately, both our Democratic senators from Maryland voted for it. Also, unfortunately, the media is the message, and so much of what we see or read in the media comes directly from the Sunni jihadist terrorist organization, Hamas.

We’re very honored to have with us today, Lenny Ben-David, who will explain the inner workings of the system. Lenny worked for AIPAC for more than 25 years in both Jerusalem and in Washington. Then Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu asked him to become his DCM or Deputy Chief of Staff at the Israeli embassy in Washington, D.C. Lenny is the author of the very fabulous American Interest in the Holy Land, and is currently hard at work on several other books. He is now a research fellow and diplomacy fellow, I’m sorry, at the Jerusalem Center for Security and Foreign Affairs. He and his wife, Shelly, are also very long-term and great friends of my husband and myself, and of EMET. It’s an honor to have you on, Lenny.

Lenny, let’s open this up by asking you what would happen to a journalist living in Gaza if he or she would decide to expose some of the crimes of Hamas.

Lenny: First. Sarah, thank you very much for having me. It’s a pleasure to be here, and I love the work that your EMET does in Washington. It is vital and important for the US-Israel relationship. The life of such a reporter who would be an outlier in Gaza, who would ask the hard question, would not last very long. It is a dangerous profession if you are going to do it right. If you are going to be a spokesperson or a lap dog or Hamas, then you live fine. You can survive very well, and you… Unfortunately for them, once they get stuck embedding themselves in with Hamas too deeply, then they are also possible targets and victims. That is the question that we all have to ask as consumers of the news: who is reporting this? Too often, the Washington Post or the New York Times are using such reporters as their fixers, as their alternate reporters. They have nobody on the ground, and so they rely on these reporters. I’ve been following some of them very closely. Some of the photographers, especially, and they cause a lot of the problem.

I consider this Press Corps a part of the asymmetrical warfare. They are special forces. Not necessarily commandos behind the lines, but they’re special forces that are pulled out to attack Israel, pulled out for a set policy and a set tactic of undermining support for Israel. You can see what happened even in the last two days with the hospital in Gaza City. This is not a hospital by itself. The Nassar Hospital has been a Hamas headquarters. There are tunnels bleeding out of it and into it, which are used to support actions against Israel. It is a prop and a setting for this propaganda that’s taking place. So, this is part of the Special Forces being used to portray Israel as attacking hospitals, schools through UNRWA, wounded, and too often, the foreign media, including the New York Times and Washington Post, will play into it. I’ve written about it, and you can find many of the articles and analysis, and photographic analysis on the Jerusalem Center for Foreign Affairs website.

Sarah: That’s wonderful. So, in the most recent article that you wrote in your Substack, which I really recommend everybody to subscribe to, one of the things you pointed out is, despite the Geneva Convention, Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad Fatah, they don’t wear uniforms most of the time, but they do wear different colored headbands. How is one to distinguish if they do wear the headbands? Who is a member of which Jihadist Sunni terrorist group?

Lenny: Well, the green, which you should start becoming familiar with because of the American demonstrations, that’s Hamas. Here in the Middle East, when we see these fighters, we don’t see them very often. When we do, we have to pay attention. But we don’t see them because, unlike the requirements for fighters to wear uniforms, and so that they don’t blend in with the civilians, in many cases, they don’t wear their headbands. Generally, the green is a Hamas, the black and yellow is- the black and white is the Palestinian Islamic Jihad. Fatah is a yellow. Another player to pay attention to, especially in the United States, is the Democratic Front for Liberation of Palestine, and those are red. I raised the PFLP because they are showing up in the United States. They’re not Islamists or Jihadists per se, but they are far-left communists who can fit in very well with the radicals on campus

Sarah: Which is where the Palestinian Authority or the PLO got their start from the Communist Party in Moscow. So, there’s a… Can you tell us a little bit about the case of Al Jazeera’s 28-year-old, Anas Al-Sharif?

Lenny: Al-Sharif is a Hamas member. He may have been an officer. We see many cases within the Al Jazeera network and the satellites, and Al Fager, other publications that are related to some of the terrorist groups. They are embedded in the Hamas fighting units. In the case of the reporter, the so-called reporter, Anas, which comes from the Hebrew root of a rapist, how prophetic it is. Anyway, he showed up in photographs that I found in the release of hostages. The hostages were surrounded by the members of the Hamas Elite Corps called the Shadow Squad, except for one civilian. It was this Anas. He was no civilian. He was part and parcel of them, taking photographs of them. This is also something that your readers can find, the readers can find on my Substack article. He’s no innocent. He was no innocent victim here. That’s the same with the so-called journalists who were killed at Nassar Hospital in the last couple of days. Of those people, some may have been reporting, but there were also members of Hamas, and therefore, they were legitimate targets. Those who are around them are also proportionally understandable collateral damage.

Sarah: Israel immediately apologized for this event at Nassar Hospital. Do you have any commentary on that? What would you do if you were Israel’s spokesperson?

Lenny: I go back decades to the death of a kid in Gaza named Mohamad Dura. Well, Sarah, you’re barely old enough to remember Mohamad Dura, but he was a kid who was hiding in his father’s shadow, and he was killed, and he became the biggest martyr for the Palestinians. Israel quickly said, We’re sorry, we didn’t mean to kill him. Some brave souls in Israel showed he was not killed by Israel. It would’ve been an impossible shot. This is probably the stereotype for how the Palestinians and Hamas use their casualties. In some cases, they may actually be self-shot, shot by the Arabs themselves. But how they use it to turn and blame Israel. In that case, it was a Western reporter who made the case, claiming that no, it wasn’t Palestinians. It wasn’t an accident; Israel shot him.

Today, we have similar cases where Western sources, and you have them in the United States, claim that Israel is hitting with snipers, deliberately killing some of these people. That is not the case. If such a person dies, you have a team, including Western Press, including, I have to say, a photo editor who was at the Washington Post, the New York Times, who is quick to blame Israel and say, This is who did it. That’s why we have the case of the Al-Ha Hospital, where an Islamic Jihad missile fell. Suddenly, the Western press came out and said 500 people were killed listening to what Hamas said. Who was leading the charge? It was this editor for the New York Times, who…

Sarah: Yeah. Soliman Hijjy. Yeah. Is he the…

Lenny: He’s the latest one. But this one isn’t a Westerner who worked for Amnesty International and Al Jazeera, and his name is Evan. He published this. He even posted it on his Twitter account. He pinned it as saying, This was done by Israel. At the time, I actually counted bodies in every photograph I could find, and discovered that there were maybe 50 casualties from that attack. It wasn’t on the hospital. It was outside in a parking lot. It wasn’t even an Israeli weapon. It was an Islamic Jihad weapon. This is how, this is a prototype, this is the pattern that we see, that they take an incident and they… But they have the teams ready to go. I do believe that these teams were ready to go on October 8th, 2023, because it was too fast to mobilize all the office, mobilize the campuses. It was too fast to mobilize the press. It was all in place, in my opinion. This is part of…

Sarah: Well, they were attacking with their GoPro cameras and posting these events live on October 7th. It was horrible.

Lenny: Right. As a result, this, I contend, is part of this asymmetrical warfare when John Spencer, a great professor, great scholar of warfare at West Point, writes his book. He needs to spend some time on this aspect of asymmetrical warfare. Asymmetrical warfare is generally regarded as guerrilla warfare, and the unexploded AIGs and the tunnels. It’s not just that. It is a sophisticated fight for our attention and for the West’s attention.

Sarah: Can you discuss a little bit, Hamas and PISHI’s, and maybe Fatah’s use of teenage girls as, quote, spotters?

Lenny: That is an amazing scandal, which nobody paid attention to. Again, I’ve written about it in the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs. We discovered in Janine two different cases of young women, 15-year-old teens, cherubic, beautiful girls who were killed by Israeli snipers or by Israeli gunfire. Why? How? Who were they? In both cases, these girls were given military funerals by terrorist groups. Why? Because they were spotters. There was a policy in place for children to be on their phones and report where Israeli troops were going. In this case, it was a woman who was a young woman, a 15-year-old, who was on the roof of her building, filming Israeli movements. Later, her defender said, Oh, she was up on the roof looking for her cat. After she died, there are pictures of her body being embalmed or encased in an Islamic jihad flag at a funeral home, wrapped in a scarf. The body was taken to a mosque where she was given military honors, an M-16 16 placed on her body, and then her body was taken to be buried between the mosque and the graveyard. School girls joined the parade, and they changed her uniform to a schoolgirl’s uniform. This was…

Sarah: To look innocent.

Lenny: This was prepared. This was all ready to…

Sarah: Yeah. Right.

Lenny: The report was, ah, Israel Kills a School Girl. Spotters are very important. According to international law and the Law of War, they are military targets. We’ve seen them before, and it’s something, unfortunately, that they use children for. This pulls together the sacrosanct elements of society that should be innocent and free from warfare and not on the battlefield. The children, the sick, the elderly, the schools. This is part of the policy. This is part of the tactic to bring them into the warfare by Hamas, so that Israel in very…

Sarah: So, why? Yes. So, why Lenny? Why does Israel immediately apologize when they know that Nassar Hospital also was a staging ground for Hamas?

Lenny: And held Israeli hostages at some point? Why? Because we are also victims of the Western guilt, compounded by Jewish guilt, and we’re quick to say, Well, we didn’t mean it. The forces are set up to rub our faces in it, including the Western press.

Sarah: All right. So, can you tell us something about how the international community – I mean, we really know the answer – gets the statistics about the Gazan fatality count and hunger and famine?

Lenny: I picked this up already 10 years ago in some of the battles in Gaza, where a statistician at the Schiffer Hospital, which is the main hospital in Gaza, said, “Well, bodies come in. If they’re not wearing a uniform, we assume they’re civilian.” Well, of course, they’re not wearing uniforms. So, they started counting. Moreover, you have, unfortunately, cases of 15, 16, 17-year-old young men, teens who were killed with guns in their hands. Well, they’re all children. So, this is what the report’s coming out of Hamas’ men inside the supposed Ministry of Health. Then, of course, since the press isn’t going to pull out a magnifying glass and inspect them, you’d just double it. Why not? You’d think that the population of Gaza is double because of all the doubled casualties.

Also, you have a hospital where some 80-year-old woman dies, or a child dies in childbirth, killed by the Israelis. So, they’re also counted in the casualty counts. So, nobody dies from mold age in Gaza any longer. They’re all killed by Israeli weapons. So, this also enlarges the number of the count. There are some individuals, and there are some good studies showing that this is all false, but who pays attention to it?

Sarah: Right. So, can you outline for us the work – I hope I’m pronouncing this right – of Yasser Murtaja, M-U-R-T-A-J-A, and what he revealed to Hamas? You wrote about it in your Substack article that he was basically… Well, he was basically a Hamas agent posing as a journalist.

Lenny: There are dozens of them. There are on the… In the article, you will find a picture of, and I think you’re referring to this one. He was a photographer, a drone photographer, and he was shot and killed during the riots and the attacks on the Israeli fence 10 years ago. The Palestinians were quick to say he’s a great photographer, and they killed a photographer. Well, think about it. Nobody who’s a reporter in Gaza is there, unless he’s registered as a journalist, and no photographer, especially a drone photographer, somebody who’s sending up a drone 500 feet into the air and sending back photos of what’s going on on the ground or Israeli positions, is there unless he’s also registered or sent by Hamas. That was the case of this photographer. There’ve been others, including this Soliman Hijjy, whom I’ve quoted and used.

In this case, he was so special to Hamas. He was an officer in Hamas intelligence that I found a photograph of his funeral, and he’s wearing the ubiquitous press vest, a member of the press. But he’s being kissed by a man named Ismail Hania, the leader of Hamas at the time. He was so important to Hamas that Hania shows up and gives him the ultimate honor of a kiss on the forehead. It’s not the only case. So, the pictures are there; they need to be found. I’ll find them.

Sarah: You find them. Yeah.

Lenny: Then publicize. Again, these pictures can be found in the Substack article.

Sarah: Yeah. I really, really highly recommend everybody get your Substack article. You also described the New York Times photographer, Soliman Hijjy, who in 2012 wrote a post on Facebook praising Adolf Hitler, yet the New York Times still employs him.

Lenny: He was actually let go at one point, but they have nobody on the ground. So, this is their in desperation. Hijjy was used in earlier New York Times studies, major articles, major research pieces with dozens of staffers. Hijjy was the lead photographer of some of these so-called studies. But the Post or the New York Times needed him. He writes drivel, he writes propaganda. I show one picture of his, which he’s probably taken off of his website already, the video. But of course, he’s there watching the poor crying, little girls with their pots and pans asking for food. Behind one little girl, are several other little girls cracking up because it was all theater for them. He didn’t notice. He was so concentrated and focused on showing the pot and the girl crying, he didn’t see his own background of little girls cracking up.

So, the other thing, you’ll find pictures of kids reaching through fences with their pots, getting the food. What’s the problem? Is there a problem? How do they get the pots back if they’re through fences? It’s staged. The kids come, stick their hands through their handed pots and pans, and then they’re photographed. Whatever was in the pots and pans is taken back again. So, this is theater. It is part of a whole concept of the next element of asymmetrical warfare.

Sarah: You wrote in your blog, Lenny, which was wonderful. You quoted a Gazan saying, asked if he would trust Gazan Fixers today, and a respected Arab Gaza reporter said, and he’s been working in Gaza for decades, never. He continued. They’ll report what Hamas wants them to write, photograph the pictures Hamas seeks. They cannot write or film anything that will hurt Hamas’ image. “But I don’t blame the fixers.” He continued, “I blame the news producers sitting in London and New York, Washington DC, assigning stories when they know the fixer restrictions.” Where is the objective media here? Is the media at all…

Lenny: It’s not. No, it doesn’t exist. This man that this journalist you’re quoting is a friend of mine, and thank God he’s not in Gaza. He’s writing and analyzing from the freedom of Jerusalem. Those who stick up for the freedom of the press in Gaza are the biggest hypocrites, and they know they are. They’re hypocrite. Whether it’s the New York Times, the Washington Post, The Guardian in London, they are not. They’re embedded and enlisted, recruited to smear Israel. Of course, a picture of a baby with a swollen stomach is going to bring out the sympathy all over the world, and nobody will testify. Nobody will report that the kid has a genetic disease, often caused by, I’ll say, inbreeding, cousins marrying cousins. But nobody will report that. That is the problem. That is, unfortunately, when you have Jewish writers and even rabbis crying over this, it’s not helping. I am thankful that here in Israel, there are people that are leaders who will take the choppy waters, take the winds, and keep sailing. That’s what’s going to win.

Sarah: There’s an expression in Hebrew, Imprarah. We have to, to survive. In Africa, one in five people are dying of starvation in Sudan, in Nigeria, in Kenya, Somalia, and Ethiopia, and it is affecting 282 million people. Why are there no UN condemnations against these countries?

Lenny: Sarah, we know the answer.

Sarah: We do.

Lenny: It’s unfortunate because if there are no Jews, there’s no news. When you think about it as well, to send reporters into Africa, into Sudan, the conditions are hard. The food is terrible. There are no bars to drink in the evening when they’re finished reporting. Whereas there’s a huge press corps here in Israel, where will they go into Gaza? No, of course not. It’s dangerous down there. But they have people reporting to them. They report to their heart’s content, and unfortunately, their heart is rotten.

Sarah: Yeah. All right. So, in the United Nations, which is a whole case study in and of itself, the IPC, the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification, had recently changed the definition of the word famine. Have… Right.

Lenny: Why am I holding this up? What is the change definition?

Sarah: To meet the standard of Israel. To lower the standard.

Lenny: But no. But also, what was the standard, the size of children’s limbs? If their limbs were too small, they must be starving. That was one of the changes they made. It was ridiculous. That’s why I’m holding up my arm. I’m not starving, by the way.

Sarah: Right. Thank God. So, on August 22nd, which is just a few short days ago, the UN’s Secretary General Antonio Gutierrez called, quote, “the famine in Gaza” a manmade disaster, a moral indictment, and a failure of humanity itself. Why was there no mention whatsoever of Hamas in that statement?

Lenny: Because nobody mentions October 7th, 2023. What happened then? Nobody mentions the women who were attacked. It’s beyond me. I cannot fathom why the world has shut its eyes, why it’s closed its heart to the Jews or to the Africans, or to the Palestinians themselves who are living under the terror of…

Sarah: Hamas.

Lenny: …of Hamas. In my article, I also put pictures of the summary street side executions of Palestinians in Gaza by Hamas. Where’s the condemnation? Amnesty International, are you there? Hello? Wake up. They’re not there. So, it is the…

Sarah: Yeah. Where are the women’s groups? They have never spoken out against the horrible physical and sexual abuse of women on October 7.

Lenny: Sarah, tell me, why do you think it’s the case?

Sarah: We all know.

Lenny: Tell me.

Sarah: Right. Antisemitism. I really think it’s classic antisemitism, holding Israel to a standard that we would never hold another nation to.

Lenny: And still hiding it by calling it anti-Zionism, anti-colonialism. It has infected your campuses in the United States.

Sarah: Yeah. So, there are other ways of getting out of Gaza. One way in particular is through Egypt. Why is there no agency placed on Egypt for this situation?

Lenny: Egypt has a signed peace treaty with Israel. That’s item one. Item two: Egypt has a mortal enemy in the Muslim Brotherhood. Who is a member in great standing of the Muslim Brotherhood? Hamas. Going after Egypt would be satisfying in some ways, but in the balance of power in trying to figure out, is it worth it if we undermine or have Congress cut aid to Egypt? Maybe not. So, this requires very careful statesmanship and craftsman. These are some of the decisions that are made at higher levels than me.

Sarah: Very humbly stated. So, your dear old friend, Arthur Green, wrote in to say hello, and he said, Why doesn’t Israel advocacy paint Hamas as a Muslim Brotherhood Islamist jihadist terrorist group? No different than Hezbollah, which is Shiite, or Al-Qaeda. No different from the Taliban, no different from ISIS. Why can’t we just call Hamas what it truly is?

Lenny: I think Israel does. I think Israel decapitates Hamas and its leaders the same way it did in the case of Hezbollah and in the case of the IRGC, the Iranian Revolutionary Guards. A bigger problem is that the Hamas philosophy, their cult of death, has absolutely infiltrated the hearts and minds of Gazans and many, many Palestinians on the West Bank. So, what do you do with that? What you do with it was taught to us by the Allies after World War II in a massive de-Nazification plan for Germany after Germany surrendered. But even to get Hamas to surrender, it’s against their philosophy. It’s against their raison d’être, and that is a massive problem. I appreciate Art’s question, but I think we work double time, triple time to show Hamas’ terrorism. We even put out the horrible videos, which nobody in Israel wanted us to publish. But nobody saw it. Nobody took it to heart.

Sarah: Yeah. There was a screening for select members of certain committees on Capitol Hill. Very few people went. This is really horrible. I mean, I think the media is the message. Also, the universities, and it has trickled down. It’s really horrific, even to all schools.

Lenny: Let’s come up with a different motto. It’s not just the media is the message. The media is the medium. They are passing the message on. How we change that, I don’t know.

Sarah: Yeah. So, we’ve got a lot of questions like, why are we losing the propaganda game or Hasbara? What can we do? What can average people do? How do we counteract these false narratives? What about reports that Israel doesn’t allow journalists into Gaza?

Lenny: Let me handle the last one, and that is because the only journalists who would go in are those who are in the pay or in the sway of Hamas and antisemitism. No reporter is suicidal who will go in and say otherwise. There was a group of reporters a few years ago who were taken in by bus into Gaza, and it was supposedly all arranged, and it was supposed to go in and report and see everything taking place. The bus was attacked, and the reporters wouldn’t say that they were attacked. Why? Because the producers and the editors in New York and London don’t want that. That’s a different story.

I’m going to give you an idea. It’s a betan. It’s in my gut. One of the worst propagandists against Israel, or in policy making, was a man named Ben Rhodes, who worked for Obama. He’s still at it. You should see what he writes on his Twitter account with another Obamite named Tommy Vietor. They’re still at it, claiming that Israel is massacring and committing genocide. Who was Ben Rhode’s brother? The president of CBS News. He’s now in Sky News. Who does he hire? One of his first hires is an Arab newsreader who continues to attack Israel from Sky News’s broadcast. In some cases, we, the West, are doing this to ourselves. But not enough people are calling it out. I don’t say anything unless it’s proven black on white.

Sarah: Yes. Right. Okay. Some of our audience members are expecting you to have a solution for Gaza. Are Arab countries going to contribute to help form a new, quote, they say, “Democratic government” and help in financing its rebuilding?

Lenny: Another excellent question. Something that I pondered maybe eight years ago, when I wrote a piece in the Jerusalem Post, Is it time for an Arab mandate for Palestine? Excuse me, Arab mandate for the Palestinians? Then I even suggested maybe there should be a role played by some of the Gulf countries and by Egypt. Some of that’s taking place, but I’m afraid it’s not taking place in time. I’m afraid it’s taking place under pressure, and it won’t work out. But I don’t want American troops on the ground. Perhaps some of the answer is in Gazans moving by their own desire out of Gaza. The forcing of people out of their homes is to be…

Sarah: Can’t be forced to transfer.

Lenny: It’s not good.

Sarah: But every time there is warfare, there are refugees. Most of the West has opened up, there are homes for refugees. Of course, there was an exception during World War II when it was very hard for Jews to get in.

Lenny: Where are Syrians? They’re in Turkey, they’re in Europe. They’re all over.

Sarah: Right.

Lenny: Correct. Absolutely correct. I will also promote my Twitter account, because I collect photographs, and I’ve got what’s called a photographic memory. Not that I remember what I read. It’s that I remember photographs. Today, I posted pictures of a wall between Gaza and Egypt that was knocked down six or eight years ago, and tens of thousands of Gazans fled across into Egypt, to Al-Arish, to Ra’afah. It would happen again. They would move there voluntarily because they one, don’t want to be near war. Number two, they don’t want Hamas over their heads. They have to flee Hamas, which is also a reason to decapitate Hamas further. So, moving is an option. There are countries that are willing to take them. They may be far off in Indonesia or Malaysia or in South Sudan, but I am not saying forcibly move them. But if you had the choice of saving your family from Hamas or from bombs, you’d get the hell out of there.

Sarah: At this point, I think most people would prefer to leave than live among the rebels. But there are no countries that are willing to accept them that we know of.

Lenny: Publicly.

Sarah: Publicly.

Lenny: Negotiations do take place beyond, but I don’t have good answers. Maybe right now in the White House, the top-level meeting taking place is looking into some of these questions. There’s supposedly a top-level meeting taking place now on this issue, the day after. Take lessons from the past, and one of the lessons is the de-Nazification, but that would also require paying attention and focus on the Palestinian authority that is teaching this, and to West Bankers.

Sarah: Yeah. So, of course, you know that…

Lenny: I don’t have an answer.

Sarah: Yeah. The United States has ceased funding, and I wish that there were another vehicle to influence the young people coming up. But it just seems like the sermons from the mosques, whatever schooling they have, as just breeding resentment.

Lenny: Imagine going to a mosque, and you know that underneath the mosque are all kinds of mortars and bombs, and guns that are going to be used. The whole basis of the mask is built on warfare.

Sarah: Right. Okay. All right. So, Ken Abramowitz, you’re right. There’s no such thing as the West Bank. It’s called Judea and Samaria, and there are…

Lenny: Absolutely.

Sarah: Right. We agree with you 100%. They’re not Palestinians. They’re Arabs living in Gaza. So, is there a way to reach out to students that you know of in the United States? Not even Jewish students, regular, because the contempt for Israel right now, and I’m not partisan at all here, but particularly among young graduates of universities, young Democrats, is awful. I read to you that statistic, 27 Democrats, which was more than half their numbers, voted for these resolutions to stop arming Israel. So, do you know of a way to reach out to students of all ages so we could fix this problem?

Lenny: One thing that I noticed today in the press in the US, may have been even in the New York Times, that there’s a natural flow. Jewish students are leaving, or not all flowing to the Ivys, and they’re going to the south. Tulane has become Julane with so many Jewish students. Emory. Many of them are in the heart of the South, and those are… Many of the students there are Christian students, whereas up in the Ivys, too many of the professors, too many of the graduate students are themselves Jewish or anti-Israel. So, there may be a natural flow of students going to get a better education. They don’t want to sit and get a suntan on the commons in Boston. So, is it a conscious move? Is it something with a strategy? No. I pray that sanity is restored. I don’t have a better answer than that. Don’t look for better hasbara. That’s not the answer.

Sarah: Yeah. So, Dr. Steve Gersoff wrote a very good question. Why not ask if death, fi sabilillah, for the sake of Allah, is so great, why don’t the leaders of Hamas move out of Doha and go to Gaza? Yeah.

Lenny: Why don’t they send their children? Why are their children driving fancy cars in California? They’re not suckers. But everybody who follows them, including people in the West, they’re the suckers.

Sarah: Right. It is…

Lenny: Despots are despots everywhere.

Sarah: Yeah. Ah, okay. So, one person asked if your views about American policy and the current administration are helpful towards the situation.

Lenny: The obvious short answer is yes, there is a better understanding of what is at stake in the Middle East. There’s a better understanding of what is evil in the United States. I don’t think we’ve seen an understanding of evil since somebody recognized the axis of evil many years ago. So, if a democratic presidential candidate recognized the evil, recognized the good, recognized that America has a role to play in protecting interests, then his policy or her policy would be just as good. For now, we are very lucky.

Sarah: Yeah. Okay. So, we have maybe three and a half years, but we’re not sure, and we’re not sure about the midterm elections or anything else, how the balance of power might shift. No matter what your feelings are about domestic policy, I think a lot of Israelis feel a little blessed right now.

Lenny: Since I’m not an American, I am an Israeli, I will also have blessings for the president, whoever it is, of the United States.

Sarah: Right. Great. Speaking like the diplomat that you are, Lenny, really, and that, yeah. So, how far down? I am seeing elementary schools that they use Audrey Shabbas, the Arab World Studies Notebook, which is basically an anti-Zionist creed, very, very thoughtfully and carefully embedded. The anti-Zionism is embedded within almost each sentence. Do we have an alternative that we could be producing? We know that the government of Qatar has a tremendous amount of money and is funding so many universities, so many think tanks, so many politicians. I don’t know, especially while Israel is fighting these battles on seven fronts, they can match. I doubt that they can match Qatar dollar for dollar, but can we come up with alternative curricula for teachers going down to elementary school?

Lenny: You said, Can we? That is the case. You Americans have to do this. It’s not up to Israel. Israel can help, but Americans need, and it’s not just the Jews, need to recognize that wokeism is in their schools. This is part of the wokeism in the kindergartens, that you have people in drag reading stories to nursery schools. Something is amiss. A lot of this is going to have to come from within the United States to restart and recharge. Hopefully, it’s taking place in some states. You’re concerned about midterm elections. Well, you Americans have time to be involved in those midterm elections, whether it’s running for office, whether it’s going out to vote, or supporting candidates. Not my place to talk to you about that.

Sarah: Right. So, I have to say that in a world where we’re replete with misinformation, EMET does go to Congress practically every single day, and people on Capitol Hill, young foreign policy staffers depend on us to provide accurate facts and analysis for critical policy decisions about the Middle East. We’re trying to work very, very hard to do this. We get support from respected scholars and thought leaders like Ambassador Lenny Ben-David, and we’re on the front lines daily, trying to offer timely nonpartisan education on Capitol Hill. Our efforts have been successful, and we try to make impactful changes to ensure a very secure future for both the United States and for Israel. What we do is we put America’s national security interests first, and Israel is in the framework of America’s national security interests, and it has to be. We believe that Israel is defending the West from radical Jihadism in both Sunni and Shiite.

So, if you want to support us, we really do need your support. You could go to emetonline.org. Also, please support the Jerusalem Center for Security and Foreign Affairs, where Lenny works. I know they’ve changed their name from the Jerusalem Center of Public Affairs recently, which is an amazing think tank in Jerusalem. We really appreciate that.

Lenny: Sarah, may I just add a word? I opened and people who came late may not have heard me. We in Israel know of EMET’s work, and we appreciate it, and we want you to go from strength to strength.

Sarah: Thank you so much. Please, everybody, reserve November 19th, the evening of November 19th. We’re working on a dinner and you’re going to be pleasantly surprised of who we’re bringing. So, thank you so much, and thank you so much, Lenny Ben-David. It’s always a pleasure to talk to you.

Lenny: All the best. Shalom.

Sarah: Shalom.

[END]