Name: Bonus Episode: Abby Martin
Uploaded: 2023-12-01T22:03:21.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Bonus Episode: Abby Martin' from The Tim Dillon Show on Comedy Buff. Published 2023-12-01. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Bonus Episode: Abby Martin' from The Tim Dillon Show on Comedy Buff. Published 2023-12-01. Transcript available.

Bonus Episode: Abby Martin

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Tim Dillon Show.
Very special episode.
We're joined again by Noah Tishby, who is here.
No, I'm kidding.
It's Freaky Friday, and we have journalist Abby Morton here with us,
as we promised we would get.
Her documentary, Gaza Fights for Freedom, which I watched again the other night,
and a lot of people are now rediscovering the documentary
because they're uneducated about what's going on, as I am.
And you have been boots on the ground covering this issue for years
when no one cared about it.
And your concern, and what's interesting about you,
you're a big critic of Israel, we know that.
But I don't really hear a lot of people calling you anti-Semitic.
I don't see that.
I don't, I've never heard you like engage in any kind of weird conspiracy mongering
about the Jewish question or whatever.
You focus on facts, and you report facts that are uncomfortable to governments.
This is what I've always seen, right?
Whether it's the American government or the Israeli government, that's what you
do.
And you don't, you go to these places.
You have, you spent time in Gaza.
So what is, from someone who has sources there, who speaks to people there,
who knows people there, what is happening right now?
Because I think a lot of people obviously recognize Hamas's attack was brutal,
and everybody is, you know, has sympathy for people whose children are being
hostages,
or whose family is being hostages.
But there are also a lot of civilians in Gaza that are dying.
And you've covered that closer than probably anyone I know.
What is going on there now?
I'm glad that you set up that pretext, because I am a journalist critical of U.S.
empire
and its proxy forces.
And Israel is its central proxy in the Middle East.
And there's a multitude of reasons for that.
Can we move your mic just a little closer?
Right here?
Yeah, perfect.
So there's a multitude of reasons, geopolitical reasons,
why the U.S. supports and backs Israel so much.
I, as a media critic and as a propaganda critic my whole life,
I realized Israeli propaganda, echoed by the U.S.,
was such an important case study.
And so I really have done a deep dive over the last 10 years,
speaking to hundreds of Palestinians,
speaking to dozens of Israelis, including former soldiers,
going there on the ground, spending a month in the occupied West Bank.
I'm actually banned for life from entering Gaza.
I was told that I was a propagandist and an Iranian agent
from the Israeli government.
I thought that I was a Venezuelan agent and a Russian agent,
so I can't keep up.
You wear a lot of hats.
I wear a lot of hats.
So I wasn't actually able to get in,
but I worked with journalists inside through the blockade
to create Gaza Fights for Freedom.
What is going on right now is a textbook case of genocide.
And I can explain why.
This isn't just me pontificating from an armchair analysis.
These are Holocaust scholars,
three of which have actually put forward a case
against Anthony Blinken and Joe Biden for complicity in genocide.
They have actually set formal charges.
These are Holocaust scholars that are Israeli historians asserting this.
So not only that, but of course you have the crime of apartheid.
These are the most serious crimes against humanity.
So I could talk about context all day long.
I could talk about context behind the October 7th attack.
But all of that is kind of pushed to the side when you see
what is Israel doing in response right now,
and that is committing genocide against the Palestinian people.
I guess the response that they would say is that if they wanted to do a
genocide,
they would have done it already.
They're basically saying their argument is we're responding to this attack.
We're trying to get rid of Hamas,
and our mission is to eradicate the leadership of Hamas and Hamas fighters,
and they embed themselves with civilians.
This is what is out there as the party line,
and this is what is being said.
I'm sure there's elements of truth to everything, right?
So they're basically saying Hamas' command centers are all under hospitals.
I don't know if this is—obviously you're familiar with that.
Is this something that is well-known?
Is this true in your estimation?
So, okay, they say that they are targeting Hamas.
Right now, during the four-day truce,
we've seen kind of the death toll be accounted for at this moment
now that the hospitals that have been bombed relentlessly
are able to finally account for the dead.
20,000 civilians have been killed.
I'm sorry, 20,000 people have been killed.
They claim 1,000 were fighters.
So right out of the gate, that's an extraordinary amount of civilians,
70% women and children, 8,000 children, 8,000 children.
You have UN officials, you have people who have documented war zones
all over the world saying this is unprecedented.
This is an unprecedented amount of carnage.
It's a bloodbath, and it's a slaughterhouse,
and they have never seen anything like it.
So for Israel to claim that they are targeting Hamas,
it doesn't really make sense when you look at the complete destruction
and leveling of civilian areas.
They are targeting hospitals.
They are targeting schools.
They're targeting mosques where they know tons of civilians are sheltering
there.
Hamas is underground.
So why would you level the entirety of the infrastructure on top of Gaza
if you're trying to target fighters underground?
And no, there is absolutely no evidence for human shields,
and I can debunk that all day,
and there's no evidence for command centers under hospitals.
Interesting.
And is this something that, because Bill Clinton has repeated,
like a lot of people have repeated that idea
that the command centers are under the hospitals.
Early on in this conflict, there was a hospital,
I'm forgetting the name here.
Ali Arab, the one that they claimed was an errant missile?
Right.
They claimed that it was an errant missile from Hamas,
but a lot of people thought that it was potentially a strike,
a missile strike.
Where are you on that?
So there's so many lies.
I mean, Israeli propaganda, it's very well-funded.
There's a billion-dollar apparatus behind this.
There's war rooms at Tel Aviv University
that fund and employ people to, like, correct the record online.
It's a very concerted effort to obfuscate the obvious reality.
So right out of the gate on October 7th,
almost all of the lies,
all of the things that we were told turned out to be lies.
Beheaded babies, the mass rape, all of those things.
It turned out to be a lot of that was false.
We actually don't know exactly what happened on October 7th
because everything Israel said has turned out to be lies.
Then it turned to what was happening in Gaza.
Human shields,
and then the most egregious attack at first
was the Ali Arab Hospital.
500 civilians were massacred in this bombing.
It was completely shocking
because it was the largest mass casualty event ever
against Palestinians from Israel.
So that was, like, really shocking.
There was a lot of international outrage that was mounting.
And then immediately, all of a sudden,
the news became actually it was an errant missile
from Islamic Jihad.
Now, I immediately just stepped back and thought,
wow, that's so crazy that an errant rocket,
the first time in the history of this conflict,
was able to kill 500 people.
If that's the manpower of these rockets,
we would have seen a lot more civilians dead
because rockets do misfire in the Strip.
That is unprecedented level of carnage.
And so this is how you know it's false, Tim.
You don't need to know anything else
about the blast radius or the zone
or what it looked like afterward.
None of that matters.
Or even the satellite footage
that actually turned out to be debunked.
They reversed the angle of it.
This is how you know it's a lie.
Israel released doctored audio recordings
after claiming to be Islamic Jihad operatives
talking to each other,
proving that they had the command center
or that they had misfired the rocket.
Excuse me.
I'm talking about another propaganda thing
later on about the Al-Shifa hospital.
So they actually released an audio recording
of two Islamic Jihad operatives being like,
hey, man, that was my rocket.
Oh, man, like, we fucked up.
It was crazy.
And then what turned out-
And how do we know they're doctored?
Because audio forensics experts
from Channel 4 News,
which is a mainstream news publication,
they analyzed the recordings
and found out that they're recording
on two separate channels
like you would a podcast
and then mix them together.
It wasn't a legitimate phone call.
And plus, people in Gaza
don't use just cell phones.
They know everything's recorded
and monitored through surveillance.
So they use different kinds of methods
to discuss things.
And so the fact that that was a doctored recording
really just pokes a hole in the whole narrative.
Why?
If it was an errant missile-
Well, it's embarrassing, first of all.
If it was an errant missile,
why the hell?
Would you release it?
Yeah.
And then I found out, Tim,
this is insane.
All of my-
All of this comes back to 2010,
the flotilla massacre,
when Israeli forces commandeered a ship
in international waters
and executed like eight or nine activists
on board completely unarmed
that were just delivering aid to Gaza.
That's when I woke up to how egregious
the propaganda was
because I saw our mainstream media
running with the narrative
that people on the boat
were the ones who were aggressors
trying to stave off commandos
that had just executed their friends
with tables and chairs
and acting like they deserve to be executed.
Back then, Israeli forces
released an audio recording,
doctored,
claiming that the people on the ship
were saying,
go back to Auschwitz.
That turned out later to be false.
They admitted as such.
This is a playbook
that I'm realizing that they do.
Yeah.
Well, it's interesting.
The Israeli lobby,
like John Mearsheimer,
who's a historian,
wrote a book
about the Israeli lobby
and he described it
as this kind of loose coalition
of interest groups,
not all of them Jewish.
A lot of them are Christians, right?
A lot of them are like
fundamentalist Christians in America
that are deeply supportive
of all of Israel's actions, right?
And, you know,
obviously certain interest groups
have a lot of power
and have a lot of influence
and that's certainly one of them.
And, you know,
what he had said recently,
he was on Lex Friedman's podcast,
he said,
the definition of anti-Semitism
is now expanded
to include any criticism of Israel.
So if you criticize Israel's actions,
it's anti-Semitic,
but he goes,
a lot of the policies being pushed
by hardliners in Israel
aren't good for Israelis
and they're not good for Americans.
You know, a lot of,
I didn't think the Iraq war
was great for Americans, right?
I mean, all of these things
that we now know,
we look back on these,
you know, foreign wars
and how much money we've spent.
We've sent floods of refugees
all over the world
and we see these are not policies
that have been good
for Americans, right?
They enriched a small percentage
of Americans, you know.
How do you separate,
there is clearly anti-Semitism,
there are people that hate Jews,
there are people that think
they control the whole world,
there are people that think
that they're in the cupboard,
they're everywhere,
they're under the bed,
whatever it is.
How do you separate that?
Because there are some
of those people out there
and some of them are going
to these marches
and some of them are,
you know, probably,
you know,
you know,
certainly there are crazy things
going on at colleges,
people being locked in libraries,
people being harassed.
How do you separate that,
which is a real issue,
from the kind of legitimate criticism
of the actions of Israel?
And let's not forget
the rise in anti-Palestinian hate
as well.
Three people just got shot.
Just got shot.
A hundred percent.
And two of them might die
because they were wearing keffias.
Insanely horrible.
And there was a young child