Show Notes and Transcript
Morton Klein, President of the Zionist Organization of America joins Hearts of Oak to emphasize the significance of Zionism and what the term really means. He delivers the case for the Jewish people's right to their ancestral homeland, discussing historical, legal, and biblical support for Israel, dispelling misconceptions about the region, and addresses ongoing struggles faced by them. The discussion covers ZOA's role in promoting U.S-Israel relations, combating anti-Semitism, and ...
Show Notes and Transcript
Morton Klein, President of the Zionist Organization of America joins Hearts of Oak to emphasize the significance of Zionism and what the term really means.
He delivers the case for the Jewish people's right to their ancestral homeland, discussing historical, legal, and biblical support for Israel, dispelling misconceptions about the region, and addresses ongoing struggles faced by them. The discussion covers ZOA's role in promoting U.S-Israel relations, combating anti-Semitism, and supporting security through education and advocacy efforts. Morton delves into the religious and political aspects of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, critiquing media bias and highlighting support for Israel. He criticizes the current U.S. administration's stance on Israel and emphasizes Israel's efforts to minimize civilian casualties during conflicts. The conversation concludes with reflections on Israel's challenges in international relations and combating terrorism, acknowledging the importance of advocating for truth amid anti-Israel narratives.
Morton A. Klein is National President of the Zionist Organization of America (ZOA), the oldest pro-Israel group in the U.S., founded in 1897. He is a member of the National Council of AIPAC. Mr. Klein is widely regarded as one of the leading Jewish activists in the United States.
The US Department of State has awarded Klein a “Certificate of Appreciation” “in recognition of outstanding contributions to national and international affairs,” after he delivered a major address there. He is a member of the International Board of Governors of the College of Judea and Samaria in Ariel, Israel.
He is an economist who served in the Nixon, Ford, and Carter Administrations. He has served as a biostatistician at UCLA School of Public Health and the Linus Pauling Institute of Science and Medicine in Palo Alto, California. He has been a lecturer in mathematics and statistics at Temple University.
His successful campaigns against anti-Israel bias in leading textbooks, travel guides, universities, churches, and the media, as well as his work on Capitol Hill, were the subject of 30 feature stories both here and in Israel. His scientific research on nutrition and heart disease was cited by Discover Magazine as one of the Top 50 Scientific Studies of 1992. He has been invited to testify before the US Congress, Including the US House International Relations Committee, and the Israeli Knesset.
He travelled to Germany and persuaded the publishers of Baedeker’s, the world’s leading travel guide, to correct the many anti-Israel errors in its guides to Israel and Jerusalem. He launched a campaign to correct dozens of anti-Israel errors in D.C. Heath’s “The Enduring Vision,” the most widely used American high school and college history textbook.
More than 300 of his articles and letters have been published in newspapers, magazines, and scientific journals around the world. Klein has appeared on TV and radio. Lines from his speeches appear in the respected volume entitled “Great Jewish Quotations,” He is on the speaker’s bureau of UJC, and Israel Bonds.
Connect with Morton and ZOA...
X x.com/MortonAKlein7
x.com/ZOA_National
WEBSITE zoa.org
Interview recorded 11.4.24
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WEBSITE heartsofoak.org/
PODCASTS heartsofoak.podbean.com/
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*Special thanks to Bosch Fawstin for recording our intro/outro on this podcast.
Check out his art https://theboschfawstinstore.blogspot.com/ and follow him on X twitter.com/TheBoschFawstin
TRANSCRIPT
(Hearts of Oak)
And it is wonderful to have Morton Klein with us from the Zionist Organization of America. Morton, thank you so much for your time today.
(Morton Klein)
It's great to be here during these very extraordinary and important times.
They are, and that's probably what makes this conversation even more interesting with what is happening currently over in Israel.
People can obviously follow you @MortonAKlein7.
That is your Twitter handle. And ZOA, not Z-O-A, like the Americans like to say, ZOA.org, ZionistOrganisationOfAmerica.org.
I'd encourage our viewers and listeners to use both of those resources and understand what is happening in the Middle East at the moment.
Now, there's lots to talk about. You're obviously president of the Zionist Organization of America.
You've got a number of other accolades into your name, but it is this specifically which I'm intrigued and want to have a conversation about.
And actually, I saw your name on the back of Robert Spencer's book.
We had him on a few weeks ago on the Palestinian delusion.
And you were there as an individual promoting the book and endorsing it.
So I thought, I need to reach out to Morton. So it's great to have you on.
Lots to discuss. And I think probably if we can step back and ask about the term Zionism before we jump into what is happening in the current day Israel.
And I certainly call myself a Christian Zionist. And that's from a biblical understanding 3,000 years since Jerusalem was founded as a capital of Israel under King David.
And then much further back, the promise given to Abraham. But maybe that's a spiritual understanding of the term, and the term Zionism is not necessarily a spiritual concept.
Maybe you can unpack a little bit the term Zionism before we delve into some of the other issues.
It's really a very simple term. All it means is that the Jews have a right to their ancient homeland that was given to them, for those who believe in the Bible, and a couple of billion people do, by God.
In fact, he gave the Jews the land that Israel controls now, and much more.
So this is a fraction of what the Jewish homeland consists of, according to the Bible and what God has promised in the Bible.
It is called the promised land because God promised it to the Jewish people.
We are the people who God promised the land to. That's why it's called the promised land.
But it's not only a biblical right to have a Jewish state, but numerous international legal resolutions also give that right.
The League of Nations Covenant, Article 22, the British Mandate for Palestine, the UN Charter, Article 80, the San Remo Resolution, the Lodge-Fist Resolution, the Anglo-American Resolution, and more.
Legally, under international law, gave this land to the Jews when it was essentially a wasteland, just a desert.
When the Balfour Declaration said this land is going to be given as a mandate in trust for the Jewish people in 1917.
And historically, the Jews have lived in this land for thousands of years. This has been the place where Jewish people lived and occupied and lived in for all this time.
And so all Zionism means is the Jews have a right to a country, just like the French have a country, the Italians have a country, even the Irish have a country, and the British have a country, and the Jews.
There are 56 Muslim countries in the world, 56 or 57, why can't there be one small, little, tiny Jewish country, which is one-eighth of 1% of the landmass of the Middle East?
There are 22 Arab countries in the Middle East.
Israel is one-eighth of 1% of that land. So Zionism is not a complicated term.
It simply means the Jews have a right to a homeland, just like so many other people have it.
And this is a homeland, unlike most other countries in the world, where the Jews have lived in for thousands and thousands of years.
That's what Zionism means. Nothing more, nothing less.
Over the weekend, I actually went to the Churchill war rooms in London.
And part of the story on Churchill, obviously, is involvement in the Belfort Declaration.
And you see those maps and the discussion of British politicians and their relationship with Israel and whether they were pro-Israel or not.
And you realize Israel is tiny.
And you expand it out. Now, the Middle East is large and Israel is tiny.
And it makes you realize that most people, I think, have forgotten the size of Israel in comparison to the Middle East.
And it is really quite small.
The Arab countries are 800 times the size of Israel.
As I said, it's one-eighth of 1% of the land mass of the Middle East.
It is smaller than New Jersey.
It is smaller than Rhode Island. It is a tiny, tiny land.
With 7 million Jews and 2 million Arabs.
It's remarkable. The Arabs have a right to live in Israel, the Muslim Arabs and the Arab Christians as well.
They have a right to vote. They're in the parliament, Israel's parliament.
They're in the Supreme Court. They're in judges and courts throughout Israel.
Their doctors, almost half of the doctors in Hadassah, Israel's major hospital, are Arabs.
And yet the world, the Arab world, says the Jews have no right to be there.
And it's really a racist, anti-Semitic, hateful disgrace to say that the Jews can't have this little tiny homeland.
We talked about the term Zionism, but I want to ask you about the Zionist Organization of America, their role, why it's needed.
You've headed up the ZOA away for, what, 28 years now, I think?
31.
31, sorry. I've got my three years. I blame COVID for that.
So that three years have disappeared.
Do you want to just let us know why it exists and why it's needed?
The Zionist Organization of America is the oldest and one of the largest pro-Israel groups in the United States, founded in 1897 for a sole purpose, to reestablish the Jewish state of Israel.
That's why it was re-established. Past presidents include Louis Brandeis, a famous Supreme Court justice, Abahel Silver, Stephen Wise.
These are famous Jewish leaders.
And that's its original purpose. Once Israel was re-established in 1948, ZOA's role has been to fight for strong U.S.-Israel relations and for the safety and security and prosperity of the Jewish state of Israel.
And also, by the way, in recent years, fight against the scourge, the ugly scourge of irrational, mindless, anti-Semitism, Jew hatred and Israel bashing.
So that's really been our purpose. We have a legal division.
We have people on Capitol Hill who are educating members of Congress about these issues.
We take young kids to Israel twice a year.
We take adults to Israel. We have a trip coming up in June for adults where we go all over Israel, including Judea and Samaria, Hebron, Afrat, Ariel, Maladumim, Eli, those smaller areas in Israel.
And we also have a campus department. We're on 80 different campuses bringing in speakers, disseminating literature, telling the truth of the Arab-Islamic war against Israel and the West because that's what it is.
It is an Arab-Islamic war against Israel and the West.
We now see it in all the rallies on campuses and around the world.
They say from the river to the sea, meaning Israel should not exist.
They don't say there should be a Palestinian state in Judea and Samaria, the West Bank and Gaza and half of Jerusalem.
They say no Israel. So these are despicable, vicious, ugly human beings that want to destroy this tiny little Jewish state of Israel within any borders.
They're not looking for a Palestinian state solution.
They're looking for an end of Israel solution.
And we're fighting against this with all of our heart and soul.
Tell us about, because you mentioned it's the political fight, it's the media fight, you mentioned about on campuses with students.
I mean, kind of break those down, because it is about winning hearts and souls and minds over to the position that Israel do have a right to exist like any other nation.
And yet there seems to be a lot of pushback, certainly in our media and massively in our universities and educational establishments.
It's incredible. After 80 years of re-establishing the state of Israel, remember 2,000 years ago, there was a Jewish state that was destroyed really by the Romans 2,000 years ago. This was the first Holocaust.
The Romans murdered 600,000 Jews.
And then they renamed this area Judea and Samaria, the Jewish state, Philistinia, translated to Palestine.
So this is a Roman word. If this really was an Arab country, which it never was, why would they use a Roman name to name it?
Palestine is a Roman name.
Moreover, Arabs can't pronounce the letter P.
They say Palestine with a B. They can't pronounce it. Would they name their own country with a letter that they can't even pronounce?
There was never a Palestine. There were never any Palestinian kings and queens.
The only state that ever existed in this area has been a Jewish state.
In fact, 99% of the Palestinian Arabs live under their own control.
Israel has given away Gaza and 40% of Judea and Samaria, the West Bank.
99% of the Arabs live in those areas under Abbas's rule, the dictator, terrorist, Abbas's rule.
They have their own parliament, their own schools, their own textbooks, their own newspapers, their own radio and TV businesses, police force.
They run their own lives totally in Gaza under Hamas, the Nazi-like dictatorship, and in Judea and Samaria under Abbas, another terrorist dictator.
By the way, I don't know how many of your listeners know this, an ugly fact.
Mahmoud Abbas pays Arabs a lifetime pension to murder Jews.
If an Arab kills a Jew, They get a lifetime pension at five times the average rate of a salary of a Palestinian.
It is very lucrative to murder Jews. They spend $400 million a year to murder Jews. How many people know this?
Why would our college kids are defending a regime that pays people to murder Jews?
By the way, and Americans, they've murdered Americans in Israel.
And the Arab who murders Americans also gets a lifetime pension.
And if the Arab was killed murdering a Jew or an American, his or her family gets the lifetime pension.
So this is the most heinous regime on the face of the earth.
And it is just mind-boggling that people around the world are supporting this regime and supporting Hamas in Israel's existential war.
Hamas, Article 7 of their charter calls for the murder of every Jew on earth, every Jew on earth.
Article 13 calls for the destruction of Israel.
They massacred 1,200 innocent Jews, raped them, mutilated them, tortured them, and then kidnapped 250 mostly Jews. Six Americans, I might add, are left.
And now they're saying that out of the 140 left, that they released 100, out of the 140 left, they're saying they don't think they have 40 Jews there.
In other words, it's likely that these Hamas monsters have murdered all of the Jewish hostages, murdered them all.
The world should wake up and understand this is an Islamic, radical Islamic war against the West and against the Jews.
Mahmoud al-Zahar, the co-founder of Hamas, two months ago on the Internet, said, I want the world to understand this. This is the co-founder of Hamas.
First, we're going to kill all the Jews, but we're not done after that.
Next, we're going to kill all the despicable Christians. And then all the non-Muslims establish a caliphate where Islam rules the world. He said it two months ago.
And so you have these non-Muslims supporting Hamas, who wants to kill every one of them.
Not to mention, they immediately say every gay person will hang and kill immediately.
The gay people, the transgender, they're dead immediately.
So how are these left-wing students and left-wing people around the world supporting the most despicable ideology on the face of the earth, the ideology of the Hamas and Abbas regimes.
I want to pick up on a few of those, and I would love for the Western liberals to have a pride rally through Gaza or West Bank and see how long that lasts.
But that's a whole other issue. Modern-day Israel has been for 75 years, give or take a year, since 1948.
And re-establishing that entity, that territory that had been Israel before the Romans removed, basically removed it from the face of the map.
But tell us about that, because you obviously look closely at, since 1948, at the establishment, Israel has had to fight for its survival on a nearly daily basis.
Israel's military spending is huge compared to other countries, and it must do that because it has to defend itself.
I mean, tell us about that, because that 75 years, I see it as a Christian that Israel have the right to exist, have the right to take the land that is theirs, and seem to be a natural, progression from the collapse of the Ottoman Empire to actually Israel re-establishing that in that vacuum.
And yet many critique and mock and attack Israel simply for the right of existing in their land, which should be a given, really.
Those who oppose the Jewish state's right to exist are mocking God Almighty from the Christian and Jewish Bibles, are mocking the United Nations resolutions and England's resolutions who controlled this legally, this land legally, since 1917.
And it's nothing less than overt Jew hatred that's all it is. It's pure Jew hatred and
Israel has offered a Palestinian state to the Arabs four times in the last 20 years, four times.
Ehud Olmert was the most recent one, where Ehud Olmert, the prime minister, offered 97% of Judea and Samaria, the West Bank, 3% of Israel proper to make up for the 3% he couldn't give away because there's a half a million Jews living there.
So Olmert offered virtually all of the West Bank, half of Jerusalem, billions of dollars in aid, and Mahmoud Abbas said, said, no.
I called up the prime minister.
How could he not turn down? This is not a compromise.
You've given them every single part of the disputed territories and half of Jerusalem.
And Olmert said to me, Abbas said to me, you must eliminate three clauses in the agreement.
One, you must eliminate the clause that says we accept Israel as a Jewish state.
Abbas said, I'll never accept Israel as a Jewish state. Two, you must eliminate the clause that says you must limit the number of Arabs we bring into Israel proper to 150,000.
I want to bring in millions if I went into Israel. I will not accept a limitation on the number of Arabs I bring into Israel proper.
And three, you must eliminate the clause that says no further claims.
And the Olmert says, but that's the deal. We're giving you everything, virtually everything.
It ends all the claims. It's done. Peace. And Abbas said, I won't sign it until you get rid of those three clauses.
So they've been offered a state four times, turned it down every time in the last 20 years.
In the last 80 years, they've been offered a state eight times, starting with the Peel Commission in 1937, where they offered 95% of the rest of Palestine, 80% of original Palestine mandate went to Jordan.
There's only 20% left of the original Palestine mandate.
The Peel Commission offered 95% of the rest of Palestine to the Arabs, not 5% of the Jews, the Arabs said no.
In other words, they say no. They don't want a state.
They want Israel destroyed. They won't accept a Jewish state. That's the deal.
Because from 1948 to 1967, the Arabs controlled all of the West Bank, all of Gaza, half of Jerusalem.
They had it. Did they establish a state when they personally controlled it? No.
Because the goal is not a Palestinian state. It's Israel's destruction.
It's Israel's destruction. Let me show you a picture if you can see this.
This is the Palestinian Authority's official emblem that they commissioned.
This is their official emblem. You notice it's the shape of all of Israel with a keffiyeh over all of it, not just the West Bank and Gaza and Eastern Jerusalem, all of it.
Arafat, the arch terrorist in the centre, and a Kalashnikov rifle.
So their official emblem is all of Israel is ours.
What more proof do you need that they have no interest in a Palestinian state solution? They have in an end of Israel solution.
That's what they're interested in. And by the way, I can show you another thing.
It's quite interesting.
Every Arab that murders a Jew gets a poster. This is one of the Arabs who murdered a Jew.
This is on all the high school walls, all the university walls, calling him a martyr and a hero.
This is just one of hundreds of posters honouring Jews. And when a terrorist who killed Jews dies, they have a parade and they honour him.
What a great man or woman he was.
And they hand out candy and sweets to each other, praising murder. They glorify murder.
They glorified massacres. They glorify rape. They glorify terrorism.
This is a vicious, Nazi-like, despicable regime. And the world has to wake up because the radical Muslims are coming after everyone that's not Muslim, not just the Jews.
People better start to understand this and start supporting Israel, who's fighting a war against Hamas, to protect the entire world from radical Islam, not just Israel.
Is part of the problem that, I know on the Jewish side, you've got a weird mix of those who support Israel and Israel's right to exist from a biblical point of view, from a spiritual point of view, and those who support it from probably a social, historical, cultural point of view.
So you've got that weird mix in Judaism, which always confuses me.
But then on the other side, you've also got the world refusing to recognize that this is a clash between Islam and Judaism.
And the West thinks that you can come up with a solution which is a land-based solution. And if you've got one side wanting to destroy the other, actually, you've got a problem.
And the world doesn't seem to want to wake up to the reality that this is not simply a land issue, that the Islamic nations will not be happy until Israel doesn't exist.
Am I correct in my assumption or am I completely off?
The proof of what you just said is the fact they've been offered a state, the Palestinian Arabs, eight times in the last 80 years, four times in the last 20 years. They've said no.
When they controlled all this land themselves for 19 years, 48 to 67, they didn't establish a state.
They still were committing terrorist acts. This is a religious war. war.
The radical Muslims believe that the Jews or the Christians have no right to any land in the Middle East that is all theirs. Lebanon was a Christian country.
The radical Muslims destroyed Lebanon. It is now a Muslim country.
They massacred hundreds of thousands of Christians until Hezbollah.
Now Hezbollah has taken control of Lebanon.
So this is a religious war, and that's why it has nothing to do with land.
Land for peace is nonsense. It's been offered repeatedly. They say no.
It's a religious war. The issue is they don't want Israel in their midst.
They don't want a Christian country in their midst. They don't want non-Muslims in their midst.
I've met with many Christians who live in various parts of the Arab world.
They're scared to death for their lives.
Their lives are made miserable and dangerous by their fellow Muslims.
This is a reality, so yes land for peace has been offered repeatedly, turned down every single time, it's a religious war. The radical Arabs will not be satisfied until Israel doesn't exist, just like they weren't satisfied until Lebanon was no longer a Christian country.
Tell us I'm curious the ZOA obviously exists in the US in America and America, I think was Truman was one of the first leaders to actually recognize the state of Israel uh back in, just after the creation of Israel in 48 and there is that close link between America and Israel.
Do you want to just expand on that a little bit? Because geopolitically, that's a fascinating relationship.
And maybe then we can get up later into where it now sits at the moment between that maybe being more fractured than it has been.
But yeah, America and Israel have always been strong allies, starting with that Truman Declaration of Israel's right to exist in 1948.
Harry Truman, as president of the United States in 1948, was the first country in the vote at the United Nations to recognize the state of Israel.
Or maybe they cast the deciding vote, I'm not sure. But they certainly cast the vote to support Israel.
But the polls at that time in America showed Americans supported Israel by 80% of Americans supported the right of the Jewish people to have a state.
So this was overwhelming support in the United States.
The chief of staff to White House counsel to Truman was begging Truman to recognize it.
Quoting from the Bible, he repeatedly quoted the lines from the Bible saying, this land was given to the Jews, Mr. President, you must recognize it.
And by the way, many presidents since then have publicly stated there should be an Israel before there was an Israel.
John Adams, Franklin Roosevelt, Teddy Roosevelt, and many others have in their speeches, I've said, we hope and pray that a Jewish state is re-established.
So there's been a love affair with the leaders of America and the American people and the Jewish state since America was created.
George Washington was a supporter. In fact, this is an interesting story.
Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and I believe John Adams, I think.
Proposed that the seal of the United States, which is now an eagle holding out its wings, they proposed the seal should be Moses splitting the sea as the pharaoh and the military Egyptians were coming across the sea to come and kill all the Jews who had just escaped.
All the Israelis, the Hebrews who had just escaped, and the sea splits and swallows up all the military while the Jews are watching in the scene beforehand and cheering.
That's the seal that Franklin Jefferson and Adams wanted as a seal of America.
That's the kind of connection America's had to the Jewish people.
It was barely voted down, barely voted. It almost became the seal.
So to this day, in a recent poll, who do you support in this war in America, Hamas or Israel?
I'm shocked. It's only 82 percent should be 100 percent. But it's 82% say Israel should be fighting against this vicious regime of Hamas.
So there's overwhelming support in America. There's even overwhelming support in Congress.
It has weakened. There are now a number of congressmen who are speaking out inappropriately in a hostile way toward Israel.
But nonetheless, the overwhelming majority of the Congress is supportive of Israel.
And that's been true really since Israel was – America was established in 1776.
There's been support for the re-establishment of a state and now for the state itself.
Well let me throw in some other kind of facts on that, I think the US is Israel's largest trading partner, I think I read is about 50 billion trade back and forward and of course you got the military aid that goes to Israel every year of billions and you mentioned the beginning about the U.S. backing Israel in the U.N.
And the U.S. has used a veto dozens and dozens of times in the U.N.
Supporting Israel, backing Israel.
And, of course, President Trump moved the U.S. embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem despite all the pushback, despite the debate over that.
But all of that is actually Israel is shoulder to shoulder. And there have been a time where maybe Britain was shoulder-to-shoulder with Israel.
That is still there in relation to Europe, but actually it is the U.S.
that seems to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with Israel.
Well, let me first tell you about, you mentioned the aid, billions of dollars in aid. Let me tell something that I'm sure most of your viewers do not know.
Israel was getting half a billion dollars in aid, 500 million, until the late 70s.
Then Carter was pushing the deal with Israel to give away the entire Sinai which was five times the size of Israel. Israel when they controlled the Sinai developed four major oil wells themselves in the Sinai these oil wells gave Israel two and a half billion dollars in income in 1978. And Menachem Begin, the prime minister, then said, we cannot give away the Sinai because we will lose two and a half billion dollars of oil wells we found, we developed ourselves.
And we can't do it. Carter said, I will make up the difference.
I'll give you the extra two and a half billion. So it went from 500 million to three billion.
But this is not really America's money per se.
Israel gave up two and a half billion. So $2.5 billion of the aid Israel gets is the fact that they gave up the oil wells.
And do you know, Peter, how much income today those four oil wells would be delivering to Israel?
$10 billion because oil prices have gone up dramatically. So they've given up a tremendous amount.
And people forget. Do you know how much aid Egypt gets from America?
It's never mentioned. $2.5 billion.
$2.5 billion for Egypt. Jordan, $1 billion. The Palestinian Authority, a terrorist dictatorship, gets almost $1 billion in aid right now.
So people forget about the aid others get. And with Israel, 97% of the aid they get is spent in America, buying equipment here in America.
So it comes right back to America in any event.
And you mentioned that Trump moved the embassy to Jerusalem.
I was intimately involved in that issue with Senator John Kyle, who's a hero that no one even remembers.
He's the one who really pushed this issue more than anyone else.
And the vote to move the embassy in 1995 was 93 to 5 in the Senate, 93 to 5, 347 to 37 in the House.
In other words, over 95% of Congress voted to move the embassy.
Bill Clinton was against it. Now, he couldn't veto it because it would be overridden because it was such an overwhelming support.
So he ignored it. If you ignore a law, if a president ignores a law, it automatically becomes law in 30 days. and it became law.
And then Senator Dianne Feinstein had put in what's known as a poison pill.
She said, any president can say, I'm not moving it if there's a security issue.
And each president for 18 years said there's a security issue and never moved it.
But people, of course, predicted if you move it, there'll be violence all over the place.
Of course, it turned out to be completely false. There was no violence.
But let me tell you something else that I'm sure most of your viewers do not know.
Of course, they want to move the embassy to Jerusalem because Jerusalem is the capital of Israel.
Jerusalem has been the holiest state to the Jewish people since time immemorial.
But the Arabs say this is their holy city. Well, is it? Is Jerusalem holy to Muslims?
Jerusalem was the capital only of Israel throughout history, never of any other country.
When the Palestinians conquered Palestine in 716, they made Ramleh their capital, not Jerusalem.
It's called the Temple Mount, not the Mosque Mount because the Jewish temple was on this area.
The majority of people living in Jerusalem since 1850, the first census, have been Jews.
The overwhelming majority of people living there since 1850 have been Jews.
The Jewish holy books mention the word Jerusalem 700 times. How many times is the word Jerusalem in the Koran?
How many times is the word Jerusalem, if it's so holy to Muslims, this is their holy book, how many times is it mentioned? Zero.
Not a single time. How can it be so holy to them if it's not in their holy book?
So they say, Muhammad went from Jerusalem to heaven.
But that's not what the Koran says. Read the Koran. It says that Muhammad went from the furthest mosque to heaven. It didn't say Jerusalem.
And they say, well, the furthest mosque was in Jerusalem. Well, when the Koran was written, there was not a single mosque in all of Jerusalem.
So if Muhammad went from the furthest mosque, it couldn't be in Jerusalem.
There were no mosques there.
So the truth is that Jerusalem is not holy to Muslims.
In fact, from 48 to 67, when they controlled Jerusalem, When they captured that war, they captured it.
They allowed it. The Jordan and the Arabs allowed it to become a slum.
There was virtually no water, electricity or plumbing.
There were 58 synagogues in Jerusalem that they captured.
They destroyed all 58 of them to eliminate proof that Jews, this was a holy place to them.
So that's another thing that most people don't understand.
Jerusalem is minimally holy to Muslims at most.
It is a holy to Jews and possibly Christians. I'm not a Christian, so I don't know the Bible so well, the Christian Bible, that may be holy to Christians, but it is not holy to Muslims.
Yeah, well, I think the holiness to Christians is simply because of the biblical story.
And without Judaism, there'd be no Christianity. Without Judaism, there'd be no Jesus.
But I love the way Muslims can claim hold of a city because Muhammad flew there on a winged donkey in his dreams.
So if we could all actually take our dreams and claim to hold, we could be in paradise more.
We could be anywhere.
But again there was no, it wasn't from Jerusalem it's from the furthest mosque, no mosque in Jerusalem, it can't be Jerusalem and by the way this is interesting, not a single Arab leader except from Jordan ever visited Jerusalem when the when the Arabs controlled it.
It meant nothing to them, Mecca and Medina are the holy cities for Muslims, not Jerusalem, it's high time we make that publicly clear.
No 100 % and Muhammad probably never went to Jerusalem if Muhammad did exist, but that's a whole other conversation I'll take up with Robert Spencer.
Can I ask you, because the support for Israel comes from different sections of society, and certainly there is a strong support from churches, from Christianity, not across the board, certainly, but there is.
Can you tell us, where does the support, the backing, individuals, organizations standing up for Israel's right to exist, where does that come from?
I mean, have you been surprised maybe with some of the areas it's come from that you weren't expecting?
The strongest support in America for the Jewish state and the Jewish people comes from the 80 million evangelical Christians.
Why are they so supportive of Israel as a Jewish state? Because it's in the Bible. Because God gave the land to the Jews.
When I speak at churches, they say it's in the Bible. This land was given to Jews by God. End of discussion.
So and the Jewish people are not nearly as strong Bible believers as the Christians.
So you have stronger support for Israel among the Christian evangelicals than you do, frankly, among the Jews.
So for most Christians, it's simply a matter of religion and God.
For others who are not religious, they recognize that this land was given to Israel under international law.
In 1917, the Balfour Declaration and many UN resolutions after it, and they accept the fact that that's right. Plus, they see it's reasonable.
Why should there be 56 Muslim states and not a single Jewish state where the Jews can practice their religion in the way they're supposed to?
So I think it's just a rational support for what's right, for what's moral, for what's decent, for what's just, that most non-religious people support the right of the Jews to have the state. It's a tiny little state.
There's over 200 million Muslims in the Middle East. There's only 7 million Jews.
Imagine if there were – there's 22 Arab states. Imagine if there were 22 Jewish states and one tiny little Arab state the size of Israel.
And the Jews would be saying, we want a 23rd Jewish state carved out of this tiny Arab state. The world would say, this is ridiculous.
The Arabs have nothing, this little tiny state. Leave them alone.
But that's the situation we have. 22 Arab states, 99.5% of the land mass, and they still want to make Israel even smaller in order to make it easier to destroy.
That's the basis. It's a religious war to destroy the Jewish state.
It has nothing to do with land per se. It has nothing to do with the Palestinian state. Nothing.
Because they could have had it eight times in the last 80 years.
They said no every single time.
Can I finish just with the current situation, which we'll not give justice to in our time, but just to touch on it.
And I am perplexed at how Israel seemed to be so bad at the PR war, at the publicity war, the media war.
But I've been intrigued watching kind of different countries holding with Israel and then pulling back in the media conversation.
And what is it like, maybe for our viewers, I mean, our viewers are 50-50, US, UK and Europe.
Maybe just give us your thoughts on where the media and the government is in terms of support for Israel over the last six months.
You mean the US government?
Yeah, yeah.
This government in America under Joe Biden and Barack Hussein Obama, Obama never left Washington.
Every president, when they're finished their term or terms, they go back home.
Obama stayed in Washington.
Obama is running the show behind the scenes. How do I know this?
Because almost every person that Biden has appointed that affects Israel is a friend of Obama's, virtually every one, and is hostile to Israel.
This government of Biden, Obama, Blinken is the most hostile to Israel we've ever had in America, I'm sorry to say.
So, and when the war started, Biden did come to Israel two days after the Hamas massacre.
And he said he has total support for Israel. But in that speech, the original speech on the tarmac, Biden said we need to establish a Palestinian state.
Now, that is his first speech two days after the massacre of 1,200 innocent Jews.
What's he bringing up a state for? It shows the hostility he has toward Israel.
And now he's pushing for a state relentlessly.
He condemns Israel for killing too many civilians. Let me tell you something.
The record is this is the smallest number of civilians per capita ever killed in any war in history.
And the reason for that is Israel drops leaflets before they hit a building to tell the Arabs to get out of the building. They put knock bombs where they knock on the top of the roof as a signal, get out of here. They call on cell phones, get out of here.
They protect civilians to the detriment of their own soldiers.
And when Hamas says 32,000 civilians were killed, first of all, Hamas is a terrorist Nazi-like monster group. Who believes them anyway?
But the fact is 15,000 of the alleged 30,000 or so have been terrorists. These are combatants.
And the other 15,000, a number of distinguished statisticians have studied the data from Hamas and say these are grotesquely exaggerated.
It is only a few thousand that have been killed.
And moreover, they say, look at what they say every day, Hamas' division telling you how many civilians died.
The same number of civilians die every single day according to the data of Hamas. That's not possible.
This showed you how fraudulent the data is.
So we have to really thank Israel for being extraordinarily humane in protecting civilians And let me tell you, in any war, innocent civilians die.
You can't have war without civilians dying. If you say to yourself, I won't go to war unless I can assure no civilians will die, the tyrants will win.
Hitler will win. Hamas will win. Because civilians naturally will die in a war. It's tragic.
And now when Biden went crazy, when Israel mistakenly killed seven aid workers, in wars, these types of tragic mistakes happen all the time.
In America's wars, we have killed many civilians' envoys, mistaking them for terrorists.
In Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, I can list them. I won't.
We've hit wedding parties by mistake, killing 50 people attending a wedding, including the bride.
So this happens in war. So the fact that Biden is making a major deal out of this tragic mistake just shows he is trying to find anything to put enormous pressure on Israel to set up a Palestinian terrorist state.
And remember, Israel gave away all of Gaza.
And what did they get in return? They got a Hamas regime and 30,000 rockets aimed at civilians, 30,000 since 2005 when the regime was established.
Why is it wise to give them even more land, the West Bank and Gaza, headed by who, Hamas, by Abbas, by another terrorist?
It'll give them more power to endanger Israel. And this state would be on Israel's longest border, directly adjacent to 70% of Israel's population.
It would be a tragic mistake to establish a state. That's why the Israeli people, 80% and more say we cannot have it, it's too dangerous.
Biden has become enormously hostile to Israel, despite the fact that overwhelming numbers of Americans support Israel, and we are devastated by this.
We're terribly disappointed by this.
But outside of this regime and Obama's first regime, the American governments have been extraordinarily supportive of Israel throughout the establishment of Israel and throughout America's own establishment in 1776.
You know, well we'll finish it up, there my criticism of Israel is they were for 13 years, they were far too patient with Hamas whenever they pulled out in 2010 to actually going in 2023 and it wasn't of their own accord, they went in actually, it was because of that attack on 7th October, so Israel had been remarkably reserved I think in how how they've dealt with them, and maybe they should have been a heck of a lot stronger. But that's another conversation.
Morton, I really appreciate you coming along. I do thoroughly love and admire the work that ZOA do there.
I know people go on the website, they can find not only your work on campuses, they can find news articles, they can donate, and there's many ways they can support you on ZOA.org.
So thank you so much for your time today.
Peter, thank you for your holy and important work to give a podium to people who are telling the truth of the Arab-Islamic war against Israel and the West. Very holy work you do. Thank you.
