Below is a partial transcript (the Substack transcript AI didn’t catch everything). -KB
Welcome to Press TV Spotlight, I'm Marzieh Hashemi. Thanks so much for being with us. Well, it's day three of a ceasefire which has come to an end. This after 48 consecutive days of some of the worst weapons to exist falling on the heads of Gazans in one of the most densely populated places in the world. Now the sight and sounds of bombs falling, phosphorus burning, cut into pieces missiles made by the USA and used by the Zionist regime against Palestinians have been quieter the last three days. This as people in a devastated Gaza try to get supplies if they are able to as uncertainty looms. Will this ceasefire be extended?
Of course, we have seen that most of the captives are women or children, some who were very, very young when they were taken by the Israeli regime. Again, you're looking at these live images here coming out of Ramallah.
And interestingly enough, of course, the Israeli regime has said that they were going to crack down on the Palestinians showing their happiness for the prisoners being released. So this was another threat by the regime: the Palestinians should control and contain their happiness. And of course, also their support for the resistance. But as you can see, it did not make a difference. And the people have come out en masse to welcome these individuals back home.
I'd like to welcome my guests now to this spotlight. Out of Morocco, Kevin Barrett, editor of Veterans Today. And out of London, Shabbir Razvi, political analyst. Thank you both for being with me. Let's start off in Morocco with Kevin. Kevin, how important is this ceasefire for the Palestinians and how significant is it that the Israeli regime was forced into a deal?
Kevin Barrett: Well, this is a big win for the Palestinian side. There are no two ways about that, and increasingly even Western commentators, ranging from the pro-Palestine Scott Ritter to the fanatical, ultra-extremist, genocidal Zionist John Bolton, agree that this is a huge win for Palestine. The Palestinians have been open to and indeed calling for a ceasefire and a hostage exchange. The main tactical purpose of the al-Aqsa storm operation was to take captives who could be exchanged for the 10,000 Palestinian prisoners who are languishing in Israeli prisons. And, of course, the Zionists then used this raid as an excuse to pump out absurd, mendacious hate propaganda based on lies, and then use that as their excuse to decimate the civilian population of Gaza. And they wanted to keep doing it and they said that they were going to eliminate Hamas and they weren't going to stop until they eliminated Hamas. That was their goal. And of course they won't be able to achieve that, and now they've had to negotiate with Hamas and the rest of the Palestinian resistance and accede to its requests for a prisoner exchange. And all of this is making the Zionists look terrible in the eyes of the world and even in the eyes of people like the administration in the U.S. They can't fail to notice the bad behavior of the Zionists, who are releasing prisoners who have been horribly mistreated in Israeli prisons and telling them not to be happy, not to smile, don't celebrate. They're almost walking “anti-Semitic” caricatures…
Why do they hate Palestinian women and children?
That's a very strange aspect of Israeli mass psychology, this hatred of Palestinian women and children. The former Justice Minister, Ayelet Sheket, who is still currently a close associate of the Netanyahu camp, made a bit of a stir a while back when she openly called for the murder of the little snakes, that's what she called Palestinian children and babies, little snakes. She said they all had to be killed and the mothers who bear them needed to be killed as well. And in saying that, she didn't get fired. She didn't get even reprimanded from within Israel. Because this is a part of shared Israeli mass psychology, genocidal hatred of Palestinian women and children. We see this also in the famous one shot, two kills T-Shirts that the IDF wears.
The existence of a Jewish state in Palestine requires genocide, and genocide means eliminating the people of Palestine. And it's women who give birth to children, as Ayelet Shaked said when she called for killing the little snakes and the mothers who bear them. And so Israelis just want to kill off and extinguish and exterminate and rid the land of all natives. It's a genocidal settler colony. And that's what Israel has always been. And as our other guests so eloquently said, the mask has now dropped and the whole world can see what Israel really is.
What explains the shocking, unprecedented scale of the ongoing genocide?
Well, I think there are two factors involved, and one is kind of a psychological factor that's peculiar to the Zionists.
Their culture, even though most founders of Zionism, and probably most of the leaders, not all of them today, but most of them, are not religious, but their Jewish heritage…is tied in with a kind of lust for biblical vengeance. And we see this in the story of the murder of 70,000 Persians in the book of Esther and elsewhere in the Jewish scriptures. So there's that cultural factor that still influences these atheists who run the Zionist entity.
The second factor is that they have gotten away with murder so many times, they think they can keep getting away with it. They got away with attacking American targets in the terrorist attacks in Egypt in 1954, the Lavon Affair. They got away with murdering 34 American sailors on the unarmed spy ship the USS Liberty in 1967, and wounding almost 200 more. And then they got away with blowing up the World Trade Center and murdering 3,000 Americans on September 11th, 2001. And I forgot to mention the two Kennedy assassinations that were largely driven by the State of Israel as well.
They've been literally getting away with murder, forever. And they largely dominate the highest levels of organized crime, finance, and journalism here in the United States. And the entire journalistic establishment, which is about 50% Jewish Zionist in terms of the owners and editors and publishers, runs interference for Zionist genocide.
Genocidal Zionists Reveal Their True, Hideous Faces