Trained as a journalist by the BBC, Tony Gosling is a British land rights activist, historian & investigative radio journalist. He interviewed me last night (Jan. 24). Below are selected extracts. -KB
Tony Gosling: So what do you make of what's been going on in Gaza? Most people looking at this absolutely horrified. And we do see a large proportion of the press, particularly the Murdoch press, doing everything they can, bending over backwards, to defend the actions of Netanyahu and the Israeli state.
Kevin Barrett: It’s absolutely disgusting. It is the most in your face transparent genocide in human history. You can argue about what really happened in the Armenian genocide between Armenia and Turkey. You can even argue whether that really was a genocide, as some Turks do. You can make the same kinds of arguments around the Jewish Holocaust of World War II. And indeed, the Holocaust revisionists have a surprisingly good case for many of their contentions. And so you can argue until the cows come home about these horrific mass killings and ethnic cleansings that have defaced the history of humanity.
But you can't really argue about what's going on in Gaza now, because it's all being televised. The genocide is on television and it's being covered nonstop, even though the Israelis have murdered more than 100 journalists already and counting, trying to make sure it doesn't get reported.
Israel is clearly deliberately targeting civilians, civilian infrastructure, deliberately destroying fresh water supplies, blocking food supplies, blocking fuel supplies in the middle of winter, and then blowing up the housing. They’ve blown up the majority of the housing in Gaza. The Israelis are very clear in their intention to murder as many as they can and expel the rest. That’s genocide. It’s the clearest case of genocide under international law that has ever existed.
The Israelis are currently in court, being prosecuted by South Africa for genocide. We're expecting a preliminary ruling on the emergency measures that may be ordered on Friday.
So every one of these Murdoch papers, every one of these journalists, every one of these people who are defending this genocide are guilty of complicity in that genocide. And theoretically, they all are subjected to the legal punishments for mass murder, conspiracy to commit mass murder and genocide which would be life in prison in many jurisdictions and death in others.
Well we're seeing though, aren't we, amazingly many Zionists actually out on the streets of Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, particularly Tel Aviv, and Haifa as well by the way, even campaigning with Palestinians. Many Zionists believe that Netanyahu is in the process of completely destroying their dream.
I understand why they think that, because this has been a complete disaster for Israel. And one of the reasons Israel is pursuing this horrific and genocidal and indeed self-destructive policy is because Netanyahu can't stop or he might not only be thrown out of office but he might go to prison. Basically as soon as that war emergency is done then Netanyahu faces his legal reckoning for corruption cases. And once he’s out of power he’s going to be very, very vulnerable. His only hope is to stay in power, and the only way he can stay in power is as a sort of wartime commander-in-chief. So Netanyahu’s interests are overruling Israel’s interests in its own self-preservation.
It’s possible that the Palestinian resistance calculated this when it thought about what they would be doing on October 7th. They may have seen this vulnerability, that they could put Netanyahu in a position where he would pursue a self-destructive course. I think they thought it likely that Israel would go into Gaza. And the Palestinian resistance has built powerful fortifications in Gaza in the form of a tunnel network that was designed to basically pull the Israelis into a sort of Chinese finger trap where they can't possibly win.
And so all Israel has been able to do is mass murder civilians and get itself prosecuted for genocide and suddenly wake up most of the world to the crimes of Israel and arguably to change the world's view of Jews as a group.
Jews have been enjoying a kind of impunity since World War II. Throughout all of history up until World War II, Jews were looked on as having very problematic characteristics by virtually every people that they'd ever been in contact with. And then with the Holocaust narrative that came out of World War II, suddenly Jews enjoyed total impunity. And they've been running roughshod ever since, and basically took over the United States.
And now with this genocide, suddenly huge numbers of people are not only rethinking Israel versus Palestine, but they're also noticing that this ridiculous impunity that Jewish power has been enjoying now since World War II needs to be critiqued and taken down.
A lot of the Jews that we speak to would argue that it's not Jewish power you're dealing with there, that Zionism is a hijacking of the Jewish faith and they are part of the fight back against it. For example, here in Bristol, many Jews want nothing to do with this (genocide). Jews were killed during the Second World War, they were put into labor camps by the Nazis, because they weren’t Zionists. That was a big sorting out that went on, and Hitler was doing the sorting. And if you weren’t a Zionist Jew, you were going to be put in the mincing machine.
Well, yes, I think that's true, Tony. But I think that that illustrates a kind of dynamic within Jewish culture. I think that Jewish culture has a very powerful ethnocentric tribal dimension.
Now, different people react to that differently. American culture also has an ethnocentric tribal dimension, and I reacted to that by ultimately becoming a rebel against it. I was so disgusted by America's actions in Vietnam and other similar actions around the world, and by the unsolved coup d'etat of the Kennedy assassination and things like that, when I was young, that I became very much a rebel against American tribal power.
In the Jewish tribe, you have similar dynamics, where you have some people who become immensely chauvinistic and tribal—when they pick up the New York Times in the morning, all they care about is “what’s good for the Jews.” Many of my Jewish friends have somebody in their family like that. And then there’s somebody else in the family who rolls their eyeballs at Uncle Hymie who’s stuck on “what’s good for the Jews” and has no use for the tribal dimension of Jewish culture.
So many Jews are aghast at the extreme Zionist tribalism of Netanyahu. And many others, even some fairly tribal Jews who are brought up to believe that everybody hates them for no good reason, which is of course ridiculous, and wants to throw them into the sea and throw them in gas chambers and things like that—I mean, these people are traumatized, a lot of them, certainly the Israeli Jews more than anyone. But I think even some of the people who are somewhat traumatized into believing that the world hates the Jews and persecutes them are horrified by this, because they understand that this is going to take away that immunity that Jews have enjoyed since World War II, which has allowed Jews to take over the United States.
Now many of the Jews who have taken over the United States are liberal. They are not fanatical Zionists like Netanyahu. But there’s an ethnocentric ethnic nepotism that goes on in which ethnic groups vie with each other for control. The United States was dominated by Protestants, or WASPS, up until World War II. Since World War II, the dominant, most powerful ethnic group in the United States has become Jews. We can see this in the Ivy League admissions, where Jews basically took over the Ivy League institutions and now that's why we have so many of these cases where Ivy League presidents are being fired for criticizing Israel and so on. Ron Unz has proven that Jews are grossly overrepresented in Ivy League institutions based on their test scores, grades, etc. That is, there has been a very powerful bias towards admitting Jews in disproportionate numbers to their abilities in the Ivy League now for decades.
That's just one example of American Jews becoming the dominant ethnic group. They also totally dominate the media, Hollywood being the most extreme example, and are grossly disproportionately represented at the high levels in the financial world.
Now, you're not supposed to say this. It's said to be anti-Semitic to say these things, but they are true. And I don't understand why you would call somebody a bigot if they speak the truth about this.
You weren't a bigot if you said the Protestants dominated the United States in, say, 1910. So why are you a bigot if you make the same observation about Jews dominating the United States now, which they obviously do?
I mean, look at Biden's minyan. The Jewish newspapers say Biden's cabinet has enough Jews to make up a minyan. Biden is totally surrounded by Jews and by people with Jewish spouses.
The Israeli state was actually founded by secular Jews not by religious Jews. But there is an attempt to turn it into a big religious conflict. Kevin, can you just say something about that, and whether you think that's played into.. why it's been so long-lasting this particular one, and so horrific, with something like a hundred Palestinians being killed for every Israeli.
Right. And the Palestinians being killed are almost all civilians, the great majority being women and children. Whereas the Israeli dead are mostly troops.
Look at what really happened on October 7. About half of the Israelis who died were armed forces or police, and another significant proportion were security guards and other armed people. The kibbutzes are full of people who carry arms. All Israeli Jews are trained in arms. They all go through the military except for the religious Jews who get exemptions.
In any case, the Palestinians have been targeting the Israeli military from day one. That's what they did on October 7th. They did try to grab some civilian hostages. But the killings of civilians on October 7th almost entirely came from the IDF. The Israeli military slaughtered its own people according to the Hannibal Directive, which tells the Israeli military to kill both hostages and hostage takers in order to prevent the political liability of having to bargain for hostages.
So that horrific massacre that we saw—we saw the aftermath of the massacre on October 7th—that massacre was perpetrated by the Israeli armed forces. The Palestinians had attacked Israeli military targets and in some cases tried to grab civilian hostages.
Today it's the same thing. The Israelis are just bombing people's houses, killing women and children, bombing hospitals, bombing ambulances, bombing refugee centers. They just killed a few hundred people in a UN refugee camp today.
The Israelis are committing terrorism, which means deliberately targeting civilians. The Palestinians aren’t. They are targeting the Israeli military. They are coming out of their tunnels and blowing up Israeli tanks, often sprinting to the tank and applying the explosive from distance zero. They're fighting incredibly bravely, fighting against a truly evil occupation and indeed an evil people. The Israeli people, Israeli Jews by a ratio of well over 90%, support this genocide, making all of them complicit in genocide and subject again to life in prison or the death penalty.
That's more than 90% of Israeli Jews. And yet the Palestinian resistance is not targeting unarmed Israeli Jews. It's targeting the Israeli military. The difference in moral stature between these two sides is so extreme.
There's never been a more clear-cut case of a battle of good versus evil.
Palestine vs. Israel: "There Has Never Been Such a Clearcut Case of Good vs. Evil"