This is Michael Moore and this is my podcast.
One year ago today, my clock radio, old school clock radio
alarm went off, set to NPR News. And I woke up hearing these
words that 1200 people in Israel, mostly Jews, had been
slaughtered and lay dead in the street and in the kibbutz and at
a music festival for young people.
I was certain I didn't hear it right.
And so I got up and went out and to the living room to turn on
the TV. And there it was.
Is it safe to say that none of us, nobody, hopefully nobody,
ever wants to wake up and hear those words, That there are 1200
Jews laying dead in the street somewhere in this world?
I started to cry. It seemed to me for, I don't
know, decades, that as bad as things were in the Middle East,
as tough as it was to fix this Israel Palestine issue, that it
could get fixed. And in that moment, all hope
just kind of flew out the window and that awful sinking feeling
that now this will never be fixed.
And then the news started to trickle in with some very
uncomfortable truths. And I now subscribe to three
Israeli papers, publications that have an English version so
I can read it. And immediately the Israeli
press, the investigative journalists in Israel who were
already on to Netanyahu. If you remember, in the months
leading up to October 7th, 10s of thousands of Israelis,
hundreds of thousands of Israelis were in the streets
protesting his attempt to destroy their judicial system.
In part, his desire to do this was because he himself was under
indictment for fraud, for bribery, for other misconducts
of government. And the case against him was
pretty strong. And people thought that this was
going to be the end of Netanyahu.
Netanyahu thought it was going to be the end of Netanyahu, the
Prime Minister of Netanyahu. And so in the week before
October 7th, he decides to pull back the Israeli army from the
Gazan border. People were like, what's going
on? What?
Why? Why are you doing that?
And they, they had an answer. Oh, there's trouble in the West
Bank. We need to move them into the
West Bank. The only trouble was that the
Israeli settlers, the illegal settlers were doing a lot of
damage and killing of Palestinians, stealing more
homes, more land, et cetera. And he wanted the army up there
to stand by and be supportive of of the settlers.
Why do we use that term? Settlers?
I don't know. Is that what General Custer was
here in the US? He was a settler, the Spanish
conquistadors who came to the Americas.
And they were just, they're just doing some some settling.
Wow. So he pulls the army away from
the Gazan border and then sends some of the army up to the
Lebanese border because, you know, they're worried about
what's going on up there and left the people in the kibbutzim
along the Gazan border completely unprotected.
And many Israelis have been asking now for a full year, what
the hell was that about? Where was the army?
Where were the police? It's not that there weren't any
police and it's not that there wasn't any army.
There's, you've probably seen the footage of the, the
destroyed, you know, towers on the border where the army was
keeping track of things. They were all overrun by Hamas.
But the general army, the basic, especially the reserves who were
there to be protecting their citizens inside Israel, how
Hamas was able to get through and they and using hang gliders,
kites, who goes up in a kite to fly over a border where you're
going to be shot down, you're not going to make it.
I mean, if anybody was surprised about this whole thing that
happened on this day, it was probably Hamas.
They never expected to get as far as they got.
And they got to go. Back and forth They go and they
take hostages and then take them back into Gaza and then go back
in and get some more, kill some more people.
What the hell? And then as the days and weeks
go by, we learned some awful truths.
And boy, oh boy, it's when the Israeli press again was doing a
great job and we learn. And I think I think people in
Israel had already heard the story but or suspected it.
But but it turns out Netanyahu, he had been funding Hamas and
you're like, what? What do?
What do you mean? He had given the green light to
Arab nations and to Qatar and Qatar, as some people call it,
to go ahead and give Hamas millions of dollars over a multi
year period. Now you're, if you're just
hearing this for the first time, just Google it, look it up, read
it. Why would he do that?
Well, because he wanted really to destroy the Palestinian
Authority, which runs the Palestinian government in the
West Bank. And he wanted to create this
wedge between Hamas, which is running Gaza, and the
Palestinian Authority in the West Bank.
And he really wanted to destroy them because ultimately the
majority of Palestinians are, you know, going to be, even
though many, many criticisms of the corruption and stuff within
the within the Palestinian Authority, they still knew that
that was probably their best way to achieve some semblance of
their own government and the ability to hopefully be free of
the apartheid situation that they're living in.
And so Netanyahu's plan was to create this conflict, to create
a fight between Hamas and the Palestinian Authority.
And so he funded Hamas. A lot of those tunnels, this
goes back even before or back when Israel was occupying Gaza,
Israel built a lot of those tunnels.
This never gets pointed out, never gets pointed out that this
whole from the river to the sea business that they claim the
Palestinians, that's their position is to just wipe out all
Jews, all Israelis. The sentence about from the
river to the sea or from the the sea to the river is in the
original founding documents of the Likud Party, Netanyahu's
political party. It's in their founding statement
that they own it all, that there are no Palestinians.
And how many times have you had to listen to the propaganda this
year that there are no Palestinians because there is no
Palestine? There was never a Palestine.
It's just a concept, as Trump would say, demeaning this group
of people that have lived on that land for a couple thousand
years at least. So what is Netanyahu up to?
Funding Hamas and pulling the army back?
All the reports from the Israeli intelligence during the week or
two leading up to this, there are people trying to get some
attention to this. You know, and it's been pointed
out that there are a number of women in the Israeli government
were trying to point this out that why are they leaving the
people in Israel, living in Israel, Israel proper now, the
Israel, the country, not settlers, actually Israel along
the Gazan border. Why are they leaving them
unprotected? And then when the Hamas attacks
occur and Hamas is even shocked that they can fly in on a kite,
go back and forth kidnapping people, and they do this for
hours. And there's there's Israelis
hiding in shelters, trying to take cover somewhere, calling
the police. No answer, begging, calling
relatives in Israel. Can anybody come down to help
us, please? And all these people die and the
and the army, what's finally and police and reservists finally
make it there. 10/12/14 hours after the attacks began at 6:30
in the morning, finally in the late afternoon and evening, they
aren't. Can you imagine that in the USI
mean, just seriously, Can you imagine whatever country you're
living in that, that your own people within your country are
under attack and being slaughtered and there's no
response. There's no cops, there's there's
no National Guard, there's no nothing.
I mean, even on January 6th, when, you know, they're begging
and trying to get the National Guard in there to protect the
capital from the Trumpsters that were trying to overthrow the
government, that took hours. It didn't take 14 hours.
Can you imagine that happening here?
How could that happen? You know, I mean, let's come on,
let's give some, everybody knows that the Israeli army and the
whole Israeli Defense Force and the Israeli, the Mossad and
their intelligence and their spies and everything and the
fact that they have a nuclear weapons.
This is one of the most. I mean, it's why, it's why
people around the world who can claim Israeli citizenship, even
if they don't have it, can claim it because they feel this is a
safe place. This is the place, you know,
after World War 2, this is this was created so we would be safe.
We'd have a place to go. And what October 7th showed is
that you're not safe. It's not the place to go.
Your own government won't defend your life, will not show up as
you're being slaughtered on your own soil by a people that don't
have a single bomber, jet plane, fighter jet, battleship, nothing
except homemade explosive devices that they cobble
together from the bombs that are sent into their land from
Israel. American bombs.
And they take the pieces, especially of the ones that
don't blow up, and they make their own bombs and missiles to
fire back into Israel. Total insanity, I know, but look
what the hell was going on before October 7th.
On October 7th. It's an embarrassing question
that fewer and fewer Israelis seem to want to ask anymore.
Because Netanyahu needed the justification to obliterate
Palestinian people. And that's what he went ahead
and did. And Biden warned him, said don't
be doing this. Don't do what we did after 911
where we invade two countries and we got it ended up in the
longest war in our history. And it did really it didn't no
good. And one of the countries had
nothing to do with 9/11. Don't do what we did.
That's what he said. And Netanyahu was like, shut the
F up. We're going to go in and kill as
many people as we want. We're going to teach them a
lesson. And what better lesson to teach,
you know, and to and to, to fight for the justice of the
1200 dead in Israel. What better way to, to, to honor
the dead than to go in and kill more than 40,000 people, mostly
children, women, old people? Why 'cause that'll stop Hamas
and whoever else from ever attacking you again.
You've created so many, so many now, hundreds of thousands of
Palestinians who will never forget the slaughter, the this
annihilation of civilians, people that have lost family,
babies, babies, thousands of babies dead, hospitals bombed,
schools bombed, universities bombed, everything bombed to
smithereens. Oh, and that's going to make you
safe. Only a sick, sick person would
think that this is the way to peace.
Only a sick person would approve millions of dollars being sent
to Hamas so that you can start a fight, a war between the two
Palestinian factions that that's going to help you sick.
Only a sick leader would leave his own people undefended.
Perhaps because it sure sounds like it in his tone of voice.
Because by having all these dead Israelis gave him the
justification to start. What he really wanted was to
move the Palestinians, to move them into the sea, to move them
into the Sinai desert and to kill as many of them as
possible. And probably surprised that
Biden let him get away with it because Biden had warned him.
So he knew this was a risky thing with the Americans.
I mean, they fund us, They're our bank.
They build the bombs for us and give them to us.
Very risky thing. And and yet he knew the old man
just didn't have it in him to follow through on his threat.
That if you, if you commit war crimes, we will shut you down.
And that's so Bibi just went ahead and committed this war
crimes and nothing happened. Nothing.
I mean, the international, you know, Court of Justice or you
know, whatever they're they're on their way to hopefully
prosecuting them someday. But still, we could have ended
this. We Americans could have ended
this so quickly. We could have easily said to the
Israelis, not one more Israeli is going to die.
And we will make sure that that happens.
But you are to stop the slaughter of babies and old
people and civilians and quit lying to us.
Quit telling us every time you bomb a school that there, oh,
Hamas was there. Every time you bomb a hospital,
oh, Hamas was hiding in there. I think they think we're really
stupid. I know they probably do think
we're stupid. I mean, you can, you know, turn
on any episode of The Real Housewives and, or anything on
our TV and you could see how freaking stupid we are, or at
least we appear to be. And they knew that we weren't
going to do anything to stop them and they just went ahead
with the slaughter. So they're going to avenge the
1200 dead by killing 40,000 civilians.
And then they try to come up with, Oh no, no, we got a bunch
of Hamas too. And they start bombing the very
places where they're hostages are being held.
Would you, I mean, just imagine if these were your grandparents
being held and the United States government was, was just bombing
the very place they're being held.
Why are you doing that? You're going to kill my
grandmother. There's still over 100 hostages
there and they don't have him back.
The Israeli army, think about this.
The Israeli army, with all of its defense forces, with all of
its nuclear weapons, with all of its really smart spies and
everything that they've got in their intelligence community.
And they don't know where the hostages are and they don't know
how to go in and get them against the people that have no
friggin army, no Air Force, no Navy, and they're still being
held. You do know how big Gaza is,
right, folks? It's about the size of Queens
roughly, roughly in terms of square mileage, you know, not
exact, but roughly the same size as Queens and roughly the same
population as Queens. You know, a little over 2
million people. Can you imagine some group, some
terrorist group, whether they be one of our home grown terrorist
groups in the US or they came from the outside, kidnapped over
200? Americans and then took them to
Queens and are hiding them in Queens, hiding them in the same
size of place that Gaza is. How long would it be before we'd
find those 200 Americans? Seriously, You know, as inept as
we are at a lot of this stuff, a year later, Can you imagine
there's there'd still be 100 some Americans being hid in
tunnels, rooms, wherever in Queens?
No, no, it's all bullshit, isn't it?
They know where these people are.
They know where their own people are being held and dying in
Gaza. Do you remember the the night
very early on when Hamas decided to release the elderly women,
the Jewish women with no, with no advance notice, they just got
the Red Cross and the Red Crescent together and took them
to the border and, and released them.
Do you remember that? And Netanyahu was in shock.
And again, the great Israeli reporting in their press about
their he was like, wait a minute, yeah, wait a minute is
right, Bebe, because he needed the hostages as the
justification for all this mass killing.
He needed it for the larger plant to remove the Palestinians
from Gaza entirely. And Oh my God, And he got, he
got to read some of this stuff, the Israeli press and, and, and
their commentators and their analysts and whatever.
It's like, wait, he, he was expecting them to hold these
hostages because he needed the justification for what he was
going to do. And now all of a sudden they're
going to start releasing them. Oh my God, what if they all got
released in the next few days? We got to get the get the
bombers out, send the missiles in, start killing these
Palestinians quickly. And when they did that, of
course, then the Palestinians and the Hamas were like, OK, to
hell with you guys. This is how you're going to,
we're starting to release the hostages and and you're just
going to kill us just like that. Wow, people have forgotten this
part of the story. Netanyahu did not want those
hostages released and not then. I'm not saying he wanted them
dead, but why would you bomb the very areas that they're being
hidden in? Why would you do that?
Can you imagine the US Army just bombing Queens because people in
Queens are holding 200 people hostage?
No, no, believe me, there's many Israelis who question it, but
you rarely hear it on the news here.
No, he wanted it. He wanted the war.
He wanted the slaughter. He needed the justification.
He came here and gave that vile speech to our Congress about the
Barbarians. They're the Barbarians were
civilization. We're the civilized ones.
There's nothing civilized about us Americans funding Benjamin
Netanyahu and funding the slaughter.
Nothing about this. Do we not think that we're going
to get away with this? Then we're going to have to not
answer for this someday, for our behavior, for our participation
in the slaughter. What makes us think that we're
going to get away with this again?
Jeez, I just, I just don't know. And so now the whole thing has
switched to the other front. They've created Lebanon.
They're under siege again. They're under attack.
The Iranians are firing missiles into Israel, just probably
lighting up Netanyahu's face like, oh, they took the bait,
these stupid Iranians. Oh, wow.
Yeah, because now you listen this weekend to all the
rhetoric, all the talk, and now just watching the news here this
morning, People on TV here, they're like, you know, this is
going to be an all out war. This is going to be an expanded
Middle East war where the United States is going to be dragged
into a war with Iran. No, no, Oh, no.
I'm sorry, Netanyahu. We are not entering any kind of
war. It's bad enough that we've
allowed your war to continue, but what?
What we are going to send our troops and our ships and
everything to have a war with Iran?
Are you freaking kidding me? The fact that you think that we
are that stupid, that we could be that easily led by the nose.
Just take us by the nose and lead us into a war with Iran.
Do you know that? Everybody listening to me and
those not listening to me and those who usually would disagree
with me. The vast majority of the
American people do not want a war with anybody.
They don't even want this war that you're doing.
The majority of Americans, every poll has shown that we want a
ceasefire. The majority of Americans want
this to end. And now you're talking about
that we're going to join you in going to war with Iran.
Are you frigging crazy? We are not going to war with
Iran. We want the war on the people of
Gaza stopped. We have enough problems in this
world. We have enough problems in our
own country and we lost enough people and we killed enough
people in Iraq and Afghanistan for years and years and years,
and nobody wants a return to that.
Before I continue on with a few other things, I want to say if
we could just pause for a minute to thank our underwriter for
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And thank you Shopify for supporting this podcast and
supporting my voice, especially on such an important day as
today. Netanyahu is a fascist, Trump is
a fascist. They are peas in the same pod.
And I'm telling you, my friends watching Trump this weekend at
those rallies, wow, we're coming right out and saying that the
Democrats the the, the enemy to him.
They tried to have me killed. These assassination attempts,
they, the, they to him is the Biden Harris administration or
the other people or the deep state or whatever it is that's
controlled by the liberals and they, the radicals and the
communists of America. Oh my God.
And his people just eating it right up.
And then telling the people in the hurricane areas there in
North Carolina that Biden and Harris are only going to give
each of them $750 for all the devastation that's been caused
in in their homes and in their towns.
And that the reason why there's not enough aid there already is
because Harris and Biden sent billions of dollars of FEMA
money to help all these migrants relocate themselves all over our
wonderful country. The, the lying, the lying right
now. I guess it's going to be like
this for the next 4 weeks is intense.
It's incredible. It's it's gobsmacking in terms
of of what they think that they're going to get away with.
Wow, wow. They did whatever they could
this weekend to once again try to destroy this country, to try
to create violence. I know why a lot of you are so
scared, so scared that somehow he's going to pull this off.
And I've tried to tell you in these last weeks here that I
don't think that's going to happen.
I think most Americans know that this is wrong and he's not going
back to the White House. And there's going to be an A
tsunami of women at the polls this month, early voting all the
way up to Election Day on November 5th.
And they're not going to tolerate a return of Donald
Trump. But I know it's not going to
feel that way right now. You know, and you're hearing the
reports out of Michigan that, you know, the internal polling
that the Democrats have been doing or whatever, seeing that
something I've been saying for months now that Harris could
lose Michigan. And you know, I'm so used to, I
know this, we're somewhere around 40,000,045 million
downloads to my podcast, 10 million of you follow me on
social media. I mean, I, I know I'm, I'm very
fortunate and blessed to have so many people that will listen to
my thinking on all this stuff. But in the end, I I've never
been able to beat back the party hacks that help us lose so many
times, help the Democrats lose when we should be winning.
They, they lose even when they win, even when they win the
popular vote, which should mean that they should get the
electors from that state. But no, twice, just just in,
since the year 2000, Gore won the popular vote, Hillary won
the popular vote. And I've told them why they're
going to lose Michigan. They won't listen.
They went to Flint on Friday. They had a meeting with Arab and
Muslim voters there. At least they had the meeting.
I'll give Kamala credit for that, that she sat down and she
listened. Biden had not done that.
She did it because, as I've told you, I think her heart is in the
right place. I think she's said and done
enough. And we've learned from our own
reporting of our press that she has not and has not approved
what Netanyahu has done in terms of the slaughter of civilians
and and in terms of not allowing humanitarian aid, food and
water, etcetera, to get to the people in Gaza.
And she would not sit there on the stage in Congress when
Netanyahu gave a speech. She would not participate in
that and did not attend. Now, I know a lot of you are
like, Mike, she's the same as Biden.
It's the Biden Harris administration.
Yeah. You know, and maybe, maybe,
maybe when she's president, she will not fix this.
I'm going to stick to my what my gut tells me.
I don't know her. I've met her a few times.
Each of those times, I walked away from those meetings feeling
very, very good about her as a human being, about her politics,
about who she is. And I have no personal
experience that tells me otherwise.
And I was very happy when Joe Biden stepped aside so that we
would have a chance. And as you can see, we have a
hell of a chance of having an incredible Election Day.
But if you are listening to me in Arizona right now or Georgia,
and you are not registered to vote or you haven't checked your
registration to make sure you're still registered, you have only
a few hours because today's the last day for Georgia and
Arizona, two of our critical blue states, to make sure that
you are registered to vote. This is the day you've got to go
online. You've got to go to vote.org.
You've got to tell family and friends in Arizona and Georgia
to do that. This is the day, this is it.
And in in the coming days and weeks, this is how it's going to
go. Every other day there's going to
be another state. The deadline for Alaska was
yesterday. That's already passed.
So if you're listening in Alaska and you're not registered, well,
we'll see in 2028. That's how this works in this
country, you know, But a lot of states like Michigan, you can
register the day of the election.
In fact, we've made it so easy in Michigan that let's say you
live in Flint. But that day you have to work in
Detroit. You can go to any polling
location in Detroit and vote even though it's not your
polling location, and just tell them where you're registered.
They'll make note of it and they'll have, they'll create
this ballot for you so that those votes go to who you want
to vote for in the state of Michigan and it'll go to your
locality. That's how easy we've made it
now in Michigan. And yet Hillary lost by 10,000
votes. That's two votes per precinct,
on average, 2 votes per precinct.
That's how Trump won Michigan in 16.
Hillary refused to campaign in Michigan or Wisconsin and lost
both states as a result of it. I tried to get them to listen.
They wouldn't listen. I got, I organized people.
I organized people to come in and help.
I did everything I could. I went everywhere to try to get
out the vote, college campuses, etcetera.
Two votes for precinct. Don't think it can't happen
again. And, and, and even though Harris
has one back, according to the last poll, I saw a goodly number
of the Arab and and Muslim voters in Michigan, she is still
18 points behind in the polls where she and Biden were at in
2020 with the Michigan Arab Muslim vote 18 points behind
what they actually got in 2020. That's where she's at today.
So if the her campaign is not understanding that if Hillary
lost by 10,000 and right now according to these numbers, you
can see that it could be as high as 40,000 Arab and Muslim voters
that voted for them in 2020 that are not going to vote.
They're not going to vote for Trump.
All the polls show that he's won.
None of the the Arab or Muslim vote he's he's going to get.
Right now he's polling the same number that he pulled in 2020.
So that's not going to happen. They're just going to stay home
or they're going to go vote, but they'll leave the top line blank
like 75,000 Michigan voters did in 2016 when Trump won.
They went in there. They didn't want Hillary, they
didn't want Trump. So they voted for every other
candidate on the ballot and left the top line blank. 75,000
people, mostly in Democratic areas did that and we got Trump.
And I'm sorry, I wish I could just wave a magic wand over the
over the state of Michigan and make this happen, but that's not
how it's going to work. I mean, I'm doing everything I
could do. Everybody I know is doing.
And yet what we hear this morning from our people in
Michigan is it's not looking good.
And I think we all know we can't afford to lose the state of
Michigan, just as we can't afford to lose Pennsylvania or
Wisconsin. And I showed you in my sub stack
last week how if that does happen, we can still win.
If we win North Carolina, Georgia, if we win Arizona or
Nevada, we can still pull this off without Michigan.
But who wants to go there? Who wants to do that?
It was great watching the rally in in Flint on Friday.
She was introduced by the UAW local president of my dad's
local union, UAW Local 651 in Flint.
It's what he belonged to. And my sister worked in the
factory for a summer or two and she also belonged to that UAW
local. So that was kind of cool, seeing
the union president there introducing her speech in Flint.
Jeez. But we've got a lot of work to
do with Michigan in these four weeks.
And I promise you I'll do whatever I can do.
I will not try to convince, though a single Muslim or Arab
voter tells me that I just can't vote.
I'm so distraught over the killing of my people.
I'm distraught over relatives of mine who've lost their homes,
who've lost their babies. These are people with real
people, real relatives who've been killed by our bombs and our
money. And they just want to just sit
it out or stay home. And what do you say to that?
What do you do? Oh, no, you've got to vote
because you know, Trump is worse.
Not going to work. It isn't how it works.
And if you have any humanity in you, you wouldn't do that.
So I've what I've said to people is here's what we have to do.
You know, there's at least 2 million non voters in Michigan.
These are people who just never vote, you know, but they can
vote if they choose to vote, they can vote 2 million.
We only need a few 1000 people in Michigan.
So I said that let's make that that's our mission, not to
convince people who've lost their own people due to our
bombs and our funding of this war in Gaza.
Let let's that's we'll make up for those votes that we're not
going to get from the Muslim and and Arab community.
We can do that. We actually can do that.
We just only need to if it's really just a few thousand.
If Hillary lost by two votes per precinct, What I'm saying is
can't we get four to six votes per precinct to people that are
essentially non voters? They don't like to vote, but we
convince them to just this one time, just this one time, you
vote, go back to non voting after that.
But just this time, because of everything that we're having to
confront here and the last thing any of us want is Trump back in
the White House. It's really hard to take, isn't
it? Somebody pointed out to me this
weekend that, you know, you're the probably the only filmmaker
that has won the top prize at both the Tehran Iran Film
Festival in Tehran and the top prize at the Jerusalem festival
for one of your films. That's right.
I'm yes, I'm, I have the prize from Iran sitting in my podcast
studio. It's a beautiful Persian rug
that's handmade for the purpose of this of the top prize winners
of The Maine Film Festival there in Iran.
I was very honored, very, very happy to be given that.
And, and I was really happy and surprised to win in Jerusalem
because when that happened, I did not go, I did not attend for
moral reasons. This was in, I think, late 89,
early 90. And first they told me I needed
to supply a print of Roger and Me, my first film.
This is my very first film, a print that had a Hebrew and
French subtitles. And I'm like French, obviously I
get the Hebrew part, it's Jerusalem, but shouldn't there
be Hebrew and Arabic subtitles? It's a, this is a, a mixed city
here. No Hebrew and French.
That's the way we've always done it.
Oh, man, he said, I can't do that.
No offense to the French either. I'm just And then I said, and
what about what? Aren't you going to show my film
at the at theaters in East Jerusalem?
The Arab part of Jerusalem? Well, no, there's a curfew now.
And in fact, I said so wait a minute.
There's, you know, because there was the first intifada was
taking place, the uprising of children throwing stones at
Israeli soldiers. What about Bethlehem?
I mean, that's like two or three miles outside of Jerusalem.
We can't show it there. Oh, no, no, no, no, no.
There's a curfew. You can't.
We can't show the film at night. Can't.
People can't come into Jerusalem from Bethlehem to see your film.
I said, well, but so basically you've got this set up so that
no Arabs can see my movie, which that makes your theatrical
situation an apartheid situation because because of people belong
to a certain Group, A certain race, a certain religion,
they're not allowed in. Well, it's complicated.
Yeah. No, I yeah, I get it.
Yeah. Wow.
And finally, I just said to them, I can't, I can't come to
your festival. And Oh, my God, the shitstorm in
the Israeli press and people in Israel attacking me for not
coming, for not, you know, supporting.
I mean, here they are bringing my movie, and I won't come
because they won't put Arabic subtitles up there with the
Hebrew ones. And OK, so Palestinians can't
come into Jerusalem because of the curfew to watch your movie.
Yeah, that's right. I'm not going to participate in
an apartheid situation, and I would if I'd had a film during
South Africa, I never would have let it be shown there in in
segregated theaters. I don't support any kind of
segregation. And I'm also one of the few film
makers who will never sign one of these contracts.
We always have to sign for international distribution that
allows certain countries where you are.
You if you say anything that's positive about Israel or Jews,
you have to give them that country the right to snip out
anything that they find offensive because it's pro
Jewish or pro Israeli. And I, I couldn't believe the
first time I got asked to sign. I'm not signing that.
Well, everybody else does. No, they don't.
Yeah, Yeah. You want your movie shown around
the world. The world is not a democracy.
The the world, you know you're not going to.
Then you're not going to allow us to show it on airplanes
because airplanes fly to all these countries.
Yeah, that's right. I'm not going to participate in
any of this. MM Just listen to reason.
Anyway, so I didn't go to the Jerusalem Film Festival, and I
end up winning the top prize, the jury, the jury with other
film makers who they bring from, you know, around the world, they
decided that Roger May was the best film of the festival.
And I was awarded this beautiful prize, not in attendance, in
spite of all the vitriol toward me amongst, you know, the more
conservative Israeli citizens. Awful.
Just I was like, well, I was very honored that they gave me
the prize. A year later, I'm at the Toronto
Film Festival, and I see the woman who is the head of the
Jerusalem Film Festival walking toward me.
She spotted me, and she's coming right toward me.
And I'm going, Oh, no, Oh, no, please run away.
Anyway, she came up to me. She comes up to me and she gives
me this huge bear hug, I mean a huge hug, and says, I want to
thank you for having the courage to to not come and to say what
you said. It was the right thing.
And she said this isn't public yet, so you can't announce it or
anything. But we, the board of the Film
Festival just voted. We're changing this.
From now on, the film's are going to have Hebrew and Arabic
subtitles and we're going to try to make sure that there's some
way to show the films in the Arabic Palestinian areas.
Should the government say no, There's a curfew where there's
this or that that. You're right, you're right about
all of this. You were right.
Thank you for having the courage.
It motivated us to do the right thing.
And the fact I get to see you here in Toronto and tell you
this, I was just, I was just like stunned.
I mean, I'm like, wow, I'm really moved that you did this.
Yeah. So we're sorry that you had to
take all the crap you had to take being called an anti semite
and all this stuff. You're doing the opposite of
that. You're trying to what you what
you believe in is what we believe in.
And there's not going to be in Israel if we go the other way.
This is, of course, this is, you know, 20, what, 24 years ago
now? Oh, no, it's longer than that.
God is this what happens as you get older?
You just start to think that you're still 45.
This is, I'm talking about 1989, not 1999 here.
No, no, no, no, no. Oh, my God.
No, no, no, it's 30. Yeah, it's 30.
It'll be 3535 years ago right now is the was when the
Jerusalem Film Festival was in the fall, I think the fall of
89. Oh, my God, 35 years, 35 years.
And you know, first time I went to Gaza and Palestine was back
in the early, early to mid 80s what I saw then 4040 plus years
ago. My friends, it's a sad day today
for everybody in Israel who lost somebody who's still waiting for
hostages to be released. And my heart goes out to
everybody who suffered any pain and any loss.
And I've received some wonderful letters this year from Israelis
who understand that for 16 plus years now, Gaza hasn't been
nothing but an open air prison where 2.3 million Palestinians
have been imprisoned and cut off and suffered.
And knowing that that's wrong and maybe not even surprised,
you know, because when you treat people a certain way with a
certain inhumanity and barbarianism, sometimes they
react in not a good way. You know, I think I've told the
story before about the kid in the neighborhood who kept
kicking this dog. It's one of the neighbors dogs.
And one day the dog went after this kid and, you know, chewed
off half his face. I'm probably exaggerating there,
but he did have, he did have a awful scar for the rest of his
life. Because that's what happens,
right? And you know, we all are animals
in that way. And we all can only take so much
suffering. And then, and then you go crazy
and you do something that isn't right, but you want to protect
yourself and you want to live. And I'm not, I'm not just really
talking about the people in the open air prison of Gaza.
I'm talking about the people who were almost wiped off the face
of the earth in something we call the Holocaust.
At least 6,000,000 Jews slaughtered for what?
For being Jewish. That's it.
And this country called Germany, one of the most intelligent at
that time and now and even before then, one of the most
intelligent countries on earth with the greatest scientists and
writers and thinkers, the first country to have universal
healthcare back in the 1880s. And they came up with this idea
that we really could get away with this.
We could kill every Jew, at least every Jew in Europe.
And, you know, if you were part of that group, if you were
Jewish, or just pick another group that has had to suffer
genocide and slaughter. And when it's over and you,
luckily enough, are still alive, you may not make the best
decisions about what to do to protect yourself, to make sure
it never happens again. Somebody may come up with some
wacky idea of, you know, what we should do to help the survivors
of the Holocaust. Let's go and take other people's
land in the Middle East because it says somewhere in the Bible
that we could do that. And, and, and let's give that to
the survivors of the Holocaust and then we'll all feel better.
We white people, white Christians, European types,
descendants of Europeans, look what we did.
We created the state of Israel to protect them and to make it
up to them. And yet, as far as I'm
concerned, if you really read the history of the 1930s,
there's no making it up. Boatloads of of Jewish refugees
trying to get to America turned away at every port, every single
port up and down the East Coast, every port in Canada, turn them
away and then they go. Then they went down to the
Caribbean and they're stopping at all these Caribbean islands.
Would you please let us stay? No, no, no.
And then finally, I only know this because they the one of my
best friends and Co workers on my films, she's only with us
today because her mother and grandmother were on one of those
boats. All the boats got sent back to
Germany, got sent back to Europe.
The majority of the people on those boats ended up dead,
killed in the Holocaust. Except Trinidad and Tobago, the
very last two islands. They're the same country.
It's called Trinidad and Tobago. Told the Jews they could stay
and they would give them Trinidad passports.
And so they lived The shame that we carry as Americans by not
taking them in here in the 30s, by waiting and waiting and
waiting. And then during the war, not
bombing the railroad tracks, that would prevent the trains
from taking all the Jews into the concentration camps, taking
them out of Germany, out of France, you know, out of other
European countries, to Germany and to Poland, where they could
be put in ovens or gassed or shot.
That's on us folks. And so, and the way we fix it,
the way we fix it after the war is to to take other people's
land who had I can guarantee you, we folks, you don't need to
Fact Check this, OK? I can guarantee you not a single
Palestinian turned away a single boat on the docks of New York or
Boston or Baltimore or Miami. No Palestinian sent any Jews
back to their deaths in Europe. No Palestinian built an oven at
Auschwitz. No Palestinian took Jewish
people to to their death by putting them in those ovens, by
gassing them. No Palestinian did that.
And yet somehow they've got to pay the price.
Is it the right thing to do is to say to everybody who survived
the Holocaust you come live here in the US you live here in
Canada, you live here in the UK, we'll take you in.
You'll be safe here. You'll be protected.
No, no, no, no, no, no, no. So we and the Brits, we have to
create this awful situation. The UN goes along with it.
Why? So all the people can feel good.
Oh, we did something right for the Jewish people.
What you did was set them up. That would eventually bring us
to the moment we're now in, to where a madman is now running
their country who won't even defend his own people.
Who pulls the army back, doesn't protect them, doesn't answer
their calls on October 7th, all day long begging.
Please save us. No.
And then to find out that he approves this funding of Hamas
over all these years just so he could create a fight between
Hamas and the other Palestinian group, have them fight each
other instead of us. That's the theory of war there.
And now expects us to fight Iran?
You friggin crazy. This has to be stopped my
friends. I'm sorry I'm so emotional and
upset about this and I've gone much longer than I planned to
go. But those tears I had on October
7th last year. You know, I've been, I've been
working in New York here the last year or two and I have an
apartment. I have an apartment in New York.
Three blocks away at the end of the street is a Jewish
synagogue. And on October 7th, I just, I
didn't know what to do. And I just wanted to do
something. And I thought I should go down
there, just just stand there and offer my support.
And I thought about it and I thought, Oh no, don't, just
don't. But they see that's not me.
And then the next day I'm like, oh boy, all right, don't tell
anybody I'm going to do this because family and friends are
going to say do not risk this. Don't you don't want to get
hurt. I'm thinking, what am I risking?
I really just want to maybe just take some something down for
people to eat there or you know, so anyway, so I go, I go down.
Well, I go down there and I'm like half a block away and I can
see tons of NYPD police cars, tons of police people, others
standing up front of their congregation, couple people with
Israeli flags. And I thought, you know, what
you just need to do is just go and stand there, just make the
statement that not on my watch, we're going to resolve this
situation. Netanyahu is wrong.
The government in Israel is wrong.
All of this is wrong. We're going to make it right.
We are the bank. We can call them in and say,
look, there's got to be a way to peace here, a path to peace.
But I think my feelings about this are pretty well known.
And, and, and I don't know, I don't want, I don't want to say
I was afraid, but I just, I, I stood there and sat there for a
while. I thought, you know, the best
thing to do is just on a spiritual level, just be here,
you know, a couple buildings down from the synagogue and just
stand and watch and feel the pain and recommit yourself to
always have the backs of our Jewish brothers and sisters,
that this never happened to them again, what happened in the last
century. But also also that statement has
no credibility. And if you're Jewish and you
hear somebody say that they'll do that, that they've got your
back, if they're not also saying that they also have the backs of
your cousins, the Palestinian people, then then don't trust
them that they've got your back. Because that statement has no
credibility. You have to be for everyone,
Everyone to have justice, everyone to have freedom,
everyone to be alive. You have to stand against
apartheid. Otherwise it's hollow.
Your statement of support for those who survived the
Holocaust. You, you white people, should
not be trusted by them when they hear you say that because they
should say to themselves, yeah, but they don't give a shit about
the Palestinians. And by not giving a shit about
the Palestinians, that means you don't give a shit about the Jews
and the Israelis either. Sorry, not sorry.
That's the way it's got to be. We have to survive all of this
and we have to live in peace and we have to stop the madness.
Thanks for letting me go on like this.
I really appreciate it. Feel free to share this with
others. I know the world I want to live
in and I think it's the same world all of you want to live in
too. So let's do what we have to do.
Let's especially do what we have to do in these next 4 weeks.
And Vice President Harris, if you're listening to me, I think
the world of you. I've really enjoyed the few
times that we've met and talked. And I know, I know you will do
the right thing. I know I can't wait to your
president. I know it's hard to say and do
something now against the person you work for.
You hold no power right now. You'll hold zero power.
I know that you've tried to influence what's going on.
Whatever you can do now, please do it.
Whatever that needs to be done once you're elected, definitely
this, this will be on you. It's OK.
You've got the majority of the American people who want a
ceasefire just like you. You're the majority is on your
side. Just says the guy that was
afraid to go down and stand there too close.
Be brave. It's required of all of us right
now. Thanks, everybody for listening.
This is Michael Moore. This is my podcast.
Thanks to my executive producer here, Angela Vargos.
We'll talk soon the.