Derek: 00:28

Welcome back to the Fourth Way podcast. Today's episode is one that I did not originally plan, and so it's not going to fit, exactly in the, the vein of this part of the season. But it does give us a good opportunity to look back at some of the things that we've learned about propaganda and to apply them kind of in a a real world situation. Because, unfortunately, what is going on with the conflict in Israel and Palestine is giving us an opportunity to see propaganda in action. Now Palestine and, and Israel, the conflict that's going on there is something that I have taken interest in for a while now because, when you take a look at nonviolent and Palestinians have been participating in nonviolent action for a long time, decades.

Derek: 01:23

I mean, over half a century, I think. And and when you're familiar with the actions that have gone on in Palestine, Intifadas and all those things, it's just something that I've I've taken an interest in because it's a conflict where there was a lot of opportunity for nonviolent action to, to form, to take shape. So overall, I'm definitely still extremely ignorant as to the history of the conflict and and all the ins and outs, But I'm probably more informed than a lot of Americans. And it's, it's been interesting as this whole thing has taken shape here with Hamas' recent attack and then Israel's retaliation that, I I just so happened to be stateside at this point, out of Romania. And the community here in The United States and the news, agencies, especially Fox News, I mean, it's just like in insanity, the the vitriol and, everything that's that's going on in an extremely lopsided way.

Derek: 02:31

Now Hamas is, being condemned as terrorist animals. At the same time, people are, here in The States at least, are extremely dismissive of Israeli atrocities present and past. And this really just highlights the the saying that I've been, bringing up throughout the season, which is that propaganda makes atrocities possible, or it makes them unbelievable. You know, Palestinians are all bad. Israelis are all good.

Derek: 03:06

And, when you think that way, like most Americans seem to do, then, hey. If, if hospitals get leveled, if civilians die, if kids are dying all over the place, And that's just kind of what happens in war when you're the bad guy. And in some sick way, we actually feel bad for Israel. Those poor Israelis, you know, to to bring about justice, they're forced with these terrible moral choices, and they just have to bomb the civilians to, you know, to bring about safety for themselves. And we we almost make them into victims in the the oppressive and, atrocious bombings that they're doing.

Derek: 03:44

And in that, there is zero accountability because the ends justify the means, even if we say that they don't, even if we say that we have some high moral ethic. We just don't. Now there are a whole lot of angles and arguments that you could go about this, looking at, you know, is this true? Was it really Israel that bombed that hospital, or was it actually a misfired rocket from Hamas? There are all of these minute details that you could look at, and those things certainly are really important, and I am interested in those.

Derek: 04:18

However, what we've done this season is we have started from the top down. We we've looked at or I'm sorry, the bottom up. We have looked at the the small, the easy to see, and then we've worked our way to the, to the concepts that are more like, you know, this this maze or this spider's web. And I think that's what you really need to do when you begin with any conflict. You look you, pick the low hanging fruit.

Derek: 04:47

Where is the easy propaganda to see and where is a lot of that propaganda occurring? And that doesn't prove which side is right or which side is wrong, but it certainly gives you some key indicators on on where to move forward and where probably a lot of the deception and injustice lie. So in this episode, there are two major elements in in this conflict between Palestine and Israel that I want to touch on and and draw out in regard to propaganda that we can see. So the first concept of propaganda that I I think, is extremely important, and this is this is really important, not just for this conflict, but for a lot of the world conflicts. You're gonna see this as one of, the key indicators, or the key ways that truth is suppressed and propaganda perpetuated.

Derek: 05:44

And that is, when you see history as only modernity. What do I mean by that? Well, let me start off before we get into Israel and Palestine, let me show you through a number of other examples. Hopefully, one of which you'll at least be able to to see it in, if you can't see it in all of them. So first, in The United States, you know, black and brown individuals should be extremely familiar with this form of propaganda, with history as modernity.

Derek: 06:15

So I remember back I think it was 2015 when when this was a realization that I just started to have. It was, you know, right around the time of Ferguson, Missouri and, and and the race, you know, the the police officer, I think Darren Wilson, and you you had, racial tensions and riots and protests and all kinds of things going on. And I was thinking to myself at that time, I was like, well, you know, I I feel so bad for these police officers. I don't know how they they can make these difficult decisions. Simultaneously, I I could not understand how, how the black community was so up in arms about this this one guy getting killed by a police officer.

Derek: 07:09

Even if it was a mistake, even if this police officer, did something wrong, then, what's you know, that that's just one instance. It's an individual instance of something bad happening. So what? And what I failed to realize is that, is that this wasn't just one incident. This was something that the black community saw as happening with a whole lot of frequency and not just a whole lot of frequency in modernity, but stretching back a long, long, long time.

Derek: 07:45

You know, it was just part of the oppression that that came with slavery and afterwards. And so as I started to read black history, like, W. E. B. Du Bois was one where, you know, he's writing I think he wrote his his main book around 1900 or something.

Derek: 08:02

And he's talking about, the the the police and the injustices and and singling out black people and quite a number of other works. And you're like, oh, this is something that's been going on that's never really been addressed. But because for me, on the on the news, police violence against black people just popped up, and I only noticed it. And it only, got latched on to, and there were riots about it in, in my lifetime in 2015. Then to me, it was an individual instance in modernity.

Derek: 08:39

Now I failed to understand the history of of, what had been going on. And so for me, whether I I knew it or not, whether it's subconscious or or conscious or not at all, You know, what I wanted to do is I wanted to press the reset button on racial justice. You know, I wanted to start history from point x without dealing with the systems that have been created, the systems that are, have racism baked into them, or the consequences of of previous actions and, and restoration and what that would cost our society. I don't wanna have to deal with those things. And so for me, I didn't see systemic injustice.

Derek: 09:22

I just saw an instance of injustice that, I felt should have been dealt with on an individual level as opposed to something that needed to be dealt with systematically. Another example of this type of thing, you know, take a look at I I just went to see Killers of the Flower Moon, which was, a movie that I'd really been looking forward to, because I I'd read the book, and the book was just so phenomenal. The the book was actually if if you see the movie, you need to read the book because the book does a better job of showing you how systematic, the violence against this one small tribe of people was. And, but you take a look at the Native Americans, the Osage, who had oil on on this land that they were basically they were kicked out of their own land. And so they bought this junk property, and they said, look, we'll buy this because nobody's gonna wanna take this from us.

Derek: 10:18

Well, then, of course, unbeknownst to the world, the oil boom and everything would come, and they'd find oil under Osage lands. And then so the Osage, would end up becoming extremely rich, like the richest people in, like, the nation, if not the world. But the government set up people to oversee their money so they couldn't take out their own money in a lot of situations. And these people who would control their money oftentimes, just so happened to have all the people that they were overseeing, they would die. You know, these young people would get would die, a lot of times in in very mysterious ways.

Derek: 10:59

And people would figure out how to funnel money, to to various people, you know, to the the morgue, the undertakers, the police officers. Everybody had a hand in, in this because they all profited from it very greatly. And so the movie does a really good job of showing you the banality of all of this, like, how it's just, you know, everyday life, everyday business for these these white people and how interconnected they all are with the oil magnates and everybody just having their hands in the murders. And the book does a good job of of showing you just how broad, this this spread across the Osage tribe and, and just how how systematic it was. But that's another thing.

Derek: 11:44

Right? We don't want to start with with, Native Americans. We want to start our history in modernity. Well, you know, those those native Americans, they've got really high rates of alcoholism, and they gamble their money away. Can you believe they still get, a lot of these tribes?

Derek: 11:59

They get allotments. They get paychecks, and they just squander it away. It's like, okay. Maybe they do have higher incidences of, all of these these various, issues. But what like, what is the history?

Derek: 12:16

Where does the history start? Does your history start today or, you know, since the creation of reservations? Or does your history start, like, go back farther and farther, until you understand why we are today, where we are today? One of my favorite examples, another example that is important for Americans to know is Iran. And I've I've talked about this one a number of times, but it's worth talking about again.

Derek: 12:40

Now for most Americans, history, The United States history with Iran starts in 1979, not just in 1979, but in November of nineteen seventy nine when Iran took a bunch of Americans hostage. How dare they? Like, why would they hate us? You know, it's it's for our freedom. Right?

Derek: 13:02

But our history so conveniently begins with the hostage crisis in 1979 in November. We can't even go back two weeks to the October when, The United States took in the Shah of Iran into The United States. This guy who is a dictator for decades in Iran, who was trained by the CIA in in torture methods and things, who would, kidnap his people off the street, political prisoners, people that didn't agree with him, and do terrible things to him. And we supported him. Right?

Derek: 13:37

And even after all of that, Iran, after its coup and overthrowing the Shah, they still didn't take hostages. But in at the October when we're like, alright. We'll we'll give refuge to this guy. That's that was, like, the last straw for them. Right?

Derek: 13:53

And if you go back even further, beyond, the the dictatorship of the Shah to the fact that The United States is the one who overthrew, like, the most popular leader in Iranian history, Mosaddegh. And, like, we overthrew that government. So we are responsible for the terror and the the horrible, things that were going on in Iran, for decades, and we supported that. And then to just spit in their faces, we accepted their, their dictator into our country. And so they took hostages.

Derek: 14:34

And then we wonder, well, why do they hate us? Right? Because we not only did not install democracy in Iran, but we undermined democracy in Iran, And we implemented torture and terror there. And so they hate us. But, you know, I remember when I always forget the guys names.

Derek: 14:52

I don't think it was Soleimani, but, the Iranian general who was killed in Iraq by a US airstrike, or missiles. And I was asking people, like, why do you think Iran hates us? They would just constantly go to this, this you know? Well, they they took hostages. You know?

Derek: 15:10

They just they hate us for our freedom. Nobody knew. Nobody knows about, the the coup that we established and the dictatorship that we set up even though it's extremely common knowledge. We did this kind of thing, I mean, with other dictators too. Ferdinand Marcos of The Philippines, we we took in and set him up in Hawaii after he he instituted terror in The Philippines for decades.

Derek: 15:34

We just accept these, terrible fascist leaders, who do our bidding. And simultaneously, we do terrible things, and we undermine, we undermine the sentiments of of, nations. We saw Haiti in our creation of their constitution. We did the same thing in Cuba. We took some of their land, and we forced the constitution on them.

Derek: 15:57

And then all the the different things that we were doing to the Castro regime, Al Qaeda. You know, why do they hate us? Well, that goes back to, Osama bin Laden and, his experience in in Saudi Arabia and with all the stuff that The US was doing in The Middle East. He got why do South Americans hate us? Because of the Contras and and the terror regimes that we set up over there and our support of, you know, all the terror there.

Derek: 16:24

And looking looking the other way for people like Pinochet and actually setting up dictators like Pinochet there. Like, our history begins when it's convenient for us to begin, and it usually begins with, with somebody else doing something to us. We never take that extra step and go back farther to see why are they doing what they're doing to us. Now I wanna argue that it is the exact same sort of thing that is going on with with Israel here in this conflict. You know, the the history that Israel wants you to have and and that most people in The United States have, it begins in, like, 1967, '19 '60 '8 with a narrative of, this helpless Israel that's just being picked on by all of its Arab neighbors, and it's defenseless.

Derek: 17:15

And somehow, it pulls off this, this miracle win, against all odds and establishes itself. And from that point on, has to establish itself, in a a an extremely defensive position with a, a very strong and aggressive military, not aggressive in the sense of, like, going out to meet other people, but a a very serious and very tough military that's ready to fight for its freedom. And there might be some aspects of truth in some of that. But but what Israel doesn't want you to do is it doesn't want you to go back before 1967. It doesn't want you to go back to 1947 and '48, and it doesn't want you to go back earlier than that.

Derek: 18:01

It doesn't want you to see, the land grabbing that they were doing. It doesn't want you to see the ethnic cleansing that they were doing. It doesn't want you to see, the the murders and atrocities that they were committing against Palestinians as they were trying to evict them from their land, as they were trying to take over their land. They don't want you to see that history because then the narrative isn't as helpful for them. It doesn't, exonerate them from the evils that they're doing, and it doesn't give them, free reign to do what they're doing out, which is bombing and killing civilians.

Derek: 18:39

Because if you believe that they have been picked on since their inception, and if you believe that they have done no wrong and they're the this innocent party, then you are much more willing to accept the atrocities that they're committing right now against Gazan civilians because your history starts, with Israel as as the good guys, with injustice being done against them. So what I would challenge you to do with with all of this stuff, if there's a country that your country hates, so, like, The United States and Iran or Cuba, or if there is a a group that is is doing something like Israel's doing, like Israel and Palestine, wherever in your mind the history starts or wherever the news media and the narratives that they're they're talking about, wherever that starts, I want you to go back a couple decades at least, if not, you know, a century. And I want you to do some history research because, you know, sometimes you might still end up agreeing. So maybe you would you would go back and you'd say, well, you know what? Israel is still, maybe more right than Palestine in this situation, but I really understand where the Palestinians are coming from.

Derek: 19:58

And what that's gonna do, even if you end up landing kind of on the same team, you know, even if you're, you move from 7030 to, like, fifty one forty nine, even if you still land on the same side, what that does is that humanizes the other side, and it gives you empathy for them because you can understand where they're coming from. And it it prevents this, you know, propaganda making atrocities possible or unbelievable because what it does is it doesn't make atrocity possible. You will defend those guys and civilians because that is atrocity, and you're not gonna buy into that propaganda. And at the same time, it's not gonna make atrocity possible, or unbelievable because you will believe that Israel is capable of committing atrocities because you know their past. And, even if you end up landing on Israel's team in terms of of what you think who should have maybe more political weight, maybe who who has the better overall argument, and such, it's gonna humanize the Palestinians.

Derek: 21:00

And it's going to cause you to call out Israel for the evil that it does do. And it does do evil, even if you land land on their team. And that's really just the the wicked danger of propaganda that I'm seeing so much is that, it's forcing people to go all in on one team or the other. And there is zero nuance, and there is zero humanization of, you know, whoever the other team is. So whatever you do, make sure you understand history.

Derek: 21:32

This is one of the most important aspects of, of why history is important and why you need to know it. But the second thing that I think we see here in, in the Israeli, the conflict with Israel and Palestine is this idea of history as mythology. And we've explored that a little bit, especially towards the end of our season on government with the donation of Constantine. And, and as we talked a little bit about religion, just seeing history, how history and mythology are really important for, for a country. So what mythology is going to do is it it does two things.

Derek: 22:13

First of all, when people do exactly what I told you to do and start digging back in the past, when you have a good mythology setup, it helps to prevent those snoops who start digging in your past. It helps to prevent them from, finding those skeletons in your closet. If you have a good, strong mythology set up, if you've controlled history really well, if you have the right spin on it, then when people do go to the history books to start digging, like, you know, in the South, the, the lost cause narrative and all that crap that was in history books, like, even if you do start digging, you you get, you get end up getting mythology that's going to make one side look particularly good. And so it's a it's a defense against snoops who dig back in history. But it's also beneficial because, for a group to create mythology.

Derek: 23:10

Because if you create really good mythology, it's going to motivate. It's going to drive motivation for the future. You know, because our founders were so great, you be like them too. And oftentimes, both of these are really accomplished simultaneously. Just think about in The United States, the incorruptibility of the founding fathers.

Derek: 23:33

We've got this pristine whitewashed history that prevents questioning of our our current motives. Right? We were we were birthed in liberty and freedom, and we are really just trying to preserve that liberty and freedom that, that was birthed with our founding fathers, who were noble religious people. And there's just there's of course, there are seeds of truth to that, but it's also just, a load of hogwash too. And, we we've dug into that this season.

Derek: 24:07

If you take a look at our our episode on Haiti, I think that's one where you can, I touch on some of the founding fathers and just some of the, the the garbage that was back there? But, nevertheless, we don't have time to kind of delve on that now because we're talking about Israel Palestine. But if you have this, this mythological seed, this mythological core of identity, then what that ends up doing is that's gonna give us a stamp of approval for the deeds that we do now because aren't we the heirs of, you know, of those founding fathers of that mythology? And it's gonna give us a passion to preserve or to advance our agenda because our agenda is couched as a continuation of those incorruptible founding fathers. We're just trying to keep their legacy alive and keep this this dream that they had alive by preserving our union.

Derek: 25:01

And we see this, I think, pretty clearly in the Israel Palestine conflict. You've got this idea of Jewish Zionism. There's this idea that this the Zionism, this, return to the homeland is something that, is just this ancient longing for, for Israel, Israelis, for for Jews, when really it's, it's a fairly modern contrivance for Jews. In fact, it was interesting when I discovered that if if you look at the Babylonian Talmud, it has three particular vows. And one of the vows that it it says, like, Jews are not to do is Jews are not to seek to return to their homeland.

Derek: 25:48

And that was really fascinating to me that, like, there's this long standing tradition, this Jewish tradition that you don't seek to return to your homeland. And in fact, a lot of Jews didn't return to their homeland when the state of Israel was created. And there are a lot of Jews, religious Jews, who would view, a return to Israel as, like, idolatrous. I mean, they would say, no. No.

Derek: 26:10

No. The Messiah is the one who sets up the Israeli state. Right now, you have a secular Israeli state, and that's not the way that things are supposed to work. Like, you're you're, you're trying to do something that god doesn't want done. Only the Messiah is supposed to do this.

Derek: 26:26

So there are a lot of Jews who were and are against the creation of the state of Israel because it's just not something that Jews have historically done for millennia. And you then begin to realize that, really, what has kind of spurred on Zionism, what has birthed it and caused it to grow isn't this ancient longing for homelands that the Jews lost and just have wanted back. No. They've integrated into the cultures that they they, where wherever they were dispersed. But what happens is you start to get some Jewish persecution, particularly in Europe.

Derek: 27:06

And, and then you have the rise of nationalism like the the nineteenth century. And so you get Zionism that is birthed out of you've got a bunch of Jews who've been picked on in various countries, like, you know, Russia and Eastern Europe and and other places. And then you've got the birth of nationalism. So this nationalism that ends up creating fascism, Nazism, and ends up leading to the Holocaust in in Germany and wherever they take it, Zionism is birthed out of that, or or at least propelled out of that. It's birthed in nationalism, but then propelled forward, of course, after the the Holocaust.

Derek: 27:47

It it was made possible. And it's just a an extremely great irony that, you know, the the same movement that produced Nazi fascism, the Holocaust, this idea of blood and soil ended up producing Zionism, which is what? Blood and soil. That's what Zionism is. It's blood and soil.

Derek: 28:08

Israel is, I think, the only apartheid states. Avi Shlaim said is, like, the only apartheid state that is, in the UN, like, accepted by the UN. Like, they're explicitly an apartheid state where they have different, different rights and and such for different races. Their ethnic cleansing of of Palestine and the atrocities that they committed there is really in the same vein as what was done to the Jews in the Holocaust. It's a different scale, of course, and it is a a different scope.

Derek: 28:44

You know, it's not they didn't seek to just, annihilate everybody. They wanted to kinda get them out of the land, and they were willing to kill, and they, hated. But, so certainly a different scope, but, like, the same sort of attitude. Like, these people are animals. It didn't Netanyahu just say that, like, you know, the Palestinians are human animals and they're gonna treat them as such.

Derek: 29:07

Right. Same sort of thing. You, you have Jews who literally just had their families destroyed in the Holocaust, who are coming into Palestine in 1947, '19 '40 '8, and they are ethnically cleansing Palestinians. That's insane. Like, that's absolutely insane that, they would do that, but that's that's humanity.

Derek: 29:31

Right? Jews aren't different than, Germans. Right? They're susceptible to propaganda. They're susceptible to hatred, and, and they did great evil.

Derek: 29:45

So, you know, this this mythology is really important. And, not only do the the the modern Israelis not want you to look too far back in history because that's dangerous, But they also insert this, you know, this perpetual Zionism, Zionist movement into into their history. They kind of create this this false history of of what's going on, of this perpetual Zionism, of these poor Jews after the holocaust, and they had nowhere to go, of, these Arabs who were just seeking their destruction, and they have to defend themselves. And, again, some of those things are true. Like, the Holocaust was horrendous and great injustice was done towards the Jews.

Derek: 30:31

But, to then use that to justify injustice by them towards another group of people is just, that that's just another injustice piled on top of injustice. So, those two things are really important for you to look out here for in the the Israel Palestine conflict, this idea of history as modernity and history as mythology. I hope you can, you get the opportunity to see the presence of propaganda here. But I I do wanna point out one more thing. And before I do that, I wanna lay out all my cards on the table.

Derek: 31:11

If you can't tell already, by the way I've been talking, I think that in this conflict, Israel bears the brunt of responsibility, for the creation of the situation. I think that by and large, they are the main oppressors here. At the same time, what Hamas has done at times with disregard for or the the targeting of civilians is also evil. I'm not saying that the level of evil is the same in terms of the number of people killed or the brutality or any of that, but what I am saying is that evil is evil wherever it's found, even if that evil is in response to something and even if we can understand why people do that evil. What I find unfortunate is that some people refuse to acknowledge any evil on the Palestinian side because this both sides is often used to exonerate the greater evil of that the main oppressor is doing.

Derek: 32:11

And so people don't want to point out that what some Palestinians, like what Hamas is doing, they don't want to point out that this is evil. But that is so dangerous too. Because when you refuse to call out an evil that is actually evil, just because you think, you know, well, that's both side ism, then, what you're doing is you're you're sowing the seeds of cyclical violence and atrocity because what you're doing is you're dehumanizing one group as all evil. They are the evil oppressors while you're refusing to see evil in the oppressed group. Right?

Derek: 32:45

You're you're doing your pick a side here. Right? Team a is all good. Team b is all bad. And that is is a dehumanization that leads to cyclo cyclical violence.

Derek: 32:56

It it's going to justify the violence of the oppressed. Now I completely get, how it is used to the oppressor's advantage when you do criticize the evil on, on one group. But nonviolent activists like Gandhi, and Martin Luther King Junior, like, they've understood this forever. When Gandhi did his march to the salt mines, he said, look, when you're going and you come up against soldiers, do not raise your hand above your waist. You keep your hands by your side because any any violence that you do or anything that they can they can twist to look like violence.

Derek: 33:38

So lifting your hand up to defend yourself. You know, you get that on video camera. That might look like you're raising your hand to hit somebody, so you just take it. Like, Gandhi recognized that. He recognized that things will be twisted to make you look guilty.

Derek: 33:55

And, and that's unfortunate, but if you are if you are unwilling to, to call evil evil, if you're unwilling to to hold your side to the standards that you wish would be used against you, then that's just injustice as well. And that's one thing that I love about the nonviolent community. Places such as Waging Nonviolence, if you go to their website, they're they don't, like, pick sides in the sense of, they're not willing to brush any evil under the rug. And they they will clearly pick a side in terms of which group is is the oppressed group, but they're not going to justify violence. So I wanna leave you with kind of a a closing thought here as I encourage you to, to not justify the the violence of Hamas and to not be fearful of, getting close to this both sides ism because, it's important to call out evil wherever you see it.

Derek: 34:59

And in the in the Bible, justice, you know, flows forth like a river. And, I think that's kind of a a beautiful depiction because I think what water does or I know what water does is it seeks its own level. Right? It, it seeks to be level. And what you see with all kinds of injustices, but particularly the injustice here with Israel and Palestine, as you look through their history, you recognize that there's a mountain of injustice against the Palestinian people.

Derek: 35:29

Right? Ethnic cleansing, killing, economic injustice, all kinds of things. So when Hamas retaliates, Some people call that injustice, and it is, I think, in in in technical term. But the way that we often use injustice, the way that, the news will use this idea of injustice is that, they level it against a group and use it to mean unexplainable, inexplicable, absolute evil. You know, what Hamas did was, injustice.

Derek: 36:07

But, really, if you look at the history and, and you see how things play out, what Hamas is doing is they are seeking justice. See, like I said, water seeks its own level. And, and what Hamas is doing is they see this mountain of injustice against, again, for by Israel against Palestine. And so what they're doing is they're they're kind of creating a more of like a system of locks. And and what they're trying to do is they're trying to lift the level of the water up.

Derek: 36:37

They're trying to build their own mountain to kind of, you know, make the water flow back towards Israel. They're trying to fight injustice with, their own injustice. And of course, that's no justice at all. That's just an increase of injustice. The way that the Bible depicts, you know, the mountains is is that the mountains will be made low.

Derek: 37:04

They'll they'll be flattened out, and the paths will be made straight. The way that you you fight injustice is not to create your own mountains of injustice, but to have the mountains leveled. I don't know what that looks like. I don't know how such a thing is accomplished with such a complex history. You know, going back in history, I mean, we could even look at the the Jews themselves.

Derek: 37:32

Right? They had a mountain, Mount Everest of injustice, raised against them by Europeans and by the Germans in particular. And, they had a huge mountain of injustice. But the way that they've tried to write that, the way that they've tried to, you know, get their own is by creating a different mountain of injustice now against the Palestinians. And so, while we could blame the Jews for the Palestinians, what was ever done by Europeans, by the Germans to really bring about true reconciliation and justice towards the Jews?

Derek: 38:13

Is really Great Britain, taking a bunch of land from a group of people that have lived there for millennia and and giving that to the Jews? Is that really justice? I mean, Great Britain and The United States and and all of the other countries that were part of that really have just as much to do with the evil done against Palestinians, because we never really solved resolved the issue with, with the Jews and how they were treated and the injustice against them. We were just willing to pass that off to a group group of helpless, relatively helpless Palestinian people, you know, helpless against the Western powers anyway at that point. So they're just mountains upon mountains of injustice.

Derek: 38:56

And when you start to look back in history, it's much more complex and and much darker than whatever news outlet you follow is leading you to believe. It's so easy for the West to blame, Palestinians, to blame Hamas. It's so easy for other groups to just blame Israel. But nobody's nobody's blaming empire. Nobody's blaming, the West that has created so much evil across the globe, across Africa and The Middle East in particular with with the things that we've done, the border creations and injustice towards peoples.

Derek: 39:39

But it's deep, and it's dark. And what you really need to get out of that is there's a whole lot of propaganda going around, and all of that propaganda is trying to get you to exonerate one group while, completely judging and condemning another group. And that's just that's generally not the way that injustice works. And doing things that way are going to cause you to dehumanize one group of people, and that's what leads to what we're seeing today. So, hopefully, you know, this was a more off the cuff episode, recorded on the road.

Derek: 40:17

Hopefully, hopefully, I I didn't, speak offensively or or anything else because I didn't have a bunch of time to edit. But, those are just some some thoughts I had that I wanted to be able to share with you all. I hope you enjoyed. That's all for now. So peace, and because I'm a pacifist, when I say it, I mean it.

Derek: 41:00

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