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Speaker 1: This segment of the Seth Leipson Show podcast is brought to you by Don Spini and Logan Marcus from Sun Valley Wealth. Independent advice, fiduciary guidance, personalized retirement planning.
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Speaker 2: Well, welcome back as we head into our final hour. It is a delight to welcome back to the show Seth Mandel. Seth, among other things, is a senior editor at Commentary Magazine. You can read his works there at Commentary.com. where he writes prodigiously. You can follow him on X at Seth A.
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Speaker 3: Mandel.
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Speaker 2: Many of you know from these airwaves as well, his wife, Bethany, who calls me her second favorite Seth, which I think I'm okay with so long as I don't become.
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Speaker 3: Her third favorite.
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Speaker 2: But Seth can also be heard almost daily on the Commentary Magazine podcast, which is just a fabulous podcast. You can't listen to the Commentary Magazine podcast and not be smart. Seth, welcome back. Thanks for being with us.
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Speaker 3: Thank you, Seth. And I think that your advantage with not being relegated to the third spot, to the bronze medal, is that there just aren't that many Seths around.
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Speaker 2: It's a problem of insufficient options.
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Speaker 3: Otherwise, you know, I don't know if I would be in first place all the time.
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Speaker 2: Okay, fair enough. Fair enough. It's not as, okay, fair enough. It's not as if she and She didn't marry a man named Sam and my name isn't Sam. Gotcha. The more rare, the more precious, they say. You write a lot. Everything you write is wonderful. This piece that I think it's your second most current because you wrote something on the hijacking today we can talk about as well. But I want to get to this. As the Hamas narrative disintegrates, can its devotees rejoin reality? And there's a lot in here. And you start with another series of facts that have, shall we say, killed a lot of theories about the war between Israel and Hamas or Israel and Gaza. This time it has to do with all the journalists supposedly Israel killed. We're now learning increasing numbers of them turn out to have been. Hamas members, Hamas representatives, and allies of the terrorists. And you add this as a fact, right, to any number of facts that have dispelled so many of the myths in the war. And you raise the question about the war that has happened being so different from the war that the media has reported. raises at what point can we expect or might we expect people to climb down from the mythology? A fair summary, is that a fair summary of your piece?
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Speaker 3: I think so.
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Speaker 2: Now, it raises so many questions, I think, because even as we have learned by the day any number of facts that dispel the genocide myth, I don't know if people are coming to the realisation that the myths they have been perpetrating are wrong. Any night I would tune into a Piers Morgan show or any other podcast, I don't know that opinions about the facts of this war are being changed that much. It seems we are living in two different realities, or a reality and a delusion. We don't have, as you point out, a shared reality. Do you disagree with that?
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Speaker 3: No, I don't disagree. That's really what drove writing the piece in the first place, which was thinking about just how many people still haven't climbed down from those perches, from those limbs, and what that means for us as a society. It's one thing in the fog of war for everybody to have a different impression. It's one thing. It's another thing at the beginning of a war. for a certain amount of time, for people to just be overwhelmed by the stress of it all, maybe. There's all sorts of normal human emotions that you can use to explain why people seem to be living in separate realities. And three years after the war starts and a year after the war ends, We're no longer at that part. That's really the point, which is that we've now reached a point where the annual statistics, we know what to expect from them. We know how they'll be adjusted. And now that we can actually look back on the war, it's downright absurd to hold on to some of these myths about the war. In fact, today came just another one. I saw people talking about the fact that today... The Gaza Health Ministry, as they've so successfully branded themselves, which is Hamas, the Gaza Health Ministry has released its 2025 population numbers. And the number of natural deaths, this is something that they didn't include during the war, by the way. So you would get the number of deaths in Gaza, and that way the Times and others would report it. as if every single death in Gaza were Israel's fault or even a result of the war, which was very much not true. So they released the numbers and they divided them up into more specific categories. And so we got a look at the natural deaths or the non-war deaths. And the number in 2025 pretty much matches the number in 2022, a full year before war. Because the war started in the third quarter of 2023. So what that means is that that doesn't mean that there weren't people killed in battle and on the battlefield and all that. It just means that the idea that there was something beyond– the war, a famine, for example, intentional starvation, things like that, it's just not true. And it's not even possibly true. I think that's what you take from these numbers when you look and you say that there aren't excess deaths over and above what the number for natural deaths is. And so the people who died on the battlefield are the casualties of the war. but not of starvation and all these other things that they said. And so that's, you can't even formulate anymore an argument, a serious argument that in the year 2025, there was a famine in Gaza. It's over. And so how many people climb down from that? I'm not seeing a ton, but at some point, you're going to stop seeing the UN putting out statistics that could plausibly back up the claims against Israel. In other words, the Gaza health ministry has given up the game, right? Hamas is putting out more detailed numbers as the post-war, as it collects them in post-war Gaza. And so you're going to stop seeing Hamas putting out the kinds of vague and inflated statistics that they were able to do throughout the war. So if you're a, and the UN, the same thing with the UN, the UN found, UN-affiliated food security organizations also found the same thing, that there's no, in fact, there might be a slight obesity problem, a slight child obesity problem in Gaza. It's hard to tell how, you know, whether that's really a big problem, but it's certainly not starvation. And so if you are of the mind that Israel is doing all these terrible things deliberately to the Palestinians, during the war, you would be able to reach four numbers that could back you up in the heat of an argument and at least say, well, I believe these numbers. And one of my points in the piece is that you're going to see those numbers disappear. It's not going to be the case anymore that the Gaza health ministry is going to back you up. You're not going to see their stats anymore. The UN is not going to write that there's a looming famine in Gaza anymore because they have the stats. They've been able to collect since post-war and they figured out what the real situation is. And so now we move farther and farther away from fog of war and into these are people who just live on another planet in an alternate reality. And what does that mean for us in a self-governing country to have such a split and not a shared?
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Speaker 2: Even beyond a self-governing country, if one thinks about a world of international relations and a world of you know, different kinds of discussions, debates, sanctions, trade, and that sort of thing. We live in a world that lives partly, and I think it's the minor part of this world, the smaller part of this world, that recognizes the truth. For example, one gleans from the data that the Hamas health ministry put out that you're referencing, one realizes and divines that there will be more births in Gaza than deaths in 2025. And if things hold steady, 2026 as well, which is the exact opposite, or at least one of the exact opposites of what one would call a genocide. But tonight on CNN or on any given series of platforms, None of those arguments will be made. The genocide charge will not disappear. And I wonder if the world does move on because these statistics will no longer be able to be used on behalf of the Hamasnik propaganda machine. I wonder if people will just walk away with the damage having been done, the term genocide having been so encrusted that it won't matter. Let me take the break and pick up on that with you when we come right back. Welcome back to the Seth Leibson Show. Delighted to have Seth Mandel with us, senior editor at Commentary Magazine. Commentary.org is where you can subscribe, where you can read, where you can see Seth's prodigious writings. We're talking about his recent piece, As the Hamas Narrative Disintegrates, Can Its Devotees Rejoin Reality? Seth, I suspect at some point, I couldn't put my finger on it, but at some point in in the future here, the coverage and the discussion about Israel and Gaza will just kind of dissipate and move into the ether and other stories will crowd it out, or people will just move on to some other issue in the Middle East. With no accountability for these slurs, for these slanders, Israel committed a genocide, Israel committed a famine, even as the numbers increasingly prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that those were slurs, those were slanders. In other words, it seems to me the campaign to discredit Israel, to disparage it, has been successful despite the numbers at this point. Three years of propaganda has done its job, I think, and that the viewpoint has been frozen in amber that Israel is a committer of genocide. regardless of what any other numbers come out going forward will show. Am I being too pessimistic?
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Speaker 3: I don't think you're being too pessimistic. I think that's the point of all this. Look, I have a hard time believing that any proponent of the genocide accusation actually believes it. Okay. I mean, I could I could imagine that somebody hears it and or reads it in the newspaper and says, OK, I believe it. But I mean, people who look at the conflict, the people who are really spreading this around are people who pay attention. And I I I don't think they really believe it. I think the whole point of a big lie is just. to have that be the narrative, and the narrative becomes reality. And that's something that Israel has faced over and over again. It's not that Israel has never made a mistake or never done something wrong in wartime or any of that, because it has. It's just you have these labels that stick when the truth is always much more complicated. I mean, this goes back to the founding. One example is there was what has long been known as the Dariusine Massacre. And so that was in the Civil War leading up to the War of Independence, I guess, but it was all right around the time when Israel broke free and independent and And I reviewed a book for commentary a few years ago by a scholar who could not find– it took him, I don't know, five years or so to find someone willing to publish an English version of this book. And what he did was he took– his research consisted of– Arab sources from the time of the supposed massacre, and he put them all together. They were lists of people, and he was able to figure out how most of the people died in Deir Yassin. And what he came back with was a definitive argument, and not that he's the first to make it, but the idea that it was a battle and not a massacre. Now, Did those Palestinians die? Yes. So people say, well, it doesn't really matter how or whatever. But the whole point of making– of branding it a massacre was to plant the idea in people's heads that the Zionists came into this sleepy town that wanted no part of war anymore. And they just went around tying people up and blindfolding them and executing them. That's the narrative that developed because you use the word massacre. It was not a massacre. It was a battle. In other words, war. And you see this, not that it's the same thing in Dariusine as it is in Gaza, but you see this again and again where what's happening in Gaza, what happened in Gaza was a war. That's the word that you would use to describe it. Israel did not start the war. They did definitively end the war, I think we can say, at least for now. Maybe that's not definitively, but they certainly didn't lose the war, and they're being punished for that. They're being punished for not losing as many people as Hamas did or whatever. So, you know, is it a genocide? No. Is it war in an urban environment where the soldiers are of the other side are not wearing uniforms and they are not recognizably civilian and they're operating from civilian areas? Yes. And in fact, it's in almost any other similar situation, you would have had higher civilian deaths. That's not to say that every death is not a tragedy, just that it's almost miraculous how few people died, few non-combatants died, when you consider this situation on the ground and what this war consisted of. And people don't like that. They don't like to have that discussion. They don't like to have a debate about So it's not a war. It's a genocide. And when you say genocide, it just trumps everybody, and you never have to explain yourself.
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Speaker 2: This is a hugely important point you made, and it never occurred to me, and I've never seen anyone make it quite as clearly and as poignantly as you did in your essay, that you might use the word massacre for Darius scene two. It serves the same purpose. You use a word like massacre, you use a word like genocide, then you don't have to acknowledge that there was a war with facts and disputable arguments to be made. And I think that kind of serves to distinguish the two kinds of people you were talking about at the beginning of this segment. The experts or the people who do some research or the talking heads, let us say, in podcastistan or on TV or whatever, you said really believe it's a genocide. But there is a huge class of people, probably a larger class of people, that don't study this stuff, and they just kind of pick up what's in the ether. Their news might be from CNN or from a clip out of the New York Times, who don't know any better except to parrot what is said in the ether, what is said by the dominant commentariat in the mainstream media. And the use of those very, very heavy... words, genocide, massacre, they're conversation stoppers. They cut off the notion that there is something here to actually debate. It's almost a priori or ipso facto statement that becomes the new baseline of discussion. We have to start with the fact, they will tell us, or they will imply by argument. You have to start with the fact of genocide. You have to start with the fact of massacre. And from there on, we can debate. That's been their very skillful use of and abuse, I should say, of language, right? You do this very well.
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Speaker 3: It stops you, honestly, from having to think. Right. Because once you get told that there's a genocide on one side, that's it. The jury's not out anymore. You know how to respond to a genocide. And so you have all these people who seem authoritative or knowledgeable, especially because many of them are in academia or wherever, And you say, OK, well, they study this stuff. I guess they know. So, yeah, I mean, the consumers of the smear, they believe it because they're consuming it. The purveyors of it, I don't think, the purveyors of it, I think it's much worse than that, as my colleague in Greenwald likes to say it. It's worse than that, which is that they're just being dishonest. That's the point.
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Speaker 2: That's the point. Let me take this quick commercial break, too, Seth, and pick up on that point on the other side. Seth Mandel is my guest, senior editor, Commentary Magazine. Welcome back to the Seth Leibson Show, coming to you from the CMI Gold and Silver Studios. Seth Mandel is my guest, senior editor, Commentary. We're discussing his current piece as the Hamas narrative disintegrates. Can its devotees rejoin and its devotees rejoin reality. use, this very casual or indiscriminate use of the word massacre or genocide more aptly in the war Israel has been engaged in in Gaza. Seth, it does seem a very skillful use of that word. Jean Kirkpatrick, in one of my favorite pieces in commentary, how the PLO was legitimized, makes the point that when it comes to the Middle East, particularly, compassion comes easier than comprehension. And so I think people can manipulate the language to move them into the compassion, which is misplaced in almost every case when discussing the wars Israel has been engaged in. But it does pull the emotional chain appropriately. for mass consumption. And if you watch these debates or talk shows or broadcasts carefully, there is this interesting thing going on. You use the word Stalinist in your piece. There's this interesting thing going on from those that want to be on the side of disparaging and delegitimizing Israel. They almost use this word genocide as if it's a shibboleth that you have to confess to. It's a weird thing. They almost force everyone else around the table or at the conversation to say genocide. It's a very weird thing. It's almost like a say their names kind of chant.
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Speaker 3: It's very odd.
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Speaker 2: A shibboleth is the only word I can come up with really on the fly here. But they have a demand, if you will. Unless you can admit or state that it's a genocide, you yourself are the idiot, or you yourself are not worthy of conversing with. Have you noticed this?
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Speaker 1: Well, sure.
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Speaker 3: I think one of the more recent examples of this was Scott Wiener, the state politician in California who was running for Nancy Pelosi's old cities. And in the crowded Democratic primary field, Wiener had— he' s Jewish— And he had held off calling, accusing Israel of genocide specifically. But he's very critical of Israel. He's very much on the left. He's not any kind of hawk or neoconservative about it. But he wouldn't use the word. And one of the reasons he wouldn't use the word, well, the real reason is because it wasn't true. But in trying to walk the tightrope, he talked about what it means for Jews to be accused of this thing, right? And with the Holocaust not that far in the rearview mirror, all that. And they just don't care about that. The activists don't care. But Scott Wiener does. And whether or not he thought it was a genocide, he understood that there's just a certain amount of tact of empathy, of humanity, of decency that you can, you know, that you show toward people. And he was just absolutely flayed for it. I mean, they hated him for it. And in a Democratic debate, he and two other, I think it was mainly he and two other candidates, the other two candidates were happy to call it a genocide. They used it against him. And then there was all this blowback. And a couple days later, Scott Weiner says, you know, I've given it a lot of thought, and I didn't want.
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Speaker 2: To call it a genocide. He came to love Big Brother, right?
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Speaker 3: Right. But, you know, I am compelled to call it a genocide at this point. Now, the postscript to that is that Scott Weiner has been hounded out of progressive spaces on the regular since that time. In other words, Nobody believes that he believes it's a genocide. So just saying it late, it's like they do want you to bend the knee, but they're not going to actually reward you for it. So why not just show a little spine? And come out with a shred of dignity, whether you win or lose, because bowing to the mob on the word genocide doesn't work. It happened in New York also. There was a race in New York where one candidate didn't say it until they were locked in a competitive primary. And his opponent said, well, you didn't say it until I was five points behind you or two points behind you or whatever, and you realized that you were going to be in trouble. And she was right, I remember thinking at the time. He didn't say it until he thought it would cost him not to have said it. But she used this as an effective argument for why, if you're a progressive, why vote for him? He doesn't really believe it. So he says that it's just lip service. And this is the kind of thing that's happening. So yes, they make it a litmus test. And they have made it a litmus test. It's the price of entry. in a way and so but if you.
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Speaker 2: Only hold that right there let me take the break just the tyranny of the commercial we'll pick up on that point on the other side Seth Mandel is my guest be right back welcome back to the Seth Leibson show Seth Mandel is my guest senior editor commentary magazine you can follow him on X at Seth A. Mandel M-A-N-D-E-L And in using that word, as we were talking about in the previous segment, Seth, the word genocide, you were saying it's the price of entry for discussion. Although, to have the credibility, as I think you were also pointing out with the Scott Wiener example and others, you better get there early. Because at a certain point, it is like the interrogation of Winston Smith in 1984. You can say two plus two equals five. But we're not going to believe you nonetheless, right? There is this element that you don't just have to say it. You really, really, truly have to believe it. There is something, and I think you were right to use the word Stalin, very Stalinist about what is demanded to enter the conversation about the Middle East.
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Speaker 3: Yeah, and the thing about Stalinism is that it's a way of speaking that turns into a way of thinking, right? So that's the end result is not just they want you to say the word for its own sake, but you train your brain to think this way, to think this way, in this case, to think this way about Israel, to think this way about the Jews, what they're capable of. And so Stalinism was such a difficult toxin to flush out of the system because it had trained people to speak a certain way as if in code. And that code, it's like what they say about wearing a mask. Eventually, after enough time, the mask just is your face. Yeah. right? I mean, you pretend to be something for so long you turn into that thing. It's the same thing with speech. They understand that. The left has long understood that. And that's what I try to call to mind with the reference to Stalinism is just how long this tactic has been used and how it's been effective in the past.
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Speaker 2: And it's a very Soviet thing if you think about, well, the kind of incident near tragedy we had Today, with Flight 1073, I guess it was, Fly Dubai Flight 1073, we see again the words that actually do fit the situation, words like terrorism, are scarcely or sparsely used. CNN wanted to call it an altercation. The New York Times called it an altercation between pilots. The Wall Street Journal called it a struggle. When it comes to issues of where the word truly does fit, from the 50s onward, from Khrushchev onward, those kinds of terrorism has really been redefined as what? Liberation or justified resistance. The entire claim after October 7th on behalf of those who supported it, like Daria Elisa Chevalier, right? They called it a justified resistance. It's an interesting manipulation of the English language where you apply the worst words that can be summoned from a thesaurus onto Israel and yet find the most innocuous words to describe what its enemies fight and have been fighting for. since the 1930s, right? It's a weird.
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Speaker 3: Sure, and in fact, if you... Yeah, go ahead. If you look at the word resistance specifically, sure, because what do you think of when you hear the word resistance? Well, they're resisting something.
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Speaker 1: Yeah.
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Speaker 3: So there might be peace.
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Speaker 1: Right, right, right.
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Speaker 3: But like in Gaza, you know, it was on October 6th, there was a ceasefire. And on October 7th, Hamas broke the ceasefire and, you know, slaughtered 1,200 people and took those hostages. But... There can be a period of peace or ceasefire or whatever, but they don't think that that takes away the terrorists' right to wantonly kill people when they want to. So how is it resistance if there's a ceasefire? They find ways to justify it. But the point is that any... violence, it doesn't matter if they initiate it, which they usually do or not, any violence done by one side falls under resistance, which in the popular imagination, when people just casually hear that word, casual news consumers hear that word, it sounds to them like they're being informed that someone who was being attacked fought back. Mm-hmm, mm-hmm, mm-hmm.
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Speaker 2: And that seems to inspire the greatest ire, doesn't it, when Israelis or when Jews fight back? That's the greatest of crimes, isn't it? It's a hard thing to say, but it does describe, back to our first or second segment in this hour, it does describe that first class of people that knowingly use the word genocide inaptly or falsely. There is something here that is a deep-seated bitterness or hatred, if not of Jews particularly, then something about or inherent in Western culture that they hate.
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Speaker 3: Yeah, definitely in Western culture. For sure, you'll notice that the enemies of Israel and the enemies of the United States have a lot in common, for example. Big Satan and little Satan, right? Israel's not the big Satan in that formulation. So we're dealing with something that is civilizational, sure. And then, yeah, the other part of that is that people are used to a certain amount of vulnerability on the part of the Jewish people and just haven't adapted emotionally, I guess you could say, to a world in which this is simply not the case. Israel is a major military power, and it's a fairly successful first world economy, OECD economy. So it's not a basket case, and it's not a giant refugee camp, as it was arguably in 1948 and for some time after that. So even at the founding of the state, it wasn't like They weren't all powerful. They were more powerful often than their enemies, and they won the wars, but they didn't look like a juggernaut. And then somewhere along the line, Israel started looking like a juggernaut, and that just seems to drive certain people. I would never say that it's the main factor in how people digest the news, but for a certain class of people, that just drives them up a wall. Yeah.
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Speaker 2: Why?
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Speaker 3: Why? I guess we'll never know. It's an uncomfortable answer.
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Speaker 2: It's an uncomfortable question.
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Speaker 3: Yeah.
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Speaker 2: What was the book? What was her name? Dorn? People Love Dead Jews?
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Speaker 3: Dara Horn's book, People Love Dead Jews. An excellent book. She's written a follow-up that's also very good. But yes, that phrase has really caught on in the post-war. October 7th world, and for good reason, because you see the other day, Mayor Mamdani says, oh, we're going to combat anti-Semitism. How? He's going to mandate that middle schoolers or junior high kids have to go to the Holocaust Museum. They love Holocaust museums. They're not threatened by dead Jews. So go celebrate the dead Jews. The problem is that there's a lot of anti-Semitism against the living Jews, and that's what people want Mamdani to actually intervene against instead of, in some cases, inspire it himself.
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Speaker 2: Do you have three more minutes for me? I just have one more commercial break.
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Speaker 3: Thanks.
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Speaker 2: Seth Mandel has been my guest, and he'll finish the show with us on the other side of this commercial break. Senior editor of Commentary Magazine, I can't emphasize enough. how critical that magazine is, commentary.org to access it, or the podcast, Daily Podcast, which is critical listening as well, a commentary magazine podcast. As I say, you just can't listen to it and not be smarter for having done so. Seth and I will be right back. Welcome back to the Seth Leibson Show. Thanks for spending some of your afternoon with us, some of your hour with us, and thank you to Seth Mandel for joining us for this hour, Senior Editor at Commentary Magazine. Story of the day, at least I thought it would be the story of the day, Seth, and you wrote about it, of course you did, over at Commentary.org was this attempted hijacking of FlyDubai Flight 1073. It's a hell of a story, and we have in this story such interesting heroism and such interesting potential for huge, dramatic loss of life and tragedy. And we get someone named Yaniv Hayun, who is a surviving Todd Beamer. I was having a discussion with one of my editors today, and he and I were kind of I would love your opinion on this, on how long this will be a story. I'm going to guess tomorrow it won't be.
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Speaker 3: Sometimes that is the case. I think that the only reason that won't hold true, I think that would normally be the preference of the media for sure. But I think it makes a difference having– A pro-Israel president who is so good at driving the news that the discussion around American foreign policy and the Middle East is totally tied up in what Donald Trump and his advisers think and say, what Marco Rubio thinks and says, Mike Waltz. And so they have been very good, I think, at jousting with that, with the media over that particular tactic, which, yes, is to make something disappear from the headlines. It's very easy for them to do it when it's in a domestic context. It's harder when the Israelis are going to be, you know, there's going to be information coming out of this. And the Trump administration is going to be receptive to that because if, for example, there's evidence or increasing evidence that Iran was behind it or involved in some element in the attempted hijacking. It happens to be that the United States is currently at war with Iran. Right. So a lot of these things that happen with Israel right now are happening because they're also being aimed at the West, at the United States, at our soldiers, Iran killing our soldiers. And also, which they have for a long time, and also these stories about Hamas and Hezbollah and other Iranian proxies in Europe planning mass casualty attacks. So there just is this sense right now that it's very hard to bury because the president speaks aggressively about this particular conflict. And he does it regularly. And I think that's enough to keep this going. All right.
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Speaker 2: Well, thank you for that.
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Speaker 3: We'll see.
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Speaker 2: Let's hope so, because it is worth further discussion with all the implications involved here, including the fact that we still live in a world of terrorism. Seth Mandel, Commentary Magazine. Thank you, sir. On behalf of Seth and David Dahl and Mr. Bill here, until tomorrow, God bless you all. Class dismissed.
Speaker 1: This segment of the Seth Leipson Show podcast is brought to you by Don Spini and Logan Marcus from Sun Valley Wealth. Independent advice, fiduciary guidance, personalized retirement planning.
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Speaker 2: Well, welcome back as we head into our final hour. It is a delight to welcome back to the show Seth Mandel. Seth, among other things, is a senior editor at Commentary Magazine. You can read his works there at Commentary.com. where he writes prodigiously. You can follow him on X at Seth A.
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Speaker 3: Mandel.
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Speaker 2: Many of you know from these airwaves as well, his wife, Bethany, who calls me her second favorite Seth, which I think I'm okay with so long as I don't become.
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Speaker 3: Her third favorite.
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Speaker 2: But Seth can also be heard almost daily on the Commentary Magazine podcast, which is just a fabulous podcast. You can't listen to the Commentary Magazine podcast and not be smart. Seth, welcome back. Thanks for being with us.
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Speaker 3: Thank you, Seth. And I think that your advantage with not being relegated to the third spot, to the bronze medal, is that there just aren't that many Seths around.
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Speaker 2: It's a problem of insufficient options.
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Speaker 3: Otherwise, you know, I don't know if I would be in first place all the time.
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Speaker 2: Okay, fair enough. Fair enough. It's not as, okay, fair enough. It's not as if she and She didn't marry a man named Sam and my name isn't Sam. Gotcha. The more rare, the more precious, they say. You write a lot. Everything you write is wonderful. This piece that I think it's your second most current because you wrote something on the hijacking today we can talk about as well. But I want to get to this. As the Hamas narrative disintegrates, can its devotees rejoin reality? And there's a lot in here. And you start with another series of facts that have, shall we say, killed a lot of theories about the war between Israel and Hamas or Israel and Gaza. This time it has to do with all the journalists supposedly Israel killed. We're now learning increasing numbers of them turn out to have been. Hamas members, Hamas representatives, and allies of the terrorists. And you add this as a fact, right, to any number of facts that have dispelled so many of the myths in the war. And you raise the question about the war that has happened being so different from the war that the media has reported. raises at what point can we expect or might we expect people to climb down from the mythology? A fair summary, is that a fair summary of your piece?
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Speaker 3: I think so.
00:03:06
Speaker 2: Now, it raises so many questions, I think, because even as we have learned by the day any number of facts that dispel the genocide myth, I don't know if people are coming to the realisation that the myths they have been perpetrating are wrong. Any night I would tune into a Piers Morgan show or any other podcast, I don't know that opinions about the facts of this war are being changed that much. It seems we are living in two different realities, or a reality and a delusion. We don't have, as you point out, a shared reality. Do you disagree with that?
00:03:48
Speaker 3: No, I don't disagree. That's really what drove writing the piece in the first place, which was thinking about just how many people still haven't climbed down from those perches, from those limbs, and what that means for us as a society. It's one thing in the fog of war for everybody to have a different impression. It's one thing. It's another thing at the beginning of a war. for a certain amount of time, for people to just be overwhelmed by the stress of it all, maybe. There's all sorts of normal human emotions that you can use to explain why people seem to be living in separate realities. And three years after the war starts and a year after the war ends, We're no longer at that part. That's really the point, which is that we've now reached a point where the annual statistics, we know what to expect from them. We know how they'll be adjusted. And now that we can actually look back on the war, it's downright absurd to hold on to some of these myths about the war. In fact, today came just another one. I saw people talking about the fact that today... The Gaza Health Ministry, as they've so successfully branded themselves, which is Hamas, the Gaza Health Ministry has released its 2025 population numbers. And the number of natural deaths, this is something that they didn't include during the war, by the way. So you would get the number of deaths in Gaza, and that way the Times and others would report it. as if every single death in Gaza were Israel's fault or even a result of the war, which was very much not true. So they released the numbers and they divided them up into more specific categories. And so we got a look at the natural deaths or the non-war deaths. And the number in 2025 pretty much matches the number in 2022, a full year before war. Because the war started in the third quarter of 2023. So what that means is that that doesn't mean that there weren't people killed in battle and on the battlefield and all that. It just means that the idea that there was something beyond– the war, a famine, for example, intentional starvation, things like that, it's just not true. And it's not even possibly true. I think that's what you take from these numbers when you look and you say that there aren't excess deaths over and above what the number for natural deaths is. And so the people who died on the battlefield are the casualties of the war. but not of starvation and all these other things that they said. And so that's, you can't even formulate anymore an argument, a serious argument that in the year 2025, there was a famine in Gaza. It's over. And so how many people climb down from that? I'm not seeing a ton, but at some point, you're going to stop seeing the UN putting out statistics that could plausibly back up the claims against Israel. In other words, the Gaza health ministry has given up the game, right? Hamas is putting out more detailed numbers as the post-war, as it collects them in post-war Gaza. And so you're going to stop seeing Hamas putting out the kinds of vague and inflated statistics that they were able to do throughout the war. So if you're a, and the UN, the same thing with the UN, the UN found, UN-affiliated food security organizations also found the same thing, that there's no, in fact, there might be a slight obesity problem, a slight child obesity problem in Gaza. It's hard to tell how, you know, whether that's really a big problem, but it's certainly not starvation. And so if you are of the mind that Israel is doing all these terrible things deliberately to the Palestinians, during the war, you would be able to reach four numbers that could back you up in the heat of an argument and at least say, well, I believe these numbers. And one of my points in the piece is that you're going to see those numbers disappear. It's not going to be the case anymore that the Gaza health ministry is going to back you up. You're not going to see their stats anymore. The UN is not going to write that there's a looming famine in Gaza anymore because they have the stats. They've been able to collect since post-war and they figured out what the real situation is. And so now we move farther and farther away from fog of war and into these are people who just live on another planet in an alternate reality. And what does that mean for us in a self-governing country to have such a split and not a shared?
00:09:30
Speaker 2: Even beyond a self-governing country, if one thinks about a world of international relations and a world of you know, different kinds of discussions, debates, sanctions, trade, and that sort of thing. We live in a world that lives partly, and I think it's the minor part of this world, the smaller part of this world, that recognizes the truth. For example, one gleans from the data that the Hamas health ministry put out that you're referencing, one realizes and divines that there will be more births in Gaza than deaths in 2025. And if things hold steady, 2026 as well, which is the exact opposite, or at least one of the exact opposites of what one would call a genocide. But tonight on CNN or on any given series of platforms, None of those arguments will be made. The genocide charge will not disappear. And I wonder if the world does move on because these statistics will no longer be able to be used on behalf of the Hamasnik propaganda machine. I wonder if people will just walk away with the damage having been done, the term genocide having been so encrusted that it won't matter. Let me take the break and pick up on that with you when we come right back. Welcome back to the Seth Leibson Show. Delighted to have Seth Mandel with us, senior editor at Commentary Magazine. Commentary.org is where you can subscribe, where you can read, where you can see Seth's prodigious writings. We're talking about his recent piece, As the Hamas Narrative Disintegrates, Can Its Devotees Rejoin Reality? Seth, I suspect at some point, I couldn't put my finger on it, but at some point in in the future here, the coverage and the discussion about Israel and Gaza will just kind of dissipate and move into the ether and other stories will crowd it out, or people will just move on to some other issue in the Middle East. With no accountability for these slurs, for these slanders, Israel committed a genocide, Israel committed a famine, even as the numbers increasingly prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that those were slurs, those were slanders. In other words, it seems to me the campaign to discredit Israel, to disparage it, has been successful despite the numbers at this point. Three years of propaganda has done its job, I think, and that the viewpoint has been frozen in amber that Israel is a committer of genocide. regardless of what any other numbers come out going forward will show. Am I being too pessimistic?
00:12:34
Speaker 3: I don't think you're being too pessimistic. I think that's the point of all this. Look, I have a hard time believing that any proponent of the genocide accusation actually believes it. Okay. I mean, I could I could imagine that somebody hears it and or reads it in the newspaper and says, OK, I believe it. But I mean, people who look at the conflict, the people who are really spreading this around are people who pay attention. And I I I don't think they really believe it. I think the whole point of a big lie is just. to have that be the narrative, and the narrative becomes reality. And that's something that Israel has faced over and over again. It's not that Israel has never made a mistake or never done something wrong in wartime or any of that, because it has. It's just you have these labels that stick when the truth is always much more complicated. I mean, this goes back to the founding. One example is there was what has long been known as the Dariusine Massacre. And so that was in the Civil War leading up to the War of Independence, I guess, but it was all right around the time when Israel broke free and independent and And I reviewed a book for commentary a few years ago by a scholar who could not find– it took him, I don't know, five years or so to find someone willing to publish an English version of this book. And what he did was he took– his research consisted of– Arab sources from the time of the supposed massacre, and he put them all together. They were lists of people, and he was able to figure out how most of the people died in Deir Yassin. And what he came back with was a definitive argument, and not that he's the first to make it, but the idea that it was a battle and not a massacre. Now, Did those Palestinians die? Yes. So people say, well, it doesn't really matter how or whatever. But the whole point of making– of branding it a massacre was to plant the idea in people's heads that the Zionists came into this sleepy town that wanted no part of war anymore. And they just went around tying people up and blindfolding them and executing them. That's the narrative that developed because you use the word massacre. It was not a massacre. It was a battle. In other words, war. And you see this, not that it's the same thing in Dariusine as it is in Gaza, but you see this again and again where what's happening in Gaza, what happened in Gaza was a war. That's the word that you would use to describe it. Israel did not start the war. They did definitively end the war, I think we can say, at least for now. Maybe that's not definitively, but they certainly didn't lose the war, and they're being punished for that. They're being punished for not losing as many people as Hamas did or whatever. So, you know, is it a genocide? No. Is it war in an urban environment where the soldiers are of the other side are not wearing uniforms and they are not recognizably civilian and they're operating from civilian areas? Yes. And in fact, it's in almost any other similar situation, you would have had higher civilian deaths. That's not to say that every death is not a tragedy, just that it's almost miraculous how few people died, few non-combatants died, when you consider this situation on the ground and what this war consisted of. And people don't like that. They don't like to have that discussion. They don't like to have a debate about So it's not a war. It's a genocide. And when you say genocide, it just trumps everybody, and you never have to explain yourself.
00:16:50
Speaker 2: This is a hugely important point you made, and it never occurred to me, and I've never seen anyone make it quite as clearly and as poignantly as you did in your essay, that you might use the word massacre for Darius scene two. It serves the same purpose. You use a word like massacre, you use a word like genocide, then you don't have to acknowledge that there was a war with facts and disputable arguments to be made. And I think that kind of serves to distinguish the two kinds of people you were talking about at the beginning of this segment. The experts or the people who do some research or the talking heads, let us say, in podcastistan or on TV or whatever, you said really believe it's a genocide. But there is a huge class of people, probably a larger class of people, that don't study this stuff, and they just kind of pick up what's in the ether. Their news might be from CNN or from a clip out of the New York Times, who don't know any better except to parrot what is said in the ether, what is said by the dominant commentariat in the mainstream media. And the use of those very, very heavy... words, genocide, massacre, they're conversation stoppers. They cut off the notion that there is something here to actually debate. It's almost a priori or ipso facto statement that becomes the new baseline of discussion. We have to start with the fact, they will tell us, or they will imply by argument. You have to start with the fact of genocide. You have to start with the fact of massacre. And from there on, we can debate. That's been their very skillful use of and abuse, I should say, of language, right? You do this very well.
00:18:44
Speaker 3: It stops you, honestly, from having to think. Right. Because once you get told that there's a genocide on one side, that's it. The jury's not out anymore. You know how to respond to a genocide. And so you have all these people who seem authoritative or knowledgeable, especially because many of them are in academia or wherever, And you say, OK, well, they study this stuff. I guess they know. So, yeah, I mean, the consumers of the smear, they believe it because they're consuming it. The purveyors of it, I don't think, the purveyors of it, I think it's much worse than that, as my colleague in Greenwald likes to say it. It's worse than that, which is that they're just being dishonest. That's the point.
00:19:32
Speaker 2: That's the point. Let me take this quick commercial break, too, Seth, and pick up on that point on the other side. Seth Mandel is my guest, senior editor, Commentary Magazine. Welcome back to the Seth Leibson Show, coming to you from the CMI Gold and Silver Studios. Seth Mandel is my guest, senior editor, Commentary. We're discussing his current piece as the Hamas narrative disintegrates. Can its devotees rejoin and its devotees rejoin reality. use, this very casual or indiscriminate use of the word massacre or genocide more aptly in the war Israel has been engaged in in Gaza. Seth, it does seem a very skillful use of that word. Jean Kirkpatrick, in one of my favorite pieces in commentary, how the PLO was legitimized, makes the point that when it comes to the Middle East, particularly, compassion comes easier than comprehension. And so I think people can manipulate the language to move them into the compassion, which is misplaced in almost every case when discussing the wars Israel has been engaged in. But it does pull the emotional chain appropriately. for mass consumption. And if you watch these debates or talk shows or broadcasts carefully, there is this interesting thing going on. You use the word Stalinist in your piece. There's this interesting thing going on from those that want to be on the side of disparaging and delegitimizing Israel. They almost use this word genocide as if it's a shibboleth that you have to confess to. It's a weird thing. They almost force everyone else around the table or at the conversation to say genocide. It's a very weird thing. It's almost like a say their names kind of chant.
00:21:34
Speaker 3: It's very odd.
00:21:35
Speaker 2: A shibboleth is the only word I can come up with really on the fly here. But they have a demand, if you will. Unless you can admit or state that it's a genocide, you yourself are the idiot, or you yourself are not worthy of conversing with. Have you noticed this?
00:21:53
Speaker 1: Well, sure.
00:21:53
Speaker 3: I think one of the more recent examples of this was Scott Wiener, the state politician in California who was running for Nancy Pelosi's old cities. And in the crowded Democratic primary field, Wiener had— he' s Jewish— And he had held off calling, accusing Israel of genocide specifically. But he's very critical of Israel. He's very much on the left. He's not any kind of hawk or neoconservative about it. But he wouldn't use the word. And one of the reasons he wouldn't use the word, well, the real reason is because it wasn't true. But in trying to walk the tightrope, he talked about what it means for Jews to be accused of this thing, right? And with the Holocaust not that far in the rearview mirror, all that. And they just don't care about that. The activists don't care. But Scott Wiener does. And whether or not he thought it was a genocide, he understood that there's just a certain amount of tact of empathy, of humanity, of decency that you can, you know, that you show toward people. And he was just absolutely flayed for it. I mean, they hated him for it. And in a Democratic debate, he and two other, I think it was mainly he and two other candidates, the other two candidates were happy to call it a genocide. They used it against him. And then there was all this blowback. And a couple days later, Scott Weiner says, you know, I've given it a lot of thought, and I didn't want.
00:23:40
Speaker 2: To call it a genocide. He came to love Big Brother, right?
00:23:45
Speaker 3: Right. But, you know, I am compelled to call it a genocide at this point. Now, the postscript to that is that Scott Weiner has been hounded out of progressive spaces on the regular since that time. In other words, Nobody believes that he believes it's a genocide. So just saying it late, it's like they do want you to bend the knee, but they're not going to actually reward you for it. So why not just show a little spine? And come out with a shred of dignity, whether you win or lose, because bowing to the mob on the word genocide doesn't work. It happened in New York also. There was a race in New York where one candidate didn't say it until they were locked in a competitive primary. And his opponent said, well, you didn't say it until I was five points behind you or two points behind you or whatever, and you realized that you were going to be in trouble. And she was right, I remember thinking at the time. He didn't say it until he thought it would cost him not to have said it. But she used this as an effective argument for why, if you're a progressive, why vote for him? He doesn't really believe it. So he says that it's just lip service. And this is the kind of thing that's happening. So yes, they make it a litmus test. And they have made it a litmus test. It's the price of entry. in a way and so but if you.
00:25:18
Speaker 2: Only hold that right there let me take the break just the tyranny of the commercial we'll pick up on that point on the other side Seth Mandel is my guest be right back welcome back to the Seth Leibson show Seth Mandel is my guest senior editor commentary magazine you can follow him on X at Seth A. Mandel M-A-N-D-E-L And in using that word, as we were talking about in the previous segment, Seth, the word genocide, you were saying it's the price of entry for discussion. Although, to have the credibility, as I think you were also pointing out with the Scott Wiener example and others, you better get there early. Because at a certain point, it is like the interrogation of Winston Smith in 1984. You can say two plus two equals five. But we're not going to believe you nonetheless, right? There is this element that you don't just have to say it. You really, really, truly have to believe it. There is something, and I think you were right to use the word Stalin, very Stalinist about what is demanded to enter the conversation about the Middle East.
00:26:34
Speaker 3: Yeah, and the thing about Stalinism is that it's a way of speaking that turns into a way of thinking, right? So that's the end result is not just they want you to say the word for its own sake, but you train your brain to think this way, to think this way, in this case, to think this way about Israel, to think this way about the Jews, what they're capable of. And so Stalinism was such a difficult toxin to flush out of the system because it had trained people to speak a certain way as if in code. And that code, it's like what they say about wearing a mask. Eventually, after enough time, the mask just is your face. Yeah. right? I mean, you pretend to be something for so long you turn into that thing. It's the same thing with speech. They understand that. The left has long understood that. And that's what I try to call to mind with the reference to Stalinism is just how long this tactic has been used and how it's been effective in the past.
00:27:42
Speaker 2: And it's a very Soviet thing if you think about, well, the kind of incident near tragedy we had Today, with Flight 1073, I guess it was, Fly Dubai Flight 1073, we see again the words that actually do fit the situation, words like terrorism, are scarcely or sparsely used. CNN wanted to call it an altercation. The New York Times called it an altercation between pilots. The Wall Street Journal called it a struggle. When it comes to issues of where the word truly does fit, from the 50s onward, from Khrushchev onward, those kinds of terrorism has really been redefined as what? Liberation or justified resistance. The entire claim after October 7th on behalf of those who supported it, like Daria Elisa Chevalier, right? They called it a justified resistance. It's an interesting manipulation of the English language where you apply the worst words that can be summoned from a thesaurus onto Israel and yet find the most innocuous words to describe what its enemies fight and have been fighting for. since the 1930s, right? It's a weird.
00:29:05
Speaker 3: Sure, and in fact, if you... Yeah, go ahead. If you look at the word resistance specifically, sure, because what do you think of when you hear the word resistance? Well, they're resisting something.
00:29:15
Speaker 1: Yeah.
00:29:15
Speaker 3: So there might be peace.
00:29:17
Speaker 1: Right, right, right.
00:29:19
Speaker 3: But like in Gaza, you know, it was on October 6th, there was a ceasefire. And on October 7th, Hamas broke the ceasefire and, you know, slaughtered 1,200 people and took those hostages. But... There can be a period of peace or ceasefire or whatever, but they don't think that that takes away the terrorists' right to wantonly kill people when they want to. So how is it resistance if there's a ceasefire? They find ways to justify it. But the point is that any... violence, it doesn't matter if they initiate it, which they usually do or not, any violence done by one side falls under resistance, which in the popular imagination, when people just casually hear that word, casual news consumers hear that word, it sounds to them like they're being informed that someone who was being attacked fought back. Mm-hmm, mm-hmm, mm-hmm.
00:30:15
Speaker 2: And that seems to inspire the greatest ire, doesn't it, when Israelis or when Jews fight back? That's the greatest of crimes, isn't it? It's a hard thing to say, but it does describe, back to our first or second segment in this hour, it does describe that first class of people that knowingly use the word genocide inaptly or falsely. There is something here that is a deep-seated bitterness or hatred, if not of Jews particularly, then something about or inherent in Western culture that they hate.
00:30:57
Speaker 3: Yeah, definitely in Western culture. For sure, you'll notice that the enemies of Israel and the enemies of the United States have a lot in common, for example. Big Satan and little Satan, right? Israel's not the big Satan in that formulation. So we're dealing with something that is civilizational, sure. And then, yeah, the other part of that is that people are used to a certain amount of vulnerability on the part of the Jewish people and just haven't adapted emotionally, I guess you could say, to a world in which this is simply not the case. Israel is a major military power, and it's a fairly successful first world economy, OECD economy. So it's not a basket case, and it's not a giant refugee camp, as it was arguably in 1948 and for some time after that. So even at the founding of the state, it wasn't like They weren't all powerful. They were more powerful often than their enemies, and they won the wars, but they didn't look like a juggernaut. And then somewhere along the line, Israel started looking like a juggernaut, and that just seems to drive certain people. I would never say that it's the main factor in how people digest the news, but for a certain class of people, that just drives them up a wall. Yeah.
00:32:28
Speaker 2: Why?
00:32:30
Speaker 3: Why? I guess we'll never know. It's an uncomfortable answer.
00:32:35
Speaker 2: It's an uncomfortable question.
00:32:36
Speaker 3: Yeah.
00:32:39
Speaker 2: What was the book? What was her name? Dorn? People Love Dead Jews?
00:32:45
Speaker 3: Dara Horn's book, People Love Dead Jews. An excellent book. She's written a follow-up that's also very good. But yes, that phrase has really caught on in the post-war. October 7th world, and for good reason, because you see the other day, Mayor Mamdani says, oh, we're going to combat anti-Semitism. How? He's going to mandate that middle schoolers or junior high kids have to go to the Holocaust Museum. They love Holocaust museums. They're not threatened by dead Jews. So go celebrate the dead Jews. The problem is that there's a lot of anti-Semitism against the living Jews, and that's what people want Mamdani to actually intervene against instead of, in some cases, inspire it himself.
00:33:35
Speaker 2: Do you have three more minutes for me? I just have one more commercial break.
00:33:38
Speaker 3: Thanks.
00:33:39
Speaker 2: Seth Mandel has been my guest, and he'll finish the show with us on the other side of this commercial break. Senior editor of Commentary Magazine, I can't emphasize enough. how critical that magazine is, commentary.org to access it, or the podcast, Daily Podcast, which is critical listening as well, a commentary magazine podcast. As I say, you just can't listen to it and not be smarter for having done so. Seth and I will be right back. Welcome back to the Seth Leibson Show. Thanks for spending some of your afternoon with us, some of your hour with us, and thank you to Seth Mandel for joining us for this hour, Senior Editor at Commentary Magazine. Story of the day, at least I thought it would be the story of the day, Seth, and you wrote about it, of course you did, over at Commentary.org was this attempted hijacking of FlyDubai Flight 1073. It's a hell of a story, and we have in this story such interesting heroism and such interesting potential for huge, dramatic loss of life and tragedy. And we get someone named Yaniv Hayun, who is a surviving Todd Beamer. I was having a discussion with one of my editors today, and he and I were kind of I would love your opinion on this, on how long this will be a story. I'm going to guess tomorrow it won't be.
00:35:24
Speaker 3: Sometimes that is the case. I think that the only reason that won't hold true, I think that would normally be the preference of the media for sure. But I think it makes a difference having– A pro-Israel president who is so good at driving the news that the discussion around American foreign policy and the Middle East is totally tied up in what Donald Trump and his advisers think and say, what Marco Rubio thinks and says, Mike Waltz. And so they have been very good, I think, at jousting with that, with the media over that particular tactic, which, yes, is to make something disappear from the headlines. It's very easy for them to do it when it's in a domestic context. It's harder when the Israelis are going to be, you know, there's going to be information coming out of this. And the Trump administration is going to be receptive to that because if, for example, there's evidence or increasing evidence that Iran was behind it or involved in some element in the attempted hijacking. It happens to be that the United States is currently at war with Iran. Right. So a lot of these things that happen with Israel right now are happening because they're also being aimed at the West, at the United States, at our soldiers, Iran killing our soldiers. And also, which they have for a long time, and also these stories about Hamas and Hezbollah and other Iranian proxies in Europe planning mass casualty attacks. So there just is this sense right now that it's very hard to bury because the president speaks aggressively about this particular conflict. And he does it regularly. And I think that's enough to keep this going. All right.
00:37:25
Speaker 2: Well, thank you for that.
00:37:26
Speaker 3: We'll see.
00:37:27
Speaker 2: Let's hope so, because it is worth further discussion with all the implications involved here, including the fact that we still live in a world of terrorism. Seth Mandel, Commentary Magazine. Thank you, sir. On behalf of Seth and David Dahl and Mr. Bill here, until tomorrow, God bless you all. Class dismissed.
