Broadcasting from the Hip Hop Weekly Studios. I'd like to welcome you to another episode of Civic Cipher, where our mission is to foster allyship empathy and understanding. I am your host, ramses Jah, and I want to send a big shout out to my man q Ward, who is globe trotting once again. He is somewhere down in Columbia doing the Lord's work. I'm not sure if that's literally or not, but it sounded good, So shout out to q Ward, who will be back with us next week.
In the meantime, we are going to have a very important and I believe timely conversation slash update with a good friend of ours and a good friend of the show. Today's guest goes by the name of Amy Horowitz. And for those that may not remember the many times Amy is set with us. He is a fellow journalist, and he is a Jewish Man, and in his story he's been able to go underground with Hamas and research and report on the ongoing conflict in the region and even
prior to the is Hamas War. He's a globally renowned journalist and his videos on YouTube and elsewhere I have garnered over half a billion views, and these videos are very important.
And he is a.
Again, a well renowned conservative I will say that now, conservative journalist. And while we don't see eye to eye on too much, I do reckon him a brother. And I'm honored that you would come back on the show and continue to have this conversation with me.
So welcome back to the show.
It's my pleasure. And that was quite an introduction. Man, I should bring you around everywhere I go.
Well, listen, I appreciate you saying that, and I hope that today's conversation won't be too challenging for either of us, because I know that I'm not the best person to speak about it.
Oh, challenging is good.
Challenge is good.
We want to always challenge our assumptions. We want to check ourselves. Man, that's a healthy way of look at the world.
Okay, Well, then I tell you what we will get into the challenging conversation right after our first order of business, which of course, as always is Ebony Excellence. And Today's Ebny Excellence is sponsored by Major Threads, her Innovative Fashionable Sports where checkmajorthreads dot com and Today's Abny Excellence comes from the Black Information Network. Several black stars showed up at the ninety sixth An Academy Awards Sunday Night, which was March tenth, in hopes of taking one of the
most prestigious honors in entertainment. Late night talk show host Jimmy Kimmel hosted the high profile ceremony for the fourth time at the Dolby Theater in Los Angeles, with many actors, movie makers, and celebrities in attendance. Danielle Brooks, Divine Joy, Randolph Sterling, k Brown, Holman Domingo, and Jeffrey Wright were nominated for their phenomenal acting roles, with Divine Joy, Randolph Kor,
Jefferson and Chris Bowers taking home big wins. This year's presenters included previous OSCAR winners and prominent actors such as India, Dwayne the Rock, Johnson, and Marcia Ali, as well as Lupita Neong, Grammy Winder. John Batiste delivered a heartwarming performance during the awards ceremony as well.
And I know this is not really an entertainment show.
We talk about things that are based in politics, based in social justice, but in terms of any excellence, and this is really why we incorporated this feature. It's important to celebrate creativity, it's important to celebrate ingenuity. It's important to celebrate intelligence, particularly when it comes from black people.
A lot of people, in a lot of.
People's minds, when they think of black people, they think very negative things. And so again we delineate this time in the show to celebrate what we've deemed Abny excellence. And forgive the fact that this is primarily entertainment based, but the Academy awards and the winners certainly do reflect prosperous energy and certainly noteworthy accomplishments, and so I want to make sure we shout them out now onto business.
If I may say, you, my friend, are Ebony excellence.
Hey, I'll take it man, Thank you, brother, I appreciate that. So what we're going to do is have a conversation about again the ongoing conflict between Israel and Palestine. And there has been a lot that has been said by everyone pretty much who has an opinion on this, who's connected to this, and people who are on the periphial as well. And you are one such individual who I
wouldn't call you on the perifiel at all. You've actually been on the ground there, and so for the second part of the show, I definitely want to talk to you about what it's been like on the ground, But for now, I'd like to get your thoughts on a couple of things that have transpired since the last time we spoke.
So let's start here.
Give me some insight into how maybe you're feeling or maybe how folks are just in general. And I'm talking about people that feel the way that you feel, and feel free to define that for our audience. But last time we spoke, it was very much you know that the Israel has a right to defend itself. They have to go after Hamas at all.
By all means necessary.
You know, the human shields, you know the major talking points that we hear from the pro Israel stance, and it's very much the casualties are unfortunate, but that's just kind of the cost of doing business. That's that's kind of the ugliness of war.
So be it.
Onward and upward, and let's keep carpet bombing the Gaza strip And so again you start, you tell us that, and then I want to get an idea of how your thoughts, what your thoughts are with respect to how the fact that global support has shifted away from Israel more in favor of Palestine. So please tell us sort of your feelings and then how that hits you.
Look, and I wouldn't use the casualness of hey is the cost doing business? Whatever? I mean, it's I think Israel always feels moral responsibility in terms of how it deals with this enemy. I think it always has, you know. I remember that there was a quote that you and I talked about off the air from Golden Mayer which said, I think it's exact, but I might be slightly paraphrasing, which said, I will I could forgive the Palestinians for killing our children, I will never forgive them for making
us killers of their children. I think it's a very very powerful statement because it does go since to the point that I've been trying to make overall, which is there is no casualousness or callousness when it comes to Israel engaging in war with the other side, no matter how obscene or how brutal or barbaric what they did to us was. And I think it does in fact encapsulate the feeling of Israel that deals with war, which is look we know when we get in war, they're
going to be casualties. They're going to be children who are killed. We know that, and it kills us that we have to engage in that kind of behavior, and I have to do that. But ultimately, the difference comes down to something very simple. And look, it's the problem ramseyes,
is that it's very hard to denude emotion from this argument. Right, It's an emotional argument, and sometimes that's difficult to discuss because the emotion, I think, actually gets the way of the real argument, which is the data, what is actually happening on the ground. No, obviously I hold this against you used the word carpet bombing, which a lot of people have used, and this is part of the problem. If this or was carpet bombing Gaza, Gaza wouldn't be there.
It wouldn't be an argument on me. There's an argument that Gaza is not there. Effectually, a gaza doesn't exist anymore. There's nowhere for the people to live, there's nowhere for the people. The population has been displayed to people are hungry, people don't have homes that they can go back to. So effectively, effectually, Gaza is has been decimated.
There is no gaza, so that isn't actually true, and that there's there are many many In fact, I think the majority of building are still standing. A lot have been taken down for sure, but you're not seeing the entire gaza strip, right, So.
The population centers is what I'm referring.
Yeah, yeah, even in the population centers there are many, many, many neighborhoods standing in but yes, most of that displaced. What I'm talking about is if it was if Israel was in fact carpet bombing, you wouldn't have thirty thousand dead. It has three million dead. Israel's the ability to bomb every inch of that and kill every single person there. So the reason why I don't we're because car bombing has a specific military attribution, which is completely random destruction
of a city or a country. If it was completely random, again, it wouldn't be thirty thousand, maybe three hundred thousand and three million deads So I don't like the use the word that you use the word carpet bombing, but certainly it has been bombed, I mean massively. There's no no debate about.
That, Okay, So let's let's keep that in mind. So what we have now is now. The thing is one of the things I've never been able to fully get to the bottom of is the why. Okay, now, the why in terms of the Hamas attacks. I've learned since then that this has been very much an ongoing war, and what I originally thought of was just kind of hatred.
There is some.
Mental framework that exists within the the Hamas group which is based beyond simply just hatred. There's a degree of retaliation, there's a degree of defense, There's all these things that
they feel is appropriate given what they've been through. Right, So when we look at Israel and Israel's response to the Hamas attack on October seventh, the why comes into question because either they are going to get the Hamas terrorists or they are going to do something more significant, something greater, right, And what we see as the result of them, quote seeking out the Hamas terrorists, well, the result of that is something far greater, right, as you mentioned,
significant destruction. Okay, Now, this is something that I have seen. I've seen the data on this, and I'm sure you have to, and I fear that we are subscribing to potentially at some point in this conversation we might find ourselves having subscribed to two different sets of data. But I want to be very fair when I say that the data that I look at, because again I don't have an a vested interest in the outcome directly here. These are not necessarily speaking my people on either side.
I reckon both sides, brothers to me, right, So the best that I can do is try my best to use data that is either not biased or not listed as uncredible. Okay, So so that what I'm What I mean is I'm looking at data from sources that are journalistically credible and do not have a significant bias one
way or the other. Okay, there are some that are left bias, some that are right byas with that in mind, where I am is when I see that Israel has done so much damage, the why and this might have been a conspiracy theory, but increasingly it starts to feel like maybe that's true.
Okay.
So again, you mentioned that carpet bombing would have destroyed hundreds of thousands or potentially millions of people, right, and Israel has the capability of doing that. But if in fact Israel does want the land, it certainly looks like they're moving the population of the Gaza strip south toward the Egyptian border. And because of that, and and and because of the fact that they are not I mean, they're still on the edge of sort of a crisis, a pr crisis, certainly, And that's kind of what the
question was about. I would imagine that had they bombed one hundred thousand or you know, three hundred thousand or whatever number it is that's there, then obviously there would be a much more significant pushback that would overwhelm Israel's relationships, perhaps they're military, et cetera, because there would be a much more significant response to this. So in other words, keeping those numbers relatively low compared to what they could
do allows them to get the land. Now, again, I can't say that that's the why, but it's starting to look that way. So my question now is these and if you ask for my sources, I have them right here, But for the sake of time, we're going.
To get through them pretty quickly.
There was a UN vote in December which highlighted the shift away from support of Israel to the support of Palestine. One hundred and fifty three countries and the bodies General Assembly, the overwhelming majority voted in favor of an immediate ceasefire humanitarian ceasefire, and that's an uptick from October. Of course, since then, Biden has stated that, you know, Israel is starting to lose support in the war due to indiscriminate
bombing that takes place. According to Time magazine, there's a net favorability. The percentage of people viewing Israel positively after subtracting the percentage viewing it negatively dropped globally by an average of eighteen point five percent. So this shift away from let's support Israel more toward let's support Palestine.
I want to get an idea of how that hits.
Do we still feel like Israel is doing the right thing and everyone around the world is wrong, misinformed, anti Semitic, you know, whatever the case is. And this is where we need some insight from a person who is so not only intelligent but involved as you.
So you drop a lot of stuff there, Yeah.
Sorry about that.
That's a right unpack some of it. So first of all, let's let's talk about the motivation. The motivation the land park. So it just it isn't true, and we know it isn't true because Israel willingly left Israel's zero zero intention for the Gaza Strip to be part of Israel. Zero. How do I know that Israel left voluntarily? This doesn't have to leave the Gaza Strip. It did. They said, we're going to give that to you. You can run it as you see fit. We're gonna have zero involvement.
There's not, there was. There's not been a single Israeli soldier in Gaza for almost two decades.
So so if Israel has zero involvement there, then Israel does not control their borders. It does not control their ports, It does not control the water supply, it does not control the electricity, the internet.
So that's kind of tough.
That's not true. That doesn't.
Okay, go ahead, help me out.
But first of all, Israel does not control their borders. It controls a board, it controls the border that it bores Israel. Israel has again zero control over his border in the south, zero, no involvement, not israe a soldier, not a policy of decision, nothing. The southern border has no connection Israel whatsoever. It only controls the northern border or Israel obviously. So no, that's it's not true that
Israel controls its borders. Israel does control a lot of the infrastructure, some of it, not all of it, some of it because that's where the it controls it because the electricity comes from Israel. The water some of it comes from Israel, so obviously it controls it. Hamas decided it wasn't going to build electrical infrastructure for itself because that would mean it had to spend money for its civilian infrastructure and not its terror arms. So it was
happy to have Israel provide all of electricity. So thisel controls it because they provide it. If if Hamas or the or the past that or the Gazans built their own power plants, which they could have. By the way, they get billions of dollars in funding from abroad, and for miserbel it is, we're also funds them. They could have spent their money instead of building tunnels, they could have built civil infrastructure. It decided not to do that. So the reason why controls it is because ISRAELA gives
it to them. Obviously, you're giving thing to somebody, you could take it away, especially if you had went through the brutality that it went through October seventh. So yes, some of these are technically true, but when you start putting context around it, it starts to make a little more sense.
Well, okay, so then there's another one here. Now be that as it may, as far as I'm very.
Clear, what I'm sorry, One more thing. The land thing is a huge It is a conspiracy theory. Again, there's zero Israel has has engaged in war with Gaza many many times since they were given autonomy over the Gaza Strip many times, and they've never taken one inch of territory. There's literally literally no evidence that this is an intention of Israel, and it truly is a conspiracy theory.
So so here, here's where I here's where.
So this this I was just looking at something last night, right, and I don't have it in my notes today because again I found that I think it's nine I forget the name of the magazine, but it's a Israeli owned magazine. It starts with the nine to three digits, but they have a left bias. And then the source material that the magazine was quoting had warnings that it sometimes uses questionable information. So I didn't include it in my notes today.
But I saw the video, right, and the video purported to have a Palestinian man's house being taken over, which certainly reflects the reality that a lot of people on the Palestinian side of things, certainly in the West Bank, suggest is going on. There are people that are just taking land, taking houses, withdrawing borders, these things.
What.
Okay, so so real quick, I've had people on.
This who's taking over a house? You're taking like Israelis are coming across the border and taking people's homes.
Absolutely, and I saw the video for it last night now at the time my notes because I didn't.
But you can't believe that. That's not That's not a thing. There's no there's no zero. He's really civilians crossing the border to Gossa zero zero z ro ramseys. I can't. I'm not sure I said it. Zero. This is all this is None of this is happening, none of them, I can, by the way, I say that.
Sorry, it's okay, it's the radio.
Sorry, I told you of motion. I don't, I don't know. I don't know how else to. This is not this is not reality. And you're you're you know me, I don't. I'm not. I'm not into hyperbole, right.
Okay, Okay, So so so here's here's where we have to leave this because there's a lot more we need to cover. I want to make sure that I state two things. One is that there are people who have lived experience who have brought it to me. I of course don't live there, but they feel just as passionately as you do. And they say that it has happened
to their family members. Their family members no longer lived in the houses that are now occupied by Israeli people in Gaza or in the West Bank, the West Bank specifically as well, and real quick on me, those people will be on next week to share their perspective on this. So I do want to move on because there's a lot that we have to cover here.
I don't want to Besmortis people. I'm telling you that somebody tells you that they have a home the Israeli citizens then crossed over to take in Gaza. I hate it. They're lying to you. They're lying to you, all right, and there will be no there's no evidence for that, zero evidence.
So we're going to move through the rest of this a little bit quicker.
Talk to us a little bit about the many videos that are coming out that are showing sort of that misconduct of the IDF and the humiliate, the humiliation of the dozens. So so, how does that hit you when you see those videos? Real quick, give me like thirty seconds.
Yeah, so there, of course, when you're in war, forget about the general the general amount of death in the war, but there's going to be misconduct, an ethical, moral behavior by certain soldiers. And there's no doubt to me that some of that has occurred.
Okay, now it hits me very poor, real quick, real quick. I want to make sure that we're addressing the fact that it's quite prevalent. So so so please continue.
Yeah, I'm not sure how. I'm not sure how. I don't think it's that prevalent. I think that when you have this kind of this kind of war, the amount of battles going on, if it happens, I don't know, with the number ten twenty fifth, I don't know. I just make up a number. I don't know. It's not prevalent. It happens. They're isolated. And by the way, when videos come out of this stuff, they get punished in court martial.
That shows you how serious Israel takes it. They court martial and arrest people who they have proof, are creating, are having misconduct, or behaving them morally in times of war.
Thank you for that.
I want to move on to what was it like watching the video of the US soldier Aaron Bush Now when he set himself on fire yelling free Palestine. Did that give you pause to suggest that maybe there are people who are sincerely hopeful for a free Palestine at some point in the future.
I'm sure there are a lot of people who are hopeful and want that and so so.
To go to that degree, did that? How was that discussed in circles that you're familiar with.
I mean, you know, it's it was. It was horrific to watch and but and again I don't want to be callous about it, but I mean, he's just it was it was for him to die for this was a terrible thing. I mean, I don't know how, I don't know how I do say it. It wasn't nobody's laughing about it. Nobody found it funny. Everybody found it terrible. But he'd unfortunately he died for a cause, a misplaced cause.
Okay, and by missing okay, let me.
Take that back. Not the thing he believes that having a free Palestine is a misplaced cause. I'm not saying that. I'm sure he believes that he wants that, and I understand that. But again, I want to point out that Gaza has been free for almost twenty years.
Okay, So here's what I'm gonna do. We're gonna have to come back to this. But there's been a lot of things that have been stated, and I personally have researched them. Maybe you've reached searched different sources, but I want to share them before we move on, and then we'll have to come back to it. So just let me get these off and then we'll come back. So some of the things that have been determined to be lies.
One that there was already a ceasefire in place on October sixth, and as it turns out, there's examples of Israel Israeli soldiers violating that ceasefire prior to October sixth. Another one is that the priority of freeing the hostages. I'm not even gonna get through all these, but we need to talk about how the IDF has accidentally killed hostages, the beheading of babies, et cetera. We'll come back to it, but I'd love to get your thoughts,