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