Words at War Now when Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judea in the days of Herod the King, behold, the angel of the Lord appeared to Joseph in a dream, saying, Arise and take the young child and his mother and flee into Egypt, for Herod will seek the young child to destroy him. The National Broadcasting Company in cooperation with the Council on Books and Wartime presents another of the most widely discussed programs in America, Words at War, dramatizing the most representative books to come out of this great world conflict. Tonight's Words at War program is a Christmas story based on two books, Kenneth Gould's Scapegoats in History and History of Bigotry in the United States by Gustavus Myers. For today's sermon, our text is the Gospel according to St. Matthew, chapter 2, verse 16. Then Herod, when he saw that he was mocked of the wise men, was exceeding wrath and set forth and slew all the children that were in Bethlehem and in all the coasts thereof, from two years old and under. Then was fulfilled that which was spoken by Jeremy the Prophet, saying, In Rama was there a voice heard, lamentation and weeping and great mourning, Rachel weeping for her children and would not be comforted because they are not. Is there a man among us who does not in this Christmas season of goodwill and brotherhood among men condemn this slaughter of innocent children by a ruthless king? Now I am confident that Herod's crime against humanity will wrinkle in the hearts and minds of just men forever. And yet the slaughter of the innocents was not the first such act of persecution or has it been the last? There have always been scapegoats among us, hated, distrusted, persecuted. It is of these that I wish to speak to you today, scapegoats in history. The original scapegoat described in the book of Leviticus was an animal called Azazel.  Place him on the altar. Yes, sire. Witness, oh Lord, that we are gathered in holy convocation on this day of atonement. In the tenth day of the seventh month, and with penitence and sorrow, we confess the iniquities and sins of the people, and transfer those sins and iniquities to the beast Azazel. Amen. The Azazel was a goat, and the ritual was common among the people of Israel, the Babylonians and the Hittites. Years later, distorted religious sentiment produced the human scapegoat. Out with hunger, and in with health.  Die, you must, it is ordained by the gods. Out with hunger, in with health, out with hunger, in with health. That was a ceremony performed annually by the ancient Greeks and called the expulsion of hunger. When the custom became refined, the Lucadians once a year hurled a criminal into the sea as a public sacrifice to Apollo. In Marseille, a poor man was dressed in holy garments and stoned to death to avert the plague. In Rome and Sparta, the sacrificial offerings were beautiful young virgins. All this was done for a well-recognized purpose, to benefit the community, to drive out famine and disease, to prevent the loss of crops or cattle, to atone for sin, with the community's scapegoat taking the rap. The practice grew un- molested, and rulers soon found it to their advantage to let popular prejudices concentrate on unpopular groups, the minorities. You know what I heard today? It was told to me by a very high official of the Senate. It's the foreigners who are responsible for the flood, the Phoenicians. They are? The sooner we get rid of them, the better. There's no food and people are starving, and all because of them, because of their magic. Then they should be driven out. Or better still, sacrificed to the gods. Yes, sacrificed to the gods. Why wait? Let's go to the high priests, spread the news throughout the city, and tell the people of a crime of the Phoenicians. It is done, sir. The news is spreading throughout the city like wildfire. By tonight, there won't be a Phoenician left alive. Good work, Delenius. You have done your job well. This is your reward. By such means it was easy to distract the attention of the public from the real shortcomings of the group in power. Or to cause the masses to forget their own miseries. It was also easy to arouse fear and hatred and suspicion of those who differed from the rank and file. Shrewd manipulators of mob psychology stimulated this fear and hatred by means of subtle propaganda, and by creating scapegoats. The mob is getting restless, pilot. Very well, any decision they shall have. I wash my hands of the whole business, announce that I release Barabbas, and deliver Jesus unto them to be crucified. It was after the death of Jesus that the word scapegoat began to have a broader meaning. Organized persecution of races, groups, minorities and creeds spread throughout the world, took root in every continent, festered in the hearts and souls of the people. This is the long history of man's inhumanity to man, a history of bloody terror, of oppression, of bigotry, which has come to us through the ages. Listen then, listen to these scapegoats cry out from their martyred graves. In the early days of the Roman Empire, the Christians were the scapegoats. In 64 AD Rome was destroyed by a great fire. Citizens of Rome, listen to the words of Emperor Nero. The fire which consumed Rome was started by members of the upstart groups calling themselves Christians. For this outrageous crime against the people of Rome, all Christians will be arrested and the guilty persons executed. In 112 AD there was an earthquake. It has been discovered that the earthquake was brought about by the Christians. For this outrageous crime against the people of Rome, all Christians will be arrested and the guilty persons executed. Two years later the Empire suffered from famine and pestilence. If the Christians who are responsible for this outrageous crime against the people of Rome, feed them to the liars. The climax of the long and fiery ordeal came in the reign of Diocletian in 284 AD. Fire! They are the ones who are responsible. They are the ones who started the fire. But we have no proof, Sire. Proof? Since when is it necessary to have proof against the Christians? I say they started the fire. It was a conspiracy against the Empire myself. And they shall pay for this conspiracy. They shall pay for it with their blood. A terrible persecution that began that day spread throughout the Empire. Christians were imprisoned, tortured, and in some towns the entire population massacred. This anti-Christian campaign lasted until 311 AD. Twelve years later Emperor Constantine accepted Christianity as the official religion of the Roman Empire and the persecution of the Christians stopped. Human nature, unfortunately, is slow to learn from its own experience. Minority groups sometimes escape from their prison of prejudice and increase in number and influence. In such changing circumstances they in turn become intolerant of other groups and treat them as scapegoats for their own ills. And so it was with the early Christian church when it fell prey to the poison of power. This Christmas season the voice of history rings out in accusation. These are the crimes the Christian church perpetrated in the Dark Ages when the heretic was the scapegoat because he was believed to be in league with the devil and the traffic of a black magic. Listen well, for the list is long and bloody and the names are well known to you. It includes the imprisonment, torture or execution of such men as Galileo, Roger Bacon, John Huss, the Spanish Inquisition, the murder of Joan of Arc, the massacre of St. Pytholomew, the burning of Ridley, Latimer and Prandmer at the stake in the days of bloody fear. These are the dark stains upon the pages of a glorious history. Stains which spread and multiplied as new religious groups, sects and denominations won first toleration and then control in the countries of Europe and America. First the Protestants took their turn, the Calvinists and the Puritans, fleeing from religious intolerance themselves yet not believing that others were entitled to freedom in the worship of God. Hear ye, for insolent and contemptuous behavior against authority and for publicly insinuating opinions and heterodoxies that transgress Puritan laws, Roger Williams is hereby expelled from the colony of Massachusetts Bay. Hear ye, Anne Hutchinson is hereby expelled from the colony of Massachusetts Bay. Mary Dyer, a Quaker, is to be hanged on Boston Common. It were Christian acts, promulgated by Christian ministers of God, ministers who held powers so complete that church and state were practically identified as one. In the year 1692, the hectic hysteria flamed up in Salem. In that year in Salem, there was a West Indian Negro servant called Tituba who both terrified and enchanted her big-eyed listeners with the voodoo spells of her ancestors. So the medicine man gave her this potion I'm making up now. And what do you think happened? She became the most beautiful girl in the world. And the men, they all came to see her from far and wide. And pretty soon the prince came too. And the prince, he said to her, I've been in love with you all my life. Will you marry me? It's thrilling. Thus Tituba entertained her friends. And although the potions never did anybody any good, neither did they do anybody any harm. Still one day when those voodoo stories of Tituba came to the attention of Cotton Mather, a minister of God who immediately brought the case to the attention of Governor Sir William Phipps, a representative of the people. Witchcraft, that's what they say Governor Phipps. The woman is a witch possessed of the devil. She's a minister to our community, a minister to the people and the Puritan church. What do you want me to do, Reverend Mather? Hang her. If thy right, I offend thee and cause thee to stumble, pluck it out, cast it from thee. Unless you hang that witch, she will spread the disease of a witchcraft throughout Salem. She will infect the entire community. Very well. I shall appoint a special court to try her with instructions to carry out the execution. And so Tituba was hanged. No! No! And then there came others, young girls and old women. No! No! All tried by a special court, all declared to be possessed of the devil and executed for the welfare of the community. Before this flame of insanity burnt itself out, 19 innocent persons had been hanged and one pressed death. Yes, even to America, it was carried the hate and prejudiced fear that was born thousands of years ago in the jungles of Africa and the rituals of the primitive races and the warped mind of King Herod. And as we began to grow as a nation, so did the scapegoats multiply. In the 17th century, the hatred was directed against the Catholics. There is no room in the colonies for the Pope and the Romish church. Popory and Christianity are as dissimilar as day and night, as foreign as Christ and antichrist, as contradictory as God and the devil. So thundered the Puritan Popits and the cry was echoed throughout America. Down with the Phoebe! Down with the Catholics! Down with the Phoebe! Down with the... Except Rhode Island. Could a Catholic vote or enjoy civil and religious rights? In New York, an act was passed, confiscating property of Jesuits and other Catholic priests. And during the French and Indian War, Catholics were charged with fomenting Negro-Indian uprising against the colonial governments. This wave of anti-Catholic sentiment died down with the Revolution and the adoption of the Constitution with its guarantee of freedom of worship.  It burned and festered in the hearts of men. And in the middle of the 19th century, it was directed against the Irish. This is an Irish invasion.  Responsible for our unemployment and panics, depriving Native Americans like yourselves of jobs. They've been responsible for lowering the wage scale. This weren't enough. Most of the Irish who come here are clannish, unassimilable and... This was the beginning of the many nativist, nationalist and anti-foreign movements that have periodically marked and plagued American life. The resentment soon became linked with religious bigotry. Bigotry turned to hate and another anti-Catholic crusade was underway. The Catholic publications in society sprang up to keep the country safe for Protestant Americanism. Among them, the Order of United American. The United American Mechanics. The Order of the Star-Spangled Banner. The propaganda of these organizations soon inflamed Native Americans to direct action. Come back where you can from, you dirty Irish Catholics! In 1829, mobs attacked the homes of Boston Catholics and stoned them for three days. The Irish section of Charleston, Massachusetts was devastated. In 1834, an Ursuline convent was burned to the ground and in the years 1835 to 1845, violent riots broke out in Philadelphia and New York. Get those dirty Irish out of here! Send them all back to Ireland! Later, they followed the know-nothing party with their war cry of rum, Romanism and rebellion and the American Protective Association, all serving but one purpose, to spread hate, fear and distrust among the people of America. In 1867, shortly after the Civil War, there appeared another organization using different methods but producing the same results. Kill the Negroes! Burn their... This clan standing for white Anglo-Saxon Protestant supremacy, standing also for murder and pillage and terror. Created at first to combat the carpet bag governments of newly freed Negroes, broadening its field of hate and persecution later to include foreigners as well as native-born Jews, Catholics, labor, radicals, liberals. Existing even now, this Christmas season, as I speak to you, waiting to go into action again when conditions for mass hate are ripe and the blind among us willing to follow their program. Let us examine now the scapegoats in our midst. Let us ask ourselves this question. What does it mean to be a Negro in the United States today? I can answer that question. I am a Negro, born in America, lived in America all my life. It's a good country too, created by God and by man so that people can live together in peace and freedom. I figure, according to the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, it belongs to me as well as to anybody. But sometimes I wonder. Sometimes I wonder about a lot of things which make me an outcast in the country where I was born. I wonder why in many states I can't vote like the white people do. I wonder why I have to live in the slum areas and pay exorbitant rents for fire traps. I wonder why I have to go to different schools, sit in designated sections of buses and trains, go to different hotels and restaurants. I wonder why I can't get a job at wage rates comparable to those of other Americans. Why I can't get into certain unions? Why many defense industries won't hire me? I wonder why in time of war a German prisoner is more respected by some white men than myself? And why in time of war the Army and the Navy have to have special Negro units? I wonder about justice different for the black man and the white and about lynchings created to strike terror in our hearts and keep us where we belong on the bottom rung of the social and economic ladder. Yes, I wonder about a lot of things in this land of mine, in this country which gave me life and won't let me live to enjoy it. Sometimes I get mad.  I have the same blood flowing through my veins. I feel the same pain when I'm sick and a rope around my neck produces the same burning flesh as it would to you. Only my skin is different and that I have not created. Why then haven't I got a right to live in peace and freedom? Why have you chosen to persecute me? Who among us can answer this man? Who among us can justify his burden or contradict his cry for justice? We can say that he is wrong and those who are responsible for his condition right. Those of us who can, let us step forward and take our place in our exalted company with Herod, Pontius Pilate, Caligula, Nero, Ivan the Terrible, Torquemada and Hitler. We come now to the second group of scapegoats in our midst. They're the ones who own all the land, grab all the money, cause all the trouble, kill them I say. This is an incident that has occurred and re-cured a thousand times in the last thousand years. Listen now to the list of crimes perpetrated by the people of the world against the world's favorite scapegoat. Listen to the words of the wandering Jew. In 70 AD, we were evicted from our homeland by the Romans. In the Middle Ages, we were forbidden to own land and assigned to ghettos. The enclosures kept locked at night. In 1290, we were expelled from England. In 1350, we were accused of responsibility for the bubonic plague. In the day of the Russian czars, the armies incited outbreaks against the Jews known as pogroms, systematic house-to-house searches, beatings and massacres. And with the advent of national socialism in Germany, we were subjected to a degree of cruelty unmatched in human misery. Why? What reason was there for this persecution? What reason exists today? If you know the answer, step forward and speak and tell us what truth existed in the accusation. The Jews were responsible for the bubonic plague. What financial and economic proof backed up the accusation. The Jews were responsible for the depression that followed the Napoleonic Wars. America was ever given to substantiate the charge. The Jews perform ritual murders. What logic exists behind the statement? America is controlled by Jewish international bankers. What reason is there for this hate? What purpose does it serve? What has it accomplished? Who has reaped the benefits? And why? What answer shall we give this man? Shall we tell him that these charges were against our deliberate falsehoods invented by purveyors of hate to suit their ends? Shall we tell him that his persecution and the persecution of his race was inspired by these purveyors of hate to give the gullible and the bigoted among us a scapegoat for our economic and social ills? Shall we tell him that the babe in the manger was a Jew himself? And when we persecute the Jews, we also persecute him. We come to worship tonight. But this man knows all that. He has known that for over a thousand years. Now, we cannot answer him. Or can we answer those many others who have felt the whip of bigotry from us, the Italians looked down upon in many cities, and the Negroes and the Catholics and the Mexicans and the Chinese and the millions of other scapegoats standing even now with the tribunals of bigotry we have erected for them. We can only hope and pray for a day when the truth will prevail, when the people of the world will learn that bigotry and persecution were the very things Jesus died to destroy. I have no advice to add. No plea to make. For tolerance and justice and compassion for truth and a spirit of brotherhood must come to each man from his heart, from his own understanding of the facts. Blessed are they who mourn, for they shall be comforted. Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth. Blessed are they who do hunger and thirst after righteousness, for they shall be filled. Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God. Blessed are they which are persecuted for righteousness' sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Tonight on Words at War, we've brought you a play in the Christmas Spirit based on Kenneth Gould's pamphlet, Scapegoats in History and the History of Bigotry in the United States by Gustavus Myers and featuring Bernard Lenro as the narrator. The music was arranged and played by William Meader and the production was under the direction of Garnet Garrison. This is the National Broadcasting Company.


Hello, welcome back everybody. I'm DroneTech and today I wanted to talk to you about this entertaining panel discussion I saw from the Paley Center for Media. It's a YouTube channel, the one you can see right there, so you can go check that out later. But they had a really interesting discussion. I guess the main topic was the presidency, but obviously it got into media bias since we have a bunch of media people here from different spectrums. At some point the conversation veered into the media's bias when it comes to reporting on Republican administrations compared to Democrat administrations, it's really the kind of stuff I talk about every single day on this channel. At one point the New York Times reporter that's on this panel jumps in and just denies that there is any bias and that's when the fun starts. We're gonna get right into that, but first let me implore you to check out PrepareWithDroneTech.com and get your emergency food storage going. Everyone's talking about food shortages and this is a really good way to get a good piece of mind. Knowing that no matter what happens, you're gonna be okay. So remember go check out PrepareWithDroneTech.com Sean, from your perspective, what do you see as the primary responsibility of the media when you're covering the White House in your sort of role when you were there? I think the media's responsibility regardless of administration or frankly beat is to give people the facts and frankly without opinion. Just real quick, in case you didn't notice that is Sean Spicer, Trump's former press secretary, one of my favorites actually. I remember at the time it was hilarious because he would just destroy the press core and the popular saying at the time was that you can't dice the spice. In any case Spicer is absolutely correct here. The reason that trust in media has been plummeting for the last 20 years with everybody except for Democrats is because they don't report objectively. They clearly have an agenda and it's right in line with the Democrat Party. I've made an entire channel, made a living for the last five or six years now, simply pointing that out on a daily basis. And too often it's you know and Tim and the media research center and the newsbusters document a lot of this, but it's what they cover, what they don't cover, the tone in which they cover it is crucial. And so and the skepticism, right? So that's what Biden does is always altruistic. They're seeking a goal that's worthy. Everything that Trump did was bad. Nothing was good. Everything, you know, when he screwed something up, it was it's a disaster when Biden, and we're now on what, I mean, we made fun of Infrastructure Week over and over again during the Trump administration. We're on now on like week 47 in the Biden administration and no one brings it up. I mean, it's, it's, well, he's still trying hard from fighting for the American people. It's an embarrassment what's going on in the briefing room. Again, Spicer is dead on here and I just want to point you to the New York Times reporter. He's the guy with the beard on the left, Patrick Haley. And he just got this kind of smug look on his face the entire time. Like everything that he's hearing from these people is just completely crazy.  But Spicer talks about this in terms of comparing Trump to the way Biden's being covered, but I've talked about this often. You can go back to at least Clinton. See how Clinton was covered compared to Bush, how Bush was covered compared to Obama, how Obama's coverage compared to Trump. And you know, after the Bush-Obama transition, I was able to predict exactly how it would happen every time. And it's not that I'm psychic. It's just that this pattern is very obvious. Their bias and complete lack of objectivity, their agenda-driven news coverage is just so obvious. And it's for all the reasons and more that Spicer just pointed out here. When we're talking about Democrat policy, the media reports on it as if they are salespeople, you know, trying to sell the... And Democrats expect this. And this is why you saw Biden and Pelosi and a couple other Democrats actually come out and say that the reason they're not able to pass this build-back-better-bill is because the media hasn't been selling it enough. Yet when it's a Republican administration, suddenly the media is very adversarial. Suddenly they want to dig into every policy and they want to see how it's going to affect everything. They really want to get into it. And they say that, hey, we're just holding truth to power. You know, when I used to... During the Bush years, when I used to ask people like, why is it that they're covering Bush so much more critically than they did Clinton? And I would constantly hear responses like, oh, well, it's because the Republicans are the ones in power. Oh, okay. Well, all right. Well, then we get into the Obama administration where Democrats had a majority. And suddenly that reasoning's right out the window. And suddenly they're just pushing the agenda again. I think anyone objectively who can look at a clip of the press briefing between... When I was there, frankly, I think it went subsequently. And what it is with Jen is it's not something that I think is debatable. The press, when Patrick was on the reporting side, clearly came in in an adversarial role. I don't think journalists are there to present stories and facts and say, this is what happened. Here's the who, what, where, when. They have crossed that line. In Trump, it was very much advocating why he was wrong. And in the Biden administration, it was why he was right. This is absolutely correct. This is why, during the Trump years, you saw this just barrage of fact checks. You had Washington Post and the media constantly touting that 10,000 fact checks on Donald Trump. And it was very obvious to see what was going on there. They throw out this enormous number and that's all people really see. When you started to actually dig down into these fact checks, you found that it was a lot of times just like semantic word games or maybe Trump was just wrong about something. It was obvious that he misstated like a data point or something like that. And yes, there were some lies in there. Because guess what? All politicians lie. The Washington Post fact checks, so many of these that weren't even actual lies. It was just like disagreement or semantic word games. They would then attribute that to like hundreds of different... Because Trump was out there speaking a lot. They would attribute those to just all these different statements. Then after the election, we started seeing these news reports where they were saying, oh well, you know, you might not see a bunch of fact checks like we did of Biden. It's not because we're, you know, that we're biased and we're just covering for him. No, no, don't think that. That's not it. It's just because Joe Biden doesn't lie, which is of course absurd because Joe Biden is known for lying. He's been known for lying since I started paying attention to politics. Even during the run up to the election in 2016, the his Democrat, Biden's Democrat opponents were all calling him out for his lies. But then he gets elected and suddenly we just have to pretend like that's not the case. There's such a thing as popular opinion anymore when it comes to the president and what we're seeing today. Well, it's an interesting question to ask given how public opinion polling for the current president has shown him to be off a cliff in terms of what the people want and how that relates to media coverage. Right. And is there media touting those numbers every day? No, they're not. You remember any time a low poll came out for Trump, it was everywhere. On every headline, you turn on the TV and that's all they were talking about. It's on the lower thirds, it's on the crawler. That's all you heard. That's all you saw. But with Biden, not at all. And you could have predicted this. I want to just point out that there is a group of people that does believe they are treated fairly by the media. The most recent Gallup poll showed that the group of people who three out of four believe they are treated fairly by the media, that's Democrats. Only 9% of Republicans feel that their views are represented fairly by the media. Yep. And you know what? That has been the case for at least the last 20 years, folks. I'll post a poll up on the screen when I go into editing here to show you this. But this is nothing new. And they've really tried to blame Trump for the lack of trust in media. All through the Trump years they were doing that, Brian Stelter still to this day makes that claim. It's not their fault, of course not. It's just Trump because he said the media was the enemy of the people. Even though the fact is Trump was elected because of the media, in large part, because of how the media is, how corrupt they are. They talk so much about democracy. How can you have a functioning democracy if instead of a free press, that's supposed to hold all power to account, you have a giant propaganda machine that is in the corner of one party. They are the extension of one party against the other. While constantly demonizing to extreme insane links, to the point now where you have people like Nicole Wallace, who claimed to be Republican, out there actually calling for the government to use violence against people they disagree with politically. Back to the polls. As Biden's poll numbers continue to drop, the media will continue to downplay it. They'll cover it a little bit, but not a lot. Nothing like what we would see if it was a Republican. That's for good reason. And it's because our media in the last five years, and this is directly related to their posture toward the office of the president under the current. Right. And I just also want to point out again that independence are right there with conservatives and Republicans with their confidence and trust in the media plummeting. I think for this conversation to have any value or meaning, we do have to remember what the press did with the current, with the previous administration. And I think about the current administration, the first press conference I think was March 25th. It was embarrassing. It was embarrassing like as a journalist to watch what the media did, gently asking questions. You were so kind. And that's why we have a border crisis, right, Mr. President? It was unbecoming of anybody who thinks that they're professional. Compare that with the previous office holder, where the first press conference, I think, was before the inauguration. And it was about a delusional conspiracy theory that Donald Trump had stolen the 2016 election by colluding with Russia. This became the main focus of much of our media.  I don't know if they believed this delusional conspiracy theory that Donald Trump stole the election or if they pretended to. Either way, that's why they don't have any credibility outside of their co-partisans. Yeah.  And just think about it for a second, what they did. They created this grand conspiracy theory to try and undo an election because they didn't like the results.  They literally got Russian disinformation spread it throughout the government, its institutions, and the country. In order to undo an election, they didn't like the results of. And now we know that Durham, in his investigation, is now arresting the guy who they actually went to for the information in the Steele dossier. Charging him with lying to the FBI. And you may remember there was a Democrat lawyer, I believe, who was just recently arrested for the exact same thing. And guess what? This all goes back to Hillary Clinton and the DNC who paid for this opposition research that turned out to actually be Russian disinformation. Once again, they are all guilty, completely guilty of what they accuse us of. Either way, that's why they don't have any credibility outside of their co-partisans. This is a major crisis for our country because we know we need a free press to preserve liberty. We know we need a press that holds people responsible. And they can't move from cartoonish hostility to gentle sycophancy based on who's holding the office. Cartoonish hostility is such a good word for it. I mean, what do we always say? That it's almost like they're putting on a theatrical performance, right? And that's what it is. And then you get a Democrat in office and it's just like a completely different thing. The press briefings are a great example of that because we all remember that the press briefings used to be pretty fun and entertaining because the press would just go insane.  To, like she just said, it's just this gentle sycophancy.  Now, next up, that New York Times reporter is gonna respond and this is where it gets really good. I don't think any media organization or business today really can survive at a level of covering the country. If they're not trying to tell the stories in a good faith way of people on both sides, I understand people see it differently, but... Hold on, hold on a second. I mean, more and more. And in fact, after Biden won the election, the media started putting out all these stories about how objectivity is bad. We heard big people, like Lester Hulke fountain, say that, oh, objectivity is not such a great thing, actually. And several other ones. I'll go find some more and again, put them into the video and editing. But, and I'm pretty sure there were some people from New York Times, but that's a thing. And they started doing that as a sort of cover for what was blatant bias and partisanship in their stories. It's just, this guy is just really showing this very trademark lack of self-awareness that we constantly see on the left.  And you'll see what I mean here in a second because he gets called out for this excuse that he's making that, oh well, I don't think we'd be in business if we weren't trying to tell both sides of the story. He gets called out for that and his response is very illuminating. That's really the intent. I don't think that's true, honestly. The whole idea that the New York Times and the Washington Post under Trump had marketing campaigns that were going after the anti-Trump vote. The U-Slogans like democracies dying in darkness. The truth is more important than ever. They were clearly saying, we are going to build a subscriber base of people who do not agree with the current trend. I don't think anybody believes that the New York Times or the Washington Post are here to represent all of us. And that's the problem with the... Hey, what do you have against democracy? What do you have against truth? I don't understand you harping on the models. It's a little strange. Oh, oh, what do you have against democracy? That's immediately what he goes for. It's just like what we hear in the media constantly. If you oppose or criticize the left Democrats or their media, then you hate democracy. Tim Graham that was making that point, the guy on the upper right there, by the way, he is with newsbusters.org. You should definitely go check it out. But Patrick Haley's response here is just a slap in the face. Like the point that Tim was making here is that this sort of soaring journalistic standards, hard-hitting just-the-facts news, that sort of model only pops up when there's a Republican in office. Suddenly, when a Democrat's in there, it's like they're just an extension. They're not doing that same hard-hitting news. They're not doing those same fact checks. During a Democrat administration, most of the fact checks that you're gonna see from guys like Patrick Haley or from the New York Times are gonna be in defense of Democrats. It'll be like, oh, they're making this criticism of Joe Biden and that's not true. This is the truth. Something that you will never see them doing under a Republican administration, especially not the Trump administration. Like there was never a New York Times fact check on the very fine people lie. No, they actually helped to perpetuate that lie. Just a side note here, I love the look on the moderator's face when Tim Graham starts getting into it with the New York Times reporter. You can tell he so desperately does not want to talk about this topic and would like to move on. Before I go, I do want to let you all know about my new Let's Go brand and T-shirts and hoodies. You can find the links for that in the description or pinned comment. If you enjoyed this video, please hit that like button and let me know what you think in the comments. As always, thanks for watching. I'll see you all next time.


In celebration of hillbilly days, the Pikeville-Pike County Visitor Center has released their own line of trading cards called Hallard Critters. Well, we was trying to think of some ideas to bring people to our welcome center because we moved to a new location and we wanted to bring the families here to let them know where we are, show them our exhibits and in case they have family or friends that come in, we wanted them to be able to know where we are so we can give them those brochures and help them find their way around town. Do you worry about having enough money to last throughout retirement? Give Reed Potter at Raymond James a call. Reed has 26 years experience helping folks enjoy their best life in their retirement years. The cards made to look like the popular Pokemon trading cards depict various hillbilly themed critters on both regular and holographic cards. Hallard Critters have become a huge hit and as of this recording, not many packs of the unique trading cards are left. Yeah, we came up with some silly hillbilly creatures, critters that, you know, they kind of play into the stereotype a little bit, but in a funny way, not in a disparaging way. And of course, they are a parody of the Pokemon creatures, but we just wanted something a lot hearted, funny. We have hillbilly days going on this week, so we thought it would be a good match for the festival. Card packs are limited, but people's names will be taken to place a second order. If you'd like to get your own pack of Hallard Critter cards, you can visit the Pikeville Pike County Visitor Center Monday through Friday from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m., and Saturdays from 8 a.m. to 3 p.m. For Mountaintop News, I'm Kelsea Fidel.


My name is Peter. I did, I guess, most of the analysis on the long-term strategies of the Baltic state. So, if someone has an issue with the results, then I guess I'm the one that you should talk to. I guess we didn't know exactly who was going to show up today, so I thought I would give a bit of a kind of overview of long-term strategies, ac mae'n fwy o'r rhai gwybod yw'r unig o'ch bod ymwneud yng Nghymru yn yr EU a'r bwyd yn ddodd yn y Gweithgafol Llywodraeth i'r Chymru ac yn y rhywbeth diolch yn gystafell. Mae'n ddifrif yn y fwy o'r hyn yn y Ymddiad Ymddiad Ymwy, yw ymwneud ym Mhwy, ymwneud ym Mhwy o'r 10, ym Ymddiad Llywodraeth i'r Gweithgafol, yn y cyfraeg, ymwneud ym Mhwy o'r Ymwneud ymwneud yn y Llywodraeth, oedd y LTS i gynllunio'r economi. Mae'r gynhwysawdd y gallwn i'r gynllunio'r eu ffawr oherwydd y LTS yng Nghymru, oherwydd ychydig yn ni'n deall ymddiol, mae'r gweithio'r gweithio'r cyfnodau eu mhwyl yn ymddiol i'r proses yn gyfnod yn agorol. Rwyf wedi gynllunio'r Cyfnodau. Ac rwyf wedi gwneud o'u gynllunio'r gynllunio'r LTS, augment Going what Each country was meant to include based on annex four of the regulation and that was five different kind of main topics. So an overview of how the strategy was developed and then content which includes targets for greenhouse gas reductions and renewable energy and energy efficiency and then also a sectoral breakdown of I think were integrated together agriculture but five different sectors, then details on the financing and the socioeconomic impacts of the plans and also it was specified that any sort of modelling that had taken place to inform the plans should also be included in the documents. I had a look yesterday at how many different countries have submitted their LTSs and it's still only 22 of 27 despite the fact that the deadline was two years, two and a half years I think ago now and they also vary quite a lot as I think we all know in terms of the length and the content so the longest one I think I've seen is the French one which is is close to 200 pages and then the Estonian one is eight pages so you have this really big variety in terms of what has been included and in fact some countries such as the furania have already updated theirs I think Hungary have also updated theirs but kind of the environment the environment on the environment is is not static and we know that over the past two years there have been quite a few different factors that have led to most countries being in a position where they now need to subsequently update their strategies again and that's kind of what the purpose of this analysis is because hopefully we can start a conversation or look at kind of the best practices from lots of different countries so that people can kind of pool the expertise and we can kind of raise the standard of the LTSs or put a bit more emphasis on them. So that was kind of about the LTSs and I will also just include a tiny bit of background on the energy and emissions in the free countries. I'm sure everyone already knows this anyway but as most countries do all three countries in the Baltic States have quite high dependency on fossil fuels. What is different is that in Estonia this is mainly through oil and petroleum products because of the oil shale industry here whereas in Latvia and Lithuania a bit more natural gas is used. They also all have quite a big emphasis on bioenergy and when you look at the electricity sectors in particular you see this really big dependency from Estonia on oil shale. You also see in Latvia there's quite a lot of hydropower and in Lithuania and also in Estonia to an extent there's quite a lot of wind power coming on line and again you see that Latvia and Lithuania are using gas and Estonia is not but the other thing to note here is partly as we all know from the really high prices the amount of production in the free countries is not sufficient so there's quite a lot of electricity that's coming from the Nordic countries also and in terms of emissions we've seen that all three countries have seen quite big decreases at least since 1990. For Estonia and Lithuania this has persisted throughout the entire period two years ago whereas for Latvia the emissions have actually started to rise and the reason I think is because of the Lulusaf sink which has been going down consistently in Latvia and also in Estonia since 1990 whereas in Lithuania I think it's most recently been increasing. All countries also have increasing emissions in I think agriculture and transports which is I think quite commonly seen throughout the EU whereas the power sector is going down and then just to give a general overview before we go into things in more detail the three countries differ quite a lot in terms of when the strategies were adopted and what actually included them. So for Estonia one thing to point out is that when we were doing our analysis we know that the Estonia 2035 document came out and that is the one that includes the ambition for climate neutrality so we also we mainly looked at the Estonian LTS but as this was published such a long time ago and because things have changed so much we also supplemented it with anything we could find in the Estonia 2035 document. For Latvia we used the LTS that was published in 2019 and for Lithuania we used the one that was published last year and we can see that the length of the strategies is really different so if we look at the original Estonian document it's eight pages the Latvian one is 55 and the Lithuania one is 35 and in terms of what they include we also see quite big differences but yeah I'll come on to that I'll come on to that in a little bit and you will also see in the subsequent slides some tables with different scoring in and I wanted to just sort of explain how we came up with that scoring so there's it's a three point scale for each different category that we looked at and these categories are the categories from the governance regulation that we've expanded slightly so a country would get three points if they've included a lot of detail on a specific sector to such an extent that a different country could look at their strategy and use it as the basis for forming their own strategy. Two points are given if they've included most of the elements that we've looked for but not everything so it's not fully comprehensive and one point if the section was only described very briefly in qualitative language or was not included at all so examples more specifically for the different sectors is what maybe we were looking for for a score of three would be that there was a clear kind of series of targets for how decarbonisation would take place for a specific sector as well as background and trends for what would take place if different policies were not put into effect. For financing and enabling policies and measures there'd be a score of three for investment if this was clearly described in the document for the whole of the different sectors if it was only partially described for one sector then maybe there'd be a score of two and if there was no kind of detail on investment and what the costs of the decarbonisation would be then there'd be a score of one. Similarly for the other categories so we start with a kind of a look at the general information and targets for the different countries so in terms of how closely the different countries kept to the governance regulation we gave each a score of two and that was because most of the things that should have been included were included but not everything so for instance Latvia and Estonia didn't include details on the renewable energy share in 2050 for example but this kind of also masks differences that we will see later that on this kind of overall thing the strategies scored quite similar but that's partly because of how we were assessing them there are very big differences in terms of what is actually included and a final thing that I want to emphasise here is all three countries particularly Lithuania and to a smaller extent Latvia included quite a lot of detail on adaptation which is something that is important to include but wasn't actually in the in the governance regulation. Moving on I just copied out all of the targets that we could find and you can see that Lithuania has kind of targets for everything that was required whereas Latvia and Estonia have this headline target of climate neutrality by 2050 but are missing in terms of the renewable energy share and the energy efficiency share by 2050. They all kind of have targets that are needed for 2030 although for Estonia we had to take this from the Estonia 2035 document so it's for 2035 rather than 2030 and a lot of these targets are kind of just taken from the NECP although this is not the case for Lithuania I think some of the targets for 2030 were actually upgraded in the LTS compared to what they were in the NECP because the LTS was the newer document in that case and then when it comes to kind of the bulk of the strategies looking at the different pathways and measures for the different sectors we scored most countries mainly two. I actually I'm sorry to say for Estonia recently downgraded the scores from two to one because Estonia does talk about basically all of these sectors but I wanted to emphasise that there was quite a big difference between Estonia which in the original LTS just had some qualitative detail compared to Latvia and Lithuania which had much more detail in terms of the sector breakdown but even Latvia and Lithuania could have included more detail so for instance it was difficult in the Lithuania strategy to see a lot of modelling details all sort of quantitative details about what the situation was in the past and so there were loads of targets but I found it difficult to understand how ambitious the targets were because I didn't know what the starting point was and for Latvia there was a slightly different problem in that there was a good kind of description of what the sector was like but in terms of the breakdown of what the sector is going to look like in the future there was a bit less detail this kind of existed at a higher level and a little bit in terms of the future scenario but it was not entirely clear how those numbers were arrived at and there was also beneath kind of the targets and what was going to change there was not that much detail in terms of how countries were going to attempt to get there and so that made the strategies to me read more as kind of aspirations of where they would like to go and not kind of sort of strategic guidelines of what needs to take place in order to get there which is what you may be found in some of the other strategies in other parts of the EU. When it came to financing and enabling policies and measures this was the case where Latvia scored free because they clearly included that in the LTS although for the Latvian case it was also a bit difficult because it felt like modelling had been done on the how climate neutrality would be achieved but it wasn't really included in the LTS so they just said that this is what it will cost to reach climate neutrality but there wasn't the kind of this detail so it was kind of difficult to know how they'd got to that figure or what it actually represented. Liffioraenu and Estonia didn't really include the investment needs at all. All three countries also could have included a lot more detail in terms of where this financing is going to come from and I think this is one thing that we will see when we look at the Visigrad countries they included a bit more detail here and the final thing is all three countries talked I would say more than the average across the union in terms of the importance of research and development and in terms of upgrading the level of research and upgrading the level of specialists in the country and Liffioraenu included the most detail and they got a score of three in this category. In terms of the economic assessment this was something else that the countries could have really strengthened and hopefully will in the future it's important to perhaps point out that all three countries have GDPs per capita they're a little bit below the EU average and so there are a lot of there's a lot of argument that could be made this is a really important category for these for these three countries because we need to know how different areas of society are going to be impacted by the transition and we found that there was not so much detail on this and this is something that could really be strengthened and particularly when it came to kind of the distribute of aspects so who is going to be impacted and in what way are they going to be impacted this is something that could really be strengthened and I actually took this table from the Visigrad assessment where most of these things were included by quite a lot of the countries and you can see that in the Baltic states beyond any energy security a lot of things are missing Latvia includes the most detail because it includes kind of this assessment of what they think is going to happen to GDP but this is really a section that could also be strengthened along with kind of the sectoral pathways and then to look at preparation and implementation the key point here I think is the analytical tools because I think this really feeds back into what was missing in terms of the economic assessment and also the pathways for the different sectors it was not always clear what kind of modelling the different countries had done and it felt like in a lot of cases modelling hadn't been done and if modelling had been done it was just for a business as your usual scenario in some cases there were figures that were included but it was really difficult to understand what those figures represented there might be for instance I think in the the Latvian and the Estonian cases there were extrapolations to 2050 but it wasn't really clear if they represented rigorous modelling or they were just kind of to guide the eye to what the situation should be like in 2050 I think for the Latvian case it felt like I said before that this kind of climate neutrality modelling had taken place but it wasn't included in the LTS it didn't really say where it came from and that made it difficult to give it a higher score whereas for Lithuania and Estonia it felt like there was less modelling that was included yeah and like I said what was included was not always really well described and yeah for someone for someone from my background that's really important that if you include a figure and you have that in your LTS then it should really state what that represents and how it was derived and a final point is in the Lithuanian strategy and this is something perhaps we can talk about today it's stated at one point that modelling capabilities needed to be strengthened and I think if the reason that there was not as much modelling as in some other countries in the European Union was because that capability was was not easy to find in in the region then this is something that really has to be dealt with quickly because the best LTSs at least in my opinion had quite significant modelling aspects and this was something that was there was not included so much here and then to move on to governance and governance and consultation this was included in all of the countries to some extent especially in Lithuania and Estonia public consultation was also included well at least in two of them but it wasn't always clear what influence this had had on the strategies so for instance in the Estonian original LTS it wasn't included but in the Estonia 2035 document it was included and said what kind of consultations had taken place but to get a score of three it maybe would have had to have said that this was taken on board and based on this consultation with stakeholders this changed but overall this was quite a reasonable section I would say and one thing I wanted to highlight which I think is a little bit unique in the in the countries is that Estonia developed this this tree of truth in English where anyone can go and see how they are performing in terms of a huge variety of different indicators and that includes indicators that are relevant for for decarbonisation such as the greenhouse gas emissions or the renewable energy share and I think this was this was really a really good thing to include and it makes it kind of easy to have this accountability of the strategies even if this was not necessarily devised for the LTSs in general so yeah to come to the general conclusions there was a high amount of heterogeneity the the difference was between the strategies was really big as I think we found for the whole of the EU all of the countries do adopt the the really crucial target of climate neutrality by 2050 but beyond this kind of headline target there were quite big differences in terms of the the sectoral detail so no country is provided what we would like to see in order to get the highest score in our assessment and this is something that could also be strengthened and this partly I think probably comes from the the modelling weaknesses that each country didn't really include enough detail in terms of the modelling and this kind of probably made the sectoral detail and the socio-economic aspects weaker than they perhaps could have been and also there was limited specificity in terms of details especially after 2030 in terms of what direction the countries want to go in in terms of reaching their goals which for the best strategies was included like for instance for Greece for Portugal it's really clear how they want to go about reaching climate neutrality how they want to go about decarbonising their energy systems whereas for the free Baltic states this was a little bit opaque research and development was also highlighted as I said in all three countries really strongly but could be made a bit stronger if different funding sources and research programmes were included. Collaboration I guess is one of the reasons why we're here today regional collaboration was not really discussed about in the different strategies although I think it was to some extent in the NECPs so this is something that again is not required in the governance regulation but could could be strengthened in principle and governance and consultation is generally included but it could be made a bit stronger if the impacts of the consultation were also shown in the strategies and from these kind of conclusions we also developed a series of recommendations which I've kind of already talked about and I guess the clearest one that would really help for every country is if the EU decided to place a bit more emphasis on the long-term strategies I mean these are the kind of documents that are telling each country how they're going to reach climate neutrality and a lot of the things that countries are going to have to do have really long lead times so it's really important that at least some of the decisions or the general directions that they want to head in are made now and the EU could I think place a bit more emphasis on this and then yes coverage in terms of sectors and comprehensive modelling these are things that I've talked about that could really be included in the strategies in a bit more detail and also socioeconomics especially what the costs are going to be and how those costs are going to be shared between society and how that's going to impact households would be really important I think to include in the next round of updates yeah and then the other things are things that I've already talked about so yeah I think that's it for our assessment of the strategies and I think we have time to take questions if anyone has questions on our analysis


Relic looted from the West Bank to the Palestinian Authority will examine the implications for archaeology in the Holy Land. And a medical team in Israel makes progress towards treating a deadly form of blood cancer. We'll speak with one of the researchers involved in that breakthrough study. We have established a different government with a different policy and everyone will see this. That was Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at today's cabinet meeting in Jerusalem, relating to a series of punitive measures taken over the weekend directed against the Palestinian Authority. This follows last week's visit by National Security Minister Inamar Ben-Veer's visit to the Temple Mount that dialed up tensions between Israel and the PA, with both sides now blaming each other for unilateral steps aimed at heating up the already fragile atmosphere. Defense correspondent Jonathan Regiff has more in this report. A sensitive incident at a sensitive time shows a transition in policy in Israel towards the Palestinian Authority. Entry permits to Israel for three senior Palestinian Authority officials were revoked this weekend by Defense Minister Joav Galant after the trio crossed into Israel to congratulate released prisoner Karim Yunus, who finished his 40-year sentence for the murder of an Israeli soldier in 1980. Palestinian sources also say Israel revoked the entry permit of Palestinian Foreign Minister Riyad Al-Maliki. This follows days of back-and-forth actions between Jerusalem and Ramallah. On Thursday, Israel announced that it is taking steps against the Palestinian Authority, including the freezing of the PA's tax money collected by Israel. Our measures include sanctions against senior Palestinian officials, the offset of terrorist funds and the freezing of Palestinian construction projects in Area C, which are contrary to the explicit commitments which the Palestinian Authority took upon itself. The Israeli government claims this comes as a response to what it describes as diplomatic terrorism such as the debate last week at the UN Security Council to have the International Court of Justice draft an opinion on Israel's actions in the Palestinian territories. What red line does Israel need to cross for the Security Council to finally say enough is enough and to act accordingly? When are you going to act? If the previous government tried to keep an apparent cooperation with the Palestinian Authority, the current one is not wasting any time in showing times have changed. Joining us in studio is our Defense Correspondent Jonathan Regev and also Palestinian Security Analyst Mohamed Najib. Mohamed, let's start with the Palestinian reaction to these measures and how the impact that you see having, especially on relations between the Palestinians and Israel. Yes, Kalev. The Palestinian Authority is strongly shocked by the quick measures that taken by the Israeli ministers. In the first week of its formulation, the Marbonik Veer visited Laxamosk last Tuesday. On Thursday, he went to Nefha in prison and asked to restrict the treatment of the Palestinian prisoners. And on Friday, in both the legislative measures against the Palestinian Authority, which is the most important, is the fees of the money, the freeze of the money of the Palestinian Authority. Beside the 200 million shekels that they confiscate every month since November 21 and make the Palestinian Authority unable to be except 80 percent of the salaries of its 170,000 employees, the Palestinian Authority suffered from financial crisis and this will complicate and double its crisis and the threat is collapsed because of this financial crisis. Jonathan, this government did say it was going to take a different policy, but I think the speed in which they've done it and some of the measures and even steps that we've seen have caught some observers by surprise. Yes. And the question is, should have everybody been caught by surprise, the men in charge of the money is Batala Smutrich. The new finance minister, this is what his voters, I think, would expect him to do. Is this what Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu really wants to see? The answer is probably no, but Netanyahu understands very well that he depends on Smutrich. We're speaking of a broad coalition, 64-member coalition. That's very nice.  We're down to 57. Take away Ita Marvin, the VRA and his party. We're down to 57. So Benjamin Netanyahu strongly depends on these people. These people, you know, you can agree or disagree with an Israeli finance minister saying, we'll keep this money because this is money that we should actually pay the terror victims instead of give it to the Palestinian Authority, which will only give it to terror perpetrators. Others can agree or disagree with the fact that the Minister of National Security goes to the Temple Mount. Israel says, you know what, this is no change in status quo. This is the status quo allows ministers to ascend to the Temple Mount. You can agree with that. You can disagree with that. The one thing that is clear, these are senior members of the Israeli cabinet and the Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who I'm quite sure is not very happy with these moves, depends on these people. Right. Well, let this disagree with it, certainly in the Palestinian camp. That is the case. How do you think this, where do you think this is leading toward? How do you think that the Palestinians are going to respond, Mohammed? Yeah, the Palestinian Authority cannot stop its actions to go to the international courts or an international organization against the Israelis because this is the only thing that can do. It cannot tell its people, it cannot do anything handicapped. But also, I think the Palestinian Authority that survived the time when Netanyahu was the Prime Minister two years ago and the late U.S. President Donald Trump, now is facing a serious challenge with having the Smotrich and Ben Kivir at the government. And I think there is a serious concern that it may collapse and they are upset. And even the moves by the Israeli ministers angered not only the Palestinian Authority but the Arab countries who have good ties with Israeli Emirates, Jordan, Egypt, the European Union, the United States. So the new Israeli policy and how it's needed to take these actions, a concern not only the Palestinian Authority but even the friends of Israel who defend Israel all the time. And Jonathan, we have seen, for example, Minister Ben Kivir take not only the moves we've described in that video but even on last week breaking up what was described as a parents teacher conference in East Jerusalem on the grounds that the organization behind it was funded in some way by the Palestinian Authority. But again, this creates, as Mohammed relates, challenges for the Netanyahu government and for Benjamin that's now in particular on the international front. Yes, it doesn't look good. Yes, perhaps on paper, Itamar Ben Kivir had some kind of a right to do it because this is maybe some kind of an activity in East Jerusalem that is some way or another supported by the Palestinian Authority. Yes, is this governance breaking up a meeting between teachers and parents? Yes, maybe sponsored by the Palestinian Authority. Is this the governance? Is this what the voters were expecting? Itamar Ben Kivir and I have attended plenty of his rallies during the election campaign. He was speaking about governance in the Negev. He was speaking about governance in the Galilee. These are things that speak to the Israelis, especially to the people that live there, breaking up a meeting between teachers and parents in East Jerusalem because of Palestinian authorities somewhat involved in it. I'm not so sure this is what the Israeli public was looking for, clearly not what the international public was looking at Israel and saying this is not exactly what we're expecting from the Israeli government and the minister in charge of national security. Okay, but you could argue his own voters who voted for his party maybe certainly would expect and want this, a final word, just Muhammad on the series of the situation for the Palestinian Authority. And the big question is, will we see some kind of violent reaction by some elements in the Palestinian community? Now there is a stronger pressure on the Palestinian Authority to stop security coordination with Israel and during the dark days and during all the crises from the late Prime Minister Ali Ershalon until Netanyahu, the security continue to cooperate and to keep the situation calm on the ground. But now the security takes in that direction, then I think it will be a problem. So the Palestinian Authority cannot continue to face these measures, punitive measures without doing things. But also the Palestinian prisoners are preparing for protestation inside the Israeli jails for the coming weeks. And if that's happened, then the Palestinian State and the West Bank will revolt and will support them. Then we are going to witness more violence and instability. Well, we'll have to see what develops in the coming weeks. Muhammad Nesheev, Jonathan Raghav, thank you for that. Still to come on the rundown, Iran executes two more anti-regime protests amid growing international calls to stop what's being called a human rights crime. We'll have that story. An organism that pulsates through millennia. Touch it, listen to it, smell it, taste it. Experience the Holy Land like never before. Holy Land uncovered every Sunday only on I-24 News. Sometimes it's tough to get past all the noise and get to the heart of the story, and tougher to make sense of it all. I'm David Matlin, and each weekday I'll take on the most important topics, breaking down the issues so you can decide for yourself. Zoom in each weekday here at I-24 News. Israel experience is not complete without a visit to Yad Vashem, the World Holocaust Remembrance Center. On Jerusalem's Mount of Remembrance, you will uncover the rich tapestry of Jewish life prior to the Holocaust. Discover the history of one of the darkest periods in humanity, and be inspired by the courageous actions of those who fought back. The World Class Museum of Holocaust History, the sprawling outdoor grounds, and the moving monumental memorials offer an unrivaled encounter with one of the most pivotal events in modern Jewish history and all of humanity. Yad Vashem, a place to remember. Entrance is free. Reserve your visit on www.yadveshem.org. Back to the rundown. A delegation of Israeli officials are in Abu Dhabi today to begin meetings with officials from other nations in the NEGEV Forum, the regional grouping comprised of Bahrain, Egypt, Israel, Morocco, the United Arab Emirates, and the U.S. The first NEGEV summit of foreign ministers was held last year in Israel's Kibbutz, St. Bokeh. This week's meeting in the UAE aims to lay the ground for the next summit, hopefully in Morocco in the spring. The forum aims to implement the principles enshrined in the Abraham Accords in joint initiatives and projects in areas as diverse as regional security, energy, tourism, education, and water security. His U.S. State Department spokesman, Ned Price, speaking on this process last week. Since the conclusion of the NEGEV Forum last year, the inaugural convening of the NEGEV Forum, it has always been our intention to bring together the NEGEV participants at the ministerial level. Again, we don't have a specific date at the moment to provide, but that remains our intention because normalization between Israel and its neighbors is something that we unambiguously support and we believe it brings opportunity to the people of Israel, to the people of the region, and we seek to help Israel and its neighbors build those bridges of opportunity. But this week's meeting of the NEGEV Forum Steering Committee comes at a time of somewhat strained relations between Israel and some of its Arab neighbors. Following National Security Minister Ben Veers' visit last week to the Temple Mount al-Aqsa Mosque compound in Jerusalem. Now this does include the UAE, which joined those other Arab states in condemning the move at the United Nations. Also weighing in this weekend was a very prominent Emirati businessman and philanthropist Khalif Ahmad al-Habtour, who tweeted, quote, at a time when Arab countries are seeking to establish peace and spread tranquility in the region, the Israeli Minister of National Security stormed the courtyard of al-Aqsa Mosque, committing a clear violation and unacceptable provocation. These actions inevitably lead to an exacerbation of escalation, and this is not in the interest of anyone in Israel will be the biggest loser. Well joining us now for more is Dr. Marwa Maziad, non-resident scholar, defense and security program at the Middle East Institute in Washington, DC, and visiting assistant professor Gilda Horn, Institute for Israel Studies University of Maryland. She joins us from Washington. And Marwa, of course, the big question is to what degree the actions taken by Edomar Kaven Veer last weekend, to some degree continuing over the weekend, are going to impact on Israel's relations with its abnations, especially those connected with the Abraham Accords? Well, you can see from this tweet from someone like Khalif al-Habtour, who is a billionaire who's even was for the normalization for the Abraham Accords. But then when that, you know, strike a chord with the general Arab population and Muslim population, then you find these people will be vocal about the idea of the violation and being an unclear provocation this way. So I think, yeah, we have to pay attention to the fact that this tweet took place in the first place because this means it's perceived this way Israel is going to lose on some of its connections with some of the more pro Abraham Accords and normalization and business deals, etc. Right. And to what degree now you're talking about people say in the business community, especially people of influence as he is and have some connection with the regime. But what about with the government, but what about with the government itself in countries like the UAE, Bahrain, and Morocco, all participants, not only just in the Abraham Accords, but in these other forums such as the NEGF forum? Okay. So this is to tell you that there are parallel, you know, lines. So the NEGF forum is going to take place in Abu Dhabi, the participants are going to be there at the governmental level. But I think the point here is to be attuned, Israel has to be attuned to the sentiment among the populations at large and among influentials or characters and business people or authorities like that. I think also, you know, during the World Cup, for instance, I think the Israeli coverage of Qatar and how it didn't pay attention to how much the Palestinians during that month's long event, the Arabs, including the Emirates, the Egyptian, all the normalizers basically, where really the Palestinians were in their mind, they were having a good time with their brothers, et cetera. And yet there was such a coverage that was almost either too negative of the Palestinians or too jealous of this relation. I think Israel has to really gauge very much how people within the Arab and Muslim countries feel. And I think in particular about the Temple Mount Aqsa Mosque, Haram Sharif, the idea of the status quo needs to be very clear. So the idea that the status quo necessitates that Muslims have the right to worship, but maybe Jews have the right to visit. But it shouldn't have ever been the way the Ben-Ghver has visited. This was not seen as a visit anyway. So the delineation of even the terms, what is the status quo, what it means, how it is applied to visit versus to worship, oh, he says, I just visited. But with the security and kind of the idea of storming, all of these things matter. And I think Netanyahu took a risk of saying, nothing will happen. Yeah, maybe nothing will happen in the terms of actual interfa'ada and escalations and violence. But you can see a tweet like that. And someone who feels condemning that or even just embarrassed by Israel's government's behavior this way, then the government has to calculate for all of that. Because it's very, very sensitive and ephemeral, even the relations and the ties and all that, they can change over events like this. Just very briefly, do you see a visit by Benjamin Netanyahu to the UAE in the coming weeks? So see, this was postponed, canceled, whatever. So yeah, maybe it will come in the next month after all of this kind of calms down a little bit, but it didn't happen. So he should understand that there are costs for that. And actually, the normalization and the ties between UAE and Israel means that the UAE will have some cloud leverage. If it's upset, then it means something. If people like Al-Hathor is upset, it means something. So I think, yeah, he will have to calculate. All right, Dr. Marwa Mazia, thank you for joining us on the rundown. Now at this morning's cabinet meeting, Prime Minister Netanyahu also spoke about Iran, the Palestinian Authority and the economy, but his comments on one issue dominated domestically, the future of Israel's legal system and the changes the governing coalition wants to make to it. Senior correspondent Owen Altman brings us the latest on an issue that is quickly igniting passions on both sides of the political divide. A Sunday cabinet meeting to launch the new week and a chance for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to get his message out in the escalating fight over the future of Israel's legal system. The Minister of Justice presented the first stage of the reform he is planning. The claim that this reform is the end of democracy is baseless. Until recently, many from all parts of the political spectrum recognized the need to restore the balance between the three authorities. Netanyahu's words come as the governing coalition looks to push through the Israeli parliament the reforms it wants to see in the legal system, a number of items. But most controversially, the so-called override clause, which would allow 61 of 120 members of parliament to override some decisions by the Supreme Court. My reform is not arriving at the Knesset on top of tanks. It's arriving at the Knesset through ballots cast by voters in a process of democratic elections with the support of enormous segments of the public, whose voice for years were not heard by the legal system. I think that there is a danger to the Israeli democracy, a clear and present danger. If these policies will be implemented, we will formally have a democracy, a democracy without balances. That is to say, a democracy with, in effect, only one authority, the Prime Minister. The debate has spilled out onto the streets, with opponents of the overhaul protesting in Tel Aviv Saturday night. We don't want to lose it, we don't want to feel that our democracy disappears from us, we don't want the Supreme Court to be destroyed, and we want the government to be under control. The coalition wants legislating to start soon, making these only the opening rounds of what both sides see as a high stakes fight over the very future of Israeli democracy. And joining us now is Likud Party member Dan Iluz, who is expected to become a member of the Knesset in the coming weeks. As some of those Knesset members give up their seats, become ministers, or as part of what's called the so-called Norwegian law, and he speaks to us from Jerusalem. Dan, thank you for joining us. I know you've spoken on the judicial reforms before, but let's relate specifically to some comments by Justice Barak in his interview last night, particularly that even though, yes, democracy is majority rule, but this reforms will take away the checks and balances that are needed in any democracy to prevent just one part of it being so dominant. First of all, thank you for having me here. I heard the Justice Barak's comments, and I have to say he really made up a whole doctrine in law. I'm a legal student. I studied law in Canada. Canada has an overwrite clause. Canada's Constitution Charter of Rights and Freedom is the charter that Israel based itself when creating the basic laws that the Supreme Court now uses in order to cancel laws and to do judicial review. It has an overwrite clause. Is anyone in the world arguing that Canada is not a democracy? I mean, I'm Canadian originally. I've never heard us being accused of not being a democracy. So why is it that in Canada an overwrite clause is okay, and in Israel an overwrite clause is not okay? I think that the reason is clear. Can I quote good? I'll quote you what Alan Dershowitz said on this program. Israel is not Canada. Israel's legal legitimacy is not questioned in international forums. So it's more important that Israel have that highly respected Supreme Court. I definitely respect Alan Dershowitz. I think he's a great defender of Israel, and I thank him for his work. You can hear from the things that he said that what he's worried about is how the world will interpret these things. He might be saying that it's not smart, but it's definitely not anti-democratic the way that Aaron Barak is trying to say. I disagree with him, by the way. I think that the smartest thing that Israel can do is be a healthy democracy where the people can decide what the future will be. That's what a democracy is. The people deciding for themselves what the future will be, and not unelected courts making political decisions. By the way, something else that doesn't happen anywhere else in the world. Political decisions are not supposed to be dealt with by courts. They're supposed to remove themselves whenever it's a political decision in Israel. They focus on political decisions in order to try to stop things that they disagree with. It's completely unheard of all around the world, and so I think that really the question here is not a question between democracy or not democracy. It's a classical question between judicial activism or judicial restraints, something that exists everywhere in the world, and so right now, the proponents of judicial restraint, which I'm part of these people, have the upper hand. We won an election, and so we're going to apply policy according to our... I understand. There are those in the United States that would disagree with you that courts don't get involved in political matters, and they're talking about even as critics of the court. But I'm just going to mention that. But let me ask you, do you think the Likud polls are not showing strong public support in the general public, and even in some weakness among voters, for example, the Likud, for these reforms? Do you think the Likud is making an effective enough public argument for these reforms? I think that we're just getting started. We are just getting started. The reforms were announced last week, and I'm sure that they will pass with white support. And I agree, by the way, that constitutional reforms should pass with white support. So it's up to us in the Likud to sell this to the public in order to make sure that there's white support. I just wanted to bring up a few seconds. Do you want to see, for example, Benny Gantz's call for a sort of conference to discuss this? Listen, after he lost the election, now he's trying to be nice and to speak about a conference. We have a wide majority of 64, which is considered a serious majority in Israel. And so we can make decisions by ourselves. It doesn't mean that we shouldn't listen to the opposition, to their concerns. They can help us make the legislations better. That's definitely true.


so here's an 18 by 24 custom piece that's going out to one of my customers and they wanted some blue i'm gonna put some black just like this put some gray just like that then some light blue just like that how pretty this light blue is so pretty then we're gonna do some light silver so pretty the way the colors just interact with one another and then some more black on here and then last some dark blue to kind of give it a little just a little so now what we've got to do is we've got to spin it so let's do it here we go and just like that so beautiful


What's going on everybody? Got Kyle and Sean here relating sports cars. We are ripping a um leaf Um leaf jersey leaf autograph jersey a personal for Michael R. Good luck Michael. Let's see what we got here Leaf autograph football jersey start on the back side. We'll cut the seal there Good luck Michael. We got a jersey for the Steelers. It's gonna be there QB Kenny Pickett Nice one there on these Steelers Jersey. Very nice the black and yellow Kenny Pickett there on the autograph Steelers Jersey nice big auto there as well. I'll be Beckett authenticated auto Kenny Pickett. That's a nice one there for you. Mr. Michael. I'll be for Michael R We'll get a ship to you sir right in this Alrighty. Alrighty. Thank you, sir. Appreciate you as always and get that right out to you