Bassem Youssef: evaluation

Transcript context

…Terrorism? Or I don’t know. I mean you cannot really say, “Human shields,” but they would say they were throwing rocks. There was a guy who went on Chris Rock and he said his son, a US citizen was killed, and they were throwing rocks, so we killed him. Even when they were throwing rocks, you killed him? But the thing is, you see, this is how easy for them to get rid of Palestinians. I mean, I had to say, I prepared a little bit for the podcast because you are in tech and I am ignorant in tech. There is a movie called The Lab. It is directed by an Israeli director called Yotam Feldman. And he talks about how the military industry in Israel is very advanced. And what is really mind-boggling is in that movie, he shows how the military tests its weapons in the field, in urban areas, on Palestinians. It is heartbreaking, as a doctor, there’s five stages of trials. There is discovery, pre-clinical, clinical, and then market, and then post-market evaluation by the FDA, the FDA approve, and then the FDA post-market. Five just to take a pill. And you go in and he interviews people as like, “Where did you test this? ” They tested in the field. So when human life is so cheap, and it is so indispensable, it gave me a visceral reaction because this has been actually the state of humanity. Humanity lived, and survived and thrive by actually killing each other. But there was kind of a, we were remotely, we are removed from it. People in Greece didn’t know what the Alexander the Great was doing. He was killing and pillaging. We call him, “The Great,” but he was killing. He was conquering, he was invading. Julius Caesar, all of the greats, he would do it, but killing was difficult. Killing had to have some sort of… You have to be with your enemy. Then you go back, catapults, then cannons, then a little bit back, and then you are kind of starting remotely. Now you’re killing people behind the screen with a push of a button. A lot of people say, “Terrorism, they killed you with a knife, killed one person with a knife, shot you. That’s terrorism.” But if you fly a $64 million F-16 and you drop up in an A-84 bomb that costs $16,000, that’s not terrorism because it’s remote. You’re behind the screen. So what happened, what Israel is doing, it is removing itself, like America too, drones [inaudible 00:19:55]. And then when you push someone to be, they always brag about bombing them to the Stone Ages. What happens when the screens, and all of the obstacles that you have been put between you and those people, that you have treated them this way, when this is a breach and you come face to face, you will come face to face with what you have created. Yeah, there’s a lot of interesting things you just said. So one is the methodology of killing. If you want to look at some horrific, hard-scaled killing, people often talk about the Holocaust, but that’s visceral. You can look at Holodomor by Stalin, where the murders through starvation.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.