#1684 - Abby Martin

SPEAKER_2 (0:04)

The Joe Rogan Experience.

Joe Rogan (0:14)

Hello, Abby Martin, how are you?

Abby Martin (0:15)

I'm great, how are you, Joe?

Joe Rogan (0:16)

You're my favorite hardcore lefty.

Abby Martin (0:18)

Thank you.

Joe Rogan (0:21)

Yeah, because all the podcasts that I ever do, whenever I do a podcast with you, I'm like, okay, this one's gonna be interesting. This is gonna be some shit that's gonna disturb me that I don't know about.

Abby Martin (0:31)

Hell yeah, man, that's how I like to do it. Well, a lot of this stuff is depressing and it's not for everyone, but you try to just go balls deep because I grew up in the YouTube generation and I learned so much and I wanna be that source for a lot of people. I wanna guide people through the journey of learning about real education and all the sinister shit your government's doing.

Joe Rogan (0:52)

Sinister shit all governments are doing. I remember one of the first times, not one of the first times, but one of the biggest times that I got blow back from having you on was your personal experience interviewing people in Israel, interviewing Israelis and interviewing Palestinians and trying to sort through what is really going on over there, what is the real attitude about people over there. And I remember, it must be an email campaign. It must have been a campaign because it was the same letter over and over and over again. I was receiving in my inbox. It must have been like a website. You could go and then sign it and then send it to me.

But don't you think that like the tide has shifted in that subject where now people are realizing, like they're going, hey, like this is not as simple as the mainstream media wants everybody to look at it. The way the mainstream media was portraying it in this country, it was always that Israel's the good guys, the Palestinians are the bad people. That's how it was. But the mainstream perception now has very much shifted, don't you think? Like with this last, when you see like the iron dome and you're seeing these rockets being fired out of Palestine and they're all getting detonated in the air and then you realize like, oh, this is kind of a crazy situation, like one side has this insane technology and the other side is kind of in an open air prison camp in a way, like you can't go anywhere, you're kind of stuck.

Abby Martin (2:30)

25% of American Jews now, after the latest onslaught in Gaza, believe Israel is an apartheid state.

And that shows you how dramatically the narrative has completely flipped on its head. Because for the last 20 years, Israel has been losing control of dictating the narrative. I mean, that was really what they relied on for so long, that we're acting in self-defense, that we're surrounded by people who hate us and hypothetically will commit genocide against us, to basically defend the fact that they are committing de facto genocide in Gaza. That is the erasure of Gaza residents. It's the erasure of a culture. It's not just the extermination. That's according to the UN. But yeah, the tide has changed, Joe. They can no longer say that they're acting in self-defense over the last 20 years with the bombardments, with the invasions, with the colonization outside of their borders. I mean, we're talking about Lebanon, Syria, and the Golan Heights, and just constantly bombing an open air prison. It is an open air prison. There's 2 million people trapped there. They cannot leave without permits by the Israeli government or the collaborative government in Egypt.

Those people are trapped. And then you look at Israel, they're living high. They're living a great life. I mean, I saw some crazy ass ad from Dior, like of people, you know, basically just having this very ritzy time, you know, living in Tel Aviv, living in Jerusalem, and completely just separate from the fact that there is this besieged ghetto of 2 million people denied basic access to things like water and electricity. I mean, the right to have human mobility, I think, is like the most basic right that you can have as a human being. Like to leave and freely travel.

And these people can't do that. And the media has completely painted it forever. The media is totally controlled, right? The media acts as an arm of the state. And for the longest time, the media has basically just said Israel is right. They've only depicted the Israeli side of the story.

And it doesn't matter anymore because with the advent of social media, Palestinians are able to film their own reality for the first time. So they're filming the home demolitions. They're filming the ethnic cleansing. They're filming themselves getting bombed relentlessly for no reason other than collective punishment and torture of this area. And that is convincing the world and actually bringing more people to their side. The sympathy is now going to Palestinians, where even Democratic voters, a Gallup poll is taken every single year of Democratic Party voters and where they're at on the Israel-Palestine thing. And this year, for the first time in the history of the poll, more Democratic Party voters say that the pressure needs to be put on Israel than Palestine.