Roy K. Altman
@RoyKAltman • 18,765 subscribers
Father. Husband. Judge. Passionate defender of the West. Yale Law School. Former federal prosecutor. NYT bestselling author of "Israel on Trial."
Videos
I was in a bomb shelter in Be'eri with 18 federal judges from America. A young woman who had grown up in that kibbutz in a peaceful border community told me that on October 7th she was at her army base and all the members of her family had gathered in this house in the bomb shelter for safety. She said, "They all died here." She asked us to come inside of the bomb shelter. The entire house was charred black and burned to the ground and the bomb shelter was still standing. We were standing in the rubble of this home around this bomb shelter. She was inside and so a couple of us went in. She said, "No, all of you." So then a couple more went in. She said, "No, all of you." And then all 18 of us federal judges got into this bomb shelter where she had slept as a little girl. It used to have pink and purple walls and unicorn pictures. And we were packed in like sardines. She said, "A terrorist opened the window and threw in a grenade. And all eight members of my family—grandparents, parents, and children huddled together— were blown to pieces." It took weeks for them to take all the physical material off the walls and the ceilings. And they did this house after house after house. Hundreds of houses.
Roy K. Altman37,900 views • 2 days ago
My grandmother killed a Nazi who tried to rape her when she was 16. She pulled his gun out of its holster and shot him in the side. Then he fell onto his back, and she shot him two or three times in the chest. She dropped the gun, went out the window, and down the fire escape. She had gone to this dance party in Paris and met this young, handsome, dashing young man—not my grandfather—and they danced all through the night. At some point during the party, the Germans come in, the Vichy Police, and everyone went running. My grandmother hid in a dumpster behind the warehouse. She got pulled out by a dog and taken to jail. The Nazis asked all the kids about this young, handsome, dashing man and all of them said, “Look, I don't know who he is, but Janine was dancing with him all night.” So, the Nazis questioned my grandmother and she said, “Look, I don’t even know who he is. He never told me his name.” They didn’t believe her. So, they beat her, kicked her and spat on her. By the end of the night, she had a broken rib and her eyes swollen shut. She thought they were going to kill her. But in the morning, they came in and said, “You’re free to go.” She leaves the jail and quickly notices that one of the Nazis from the jail is following her. She then remembers that a friend’s husband who lives in the area has a gun, so she goes to her friend’s place. When she got to the apartment, the Nazi came in behind her, forced her friend into the bathroom, and took my grandmother into bedroom where he started to rape her. But she was tough and she pulled out his gun from its holster and she shot him in the side. And then he fell onto his back. And she shot him two or three times in the chest. And she dropped the gun and went out the window and down the fire escape. Now, I told this story at a commencement speech I gave a few years ago. She was 96 and she was in the audience in the front row. I said, “Hey, don't mess with the Altmans because my grandmother, she killed a Nazi who tried to rape her when she was 16.” And my grandmother says in front of everybody, “I’m not sure that he died.” I responded, “That’s not how firearms work, abuela.”
Roy K. Altman147,297 views • 14 days ago
In March of 1918, King Hussein, the king of all the Arab armies, writes an op-ed in the Al Qibla newspaper. He writes there, "If we, the Arabs, want the Europeans to honor our claims to our ancestral homelands, then we cannot deny the Jews claim to their ancestral homeland." "They," he said, "are the original sons of that land." Nine months later, in December of 1918, his son, Prince Faisal, he would become installed as the first king of Iraq, at banquet in his honor, turns to the Jews in the audience and he says, "To my Jewish friends, I say to you, welcome back home." The truth of the matter is that if we go back 3,200 years ago, there is only one people who still speaks the same language, who still practices the same religion, who still passes to their children and grandchildren the same names, and who still lives and governs in the same land as they did, 3,200 years ago. And those are the Jews who live in Israel.
Roy K. Altman42,514 views • 8 days ago
I was born in Venezuela, a country where there are no guardrails, where the government can take what it wants from whoever it wants at any time. In this country, we have guards. We have guardrails, and those who work in the legal profession are the essential ingredient that interposes itself between a free people—that’s what you are—and its government. And if you can just embrace that, if you can just live that every day of your life, you will live a life that is worthwhile, and that feeling that your life is worthwhile will make you happier, healthier, a better parent, a better spouse, and a better friend.
Roy K. Altman229,924 views • 1 month ago
Shani Louk—a 23-year-old German woman who was at the Nova dance party—was raped, butchered, murdered, and her body was dragged back to Gaza behind a car. Thousands of Palestinians are on video fighting with one another—regular people in Gaza, not dressed as Hamas—just for the chance to get at her body, spit on her, beat her, and kick her. And then they take her lifeless, broken body, and they dump it into the back of one of these pickup trucks. It's 6:37 in the morning, and there are all these guys chanting Allahu Akbar in the back of the truck. And there was an AP photographer present who snapped that famous photo of her broken body among these huge men chanting. How did that photographer know to be there? He won essentially what amounts to the Pulitzer Prize of photography for that photograph that he was only able to take because, of course, he was in league with the terrorists who told him to be there. That's the kind of moral distortion that I think we, as members of Western society, need to be deeply concerned about.
Roy K. Altman395,101 views • 3 months ago
If someone had asked me before October 7th what I wanted to be remembered for, I would have said that I wanted people to know that I was a good father, husband, and friend; a fair judge; and a model American citizen. But October 7th was a watershed moment in the history of Western civilization—not because of what happened thousands of miles away, but because of what happened here in our supposedly sacred institutions. Hamas killed 1,200 innocent people. They butchered them in their bedrooms. They beheaded them at their dance parties. They blew them up clutching their families in their bomb shelters. And yet, at my alma maters, in our universities, we Jews became the oppressors. Hamas raped dozens and dozens of Jewish women and girls, mothers together with their daughters. That's now clear beyond peradventure. You can go home tonight and watch the videotaped confessions of Hamas terrorists admitting to these unspeakable acts. They committed the crime of kinocide. This was just announced in a recent report by an international NGO on May 12th of this year. It is the first documented use of kinocide as a weapon of war anywhere on the planet since Rwanda in the 1990s. And yet, in our Western media outlets, we Jews became the aggressors.
Roy K. Altman254,252 views • 2 months ago
All over the country, I get people who say to me, "You know what I was at a dinner and there were 10 or 12 people. Two of them were Jews. And somebody said, 'oh, it's genocide, it's apartheid,' whatever it is. And the Jews, they stayed silent. So we all just went home and assumed that it was true." It's not nice to say, many of us have been in that situation. That is how they feel whether you like it or not. So I know that it's awkward to say something back to a person at dinner. I know that it's hard to make the dinner difficult. Maybe even lose a friend. But let me tell you, it'll be much more awkward for you 20 or 30 years from now, if not 20% or 30% of people, but 100% of your fellow Americans believe that you and your children and grandchildren are genocidal monsters. It'll be much more awkward then. So, It's time to wake up and nip this thing in the bud. We are the Jewish people. We gave the world not just Jesus and monotheism and the Bible — a system of political democracy. We're the first people to say, you don't need a God to be your King. You don't need to have a Queen who's divine. Every single one of you has a light within yourself to be equal under the law for our God. All political democracy stems from that. Remember who we are, be proud of where you come from. And be optimistic that just as for thousands of years, there have been cataclysmic problems brought on by much bigger and more powerful empires than a few people with purple hair on the Upper West Side, and they are all gone now. But we are still here. Know that. Internalize that. And put that into your conversations.
Roy K. Altman43,301 views • 15 days ago
Because I am an American who loves this country with all my heart and who understands that, throughout history, time and again, societies that allow the conspiracy theory of Jew-hatred to metastasize are societies that are sick and dying. Look at the Russia of Kishinev in 1903. It had been around for hundreds of years. Fourteen years later, it was gone. Look at the Germany of Kristallnacht in 1938. The thousand-year Reich. Seven years later, it was dead. Again, not because I’m a Jew, but because I’m an American, I recognize that we have an obligation to root out this nonsense now. Because if we are not careful, it will bring the entire house tumbling down on all of us, not just your Jews. And that’s why I spend all of my free time fighting this fight. People say, “Well, how do you do any judging?” You know, all the extra minutes in your day when you do things that aren’t work? Those are lovely moments, I’m sure. I have none of them. I have given it all up. And I’m happy to do it because I want to see a country for my children and his children and my grandchildren that’s like the one I grew up in—a country that knows what’s right and what’s wrong. A country that knows what’s true and what’s false. A country that knows that the bad guys are the terror army that invades peaceful border communities in our closest regional ally and beheads, burns alive, and mutilates women, children, and the elderly; that rapes—violently rapes—dozens of women and little girls, mothers on the same bed as their daughters; that takes 251 innocent people hostage, stolen from their homes—not soldiers (some soldiers, yes), but mostly septuagenarians, octogenarians, Holocaust survivors, and two dozen infants and toddlers stolen from their cribs—brings them into deep, dark dungeons in Gaza, and holds them there for hundreds of days without food, without medicine, without water.
Roy K. Altman17,604 views • 7 days ago
I was born in Venezuela. My family came here with nothing and we knew no one. But my parents always taught me that in America, you could be and do anything, so long as you worked hard and treated people with respect. When I was in college, I was playing football and my grandfather—who fled Europe during the Holocaust—was dying of cancer. My father called and said, “If you want to see him again, this is your last chance.” So, we flew down to Caracas, and it happened to coincide with a momentous event in Venezuelan history. Hugo Chávez came to power in 1998, and the Constitution said he could run for only one five-year term. So, in 2003, like any self-respecting dictator, he petitioned the Supreme Court to run again. And to their credit, the judges ruled he could not. So, what is a self-respecting autocrat to do? He packed the Supreme Court with his buddies and petitioned for reconsideration. This time the Court said, “Not only did we get it wrong, not only can you run again, you can run as many times as you like, until the day that you die.” And that's what he did. He was president until 2013 when he died. After that decision came down, Venezuelans took to the streets to protest and that coincided with my last trip to see my grandfather. During my visit, my grandfather asked me to take him out on the balcony so we could play chess one last time. He had taught me how to play as a little boy. People were protesting on the streets below. He said to me, “Your father tells me you want to go to law school.” I said I did. He asked, “What kind of lawyer are you going to become?” I said I didn’t know. Then he gathered all the strength that he had, and he lifted his bony finger out at the crowd and he said, “Always remember, this is what happens to a country when good people don't serve.” And so, when I was 34 and the president intended to nominate me to be a federal judge, which is a lifetime appointment, people said, “You're crazy. You got your whole life ahead of you to make money for your family.” But for me, the opportunity to serve this great country was a no-brainer. And what you should know is this country is very much worth serving.
Roy K. Altman239,638 views • 4 months ago
Hamas committed the crime of kinocide during the October 7 attacks. They forced men at gunpoint to have sex with their sisters and daughters, something we really haven’t seen in the world since Rwanda. And yet in our Western media outlets and on our Western campuses, we Jews became the aggressors and oppressors. 1,200 Jews were butchered and burned alive, mutilated and beheaded in their homes, in their kitchens, at their dance parties for peace. They raped dozens and dozens of Israeli women and girls. They took 251 people hostage, stolen from their homes, and kept them in dark, dank holes, deep underground. And yet at the United Nations—which was created in many ways to ensure that never again would anything like this happen to the Jewish people or to any people in the world—we Jews became the violators of human rights. It's preposterous. Where does it come from—this moral inversion, this moral distortion of everything we have always believed in, everything we have ever cared about? How do we fix it? And that is really the question I started trying to answer, the question that led me on this journey of giving speeches all over the country, in almost all 50 states over the last three years, at hundreds of schools, colleges, law schools, and churches of every denomination. Along the way, I have had thousands of conversations with people about Israel, many of whom see the world very differently than I do. And what I came to realize is each of these people who is chanting about Israel, they've come to believe one or more of these six main claims about Israel. The good news is, each of the six claims is totally false. The other good news is that all of these claims are, at their core, legal claims. We do not have to shout at each other about politics. The problem with politics is that two people just shout at each other and they're never going to find common ground, because they're looking at different things that they're interested in and that they care about, and they're playing by different rules. They’re not playing on the same field. In the law, there's only one set of rules. It applies to everybody, whether you're black, brown, or white, whether you're a man or a woman, whether you're Jewish, Muslim, or Christian. Everybody has to comply with the law. So I thought, why not apply the same legal methodology that we have been applying for hundreds of years in courtrooms all across this country—a methodology that we know and trust because we use it where truth-telling matters most? That is the methodology I apply to each of these six claims in the book.
Roy K. Altman159,267 views • 3 months ago
There’s no doubt that Israel’s war in Gaza was not genocide. It is the least likely urban conflict in modern history to meet the standard legal definition of genocide. And you don't have to take my word for it. Take the word of the High Level Military Group, the HLMG, which is a collection of all the of high level officers and generals from almost all the Western democracies in the world, not just the United States. These people aren't Jews. They have no connection with Israel. They're just generals in militaries around the world. They wrote a report and a brief to the International Criminal Court, the ICC, saying that Israel’s civilian warning system is completely unlike anything any other country has ever been willing to do for the civilian population of an enemy in wartime. Under this system, Israel tells the civilian population of Gaza exactly where it will be striking the next day and then provides humanitarian corridors for them to leave those zones. They also say it is something our own democracies would never be able to do, because our civilian populations would never stomach endangering the lives of our own soldiers by warning the enemy where our sons and daughters will be. Israel's unprecedented efforts to protect the lives of civilians in Gaza has taken a very heavy toll on the IDF. Over 800 Israelis have been killed in Gaza precisely because they warned the civilian population to get out of harm's way.
Roy K. Altman177,502 views • 4 months ago
When I was a little boy, all of our family vacations were the same. We would travel around the southern United States to Civil War battlefields—to places like Alabama, Georgia, and Virginia. We’ve been to all the battlefields you’ve heard of, and a hundred you never knew existed. And one day, we were at Chattanooga. A very important battlefield in the Civil War. The entire Union Army was arrayed at the bottom of a ridge called Missionary Ridge. The Union had lost battle after battle, and the command came down not to charge up the hill at the Confederates. But there was a young man—to show you how one man can change the world—a 17-year-old boy named Arthur MacArthur, who later became the father of Douglas MacArthur, the great general from World War II. And he saw the standard bearer in front of him get shot, and the flag hit the earth. And he couldn't bear the American flag on the ground, so he picked it up and charged up the hill. And the entire American army charged after him and won the day. He got the Medal of Honor pinned on his lapel on top of that ridge. I was standing there with my father when I was eight years old, looking out over the battlefield, and it started to snow. Now, I grew up in Miami, Israel, and Venezuela, not a lot of snow in my life. So, I turned to my dad, and I said, "Papi, this is beautiful. This is so fun." And he turned to me, very stern, and said, "Fun? You think this is fun? You don't understand why we bring you to these places. We bring you here so that you and your sister can understand the soul of the country we brought you to. This is a country where 600,000 men died so that a part of the country who were enslaved could be free. That is the level of devotion and dedication that a free and fair democracy demands."
Roy K. Altman186,424 views • 5 months ago
Occupation under international law has to be the occupation of another state's territory. There is no state that's being occupied—in this case by Israel—because the Palestinians have, on six different occasions, been offered a state of their own, and in each case have rejected the state. Every poll that's ever been conducted and every political settlement that's ever been broken—from 1936, 1947, and 1967 after Khartoum, to Oslo in 1993 and the offers in 2000 and 2008—show that the Palestinians do not want a second state. They want one state from the river to the sea, a fully Arab state with no Jews on it. This is the analogy I like to make: You go to the store and they tell you that a pair of jeans is a hundred bucks. And you say, "Okay, I'll, gonna pay a hundred bucks." Then a guy next to you in line comes, he returns a shirt that was worth 50 bucks. He wants to buy the same pair of jeans. How much does he have to pay? He only has to pay 50 bucks. He gave back a shirt that was worth 50 bucks. The pants were a hundred bucks, he only has to pay 50 bucks. Now, if you say to the store owner, "Hey, I don't want to give you anything of value, not the shirt, not the money, but now I want the jeans," no business person in the world would accept that claim. You can't say, "I take the jeans, I give you no money." That's not how business transactions work. It's not how the law of contracts work. But that's exactly what the claim of occupation does in this case. The Palestinians rejected the state that was offered to them, insist on calling themselves a state, and then claim that Israel is occupying their territory. But here's the problem: There is an international law test for the creation of legitimate nation states. There are over 7,000 ethnic groups in the world that archeologists and anthropologists and linguists have pieced together. The vast majority, over 98%, don't have a state of their own. So who gets to have a state? There are only 193 states in the world. These are nation states that meet these four elements from a conference in Montevideo in 1933. The four elements are: 1. Do you have a defined population? 2. Do you have defined borders? 3. Do you have a single effective government? 4. Do you have the capacity for conducting international relations? Israel has unquestionably met all four elements every single day since its founding. The supposed state of Palestine, which people now claim is more legitimate than the Jewish state, indisputably fails at least two of those four elements.
Roy K. Altman183,351 views • 5 months ago
As a historian, I can tell you that societies that allow Jews to thrive are societies in history that are flourishing themselves. Look at America. It is the center of the most influential, the wealthiest, the most powerful Jewish community that has ever existed in the world, and it is no surprise it is also the most powerful, the most influential, and the wealthiest force for good the world has ever had. We are privileged to live here. But on the other hand, societies that allow themselves to be taken over by Jew hatred are societies that are sick and dying. Look at the Russia of Kishinev in 1903, the worst pogrom of the 20th century before the Holocaust. It was the biggest country in the world at that time. It had existed for hundreds of years. 14 years later, it was gone. Look at the Germany of Kristallnacht in 1938, the most powerful army, the most powerful air force. It was supposed to be the thousand-year Reich. Just seven years later, it was dead. So not because I'm a Jew, but because I am an American who came here from Venezuela with nothing, knowing no one, and who was embraced by this community and this country with open arms, which has given me and my family every blessing and privilege under the sun, I understand that we, each of us, Jew and not Jew alike, have a moral and practical obligation to root out anti-Semitism in our society because it is the moral rot in the wooden framework of our house. If we are not careful, it will bring the entire edifice tumbling down on all of us, not just the Jews.
Roy K. Altman155,318 views • 4 months ago
In 1918, King Hussein of the Arabs—one of the great heroes of Arab history—wrote an op-ed in the Al Qibla newspaper. He said that if the Arabs wanted the British and the rest of the world to care about their claim to their ancestral land, then they cannot deny the Zionists’ claim to their ancestral land in the Land of Israel. This isn't me saying this. This is the leader of all the Arabs, King Hussein himself. And he says at the end of the op-ed, "The Jews are the original sons of that land." Nine months later, on December the 29th of 1918, King Hussein's son, Prince Faisal, who becomes the first King of Iraq, has a banquet in his honor thrown by a bunch of British dignitaries, along with Lord Rothschild. Prince Faisal stands up and gives a toast, and at the end of the toast he turns to Lord Rothschild and he says, "We Arabs cannot in good conscience deny the ancestral home of the Jewish people." And he turns to Lord Rothschild and he says, "To my Zionist friends, I say to you, welcome home."
Roy K. Altman69,557 views • 2 months ago
In this country, we have to remember who our friends are and who they aren't. Who shares our values and who doesn't. Who the real monsters are and who the good guys are. Remember the 'There's a famine in Gaza' myth? We now know it was all complete bogus—not because Roy Altman said it—UNICEF just wrote a report. UNICEF is not big fans of the Israelis. This was a begrudging report. The children of Gaza today, the report says, are better nutritioned than they were before the war started when they were being governed by their Hamas overlords. The children of Gaza today are better nutritioned than their Muslim Arab compatriots in the two adjoining countries, Egypt and Jordan. Why? Because Israel did something no army in the world has ever done or would ever do again: It brought more food, medicine, and fuel— 3.9 million tons—into Gaza to feed, supply, and keep healthy the enemy's civilian population even though it knew that 251 of its own citizens were actively being held hostage after they were kidnapped on October 7. The hostages were dragged into dungeons. They were not being fed. They were not being clothed. They were not being given medicine. We know that the girls were being sexually abused almost on a daily basis. Men were being tortured and electrocuted. Each hostage lost 30, 50, some of them 70 pounds in captivity. We met one hostage, an American, who told us that despite all the torture, all the horrible things she went through in there, that she could think only of one thing: If there would be enough oxygen deep underground for her next breath. Think about doing that for one hour. Think about doing that for 24 hours. Think about doing that for 400 days.
Roy K. Altman11,758 views • 8 days ago
One of the claims I address in my new book, Israel on Trial, is the allegation that Israel has committed genocide. Genocide has a clear legal definition. It means that a country, not individual soldiers, a country has the specific intent to destroy an entire people in whole or in part as such, because they are that people, by killing their members or because of their racial, religious, or ethnic origins. The proponents of the genocide claim have to show that the Israeli government had the specific intent to wipe out the Palestinians of Gaza because they are Palestinians, not because there's Hamas fighters embedded within them, not because they're trying to release the hostages. That's why when you read, for example, the briefing book that the legal team from South Africa submitted at the International Court of Justice, there's no mention of Hamas really. There's barely a mention of October 7th. There's no hostages. It's a fictional world in which there are no hostages, there was no October 7th, there is no Hamas, and there's just Israeli war planes and an innocent civilian population. That starts to look a lot more like genocide if you remove all of the essential elements that are the reality on the ground. How do we begin to analyze this question? The first is historically. We know for example from the Nuremberg trials that this argument that Hamas and its supporters are advancing was already rejected by the original people who tried the original war crimes trial at Nuremberg. The German defense team wanted to advance the defense that you shouldn't be too angry with our people, and you shouldn't think that the prosecution has any moral right to be prosecuting and trying our defendants, because the pilots who were flying over Dresden and Berlin and Tokyo and Hiroshima are equally guilty of these war crimes. And the Nuremberg trials resoundingly rejected that theory and said, "You're not guilty of these war crimes when you're fighting a war of existential survival against a genocidal regime in a war that is defensive in origin, that you didn't start, and never wanted and frankly never expected." But it's much more than that. Israel has fought the most precise, and in some respects the most humane, urban warfare conflict the world has ever seen. And you don't have to take my word for it. Take the HLMG, the High Level Military Group. The HLMG is a collection of high-level officers and generals from almost every Western army in the world. Not Jews. Not Mossad agents. These are generals from America, from Canada, from New Zealand, who all went to Gaza, went to Israel, looked at the evidence, looked at Israel's strike packages, realized that Israel is fighting a war that is essentially run by lawyers. This doesn't appear in the newspapers, but as I can tell you when I lead these judges' trips to Israel, Israel is fighting an almost preposterously Jewish war, where all of the calls of strikes that are not emergent are made by lawyers in the field. This is a reality that must be understood. Israel has a corps of military advocate generals. They're called MAGs. Think about our JAGs, for example, and many of our judges were JAGs, and so the context and the contrast is stark. Military advocate generals are deployed in the field with the commanders all over Gaza and on the Gazan border, and one of the things that you should remember about the military advocate generals isn't just their deployment. It's also that their advice is not precatory. So in the United States, a JAG says to a commander, "You shouldn't strike. That's my advice." But the commander can always override the strike because the advice is precatory. In Israel, the MAG's advice is not precatory. It's mandatory. It's an order that must be followed. Of course, if the commander disagrees, there's a whole appellate mechanism that goes to senior commanders that ultimately could end up in front of an IDF judge. I mean, this is the ridiculously legalistic way in which these Jews fight these wars. And frankly, we have seen, as judges, dozens and dozens and dozens of videos where this plays out in real time. Videos, which somehow don't make it into The New York Times, where pilots are in their planes or flying their drones over clear Hamas targets— terrorists shooting out of a mosque or out of a hospital or out of a UN car. Yes, that happens in Gaza every single day. And the pilot says, "I'm ready to fire." And then something amazing happens, something our American JAG officers are like, "What is happening here?" A nerdy Jewish lawyer comes over the air, the airwave and says, "Hey, what's that 50 yards away on the top right of the screen? Scan over to the top right of the screen." And it's two children playing soccer or three women holding a loaf of bread having a conversation. And instantly it's "Strike canceled. Strike canceled. Strike canceled." Over and over again in Gaza and in Lebanon, legitimate strikes on legitimate military targets that almost any other Western army in the world would take are canceled by Israeli lawyers, international law scholars, because of a concern for the preservation of innocent Palestinian civilian life.
Roy K. Altman125,400 views • 4 months ago
We now know from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Israel that The New York Times was made aware weeks before publishing Nicholas Kristof’s explosive op-ed that the independent commission, an NGO, was investigating and going to report on Hamas’ systemic use of sexual violence against Israeli women, girls, and men. Remember, initially, we all thought it was just women and girls, and that was horrible enough. We now know Hamas at gunpoint forced men to have sexual relations with family members in their homes, something we really haven’t seen in the world much since Rwanda. Horrible stuff. And The New York Times, according to Israel and the NGO, was made aware that this report was going come out May 12th. The NGO, independent from the government of Israel, asked for permission to run an article detailing its findings in The New York Times. The New York Times responded that they were not interested in running an article on Hamas’ use of sexual violence against Israelis. And then the day before—not a week before, not a month before, not a week after—the day before, on May 11th, The New York Times runs this explosive Kristof piece. Remember, The New York Times had said it was not interested in this subject. Then, the day before the NGO released its report, the paper ran an explosive piece that blamed the victims. Now, the Israelis are the perpetrators of mass systemic sexual violence against Palestinians. It flips everything on its head.
Roy K. Altman104,274 views • 4 months ago
As we see videos circulate online of Israeli airstrikes inside Iran, I would remind people about what the German Air Force chief said of Israeli Air Force strikes targeting Hamas in Gaza. The German Air Force chief went to Israel and reviewed their military plans, reviewed all the protocols they go through before every strike. As we do here in America, Israel has lawyers who review every strike for legality before it's conducted. And the German air chief said it is the most moral air force in the world. Israel has done more, he said, to preserve innocent Palestinian lives than any other air force would do in the circumstances. And we know that from the facts that have come out. Israel sends hundreds of thousands of text messages, issues hundreds of thousands of leaflets and flyers, issues maps on all of its websites which show the Palestinian civilians which areas will be attacked at which days and on which times. I was a football player. When you're on offense, surprise is the name of the game, and that's no less true in the military. Israel has relinquished the power of offensive surprise in order to preserve innocent Palestinian lives by telling Hamas exactly where it means to assault before it issues its orders. It has done so at great cost to the lives of its own soldiers in order to preserve and protect innocent Palestinian lives. What other country in the world would do that?
Roy K. Altman152,813 views • 7 months ago
Following the October 7 attacks, my wife and I did not sleep for several nights. We stayed up all night, doomscrolling on our phones. A few nights later, my wife reached out, grabbed my hand, and asked, “How is it that, 80 years after the Holocaust, we are still all alone?” And then, something amazing happened. We weren't alone. In the days and weeks after that, I would get calls and text messages and emails, and some people even showed up in Miami in person to show me that they stood with the Jewish people, that they stood with me and the one Jewish state in the world. And who were these people? These people were Christians of every denomination. And they were federal judges from all across the country. And I thought to myself, “Why don't I start a program to take these judges to Israel so they can see for themselves what it's really like?” And so I started taking federal judges to Israel right after October 7th. I've taken 10% of the entire federal judiciary in America in just three years.
Roy K. Altman157,935 views • 7 months ago