Roy K. Altman
@RoyKAltman • 12,237 subscribers
Father. Husband. Judge. Passionate defender of the West. Yale Law School. Former federal prosecutor. NYT bestselling author of "Israel on Trial."
Videos
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. Altman392,358 views • 5 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. Altman125,244 views • 15 days 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. Altman176,625 views • 29 days 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. Altman103,442 views • 18 days ago
Professor Ruth Wisse always famously said you should never talk to people about Israel without a map. And that's because if you just look at it in the prism that the Palestinians and their supporters want you to look at it through, you see an army with F-35 jets and tanks, and you see the Palestinians in Gaza without those things, and you say, "Okay, one is the more powerful, the other is the underdog. We'll root for the underdog." That's a common theme in Western society. But when you look at a map, you can see the reality: Israel is a teeny, tiny country surrounded not just by some of the largest countries in the world—Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Iran, Iraq—huge land masses filled with hundreds of millions of people, but also by some of the wealthiest countries in the world, with hundreds of billions, and sometimes trillions, of dollars in oil and natural gas resources that Israel does not possess. So you have some of the largest countries in the world, some of the most populous countries in the world, and hundreds of millions of Muslim Arabs, many of whom have been raised from childhood to hate the Jewish state and to see its very existence as a deep wound in the substructure of their souls—one that must be corrected if they are to fulfill their mission on this earth—all arrayed against the one tiny Jewish state in the world. When you see it in that prism, I think the lens is very different.
Roy K. Altman26,348 views • 4 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. Altman197,300 views • 1 month 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. Altman155,148 views • 1 month 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. Altman186,173 views • 1 month 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. Altman183,317 views • 1 month ago
One of the things that I think people don't understand is that Israel is actually a relatively old country. And I'm not talking about Talmudic Biblical Israel. I'm talking about the modern state of Israel, founded in 1948, became the 59th state in the world, and there are now 193 states represented at the United Nations. That means if you're doing the math, Israel is actually older than 67% of the nations in the world, and that's because so many countries were created just like Israel was—by having colonialist powers, mostly European in origin, draw lines kind of randomly on a map, creating countries out of whole cloth without very much regard for the populations that were being swept up into the newly formulated states. That's how a lot of states were formed in the '40s, '50s, and '60s in the Middle East. That's how a lot of states were formed in the '40s, '50s, and '60s in Asia, and especially in Africa. But of course, nobody protests the creation of Cameroon or of Botswana. Nobody's protesting the creation of Lebanon or Syria or India and Pakistan or Iraq. Remember, there are 57 Muslim countries in the world and 22 Arab countries with two billion citizens. But the world cannot stomach one tiny Jewish state in its ancestral homeland with only seven million Jewish citizens.
Roy K. Altman107,885 views • 1 month ago
In 2010, there were all these shark attacks in the Red Sea, which is situated between Israel and Egypt, and it just so happened, I think there were six or seven, and they were all on the Egyptian side of the border. An Egyptian minister came out and claimed that the Mossad, the Israeli intelligence service, was training sharks to like only Arab flesh. At the time, everyone was laughing about how absurd the claim was. What we didn’t understand was that less than 20 years later, The New York Times itself would be parroting almost identical claims: that Israeli intelligence services were training dogs to rape Arab men. It's a sign of how absurd the news reporting and blood libeling has gotten in our mainstream media.
Roy K. Altman85,889 views • 1 month ago
To have a state, there's a simple test. It's called the Montevideo test. It comes from the Montevideo Convention in 1933, and it's a four-part, four-element test. The four elements are: 1. Do you have a defined population? 2. Do you have defined borders? 3. Do you have the capacity to conduct foreign relations? 4. Do you have a single effective government? There's a couple things to understand about this. The first thing is that Israel, despite being called an illegitimate state, is actually a very old country. I don't mean ancient Israel. I mean, the Israel that was founded in 1948 was founded at a time when there were only 58 countries in the world. It became the 59th state. So people always say, "Oh, this newfangled creation, Israel." No, no, no. Israel's older than roughly two-thirds of all the countries in the world. And in fact, it was created in precisely the same way and at about the same time as many of the decolonized states in the world that were just drawn as lines on the map by European colonialist powers. It's the same thing with many of the Arab countries. Iraq was drawn up that way. Lebanon was definitely drawn up that way. Syria was drawn up that way with no regard for their indigenous, in many cases, local minority populations. Lots of countries in Africa were created this way. Cameroon was created this way. Part of South Africa and Botswana were split off this way. We could talk forever about the dozens of countries that were created just the same way Israel was, and nobody ever protests them because there's no Jews there, right? So there's nothing to protest. The point here is that Israel met in 1948, and has met every second of every day since then until today, all four of the Montevideo Factors.
Roy K. Altman54,934 views • 26 days ago
The last time I saw my grandfather, Izu, was in 2003. He was dying of lung cancer in Venezuela. He was a larger than life man from the Kingdom of Romania who was orphaned at 10 years old, came to Venezuela, and built his entire life from scratch. I was at playing football at the Columbia University when my father called and said, "Look, I know you're really busy with school and sports and all that, but if you ever want to see him again, this is the time." So I talked to my coaches and worked things out and I flew down to Caracas with my father. If you know Venezuelan history, in 1998, Hugo Chavez, the dictator, became president. And the Constitution was clear you could run for only one five-year term. So in 2003, his term was up, but as an autocrat, he was not going to take that lying down. So what does he do? He packs the Supreme court with a bunch of his buddies and petitions for reconsideration.Constitution is clear, you can't run again." So what does he do? He packs the supreme Court with a bunch of his buddies and petitions for reconsideration. The new Supreme Court told him that not only could he run again, he could run as many times as he wanted to. He ruled until 2013 when he died of cancer. After the ruling, there were mass protests which happened to coincide with when I was visiting my grandfather. My grandfather, who was down to roughly 85 pounds and confined to a wheelchair, asked me to wheel him outside onto the balcony and set up the chessboard so we could play one last time. As a little boy, he had taught me how to play chess. I set up the pieces. He couldn't lift his arm enough to move them, so I was moving them for him. He said to me, "Your father tells me you want to go to law school." And I said, "I do." And he said, "Where do you want to go to law school?" So I said, "I want to go to Yale, but I don't know if I'll get in." And then he said, "Well, what kind of lawyer are you gonna be?" And I said, "I really don't know, I'm just in college, I mostly just care about football, you know?" And he looked at me and he had watery eyes at that moment, and he picked up his very bony finger, which took a great deal of effort, and he pointed out at the crowd below and said, "Always remember, this is what happens to a country when good people don't serve it." And so when I got the call to serve as a federal judge, it was a no-brainer. This country welcomed us with open arms when we had nothing and gave us everything we have today. It's the honor of a lifetime to be able to serve, and I'm grateful for it every single day.
Roy K. Altman83,771 views • 1 month ago
The word "genocide" requires a specific intent to destroy the Palestinian people in whole or in part as such. In other words, as we've seen from real genocides in history—the Holocaust, the Hutus against the Tutsis in Rwanda, the Armenian Genocide—you have a top-down architecture from the governing regime to destroy, eliminate from the face of the earth, the people in question. In the Holocaust there were 12 million Jews remaining after the six or seven years of the Holocaust. Before the Holocaust, there were 18 million Jews. That's 6 million Jews that were murdered in six or seven years. In Gaza, it's important to remember that the proponents of the genocide myth don't believe that there's only been one genocide since October 7th. They have claimed on five separate occasions that Israel has perpetrated five separate genocides against the Palestinians of Gaza to wipe them off the face of the earth since Israel withdrew in 2005. Some of these involved situations where Hamas attacked Israel, killed a few Jews. Israel did a reprisal. Maybe a few Palestinians were killed. That was called a genocide. But here's the number discrepancy. When Israel withdrew from Gaza in 2005, there were 1 million Palestinians there. Despite having five supposed separate genocides perpetrated against them in the 20 years since, I think most of the numbers from the CIA, the Israelis, and even the Gaza Health Ministry agree the population has more than doubled. There is over 2.2 million Gazans in the area today. Either Israel hasn't committed any genocide, or we're to believe that the country with F-35s, nuclear weapons, and one of the most sophisticated armies and air forces the world has ever known has been the most inept genocidal regime in the history of the planet.
Roy K. Altman20,764 views • 10 days ago
The claim that Israel is an apartheid state is one of the most preposterous of all the claims made against Israel. Hitler and Goebbels always said, “If you say something ludicrous but false long enough and loudly enough, over time, it will seed itself in the collective subconscious, and people will start to believe it.” Israel is a country of 10 million people, 21% of whom are Arabs, 17% of whom are Arab Muslims, and they have the exact same civil, commercial, and political rights as their Jewish neighbors. They can open a restaurant, become dentists, lawyers, and doctors. There is a Supreme Court justice sitting on the court, Supreme Court of Israel, who is an Arab Muslim, and by the way, almost always has been. There are Muslim judges all throughout the court system. If you see the rate of matriculation and graduation at some of the most elite universities in all of Israel, the engines of socioeconomic mobility, you'll see that Muslim Arabs comprise sometimes almost 50% of the graduates in dentistry schools and nursing schools, even though they're only 20 or so percent of the population. That’s the very opposite of an apartheid state. But there is apartheid being practiced every single day all across the Middle East, but it's not in Israel. It's in the Arab states that are pushing the apartheid claim against Israel. Think about whether there would ever be a Jewish or Christian Supreme Court justice on the Supreme Court of Tehran. Would there ever be a Jewish or Christian general in Damascus, or a Jewish and Christian head of a hospital in Ramallah or Gaza City? Those are obviously preposterous things even to conceive of, but the opposite happens every single day in Israel. What does the state of New Mexico, the city of Louisville, Kentucky, and Birmingham, Alabama, have in common? Each of them has more Jews in them than there are living in the entire Arab world. 22 countries with hundreds of millions of Arabs have fewer Jews living in them than live in the city of Birmingham, Alabama, or the state of New Mexico. There is apartheid all over the Middle East, it's just not happening in Israel.
Roy K. Altman17,983 views • 9 days 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. Altman152,733 views • 3 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. Altman157,547 views • 3 months ago
One last thing about the false genocide claim against Israel: Israel has the most sophisticated warning system of any military in the world. The HLMG, the High-Level Military Group, a collection of generals and officers from Western armies all over the world, has submitted a brief to the ICC, the International Criminal Court, about this warning system. The warning system resulted in the movement of literally 1.2 million Palestinians out of harm's way during the Rafah invasion—pushing them to a camp that was created by Israel with food purveyors, medicine providers, housing, and a polio vaccination campaign. Israel brought its doctors into a war zone and vaccinated roughly 99% of the children in Gaza. Ask yourself this question: Would the Nazis have gone through that trouble to vaccinate the Jewish kids before they were being pushed into the gas chambers? The question is absurd even to ask it. The HLMG says: "Not only is the warning system the most sophisticated warning system in the world, which has resulted—contrary to what Hamas intended—the safety, security, and preservation of millions of Palestinian lives. But it is also a warning system that none of our western populations would ever allow our own armies to implement." Why? Because when you warn the enemy every morning where you are going to send your soldiers so that the civilian population can get out of the way, your enemy knows you're coming. It lays mines and booby traps. It can create ambushes and lay in wait. This is extremely controversial in Israel, as you may imagine. If Israel wanted to commit a true genocide, it has complete air superiority over Gaza, the most sophisticated air force as you've seen, maybe other than the United States, pound-for-pound the world has ever known. Gaza could have been flattened into a parking lot overnight without risking a single Israeli life. But in the end, Israel chose to send into Gaza thousands of its sons and daughters, over 700 of whom never came home.
Roy K. Altman91,769 views • 2 months ago
The Jewish people who live in Israel are probably the only population in the world that still practices the same religion, speaks the same language, passes on the same names, and then lives and rules in the same land as it did 3,000 years ago. The Jewish people have a continuous presence in Israel. This is the other part of the Tucker Carlson myth that deserves exploration. Not only is the genetic DNA dispositive, but there are actually Muslim records and Christian records and Ottoman records and later British records of Jews and Jewish communities living continuously in the land of Israel from the destruction of the temple in 70 AD all the way through.
Roy K. Altman96,071 views • 2 months ago
It's really important to understand that not only has there been no genocide in Gaza, it's the opposite. It's actually the most humane, the most precise urban warfare fight the world has ever known. It's a war that was run, for the most part, by lawyers, international law scholars and lawyers called MAGs, military advocate generals, who are deployed in the field with the commanders, thousands of them, and who evaluate every action, every strike. And unlike here in the United States, where JAG officers give advice to commanders and say, "Hey, this is a precatory piece of advice. You can disregard it if you want," in Israel, the MAG's advice is not precatory. It's a mandatory order that must be followed by the commander. Every single day in Gaza, strikes on legitimate military targets are canceled, and I've seen this with my own eyes dozens and dozens and dozens of times, because of the risk of collateral consequences to civilians in Gaza. That's the very opposite of genocide. Think about real genocides in history. When you take the Nazis, for example, who pushed my mother's half-brothers and sisters into the gas chambers, they weren't looking to warn civilians to get out of the killing zone. They weren't looking to cancel strikes, which is to say a gas chamber, because there were too many civilians near the gas chambers. The whole purpose, the whole architecture of a genocidal regime was to push the civilians into the killing zone. Israel cancels strikes because of a fear of civilian casualties. It employs the most sophisticated civilian warning system the world has ever seen that gets civilians out of the killing zone in the war. Israel then shepherds them to safety, provides them with food purveyors, medical clinics, and the polio vaccine for 98% of the children in Al Mawasi—given for free by the Israeli government and by Israeli doctors to children in Gaza—this is the very opposite of what we would expect if there were a genocide.
Roy K. Altman15,016 views • 9 days ago