Sekulow

Logan Sekulow: It has been nearly three years since the October 7 attacks in Israel. It is something that still comes up about once a week on this broadcast. Why, three years later, do we still talk about this? We talked about it last week in its relation to the September 11 attacks. Many call October 7 the 9/11 of Israel. It is what Israelis consider to be their 9/11, where 1,200 people in Israel were killed and 250 were taken hostage. All of that happened just under three years ago. Right now, you have things that happened just this week, like the situation where Ed Sheeran threw Macklemore off of his tour because of some of the statements that Macklemore was making live. Again, a new story. It seems like it is just continuing on because the narrative has completely shifted. As we predicted a week after the October 7 attack, you would have a couple of weeks of support for Israel, and then you would have a massive backlash. That is what is happening right now. Thankfully, there are still some brave individuals who are still talking about this. Israel itself is fairly divided on the response to October 7 and the fact that it is still going. They have an election coming up. But this is from our very own New York Times. The New York Times reported today from a senior correspondent in Jerusalem in an article today. This is not from an op-ed they put up as some sort of controversial thing. I am just going to read the top line quote, which is that Israelis still largely view themselves as the victims of October 7. Exactly. They consider themselves the victims of October 7. According to this and many others, it is a "how dare they" situation. How dare they feel like the victims of over a thousand people being brutally murdered and kidnapped at a music festival and in their local communities and their kibbutzes? The New York Times is preaching here that they are not ready to move on and understand that they were the problem the whole time. This is what we have had to fight against so much here at the ACLJ, whether that is at the UN or just in the media side of this. But I want to hear from you. When you hear these words from the New York Times, how do you feel?
Jordan Sekulow: The New York Times still is the paper of record for the United States. It is really in many ways where the first draft of history is written when people look back. No matter what you feel about it, that is where people look back to see what the New York Times wrote at the time. When you see this, and this all centers around this documentary that is getting a lot of praise in the liberal elite circles at the Venice International Film Festival, it is focused on the response of Israel to October 7. That is where the context of this quote comes in. People may think it is just a sentence or an offhand remark. No, I think it is really important to key in on this sentence. The fact that this journalist even thought it was necessary to write this is significant. You could write a review of the film or talk about the controversy around the film without even saying Israel views themselves as the victims of October 7. That is the obvious conclusion because that is what the fact is. But they are having to take what should be just common sense fact of when an attack like October 7 happened against Israelis at a music festival, and they have to skew it.
Logan Sekulow: A new low for the New York Times, and that is saying a lot. Phone lines are open for you at 1-800-684-3110. In the next segment, we are going to be joined by Jeff Ballabon, the head of ACLJ Jerusalem. He is going to be joining us live. We do have some news out of California, and you always know who we are going to turn to for that, and that is our friend, Rick Grenell. Gavin Newsom made some very interesting statements about a 2028 run and what that could look like. Is he starting to backpedal? Does he see his support imploding and now is giving reason to do so? We will chat that out a little bit later. As we quickly approach the October 7 anniversary, we are in the middle of many Jewish holidays right now and coming up next week and in October as well. Jeff Ballabon is joining us live, head of ACLJ Jerusalem. Jeff, as someone who spends a lot of time in both Jerusalem and New York, this feels like once again, when you feel like they cannot get any lower, a new low.
Jeff Ballabon: I think you framed that exactly correctly. I have observed several institutions over the years, but the New York Times probably more than any, never be surprised because there literally is no bottom to the depths of their depravity. There really is no bottom. To contextualize this, the New York Times buried the news of the Holocaust between 1939 and 1945. The plight of Europe's Jews was completely buried. They actually admitted to it somewhat. They admitted sometime in 2000 or 2001 that their coverage of the Holocaust was belated or belittled. They have been essentially the paper of record, but they essentially hid the evidence of the Holocaust while it was happening. When they talked about what was happening in Europe, they would not identify the victims as Jews. They cannot figure out who the victims are when the victims are Jews. More recently, in the last 20 years or so, evidence emerged and a few years ago, during the first Trump administration, they were being held to account for hiding the evidence of massive physical violence against Jews in New York City. They were not talking about it and were hiding all the evidence of the grotesque anti-Semitism that was already rising in New York. So this is very par for the New York Times. What is triply ironic is how often people will quote a Jewish paper owned by Jews as though it is somehow on the side of the Jews. It is a progressive, leftist, and purely evil rag.
Logan Sekulow: It has been that way historically for a very long time. It is a little easier 70 years after an event to go, "Yeah, we messed up," when all the people who would have been there are no longer with us. That seems to be a pretty easy catch-all for these kind of situations, but it keeps going. October 7 keeps being in the news, and it will.
Jordan Sekulow: Just the fact that this sentence did not even have to be written, but it was purposefully written. You can write an article about that film and the pushback that it is getting if that is your prerogative, without having to write a sentence that says Israelis still largely view themselves as victims of October 7. That should be obvious that Israelis are the victims of October 7. You do not have to frame that for people to understand. Why do they have to frame it? Because that is the agenda shining through. That is why it is important to point these things out, even if you do not read the New York Times, you do not trust the New York Times, or you believe that the agenda there is anti-Semitic, which we can point to over and over again and we have on this broadcast. But you also cannot just gloss over it when they decide and choose to write a sentence like that. It also is one of the most ancient anti-Semitic tropes of trying to say the Israelis and the Jews just see themselves as victims. Trying to make them the people that are the victimhood establishment is once again an ancient context.
Jeff Ballabon: I agree 100 percent. This is not a social media post that somebody threw out there. This is edited and reviewed on multiple levels. This was intentional. I spent many years in newsrooms in major mainstream newsrooms. This was not something that someone randomly did and nobody paid attention to. This is part of an agenda. During the first Trump administration, there was an extraordinary admission by the New York Times itself that was less an admission and more of a boast. They saw their role not as conveying facts, but that they had to take a side in the great moral fight of our times, which meant the great moral fight against Donald Trump. But that is what they are. They are crusading for a narrative in which the Jews are not only not the victims, but the Jews are the perpetrators of the evil. It is not different than the coarse anti-Semites on the streets. Anti-Semites in the streets of New York were literally wearing Nazi swastikas and saying "Heil Hitler" and "Free Palestine" at the same time. It is the exact same agenda because the agenda is to say the Jews are at fault every time the Jews are the victims. It is the inversion of morality as applied to everywhere else. Sometimes you could say an organization or individual says something that is anti-Semitic, but maybe they just do not know any better. This seems to be a consistent, continuous, decades-long policy of hostility to Jewish survival.
Jordan Sekulow: I want to pick up on something you said. You said this was not a social media post. I think the context of the time we are in right now is important. We just marked the 25th anniversary of 9/11. If the New York Times, being the paper of record seated in New York, were to just a few years after talk about the war in Iraq and wrote the sentence, "But Americans still largely view themselves as the victims of 9/11," it would be front page everywhere. Who wrote this? People on social media, if social media were around, would have said that type of stuff. There were conspiracy theories around 9/11 that started in the fringe, but not in the media, not in the mainstream driver of news and reporting and documenting history. That would be outrageous if that were what the New York Times wrote, just replacing Israelis with Americans related to 9/11. And yet here, it is barely a blip.
Jeff Ballabon: It is very disturbing that the use of the mainstream media in this country is to convey a narrative that is deeply damaging not just to Jews alone, but to our whole civilizational morality. It is inverting good and evil and inverting right and wrong. This is an ongoing attempt by the New York Times and by many on the far left and the far right. They are meeting at the bottom of the circle to completely invert what good is and what evil is. Anything you think that they will not say, I promise you they will say. It will be interesting to see if there is enough pushback for them to even acknowledge this line, because on its face it seems so indefensible. But we will see. I have zero hope that the New York Times ever becomes anything other than what it has always been. The other thing people should recognize is a concept that you think the New York Times is terrible on issue X, but you are still going to read it because of its other issues. That is not true. If a paper or a news organization is reliably wrong on the issue you know about, you can pretty much bet it is wrong on the other issues in just the same way because this is a world narrative. Their world narrative is not just about Israel and just about Jews. It is about America. It is about everything to do with America's survival, and consistently across the board they have the same mindset.
Logan Sekulow: Jeff, one of the things we saw this week was the situation between Ed Sheeran and Macklemore where Macklemore went on at MetLife Stadium just outside of New York City and made his speech. We know Macklemore has already made many anti-Semitic statements. We have seen him dress in costuming that would be very much considered parodying the Jewish people in a very offensive way, so it is no shock there. Then you had Ed Sheeran and his management promoters say they are going to kick him out of these stadiums and boot him from the tour. He put out a terrific statement saying his shows are not made for politics. I would have rather he took the moral position than punted, but the point is you cannot even punt. You will be swallowed and eaten alive by the monstrous evil. We are getting to the point where you have to take a side because anything short of that, they are going to come after you anyway. So you might as well stand up for what is right. I think that is absolutely ridiculous that this is the point where we are in society where someone does not get to make these decisions themselves. You had a moment of praise for Ed Sheeran for standing up for just not politicizing everything. Then within 24 hours, the mob rule takes control. Jeff, we are out of time for your segment today, but I really appreciate you chiming in. I know the holidays are here, and again, we hope you have a good one with that. I want to take calls coming up. We got three lines open for you at 1-800-684-3110. You may have a lot of people abandoning Israel and the Israeli people. It does not even mean you have to support a government in Israel. Again, they are going to have an election coming up. It is a highly diverse nation. But just its existence. We are not going to leave it and abandon it. The ACLJ team is going to be there.
Logan Sekulow: Welcome back to Sekulow. Phone lines are open for you at 1-800-684-3110. I want to hear from you. I want to pop over to a call really quick. Let's go to Harold on line two, listening over the radio. Let's go ahead with Harold.
Harold (Caller): Happy New Year and happy October. I am a Judeo-Christian man from Maine and I'm just a normal American citizen. The New York Times really needs to be held accountable for these literary crimes because they have been doing this for a long time. Unhinged people that read the New York Times feel empowered and emboldened to commit these crimes. They are not President Trump supporters. They are not Judeo-Christian people because we do not do these kinds of things. We are the silent majority of the Judeo-Christian conservative folks of this country. In large part, we have failed to hold accountable these people that are perpetrating these lies about the Holy Land and about a whole bunch of other things to fit their agenda.
Jordan Sekulow: Harold, I agree largely with you that the New York Times, this is their agenda. It is creating a permission structure to hate Jewish people. We have seen what has happened in New York at Columbia University right after October 7, where so many people were terrorized from walking to class. They assumed something about you because maybe you were Jewish, maybe you were religious. They assumed something about you and therefore wanted to create fear in your life. The media structure is creating that world. That is why we have to push back on it and we continue to and will always do that, even when it is not popular. Even when we see on the more conservative ideological spectrum it loses favor because people decide this is something we can capitalize on and make some money off of conspiracy theories. But we will continue to call it out. To a fortunate degree, because of the protections that the First Amendment affords the press and the speech that we all benefit from, offensive things are legal to say in our country and should remain that way. There is nothing illegal about what they said, so they are probably right. But you have to push back when you see it, because that is what speech does. The entire structure is that we can use our speech to fight back at this because it should never resort to violence or the terror that you see that they perpetrate from results of things like this.
Logan Sekulow: Is it a fact that Israelis still largely view themselves as the victims of October 7? Yes. Are you saying that in what we feel is the correct context? No, because you are saying that as a "how dare they." But of course they do, because they were. They continually are also as people are still recovering from that trauma. People are not traveling to Israel like they used to. Their families are not there. People lost limbs, people lost loved ones. The war is still ongoing that was sparked by this. You may not agree with it, you may not like the way Israel has responded. But if you take away the response, they were still the victims. I think if anyone starts to claim otherwise, that becomes a much more egregious moment here. Let's take a couple more calls. Let's go to Russ in New York. Russ, go ahead.
Russ (Caller): Thanks very much, Logan. I am a secular Jew. I want to ask you fellows, do you think the Streisand effect is going to go on here? Should Bob Kraft have left it alone, especially with the bullying the other owners? Ed Sheeran is a known Ukraine supporter. When you say that the mob came down on Ed Sheeran, did you mean when the backup acts all pulled out of the show?
Logan Sekulow: That is happening now in the last 24 hours or so. Do I think that Macklemore is having a moment for his career? Absolutely. And he is certainly jumping on this. Why wouldn't he? Do I think he manufactured some of this himself? Absolutely. And those other acts that are now pulling out as well are now trying to ride those coat tails. These are people who have nothing compared to the pull of Ed Sheeran. However, I start looking at trends. The trends would tell me if you have people like AOC now feeling like she has to come out and make a statement against Ed Sheeran, you have people in the music industry who I am friends with feeling like they have to make a statement against the promoters and all of this. Do I think Bob Kraft did the right thing? Look, it is his stadium. I think he says that and they go, well, taxpayer money and all this. I think he did whatever he can do. It does not bother me at all. If he does not want that in his venue, he does not have to allow it. When he booked Ed Sheeran, I do not think that they thought, oh yeah, we are going to get this political rant here. So no, I think that Robert Kraft did whatever he felt like he could, got the other owners together and said, you know what, there is a line here. You have crossed that line, we are not comfortable with this. I do not even think necessarily that it was all just to do with look at what Macklemore had to say. It is also looking at history and the fact that this act has continually done this over and over again. Now, again, is this bringing him into a much more cultural relevance? Sure. I see a lot of liberal thinkers going, but now I have to go listen to Macklemore. Again, for all purposes, no offense to him from an artistic standpoint, he was a one-hit wonder, maybe two hits there. He has not had a ton of cultural relevance over the last decade. So yeah, he is jumping on a trend. He was able to get a huge group behind him. Why didn't Mark Ruffalo get nearly an in-tears standing ovation it felt like at the Emmys the other night? Because they know that is what pop culture and social media culture has led us to. Now the industry does have an opportunity, the entertainment industry, to right those wrongs.
Jordan Sekulow: To Russ's point as well about Ed Sheeran had previously played in the concert for Ukraine, he had used his platform. A lot of people are trying to say this is hypocrisy that he is saying I do not use my platform for politics. Those are two different things. I do not think his tour specifically had been that. You can draw, we could spend hours talking about the difference in Ukraine and Russia and Gaza and Israel. Also, when you look at what Macklemore had done, it is things that if you had done for any other people group, the costuming he has dressed up as, no one would book you on your tour ever again. You would get canceled for racism. But because it is the Jewish people, you can get away with it, unfortunately, these days in this age.
Logan Sekulow: And he apologized and said, "I didn't know what I was doing." Give me a break. He is an adult man. It is absurd. It is not like we have never seen racial stereotypes and people dressing in costumes. It is absurd. With that being said, the second half hour is coming up. Some news out of California, you are not going to want to miss. It will take it a little bit more interesting, a little bit more lighthearted, if you will, because Gavin Newsom is involved. And you know if Gavin Newsom is involved, our buddy Rick Grenell is going to have something to say. Phone lines are open for you at 1-800-684-3110 as we head into the second half hour. You can find us broadcasting live 12:00 to 1:00 p.m. Eastern Time. That is on ACLJ.org, YouTube, Rumble, Facebook, however you get your podcast. You can find us there immediately following the broadcast. And again, join us always at ACLJ.org. If you can and you want to support, you want to support our support of Israel, join us in that standing up for the people of Israel. The people who I guess quote-unquote think of themselves still as the victims of October 7, do it today. Sign that petition at ACLJ.org/sign. We are going to be right back in less than a minute.