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Jimmy and Gito just talking about things going around at MAHD House Bar & Grille In Elyria, Ohio. Jimmy Is the owner of MAHD House and Gito is his close friend that helps out around the bar. Listen in while they dissect the daily dealings of the bar.
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Journalistic Journeys and the Weight of Warfare: Mark Patinkin's Frontline Tales
Renowned American author and columnist Mark Patinkin joins us to share his riveting experiences reporting from conflict zones, focusing on his latest book, "Holy Land at War." Mark provides firsthand insights into the October 7th attacks by Hamas militants in Israel, illustrating the profound impact on communities that once advocated for peace. Listen to Mark recount harrowing tales of survival and the complexities of capturing such raw narratives from the front lines, offering a unique lens into one of the world's most enduring conflicts.
Explore the cultural significance of gun ownership in Israel, where reservists and civilians alike bear arms amid security concerns. We draw intriguing parallels between Israeli and American attitudes toward self-defense, all while reflecting on historical wartime decisions with far-reaching ethical implications. Our conversation also delves into the humanitarian crisis in Gaza, examining the challenging moral questions surrounding military actions and the toll on civilian life. Through Mark's personal anecdotes, gain a deeper understanding of the strategic complexities and dystopian realities faced by those living in the region.
From tracing the historical origins of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to examining the enduring impact of the Holocaust, this episode provides a comprehensive look at the struggles and aspirations of both communities. We discuss the potential for peaceful coexistence and the influence of extremist factions, while Mark shares his experiences of navigating journalism in conflict zones. Through captivating storytelling, this episode promises to engage and enlighten, inviting listeners to reflect on the past, present, and future of this deeply contested land.
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we're number one. Jimmy isn't being a cheap ass. You know I'm like damn. You heard it here first right, right right we're the best you know. They say people that cuss are more honest, so I'm an honest motherfucker put the fish away reggie, it don't even hurt to get perfect, not for me nothing to it.
Speaker 2:Okay, let's do it, come on I'm, I'm ready, I'm ready, I want to do it, I wear a thong.
Speaker 1:I got what I'm right now. Jimmy and Geek Madhouse Bar Talks. Baby, that is a bunch of shit, if you ask me. That doesn't make no sense. All right, today's guest is American author, nationally syndicated columnist from Providence Journal. He was a Pulitzer Prize finalist for international reporting for his coverage of the trouble in Northern Ireland. He's won three New England Emmy Awards for television commentaries and he's also the author of several books, including today's talk, which is the Holy Land at War. Please welcome Mark Patinkin. Am I saying that right?
Speaker 2:Yeah, Patinkin, you got it right. So did you have to tell everybody that I did not win a Pulitzer Prize?
Speaker 1:I just am reading what I read, you know.
Speaker 2:That's okay. It's always an honor to have been a finalist. I just kind of joke about damn, but I didn't get the whole thing. That is the worst, Anyway, yes, so we're talking about this. I guess the camera is taking it backwards, but this is the new book I came out with after covering the war on the ground in the Middle East.
Speaker 1:And we have it. It's posted on my page, right next to me, right underneath me. It's going to be there, the whole show, so anybody who's interested in it can look at it. It'll be. The graphic is up there. So what made you decide to go ahead and do this book about the Holy Land War again?
Speaker 2:Well, you know, I'm a longtime columnist, james, and at first, after October 7th, that horrible day, I did a number of commentaries because it was so horrific. I was mostly defending the Israeli side because they were the target of that terrible day. And just even writing those armchair commentaries got me attacked even early on, from pretty viciously. A Providence city councilman in my own town called me a disgrace to humanity because I defended Israel early on. And anyway, there's a lot of back and forth and, as we've all seen every day, every moment, on Twitter or X or elsewhere, everybody's an armchair commentator. But I'm kind of an old school journalist and I thought that with a kind of event like this which has really upended the whole world, my role as an old school journalist was just to go, go on the ground to see, to witness and bring readers along with me, in my case, despite what I'd originally written covering both sides, and I did. I went to, I went into the West Bank to talk to Palestinians in Gaza too.
Speaker 1:I went into the West Bank to talk to Palestinians in Gaza too, that was interesting to me that there could be anti-Semitism in America again ever.
Speaker 1:Well, here we are right. It's unbelievable to me and I read the book and it was a great read, by the way. I mean it was really great great read. By the way, I mean it was a really a good read and it put me in the first thing I noticed right away in the beginning of the book, when you're talking about the soldiers paratrooping in and I'm thinking, man, if that's in my neighborhood and these paratroopers come in and they land in the street and they just, I mean, how many paratroopers total dropped in? Do you know the answer to that?
Speaker 2:You're talking about the people that were on those kind of gliders that came in right, those individuals I mean there were dozens of them. But more important, I'm not sure people appreciate this that day, October 7th, 3,000 Hamas militants invaded Israel 3,000. That's a major army and that's one reason it took Israel to take back and rescue people. People were being targeted for 12, 13 hours hiding in safe rooms, secure rooms, and it took a day and a half for the Israeli army to clean out the militants, because 3,000, 3,000 came in and they blasted holes through the border fence and just invaded and slaughtered yeah, I couldn't believe, like just the idea that they landed in a street and just went.
Speaker 1:You interviewed somebody who said that it was across the street so, because the paratrooper took a left, they were safe and that was the only reason. And that, just that the thought blows my mind, absolutely blows my mind.
Speaker 2:It's so. You talk to anybody in Israel and they've got a story like that. My brother lived in one of the communities right next to Gaza. In every case, by the way, the people live in those communities were pro-Palestinian, they believed in a two-state solution. They had pins in their house that say Palestinian Lives Matter. They were the ones that were targeted and they'll tell you. My brother was in a house and that paraglider landed and he turned right and slaughtered a family. If he'd turned left it would have been us and I went into the worst hit of those communities.
Speaker 2:It's called Kibbutz Beri. Kibbutz was just the name for a communal living town in Israel, just named for a town, really. And man, I'll tell you it was 1,200 people lived there, 1,000 were slaughtered, 30 or I mean 1,200 people lived there, 100 were slaughtered, 30 or 40 were kidnapped and the place was just burnt down. But I'll tell you what you notice even more than the houses that were burned when you walk in there. You notice that what wasn't burned was smashed. There was just this gratuitous violence that even hardscape patios in this town were just smashed into rubble. It's almost like the militants did the same thing to the towns that they did to the people? They've murdered them and then they mutilated them and it looks just like it did that day.
Speaker 2:It hasn't been cleaned up because the war is next door. The people have evacuated. Still it is not a memorial right now. These destroyed towns. They are still testimonies. You go there and it's a testimony, and the reason I went there is hey look, james, I really give you credit for having me on the show and having the book something to be talked about, because the point of the book, even though it covers both sides in a very balanced way, since we're talking about those that were targeted early on, you know we're talking about the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust and with all of history's massacres, there's only one thing you could do for the dead and that's to witness.
Speaker 2:So I appreciate you doing that today.
Speaker 1:We have my wife's. One of my wife's closest friends is Palestinian. They live across the street. She, she grew up overseas, married an American Palestinian here, and they live across the street and they have four kids and they're wonderful. We eat Diwali, you know, probably a couple of times a month. I mean with them. I mean they're great, great people. So, and my wife, you know, maiden name's Bernstein, so I mean it. We get along just fine and it's and it's really sad to me to see that the one thing that stuck out when I, when I read the book, is that people are literally putting this on their kids all the way through, like these poor kids don't have a chance because their, their parents are feeding it to them from such a young age. You show the one picture in the book with the four-year-old behind you just throwing a rock. I mean these kids don't have a chance, there's no chance at all for them. You know, with that mentality coming in, they're putting their own demons right into their children right from the start.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that was well. Let me first just respond to your neighbor. Being Palestinian, I'll tell you that I spent two days on the West Bank among Palestinians and I was the only non-Palestinian face I saw. An Israeli said don't go there, it's dangerous, but I felt I should witness as a journalist. I don't think it was dangerous, even though the West Bank, which is really going to be the future of Israel even more than Gaza, because that's where the main government is the Palestinian Authority, and it's a very depressed place. They're under siege by the Israeli army, which has cracked down and cut off work permits. But, my goodness, there's such a great hospitality in that culture and when I visited various homes, I heard the word welcome 30 times. You don't see as deprived as some of the towns are in the West Bank, the Palestinian towns. You don't see homeless anywhere because they take care of their own, they take care of each other.
Speaker 1:You mentioned that in the book I think it's a lovely culture.
Speaker 2:But you're right, you know many of the people I talked to, especially Israeli soldiers that had gone into schools. They saw the literature and kids are raised to hate the Jews and what you were referring to in the book. In the book I include a time I've been a longtime foreign correspondent and during the Intifada in 1991, when the Palestinians were staging riots and attacks, I went on patrol inside Gaza with an Israeli jeep commander and our jeep, which was armored, I should say, with bulletproof glass. We must have been hit with hundreds of stones thrown by kids. At one point, I would have to guess, a four-year-old came up behind our Jeep and threw a rock and I took a picture of it. This is my photo from so many years ago and that's what I saw from inside that patrol Jeep.
Speaker 2:And so you wonder where that little boy is today and you wonder whose fault it is if he was involved in. I don't want to say he was involved, but obviously many kids that age 30 years ago were involved in what happened one year ago and I think it's because it's too bad that they're raised in hate. Many of them are not all. I will say that many of the folks I saw, just like your neighbor in the West Bank. They were welcoming, they were wonderful, they were moderate. But I'll tell you, they'll tell you one problem, and one of the reasons Hamas got elected into power is that the current government, the Palestinian Authority, is seen as corrupt, and so there's really not a good leader right now for the Palestinian people, which is too bad.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I don't under. So what would you advocate for a two-state system?
Speaker 2:Yeah, you know, if you go over there, I think that ultimately the solution has to be in some kind of a autonomy for the Palestinians. You know, I will say I believe in peace, I believe there's hope for peace. But I will say that even those that were most for peace in Israel, because they were the ones that were targeted on October 7th, they now say I don't know if we have anybody to make peace with, and so I think the problem is Hamas. I think Hamas, as horrible as this war is and I'm not in a position to say how long it should go on or not but I think the chance for peace and the chance for a two-state solution is to degrade Hamas so that you won't have a jihadist leadership in power, and then perhaps you could have a situation where the more moderate Palestinian authority from the West Bank comes into Gaza to rule their sister territory with the backing of Arab countries like Saudi Arabia and others, to help rebuild Gaza, and I think that's the hope for some kind of Palestinian autonomy.
Speaker 1:I think it would be nice. And I'm just an idiot, don't listen to me too much.
Speaker 2:Hardly, James. I give you a lot of credit for talking. A lot of people are gun shy of this topic because it's so controversial that I give you credit for talking.
Speaker 1:I'm not smart enough to know any better. That's all that. I give you credit for talking. I'm not smart enough to know any better, that's all.
Speaker 2:Yeah, you're smart enough to talk about what's important and I feel my book and myself. It's just an uncommon thing. You see it every day. It's a blizzard of one side yelling, saying the others are monsters, back and forth, and I think this book is just a rare case of one journalist, one witness, that went in and I talked to Jews, I talked to Palestinians, I told both their stories and it's really just basically this book. Come with me on a journey. I'll take you through the war, through Israel, through the West Bank, through Gaza. I'll show you what the war is like, I'll show you what the people are like and you come to your own conclusion. This is just bringing people along to see the conflict that's upended the world and what the people on both sides are like. So I credit you for you know talking about it in a different way, which is to witness it rather than just argue about it.
Speaker 1:Sure, and that's what I, yeah, that's what I was, but I don't see why they can't do like the United States. I don't see why they can't take, say, Egypt and and Israel and and Lebanon and and just like all, get together and act like one United state and and have their States and have a, have a government that oversees everything together and gets along a little better. I mean, the Palestinians are spending all their money on rockets instead of development, and that's sad.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's true, and the problem, you know, I'll tell you the problem there could be. I don't know if there would be a United States with one government, no-transcript. So that's the whole thing about Israel being an apartheid state just is not true. But you know there should. I don't think you could ever have a United States because each of these countries want to be sovereign Jordan, egypt, lebanon, israel and the Palestinian areas. But I think you certainly could have peaceful coexistence. But the key is one thing, james, it's getting rid of the jihadists, and it comes out of Iran that.
Speaker 2:I've seen it a couple times in my life. I was in Beirut, lebanon, during the Lebanese civil war between the Christians and the Muslims in the 1980s and I was almost kidnapped. I saw the rise of Hezbollah and at one point I was almost kidnapped there because I was one of the last Westerners on the Muslim side and the people there were heartbroken at the fact that Hezbollah was rising up to take over this very peaceful, modern country called Lebanon, kind of the Paris of the Middle East. And I think a lot of the people are heartbroken that the same thing happened in Gaza. I don't think all the civilians are terrorists in Gaza. I think this, I think a truth that I found about the world from having been a foreign correspondent in a lot of places if 10% of the people are extremists with guns, they could take over the other 90%. I saw it in Lebanon, I saw it in Gaza, and that's the threat to peace and coexistence is when you have extremists that take over and have the power to make everybody toe the line.
Speaker 1:Do they have guns in Israel like we do here, like CCWs and stuff like?
Speaker 2:that, and you're often seeing reserve soldiers just walking down. More so than here, actually More so than here. You'll see reserve soldiers walking with automatic weapons over their shoulders, women police officers with weapons. They have reservists carry around their weapons, often because there are still there's this Hamas terrorism even inside Israel, and there are times when terrorists begin to stab or shoot, and oftentimes it's passersby that put a stop to it.
Speaker 1:Well, I mean, like how we carry like an average Joe just carrying a gun, do they do that there?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean they still have the rules. You can't just say I'm going to buy a gun and start packing. You've got to get permission. But you see more guns on the street of Israel. They are mostly with reservists but average Joes carry guns too, but you've still got to get a permit. But it's for security in a lot of cases because you know they've got a lot more terrorism there than we do here.
Speaker 1:Sure.
Speaker 2:On the other hand, you feel pretty safe.
Speaker 1:If they landed on our street like my street personally and they picked a door to come in, it would be a bad decision on their part. On my street, I mean I live a kind of a redneck street, you know what I mean, we all kind of have guns. I mean I live a kind of a redneck street, you know what I mean, we all kind of have guns, and I mean it would be a bad decision for sure, tell the people what town and state you live in, james. I'm in Elyria Ohio.
Speaker 2:Okay, I like it. I like it. I'm a Midwest boy myself. I grew up in Chicago and also on a farm outside Chicago we raised red Angus cows. If you ever need a bull, just let me know, I'll sell you one.
Speaker 1:Oh yeah, I have a restaurant, so we, we sell. We sell a lot of a lot of beef, that's for sure.
Speaker 2:All right. Well, um, I think you gotta. You got the same attitude A lot of folks do in Israel, especially after October 7th. You gotta defend yourself. And look in a larger sense what you just said about, about they'd make a bad decision coming through your door. They made a bad decision coming through the fence of Gaza into Israel. What's going on in Israel is a larger sense of what you just said would happen if somebody came through your door. They came through Israel's door and Israel is now responding, and that's what happens when you start a war. People say that what's going on in Gaza is a tragedy, and it totally is, with so many civilians' deaths. But history has shown throughout whether we're talking about Germany and Japan during World War II or Hamas and today people who start wars pay a price, and the price can be very high.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I wouldn't. I definitely would be about just give them a notice. You know you got two weeks to get out and we're leveling it. That's how I would handle it. They wouldn't want me to be Netany, I promise, cause I would not. I mean that. That that was insane. I mean, nobody should have to live like this and it just there, just seems to be no end in sight. When I was a kid, I remember and that's probably when you were there reporting it, but I remember it was the, it was the markets that people would just walk in with suicide bomb vests and things like that were the big thing. Now it's rockets and I mean it just has to. It's kind of like Japan. When we went into Japan, the war, the technology had grown so much that now we're not shooting each other with rifles, it's, you know, rpgs and things of that nature. To where so many people were dying. It just made more sense to drop the bomb. Now, I'm not saying that's necessary 100%, but I'd give them a warning and level it. That's what I do.
Speaker 1:Well you know when I put up some Israeli condos.
Speaker 2:Yeah, well, you're right about the bomb. You know that's also a very, very emotional topic that we dropped the bomb. But I, as a journalist man, I've interviewed more than a few World War II soldiers who were in the Pacific and everybody said that if they had to go up that Tokyo Bay into Tokyo to end the war, they would have lost hundreds of thousands of American soldiers. They did go up Tokyo Bay, they said, after Japan surrendered, and the defenses, the cannons, the artillery that was waiting for the Americans to go up Tokyo Bay would have been a bloodbath. And so you wonder whether or not dropping the bomb maybe avoided even a larger loss of life. And in terms of what's going on now, many Israelis would argue that, as horrific as the death is among civilians in Gaza, it will avoid future wars.
Speaker 2:If you could degrade or wipe out Hamas, I'll tell you. If you go there, james, how do I put this? I was in Gaza, I saw it. I saw the dystopian landscape. I was in Gaza, I saw it. I saw the dystopian landscape. I saw, you know, I was in there with here's took this picture of an Israeli soldier. That's a school. Hamas was in that school. Every school, they said, every health facility, every mosque. They had armed it to the teeth.
Speaker 2:Now, and that's me in one of the tunnels they had just found. Yeah, I seen that. Yeah, if you go through there, this is what a lot of Gaza looks like. I took this picture off an Israeli Humvee. I was in there. It's very hard to get into Gaza. They only let journalists in once a month or so.
Speaker 2:And I made it in there with about four or five other journalists, including Charlie Daggett of CBS News, the head Fox correspondent of foreign correspondents, a couple of comparable people that were network correspondents for European countries, and five or six of us got in there and I'll tell you it is a dystopian landscape, it is post-apocalyptic, and you'll wonder a little bit. You know, say to yourself that Israel have to do this much damage. But I'll tell you what you wonder even more when you see it Hits you right in the gut, james. When you see it, you say how is it possible that Hamas could allow their people in their homeland to continue to be destroyed like this, when they could stop it tomorrow by releasing the hostages and laying down their arms? They could stop it tomorrow. And it hits you in the gut that they don't care. They don't care about their people or their homeland. It's all about just being jihadists wanting to destroy Israel, the enemy, and spread Islamic extremist ideology. Just when you see it. There's no other way to think about it.
Speaker 1:You mentioned in there, too, that most of the Palestinians don't want to enjoy life either, because by doing those things, that it's, it's, it's they like showing the suffering to the world.
Speaker 2:They do, I wouldn't say most. I'm kind of convinced, James, that you know that it's just a lot of people will say that and it is true that civilians followed the Hamas militants into Israel on October 7th and did some of the slaughtering. Civilians followed the Hamas militants into Israel on October 7th and did some of the slaughtering and there's these images of civilians celebrating around the bodies that they kidnapped back into Hamas and it's horrific stuff. You know it's like ISIS kind of stuff, but I'm convinced that's not the is. Even in a case like this, maybe a third of them are pro-Hamas and a third of them are probably anti-Hamas and a third just want to be left alone to live. But I will say, yes, there is a mentality in Palestinian culture over there and, as I said, I think it's a beautiful culture, no homelessness, and they welcomed me and had a special feast for me because they wanted to honor me as a visitor.
Speaker 2:But I think what you brought up you're referring to the fact that the United Nations continues to call Palestinians refugees four generations later, four generations after the initial war for the creation of Israel in 1948. Four generations after the initial war for the creation of Israel in 1948. And there's no other case on earth like that. You get to be a refugee for a few years. In the case of Palestinians, it's four generations, and so that inculcates a mentality. The mentality is that they want to get back to what they had in 1948, but it's just not going to happen. Israel's not going to leave Tel Av happen. Israel's not going to leave Tel Aviv.
Speaker 1:Israel's not going to leave. They're doing that based on what their parents are feeding them because they have no knowledge of that. They personally don't know.
Speaker 2:And they know they don't know you. Another case I went into let me see if I could find it here I went into. This goes back a little ways, but I went into Gaza and I talked to a bunch of kids that I met on the street. I talked to these kids. They were just, you know, 8 and 10 and 12 years old, and here they are Nice, nice kids. These are Palestinian kids in Gaza that I met and talked to Really nice kids. But then I said you know, hey, so where exactly are you from around here? And they said Beersheba. And I said wait a minute, beersheba, that's a town in Israel nearby. And they said oh yeah, that's where we're from. And I said well, what's Beersheba like? And they said it's beautiful, with orange groves and green trees. And I said, oh wow, that's amazing. When were you there? We've never been there, but that's our home because my dad, my grandfather, lived there and that's what we have to get back to.
Speaker 2:And so there is a mentality and that's what you were talking about about not wanting to live for today. There is a backward-looking mentality among some not all Palestinians of needing to reclaim the past instead of building the future, and I will say it's not helpful what's happening on the campuses in America, in the streets of America, because they feed into that. That whole river to the sea chant is chanting for an impossible future, which is for Palestinians to claim the entire land that they say their ancestors lived on in part, and that's just not going to happen. And the more you chant about that is like chanting for going backwards to an impossible past, instead of chanting which they should be chanting about. Let's build a future. Gaza is actually pretty nice when it's not destroyed. Beautiful waterfront. It could be a Singapore. The question I have do you think that?
Speaker 1:do you think in World War Two? That's one of our biggest mistakes we made, Not dealing with that at the end of World War II?
Speaker 2:At the end of the Palestinian situation.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean it seems like the thing that's been a thorn in our side ever since World War II. I mean it seems odd to just say here you get your land over here and just take it from. That seems odd. I mean it seems like a weird say here you get your land over here and just take it from. That seems odd. I mean it seems like a weird policy in my opinion.
Speaker 2:It is a little bit, but you know it gets complicated, because that was the United Nations, about three years after World War II, 1948, that created, or 47, that created a checkerboard, new country called Israel and Palestine side by side, a checkerboard, new country called Israel and Palestine side by side.
Speaker 2:And so what happened then? It wasn't that was the United Nations drawing those lines. And then the Palestinian side, the Arab side at that point, said you know, we don't accept this and we're going to go to war, along with help from Egypt and Jordan and Syria. And they lost that war. And so then there were a couple other wars that they lost as well, and so that whole kind of map has been to some extent established by the fact that the Arabs keep going to war. Israel said we'll take it, we'll take the checkerboard, but the Arabs, the Palestinians didn't. They went to war again and again and again. And now we're in the situation where we are now and it's kind of trying to think how to answer this best when you say couldn't America have solved that by drawing correct lines after world war ii, or couldn't?
Speaker 1:I'm not saying correct lines, I don't mean correct. I just don't even know why we even we even like said, okay, here's israel's land. I don't even know why we did that. I don't know why we even got involved in it. I don't know why I I guess I think that's part of america's problem and britain's problem is that we get involved in too much Same thing, like Ukraine right now. It's just we're involved in stuff we just should not be involved in, in my opinion.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think you're right that sometimes that whole kind of being the world policeman is not the right thing to do. But just in terms of the essence of why this conflict goes on, you know it's pretty complicated and we've talked about how it can be complicated. But you know, what makes it kind of simple are two things. One way to think about it is this James. It's one of the oldest parts of civilization on earth. Right there it goes back to the Bible and beforehand, and there used to be six or eight or more peoples that have come and gone there From early on Canaanites and Assyrians and Babylonians and Romans and Ottomans and the British. They've all come and they've all.
Speaker 2:Israel proper has been conquered 40 times, with 100 battles over it. They've all come and they've all gone, and there's two peoples left really, the Arab and the Jew, and what makes it complicated is both of them do have I mean Jews go back the furthest. There's no, you can't rewrite that history as much as people are trying. That is their indigenous land Can't rewrite that history as much as people are trying. That is their indigenous land. But still the Arabs and the Palestinians have a claim there too, because it was their land, for you know, on and off. And what makes it simple then is there are those two ways to look at it that the world's come and gone there and conquered it and left and Arab and Jews are still there. It's two peoples with one land.
Speaker 2:And the other way to kind of talk about that, which which really makes you, uh see it, if you go to the western wall, which is that beautiful wall in the heart of jerusalem, that was the wall of the ancient temple that solomon, son of david, built three thousand years.
Speaker 2:You go to that wall and you look up at the top of the wall, at where the temple was that Solomon built. That temple was torn down by the Romans and there's now a mosque there, the Dome of the Rock, the Golden Dome, and that tells you everything. And right at the same spot you have the most sacred Jewish spot, with the wall of the temple, and one of the most sacred Muslim spots, with the golden dome where Muhammad ascended to heaven. And you know what? A two-minute walk from there is the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, where Jesus died and rose. All in this, one acre is like billions of people on earth see that as their uh, emotional and theocratic and religious center, and that's part of what the problem is about this very small spot two peoples, one land sure yeah, and and I'd argue three peoples, because christians also, I mean yeah, oh absolutely.
Speaker 2:You know they're very strong for man of. At one point I was in betlehem. A lot of people think Bethlehem is, you know, bethlehem. That sounds like Jesus, isn't that right in the heart of Israel, next to the wall? No, bethlehem is a West Bank city. It used to be 80% Christian, now it's 20% Christian, but that's where the Church of the Nativity is and nobody's there now. Used to have three-hour lines to go see the church and the nativity but because of the war there's no tourism.
Speaker 2:And me and myself and this Muslim guy, this Arab guy named Omar that I hired to take me around Bethlehem Again, I was the only non-Palestinian face I saw all day we go into the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, man, this Jewish guy that's me and this Muslim guy that's Omar, and we bend down through the door of humility, which is how you get into that church Beautiful Corinthian columns inside, nobody but us, our footsteps echoing. We go into the grotto where Jesus was born and man, it was a moment, this Muslim man, this Jewish journalist, and you could feel the mystery. You could feel the spirit of Jesus having been born in that spot and you know he was proud of it. That's his, even though he's a Muslim guy he was proud of it.
Speaker 1:Do you have that mug that you bought? Did I what? The mug that you bought, the one you bought from? Oh, good memory.
Speaker 2:I did. I went, I went into yeah, it was more like that's a thing. You read the book pretty close. There's a guy right next to the Church of the Nativity who has the best retail space on the planet Earth. He sells antiquities right next to the place where Jesus was born, but he's got no business since October 7th. And I walked in there and I and you know, to show you how open Palestinian culture is, he was selling Judaica as well as Hamza hands, which is a Muslim, and and obviously crosses and other Christian symbols in that shop and he had no business for the last three or four months. And I found this. I found this that's a Jewish star on ancient Jerusalem glass. It cost me $400. I got it right here and I bought it because it would have cost $1,500 in Jerusalem on the Israeli side, and the guy said that it was his biggest sale in three or four months. That's how tough business is over there.
Speaker 1:Yeah, they're struggling, I can imagine, and then the construction workers too, which I was shocked to find out that the Palestinians are better builders than the Jewish people and they do most of the construction of building of homes and things around there. I guess I didn't realize that they were intertwined so much and actually were utilizing each other's services like that.
Speaker 2:Damn. You read the book well, didn't you James?
Speaker 1:Oh yeah, yeah, I read it. I wouldn't bother you if I didn't.
Speaker 2:Good for you, man. I appreciate it. You know, I will say that for an author, it always touches my heart to find just one reader that you know the book might speak to them. That's what you do it for, and if you find three other people to buy it, I'll send you a set of state knives.
Speaker 1:We get knives weekly here, so we'll be all right.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I bet you do, but yes, the Jews will tell you though. You know, there's half a million Jews that live on the West Bank, which is the Palestinian territory, and that's a big argument. What are these Jewish settlements doing there, in the Palestinian land? And that's an obstacle to peace. In response, the Jews will say wait a minute. There's two million Arabs Jewish Israeli Arabs that live in Israel, and so why shouldn't, if Arabs can live in Israel, shouldn't Jews be able to live on the West Bank, live in Israel? Shouldn't Jews be able to live in the West Bank? And so they're in these various settlements there, some of which are in spots that are chosen, because that really is where there is ancient Jewish archaeology, including this one place I went to called Shiloh, where Joshua he came right around the time of Moses first brought the Ark of the Covenant. You know where the first Indiana Jones movie was about, and that's where it was in that spot. And there's a Jewish, small Jewish settlement there, and they said all their houses were built by Palestinians who are master builders. And it's really tough right now because they cut off Israel, has cut off all work permits from the West Bank into Israel because they're worried about terrorism from sympathizers with Hamas and it's stalled out a lot of construction in Israel, especially in these settlements. And yeah, they work together, they're neighbors. There's some extremists on both sides there's Jewish extremists in the West Bank and Palestinian extremists but a lot of them are neighbors and they had good relationships.
Speaker 2:And the truth is that you know in that West Bank that a lot of people say what are these? Jewish settlers are crazy. What's really weird is when you're in Israel, you're talking to people. It could be just some like conservative lawyer that you're sitting next to at an Israeli restaurant and I began to chat with him about the war and his son was in Israel and he was terrified I mean in Gaza and he was terrified every night if he didn't get a message from his son's commander saying everybody was okay, shlemim that was the Hebrew word Everybody is in one piece. And then he told me I said where do you live? You live in Jerusalem. He said you know, I used to live in Jerusalem, but now I live in the settlement on the West Bank, because in Jerusalem I could only afford a small condo and on the settlement the West Bank I could afford a house with a lawn. So that's a lot of the people that are in the West Bank from the Jewish side. Same reason Americans buy houses. It's a good value.
Speaker 1:Yeah it side. Same reason americans buy houses. It's a good value. Yeah, it's a good value, but the thing is you could get some good value in the ghettos and we tend not to do that.
Speaker 2:I mean, you know, I just, I just you know well, it's true, though there, you know, it's so emotional, james, because it's actually pretty beautiful land and they don't they don't go in like the heart of the extremist Palestinian towns, like Jenin, they just their settlements are in kind of just open areas that are surrounded by security fences most of them, not all of them and it's actually kind of beautiful. But on the other hand, I think something's important to point out here that people don't realize. You know, people think why are they fighting over the same land? It must be amazing land and it is stunning. It's gorgeous to the eye, but it's tough land.
Speaker 2:It's limestone hills and you wonder how somebody carves a single house out of those hills, let alone a country or a town. It's very difficult land to build in. It's kind of harsh, even though it's beautiful. But that's nature. You know, when nature imposes a harshness, it gives back a beauty, and that's kind of why people are drawn there as well is because they see angels in the rocks. That's where their prophets walked. But it also reminds you it's so tough to build there and so tough to carve out a life there. It's a reminder of why people hold on to it, because the harder it is to learn, the more you sacrifice to live in a place, the deeper your sense of roots are there.
Speaker 1:Yeah, you said that when you were there was it 91. You were there before.
Speaker 2:I was during the Intifada. Yeah, 91,.
Speaker 1:You were there before I was during the Intifada yeah, so 91, when you were there they were complaining there was like 100,000 Jews in Gaza. Right, was it Gaza or West Bank?
Speaker 2:In the West Bank yeah.
Speaker 1:West Bank, and then now there's like 700,000?.
Speaker 2:Yeah, there's 500,000, kind of see it. It's kind of an interesting thing to kind of it's important to see the topography If you kind of see it here. I'm not sure how easy it is to see on this map.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I can see it very well.
Speaker 2:Okay, well, you see, kind of, there's Israel, there's the West Bank over here that's kind of carved right into Israel, and there's Gaza down below. But you can kind of see how it works that the Palestinian territories are really separated. The West Bank is on one side of Israel. It's actually on the east side of Israel, but it's called the West Bank because it's the West Bank of the Jordan River, and then Gaza is there near to the Mediterranean.
Speaker 2:And if you look here man, I'll tell you this if you look right here, you understand why the Jews of Israel are a little bit crazy about security. Right here, their entire country is nine miles wide. So the same kind of attack that happened on October 7th with the same kind of vehicles could have cut the country in half in 15 minutes. And that's why Israel is so obsessed with security, that like if something goes wrong, they're cut in half and cut off. And it's a small country and this one part of it. Just imagine that. Think of nine miles. Wherever you are, that's probably from you to the next town where you get groceries, and that's how wide the entire country is at a critical point.
Speaker 2:And that's I mean the Israelis will tell you, yeah, we're a little bit crazy. We're a little bit crazy about security, and they're crazy for two reasons because of their topography. But they'll tell you another reason. They're a little crazy about it and you know it's the truth. The past is also present in Israel, james. The Holocaust is present there. Everybody in Israel lost family in the Holocaust. They could tell you often, in some cases, which day in 1942, 20 of their family members were marched into the gas chambers of Treblinka and died, and they had nowhere else to go on earth except Israel.
Speaker 1:And now they're there. You lost family too, didn't you?
Speaker 2:I did. Actually I did lose family in the Holocaust and you know, the weird thing is I never really knew that because nobody talked about it, was too painful. My old, my old jewish aunts and uncles, even my dad didn't talk about it. And but I have this cousin, my first cousin. You probably heard of him, mandy batinkham. Mandy batinkham, he's a singer and actor. He was in Homeland and Princess Bride and he was on a show called Finding your Roots where the show actually digs around celebrities' past to find out things that celebrities didn't know themselves about their past. And they found that our family, mandy, and my family, 20 Patinkins, my last name all were killed in one of the death camps at 4 pm on November 10, 1942.
Speaker 2:And everybody in Israel has that same story. And if you talk to the soldiers, if you talk as I did when I talked to the soldiers there, I always had an interesting little. It was almost the same kind of conversation. Here's Gaza again, by the way. So I talked to the soldiers at one point and you talk to these young soldiers, age 24 or so, soldiers like these guys, and they'll tell you when you get to chatting with them, they all have a story that like, right after October 7th they were in Thailand on vacation or something, and the next day they were back in Israel picking up bodies. And then they'll tell you this thing and it tells you everything you need to know about Israel's mentality.
Speaker 2:Pogroms in like russian poland, right around 1900, when 150 000 jews were killed in those little fiddler on the roof villages, uh, that were just killed by, you know, neighbors that hated jews. Uh, that's why a lot of jews came to america in 1900, including my own ancestors. And then there was the holocaust. And and they say you know, my grandparents talked about the pogroms and the holocaust, but he said I always, these said I always thought that was earlier era, that was something that's not relevant to my life as much.
Speaker 2:And then October 7th happened and they realized it was the same thing, it was another 1900 pogrom, it was the biggest slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust. And they said that's why we fight Because. And then, when we see that what's going on in the streets of america and paris and in in other countries, where, uh, there are these people shouting down, shouting against jews and zionists, and and they say, we realize again there's really only one safe place we have on earth and it's here, and and that's why we fight, we got nowhere else to go I don't feel like that's safe.
Speaker 1:I think you're safer in the US.
Speaker 2:Well, you might be, you might be, but I'll tell you. You know, if you're a Jewish student at Columbia University, you might say I don't know. In fact, you know I've interviewed a couple that said they spent the summer in Israel and they got back to Columbia and it was a lot safer in Israel. And look, I was there. It's a lot of normalcy. It'll freak you out. You go to Israel and it's a war and so you think the whole place is going to be like I don't know Britain during World War II, when everybody was bunkered down. It's not. There's people in sidewalk cafes and bicycling and on beaches. The war is always there. Though you talk to anybody and they'll say, yeah, my son's in Gaza or I lost my neighbor, but life goes on.
Speaker 1:Did you see the Iron Dome in action?
Speaker 2:I did not see the Iron Dome in action, but I will say what I did see. At one point I was on my way to one of the kibbutz in Gaza and we're driving along and I'm with my Israeli driver and translator and I'm looking up something as we go. And I'm looking up something as we go and all of a sudden his phone, which is on the dashboard. I took this picture of his phone. We're not far from Gaza. I saw that, yeah, it's an app. It's not the government In Israel, they have missile apps.
Speaker 2:That's an app. It's not the government. They get they in Israel. You can't you. They have missile apps the same way we might have, you know, some restaurant reservation app here in America. They got missile apps and that's how you live over there. And the app began to go off Red alert. It says red alert, missile incoming, missile incoming. So my guy kind of turned off the road and said we're, we'll probably have to get behind a wall or even the curb, making sure the wall or the curb is between us and Gaza. And then he looked close and he saw oh no, wait, wait, that's a missile incoming at the northern border from Hezbollah in Lebanon, while we were in the southern part of Israel. The missiles we had to worry about were from Hamas, and so it turned out not to be an immediate threat. And no, I did not see the Iron Dome in action, but I saw some incoming missile action.
Speaker 1:That Iron Dome is one of the coolest things I've ever seen. I mean, I haven't seen it in action, but I mean I've seen it on the news and it's pretty impressive.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it is amazing, isn't it? It's amazing. I'll tell you something else. I think it's a peacemaking uh, it's a peacemaking technology, uh, and there's been people, including, uh, including, uh, various american congress people that want to cut off uh money to the iron dome, to israel, and the truth is that's what keeps the wars from being worth, because you imagine what israel would do if all those missiles were landing, you know, in tel aviv and jerusalem. This war would be three times as big. And so that keeps the peace because it avoids the kind of destruction that would have created a response. But the iron dome is. It is amazing, especially, you know, iran. They're the real player here, by the way. They're the ones, they're the puppet master. Hamas is their puppet, hezbollah in Lebanon is their puppet. They're bad news, they're just spreading, they're ruining that area of the world, or trying to when I was reading through, I was listening as I'm reading through it.
Speaker 1:You're talking about a soldier that you were in a Jeep with in 91. Now, this would have been when the kids were throwing the rocks at you and he was saying that I don't know why we're here, like why we are, you know, infiltrating them. Why don't we just leave them be? And they stopped doing that in 2005. Was that correct?
Speaker 2:Yeah, good memory, good memory.
Speaker 1:So do you think that because they stopped in 2005,? I wanted to ask you this do you think that's what allowed them at that point to start? Basically, hamas allowed to come in and establish what they've established since then, yeah, it was, you know.
Speaker 2:Here's the guy you're talking about, good memory. You're ready to close? This is me. This is not me. This is the guy I took this photo of the Jeep commander in 2005 stepping out of the Jeep. His name is Oded Turban. He was about 30-something here. He is a tech guy who was doing reserve duty patrolling in a Jeep, and so part of this book as you know from reading it is I found him like 33. I was with him 33 years ago. I said you know what? I'm going to track down all the people I talked to 33 years ago. And I found him today the same guy there. He was in 1991. And here he is today in age 68. Look at that Same guy. And so that was a big part of the book is tracking down these guys 30 years later to see how they feel about. For a then and now perspective and you're right, he was patrolling there in 1991, perspective, and you're right, he was, uh, patrolling there in 1991.
Speaker 2:And the history and the jews left the gaza strip in 2005. They pulled everything out. It was even ugly. Their own soldiers had to drag out jewish settlers to get them out of there and just was.
Speaker 2:This was a, you know, there was a palestinian nation. There was a two-state solution there. There was a Palestinian state. It was in 2005. The Gaza Strip was completely Palestinian no Jews and no Israeli army in there. And then in 2006 there was an election and they elected Hamas to. You know, kind of half of Hamas was half the government. There was a shared government between Hamas and the more moderate Palestinian Authority, which is based in the West Bank, but they also were in Hamas because those two territories had one leadership then. So 2005, israel leaves, 2006,. Hamas wins a lot of an election, but they had a shared government.
Speaker 2:2007, hamas says we want the whole thing. They stage a coup. They start throwing their fellow Palestinian Authority shared government people off of roofs. There's an actual civil war in 2007 between Hamas and the Palestinian Authority. A Palestinian civil war lasts a few weeks. Hundreds get killed. The Palestinian Authority says we're getting the hell out of there and Hamas takes over the entire Gaza Strip. And my guy, my commander, had said he wanted to have the Gaza area completely for Palestinians. He said they could build up a nice country. When I talked to him today I said did you ever think what would happen? He said you mean that it would turn into a terrorist camp? He said no, I didn't think that, and it did.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's when that was. What was it? Yeah, he. So he's clearly changed his mind on his opinion of that.
Speaker 2:Yeah, he has, and he he's still a peace guy. He says he hates to see all these Palestinians being civilians, being killed in Gaza. But even as a peace guy, he says as horrible as it is, I was in there, I saw it, I saw what's happened, I saw the. If we don't get rid of Hamas, it'll happen again. So that's where he is now.
Speaker 1:Who was the gentleman that you went to his house, had the nice house and then you got a hold of him and he said he's still in the same house. I'm trying to remember Is that?
Speaker 2:a Jewish settler on the West Bank. Is that what you mean, or do you mean the Palestinian guy?
Speaker 1:The Palestinian guy. Oh yeah, you sat on his front porch.
Speaker 2:Yeah, he was a great guy. He's here, he is. His name is Adnan Hussaini. So I'm telling you, this book really has both sides.
Speaker 1:I like spent a lot of time with Palestinians and he's still in that house, right?
Speaker 2:You said he's still in the same house. Yeah, he was a prominent architect and involved in Palestinian leadership to some extent when I saw him in 1991. And he's still there now. Those are his two kids and he's a great guy. He was a moderate, he said. You know, I think there's room for Jewish settlers on the West Bank. We should share it. We should share it. And he's got a ton of.
Speaker 1:I would think it would be. You know how good that country would be if it would just be one state, the whole thing. Honestly, I think if everybody could just get along and it would be one state, that would be amazing over there for them, for all of them.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it would be, and you know, israel is an example of it. Because Israel has 2 million. Israel is like that. It's preposterous to say it's an apartheid state. There's two million Arab Israelis with full citizenship and they thrive together. And I'll tell you this. I'll tell you this the Arab Israelis don't want to. They don't want to live in the West Bank.
Speaker 2:There was at one point there was this proposal to. They went right to the line and I drove right by it, right at the border of the West bank and Israel, and they said look, um, there's a debate over Israel settlements in the West bank. I'll tell you what we'll do. Let's redraw the lines and we'll draw the line so that these Israeli settlements that are right on the border, we'll put those in Israel and then we'll draw the line into Israel to put some Arab Arab communities that are right on the border. We'll put those in Israel and then we'll draw the line into Israel to put some Arab communities that are right on the line and make those part of the West Bank. So it'll be an even swap. We'll get the Jewish settlements declared officially in Israel and out of the West Bank and we'll put the Arab-Israeli villages in the West Bank and you know what happened.
Speaker 2:The Arab-Is Arab Israelis said we don't want that, we don't want to be part of Palestinian leadership, we'd rather be in Israel. And so there's a coexistence in Israel. And some will say that the Arab Israelis sometimes feel like second-class citizens in some respects, that they have one of the best living standards of anywhere in the Middle East among the Arab in that area. Best, uh, living standards of anywhere in the middle east among the arab, uh, in that area. Not, I wouldn't say anywhere in the middle east. Things are pretty good in the united arab emirates and things, places like that. But it it can work, and israel is an example of how it can work, how jews and arabs could live together it has Together.
Speaker 1:It was a great book. I enjoyed it. I didn't know I didn't have a. I mean I knew some of it and I mean I've watched it, but I'm like every other American, I'm just a dummy. You know what I mean? I don't. I guess it's not that we're dumb, it just doesn't affect us where we have to think about it like they do, and I mean have to think about it like they do and I mean you know what's going on and you really don't get a look inside that the book really gives you a look inside where you go. Wow that's. I mean putting yourself there like on that street where they're dropping in and just and somebody one of them said that that they noticed they were in the house and they noticed and you've already mentioned it that they noticed that they weren't even armed.
Speaker 2:It was just regular civilians from palestine just in there, harassing them at their door, trying to get in yeah, I'd say, more than harassing they were, they were trying to kill them, they were setting the house on fire and yeah, yeah, yep, yep it was they got there saved, yeah, but I mean it's, it's just.
Speaker 1:It really I can't imagine. I mean living in america my whole life and life. We're pretty fortunate in America not to have to deal with the things, but I feel like it's coming. I feel like if at the rate the world's going right now we're in trouble, I think that it could end up in America similar to what's going on there, not maybe as extreme, but I feel like it could happen. Let me ask you what you think.
Speaker 2:James, let me be, let me be, let me be the talk show host for a second. What do you think about some of these demonstrations in America, you know, both on college campuses and the streets, chanting to globalize the intifada and things like that. What do you think?
Speaker 1:There's a little city next to me called North Ridgevilleville and it's a pretty conservative city. But I'm driving through there and I'm going down the road center Ridge road and there's a little Toyota in front of me that says free Palestine, and it's got a girl with purple hair and green hair in the car and I wanted to run her off the road.
Speaker 1:So that tells you how I feel, and I'm not saying I mean, like I said, our neighbors, I love them, I and I and I, you know, I I would hate to ever make them think that I don't, you know, think that they're great people but at the same time, what's going on over there with the extremist and, like you say, it's 10% One bad apple ruins the whole damn bunch, as they say. But I mean, it doesn't take much to be. I grew up in an apartment, living in an apartment, and apartments would get a bad reputation. Oh, that apartment complex over there is bad, but really there was only a couple kids in there that were bad.
Speaker 1:You know what I mean like yeah, it was an analogy and and, and I can grasp how that happened, although that's a lot larger scale, of course, but it's definitely what it is. It's the same, it's just the way it is. But I think a big part of it is the teachings from the adults and, and I think people like to play victim to their past too. I think that's something that I mean human nature. I mean we see it with race in America. You know, where people are playing victim to their past, that they have no knowledge of, no true knowledge of. I mean, they are educated on it, certainly, but they don't have true, firsthand knowledge of it. And you know, I think that's similar to what's going on there. I mean, instead of enjoying what they have now, I mean Gaza is beautiful, enjoy it. I mean, go to the beach, you know, get a umbrella and, you know, make a margarita and a daiquiri and enjoy life.
Speaker 2:Amen, amen to that. But you know, it tells you look, there's areas in the Arab world that are like that, dubai, as I said, the United Arab Emirates. They're amazingly beautiful places and there's a reason for that they won't put up with jihadist Islamic extremism. So that's the problem is this jihadist attitude that comes out of Iran and then it starts to take over countries. It took over a lot of Lebanon and I saw it myself. As I told you, I was almost kidnapped by Islamic extremists there and they've taken over Gaza. Now how?
Speaker 1:did that go? How did that go? When you say you were almost kidnapped, I kind of want to hear the story.
Speaker 2:Well, I was covering the, I saw the rise of Hezbollah. What's going on right now? You know a lot of people don't realize this, but Hezbollah, they've killed 500 Americans Americans not just, and I don't mean just Americans that happen to be walking around Israel. 1983, they drove a truck bomb into the US Marines peacekeeping barracks in Beirut and killed 220 of our Marines. Hezbollah did that and that was all part of the civil war in Beirut and I went there to cover it and Beirut at that point was cut right down the middle. You know there was a green line and people were firing back and forth. One side was all Christian and one side was Muslim and I snuck over to the Muslim side and I was one of the only Westerners period on that side, not just journalists, and so I was in this hotel and you know they begin to track you there because it's their neighborhood. And again, the problem is when 10% of the people have guns and control the place. Like you couldn't look to the government for help. Hezbollah was stronger, the militias were stronger than the government then and still now in Lebanon. So you're on your own, you can't call the police, but I had this guy hired. This guy. His name was Matty. He had like cat sense. Okay, and we're going down this narrow street at one point with cars like only about two feet on either side of us, out the window, no way you could turn around, and there was a car in front of us who like had we'd seen this car before and it had been behind us and we got the hell away from it. Suddenly this car figured out how to get in front of us on this narrow street. It slams on the brakes, all four doors open up and four guys pile out of the car and start running towards us. And before I knew what had happened, mehdi had like ripped the car into reverse and we were going 40 miles per hour backwards down this narrow street with cars like inches on either side of us and we got the hell out of there. And he said there's no question that was a kidnapping attempt. And I'll tell you what could have happened to me.
Speaker 2:The night before I decided to get out of there. Finally, the night beforehand and I was in the hotel with a British journalist named John McCartney you could look him up and I was saying to him we got to get out of here, it's getting too hot. And he said, yeah, I'm leaving, let's leave tomorrow. And I said, okay, I'm leaving tomorrow and my guy is going to take me, kind of winding through the back streets, avoiding roadblocks that Hezbollah randomly throws up here and there, and get me over the green line to the Christian side of Beirut and then I'll take an eight hour ferry to Cyprus and maybe a plane from there to Tel Aviv and then get out of the middle East. And he said, oh, that's too much of a hassle, and eight hour ferry and all that. He said I'm just going to go to the airport tomorrow and fly back to the UK. And I said, john, don't do that, man, the road to the airport is right through Hezbollah country. He says I've got some bodyguards, don't worry about it.
Speaker 2:I went in my guy's car with metty and we went ripping by these back streets. We get to the green line, which is heavily, heavily fortified. You have to go through like a checkpoint, and I had four hundred dollars on me, which back then was worth three times as much in america and 20 times as much in lebanon. It'd be like him getting 20 000 bucks. I took all 400 bucks out of my pocket and I put it in his hand and I'll tell you to this day, james, my, my, my, uh, cheek still is scratchy from how hard a kiss he gave me with his four day beard. Uh, he earned every bit. It was the most expensive tip I ever gave, and the and the and the best and the best tip I ever gave. But the next day, john McCartney was kidnapped and he was held in a basement for five years. Oh wow, the same guy.
Speaker 1:I kind of remember when I was a kid. I remember that when that happened I was probably only 10 years old when all that was going on.
Speaker 2:Yeah, a lot of people were kidnapped. There were about eight or 10 Westerners kidnapped and held for years. He was held for five years and we were both engaged to be married. We talked about it and his wife actually his fiancee waited for him. It was really tense times but just bringing it back to now, you know I saw just how extreme this mentality is. It's a real cancer, the Islamic extremist, jihadist mentality.
Speaker 1:And Israel understands that and after that you go back again, huh.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I know, that's a good point. You know, I guess you keep making jokes about how you're not very bright. I'm clearly not very bright, dude.
Speaker 1:Well, I mean, you're an excellent writer, for sure, but that's what 40-some years of writing will do. How did you get into writing? What made you what you just always enjoyed writing?
Speaker 2:I kind of did. You know, we had a. It goes back to high school. We had a really good high school newspaper and a high school journalism teacher. And I grew up in Chicago and there were these great newspaper columnists there. One of them was named mike royko and and, uh, they just were, they, they were great, they like uh, you know, as opposed to just dry coverage they, they, uh, they, they were funny too, like this guy, mike royko. Uh, this columnist in chicago that was when the cubs were the worst team in baseball for a hundred years and he wrote I still remember he got us by the way, yeah.
Speaker 1:We're the ones who give them their break.
Speaker 2:Finally, finally, and I still remember him writing that you know most, most kids are raised to be Cubs fans by their fathers, which could be considered a form of child abuse. It was a. It was a great line. But anyway so that got me into it.
Speaker 1:That's what got you into. It Was just sports reporting, you think.
Speaker 2:Well, he was a general reporter but he talked about everything. So I like the fact that and that's what I do as a columnist. So I'm a columnist. I've been with the Providence Journal in Rhode Island forever, but it's a good paper. That's allowed me still allows me to travel the world. But you know, I write a little bit about everything. I could write about Israel one day and the next day about how my adult kids make fun of me because I tuck my polo shirts into my cargo shorts and I wear high white socks and new balanced sneakers and it embarrasses them. So I'll write about that one day in Israel the next day and it's kind of gives me a big, a lot of bread.
Speaker 1:Yeah, my kids give me shit for wearing socks with my slide on.
Speaker 2:You know, the thing is we got to explain to them, james, that we, that they don't believe that you and me, that we used to be cool, they don't believe that.
Speaker 1:I try to explain it to them, but they don't. They don't understand it at all.
Speaker 2:I'm sure that you, I'm sure you're you used to be cool man, cause I once was cool too, but they don't buy it.
Speaker 1:That. So with this newspaper, do they still print where you're at?
Speaker 2:Yeah, we still do print, but you know, who knows whether that'll last forever. But you know, here's the problem with newspapers. The problem with newspapers is that you know there's a lot of areas where things went digital really fast. You know, things went from film to digital really fast and so it went in that direction. But with newspapers, even though obviously a lot of people get the online version and they just get the digital newspaper, the newspapers still depend on the money they get from the print newspaper. They still get half their money from that and so it's hard to just shut that down and so they've done it around here we.
Speaker 1:It's almost impossible to get them to deliver a paper to us yeah which paper do you guys read mailboxes?
Speaker 1:which paper I? I used to read the plane dealer, the morning journal, the plane dealer in cleveland, you know, and then I always had like the morning journal in lorraine ohio. Yeah, um, but I mean you just can't get them delivered anymore. You got to go get them from a. But I used to like to wake up in the morning with my coffee, open up my paper and start my day. But it's, it's no longer there and it kind of sucks.
Speaker 2:But yeah, it's called the internet man.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's called being an old man. Things change.
Speaker 2:How, being an old man, things change. How's the plain deal? Is it pretty good still?
Speaker 1:I don't read much of it anymore. I mean, honestly, since they quit delivering them, I really don't read them anymore. I really don't. I go on clevelandcom, which is their online thing, if an article pops up that you know has some interest to me, and that's about it, really. Yeah, like everyone else, I'm getting my news on the internet, tiktok, facebook, you know, I mean it's just, and podcasts, man and podcasts I am doing? I you know I when I started podcasts, it was something that I enjoyed, but I never listened to any.
Speaker 1:I never listened to them at all yeah and now that I do have mine going, I'm starting to listen to joe rogan and people like that, starting to get you know, a little more into it. I never was into it before. I would listen. I the podcasts are perfect for construction workers and guys that are in throw their headphones on and go to work all day. You know what I mean. It's it's a perfect thing for them to listen to and that's, I know, certainly a lot of our listeners. That's what their deal is. But I was always I would honestly put on comedy. When I would do that, I loved comedy skits. When I would work like that, I would just have comedy Pandora on or something you know.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's a great Knowledge change. Yeah, it's yeah well, you're in the right game. Now we're moving towards all kinds of online and digital and audio, and so it's. I think it's. I'm sure it's a lot of your listeners know this, but I think it's really cool. You're, this is not your full-time gig, but it's your. It's kind of what your passion is and you do it well, and I I think it kind of reflects it that this is just what you want to do. It's what you want to do and you do it well.
Speaker 1:Thank you, I appreciate that. Yeah, I'm starting to see. I have a friend, donald, and he's in Cleveland. He's a sports reporter for Channel 13 News.
Speaker 2:Have you ever heard of them in Cleveland? Do you know what affiliate it is? Is it like ABC, CBS, NBC?
Speaker 1:No, it's an internet-only Channel. 13 news.
Speaker 2:Oh neat.
Speaker 1:Everybody is either podcasters or doing it on their own. Wow, it's a Cleveland broadcast. They're reporting on sports events, local feel-good stories, everything you can imagine.
Speaker 2:So it's kind of like a new model, huh.
Speaker 1:It's something new. I've never seen it before. I think it's interesting enough. I thought it was pretty cool, like a new model. Huh, it's something new. I've never seen it before. It was. I think it's interesting enough. I thought it was pretty cool, just the concept of it. It's only online. It's channel 13 news cleveland and they I mean they have a board of directors. I mean it's, it's, they're doing their thing and it's impressive to me.
Speaker 2:Yeah I'll check that out because you know we need new models. You know, obviously, as you said, a lot of people now just get their news from twitter or even uh tiktok, and but that's a cool model to just kind of put together your own thing, uh, online, which is a mix of a mix of, um, a different kind of journalism. I we need to, we need to figure that out and invent that and you know, I I fear that those of us in newspapers are we're still making buggy whips.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I agree, I agree with that, that that's a possibility. I think that. But just like Joe Rogan has replaced Phil Donahue, you know, and Oprah, I believe that. I believe that that's the what's going to happen with actual news. I believe it's going to happen that way. I think it's going to be online podcasters and it's possible that they could build a network of podcasters to make a network that was all online anyways, it's a wild west right now.
Speaker 1:Yes, it is, it absolutely is, but it's nice. It's still giving us the freedom to talk and I appreciate that. That's something that I. Free speech is everything to me and I you know.
Speaker 2:Amen to that, brother, amen to that.
Speaker 1:This has been great talking to you. I hope you write another book soon and I get to talk to you again. How's that?
Speaker 2:Yeah, well, listen, I really appreciate you putting me on here, and let me just say that it's here it is. That's backwards, isn't it? But you can see it anyway.
Speaker 1:No it's coming up perfect on there and plus, like I said, I have the image up. Your book cover is on the page. The whole time you've been on air it's on Amazon.
Speaker 2:It was actually. We haven't talked about this and don't have to get into it, but it was actually banned by Amazon when it first came out because they were gun shy of it being on a controversial topic.
Speaker 1:No kidding.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I even had some press coverage of it being some press coverage of it. I wrote a column in the New York Post about how I was banned and censored by Amazon and that finally got it unbanned when they got the heat on them and censored by Amazon, and that finally got it unbanned when they got the heat on them. And it's just that there are just people are terrified of this issue and that's why I give you credit to put it on here. People just don't want to. They're scared of the issue. It's too controversial but you've got to have controversial conversations.
Speaker 1:That's what, that's what we, that's what I feel like, that's what journalism is and podcasting is. I mean, I think that's what it is.
Speaker 2:You got to have controversial conversations you do, you got to talk about dangerous ideas sometimes that I that I it's out now and I'll tell you just as an author. It just means a lot to me. James, do you believe in dragons? Pardon me.
Speaker 1:Do you believe in dragons?
Speaker 2:pardon me, do you believe in dragons, do I? Well, it's. It's actually funny. You would say that because I actually have another book coming out that has that word in it uh dragons yeah, believe it or not, it's uh called demons and dragons.
Speaker 2:It's coming out uh and it's about uh, but there it's. The dragon is spelled d-r-a-g-a-n and that's uh. I actually had a cancer bout I had kidney cancer and they thought they'd lose me, but I found this great surgeon from like uh, from uh slovakia, named uh main dragon gulianin. His first name was dragon d-r-a-g-a-n and, and so he saved my life and I named the book Demons and Dragons about cancer, but like, he was the guy that stood at the castle door and kept the demons away.
Speaker 1:So you went through about with cancer, huh.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I went through a kidney cancer. I had a book ready to come out on that. Actually, the angle of the book wasn't just what I went through but I interviewed everybody from the ultrasound tech that found it to the surgeon that cut it out and that was ready to about to come out. And then this war broke out, so I did this book first and that I'll come out with that book pretty soon instead as the next job.
Speaker 1:I dealt with cancer very young. My mother had cancer when I was like 11, I believe.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Somewhere around that range.
Speaker 2:And it was in her thyroid gland. Is she okay?
Speaker 1:Yeah, she's absolutely okay. They actually pulled the thyroid gland out, scraped it and put it on the other side of her neck, hoping that it would actually start kicking in some different whatever you know Synthroid and stuff like that. So she had some emotional issues my mom, you know, because that thyroid gland controls a lot of your emotion, hunger issues, things like that. But I remember it was very scary, like I just remember going in there after the surgery and being I was a little boy and that was my mother.
Speaker 2:So it was quite memorable for me. I appreciate this and look, any of your listeners who would want to go on Amazon and get this book or go to the bookstore, I'll tell you. It touches any author Just to have one reader here and there, and it was a big mountain to climb and I think you could save yourself a ticket and save yourself the danger of going into Gaza. I'll take you there. I'll take you there in this book.
Speaker 1:And it's an easy read. For anybody who reads, it's a very easy read. I mean, I was. I went right through it. I think yeah, so I just wrote it.
Speaker 2:I just wrote it instead of like saying let me analyze this. I just said so, I, I, I'm driving.
Speaker 1:I'm driving through the mud in an Israeli Jeep and we bang a left-hand turn and now we're in Gaza and now we're in a tunnel. That's just how I wrote it. Just take, take people with me. Yeah, you're a very good writer. I appreciate it. It's been great and, like I said, I get ahold of get ahold of me when dragon demons come out.
Speaker 2:All right, brother, and that that that offer is good. You find three more people to buy the book. You get a set of steak knives.
Speaker 1:All right, sounds good. All right, thanks, james.
Speaker 2:Thanks a lot. Yeah, it's been an honor, it's been an honor.
Speaker 1:Thank you, sir.
Speaker 2:Thanks brother.
