WASHINGTON – Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has called out two-faced world leaders who privately agree with him that Hamas must be smashed before backing down in the🉐 face ofജ widespread pro-terror protests.
Asked by author and longtime TV host Thursday whether he had ever spoken with a head of state who “does not agree that Hamas has to be taken down,” Netanyahu responded that “many of them agree with it privately.
“And then when they’re faced with the, you know, the pressure of all this propaganda – all this madness in the [college] campuses and the various capitals of the West – they begin to fray, some of them,” he added.
“But I don’t fray, I have to do what we have to do to protect ourselves and to make sure that these atrocities are not repeated.”
Netanyahu did not mention any leaders by name, but the interview was recorded one day after President Biden confirmed he had “paused” a shipment of 2,000-pound bombs prepared for Israel in disapproval of the way Netanyahu has planned to invade Rafah, Hamas’ last Gaza Strip holdout where roughly one million civilians are sheltering.
McGraw, who ended his popular talk show in May 2023 after 21 years, said he traveled to Jerusalem to interview Netanyahu after becoming frustrated with a shift in public sentiment and media coverage of Israel since Hamas’ brutal assault on Oct. 7, in which an estimated 1,200 people were slaughtered, including 33 Americans.
“It is stunning to me how short the memory is for what happened that day in the media in terms of what’s going on. And I want to change that,” McGraw told the prime minister. “I want to remind people, and I don’t want to be sensationalistic about it, but I want to remind people the brutality of what happened that day.”
Netanyahu obliged, spending much of the interview describing “savagery on an unimaginable scale” by the jihadists.
“These monsters, when they came into the homes, one of the mothers wanted to hide their children like Anne Frank in the attic,” he recounted. “So there was a secret attic and these savages came in, killed the parents, found the latch where two little children were hiding with terror in their eyes. And they came in and they slaughtered them.”
Turning to the aftermath, Netanyahu likened his government’s response to that of the US after it was attacked on 9/11 and at Pearl Harbor.
“I asked world leaders, what would you do? Let me ask you, what would America do, Dr. Phil?” he said. “We know what you did after Pearl Harbor, right? We know what you did after 9/11. And we know that you took action because you had to to roll back this kind of attack on you.”
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The interview also was recorded after several universities across the country have been disrupted by large student protests, forcing the cancellation of events, classes and graduations.
“I’ve been very outspoken about what’s happened on these campuses. I’m shocked, I say it’s just, they’re fostering intellectual rot,” McGraw said. “They are not teaching critical thinking among these young people.”
He then asked Netanyahu how he would respond to those who “characterize what Hamas did as resistance, not as an invasion?”
“Well, Hamas openly declares its goal to wipe out everything you see around here. To kill every man, woman, child in Israel, to destroy the state,” Netanyahu replied. “That’s not resistance. That’s naked, brutal aggression.”
