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Joe Rogan’s Troubling Anti-Israel Podcast Episodes
At 14.5 million followers, The Joe Rogan Experience consistently tops the charts as the most popular podcast on Spotify.
With 16 million subscribers on YouTube and millions more on Apple Podcasts, it is clear that Joe Rogan’s unique interviews and charismatic personality both resonate with — and influence — a wide audience.
Part of the appeal of The Joe Rogan Experience is that it covers topics that are generally considered controversial, and features interviews with people who hold ideas that are seen as being outside the mainstream.
Naturally, this means that the podcast has touched on Israel and the Jewish people in the past.
However, just because The Joe Rogan Experience’s brand isn’t scared to go outside the mainstream, that doesn’t absolve the podcast of spreading misinformation by either Rogan himself, or one of his guests.
Here are just some of the times that Joe Rogan enabled the spread of anti-Israel misinformation or dangerous stereotypes about the Jewish people on his podcast.
Joe Rogan: Israel Is Committing Genocide
During a podcast interview with comedian Kurt Metzger recorded at the end of March 2024, Joe Rogan said that Israel’s ongoing defensive war against Hamas was tantamount to genocide due to the number of civilian casualties caught up in the fighting.
Rogan then went on to engage in Holocaust inversion, claiming that Israel was okay with imitating what was done to the Jews during the Holocaust. According to Rogan, “You guys [Israel] are willing to do what was done to you that led you to believe that you needed to start your own country? You’re willing to do that on a small scale in Gaza.”
Rogan also allowed his guest to openly claim that Israel’s war conduct in Gaza was worse than that of Putin’s Russia during its invasion of Ukraine, and that Israelis hated Palestinians as part of a “racial thing.”
Joe Rogan Defends “All About the Benjamins” Tweet
In 2019, Minnesota Democratic Congresswoman Ilhan Omar publicly commented on US Congressional support for Israel, tweeting “It’s all about the Benjamins, baby,” asserting that bipartisan support for the Jewish state is a result of lobby money and not shared values between the two countries.
With its allusions to the classic antisemitic stereotypes of Jews and money as well as dual loyalty, Omar’s tweet aroused a media firestorm and she subsequently apologized for her statement.
In February 2023, following a US House of Representatives vote to oust Omar from the Foreign Affairs Committee, her 2019 tweet arose as a topic of discussion between Joe Rogan and his guest, Krystal Ball.
Rogan jumped to the defense of Omar, quipping that her 2019 tweet was “not an antisemitic statement, I don’t think that is. Benjamins are money. The idea that Jewish people are not into money is ridiculous. That’s like saying Italians aren’t into pizza, it’s f—-ng stupid.”
Later, Rogan concurred with Ball’s assertion that the pro-Israel lobby movement and money are responsible for “uniparty consensus around our policy vis-à-vis the Israeli government and a total inability and unwillingness to criticize the Israeli government.”
Joe Rogan Interviews Roger Waters
For years, Roger Waters has spent his time spreading a wide variety of absurd claims about Israel, Zionism, and the Jewish people — some of which have crossed the line into outright antisemitism.
So, it was only natural that when he appeared on The Joe Rogan Experience in October 2022, the famed musician would take some time to spread his latest conspiratorial talking points about the Jewish State.
However, as pointed out by many on social media at the time, rather than push back against Waters’ extreme rhetoric, Rogan simply nodded along and even responded positively to some of Waters’ assertions, granting them an air of legitimacy.
As detailed at the time by the pro-Israel blog site Israellycool, some of the most egregious statements made by Waters during his Joe Rogan Experience interview included:
The claim that Israel behaves like “people in the past behaved towards Jews in northern Europe” [i.e. Nazis].
A legitimization of Hamas as the “democratically elected government of Gaza”; the claim that Hamas rockets are “ineffectual”; and the implicit validation of Hamas’ anti-Israel terrorism as “resistance” against occupation.
That Israel is hoping for another Palestinian intifada as a pretense “to kill them all.”
The oft-repeated claim that an Israeli audience reacted negatively to Waters’ suggestion at a 2006 concert that it was incumbent upon this generation of Israelis to make peace with the Palestinians, even though audio footage from this concert belies his claims.
Joe Rogan Hosts Abby Martin
In 2017, Joe Rogan hosted independent journalist and former Russia Today host Abby Martin on his podcast, giving her a platform to spread her anti-Israel libels and misinformation.
As noted by the UK-based Israel Advocacy Movement in its takedown of Martin’s untruths following her appearance on the Joe Rogan Experience, these are the most egregious claims that Rogan allowed Abby Martin to make without any pushback:
The claim that Palestinian political parties are illegal in the West Bank.
That Palestinians who share incitement to violence against Israelis and Jews on social media are punished based on how popular their posts are.
Her claim that someone she had interviewed had been shot in her vagina during a “peaceful protest” even though the woman admitted in her original interview with Martin that she had been shot in the leg while attempting to slingshot Israeli forces during a violent riot.
The absurd claim that 200 Palestinians had been shot during this violent riot even though there are no reports that it ever occurred.
The claim that Israel has a policy called “shooting to cripple,” where Israeli forces shoot men in their genitalia.
That barely any Palestinians are allowed to pray at the Dome of the Rock, “the most holy site in Jerusalem” (which also goes to show her general ignorance about the region in general).
The baseless claim that Arabs and Jews have different license plates (as opposed to different license plates in Israel and the Palestinian Authority).
The claim that Israel is a “white nationalist ethno-supremacist state.”
The claim that the UN “partitioned a country on top of another country” even though there was no independent state in the area during the 1947 UN vote.
That Israel has been the “crux of so many problems in the world.”
Despite the above examples, there have been other occasions where Joe Rogan has interviewed pro-Israel voices or made positive comments about Israel and the Jewish people on his podcast.
Unlike some of his guests, Rogan does not appear to have an inherent animus against the Jewish state. However, his apparent lack of understanding of the topic has allowed for the spreading of extreme and absurd claims about Israel and the Jewish people without any resistance.
As someone with an audience of millions of followers around the world, Joe Rogan has a responsibility to do better and not to allow his podcast to serve as a jump-off point for the proliferation of such baseless and dangerous claims.
The author is a contributor to HonestReporting, a Jerusalem-based media watchdog with a focus on antisemitism and anti-Israel bias — where a version of this article first appeared.
The post Joe Rogan’s Troubling Anti-Israel Podcast Episodes first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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Israel Destroyed Top Secret Iranian Nuclear Weapons Site
FILE PHOTO: The atomic symbol and the Iranian flag are seen in this illustration, July 21, 2022. REUTERS/Dado Ruvic/Illustration/File Photo
JNS.org – The Israeli airstrikes on Iran last month destroyed a secret nuclear weapons research facility in Parchin, 19 miles southeast of Tehran, Axios reported on Friday.
The clandestine site held sophisticated equipment used for testing explosives needed to detonate nuclear devices, the report read, citing three US officials, one current Israeli official and one former Israeli official.
The Washington-based Institute for Science and International Security acquired high-resolution satellite imagery of the facility, which showed that it was completely destroyed in Israel’s Oct. 26 attack.
Israeli and US intelligence agencies began noticing activity in the Taleghan 2 facility in the Parchin military complex in early 2024, which had been largely inactive since 2003, when the Islamic Republic froze its military nuclear program, according to Axios.
One unnamed US official quoted in the report said: “[The Iranians] conducted scientific activity that could lay the ground for the production of a nuclear weapon. It was a top secret thing. A small part of the Iranian government knew about this, but most of the Iranian government didn’t.”
Although President Joe Biden asked Jerusalem not to target Tehran’s nuclear facilities, the site in Parchin was chosen as a target because it was not part of Iran’s declared nuclear program.
This placed the mullah regime in a position where admitting a hit to the site would expose its efforts to resume activity forbidden by the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons.
Moreover, “The strike was a not so subtle message that the Israelis have significant insight into the Iranian system even when it comes to things that were kept top secret and known to a very small group of people in the Iranian government,” the report cited a US official as saying.
Last week, Rafael Grossi, the director of the United Nations’ International Atomic Energy Agency, visited Iran for the first time since May.
He is expected to meet with his agency’s board of governors in Vienna this week for a vote on a resolution to censure Tehran for its lack of cooperation with the U.N. nuclear watchdog.
Speaking about the tensions between Israel and Iran, Grossi said during a news conference in Tehran on Thursday that the Islamic Republic’s “nuclear installations should not be attacked.”
Earlier in the week, Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz suggested that Iran’s nuclear facilities may be targeted.
Iran is “more exposed than ever to strikes on its nuclear facilities. We have the opportunity to achieve our most important goal—to thwart and eliminate the existential threat to the State of Israel,” Katz said.
Israel’s two assaults against Iran’s air defense system this year have left the country vulnerable to future attacks, with all four of Tehran’s Russian-made S-300 surface-to-air missile batteries destroyed, according to U.S. media.
On April 19, Israel took out one of the S-300 systems in response to Tehran’s first-ever direct attack against the Jewish state. On Oct. 26, in response to a second Iranian attack, Israel targeted 20 sites in Iran, destroying the remaining three.
“The majority of Iran’s air defense was taken out,” a senior Israeli official told Fox News.
The post Israel Destroyed Top Secret Iranian Nuclear Weapons Site first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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Yemen’s Houthis Say They Attacked ‘Vital Target’ in Israel’s Eilat
Houthi-mobilized fighters ride atop a car in Sanaa, Yemen, Sept. 21, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Khaled Abdullah
Yemen’s Houthi forces attacked “a vital target” in Israel’s Red Sea port city of Eilat with a number of drones, the Iran-aligned group’s military spokesperson Yahya Saree said on Saturday.
The terrorist group has launched dozens of attacks on international shipping in the Red Sea region since November in solidarity with Hamas.
“These operations will not stop until the aggression stops, the siege on the Gaza Strip is lifted, and the aggression on Lebanon stops,” Saree added in a televised speech.
The Houthi attacks have upended global trade by forcing ship owners to reroute vessels away from the vital Suez Canal shortcut, and drawn retaliatory U.S. and British strikes since February.
The post Yemen’s Houthis Say They Attacked ‘Vital Target’ in Israel’s Eilat first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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Muslims from ‘Abandon Harris’ Campaign Gutted by Pro-Israel Cabinet Picks
US Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, US, Sept. 10, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Evelyn Hockstein
JNS.org – Muslim leaders in the United Stated who called for supporting President-elect Donald Trump at the expense of Democrat runner Kamala Harris are deeply disappointed with the former president’s Cabinet nominees, Reuters reported on Thursday.
“It’s like he’s going on Zionist overdrive,” Abandon Harris campaign co-founder Hassan Abdel Salam, a former professor at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities, said about Trump’s recently announced picks.
“We were always extremely skeptical. … Obviously we’re still waiting to see where the administration will go, but it does look like our community has been played,” Abdel Salam told Reuters.
Rabiul Chowdhury, a Philadelphia investor who chaired the Abandon Harris campaign in Pennsylvania and co-founded Muslims for Trump, was cited as saying: “Trump won because of us and we’re not happy with his secretary of state pick and others.”
Some political strategists believe that the Muslim vote for Trump, or the renunciation of Harris, helped tilt several swing states such as Michigan in the favor of the Republican candidate.
“It seems like this administration has been packed entirely with neoconservatives and extremely pro-Israel, pro-war people, which is a failure on the side of President Trump, to the pro-peace and anti-war movement,” said Rexhinaldo Nazarko, executive director of the American Muslim Engagement and Empowerment Network.
On Wednesday, Trump named Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) as his choice to be secretary of state.
Rubio is known for his staunch pro-Israel stance, including calling on Jerusalem earlier this year to destroy “every element” of Hamas and dubbing the Gaza-based terrorist organization as “vicious animals.”
Rubio joins a slew of pro-Israel officials Trump has tapped since he won the U.S. election, including former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee as ambassador to Israel and Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.) as his U.N. ambassador with a seat in the Cabinet.
Blaise Misztal, vice president for policy at the Jewish Institute for National Security of America (JINSA), told JNS that Trump’s focus so early in the transition process on Israel-related foreign policy picks is a mark of how his second administration will approach the region.
“That, in and of itself, signals that President Trump and his administration are going to take the region, the Middle East, the threats confronting Israel, seriously and take the U.S. friendship with Israel seriously,” Misztal said.
“The people that we’ve seen are known to be tremendously strong friends of Israel, first and foremost, but also very clear-eyed about the threats that the United States and Israel face together in the region.”
Before the election on Nov. 5, Trump promised Arab and Muslim voters he would restore stability in Lebanon and the Middle East, while criticizing the current administration’s regional policies during campaign stops targeting Muslim communities in Michigan.
Trump recently addressed Lebanese Americans, stating, “Your friends and family in Lebanon deserve to live in peace, prosperity and harmony with their neighbors, and this can only happen when there is peace and stability in the Middle East.”
Israel has been at war for more than a year on its southern and northern borders, ever since Hamas led a surprise attack on communities near the Gaza Strip border on Oct. 7, 2023, murdering some 1,200 people and abducting 251 more into the Palestinian enclave. A day later, Hezbollah joined Hamas’s efforts by firing rockets into Israel’s north.
The post Muslims from ‘Abandon Harris’ Campaign Gutted by Pro-Israel Cabinet Picks first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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