Transcript: ‘Crossed EVERY Moral Line!’ Piers Morgan vs Hamas + US-Iran War & Spain-Morocco Migration

They don’t listen to anyone. They don’t listen to the mediators. They should not trust anyone because I think that this is an occupation. You know Hamas as liberation organization, we never commit crimes. We never kill civilians. We try all the time to liberate our home—

PIERS MORGAN: Well, that’s complete nonsense, Mr. Hamad. Sorry. I have to interrupt there. When you say you don’t commit crimes and you don’t kill innocent civilians, we all saw what happened on October 7 in 2023. You had 3,000 members of your organization, Hamas, pour over the Israeli border and commit a series of despicable crimes in which you massacred innocent civilians all over Israel. You then captured over 250 of them, including Holocaust survivors and a baby. So the idea you’ve not committed crimes is ridiculous.

GHAZI HAMAD: I say 100%, I’m confident that 100%, we never commit crimes against the civilians. Maybe some mistake happened, but it is not the policy of Hamas. It is not the commit—

PIERS MORGAN: But they were mistakes? You gunned down innocent people. Sorry. Again, Mr. Hamad, I’m sorry. I can’t let you get away by saying that. Hamas deliberately massacred people at a music festival. Hundreds of young people enjoying the music festival. That is a war crime.

GHAZI HAMAD: Very well. There was no commands to kill civilians or to kill women or to kill children. I think maybe some mistakes happen, but I think that Hamas has no any—

PIERS MORGAN: There were mistakes? You burned people alive in their homes.

GHAZI HAMAD: Destruction to perseverance. In spite, you know, that how many people—how many civilians—100 thousands of Palestinians since 1948, civilians, women, and children were killed by the forces. What they are doing to Palestinian people is just not something that you can imagine.

PIERS MORGAN: To be clear—

GHAZI HAMAD: Where?

PIERS MORGAN: Just to be clear, I have said repeatedly on my show that I believe that the scale of Israel’s response to October the seventh has been way over the top. They’ve killed far too many Palestinian civilians in their response to what happened that day. But given that you are the Hamas spokesman, for you to come on this program and say to me with a straight face that nobody in Hamas committed any crimes on October 7 is just a brazen lie. Your people, your terrorists, poured over the border and slaughtered hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of innocent civilians and captured many more.

GHAZI HAMAD: Piers, I—main, leader, we must understand. We believe in humanity. We believe in war. We believe in ethics and morality. We understood this is very well. We’ve been against violence. Maybe there’s some mistake by individuals, but it is not a policy from us. It is not our thinking. It is not our mentality to perseverance.

But maybe some people, there are some mistakes happened. I don’t deny this. But you have to understand, you look to the hostages with all the Israeli hostages who were kept for a long time. I think we did him very, very, very kind with them. We feed them. We give him all kinds of protection and shelter. But our prisoners now, more than seven or nine thousands, now every day, they are exposed to the tortures and exposed to the humiliation on all kinds of bad behavior. So I think, no, we believe that we follow the Islamic principles who instruct us now to deal even with the enemy.

But look now to Gaza. You know, since the signature of the agreement, about 1,400 people were killed. But you can see 80% of them are civilians, women and children. Before that, in this war, this war of genocide, more than 90% of people are civilians according to our statistics and the status of the international organization. So, you know, I think as Hamas, we believe to fight against the occupation. This is our duty to fight against them again and again and again because I think we are looking to build our future, to free our homeland.

PIERS MORGAN: All right. But Mr. Hamad, let me again interrupt you, because I can’t just let you talk without being challenged. When you accuse Israel of committing crimes, I think you have perfectly legitimate claims against some of the actions of this Israeli government, and a proper investigation will need to happen about exactly what has happened in Gaza and how many civilians have been killed. I think the reaction from the Israeli government has been way, way, way over the top, and they’ve killed far too many civilians. They say they’ve only gone after Hamas terrorists, and in the process, civilians have been killed. I think that’s a very questionable position of them.

I also think the fact that 75, 80% of Gaza is pretty well uninhabitable is a disgrace, and I think the actions of some members of the Israeli government, Ben-Gvir, Smotrich, and others, and their words are borderline certainly ethnic cleansing and possibly genocidal. I think their plan and intention is to take the West Bank and Gaza. So, you know, I’ve tried to be very fair in my coverage of this since October 7, and I’m very aware of the history going back to 1948. However, if you’re going to come on here and you’re going to accuse Israel of committing crimes, but in the same breath, try and tell me that no Hamas terrorist on October 7 committed crimes, everybody watching this interview will think you’re a liar.

GHAZI HAMAD: It is not a true circumstance action. I think we are acting against occupation. We never use our power and our capability against Europeans, against Christians, against Jews, against Western people. We are fighting against the occupation, and it is our right according to United Nation resolution, according to the international community, according to all kinds of regulations. And it is our fight to end this occupation. We want to end it. No one help us to do that. So I think we have to use everything. But we never cross the lines of morality and humanity and laws in our conflict against occupation. But if you look to the other side—

PIERS MORGAN: But, again, Mr. Hamad, I’m sorry. Listen. I’m sorry, but you crossed every line of humanity—

GHAZI HAMAD: No, that’s not true.

PIERS MORGAN: On October 7, the actions of Hamas on October 7 crossed every single moral, ethical, and humanity line.

GHAZI HAMAD: No, this is—why?

PIERS MORGAN: Your people committed acts of utter barbarism against innocent Israelis. We saw it with our own eyes. Your people, your Hamas terrorists—just to be clear, your Hamas terrorists, your people, they deliberately posted videos of themselves committing their atrocities in real time.

GHAZI HAMAD: But, Piers, why do you describe Hamas as disorganized? Please answer me this question. Because I think what happened—

PIERS MORGAN: I’m going to tell you. If you let me answer, I’ll tell you.

GHAZI HAMAD: But just answer me. On October 7—

PIERS MORGAN: I’ll tell you why. I understand your position, and I understand that you believe you’re fighting an occupation. You believe you’re therefore freedom fighters. I understand Hamas’s position. However, I brand Hamas terrorists because the actions on October 7 were the actions of a terrorist organization that committed a series of despicable crimes against the Israeli people. Now, there is no justification.

GHAZI HAMAD: Not fair. I thought—again and again and again—we have no instruction to do that. We never planned to take a civilian—

PIERS MORGAN: So why did they do it?

GHAZI HAMAD: No, no, no. I want to tell you something. I thought this is a fact that in the beginning of this war, we pulled some international organization. We are ready to free all civilians in the beginning of the war. Israel refused that. You know? I wasn’t in this negotiation table. We proposed to release all the civilians, but Israel, they refused that. Our goal in this war, in October 7, is what’s called to lift the siege on Gaza, to take soldiers, in order to free about 6,000 Palestinians. Some of them, they spent more than 40 or 30 years in the prison under occupation and humiliation. This is our goal. And I know the history of Hamas, we never used to against anyone. So I think what we are fighting for is to free our people, to fight against occupation, to free our people, our land from the occupation. There is no evidence that Hamas is committing crimes against civilians. This is prohibited by our religion and our government.

PIERS MORGAN: In that case, why did Hamas terrorists go to a music festival full of young people and massacre hundreds of those young people? Tell me why they did that, if, as you say, there were no instructions to commit crimes?

GHAZI HAMAD: If you go back to some investigation done by Israeli institutions, and even if you go to Haaretz newspaper, you see that many people killed by the Israeli forces—many Israeli citizens killed by the Israeli forces—many of them, with Hamas fighters entered inside the green line, the Israeli tanks and helicopters and all the military weapons, they directed their fire to the Israeli citizens. They tried maybe to kill the members of Hamas, but they killed their own citizens. I think you have to be very accurate in decision if you go back to some Israeli investigation to understand Hamas was not directing its action against the civilians. Our goal is very clear. I don’t deny that there are some mistakes happened at that time, but this is not our policy. This is not our goal. This is not our thinking.

PIERS MORGAN: But, Mr. Hamad, they were not mistakes. These were young, armed terrorists who were going from home to home, massacring families in their homes, setting fire to them, butchering them with knives, gunning them down with guns. They were doing it all over that area when they attacked. They weren’t mistakes. This was a coordinated plan of a terrorist attack. You only—to deny that is to deny what we all saw with our own eyes. And the reason we saw most of it is because the Hamas terrorists posted what they were doing onto social media platforms in real time because they were so proud of what they were doing. Do you have any proof for that—do you have any proof that Hamas killed—went from home to home to kill people?

GHAZI HAMAD: Oh, yes.

PIERS MORGAN: There is enormous amounts of proof. You don’t think Hamas killed any civilians that day?

GHAZI HAMAD: No, I don’t deny that there’s some mistakes done. I don’t deny that. But as I told them, I’m so confident that we—we did October 7, as I told you, in order to lift the siege on Gaza, that we send people in order to free Gaza from the siege imposed on Gaza for more than years.

PIERS MORGAN: But it didn’t work, did it? Okay. Let me assume, all right, Mr. Hamad, let me assume that that was your plan. And just before we get into my point about that—there is a report that you yourself left Gaza before October 7 and haven’t been back. Is that true?

GHAZI HAMAD: I left Gaza before October 7, that’s right. But this—

PIERS MORGAN: And you haven’t been back?

GHAZI HAMAD: Yeah. It’s not something exceptional. I left Gaza.

PIERS MORGAN: No, but you’ve talked a lot about the heroic martyrs on October 7, but where was your heroism? Where were you standing up for your people given that you fled the country and went to Qatar rather than stay and fight, as you put it, the occupation?

GHAZI HAMAD: Give me one moment. If you go back to October 6, not October 7—if you look to the situation in Gaza Strip, ask yourself why Hamas did that. Before October 7, all Palestinians under occupation were being given all the time—this was called the “crazy gang” in Israel. They tried first to destroy the Palestinian identity, killing Palestinians, taking their lands, building more settlements, expanding settlements. They destroyed the peace process. They destroyed everything, and the world is watching.

Israel is very beautiful, and we have to protect Israel—but the Palestinian, for eighty years under—what do you expect Palestinians to do? We have two options: either we keep ourselves as slaves under the occupation and be very polite and throw flowers at the Israeli occupation, or we fight them. Either we go in the direction of peace or the direction of violence. You don’t give the Palestinian any option. They keep the Palestinians under occupation all the time doing nothing. So I think October 7 is justified because when you see that the Palestinians are killed every day and their lands are taken by these crazy gangs and everything is destroyed, and we have no homeland, no identity, no flag, no state—even they destroyed the Palestinian authority, they destroyed the peace process. But do you expect the Palestinian people to do that—to keep silence for eighty years, to do nothing, and no one helps them?

PIERS MORGAN: My response to you—listen, Mr. Hamad. I believe that Palestinians should have the exact same human rights as Israelis and anybody else. I believe in a two-state solution. I believe there should be a full Palestine, and that should be the way through this.

GHAZI HAMAD: So why should Israel exist? Why?

PIERS MORGAN: Let me make my—

GHAZI HAMAD: The same ways that you should exist, to kill people?

PIERS MORGAN: I believe Israel has a right to exist. I believe Israel and Palestine both have a right to exist as independent states. There should be a two-state solution. I’ve always believed that. However, I would ask you this more difficult question. If what happened on October 7, as you put it, was justified—which I think is a grotesque defense of a terrorist attack—but let’s assume for one moment that you think that what you did that day was essential for getting what you wanted for the people of Gaza, then it’s been a spectacular failure, hasn’t it? Because nearly 80,000 people at least, probably many more, have been slaughtered by the IDF in response. Seventy-five, 80% of Gaza has been flattened. The people that have been left, in a tiny area of Gaza, are living in the most appalling conditions, and you’ve now got Israeli ministers openly talking about an ethnic cleansing of both Gaza and the West Bank. So from a strategic point of view, whether you defend what you did on October 7 or not—and I think it’s indefensible—let me ask you the question: do you accept that your strategy that day has been a spectacular failure?

GHAZI HAMAD: Look, I know you are a professional journalist, and I think you have to look with your two eyes. I know that we paid a big price. That’s right, but it is not a deal. Since 1948, we paid more than 100 thousands of people murdered by Israelis, 100 thousands of prisoners, 100 thousands of injured people. There’s a tragedy—the Palestinian tragedy—continuing for more than eighty years.

So I think if you look to the other side, before and after October 7—now Israel is completely isolated. How did that happen? Without October 7, would the world now understand the fact and the essence of Israel—that this is a state of genocide, a state of mass killing, a state of ethnic cleansing, and a prime minister of Israel now is wanted by the ICC? Did you expect that this would happen without paying a price? Now Israel is completely isolated. All the world, they hate Israel. All the world now, they put the Palestinian cause on the table. They ask now to end the occupation.

Well, before October 7, we were always talking to the United Nations Security Council, meetings and meetings and meetings. The Arab communities were really indifferent. Nothing was done on the ground. But I think now, okay, the idea is a big price—Gaza is destroyed, our people are suffering. But on the other side, I think the strategic achievements happened in the last three years. When the world thinks that Israel is exhausted—either in Gaza, with Spain, Lebanon, Iraq—we want to continue to fight against Israel. Hamas did not change its plan.

PIERS MORGAN: Let me ask you. Let me ask you just finally—there’s this deal in place. How confident are you that this deal is actually going to happen? Is Hamas genuinely prepared to disarm? And if so, when will you start giving up your weapons?

GHAZI HAMAD: As I told you, this is an exceptional phase in the Palestinian history. Because of the forced necessity, because of the hard circumstances in Gaza, we accept this agreement. But I think that as Hamas, I can confirm that we need to change our mentality, our goal, to end the occupation, to continue to end the occupation with the Palestinian factions because this is our holy mission in order to end the occupation. Maybe with some different tactics, some different tools, some different methods this time. But I think this is not the end of the history. You know that the Palestinian history, if you read it, has passed many, many painful stages, but I think this is one of them.

It is very hard. I’m not so pleased with this agreement because I think that I’m looking for something better in order to protect our people. I don’t expect that Israel will fulfill its commitments because we tested Israel for more than eighty years. They will not accept any agreement because of the state of arrogance, state of supremacy—they want to control everything by force. But I think as a whole, Hamas will continue with the Palestinian factions, all of them, in order to fight against occupation until we reach the end of this occupation and freedom for our people.

PIERS MORGAN: And do you still believe that Israel should be annihilated?

GHAZI HAMAD: Well, to be fair, what would the existence of Israel give the world that is better? Israel is creating troubles with the Palestinians all the time, with Lebanon, with Syria, with everywhere. They urge The United States now to open war with Iran. All the time, they are creating troubles. Why should Israel exist? This is the question. Israel is a big burden on the shoulder of the world.

PIERS MORGAN: No, the question, Mr. Hamad—the question was very straightforward and very simple. Do you still believe, as you’ve said in the past, that Israel should be annihilated? Yes or no?

GHAZI HAMAD: I think the world should understand the essence of Israel, and they should understand this is a state of occupation, genocide, apartheid, a state of settlements. Every day, they are telling the international community—all the time, they’re violating the United Nations resolutions, all the time, they are violating the Security Council resolutions.

PIERS MORGAN: So is the answer yes or no then?

GHAZI HAMAD: Why do you describe—why do they now describe Hamas as a terrorist organization?

PIERS MORGAN: But I didn’t ask you for your view. I didn’t ask you to repeat your view. I simply said, Mr. Hamad, I simply said, do you still think Israel should be annihilated? Yes or no? What’s the answer?

GHAZI HAMAD: I think the world should reconsider the existence of Israel. I think the existence of Israel is very dangerous for the Middle East, for the whole world. If Israel gives some good fruits to people, tell me what Israel is doing in the Middle East. They are killing. They are—resisting all kinds of bad things that Israel is doing in the Middle East.

PIERS MORGAN: You’ve made your position clear, Mr. Hamad. You’ve made your views about Israel clear. People can make their own minds up from the way you answered my question. I appreciate you coming on Uncensored. Thank you for your time.

The Panel Reacts: Israel-Gaza Deal

Well, for reaction to that extraordinary interview and to debate it all is Joe Kent, the former director of the National Counterterrorism Center, Cenk Uygur, founder and CEO of The Young Turks, Rob O’Neill, the US Navy SEAL veteran, and Matt Tardio, retired Green Beret and host of Speak the Truth. Welcome to all of you.

PIERS MORGAN: Joe Kent, a pretty extraordinary conversation I had there with the official Hamas spokesman. This is the guy who became infamous very quickly after October 7 for saying publicly, “We want to do this again and again and again,” and calling for the annihilation of Israel. It’s very hard, having listened to his answers to my questions, to imagine that this deal that’s been put on the table has much chance of actually working. What is your view?

JOE KENT: I tend to agree with you. I don’t believe this deal will hold. I think it’s a noble aspiration for us to try and come up with some kind of a ceasefire or a peace or a disarmament plan there. But overall, I don’t understand what America’s role in this is. America has no dog in this fight. This is between Israel and Hamas. The second that we go in and we try and play referee, we are getting ourselves deeply intertwined in a problem that no one’s been able to solve. And quite frankly, it doesn’t really pertain to people in The United States of America.

Unfortunately, what we have done by funding the state of Israel is we’ve essentially put our name on everything that the Israelis have done to the Palestinians in both Gaza and the West Bank now, for decades, and that’s come back to cost us in a very, very big way in terms of blowback terrorism, in terms of the way the whole region views us. So my position as an American is that we should just stay out of this conflict completely. We shouldn’t be funding Israel anymore based on how they’ve comported themselves inside of Gaza and also how they’ve dragged us into this war with Iran.

PIERS MORGAN: Rob O’Neill, welcome back to Uncensored. What did you make of that interview with the Hamas spokesman?

ROB O’NEILL: Well, thanks for having me again, Piers. It’s frustrating. Obviously, he’s very passionate about where he is, but when he tries to make a point, he just starts talking over his own point and then reiterating the same nonsense. And when he gets asked a direct question that he’s expected to answer, he won’t answer it. He just dances around it. It doesn’t really seem like he’s very serious about it at all.

I’m someone that says if I wasn’t there in person and I only saw it on TV, I’m going to have questions. But the amount of footage, the amount of live-streaming, everything that happened on October 7, to say that there weren’t atrocities committed—I think war’s violent. I know war’s violent. War can be very scary, but the moment you start taking children as prisoners and then taking them across borders, that’s a big problem. That’s for a number of reasons, not just moral reasons.

But if you can’t tell the truth about something right in front of your face, why would we think that a ceasefire negotiation is going to take place in good faith? Whenever someone starts using so many words and talking over themselves, and when an argument starts, they don’t listen to the other side. It’s just very frustrating, especially on the first Monday of the week.

PIERS MORGAN: Cenk Uygur, welcome back to Uncensored. What did you think of it?

CENK UYGUR: I mean, I just felt after half an hour talking to that guy that I just can’t see any deal really working here because there’s so little trust on both sides. Hamas hate Israelis. The Israelis hate Hamas. You can have any kind of peace deal in principle that you want to try and conjure. But is it really going to stop these guys wanting to kill each other?

Of course, we could have a peace deal—Israel and Egypt have had a peace deal for decades. The necessity is for Israel to want a peace deal. So, look, that conversation didn’t move me at all as to why that particular peace deal isn’t going to work.

Hamas has agreed to give up its weapons—that’s the essence of the deal, which, by the way, you know I’m on the left, but if this deal held, I would give Trump a lot of credit because the Israelis claimed they wanted the hostages back, and they wanted Hamas to disarm, and Trump got both of them. Now Israel says no, we don’t want the deal, and we’re going to keep 70% of Gaza.

So, Piers, you know that I said on this show that this was never about self-defense. It was about land acquisition, and here they are sitting on 70% of Gaza. They basically forced over 2,000,000 Palestinians into 30% of Gaza, which is an open-air concentration camp. You ask them about how they took hostages—I think they shouldn’t have killed any civilians, and they shouldn’t have taken any hostages. Now Israel takes thousands upon thousands of hostages. They never charge them with any crime. They don’t even bother to pretend that they did anything wrong. Then they systematically torture and rape them. So what Israel has done is demonstrably way, way worse than Hamas.

So in terms of the hostages, in terms of the occupation, in terms of seventy times the civilians killed, we all know why we don’t have peace. There’s only one reason, and it’s Israel. Israel says no to the deal that Trump and Hamas just did. They say no to the deal that Trump did with Iran. In that memorandum of understanding, they have to leave Lebanon, and Israel says, no, we’re never going to leave Southern Lebanon. This was always about Greater Israel. And America, “you owe us, you owe us your military.” Now 18 Americans have died, and apparently they owed Israel their lives, and over 400 Americans injured, all for Israel. All the wars are for Israel.

And so, you know, you could blame Hamas, and I would agree with you on what they did on October 7 and the civilians killed. But at the end of the day, who deserves more blame—the slaves or the slaveholders? Obviously the slaveholders. Obviously Israel. So they say, well, look, maybe we might liberate you if you grovel at our feet, but then, you know, us, we never listen to any peace deal, so we probably will defy it anyway. There’s nothing that appeases the fascists in Israel. Can we please stop funding them and having our men and women killed for this terrorist state? And if you call Hamas terrorists, okay, no problem, Piers, but you have to acknowledge that Israel is a far bigger terrorist organization. They have a worse civilian kill ratio, and they’ve killed at a bare minimum seventy times the number of civilians. And you talked about that baby who was taken hostage—they incinerated 23,000 children. Why are we helping these Nazis?

PIERS MORGAN: Matt Tardio, welcome back. What is your response to Cenk?

MATT TARDIO: Listen, I’m holding in front of me the Hamas charter from 2017. Can you point to me where it states what the actual land of Palestine consists of that they say is being occupied right now? Do you know what it actually says?

CENK UYGUR: I don’t care about the Hamas charter. I care about Palestine.

MATT TARDIO: Well, you should.

CENK UYGUR: No.

MATT TARDIO: Okay. So, do you know what happened in—you think you got the chance to speak. It’s mine now. Hold on, Cenk. I asked you a specific question about Palestine.

CENK UYGUR: No, no, no, I don’t give a damn about that. Israel is terrorist. Forever.

PIERS MORGAN: Hang on, hang on. Don’t talk over each other. I’m interested in hearing it. So, Matt, read it to us.

MATT TARDIO: Yeah, so this is from paragraph two, “The Land of Palestine.” “Palestine, which extends from the River Jordan in the East to the Mediterranean in the West, and from Ras al-Naqura in the North to Umm al-Rashrash in the South, is an integral territorial unit. It is the land and the home of the Palestinian people. The expulsion and banishment of the Palestinian people from their land and the establishment of the Zionist entity therein do not annul the right of the Palestinian people to their entire land and do not entrench any rights therein for the usurping Zionist entity.”

When they talk about occupation, they are not talking about Gaza, because both Cenk—you, I, we all know that there were zero Israeli troops inside of Gaza on October 7. Further, when you gave that interview to that spokesperson, you asked him specifically whether they’re going to lay down their arms, how it’s going to go—he continued to state that they were going to resist. And what does that resisting basically consist of? Well, we can refer to paragraph 25 in their charter: “Resisting the occupation with all means and methods is a legitimate right guaranteed by divine laws and by international norms and laws. At the heart of these lie armed resistance, which is regarded as a strategic choice for protecting the principles and the rights of the Palestinian people by all means and methods.”

Cenk, “all means and methods” would include rape. It would include murder. It would include burning down villages and all of those things. And you want to sit back and paint them as not a terrorist entity, and say The United States should stay out of it. You’re a US citizen, are you not?

CENK UYGUR: Didn’t say that.

MATT TARDIO: Oh, no, wait, you’re not?

CENK UYGUR: Oh, oh, I’m sorry, Joe Kent. You had stated that—

JOE KENT: No, I am a US citizen. I didn’t say they were terrorists. I’m sorry, I was confused.

CENK UYGUR: You stupid Israeli talking points. I was confused. I’m very happy to answer that.

MATT TARDIO: This isn’t an Israeli talking point—this is a Hamas talking point. Further, you’re a US citizen—you said that we shouldn’t do anything about them. What about US citizens? Namely, let’s go with the last one that Hamas killed, Hersh Goldberg-Polin. He was taken hostage. Should The United States have sat idly by and allowed this radical terrorist organization to take US citizens and kill them? What’s your stance on that?

CENK UYGUR: Joe, you asked me a number of questions. Can I answer them?

MATT TARDIO: Absolutely, I’d love to hear your answers.

CENK UYGUR: Okay, here we go. Number one, Israel has killed 10 US citizens in the last three years. No one has been arrested. So our government is saying Israel is allowed to murder US citizens, and we won’t ask them to even arrest the people who did it. That is how little the Israelis think of US citizens. They take our money—they’ve taken over $300,000,000,000. We haven’t sent a dime to the Palestinians. All we do is fund the endless genocides and wars of Israel because they bribe 94% of our Congress. They bribe people like you and people in the media to pretend that they’re innocent.

MATT TARDIO: Bribed, Cenk?

CENK UYGUR: Now the reality—Hamas is fighting against occupation.

MATT TARDIO: Bribed?

CENK UYGUR: No, I don’t care. Maybe you grovel to Israel for free. I don’t really care why you suck up to Israel when you should be caring about America and our American boys and girls that have been dying for Israel for no damn reason. My money is being stolen by the Israelis for no reason, and you come on here—

MATT TARDIO: I just named Palestinians resist their occupation in the wrong way.

CENK UYGUR: Hey, I thought I was going to get to answer. Well, until you’re in here complaining about, oh, the Israelis—okay, so every time he talks over me. So you say, oh, the Israelis are murdering and taking hostages, and for eighty years, they’ve pulverized the Palestinians. And by the way, you mentioned “from the river to the sea.” Netanyahu has said Israel is going to take from the river to the sea. Hamas’s charter is entirely theoretical because they have no power to execute it. Israel actually is executing from the river to the sea, and they hit a genocide, and they murdered over 76,000 people to do that.

And you say, oh, what Israel does from the river to the sea—when they murder 23,000 children, no big deal. But when the Palestinians dare to fight back against their enslavement, oh, all of a sudden, oh, I can’t believe what terrorists Palestinians are. It’s the least they could do to fight back against those monsters.

MATT TARDIO: So the least that Hamas could do to fight back against the monsters was October 7—that’s your stance, to be clear?

CENK UYGUR: No, I didn’t say October 7. I said fighting back in terms of resistance against their military.

MATT TARDIO: Resistance? Now, Israel has—if I acknowledge that Hamas is terrorist, then you must acknowledge—

CENK UYGUR: No.

MATT TARDIO: Okay, you must acknowledge that Israel is the worst terrorist—

CENK UYGUR: Far worse terrorist.

MATT TARDIO: Not true.

CENK UYGUR: Okay, so it appears that you acknowledge that the Israeli government is a terrorist government.

Iran and the Region

PIERS MORGAN: Gentlemen, I want to segue to Iran before we run out of time. Joe Kent, let me bring you back in here. I spoke to Donald Trump last night for quite some time, actually. I can say one thing about Trump: he was still up at 1 a.m. in Washington in the Oval Office working, so no one can question the guy’s work ethic. But on Iran, he reiterated to me what he said publicly, which is that yesterday was going to be the day that, in his words, The United States would have unleashed the biggest bombardment against Iran that the world has seen since World War Two, and it was yanked at the last minute after direct appeals to the president by the crown prince of Saudi Arabia and other allies.

So he reiterated that to me—that’s clearly what he said publicly. What do you make of where we are here? Because we’re nearly, what, five, six months into this war that’s supposed to be over in two to three weeks. It’s clearly not gone the way that Donald Trump hoped or the way that Netanyahu and the Israelis told him it might go. We are where we are with this. The Iranians appear to have tight control of the Strait of Hormuz. The Gulf states are extremely twitchy about the Americans and Israelis bombarding Iran again in a way that triggers attacks on them—not back in America and Israel, but against Saudi Arabia, against Qatar, against The UAE, against Kuwait, against Bahrain, and so on. That is the asymmetric war the Iranians have been waging, and they’ve been waging it very successfully, it has to be said. So where do you think we are, Joe, with this war?

JOE KENT: Right now, we’re stuck, but I’m really glad that President Trump did not take the bombing action that he was talking about. Look, if there was a military solution to this problem, President Trump would have executed it a long time ago, and it would be over. But President Trump has realized there is no military solution to it, and that’s why we got into the MOU in the first place. Unfortunately, we cut that same-side deal at the same time in Lebanon, and then we were encouraging ships to go outside the MOU and use the Strait of Hormuz. We returned to hostilities, but President Trump, I think, wants some kind of a formal agreement with the Iranians. The Iranians simply aren’t going to give him that.

But we are up against the tight timeline of major economic shock coming from what’s taking place in the Strait of Hormuz, Bab-el-Mandeb with the Houthis. And, again, there’s no military solution to any of this. So President Trump has a narrow window right now where he can get our troops out before we take any more losses, before we are forced to then have to get back into a retaliation cycle that could spin out of control. He’s got a window where we can get out right now. I think he’s already realized that most of our bases in the region are nothing more than a strategic liability rather than a strategic asset, because that’s what the Gulf allies are telling us as well.

So now is the time for him to say, hey, we accomplished all our military objectives. Iran has agreed that they aren’t going to have a nuclear weapon because the Iranians agreed to that before the war, but he can just message that that was what we accomplished. He can pull our troops out of the region, and then we can quietly use the carrot of sanctions relief to get the Strait of Hormuz open back to a normal operating situation. Same thing with the Houthis. We’re going to have to restrain the Israelis to accomplish any of this because the Israelis were the ones that got President Trump into this. They’re the ones that got us on board with killing the Ayatollah, which, unfortunately and tragically, has galvanized the Iranian people against us—that’s why the diplomacy track is pretty much dead on the front. That’s why we just need to get out right now before this escalates further.

PIERS MORGAN: Rob O’Neill, that is certainly my view of this—I don’t see any way this improves the longer it goes on for Donald Trump or The United States’ interest in this. There is the ongoing clash with what the Israelis want, which is a different agenda to what the Americans want or should want. Trump has the imperative of the midterm elections coming and all the potential political fallout and so on. But from a military point of view, Rob, given what we’ve seen in the last five, six months now in this war, is there any way for things to escalate in a way that would actually be a good thing for The United States?

ROB O’NEILL: Militarily, I don’t want to see an escalation at all. And I think where they’re hitting on the ports and stuff right now, we’re good—they’re hitting some serious infrastructure right now, but you’ve got to believe there are some negotiations going on in the back end here, just like there were in Venezuela. Maduro had a reason to get out there and do a backdoor deal just because the cartels—he didn’t want to be underwater with them.

Hopefully—and I’m saying hopefully because they’re good at keeping their cards against their chest—there’s some backdoor deal here to get a new regime in that doesn’t include the Shah. And again, I’m not in on these, but what I’ve seen happen with the administration is they’re running a business that wasn’t run well, meaning this government—they have an unlimited budget, but they could just be playing politics, meaning there are a lot of elections coming up, including Israel right around the October–November time frame. I wouldn’t put it past them to be doing something for some sort of an October surprise, something like that, because of how short the attention span of the American public is, the world public.

So, I’m trying to be optimistic with it. It seems like no matter what people are yelling and screaming and fighting, no matter what we do—and it’s happened even back in 1978 with Carter and what we did with Egypt—like Cenk was referring to earlier, with people sitting here yelling at each other and bringing up points about how you did this wrong, it’s probably not going to solve much, but that’s kind of where we are. I’ll try to be optimistic with it. I mean, look back to even—on my birthday, April 10, 1998—something about the Good Friday Agreement up in Northern Ireland with England. Those are two countries that kind of wanted a truce. That only took twelve years, with people who wanted to, and they weren’t fanatic ideologues. So, hey, I’m sitting here watching, I’ll do what I can to help, and I’ll just say what I think is the truth, and I’ll leave it at that.

PIERS MORGAN: Cenk, the problem, it seems to me, is that if you take Joe’s scenario as the least-worst scenario, and I agree with it, you could have a situation where, for all the words that Donald Trump comes out with, the Iranians keep all their enriched uranium. They keep control of the Strait of Hormuz, maybe even having a new tolling system, which they didn’t have before this. The IRGC remain in control of the country. There’s been no popular uprising at all. You have the Ayatollah’s son, who is almost certainly, from all reports, more hardline and radical than his father—probably not least because his father was murdered, in his estimation, at the start of this war. So you’ve got a situation where—the victory—I think Joe’s right, you should claim the victory and get the hell out, but it would actually, in reality, be a very ignominious failure, wouldn’t it, based on what the original war aims were supposedly about?

CENK UYGUR: So in order to answer that question, let’s step back here—before the war, why did we do the war? We claimed that it was for a nuclear weapons program, which they didn’t have. Right? And we had ended their nuclear weapons program under the Obama deal to begin with. They were shipping out all their uranium. They had no chance of enrichment at that point. The Israelis demanded that we get out of that deal so they would have an excuse for this war. So what was their actual objective? We all know what their objective was: destroy the Iranian regime, neuter it completely, put in a puppet like the Shah that will serve Israel. Why? Because Israel wants to be a regional superpower. In fact, Netanyahu, after the war started, said that. He said this is going to make us stronger, Iran weaker. We’re going to get America to destroy all their ballistic missiles, their drones. We’re going to get regime change. Now, that was their true objective.

In terms of the American objectives, we have this fake objective of ending a nuclear weapons program that doesn’t exist, but great, let’s end it for the second time, the third time. And now we have a new objective, which is to open up the Strait of Hormuz, because that’s what the war created—it being blocked. But Iran has promised to do that now many, many times. Just take the freaking deal and let’s get out of there.

So you’re right, Piers, at the end of that, we’ll get what we want: no nuclear weapons program, the Strait of Hormuz reopened. Iran gets what it wants, which is to end the war and stop being bombed. The region gets stability and peace. The only people that’ll be unhappy is Israel. And why? Because Iran will have become a little bit stronger because they’ll have sanctions relief. They might get money from the Gulf, and now we all know that they can block the Strait of Hormuz whenever they want. But, hey, Israel, you gambled—you pushed us into a war, and you thought it would help you be stronger and Iran be weaker. As it turned out, Iran was made stronger by the war. So that’s a sad day for you.

Honestly, for us, it doesn’t really matter who’s slightly stronger in the Middle East. We have no business in the Middle East to begin with. And so Israel says, “How dare you—unless you’re an antisemite, you owe me hundreds of billions of dollars and every war that I want, and you owe me my territorial ambitions of Southern Lebanon, Southern Syria, Gaza, and the West Bank.” No, we don’t. The American people don’t owe Iran or Israel anything, anything at all. So let’s just get our two objectives, and for God’s sake, get out of it. And if Israel wants to cry, all they ever do is cry—”Oh, boo hoo, we didn’t get to murder enough Palestinians, we didn’t get to take enough land in the Middle East, we didn’t get to murder enough Iranians.” So what, that they’re crying? We just have to cut it out and just clearly recognize that the Israelis are the bad guys here. They’re literally the worst civilian kill ratio of any terrorist group in the world, and they keep making us spend our blood and treasure on their offensive, fascist attacks in the Middle East. Stop funding Israel. End our relationship completely. Sorry, we’re just not that into you.

The American people are very clear, and a percentage that is rising, saying end our relationship with Israel. The only question is, are any of our government officials going to work for America, or are they going to continue to work for Israel? And, by the way, on Tuesday, we might find out, because if Abdul El-Sayed wins in Michigan, we’re going to liberate the Democratic Party from Israel, and we’ll at least have one party back representing America.

PIERS MORGAN: Okay, Matt Tardio, your response to that, and your wider view of where we are with the war in Iran and what Donald Trump should do.

MATT TARDIO: Yeah, you know, Piers, I’ve stated this before on your show, where I don’t believe that it’s about the nuclear weapons program. I think that’s the legal excuse for The United States to go in there, because in June, he said that we had completely and totally obliterated their nuclear weapons program after Operation Midnight Hammer, set them back decades. Then in February, we heard that they were weeks away. Then this June, he had stated that only two countries in the world might be able to get it out, which is going to be either the USA or China, in reference to their highly enriched uranium that was buried.

So I do think this is about putting pressure on Russia and China and bringing Russia to the negotiation table over Ukraine. With that set aside, towards the Strait of Hormuz, and to Joe’s point where he said that we went against the MOU—that’s not true. In the MOU, it specifically says in the paragraph discussing the Strait of Hormuz, between Oman and Iran, that they must do so in accordance with international law. International law clearly lays the Strait of Hormuz out as international waters. There is no ifs, ands, or buts about it. Ships are allowed to pass through that water in accordance with international law without Iran’s say-so. So agreeing to give them control over it—quite frankly, The United States doesn’t have the authority or ability to do so.

When it goes down to Cenk’s points about the Greater Israel project and all of this other stuff, it’s absolute nonsense. Even Israel agreed to withdraw troops in a phased withdrawal. They’re going to retrograde and be replaced by the Lebanese Armed Forces, which are only about 80,000 strong—The United States is going to help build and prop them up in order to start replacing Israeli troops that they could end up pulling out. The entire thing is a facade. I don’t know how many times you can hear the same talking points out of these guys without any actual intellectual facts that back them up.

CENK UYGUR: Okay, they control Southern Lebanon and 70% of Gaza now. How is that for a fact? What does that say?

MATT TARDIO: The facts are on the ground.

CENK UYGUR: The facts are on the ground—they control Southern Lebanon, Southern Syria, Gaza, and the West Bank as we speak. They have 70% of Gaza. You keep telling us they’re going to withdraw, and they never, ever withdraw. And in fact, they say they’re never going to withdraw.

MATT TARDIO: And in fact, they literally just—they literally are agreeing to it.

CENK UYGUR: Never free the Palestinians. They are literally agreeing—it’s going to be good guys one day, but they’re never the good guys, they’re always the bad guys.

MATT TARDIO: So what is the International Security Force there for? Is it so the Israelis can stay there?

CENK UYGUR: No.

MATT TARDIO: The International Security Force just made a deal. Trump just made a deal with Hamas—they’re going to disarm, and Israel’s supposed to withdraw.

CENK UYGUR: And then Israel said no, we don’t honor the deal.

MATT TARDIO: Well, they’re going to put down their weapons—withdraw, that’s the fact.

CENK UYGUR: Somehow.

MATT TARDIO: Yeah, so here’s why. Because point 20 of the plan, the original one—the twenty-point plan—said that they should not have their weapons, that they’re supposed to be disarmed. And point eight of the new deal says that they will store their weapons.

CENK UYGUR: Agreed to it.

MATT TARDIO: And we just—hold on.

CENK UYGUR: And we just—no.

MATT TARDIO: No, they agreed to store their weapons. And a Hamas spokesperson just said that they’re going to continue to resist the occupation. You just heard it yourself—what does “resist” mean?

CENK UYGUR: No, he just—

MATT TARDIO: No, but, brother, this—

CENK UYGUR: Yes, he did.

MATT TARDIO: He says they will continue to—dramatically, you could say, resist.

CENK UYGUR: That’s not what Hamas means.

MATT TARDIO: You could resist—

CENK UYGUR: Yeah, sure, we can do that.

MATT TARDIO: And he just said they’re going to try to—that is never good enough for Israel. That’s not according to—

CENK UYGUR: That’s not according to China—

MATT TARDIO: So what else do you want? What else do you want?

CENK UYGUR: You can use the dictionary definition. Trump believes that.

MATT TARDIO: You can use that dictionary definition, or you can use Hamas’s definition. What do you want?

CENK UYGUR: This is Hamas’s definition.

MATT TARDIO: Do you want them to get on their knees?

CENK UYGUR: Okay.

MATT TARDIO: Do you want them to—get down and—

CENK UYGUR: And the truth is—

MATT TARDIO: What other humiliation do you want?

CENK UYGUR: You don’t—you know, the reality is that you want Israel to own the Palestinian land—

MATT TARDIO: Okay.

CENK UYGUR: —and you’re just a propaganda mouthpiece for them.

MATT TARDIO: No, I want them to—okay, you’re American?

CENK UYGUR: Hang on, I want to bring in—

MATT TARDIO: Why do you want to bring in Joe?

PIERS MORGAN: Country. I want to bring in Joe, gentlemen. It seems to be the Kofi Annan figure here that I can bring in when things get too outrageous. Joe, I want to end just with you because of this extraordinary photograph that emerged over the weekend, and you were in this picture. It was at Tucker Carlson’s home. You’re in there with Marjorie Taylor Greene, Thomas Massie, Tucker. What was this? There is word that you’re all planning, as Marjorie Taylor Greene put it, a new political movement. What is the movement? Could it be an actual party? What was going on?

JOE KENT: You know, things are in the initial phases right now, but there is a growing consensus on, I think, both the right and the left, of people who are sick and tired of the Republican Party. They’re sick and tired of the Democrat Party. They want us out of these foolish wars that we’re just sitting here talking about right now. Most Americans have no idea what we’re talking about—they don’t know about Gaza, they don’t know about the Strait of Hormuz. They just know that billions of their taxpayer dollars, their blood, their treasure, their sons, and their daughters continue to get sent overseas. Our best and brightest get killed. Our taxpayer dollars get spent over there while things continue to decay here in America.

And so what we’re trying to do is just build a coalition of people who say we’re finally going to put America first. We’re not going to focus on the next foreign war. We’re not going to listen to foreign lobbies—it’s going to make the Israelis—we’re going to focus on the issues that matter here to the American people. And those of us that were at that table—myself, Tucker, Thomas Massie, Marjorie Taylor Greene, and there are others as well—we are, I think, people who were initially part of the MAGA movement, the Trump Republican Party. But we feel that—

PIERS MORGAN: You were frozen in mid—sorry, we were—you were frozen right at the end there. Just to be clear, though, before we close things—could this involve establishing a new party?

JOE KENT: Look, it certainly could. If you talk to most Americans out there, they’re sick of the Republican Party, they’re sick of the Democrat Party. They do want something that actually represents their interest. And we don’t want any more foreign wars. We don’t want any foreign lobbying in our government, and we want leadership in America that’s going to put the needs—

PIERS MORGAN: Having a few little tech issues with you, Joe, at the end there, but we got the message loud and clear. I want to thank you—oh, you’re back. Joe, just—you were freezing a little bit at the end, but we got the message, we got the answer. Thank you all, gentlemen, for an extremely interesting debate. I really appreciate it.

JOE KENT: Thanks, guys, thank you, Piers, the rebellion grows.

PIERS MORGAN: Thank you.

The Ceuta Migrant Crisis

The images of 60,000 male migrants rushing into Ceuta are shocking and terrifying no matter what your political views may be, but it’s impossible to separate politics from the fallout which has followed. Spain says that almost all of the men have now been sent back across the small border its exclave shares with Morocco. The Trump administration, however, is determined to make an example of a left-wing Spanish government that it does not support.

Vice President JD Vance said, “The images out of Spain are an unfortunate reminder of radical left-wing globalist policies.” Well, the president himself called it an invasion and vowed to make Ceuta a talking point in the midterm elections.

“If we’re not in office, our country will be invaded at levels that made Spain look small-time. And when I watched it, I said, boy, I said, I’m going to say it because I knew you’re going to be at Camp David, and I say that’s going to be a talking point for the midterms, because when you look at what happened to Spain, they don’t know what to do, and it’s happening again today. They’re coming in by the tens of thousands. They’re just invading the country.”

Now, to be clear, Ceuta is on the North African coast. It’s a Spanish territory, has been for almost five hundred years, but migrants have to claim asylum or they’re sent back. Very few make it onto the mainland, but it doesn’t stop them trying. Similar, smaller crushes happen every couple of years, and critics of Spain’s liberal government say a recent amnesty for illegal immigrants drove this extraordinary crush. For his part, Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez has condemned “fake news, prejudice, and ignorance,” while his officials say an influx of this scale required organization.

And that’s where The US and Israel have been drawn into this. The gleeful commentary from some Israeli and US officials, coupled with the complex relationship between their countries and the Moroccan king, have led many to accuse them of a plot. And it’s not just conspiracy theorists—the Moroccan king has just named a major road after Trump. The Donald J. Trump Highway stretches into Western Sahara, a massive disputed territory which The US says belongs to Morocco. Responding to comments by Israel’s UN ambassador, Danny Danon, the Spanish transport minister said, “Well, it all seems to be becoming quite clear.”

Piers Morgan Interviews Mike Huckabee

Mike Huckabee is The US ambassador to Israel, and he rejoins me now on Uncensored.

PIERS MORGAN: Mike Huckabee, welcome back to Uncensored.

MIKE HUCKABEE: Well, thank you, Piers. It’s a pleasure to be on, and thanks for having me back.

PIERS MORGAN: So I want to start with a quote from the Spanish actor Javier Bardem, a big Hollywood star. He reshared social media posts blaming Israel for what happened in Ceuta, saying, “We don’t know who engineered this crisis, but we know who benefits from a weakened, destabilized Spain: Israel, and the Western far right eager to turn migration into a weapon against Muslims.” What is your response to that? Because he reflects a lot of the theories being put out that somehow the Israelis are behind all this—that it suits them and the Americans to stir things up with the migrants so that it puts pressure on the Spanish prime minister, and it exposes the European migrant problem for what it is.

MIKE HUCKABEE: It sounds like Javier needs to stick to reading a script that someone else wrote. He’s not very good at coming up with his own ideas. That’s ridiculous—to say that somehow this is a US-Israel conspiracy, and that’s why all those young men flooded to the coast, it’s nonsense. I mean, I don’t know what’s next—Israel and The US are going to be accused of the joint kidnapping of the Lindbergh baby back in the twenties, maybe the downing of the Hindenburg. Where does this stop? Everything that seems to happen on earth, somebody has this nutty idea that it must be Israel and/or The United States who would be behind it.

Why don’t you just accept the fact that there were these people who wanted to get to that part of Spain? They were deported. But I guess I would wonder, since the Spanish had been so very critical of the policies, let’s say, of Israel, of not creating a second state for Palestinians, why didn’t they create a state for those people that wanted to immigrate to their country?

PIERS MORGAN: Who do you think was behind it? It certainly seemed to have been very well orchestrated and planned. What would your best theory be as to who and why?

MIKE HUCKABEE: Honestly, Piers, I wouldn’t have a theory, because I think it’s really ridiculous for me or, frankly, anyone else who doesn’t have any facts about why they came, to just suddenly invent something. I think that’s what’s wrong in the world today—we have so many people coming up with these wild theories, and most of them don’t hold enough water to put in a thimble.

And this is a great example where people don’t recognize The US and Israel both have plenty on their plates right now. Neither country needs to be inventing some ridiculous conspiracy theory, or, more importantly, actually orchestrating the moving of almost 50,000 people from one place to the other—that’s a pretty big logistical challenge. And for somebody to just come up out of the clear blue sky and say, yep, that looks like what Israel and The US are doing—really, they need to get a better kind of argument, because that one simply falls apart.

Danny Danon says, “Spain, which never misses an opportunity to lecture Israel, has declared a state of emergency in Ceuta following the crisis over its immigration policy. Maybe before it continues lecturing us, it’s time to explain to the world why it still maintains colonial enclaves in Africa.”

PIERS MORGAN: Would you agree with that sentiment?

MIKE HUCKABEE: I actually would. I know Ambassador Danon—I’ve known him for over twenty years. I thought it was a pretty good observation. All of this talk about “the Israelis are creating a colonized area”—what is Spain doing? How come there is this particular piece of property? I think those are valid questions. I’m glad the ambassador raised them.

PIERS MORGAN: Let’s just turn, if I may, to several other issues which are probably more in your wheelhouse. One is the deal that’s been announced with Hamas. I interviewed earlier the official spokesman for Hamas, who seemed to be going along with the idea this was a deal that could potentially work, whilst at the same time persisting in saying, for example, that on October 7, nobody from Hamas committed any crime or deliberately targeted any civilians, and if anyone did, it was a mistake, not a plan—which were obviously abhorrent blood libels that he was spewing. And it made me think of that. I listened to this guy—he was the one who, after October 7, went on camera and said, “We’re going to do this again and again and again,” and so they were wedded to the annihilation and destruction of Israel. Can Israel do any deal with Hamas? Is there any point that you could actually trust Hamas, which many view to be a terrorist organization, to be any kind of body that you could do a deal with?

MIKE HUCKABEE: Well, first of all, they are a terrorist organization. They’ve been designated that way—The United States certainly has designated them that, so has Israel, and I think most civilized countries in the world would. The reason we know that Hamas did what they did on October 7 is because they were proud of it. They were so proud, in fact, that they strapped GoPro cameras to their heads and they videotaped themselves raping, slaughtering, beheading, butchering, massacring women, children, and elderly people. That’s how we know they did it. And they boasted about it. They boasted about it online. They boasted about it in phone calls. They boasted about it on the videotape that they shot. They boasted about it as they took the naked bodies of young women who had been kidnapped from the Nova Music Festival and paraded them down the streets of Gaza, beating their dead bodies.

So, you know, this guy has zero credibility. And I think that it’s very important to understand that if there’s any way in which Hamas wants to make a deal, the first thing they have to do is what they said they were going to do last October, and that’s they’re going to disarm and demilitarize. They haven’t done it yet. So when they do, then we can take them a little more seriously. I hope they do. It would be a wonderful gift to the world if Hamas did not have weapons, because if they have them, they’re just nutty enough to want to use them to slaughter people, particularly civilians and innocent people. They don’t need weapons. They need to disappear and go away.

PIERS MORGAN: If Hamas do keep their word, which I think is highly unlikely, but let’s assume for a moment they do and they do demilitarize, is there a scenario where The United States and Israel would accept Hamas continuing to be a governing body in Gaza, for example?

MIKE HUCKABEE: I don’t think so. The president has made it very clear, regardless of what Israel would say—President Trump said repeatedly that Hamas has no future in Gaza. I think they forfeited the future. It would be like asking, would it be okay if the Nazis continued to run Germany after World War Two? I can’t imagine anyone, I don’t care who they are, who would believe that that had any credibility whatsoever. So Hamas has forfeited any hope that they’re going to have a role in governing Gaza. What they should hope for is that they would be given some level of asylum that they could get out of Gaza, disappear, find some place to live anonymously in asylum. But the idea that they’re going to govern Gaza—I don’t think the people in Gaza would tolerate it, much less The United States or Israel, or hopefully any other civilized country in the world.

PIERS MORGAN: Let’s just pivot quickly to Iran. I spoke to President Trump on Sunday night about this, and he reiterated to me what he was saying publicly—that he was ready, locked and loaded, to launch the biggest bombardment of Iran that the world had seen since World War Two. Would that have been a smart move if the president had gone ahead with that kind of strike?

MIKE HUCKABEE: You know, the only person who can make that decision is the president. All of us who work for him trust his instincts—if he says it’s time to go, we’re going to be behind it. If, for whatever reason, having talked to many people in the Gulf countries, and they urged him to, as John Lennon would so brilliantly say, “give peace a chance,” to give one more round of negotiations an opportunity—and he made that decision. So let’s see if it works. Let’s hope it does. But if it doesn’t, I think the president has also made it very clear that there is the military option. It’s on the table. And if he takes it, it’s not going to be a mild tap. It is going to be overwhelming.

PIERS MORGAN: This war has not been going the way Donald Trump thought or the way he was told it would go by the Israelis when they met with him in the White House Situation Room before it began. Would it not be better politically, economically, putting aside anything else, for The United States to extricate itself from this war, claim a victory—do what Trump does very well, just paper over the cracks and just say, look, we’ve achieved these aims, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, and just get out of this?

MIKE HUCKABEE: Well, first of all, I was in the Situation Room when that discussion was held, and I do disagree with any narrative that says that the Israelis talked Donald Trump into it. That simply did not happen. Nobody talked him into anything. Piers, you know President Trump really well—you’ve known him a long time, you know him better than most people who do interviews on TV, and I think it’s pretty fair to say that he is not a man that is easily led around by the nose. The idea that the Israelis came in and sold him something is probably just one of the more preposterous things.

It was based on the fact that for over forty-seven years, Iran has been saying “death to America.” They’ve begged, pleaded, worked, strived to build a nuclear weapon, and for what purpose? To first destroy Israel—that’s always been their goal, that’s the appetizer. But ultimately, they’ve said this for forty-seven years: their goal is to annihilate America. America is the entrée. And a lot of Americans may not have even been around in 1979 when the Ayatollahs took power and they frog-marched blindfolded embassy employees across the embassy grounds, held them hostage—51 of them—for four hundred and forty-four days. I remember it quite well. And I remember the humiliation that we felt in America. I remember the chanting of “death to America,” the burning of our flags, and the threats that have never ceased nor have they ever moderated.

I think the president was looking after how can I best protect the American public. The proxies of Iran are already in the Western Hemisphere—Hezbollah alone is in twelve Western Hemisphere countries. The idea that this is some unique Middle East issue, or it’s only an Iranian-Israeli issue, is utter nonsense. These people have ambitions, not necessarily to rule the world, but to destroy every part of it that does not agree with their radical Shia philosophy.

PIERS MORGAN: The problem, it seems to me, with this war is that the Iranians have worked out that if you control the Strait of Hormuz and you terrorize your Gulf State neighbors by firing off rockets and missiles at them, thereby destabilizing their business models based around, “come here, it’s sunny, it’s safe, it’s exciting,” and so on—by working that out in this kind of asymmetric war they’ve been waging, that has, in many people’s eyes, emboldened the Iranian regime rather than dismantled them.

MIKE HUCKABEE: I think one of the problems, Piers, is that the Iranians don’t think rationally. They don’t think in a way that Westerners think. Any attempt to Americanize their worldview or the way that they will approach an issue is fatal on its face. They don’t look at life like we look at life, like most Western countries look at life. They look at it completely differently. So for them, whether this takes ten years or a thousand years, their goals don’t change. Their methods might get more sophisticated. But I think the president’s doing something that is the right way to look at it. First of all, he’s prepared to bomb them, but he’s also focused on bankrupting them, because he knows that if they don’t have money, if their economy collapses, if the people get fed up with watching this government, this Iranian regime, brutalize its own people, murdering tens of thousands of them for simply protesting, and then making life miserable for the rest of them, there may come the moment at which the people of Iran say that’s enough. And they’re the ones who, if anyone, will take down the regime and give the Persian empire, the Persian culture, the Persian people, an opportunity to once again live free and thrive as they once did quite nobly.

PIERS MORGAN: Final question for you, Ambassador Huckabee—I really appreciate you coming on the program again. Israel’s global popularity has been plummeting in the last two years in particular, and notably in The United States, where now nearly two-thirds of Americans have a negative view of Israel, where half the country thinks Netanyahu should be arrested when he comes to The United States. As somebody who is based in Israel, who knows the Israeli people very well, this is going to be a concern, hasn’t it? You know, again, in my interview with the Hamas spokesman, one of the things he said is that, however you want to categorize what they did on October 7, I view it as a despicable terror attack—he obviously views it as something else. But however you view it, I questioned whether the strategy had obviously failed, and he countered by saying, “But look how unpopular Israel now is,” suggesting that they had in some way provoked an overreaction from Israel, as many people see it, which has made Israel increasingly a global pariah. Does that concern you?

MIKE HUCKABEE: Of course it does, because it’s unfair, it’s unfounded. It concerns me a great deal because, obviously, there’s an enormous propaganda campaign that is aimed against Israel and against the Jewish people. And I think that’s really disturbing to me, because the entirety of the number of Jews on the entire face of the earth is 16,000,000, half of whom live in Israel. The other half mostly live in The US, mostly in New York, maybe Miami. But the idea that a people, a very small minority of 0.05% of the population of the world, is somehow the biggest threat to the world—on its face, Piers, that’s crazy. I mean, that is the kind of thing that you just scratch your head and say, really?

But they are up against a multibillion-dollar propaganda campaign, and a lot of money being spent in The United States on university campuses, on social media—the bots are everywhere—painting a picture of the Jewish people as a whole and the Israelis specifically that is simply absolutely unfounded. And I say that as somebody who’s been coming to this country for fifty-three years, since 1973, who lives here now as The US ambassador, and who interacts with the Israelis every single day of my life. And it is appalling to me, the reputation that has been thrust upon them, and it is ridiculously and horribly unfounded. I just want the truth to be told. Israelis aren’t perfect. Jewish people aren’t perfect. None of us are. But the blood libels that are thrown upon them should be really something that every civilized, every thoughtful, every intellectually capable person, every knowledgeable person would say—say what you want about the Israelis, about the Jewish people, but these things that are being said, they’re just not true. And they’re demonstrably untrue.

PIERS MORGAN: Ambassador Huckabee, I really appreciate you coming back on Uncensored. Thank you very much.

MIKE HUCKABEE: Thank you, Piers. Always a pleasure. Hope to see you again soon.

Piers Morgan Interviews Alvise Pérez and Miguel Mora

Well, joining me now to discuss the Ceuta crisis and who is behind it is Alvise Pérez, an EU lawmaker and leader of The Party Is Over, and Miguel Mora, the journalist and director of Revista Contexto. Welcome to both of you.

PIERS MORGAN: Alvise Pérez, it’s a weird story, this, to watch from where I am currently in Los Angeles, because one moment, you had 60,000 people pouring over a border in an apparent invasion, inarguably, and the next minute, most of them—fifty-eight, fifty-nine thousand—had been sent right back where they came from. So it all seemed to be over very quickly. What is your overview of what’s actually happened here?

ALVISE PÉREZ: Well, thank you for inviting me, Piers. Well, as you said, they said everybody went back, but their own police stopped the counting of entries, so they don’t know—nobody knows. Actually, there are still thousands of people in the city, and Italy still has controls on Spaniards, so it’s not over, I think, it’s just paused.

And about who’s behind all this—well, I was there on Friday, Piers, so I’m not speaking from a newsroom. And I actually think Morocco sold itself to Washington and to our friends of Israel as their ally in North Africa against Iran, against Algeria, against Russia. That’s the deal. And because of that deal, Rabat gets everything—as you know, the Sahara, weapons, money—and pays for nothing. And then Sánchez goes to Algiers—who’s the other side. And only nine days later, as you said, 60,000 people are in the water. I’m not saying, of course, that America or Israel ordered this, God save me. Rabat did it, but Rabat does it because it knows nobody will punish them. So Spain is not playing this game—Spain is just at the table when they play it.

PIERS MORGAN: Okay. Miguel Mora, welcome to Uncensored. What’s your response to that?

MIGUEL MORA: Thank you, Piers, for the invitation. And, well, I surprisingly agree with his comments in his argument. We are on the opposite political sides, but it’s true that I think Rabat has done it, has tolerated it, because they knew that Israel and The United States would be fine with that. I think nobody can mobilize 50,000, 60,000 people without the provision of the king of Morocco—that’s unbelievable. So it’s also difficult that Israel or America could have organized it, but everybody tolerates it. I’m sure the Mossad knew what was going to happen. I’m sure the CIA knew what was going to happen. So nobody told anyone anything, and nobody knows anything—that’s the idea. I mean, everybody knew, nobody told it.

PIERS MORGAN: But what would be the point of doing it if so quickly the vast majority were sent straight back where they came from? What is the purpose of this?

MIGUEL MORA: I think it is a message that Morocco sends to Spain. They have done it before—it’s not the first time they do it. Whenever there’s something they don’t like in the Spanish position, they tend to use it to pressure or to blackmail Spain. That is a tradition already. And there is also an element of hybrid warfare in the episode, because, I mean, Israel and America have been very clear in the last months about Spanish disloyalty with Israel, because we have to remember the Spanish government has been quite the only one in Europe that has denounced the genocide in Palestine, in Gaza, and who was one of the first that recognized the Palestinian state.

And it’s the same thing with Trump—Trump is very upset with Sánchez, we know that, and he has been threatening Spain with cutting all trade agreements, with cutting the tourist visits to the country. I mean, Israel and America have been threatening Spain for a long time now, and Morocco is now a new ally for Israel and America. They have supported the Sahara plan for the—the kickoff—of Morocco, and Spain had to do that as well. But we have to remember that Sánchez went to Algiers, like, two weeks ago, and he signed a new increase on the exports of gas in the imports. So that’s another fact that would have triggered the episode we live in.

PIERS MORGAN: Alvise Pérez, The United States have responded via Donald Trump and JD Vance. Trump called it a catastrophe—so it looks like an invasion of a country by hundreds of thousands of people, we know now it was about 60,000. JD Vance, the vice president, wrote on X, “These images out of Spain are an unfortunate reminder of the consequences of mass migration and the radical left-wing globalist policies that have enabled the invasion of the West.” You know, again, there are many people—conspiracy theorists, or maybe actual theories, we don’t know yet—but there are many people who think this was deliberately orchestrated, not just for some of the reasons Miguel put forward, but also because it is a very helpful tool for those on the political right in Europe to say, “Well, there you go, this is the problem.” Right—mass migration is becoming the big issue in Europe, it’s completely uncontrolled, and until people get a grip on this, then we’re going to have this kind of chaos. What do you say to that?

ALVISE PÉREZ: Well, thank you for the question. You know, I’m a politician, a new one, but I still suffer a lot when death arrives to politics. You know, can I say something about the death? We talk about numbers all night, and more than 70 people, some were kids—I saw the picture of their body. They drowned at night because somebody told them the door’s open, go, swim. And who did that? Well, I will say the name, because nobody in Europe says it: Mohammed VI. His government, his police looked away, his influencers made the videos. Those deaths are his, and they’re also Madrid’s and Brussels’s, because they know who this man is, and they keep sending money and kissing his hand. So I’m very, very angry with this.

And about who—you know, and they call us conspiracy theorists—no, it’s not a conspiracy, it’s not a theory, it’s a pattern. Morocco has, maybe you know this, a national holiday celebrating the Green March, the day they pushed 350,000 civilians over a border and took the Sahara. They brought up this method in 2021—they did it in Ceuta, and the European Parliament condemned them for using migrants, even children, as pressure. And then what happened? And what did the USA say? Nothing, zero. And they did it again, five times bigger. And this week, the FBI detected Moroccan intelligence agents inside the crossing, moving people in trucks—60,000 people in today’s Piers. That’s not water, and the tap is in the royal palace of Morocco.

PIERS MORGAN: Miguel, Alvise went down to the area. Many people think that he was whipping up a sort of inflammatory reaction, making things worse, not better. What do you feel—would you criticize him for doing that?

ALVISE PÉREZ: Well, I went to do a legal rally, I’ll thrive—I’m an MEP, as you know. I finished with a police escort and bullets flying over my head, and the mob was shooting, literally. “Ceuta is Muslim”—and that’s not true, that’s not religion, by the way, that’s Rabat’s slogan for our territory, to put, you know, religion in the discussion. The police have identified the leaders of that mob, and they are radicalized people of Moroccan origin—individuals with names. I’m not talking about the community, I’m not that populist, I’m talking about the specific men the police identified. And you know what happened after? A minister of my government says that I was the one spreading hate. Me. 60,000 people cross this border, they threw bottles at a member of the European Parliament—me—and his problem is my megaphone. I think the arsonist finishes feigning the smoke detector, as you’d say in England.

PIERS MORGAN: Miguel, what did you think of what Alvise did?

MIGUEL MORA: I think the community took him back to the peninsula. And the people didn’t want him there because they had enough with what they had in those days, and it hasn’t been only Alvise—some other commentators and agitators from the far right have gone to say these—things these days, and they have also been sent back. So we probably have to think about one of the European cities where the life between Muslims, Christians, Jews, and all kinds of religions is better in these days—I mean, we have to see it like that, like an example of good coexistence between religions. So trying to be Islamophobic or to find here the element of religion is always very dangerous, and it leads to things like we’re seeing—if we are going to make a supremacist speech, things will end like they are in Gaza now, or in Lebanon, and I think that’s the wrong way.

And about your previous question, Piers, about Europe, I think it’s very relevant how Meloni, the prime minister of Italy, rushed to condemn the invasion and to condemn Pedro Sánchez for not avoiding it. We have to say that the data are just the opposite—Spain is receiving fewer people from their borders than Italy, like half of it, and the deportations are bigger in Spain than in Italy. And another thing that nobody is saying, which is true, is that Italy is regularly regularizing migrants under the table, and as many migrants as Spain has, they are regularizing now. So both countries are doing the same thing. The only problem is Meloni has a new far-right party close even up in Italy, and she’s very bad in the polls, so she has to do that speech.

And, by the way, the only victim, apart from the seventy people who have been dead at the border in Ceuta in this episode, I think, is the European Union. And I think this is very sad, how the European Union has divided when it was clear that solidarity was the only way to resolve this battle.

PIERS MORGAN: Okay, I’ll give you a very quick chance to respond—we’re almost out of time, but very quickly, what’s your response?

ALVISE PÉREZ: Yeah. Not only did I hear Miguel directly call me and say that Islamophobia is far right, you know, he directs a magazine called Contexto. Look, here is the context, Miguel: 2021, European Parliament, 397 votes, Morocco condemned for using migrants, including children, as political pressure. The socialists voted for it too—were they all far right? At some point, “far right” just means the people who notice. So you can publish that, Miguel, for free.

PIERS MORGAN: Okay, gentlemen, I’m going to leave it there. I appreciate you both joining me. Thank you very much indeed.

Closing

Piers Morgan has said that he’s proudly independent: “The only boss around here is me.” If you enjoy our show, we ask for only one simple thing: hit subscribe on YouTube and follow Piers Morgan Uncensored on Spotify and Apple Podcasts. And in return, we will continue our mission to inform, irritate, and entertain. And we’ll do it all for free. Independent, uncensored media has never been more critical, and we couldn’t do it without you.

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