Josh Hammer is senior editor at Newsweek and host of two podcasts, The Josh Hammer Show at Newsweek and America on trial at the first. His columns and commentaries have appeared

in the LA Times, New York Post, National Review, and many other prominent outlets. His new book is

Israel and Civilization, the fate of the Jewish Nation and the destiny of the West. That's our topic

today. Welcome, Mr. Hammer.

Mark, you're a gentleman and a scholar.

I appreciate you have me on.

Thank you, sir.

Okay.

Well, we, you know, we jump right in.

You open with a visit to the camp at Treblinka in Poland, then shift to a cabutes in Israel that was a target of the attacks, the Hamas attacks in October 7th, adding that the attacks that day were the deadliest

for Jews anywhere since the Holocaust.

Are there many people who don't really know how bloody October 7th really was?

Well, Mark, I suppose that there are probably some people out there who don't adequately grasp just the scale of the massacre, of the pogrom. I mean, that's really what it was.

It was a pogrom, essentially, that unfolded across numerous towns there.

And if Hamas had their druthers, it would have gotten deep into the heart of the country,

further up north into Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, you name it there.

But that is how I opened the book, because I wanted to open by just saying the table for where we are and really why I wrote this book in the first place.

If October 7th had not happened, Mark, I'm not sure that I would have been motivated to write this exact book at this time.

But one of the things that just completely shocked me, I mean, holding aside just the, that's a level of just outright ignorance

when it comes to what happened on October 7th. You know, if only we should be so lucky that

our number one problem was ignorance, but that actually is not our number one problem, I think. Our

number, our number one problem that's really exploded when it come to this issue and so many

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