Sometimes you learn more about a man from what he doesn’t know than from what he does.
Theo Von appeared on Joe Rogan’s podcast this week, the most listened-to show on earth. The conversation turned to Israel. The only democracy in the Middle East. The country that has absorbed more than 10,000 rockets since October 2023. The country that gave the world the PillCam, Waze, and the emergency bandage the U.S. Army calls its own. That Israel. “That’s crazy though if you’re the f—ing terrorists,” Von said. “If you wanna stop them, stand in front of the f—ing mirror and start there.”
Nineteen million people heard that.
Fine. Let’s stand in front of it.
Choose Life or Choose Death. There Is No Third Option.
There’s a passage from Deuteronomy that has always struck me as one of the most radical things ever written. “I have set before you life and death, blessing and curse. Choose life.” Not a law. Not a command in the traditional sense. A choice. The text assumes the other option is genuinely available. This conflict is, at its most fundamental level, a conflict about exactly this choice. One side builds bomb shelters beneath its kindergartens. The other builds command centers beneath its hospitals. One side has spent 75 years trying to build a functional democracy in one of the most hostile neighborhoods on earth, attacked in every decade of its existence, from the day of its founding in 1948 to this morning. The other has spent those same 75 years building tunnels, amassing rockets, launching wars, and writing founding charters that call for the murder of every Jew on the planet. This isn’t a land dispute. It’s a war between people who choose life and people who choose death. Theo Von, with the confidence available only to those who have never thought very hard about something, picked the wrong side of that mirror.
Theo Wants Receipts. Hezbollah Has a Record.
The Soviet Jewish writer Vasily Grossman was the first journalist to walk into the Nazi death camp at Treblinka. He wrote something after what he saw there that I have never been able to shake. “Tell me what you accuse the Jews of,” he wrote, “and I’ll tell you what you’re guilty of.” It’s perhaps the most useful single sentence for understanding this conflict. Theo Von says Israel are the terrorists. Apply the test. Ask what Hezbollah has actually done, not to Israel, but to America.