00:00It's the third anniversary of the October 7th terror attack by Palestinian extremists in Hamas
00:05and other groups against Israel, mostly Israeli civilians. The event has had a lingering effect
00:11on American foreign policy and also on life in California. Start with university campuses where
00:17there are going to be protests to mark the third anniversary at UCLA and other California campuses
00:21not in solidarity with the victims of terror, but rather in solidarity with the Palestinian cause,
00:27which does include some support for that terrorism as a kind of act of resistance.
00:33What these movements claim is that there's a right to resist in international law, that people who are
00:38under occupation can use any means at their disposal to attack their oppressors, but that does not
00:45actually exist in international law. There is never a justification in international law for
00:50murdering civilians intentionally. Civilians do die in conflicts, but as long as they are not the
00:57target, and as long as any attack against a military target isn't disproportional in its risk to
01:03civilian life, it's legal. What's illegal is trying to murder as many civilians from the other side as
01:08you can in order to make a political point, which is what Hamas was doing on October 7th, and that
01:13is
01:13a crucial legal and moral distinction that our university leaders, for whatever reason, failed to
01:18make. Beyond campus, the October 7th attack has had an effect on California politics and American
01:24politics in the sense that it's radicalized, especially the left and the Democratic Party.
01:30Anti-Semitism has emerged on both left and right, but Republicans have tended to vote out. Anti-Semites,
01:34Democrats have tended to vote them into office, and you see it in California in the leftward shift of many
01:40politicians as they have moved into the slipstream of the Palestinian movement. The clearest example is
01:46Scott Weiner, who is a progressive gay state legislator now running to fill Nancy Pelosi's old
01:52congressional seat in San Francisco. He used to defend Israel's right to protect itself, but under
01:57pressure from a left-wing opponent in the primary and under pressure from frank anti-Semitism in the
02:03streets of San Francisco, he flipped and he now says that Israel is guilty of genocide, which is an absurd
02:09accusation. He did it only because that's the way the political winds are blowing. The result is that
02:16California politics are moving in a more radical direction and in that way, October 7th is something
02:21that's going to have a lingering effect on the Golden State for quite some time. However, the success of
02:25the Israeli response and its example in returning to a growing economy and a healthy society, a resilient
02:32society, is one that California can learn from in the future.
