Journalist From the Frontlines Responds to Israel’s Attempt to Assassinate Him on Camera

Steve Sweeney was reporting on the Israeli government’s murder of civilians in Lebanon when the IDF tried to assassinate him on camera. Here’s what American tax dollars are paying for. (00:00) Sweeney’s Close Encounter With an Israeli Missile Strike (11:37) Israel’s Bombing of St. Peter’s Burial Site (22:21) The British Government Taking Israel’s Side Over Its Own Citizens (31:06) Why Is Israel Bulldozing Olive Trees? (45:54) Is There More Freedom in Russia Than in Britain? Steve Sweeney is an award-winning Beirut based journalist and has been reporting from the frontline of Israel’s war on Lebanon for the past few years. He spent around two years covering the Ukraine conflict from the Russian side and gave testimony at the United Nations Security Council. In March 2026 he narrowly escaped death after an Israeli airstrike on a bridge he was reporting from in southern Lebanon. Paid partnerships with: Cozy Earth: Celebrate Mom with the ultimate gift of comfort by using code TUCKERBOGO at https://cozyearth.com Paleovalley: Use code TUCKER & get 20% off your first order at https://paleovalley.com VanMan: Use code TUCKER for 15% off your first order at http://vanman.shop/tucker Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:34Tucker Carlson?

  Last month, about two weeks ago, a British journalist called Steve Sweeney, who lives and works in Beirut, Lebanon, was in southern Lebanon, attempting with a cameraman to document what the Israeli military is doing to the southern part of that country, which is leveling it, moving people wholesale out, including Christian villages across the area. And as he was preparing his report, he was targeted by an Israeli-owned, American-made aircraft that fired a missile at him in an attempted assassination. Here's what it looked like.

• 1:09Speaker 02

  Further rocket attacks were reported against Nahariya and a minute.

• 1:25Speaker 02

  Fucking hell.

• 1:32Speaker 02

  Fuck.

• 1:33Tucker Carlson?

  That wasn't an accident. It was intentional. The jet that fired it had flown over his position, attempting to assassinate him, as the Israeli government has assassinated on purpose, not accidentally assassinated, murdered so many journalists, including Western journalists trying to cover its atrocities, atrocities that are spreading even now under the cover of the Iran War, a massive land grab across the region, killing of Christians, desecration of Christian holy sites. That's all happening. It's all real. And one of the reasons you may not know about it is because the people trying to record it, to chronicle it, have been assassinated. But Steve Sweeney was not assassinated by luck or the grace of God.

• 2:17Tucker Carlson?

  By a quirk of the landing of that missile, he survived. He joins us now to explain what happened. Steve, thanks very much for doing this. I'm grateful you're alive. Can you, we just played the tape of the moment where you were almost killed. Can you add context to that and describe what was happening?

• 2:36Speaker 02

  Well, yeah, you've seen the, the, the footage and we were incredibly lucky to come out of that situation alive. It was only purely by luck that the, the missile ended up, as you, as you've seen on the footage, it went through the hole and the bridge had already been destroyed. So just to give you some context of why we were there. Israel had issued these evacuation orders. It said that it was going to bomb every single bridge in South Lebanon. So the bridges that cross the Litani River, this connects the south of Lebanon to the rest of the country. So this was a hugely important news story. This is essentially cutting off, you know, a whole swathe of the, of the country. And they'd started the bombing the night before.

• 3:20Speaker 02

  It was a Thursday when we went to the bridge. On the Wednesday evening and into the early hours of the morning, they'd started targeting the bridges. So, you know, as a journalist and as a war correspondent, you know, we were there to report on this huge news story. So we drove down, this is in Sua district or Tyre district, as other people will probably better know it. And as we approached, the Lebanese army have a base there. They, just, just ahead of the bridge. So we approached them and we said to them, okay, is it safe to film? And they assured us it was perfectly safe for us to, to go on that bridge. And they would know because if Israel is about to bomb a bridge, which they had already bombed it the night before,

• 4:03Speaker 02

  then they would get a message to the Lebanese army via UNIFIL, the United Nations peacekeepers. They don't have direct communication. So there was no pre-warning that this bridge was about to be struck again. There was no military objective in striking the bridge again. It was already destroyed. There was, you could barely even walk across it, let alone take a vehicle across it. So this was the the Kazmir Bridge. This was the the smaller bridge. So these kind of link villages and settlements in South Lebanon together. So, okay, we we approached the bridge, we set up our camera, we started filming, there were fighter jets roaring overhead. And again, this isn't uncommon in in the south of Lebanon, but we knew that the fighter jets were flying

• 4:46Speaker 02

  away from us. So they were roaring overhead, but they were heading further south and they were bombing what they would describe as Hezbollah positions around that area. So we weren't still unduly concerned and we went on to the bridge and we started filming. So it wasn't live. Some people have said it was live. It was what we call an AS live. So we were filming that. Ali Rida, who is my colleague, was at the moment, we arrived on the bridge, I was doing my piece of camera, he went to film some B-roll, he went to film in the hole where the bridge had been struck. And it was, I mean, we talk about luck and we talk about the, you know, chance and we talk about God's will, but as he was filming,

• 5:31Speaker 02

  there was a gust of wind on the camera and the tripod was shaking. So I called him over and I said, Ali, yalla, yalla, please come, the the camera is shaking, I need you to steady it. As he came over, I guess around 15 seconds later, then we heard this tremendous roar and the Israelis struck the bridge again. And, I mean, the immediate aftermath, I mean, I remember just thinking, God, we're dead. That was it. It was, it was, it was like this earth-shattering sound, the explosion, it was an almighty blast. And then there was just dust and I couldn't really see anything. And you, from the footage, you can hear the soldiers, maybe they started saying to me, yalla, yalla. And I couldn't see anything.

• 6:16Speaker 02

  So I was, where, where? And they they took me into their Their barracks, they put tourniquets on my arms. I thought, again with adrenaline rush, I just thought I got some minor cuts. Um, you know, I couldn't really feel too much pain, but then I looked, uh, when they put the tourniquet, there was blood coming down my arms, there was blood on my, uh, on my clothes. Uh, but I was alive and, um, it's again completely by chance that we were alive. This was a very heavy munition that they'd use, a G B, uh, G B U thirty eight. Um, missile that we believe was used, it was fired from an F sixteen fighter jet. So after the Lebanese army were, uh, you know, they put these, uh, tourniquets on and gave us some water.

• 7:01Speaker 02

  Uh, then they called an ambulance and the ambulance came. And they put me on a stretcher and they, uh, off, off they took me and, and I should note. Really that the, you know, the, the paramedics and the emergency workers and the doctors and the nurses and all of the medical, uh, team that attended to us, uh, uh, are the real heroes of, of, of this, uh, story. Um, as we were traveling from the bridge to the hospital, uh, I'm not sure the distance may be about ten minutes, uh, probably less than that. But they had the blue lights on. Now, in any normal country, anywhere in the world, having the blue lights on and being transported somewhere by ambulance, you, you would be safe, right?

• 7:39Speaker 02

  Not in Lebanon, because, uh, the Israelis are now targeting, uh, medical staff. More than fifty have been killed, um. Hospitals, including the one we attended, uh, the Jabal Amal Hospital, part of that is, um, is, has been destroyed in Israeli airstrikes. And we've been working in the field for many years now, um, we're very experienced journalists and we take safety very seriously. We've spoken to a lot of medical workers, um, and they told us that the, the logo on the top of the ambulances, which is supposed to give them protection under international law, under the Geneva Conventions and this kind of thing.

• 8:19Speaker 02

  Uh, instead of giving it, giving them protection, it now places them at risk. So many of them have removed those logos from uh, their, their emergency vehicles. Now.

• 8:29Speaker 02

  Barely a day goes by now that when we don't hear of a medical worker being struck, the IDF, the Israeli Defence Force, soon after they carried out a massacre of 12 emergency workers in the south, targeting their station, they put out a statement saying that Hezbollah is using medical facilities and ambulances for military purposes. Now, of course, they didn't back that with any kind of evidence. This is a statement that they've reissued again quite recently. But, you know, we've been on the ground. We've been in the back of the ambulances. We've been in the hospitals. We've met the civil defence workers. We've met the paramedics and we've been to these stations. And all that you can see there

• 9:14Speaker 02

  are the kind of things that you would find in any hospital, in any medical station, in any ambulance, anywhere in the world. These are medical facilities and they should be protected under international law. Of course, targeting these deliberately is a war crime, but it's just one of many that we're seeing here on the ground in Lebanon.

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• 12:21Tucker Carlson?

  Here. So you're a Westerner, by your accent you sound Irish.

• 12:28Tucker Carlson?

  You live and work in Lebanon. How long have you been there?

• 12:33Speaker 02

  I came to Lebanon in October 2024. So this was during the period we call the 66 Day War. So it was a week or so after the assassination of Saad Hassan Nasrallah, the former Secretary General of Hezbollah. So I came then. We quite often joke and say that if Steve Sweeney arrives in your country, then it's not good news. But I came during that period. Now, Lebanon, as you know, and I think I've heard you say, Tucker, if I'm not, if I'm correct, it's a beautiful country, a wonderful place. You know, you look at the rich culture, tradition,

• 13:15Speaker 02

  and history of this country, even in the south now, which is the area coming under heavy bombardment, this is the area of Jesus. Khanah is where Jesus performed what I believe was his first miracle, turning water into wine. There's the Tube of Shemun al-Safa. This is Peter Simon, Saint Peter, who, I think for many Catholics, they believe that he was the first pope. Now, that's where his, some Christians believe that that's his burial site. Of course, this has been destroyed by Israel. They bombed it. This is an important site, actually, Shemun al-Safa, for both Muslims and Christians. So that's been bombed.

• 13:54Tucker Carlson?

  Wait, let me ask you to stop for a second. And I'm ashamed by my ignorance, as usual. The Israeli military bombed Saint Peter's burial site?

• 14:04Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 14:05Tucker Carlson?

  When?

• 14:06Speaker 02

  They did. Yeah. This was back in 2024. I mean, they went to, this wasn't an accidental bombing, the Shemun al-Safa. I think it's protected under World Heritage Law as well. And it's a very important site. It's, of course, the burial place of Saint Peter. It's also a holy site for Muslims. What they did during that period was they brought an Israeli, what they call a researcher, the Israeli Defense Force, brought him in. And the purpose of that really was to... Um, I guess reinvent history and the the the aim of it was to say, well, this is

• 14:49Speaker 02

  um, a Jewish holy site and this land belongs to Israel. This was the kind of narrative that they were uh trying to spin. That researcher, who was um actually a very well-known um settler activist, uh was was killed during that time. So we went, we visited the the site in um early twenty twenty five after the ceasefire period and um missiles have gone through the the domes, the uh the whole area was destroyed, bullet marks um a- a- across all of the buildings there, including the area of the shrine of Saint Peter himself. So this is um, so it wasn't like accidental, accidentally targeted, it wasn't kind of

• 15:32Speaker 02

  collateral damage, this was a deliberately targeted attack on the tomb of Saint Peter. It's not the only um church or um religious building that has been attacked, of course. We were in a place called Der De'gaya and this is a Greek uh, a Greek Catholic church. And again, that was um destroyed during the um, the sixty-six day war. They killed eight people that had taken shelter inside there. A lot of those were emergency workers, the civil defense team, and they'd taken shelter in there and they bombed it to oblivion. It's, it was completely destroyed. Um, and again, in in Yarun, um, this is uh another

• 16:12Speaker 02

  border town. And there are two um buildings there. There's the Imam Ali Mosque, um, which is a very well-known mosque in the, in the south of Lebanon, but there was also the Church of Saint George. And Saint George, of course, the patron saint of uh of of England, and this was a Catholic church, and they're very close by each other. And you may have seen the footage um circulating on social media, but there's um, there's footage of an Israeli soldier, I guess, with a body cam or or or something, a helmet cam, um destroying the statue there to uh to Saint George, but both of those were completely destroyed. Um.

• 16:49Tucker Carlson?

  So what's interesting is that-

• 16:50Speaker 02

  This is a pattern across the south of Lebanon.

• 16:52Tucker Carlson?

  Hezbollah is, and I'm not defending Hezbollah, it's not my fight, but they're designated, I believe, by the US government as a terror group. They've controlled big parts of Lebanon for many, many years, more than twenty years. And has Hezbollah blown up Christian holy sites? Has Hezbollah targeted ambulances? I mean, maybe they have. You live there, you tell me.

• 17:13Speaker 02

  No, they haven't. In fact, the opposite. And again, there's plenty of footage on all this that people can check for themselves online. But Hezbollah was in fact protecting the Christian churches and protecting the these kind of symbolic areas of religious importance to Christians. There's footage of them going into churches and cleaning up and tidying up and standing around, you know, protecting the Christian faith. If you listen to the speeches of Hassan Nasrata, he again, he said Hezbollah are the main defenders of the Christian faith in Lebanon. So it's so, no, they're not, they're not destroying ambulances, they're not destroying churches,

• 17:56Speaker 02

  they're not destroying mosques, they're not destroying people's homes. But Israel is, and it's doing it with American and Western supplied weapons as well.

• 18:05Tucker Carlson?

  And it's happening without anybody, pretty much anybody in the United States even noticing. I don't, I think people's attention is drawn to what's happening in Iran and the unfolding disaster there, and they don't even know that this is happening. So back to what happened to you specifically. You said that the missile that almost killed you and your cameraman was launched from an American aircraft, an Israeli owned American aircraft.

• 18:28Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 18:28Tucker Carlson?

  Do you believe, was that one of the planes that had flown over you? Do you think it was targeting you?

• 18:37Speaker 02

  Undoubtedly, we believe it was, it was targeting us. There's, there could be no other explanation for what happened now. Of course, because people have asked this question, you know, one, why were you on the bridge and were you deliberately targeted? And we're unequivocal about that. This was an assassination attempt by Israel to silence the voices on the ground, to silence the truth. Now, the reason we say that is because, like I said, we've been working in the field for the last two years. So our vehicle is very well known in the, in the south of Lebanon. We were in a clearly identified press vehicle. We had, as you can see in the footage, we had our press jackets on. Israel has the most advanced military technology anywhere in the world.

• 19:22Speaker 02

  It has the most advanced surveillance technology anywhere in the world. It knows everything that happens in the south of Lebanon. It knows every vehicle, it knows every number plate. It reads our messages, it listens to our conversations. This is why we say it was deliberate, because there's no doubt that they knew we were there. And the other issue has been raised by the Russian Foreign Ministry. Maria Zaharova said that this can't have been accidental. There was no military objective in targeting that bridge. It was already destroyed. So we believe it was a deliberate assassination attempt, absolutely. And it's only by luck, really, that we survived. There was a lot going in our favour that day. Let's say, had the missile not entered the hole in the bridge, had it exploded on the bridge.

• 20:08Speaker 02

  We've spoken to military experts, weapons experts, who have told us that if it had been maybe a few inches or a foot the other way, then there wouldn't even been bodies to recover. We'd have just been incinerated. These are incredibly powerful munitions that they were using. And there was no military objective, as I've said, in targeting the bridge. So we say that we were deliberately targeted by the Israelis, without a doubt.

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• 21:42Speaker 00

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• 22:11Tucker Carlson?

  Just so what? I mean, because you are a Westerner, you do have a certain advantage. I mean, you're an English speaking Westerner from the British Isles and you're on television. So you're the subject of an assassination attempt by a supposedly Western government, one that's armed by Western governments. What's your recourse? What do you do after they try and kill you, but they fail?

• 22:31Speaker 02

  Well, that's a, that's a very good question. Obviously I am an English speaking white Westerner, which gives me a certain advantage, a certain privilege. I mean, I have to say that just over a week after our very close shave, our dear colleagues and friends in the field weren't so lucky. Fatima Fatuni, Ali Shweib and Mohammed Fatuni were killed in a targeted, targeted strike by the Israelis just after they'd been reporting in the south. So I mean, this is the kind of the conditions that journalists are working in on, on the ground. In terms of the recourse, well, I work for Russian state television, which of course

• 23:14Speaker 02

  means that my, my own government, the British government don't like me. In fact, they have already, instead of supporting me, they've been put, they persecute. I was detained on a family visit last July at Heathrow Airport. I was met by counter terror police off the aeroplane. They took me away for interrogation. They quizzed me over my relations to Russia, the Russian state, working for Russian state television. Also about my work here in Lebanon, my associations or connections to Hezbollah, my connections to Ansarallah in Yemen, because I reported from Yemen, Hasdul Shabi, and my work in Donbass.

• 23:56Speaker 02

  I spent two years in the field in Donbass on the Russian side, so they were very interested in that. And they're still now currently investigating me for potential terrorist activity based on my journalism. So I don't expect anything from them. And some friends of mine at Declassified UK, British media organisation, well, they inquired, they asked the British government for comment after this assassination attempt. And they just simply said, and I'm summarising here, paraphrasing, that they said something along the lines of,

• 24:35Speaker 02

  "The Foreign Secretary has given Britain's position on the Middle East in a statement to the Commons on Tuesday." That was all they said. They didn't address the specifics of my case. They haven't commented on it. They haven't offered any kind of support whatsoever. Even the British Embassy here in Lebanon hasn't contacted me. The only support that I've had, I've had lots of love and well wishes from individuals and organisations across the world for which we're incredibly grateful and thankful for. But the only people, the only country that's actually given me strong and solid support has been Russia.

• 25:13Tucker Carlson?

  Are you a British passport holder?

• 25:16Speaker 02

  I'm a British passport holder, yes.

• 25:18Tucker Carlson?

  So you're a British subject, so this is even though you don't live there most of the time, you have family there, you are a citizen, but the British government is taking the side of the Israeli military over its own citizens?

• 25:32Speaker 02

  Well, that's how it seems to me, yes. Not only taking the side of the Israelis, but they're helping provide the weapons and the ammunition and the political and military support to carry out such strikes. So, you know, somewhere along that chain, I mean, we know it was an F-16 and a GBU-38, made American supply, but Britain is well involved in that supply chain. So, some of the, kind of the add-on equipment that enabled them to carry out that strike against me is almost certainly provided by the British government, without a doubt.

• 26:04Tucker Carlson?

  How does that, I don't understand, since, you know, both Britain and the United States fought against the Nazis and lost hundreds of thousands of their own men doing it, I don't really see where the moral culpability is here. Why would Britain and the United States have some duty to become subjects of the Israeli government? Where does that come from?

• 26:29Speaker 02

  Well, I mean, there's a long history of, you know, the two biggest supporters of Israel have traditionally been the United States and Britain, and, you know, you can trace this back to the formation of the State of Israel. Now, of course, they have their own interests in the region. They use Israel as a proxy force for its colonialist, imperialist expansion plans for the region. If you look at what's happening on the ground now, the reason that we reported on the bridges is that what you're seeing now is the forced expulsion of 1.2 million Lebanese people that have been forced from their land, forced from their homes, and they're now forcibly displaced. We describe this in Lebanon, we

• 27:13Speaker 02

  talk about it as an ethnic cleansing operation on a scale far larger than the Nakba. That's the, of course, the hundreds of thousands of Palestinians that were forced from their homes on the creation of the State of Israel. So, the situation here is, it's simply astonishing. And, you know, 370,000 of those forcibly displaced children. So, but behind that is this attempt by Israel to grab that land. Now, not only are they forcing people out of that area, south of the Lutani River, they've extended that now to south of the Zorani River. So, we're talking some 40 kilometers from the Israeli border, that they've pushed people out of that area. Now...

• 27:58Speaker 02

  The Israelis have been very open. Israel Katz, the Defence Secretary, has said that we want the land. We're going to, you know, they've said that they want to create a security buffer zone or whatever terminology they use to describe it. But these plans have been long in the making. You go back in in history and Israel has invaded and tried to take that area. They think it's their biblical right. We're talking about the Greater Israel Project, which I know you know, you know full well about after your conversation with Ambassador Huckabee. And, you know, it's, it kind of reappears in in different guises over the years. The most latest was the Trump Economic Zone.

• 28:35Speaker 02

  This was announced back in, I think, August last year, around that time, Tom Barak, the US envoy, arrived here in Lebanon. And you you might remember this

• 28:50Speaker 02

  soundbite from him because he spoke at the Presidential Palace to a group of journalists and there was a bit of a melee and he described them as animalistic. And he was condemned for, you know, this, you know, this was seen as an incredibly racist comment to make towards Lebanese journalists who are doing their job in the field, holding people to account, questioning him. But behind that, he laid out this plan for the Trump Economic Zone, which meant that hundreds of thousands of people would be forced from their homes permanently. Now, it was dressed up. This is going to be a regeneration project. We're going to create new homes. We're going to create jobs. We're going to create roads. We're going to create infrastructure. We're going to make the area safe.

• 29:32Speaker 02

  But it meant that people that have lived on on this land for generations, these are their homes. These are not just, you know, dots on a map. These are homes where people have lived on that land for generations are going to be turfed out. And nobody really paid attention to it at the time. Of course, we did as journalists on the ground. And, you know, people talk about They say that the Gaza model is now coming to Lebanon. They've spoken about it in terms, I think Smotrich said, we're going to turn Dahia, the southern suburbs of Beirut, into Khan Yunis. And then they've used Beit Hanoun and Rafa. Israel Katz said that they're going to destroy all of these villages that they call frontline villages. And I can tell you now, we've been here for two years, those villages are largely already

• 30:17Speaker 02

  destroyed. The south of Lebanon already looks like Gaza, whole villages completely lie in ruins, no reconstruction plan. And over the last fifteen months, we've seen Israel break that ceasefire. And we call about, talk about a ceasefire from November twenty twenty four, but there was never a ceasefire. You can't have a ceasefire when only one side stops firing. And, okay, fifteen thousand, more than fifteen thousand violations over the last fifteen months. And this includes, included the rigging and destroying of homes, the drone strikes, targeted assassinations, the use of chemical spray to destroy crops. And, you know, we've witnessed and filmed all this, the use of white phosphorus.

• 31:00Speaker 02

  In a, there's a place called Bleeder, a village very close to the border. Now, during olive harvesting season, we went to make a film there. The Israelis refused to allow the farmers to tend to their land unless they gave them all of the contact details and the names of who was going into the fields. While we were there, and they started bulldozing the olive groves. These are olive groves that are older than the state of Israel. So this, you know, this isn't something new. This is, you know, what we're seeing now, the escalation on March the second has been going on for a very, very long time. Now, you ask me why Britain and the United States would support that. Well, they use Israel as their kind of proxy force in the area they refer to as the Middle

• 31:39Speaker 02

  East, we call it West Asia here, and they use it to, to grab the land. The Greater Israel Project suits Israel, but it suits Britain and the United States because this is a land of great wealth and resources. And they want to extract that, that wealth, and they want to extract the resources and use it for their, for their own gain. And of course, they want strategic control across the whole of the region. Yeah, we've seen that with, you know, with what happened in Syria. We can see now with the bombing of Iran. We can see what happened in Gaza. All of these have taken place, not just with the connivance of the United States and Britain, but with their active involvement.

• 32:22Speaker 02

  So this is the kind of, you know, this is what we're happening now. We, you can see signs along the airport road here in Beirut that, you know, they say made it made in the United States, made in the USA. And that's how they see the bombs are falling on them here. They're made in the United States. They're made in Britain and they're causing, you know, they're the root cause of the death and destruction that's taking place across this region. Israel fires the bullets, but the guns, well and truly loaded by Britain and the United States.

• 32:52Tucker Carlson?

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• 34:25Tucker Carlson?

  Since you mentioned it, I have to ask you about a small point that has bothered me for many years, and that's the Israeli policy of cutting down olive trees, some of which are hundreds and hundreds, up to 1,000 years old.

• 34:36Speaker 02

  Thousands of years.

• 34:37Tucker Carlson?

  And, of course, they're, right, they're central to the ancient economy of the Levant, but they're also beautiful.

• 34:43Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 34:44Tucker Carlson?

  And they're revered almost by the people who are actually from there, not the ones from Poland who pretend they're from there, but the people who actually are there. Why would the Israeli government chainsaw or bulldoze olive trees? That seems evil to me. I don't understand the explanation for it.

• 35:01Speaker 02

  Well, that's, that's the only way to look at it. Of course, it's evil, but I think, you know, these, like you said, these olive groves, some of them are thousands of years old. I think the oldest in Lebanon is something like 6,000 years old, but it's the lifeblood of Lebanon. It's a symbol of Lebanese cultural heritage, identity, and the people here are very, very connected to their land. They're deeply connected to their land. And, you know, this is the lifeblood, not just for the south of Lebanon, where, you know, the farmers will harvest their olive groves. Tobacco is a big, a huge crop here, but this is the lifeblood for all of Lebanon.

• 35:43Speaker 02

  Now, if you can disconnect people from their land and their, and their culture, then, of course, you can, you can, you can take it over. And that's what they've been doing, not just by bulldozing it, bombing it, but by spraying these chemicals that will make sure that these crops will never be able to grow on the land again, and they can just brush them aside, they can build houses, they can build settlements there, just like they did when, on the formation of the State of Israel. They're building these illegal settlements everywhere, and that's exactly what they want to do here.

• 36:15Tucker Carlson?

  In Lebanon, they're building settlements?

• 36:19Speaker 02

  Well, they want to. That's their aim. Yeah. I mean, you look at the Greater Israel Project itself now. I mentioned Yarun earlier. This is the place where the mosque and the church were destroyed. Now, earlier this year, a few months before the escalation on March the 2nd, this group of settlers came in across the border into or very close to Yarun and they planted trees. And the message was, I can't remember the exact terminology that they used, but this was them planting their roots in Lebanese territory. And they believe that Lebanese territory biblically belongs to them. Now, you know, you look back a few years ago and this could have been seen as a conspiracy theory

• 37:04Speaker 02

  or a fringe kind of movement, but this is now right at the heart of the Israeli government. Smotrich and Ben Gavir are advocates of the Greater Israel Project. Benjamin Netanyahu himself is a supporter of the Greater Israel Project. This isn't kind of like a fantasy. This is happening now. It's unfolding in real time in front of our very eyes. So, and they have some rabbis in Israel that justify this religiously as well. They will say that this is the land that belongs to them according to holy scripture. And this is why we're seeing this whole-scale destruction. That's what it was around over the last 15 months.

• 37:47Speaker 02

  They say it was about destroying Hezbollah, but it's not. You're seeing whole kind of settlements lying under rubble. My beloved is from a village in the south and her entire village has pretty much been reduced to rubble. Her family home rebuilt, destroyed, rebuilt, destroyed so many times. And this is, you know, very common for the people in that part of the world. And again, there's... Israel has occupied Lebanon and after the ceasefire in November 2024, it built five military bases inside Lebanese sovereign territory. We filmed them and rather than

• 38:30Speaker 02

  scaling them back, Israel was expanding the construction of those of those military posts illegally, you know, in breach of UN Resolution 1701, in breach of international law. The Lebanese government asked them to to leave Lebanese sovereign territory and of course, they just simply refused and they pushed further and further into Lebanese sovereign territory. Now, the interesting thing, and I don't know whether your viewers will be aware of this, many people don't don't know, but there isn't really an official border between between Israel and Lebanon. There's no no officially agreed agreed border. We have the blue line, which was established by the United Nations. This was after Israel

• 39:10Speaker 02

  was forced out in in 2000. And this line is supposed to be the demarcation point that Israel is not supposed to encroach further upon, you know, further across this line. So Israel sees a lot of this land as as belonging. Yeah, there was the 1923 mandate line when it was the British mandate of Palestine. There was a kind of border drawn up then, which Israel inhabited in 1948, but has never really agreed to. The arms test in 1949 didn't again agree agree those borders. So Israel sees fit to to push forward. Yeah, at will, and it's done so with total impunity, of course. Yeah, there's no kind of international

• 39:55Speaker 02

  outcry about the destruction of these villages and settlements, or the use of chemical weapons, the use of white phosphorus, or the assassination of of individuals in drone strikes, or the killing of paramedics, the murder of journalists. All of these things have been happening. For many, many years, the world is maybe paying more attention to it now. We've had the Western journalists arriving in the country since March the second, of course. The major news networks have arrived and they're kind of surprised at what they're seeing. They're seeing this for the first time. But this has been going on for a very, very long time. And I say this is a bit of a failing, I would say, of the major media organizations.

• 40:35Speaker 02

  Because had they been on the ground in Lebanon for the past 15 months, they would have seen this unfolding. And, you know, maybe the situation would be very different from what it is now. As it, as it is, they weren't there. And the Lebanese journalists were reporting. The people that live on that land were, were, you know, crying for, for help and nobody was listening.

• 40:56Tucker Carlson?

  I have to ask, so you are covering this on the ground in Lebanon, living and working at the center of all this. And as noted, almost got killed for it. But you're working for a Russian news agency. You've clearly been a journalist a long time. You look over 40, so probably a long time. How did you wind up working for a Russian news agency? Like, why aren't you a BBC reporter? How did, what was your path?

• 41:23Speaker 02

  MI5 would never clear me to work for BBC.

• 41:25Tucker Carlson?

  No, they wouldn't. No, it's true.

• 41:28Speaker 02

  There's no cha, no chance. I mean, I, I, I wouldn't work for the BBC on a, on a personal level. We've met some BBC journalists here and they've been very pleasant, very nice. And I'd have all the gents from, you know, the, the major networks. There's individual journalists, you know, I have no problem with them. But how I ended up working for RT, for, for Russia Today is I was working for a newspaper. Before I entered the world of broadcast journalism, I was the international editor of a national daily newspaper in Britain for many years. When the Ukraine conflict started, the special military operation, I was covering that. And I went to the western part of Ukraine to, to pick up, there was a couple of stories I was chasing there.

• 42:14Speaker 02

  I ended up in Lviv. The Ukrainians tried to, to kidnap me and I managed to make my escape from, from there, back out, back out through Poland and then to Germany.

• 42:25Tucker Carlson?

  Wait, I'm going to ask you to pause. Why, why did they do that? Why did they try to kidnap you, the Ukrainians?

• 42:31Speaker 02

  But well, because simply because I'm, I was a journalist, it wasn't towing the, their narrative. Yes. And Ukraine, the Ukraine conflict is the most propagandized war in history, in my view. I mean, you look at what happened in, you know, even the Iraq war, there was kind of that space within the media field to criticize your government's policy. When it came to Ukraine, that, that, that window or that gap narrowed to the point where it was impossible because there was no space to offer anything that was different from the narrative of the Western governments, the British government, the Ukrainian government. So if you were going there to actually do some proper journalism, and I say that because,

• 43:16Speaker 02

  you know, with all due respect to the, those organizations, the BBC, CNN, Sky News, you know, The Times, The Telegraph, Channel Four, they were doing these kind of, it was, they were all saying the exact same thing. They were taking it in turns to stand on the top of the same hotel roof in Kiev or Lviv and repeat the line, repeat the line, but they weren't actually seeing what was the reality on the ground. They were, they were just stenographers, essentially, these kind of copy and paste reports. And it reached kind of insane levels in Britain.

• 43:59Speaker 02

  I'm sure it was the same with the United States, but Britain was, they started demonizing Vladimir Putin. One of the craziest reports I saw was that Vladimir Putin has a, an assistant that follows him around with a briefcase and every time he goes to the toilet, they collect his feces and urine so his opponents can't do, run any kind of tests on them. I mean, it got to, you know, completely insane levels. And anytime you were reporting, so I ended up at Russia today after that because I saw that my independence as a journalist and my ability to report on the truth had completely disappeared. It was impossible. The only way to do that was to, you know, was to go to Russia and work for, work for RT.

• 44:46Speaker 02

  One of our logos, Question More, and that's what we do. And I always say, yeah, question more, question us. That's, that's the role of a journalist. So I ended up working for RT, I ended up working for two years in Donbass on, on the Russian side. And I was seeing something completely different from the narrative that was being played out in, in the West. I was seeing, you know, war crimes committed daily by the Ukrainians against a civilian population. When I was there, they called it Donetsk roulette. You never know when, you know, when a missile might strike you. And I'm seeing, you know, attacks on marketplaces, for example, 27 people killed, body parts everywhere. And these were like babushkas, dadushkas, old men, old women, the poorest people in, you

• 45:28Speaker 02

  know, in, in, in that part of the, of the city, selling, you know, homemade fruit and vegetables from, from their home, just obliterated, you know, arms and legs everywhere. I was seeing hospitals that were, that were struck, bus, bus stops that were being attacked. You know, so I mean, I could talk about that for a long time. I spoke about it at the United Nations Security Council. I gave testimony of, of what I'd seen and the failures of, of Minsk One and Minsk Two and, you know, the, the path to peace. So what, what we're seeing, what, and what I always say is what we, what we were seeing in, in, in that part in the, in Donbass, is the same playbook that we're seeing in Gaza, the same playbook

• 46:12Speaker 02

  that we're seeing here in Lebanon. These are the most powerful countries in the world, waging war, using the most sophisticated technology, the most powerful weapons against some of the poorest, most vulnerable people in the world. They can't fight back. That's, you know, this, they, they, you know, they don't have the, they don't have the arms, they don't have the weapons. They were, they, the people of Gaza, the people of Lebanon, they weren't sent Klimas or Storm Shadows or, you know, these advanced weapons. These were sent to their oppressors to massacre them. You know, this, this is, this is what's happening. And it's the very same forces. In Donbass, it was, you know, it was very simple for me as a, as a journalist. It was a, a people that wanted peace, a people that

• 46:56Speaker 02

  wanted to be able to speak their own language, Russian, people that wanted to be able to practice their own culture and traditions if they identified as, as Russian. And pretty much that was it. You could put it as, as, really as simply as that. But then... And the Ukrainian government decided to wage a war against its own people. I know for some this went back to, you know, the start of the SMO, but this has a much, much longer history, starting way back in 2014, the Maidan coup. Um, you know, all of these things people forget about now. Conveniently, including the media, the media's actually made them forget about it because, you know, one day there was a neo-Nazi problem in Ukraine, you know, the Azov and the right

• 47:40Speaker 02

  sector were carrying out these horrific actions, these horrific killings, they were terrorizing the people. And the next day, all of a sudden, Ukraine is a paragon of liberal democracy. It's incredible, but people aren't getting the truth. So this is why I ended up at RT, because the space to do proper journalism just wasn't afforded to me anywhere else, none of the British press. I'm, like I said, I kind of semi-joked, but MI5 would never allow me to work for the BBC or for any of the other major news organizations. And, you know, I have to say with Russia Today, with RT, I have complete freedom to report

• 48:23Speaker 02

  exactly what I want and nobody tells me what to say. Nobody tells me where I can film, nobody tells me who I can speak to, who I should speak to. And, you know, I have total journalistic freedom, so, and I'm very happy working for RT, I'm very proud to work for RT. And we always say that here on the ground, because, you know, obviously, I came, kind of sprung into the limelight after what happened to me. And, but it's not about me, journalists should never become the story unwittingly I did. But we always say that, you know, the, our job is to raise the voices of the people of this land.

• 49:03Speaker 02

  And we always say that our mic is a tribune for the people and it will continue to be a tribune for the people as long as we remain in the field.

• 49:13Tucker Carlson?

  It must be such a strange experience for you, since you've been in the British, it sounds like you're in the British media for a long time, conventional media, a newspaper in a country that, you know, reads newspapers famously. All of a sudden to have this perspective where you have more freedom to do journalism, to straightforward journalism at Russia Today than you had at a British newspaper. I mean, what is that as someone who I assume you were raised in the UK, right?

• 49:43Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 49:44Tucker Carlson?

  What is that like?

• 49:45Speaker 02

  It's. Well, I, you know, I. The British, the, the, the media field in Britain, um, you know, the, the, and I think it's not just in Britain, but I think if you look at the Western countries, that it's, it's, it's kind of, it's very concentrated its own by a very small group of people. Um, who, who own and control the media, they control what you say, they control the narrative. So, but I think the, the, the change was that the, uh, the owners of these media organizations are now more and more forcefully pushing their view and their narrative. And you see it permeating through every word that's spoken on, um, on British television.

• 50:26Speaker 02

  You see it written in every single word in every single newspaper. There's no, um, divergence. They're, they're all uniform. So, you know, of, of course, Russia, people in the West think that Russia is some kind of authoritarian dictatorship, that we're living under the jackboot of, of Vladimir Putin. But you've been to Moscow, you know, you know, um, anything but the, but the truth, it couldn't, couldn't be further from the truth. You know, you see people, I mean, there are very educated people. They have, you know, rich, again, we was talking about Lebanon earlier, having this rich culture and history.

• 51:03Speaker 02

  I mean, Russia, come on. I mean, I don't know any other nation on earth that has such a rich culture and history, you know, Shostakovich, Dostoevsky, Prokofiev, Yuri Gagarin, they put, you know, the first, uh, human being in, in, in space, Mendeleev, the founder of the, um, you know, the, the table of the elements, um, huge, these huge figures in the field of science, of literature, of art, of music. And you go to any bar in, in, in Moscow and, and you can sit down there, within five minutes, you've had one of the most. Intelligent political or cultural conversations that you've ever had, sitting over a cold pint

• 51:47Speaker 02

  of Guinness. And for those that think that people are too afraid to criticize Putin, let me tell you, they're not. They're not. I've heard it myself. And the same, the same kind of criticisms you hear in every country, anywhere in the world, they're not afraid to express those views. They don't necessarily hold them. Vladimir Putin is incredibly popular, and he's incredibly popular for a very good reason, is that people remember the days before Putin became the president, and they remember it was a very, very dark time in the country. And after the collapse of the Soviet Union, up until Vladimir Putin came to power, there wasn't that really that kind of national stability. I mean, Russia is obviously a

• 52:27Speaker 02

  huge country, eleven time zones, I think it is. So to hold it together is incredibly difficult. But Vladimir Putin brought that stability. He made Russia into what it is today. And this is a strong, economically thriving, independent country that is actually, despite what the West says, you know, it still has these good relations with other countries on the world stage. It's not isolated by any stretch of the imagination. It's only isolated if you think the world is the Western powers. So, you know, there is this freedom to criticize. But of course, he's hugely popular. And, you know, I think people in

• 53:09Speaker 02

  the West find that very difficult to understand that, you know, he's, just how popular Putin is in Russia.

• 53:18Tucker Carlson?

  Everything you're saying is true. I've seen it multiple times.

• 53:21Speaker 02

  Even, for example, RT is banned in the United States, it's banned in Europe. In Russia, you've probably seen, but Vladimir Putin holds a, every year, he holds a Q and A for journalists, for members of the public. Every year, the BBC is there. Steve Rosenberg asks a question. He tries to get a gotcha every year. He fails every year, but he keeps giving it a go. But the BBC is allowed to operate freely inside Russia. I couldn't do the same in Britain. They're trying to arrest me.

• 53:54Tucker Carlson?

  They would arrest you if you tried, if you practiced what you're doing now in your home country.

• 54:01Speaker 02

  If I tried, if I took, yes, if I took an RT microphone into, into London and started trying to interview people, or if I stood in front of a camera with an RT microphone and started trying to give a report, I would be arrested. We're banned. We're, you know, we're, we're, we're treated as, I don't know, like foreign agents. So it's, it would be unawful for us to work there. We could be jailed, sanctioned, a whole host of things could happen. So we don't have that freedom to operate inside, inside Britain. I always, you know, this is something that always amazes me because,

• 54:37Speaker 02

  you know, the Russian state television was banned in, in, in Europe and, and America because, you know, we're propagandists or, or whatever, the Kremlin media machine or, yeah, these kind of tired old tropes that we hear this, you know, which is deeply rooted in, in Russophobia. But what they're really saying is the people of Europe and Brit, and America are stupid, right? You know, people, people are able to disseminate fact from fiction. They're able to watch a news report and decide whether it's propaganda or whether it's true. They can make that decision themselves and they should be able to make that decision themselves in a free and democratic country

• 55:16Speaker 02

  that operates with freedom of speech and freedom of the press. So, you know, it's, it always strikes me as quite bizarre that they keep saying, well, we uphold freedom of the press. Well, in fact, the European Union has sanctioned a journalist, someone I knew, no, Hussein Dourou, who is a a journalist for, for Red Media, they sanctioned him because of his work. They said he's close, or I think they accused him of something to do with the Russian state, but it was because of his reporting on, on Palestine. So there, there's no way that they uphold freedom of the press. I, I myself am being investigated for potential terrorist activities based on my journalism, nothing else.

• 55:59Speaker 02

  That's it for my journalistic, journalistic reports. So, you know, where, where, where does, where's the press freedom? Can I walk into, into the United States? Can I, can I, you know, freely walk around and start interviewing people? Can I interview Donald Trump? Can I sit down and speak to the people on the ground? Of course not, we're banned. It's an absurdity.

• 56:21Tucker Carlson?

  It is an absurdity.

• 56:22Speaker 02

  But press freedom is alive and kicking.

• 56:24Tucker Carlson?

  And it's it's also a little bit bewildering. It's it's surprising for me and it's an ominous sign, I would say, as an American, to see people arrested in Britain for criticizing Israel. Why would it be illegal for Britain to criticize Israel? What does Israel have to do with the UK? And by the way, it was Israeli terror groups who murdered British citizens, British soldiers, British diplomats.

• 56:48Speaker 02

  Exactly. The King David Hoes.

• 56:49Tucker Carlson?

  That's exactly, and many others.

• 56:51Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 56:51Tucker Carlson?

  And they murdered a lot of Brits and murdered them with their hands slowly. In some cases, blew them up with bombs, but true terrorist acts. And the guy who did it later became the Prime Minister, Manokh Mekh. So actually, Israel owes a great debt to the UK, which is responsible for its formation in the first place, as you know. So why in the world would British citizens be banned from criticizing Israel? They owe nothing to Israel. What is this?

• 57:18Speaker 02

  Well, it's it's a bizarre dystopian situation. You you've probably seen, but but in Britain, um, I guess maybe six months ago, the government moved to ban a group called Palestine Action. And these were these were protesters that were throwing paint at aeroplanes or whatever. They were trying to stop a genocide. And Britain prescribed it as a terrorist organization. I think against all the legal advice that they were given, they ignored that and they went ahead. And it became illegal to even support or hold up placards saying, I support Palestine Action. So they were arresting like eighty, ninety year old women. They were dragging them away and charging them as as terrorists, as terrorists under

• 58:02Speaker 02

  terrorism offenses. So, I mean, Britain has a, obviously, it's invested in Israel, heavily invested in Israel, clearly, because, you know, it was Britain, really, that was behind the formation of the state of Israel in the first place. You can trace it back to the Balfour Declaration, where, you know, they drew a line in the sand and gave a land that didn't belong to them to another people whose land it wasn't. You know, they gave away the land that belonged to the people indigenous to that land. So I think. You know, they talk about this historical debt owed to, owed to Israel. Now, of course, you can go to Germany and some of the European countries, and of course, they talk about the, the Holocaust and, you know, they bear a heavy burden and responsibility for that, or, or they feel that.

• 58:44Speaker 02

  And again, there's this kind of historical debt that they feel. But in, in Britain now, it's, it's kind of, you know, moved way beyond, way beyond that. And, and like you said, they were, i- in the early days in the formation of the State of Israel, they were attacking, um, Brits, killing Brits, blowing up hotels. Um. So this kind of, you know, unraveled support where you can't even criticize Israel. You know, you can't, there's no space. A- any criticism of Israel is now deemed either antisemitic, an act of terror, unlawful, um, and it can mean that you're ostracized from, from society.

• 59:25Speaker 02

  You're labeled an anti Semite, you're labeled a racist. And I mean, the Britain's objective is, I mean, Israel is an outpost for Anglo-American imperialist. Um, uh, you know, they're, they're, um, what, what they want to gain out of, out of the region. So it acts as, you know, this kind of Anglo-imperialist outpost. And it will back Israel militarily to the hilt, it will back them politically to the hilt. But of course, you know, they, they're using it to strategically control the entire of the, of the Middle East. I mean, this is, this is their historical myth. Yes. You know, ev- everything that happens in this region is because of the historical mess of the British and, and the French. You know, you back in the time of, um, the Sykes Pico,

• 1:00:10Speaker 02

  um, carving up of that part of the world, just arbitrarily drawing lines. Okay, you can have this part, you can have this part. Um, and, you know, the, the legacy of that lives on today, which is in fact why as a British, um, journalist, I say of, of Irish origin, but. You know, certainly as a as a Western, a Western journalist, I have a historical debt to the people of of this land because of what my country has inflicted upon them. And, you know, I see that as part of my my my duty as as a journalist, not to just fall in line behind my own government, not to be a stenographer for power, but to expose to the world what's happening here on the ground in in Lebanon and in other countries.

• 1:00:54Speaker 02

  And, you know, for every bomb that falls on on Lebanon, and there have been many of them, I can tell you, but every bomb that falls on Lebanon is a bomb that is supplied by the United States.

• 1:01:05Tucker Carlson?

  Yes.

• 1:01:05Speaker 02

  A bomb that is supplied by Britain. Israel just simply fires the bullets that they're supplied and it's been, you know, it's carrying out these actions with the support and complicity of of Britain and the United States and other Western countries.

• 1:01:18Tucker Carlson?

  Do do your former colleagues in the British media feel shame as they continue their stenography and see you speaking freely and risking your life to do it?

• 1:01:29Speaker 02

  They should do, yeah, they should, they should feel a great sense of shame. But now, I don't know whether that whether they do. Like I said, on a personal level, I've met the individual journalists from the major news organizations and they've been very, very gracious and very pleasant as individuals. But, you know, they all fall in line with the same narrative. Even the journalists that are coming here, they'll describe Dahia, which is the southern suburbs of Beirut. That entire area has been evacuated. We're talking an area between 500 and 800,000 people. And that whole area has been evacuated. It's bombed every single day without fail. Fighter jets roaring overhead, drones overhead, civilian buildings being destroyed. Now, for them, this is the southern suburbs of Beirut.

• 1:02:13Speaker 02

  They call it a Hezbollah stronghold. Now, okay, that use of language is not an accident, it's deliberate. They call it Hezbollah, a Hezbollah stronghold because it justifies the bombing of that area. But this isn't a Hezbollah stronghold. This, you know, this is where we live. You know, these are the coffee shops where we meet our friends. These are the places we go shopping. This is an area vibrant, full of life, people's homes, this kind of thing. And the Western media play a very pernicious role, in fact, in what I believe is this manufacturing of consent. Because outside of that, Dahia is just a place on a map that gets bombed.

• 1:02:54Speaker 02

  Lebanon is a war zone. That's how they describe it. Lebanon isn't a war zone, as we already discussed. Lebanon is a land of rich culture, rich tradition, rich history, full of the most amazing people you could ever meet anywhere in the world. The same with the south of Lebanon. They say, well, all these areas south of the Lutani, they're all Hezbollah supporters. I mean, of course, there's strong support for Hezbollah in those areas because they see them as the only organisation that is standing up and fighting against Israel, that is defending their land, their territory. Hezbollah was only born in, depending on, it was born in the mid 1980s.

• 1:03:35Speaker 02

  Now, the people of Lebanon don't have like a devolution or a fantasy of, you know, or are predisposed to using weapons and guns. You know, it's not that they enjoy going around shooting people. They were formed as an armed militia exactly to defend their land, the same as in Ireland, the same as in, in fact, you can pick any country that's come under attack from, you know, from the Western powers, from Israel, from their neighbours. Yeah, that's the origins of these organisations, but to call it Hezbollah land, which is some of the description that we're finding. This is, as we said, the land that Jesus walked in. It's a land rich in culture and history.

• 1:04:20Speaker 02

  But the Western journalists are kind of seeing it very much or speaking about it or writing about it very much in those terms. We hear the same kind of, it's like these dog-whistled frigga words, you know, Iran-backed, Iranian-backed militia. You know, the Hezbollah strongholds, all these kind of things, that they'll, the terminology that they use. And it's absolutely deliberate to justify Israel bombing those lands. That's, yeah, that's all it is. So whether they're embarrassed about writing that or not, I don't know. I think it's very difficult to get a job in the British media if you don't write those. Those kind of lines, or you don't speak them into a camera.

• 1:05:02Speaker 02

  Now, Noam Chomsky, who back in, I guess, the 90s was interviewing a British journalist, Andrew Marr, and I think he hit the nail on the head when he said, okay, I'm not necessarily saying you don't believe what you're saying, but if you didn't believe what you said, you wouldn't be sitting where you are now. And I think that's... It's true, right? I mean, you know, you're not going to get a job unless you believe those things, unless you're prepared to say them or write them. So whether they're embarrassed or not, I don't know. And to be honest, I don't care very much.

• 1:05:37Tucker Carlson?

  They may not be capable of it. So my last question, I know you don't like talking about yourself, but it's about you. So Israel tried to assassinate you, they failed, just barely. I can't imagine interviews like this make them less inclined to assassinate you, to try again. Are you going to stay in Lebanon?

• 1:05:59Speaker 02

  Absolutely. 100% without doubt. I'll stay in Lebanon. Lebanon is my home. I have my, you know, my beloved is here in Lebanon, my life is here in Lebanon. I always say, look, Lebanon isn't my country, but Lebanon and the Lebanese people belong in my heart.

• 1:06:19Tucker Carlson?

  Yes.

• 1:06:20Speaker 02

  And, yeah, I'll forever be in the service of the Lebanese people. They've been good enough to host me in their country, and I hope that my journalism does them justice, and I hope my presence does them justice. I always remember, and it's always important to remember, that I'm a guest in this land. So, no, I have no intention of leaving, I have no intention of stopping reporting. We've already been back to the front line. Just two days after the attack, we made sure that we went out because we're not going to be silenced. And, you know, if they think that we're going to be leaving the field, then they're very much mistaken.

• 1:06:58Tucker Carlson?

  What a remarkable conversation. It is one of the great countries and most beautiful countries in the world. Top five, in my opinion, top three. So I'm grateful you're there to chronicle what's being done to it in our name with our weapons. It's really evil. So, anyway, Steve Sweeney, thank you very much for doing this. I appreciate it.

• 1:07:16Speaker 02

  A pleasure. Thank you.