Editor’s note: This is a lightly edited transcript of “Victor Davis Hanson: In His Own Words” from Daily Signal senior contributor Victor Davis Hanson. Subscribe to Victor Davis Hanson’s own YouTube channel to watch past episodes.
Sami Winc: Iran, let’s turn to. It looks like internal strife is increasing, not because of the protesters out there, although I’m sure there are some. The women are openly defying the hijab in universities.
Victor Davis Hanson: They are. Daily, daily they do.
Sami Winc: But their administration knows it because they’ve increased patrols and checkpoints in fear of the protests from universities.
Victor Davis Hanson: For all you people who are worried and have sworn the war is lost, Robert Kagan, the whole left-wing media, what are you going to say when the people rise up? Three things are going to happen, and they’re not necessarily mutually exclusive.
Number one, the people are going to rise up, and this time when they try to kill them, the U.S. will add air support.
Number two, they are so desperate for a deal. Today they said, “We have a deal, we have a deal.” You can’t trust anything they say, but they will basically give most of us what we want, and it won’t be worth anything.
And number three, they will have a final fireworks October surprise, where they’ll call everybody up. How many drones you have in that mountain over there? Don’t we have a tunnel over there somewhere with six more missiles? We want them all to go at the Saudi oil field or something.
And when that happens, he will unload on them, and the regime will be destroyed, conventionally.
So it’s gonna be like Greenland. It’s going to be like the NATO problem. It’s gonna be solved, but it’s not gonna be solved in a way that’s gonna bring credit. It’s the most existential problem the United States has faced since the Cold War. A lunatic regime that’s going to get nuclear weapons and whose terrorists dominate the entire Middle East, terrify every Arab government that has Shia Arab minorities in it.
It’s gonna be solved, and it’s gonna be solved very quickly. And I’m sure the people who say that Donald Trump was a warmonger and a war criminal and it was a forever war, left and right. Tucker Carlson says he should be impeached. He’s satanic. He loves nuclear weapons. I’m sure they’re all going to say that when the people overthrow this government or this government dissolves, that it had nothing to do with Donald Trump. It had to do with their criticism of Donald Trump.
Sami Winc: Well, adjacent to that, did you see that there were passengers that rescued a plane? It was going from Dubai to Israel, Tel Aviv, and it was taken over by a terrorist who was one of the pilots, and the passengers wrested control of it. There were pilots among the passengers, wrested control of it and landed it safely.
Victor Davis Hanson: Now, there’s this preliminary. It happened early this morning as I speak. I think we’ll get the whole story. You really don’t wanna predict what the whole story will be, but from the fragmentary evidence adduced so far, I think you can come up with two or three legitimate suppositions.
One, any flight that leaves an Arab country, like even from moderate Dubai to Israel, there are Israeli security on that flight. And one of them or two of them know how to fly it. They’re probably ex-Israeli pilots, right? Military. So they not only know how to fly a plane, they know how to fly a plane in danger.
From what we can tell, as you said, the captain attacked the co-pilot, thinking that my mission is to hijack the plane and ram it and kill everybody and ram it into an iconic Israeli building when we get there 30 minutes later.
[Editor’s Note: The co-pilot attacked the pilot.]
Sami Winc: Yeah, we could guess in Tel Aviv maybe.
Victor Davis Hanson: Yes, it’s good. And so the Israelis, thinking way ahead of them, have people on every one of the flights. And number two, to enact that, I have to kill the co-pilot so there’s no other buddy that can grab the plane. And those cabins are locked. So I will be the only person here.
The co-pilot is dead or injured, and they can’t get me, and I’m just going to do what Mohamed Atta and those guys did. But what they didn’t know is that there were security, and Israelis are not normal people in the sense they just said, Oh my gosh, we’re hijacked. We’re all dead. They stormed and they broke through, and they rescued the co-pilot, and I guess they killed the pilot, and they got him out, and they had dropped about 12,000 feet in a minute, and the sheer stress on the airframe broke the rudder on the back of the tail.
[Editor’s note: The co-pilot who attacked the pilot was not killed.]
So there was no way really, it was kind of wagging like a dog’s tail. And this pilot or pilots, Israeli I assume, were able to, as they do with fighter planes, use the wing flaps and rotate, I mean, wiggle back and forth and stabilize the plane, and they landed in a Saudi airport.
Three, I would not be surprised if that pilot had some connection with Iran. I don’t know how. In the same way, I would not be surprised as the five would be, I don’t know what we’d call them, would-be attackers of the RAF U.S. base in England had ties to Iran.
But because that’s how Iran operates. And then they have deniability of culpability. Oh, we didn’t do that. That’s crazy. This guy was an Arab. He was Sunni. We have nothing to do with it. And then they brag, you know, in Farsi among themselves how they did this.
And we’ll see what happens, but I would be very careful if I was them. If this is traced … I’ll be candid. There’s an election coming up in Israel. It’s deadlocked. Has anybody noticed that of the missiles they’ve sent the last five months, most of them, half of them went to the UAE, over 5,000 of them, and Kuwait, less but substantial. A few on Qatar—their ally—Saudi Arabia, Oman, but not Israel. Not one on Israel.
And Benjamin Netanyahu‘s up for election, and he’s under pressure, and they’re promulgating this conspiracy theory that he knew about [the Oct. 7 massacre], and the UAE people told him, which we discussed was not true, I think.
So if this is traced, that they tried to … The Iranians used an agent to try to destroy a whole planeload, 737 Max, and then do so by ramming it into an iconic building, he’ll attack them. He’ll retaliate and he’ll get the entire support of the Israeli people and the United States, and Iran will be in big trouble because he had …
The Israelis have a different…I don’t like to use that word existential, but they’re in a life-and-death situation with no margin of error.
So the Americans, we have kind of a reluctance of targeted assassinations. Barack Obama did 500 of them, but he was Obama, so they weren’t gonna criticize him, even when he killed, I think, three American citizens.
But the Israelis have no compunction because it’s an existential fight. So that’s why they haven’t hit Israel, because the retaliation would take out the fourth and fifth tier of their leadership. But if this is traced to them, Israel, it’ll go after all of their grandees that are left running that country.
And it’ll be very interesting in the next few days to see what transpires, and it will ensure Netanyahu’s re-election.
If that happens.
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