0:04Last 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.
0:28And 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.
0:39Here's what it looked like.
0:40Further rocket attacks were reported against Nahariya, and a minute...
0:56FUCKING OOF FUCK That wasn't an accident, it was intentional.
1:07The 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.
1:33That's all happening.
1:34It'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 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.
1:56I'm grateful. You're alive Can you we just played the tape of the moment where you were almost killed. Can you?
2:02Add context to that and describe what was happening.
2:07Well, yeah, you've seen the footage and we were incredibly lucky to come out of that situation alive.
2:14It was only purely by luck that the missile ended up, as you've see 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.
2:30It said that it was going to bomb every single bridge in south Lebanon. So the bridges across the Latani River, this connects the south of Lebanon to the rest of the country. So this was a hugely important news stories, this is essentially cutting off.
2:44You know, a whole swathe of the country.
2:48And they'd started the bombing the night before. It was a Thursday when we went to the bridge.
2:53On the Wednesday evening and into the early hours of the morning, they'd starting targeting the bridges. So...
2:59As a journalist and as a war correspondent, we were there to report on this huge news story.
3:06So we drove down, this is in Soor district or Tire district as other people will probably better know it, and as we approached the Lebanese army have a base there, just ahead of the bridge.
3:19So we approached them and we said to them, okay, is it safe to film?
3:23And they assured us it was perfectly safe for us 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, then they would get a message to the Lebanese army via UNIFIL, the United Nations peacekeepers.
3:40They don't have direct communication.
3:42So 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.
3:49There was you could barely even walk across it, let alone take a vehicle across it. So this was the the Kazmir bridge.
3:55This was the smaller bridge.
3:57So these kind of link villages and settlements in south Lebanon together.
4:03So, OK, we we approached the bridge. We set up our camera.
4:06We started filming.
4:08There were fighter jets roaring overhead.
4:10And again this isn't uncommon in the south of Lebanon but we knew that the fighter jets were flying 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 onto the bridge and we started filming so it wasn't live some people have said it was live it was what call it as live.
4:34So we were filming that.
4:42We arrived on the bridge.
4:44I was doing my piece of camera.
4:45He went to film some b-roll.
4:48He went to films in the hole where the bridge had been struck.
4:54We talk about luck and we talk about chance and we talk about God's will, but as he was filming, there was a gust of wind on the camera and the tripod was shaking.
5:05So I called him over and I I said Ali, please come, the camera is shaking, I need you to steady it.
5:12As he came over, I guess around 15 seconds later, then we heard this tremendous roar and the Israelis struck the bridge again.
5:22And I mean, the immediate aftermath, I mean I remember just thinking, God, we're dead.
5:28That was it.
5:29It was like this earth shattering sound.
5:34The explosion, it was an almighty blast. And then there was just dust and I couldn't really see anything.
5:41From the footage you can hear the soldiers maybe they started saying to me yalla yalla and I couldn't see anything so I was where where.
5:49And they took me into their barracks.
5:53They put tourniquets on my arms.
5:54I thought, again with the adrenaline rush, I just thought I've got some minor cuts.
6:01I couldn't really feel too much pain but then I looked where they put the tournique. There was blood coming down my arms, there was blood on my clothes but I was alive and it's again completely by chance we were alive. This was a very heavy munition that they'd use a GBU-38.
6:20Um missile that we believe was used it was fired from an f-16 fighter jet so after the lebanese army were uh you know they put these uh tourniquets on and gave us some water 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 i should know really that the paramedics and the emergency workers and the doctors and the nurses and all of the medical team that attended to us are the real heroes of this story.
6:54As we were traveling from the bridge to the hospital, I'm not sure the distance, maybe about 10 minutes, probably less than that, but they had the blue lights on.
7:02Now in any normal country anywhere in the world having the blue light on and being transported somewhere by ambulance, you would safe, right?
7:09Not in Lebanon, because the Israelis are now targeting medical staff.
7:15More than 50 have been killed.
7:17Hospitals, including the one we attended, the Jabal Amal hospital, part of that has been destroyed in Israeli airstrikes.
7:27And we've been working in the field for many years now.
7:30We're very experienced journalists and we take safety very seriously.
7:35We've spoken to a lot of medical workers and they told us that 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, instead of giving them protection it now places them at risk.
7:53So many of them have removed those logos from their emergency vehicles.
7:59Barely a day goes by now that when we don't hear of a medical worker being struck, the IDF, the Israeli Defense 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.
8:27Now, of course, they didn't back that with any kind of evidence.
8:29This is a statement that they've reissued again quite recently, but ... Yeah, we've been on the ground. We've been in the back of the ambulances. We have been in the hospitals.
8:38We met the civil defense workers. We meet the paramedics and we have been to these stations and all that you can see there are the kind of things that you would find in any hospital, in any medical station, in ambulance anywhere in the world. These are medical facilities there and they should be protected under international law.
8:57Of course, targeting these deliberately is a war crime but it is just one of many that we are seeing.
9:03Here on the ground in Lebanon.
9:05You're probably thinking about where to shop for Mother's Day.
9:07Cozy Earth, obviously the answer designed for moms who make houses feel like homes.
9:12Cozy earth creates comfort for the entire day between bedding, sleepwear, towels, lounge wear, and a lot more, you will find a great Mother's day gift there.
9:20You could wear the Cozy-Earth bamboo pajama set, which is hilarious, but also great.
9:26It's literally made out of bamboo, and it's a huge upgrade over what you're probably wearing.
9:30It's light, soft, doesn't overheat.
9:33Right now, Cozy Earth is doing something they never do, a buy one, get one deal. These pajamas are so good that they sold out during Christmas, they are back now.
9:41This deal goes from April 6th to the 12th of April.
9:45Visit CozyEarth.com today.
9:46Use the code TUCKERBOGO, that's Tucker B-O-G-O, to get these pajamas for you and a loved one. Plus, there's a 100 night sleep trial and a 10 year warranty, so there's zero risk.
9:56By the way, if you get a survey after, feel free to mention you heard about Cozy earth here.
10:01So you're a Westerner.
10:02It's by your accent, you sound Irish.
10:05Um, you live and work in Lebanon. How long have you been there?
10:11I came to Lebanon in October 2024.
10:15So this was during the period we call the 66 Day War.
10:18So it was a week or so after the assassination of Saeed Hassan Nasrallah.
10:24Former Secretary General of Hezbollah.
10:27So I came then, we quite often joke and say that if Steve Sweeney arrives in your country, then it's not good news.
10:35But I came during that period.
10:40Now, Lebanon, as you know, and I think I've heard you say Tucker, if I'm correct, it's a beautiful country.
10:47Oh, the most.
10:47Wonderful place.
10:49You know, you look at the rich culture, tradition and history of this country even in the south now which is the area coming under heavy bombardment.
10:58This is the area of Jesus.
11:01Kana is where Jesus performed what I believe was his first miracle, turning water into wine.
11:08There's the tomb of Shemun Ar-Saffah, this is Peter Simon, St. Peter, who I think for many Catholics they believe that he was the first pope.
11:18Now that's where some Christians believe that that's his burial site.
11:22Of course, this has been destroyed by Israel, they bombed it.
11:25This is an important site actually, Shemu Ar-saffah for both Muslims and Christians, so that's been bombed, but so I was...
11:32Wait a minute, let me have- Wait, let me ask you to stop for a second, and I'm ashamed by my ignorance as usual.
11:37The Israeli military bombed St.
11:39Peter's burial site?
11:43When? I did.
11:45This was back in 2024.
11:50This wasn't an accidental bombing.
11:53I think it's protected under world heritage law as well.
12:00And it's a very important site.
12:02Of course, the burial place of Saint Peter is also a holy site for Muslims. And what they did during that period was they brought an Israeli, what they call a researcher, the Israeli Defense Force, brought him in.
12:17And the purpose of that really was to, I guess, reinvent history.
12:24And the aim of it was to say, well, this is a Jewish holy site and this land belongs to Israel. This was the kind of narrative that they were trying to spin. That researcher, who was actually a very well-known settler activist, was killed during that time.
12:43We visited the site in early 2025 after the ceasefire period and missiles have gone through the domes, the whole area was destroyed, bullet marks across all of the buildings there, including the area of the shrine of Saint Peter himself.
13:04So this wasn't accidentally targeted, it wasn't kind of collateral damage, This was a deliberately targeted attack.
13:13On the tomb of Saint Peter.
13:15It's not the only church or religious building that has been attacked, of course. We were in a place called Derdegaia and this is a Greek Catholic church and again that was destroyed during the 66 day war.
13:33They killed eight people that had taken shelter inside there.
13:36A lot of those were emergency workers, the civil defense team, and they'd taken shelter there and they bombed it to oblivion.
13:43It was completely destroyed.
13:46And again in Yaroun, this is another border town and there are two buildings there.
13:54There's the Imam Ali Mosque, which is a very well-known mosque in the south of Lebanon, but there was also the Church of St George.
14:02And St George, of course, the patron saint of England, and this was a Catholic Church and they're very close by each other.
14:09And you may have seen the footage circulating on social media, but there's footage of an Israeli soldier, I guess, with a body cam or something, a helmet cam, destroying the statue there to St. George. But both of those were completely destroyed.
14:27So what's interesting is that...
14:30Hezbollah is, and I'm not defending Hezballah, 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 20 years.
14:42And has Hezbalah blown up Christian holy sites?
14:45Has Hezbolah targeted ambulances?
14:49I mean, maybe they have.
14:50You live there. You tell me.
14:51No, they haven't.
14:53In fact, the opposite.
14:55And again, there's plenty of footage of this that people can check for themselves online.
15:02But Hezbollah was in fact protecting the Christian churches and protecting these kind of symbolic areas of religious importance to Christians.
15:13There's footage of them going into churches and cleaning up and tidying up and standing around protecting the Christian faith.
15:19If you listen to the speeches of Hassan Nasrallah, again, he said the Hezbollah are the main defenders of the Christian faith in Lebanon.
15:29So no, they're not destroying ambulances, they are not destroying churches, they are destroying mosques, they aren't destroying people's homes, but Israel is and it's doing it with American and Western supplied weapons as well.
15:42And it's happening without anybody, pretty much anybody in the United States even noticing.
15:49I 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.
16:06Do you believe, was that one of the planes that had flown over you?
16:10Do you think it was targeting you?
16:15Undoubtedly, we believe it was targeting us.
16:18There could be no other explanation for what happened now.
16:22Of course, because people have asked this question, why were you on the bridge and were you deliberately targeted?
16:29And we're unequivocal about that.
16:31This 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 for the last two years.
16:45So our vehicle is very well known in the south of Lebanon.
16:49We were in a clearly identified press vehicle.
16:52We had, as you can see in the footage, we had our press jackets on.
16:56Israel has the most advanced military technology anywhere in the world. It has the more advanced surveillance technology anywhere in the World. It knows everything that happens in the South of Lebanon.
17:07It knows every vehicle.
17:08It knows every number plate.
17:10It reads our messages.
17:11It listens to our conversations.
17:14This is why we say it was deliberate, because there's no doubt that they knew we were there.
17:19And the other issue, as has been raised by the Russian Foreign Ministry, Maria Zaharova, said that this can't have been accidental.
17:25There was no military objective in targeting that bridge.
17:28It was already destroyed.
17:30So we believe it was a deliberate assassination attempt.
17:33Absolutely.
17:34And it's only by luck, really.
17:36That we survived.
17:37There was a lot going in our favor that day.
17:40Let's say, had the missile not entered the hole in the bridge, had it exploded on the bridge...
17:45And 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 have even been bodies to recover. We'd have just been incinerated. These are incredibly powerful munitions that they were using.
18:04And 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.
18:12You go into the grocery store and there are endless snacks and protein bars.
18:18Paleo Valley Superfood bars are, we think, the best.
18:21Most nutrition bars seem healthy, but then you read the labels and it turns out they're packed with all kinds of bizarre stuff.
18:27Processed syrups, ingredients you can't pronounce.
18:30They're essentially candy, masked by marketers pretending they're healthy.
18:35I've eaten a lot of them, I would know. Paleo Valley Superfood bars are different though.
18:39Paleo Valley makes its products with real ingredients like organic fruits, vegetables, nuts, seeds, or no seed oils, soy, gluten, other weird additives, and you know when you finish eating one because you're not bloated and you feel good.
18:54And that is the measure.
18:56These bars are sweet, filling genuinely good tasting.
19:00Flavors include red velvet, apple cinnamon, chocolate chip, plenty more. They're all great.
19:04If you're trying to clean up your die but need something convenient to grab these are a solid option.
19:10Give them a try at paleovalley.com, use code TUCKER at checkout for 20% off your first order.
19:15Paleovally.com code TuckER, 20% of your first purchase.
19:20So what, I mean, because you are a Westerner, you do have a certain advantage. I mean you're an English speaking Westerna from the British Isles and you're on television.
19:29So you're the subject of an assassination attempt by a supposedly Western government, one that's armed by Western governments.
19:36What's your recourse?
19:37What do you do after they try and kill you, but they fail?
19:41Well, that's a very good question.
19:43Obviously, I am an English-speaking white westerner, which gives me a certain advantage, a certain privilege.
19:50I 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.
19:59Fatima Fatuni, Ali Shuaib and Mohammed Fatuni were killed in a targeted strike by Israelis just after they've been reporting.
20:09In 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 um i work for russian state television um which of course means that the my my own government the british government and don't like me.
20:27In fact, they have already, instead of supporting me, they've been put, they've persecuted me.
20:32I was detained on a family visit last July at Heathrow airport.
20:39I was met by counter-terror police off the airplane.
20:43They took me away for interrogation.
20:45They 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've reported from Yemen, Hashdol Shabi, and my work in in Donbass.
21:04I spent two years in the field in Donbas on the Russian side so they were very interested in that.
21:10And they're still now currently investigating me for potential terrorist activity based on my journalism.
21:20So I don't expect anything from them and some friends of mine at Declassified UK, British media organization, well they inquired, they asked the British government for comment after this assassination attempt, and they just simply said...
21:39Summarizing here, paraphrasing that they said something along the lines of the Foreign Secretary has given Britain's position on the Middle East in a statement to the Commons on Tuesday.
21:52That was all they said.
21:53They didn't address the specifics of my case.
21:56They haven't commented on it.
21:57They haven't offered any kind of support whatsoever.
21:59Even even the British Embassy here in Lebanon hasn't contacted me. The only support that I've had, I've had lots of you know, love and well wishes from individuals and organizations across the world for which we're, you know we're incredibly grateful and thankful for.
22:15But the only people, the only country that's actually given me strong and solid support has been Russia.
22:21Are you a British passport holder?
22:23Ambassador.
22:24I'm a British Passport holder, yes.
22:26So you're a- 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?
22:40Well, 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.
22:51So, you know, somewhere along that chain, I mean, we know it was an F-16 and a GBU-38 made American supplied, but Britain is well involved in that supply chain.
23:01So 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.
23:12How does that, I don't understand since both Britain and the United States fought against the Nazis and lost hundreds of thousands of their own men doing it.
23:22I don't really see where the moral culpability is here.
23:26Why would Britain and the Unites States have some duty to become subjects of the Israeli government?
23:33Where does that come from?
23:37Well, I mean, there's a long history of, you know, the two biggest supporters of Israel have traditionally been the United States and Britain.
23:46And, you can trace this back to the formation of the state of Israel.
23:49Now, of course, they have their own interests in the region.
23:53They 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.
24:03The reason that we reported on the Which is, is.
24:05What you're seeing now is the fourth expulsion of 1.2 million Lebanese people that have been forced from their land, forced from there homes and they're now forcibly displaced. We describe this in Lebanon, we talk about it as an ethnic cleansing operation on a scale far larger than the Nakba.
24:28That's the of course the hundreds of thousands of Palestinians that were forced from their homes on the creation of the state of Israel.
24:36So the situation here is...
24:39It's simply astonishing, and you know, 370,000 of those forcibly displaced to children.
24:47So, but behind that is this attempt by Israel to grab that land.
24:51Now, not only are they forcing people out of that area south of the Letarni River, they've extended that now to south of Zirani River, so we're talking some 40 kilometers from the Israeli border that they've pushed people out that area.
25:04Now, The Israelis have been very open.
25:09Israel Katz, the Defense Secretary, has said that we want the land.
25:12We're going to, you know, they've said that they want to create a security buffer zone or whatever terminology they used to describe it, but these plans have been long in the making. You go back in history and Israel has invaded and tried to take that area, they think it's their biblical right.
25:27We're talking about the Greater Israel Project, which I know you know fall well about after your conversation with Ambassador Huckabee.
25:35And it kind of reappears in different guises over the years.
25:40The most latest was the Trump economic zone.
25:43This was announced back in, I think, August last year.
25:47Around that time, Tom Barrack, the US envoy, arrived here in Lebanon.
25:53And you might remember this.
25:58Soundbite 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.
26:06And he was condemned for, you know, this was seen as an incredibly racist comment to make towards Lebanese journalists who were doing their job in the field, holding people to account, questioning him.
26:18But 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.
26:27Now it is dressed up.
26:28This is going to be a regeneration project.
26:32We're going to create new homes.
26:34We are going create jobs, we're going to create roads, we are going to create infrastructure, we going to make the area safe.
26:40But it meant that people that have lived on this land for generations, these are their homes.
26:45These are not just, you know, dots on a map.
26:48These are homes where people have lived on that land for generations are going to be turfed out.
26:54And nobody really paid attention to it at the time. Of course, we did as journalists on the ground.
27:00And you know people talk about They say that the Gaza model is now coming to Lebanon.
27:06They've spoken about it in terms, I think Smotrich said, we're going to turn Dahir, the southern suburbs of Beirut, into Khan Yunis.
27:14And then they've used Beit Hanun and Raffa.
27:17Israel Kat said that they're going to destroy all of these villages that they call front line villages.
27:21And I can tell you now, we've been here for two years.
27:24Those villages are largely already destroyed.
27:27The south of Lebanon already looks like Gaza, whole villages completely lie in ruins, no reconstruction plan.
27:35And over the last 15 months, we've seen Israel break that ceasefire.
27:39And we call about talk about a ceasefire from November 2024, but there was never a cease fire.
27:44You can't have a cease-fire when only one side stops firing.
27:49And okay, 15,000, more than 15, 000 violations over the past 15 months. And this has included the rigging and destroying of homes, the drone strikes, targeted assassinations, the use of chemical spray to destroy crops.
28:05We witnessed and filmed all this, the use of white phosphorus.
28:09There's a place called Bleda, 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.
28:27These are olive grove that are older than the state of Israel.
28:30So this isn't something new.
28:33What we're seeing now, the escalation on March the 2nd has been going on for a very, very long time. Now, you asked me why Britain and the United States would support that. Well, they use Israel as their kind of...
28:44Proxy force in the area they refer to as the Middle East. We call it West Asia here and they use it to to grab the land.
28:54The 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 wealth and they will extract the resources and use it for their own gain.
29:09And of course they want strategic control across the whole of the region.
29:12We've seen that with what happened in Syria.
29:16We can see now with the bombing of of Iran.
29:20We can see what happened in Gaza.
29:23All of these have taken place, not just with the connivance of the United States and Britain, but with that active involvement.
29:30So this is the kind of, this is what we're happening now, you can see signs.
29:35Along the airport road here in Beirut that they say made it made in the United States, made in USA and that's how they see the bombs that are falling on them here.
29:45They're made in the united states, they're made in Britain and they're the root cause of the death and destruction that's taking place across this region.
29:55Israel fires the bullets but the guns well and truly loaded by Britain and the United States.
30:00So what's in your toothpaste?
30:01If you're using the brand you grew up with, you probably don't want to know. The ingredients likely include fluoride, something called SLS, glycerin, foaming agents.
30:09It's a chemical cocktail.
30:12Van Man's toothpaste is different.
30:14Their miracle tooth powder is changing everything, and people are ditching traditional toothpaste filled with chemicals by the thousands.
30:22Van Man toothpaste uses ingredients with the same mineral structure as your teeth.
30:26That re-mineralizes them and strengthens your enamel naturally.
30:29No fluoride at all, and totally edible. You could put it on toast, not that you'd want to, but you could.
30:36People who use it report wetter teeth, less plaque, they wake up without that gross film on their gums, and here's the amazing part, vivid dreams are back.
30:44You dream clearly when you stop coating your mouth in Florida every night. Did you know that?
30:48Pretty amazing.
30:49Tells you a lot.
30:50So make the switch.
30:51Visit vanman.shop slash Tucker. Use the code Tucker for 15% off your first order.
30:57Vanman dot shop slash Tucker, use the code tucker, 15% Off.
31:02Vanman, real ingredients, zero exceptions.
31:06Well, since you mentioned, and 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 a thousand years old, and of course, they're, right, they're central to the ancient economy of the Levant, but they're also beautiful.
31:24Yeah. 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 actually are there.
31:31Why would the Israeli government chainsaw or bulldoze olive trees.
31:38That seems evil to me.
31:40I don't understand the explanation for it.
31:43Well, that's the only way to look at it. Of course, it's evil, but I think 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.
31:58It's a symbol of...
32:01Lebanese cultural heritage, identity, and the people here are very, very connected to their land.
32:07They're deeply connected to to their land. And you know, this is the lifeblood, not just for the the south of Lebanon, where you know the farmers will will harvest their olive groves.
32:18Tobacco is a big, a huge crop here, but this is a lifebloody for all of Lebanon.
32:23Now if you can disconnect people from their land and their culture, then of course 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 is in in lebanon they're building They want to.
33:00That's their aim.
33:02Yeah. I mean, you look at the Greater Israel Project itself.
33:05Now, I mentioned Yahrun earlier. This is the place where the mosque and the church were destroyed.
33:13Now, 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 Yahroun and they planted trees.
33:27And the message was, this, 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.
33:41Now, you know, you look back a few years ago, and this could have been seen as a conspiracy theory or a fringe kind of movement, but this is now right at the heart of the Israeli government.
33:51Smotrich and Ben-Gavir are advocates of the Greater Israel Project.
33:55Benjamin Netanyahu himself is a supporter of the Greater Israel Project. This isn't kind of like a fantasy. This is happening now.
34:03It's unfolding in real time in front of our very eyes.
34:08So they have some rabbis in Israel that justify this religiously as well.
34:16They will say that this is the land that belongs to them according to Holy Scripture.
34:22And this is why we're seeing this, this whole scale destruction.
34:25That's what it was around over the last 15 months.
34:28They say it was about destroying Hezbollah, but it's not, it's not the, you're seeing whole kind of settlements lying under rubble. My beloved is from a village in, in the South and her entire village has pretty much been reduced to rubble, her family home rebuilt, destroyed, rebuilt, destroyed so many times.
34:50And this is.
34:51You know, very common for the people in that part of the world.
34:57And again, Israel has occupied Lebanon and after the ceasefire in November 2024, it built five military bases inside Lebanese sovereign territory.
35:08We filmed them and rather than scaling them back, Israel was expanding the construction of those military posts illegally.
35:17In breach of UN resolution 1701, in breach of international law, the Lebanese government asked them to leave Lebanese sovereign territory, and of course they just simply refused and they pushed further and further into Lebanese Sovereign Territory.
35:32Now the interesting thing, and I don't know whether your viewers will be aware of this, Um.
35:37And many people don't know, but there isn't really an official border between Israel and Lebanon. There's no officially agreed border.
35:45We have the Blue Line, which was established by the United Nations.
35:49This was after Israel was forced out in 2000, and this line is supposed to be the demarcation point that Israel is not supposed to encroach further across this line.
36:03So Israel sees a lot of this land as belonging, there was the 1923 mandate line when it was the British mandate of Palestine.
36:13There was a kind of border drawn up then which Israel inhabited in 1948 but has never really agreed to.
36:19The armistice in 1949.
36:22Didn't again agree those borders.
36:26So Israel sees fit to push forward at will and it's done so with total impunity of course.
36:34There's no kind of international outcry about the destruction of these villages and settlements or the use of chemical weapons, the use of white phosphorus or the assassination of individuals in drone strikes or the killing of paramedics, the murder of journalists, all of these things have been happening.
36:53For many, many years.
36:54The world is maybe paying more attention to it now.
36:58We've had the western journalists arriving in the country since March the 2nd, of course.
37:03The major news networks have arrived and they're kind of surprised at what they're seeing. They're seeing this for the first time.
37:09But this has been going on for a very, very long time.
37:12And I say this is a bit of a failing, I would say, of the...
37:14Major media organizations, because had they been on the ground in Lebanon for the past 15 months, they would have seen this unfolding.
37:22And you know, maybe the situation would be very different from what it is now, as it is, they weren't there.
37:28And the Lebanese journalists were reporting the people that live on that land were crying for help and nobody was listening.
37:38I 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.
37:49You've clearly been a journalist a long time.
37:51You look over 40, so probably a long-time.
37:54How did you wind up working for Russian news agencies?
37:59Like, why aren't you a BBC reporter?
38:01What was your path?
38:03The MI5 would never claim to work with me.
38:06No, they weren't!
38:08There's no chance, no chance.
38:11I mean, I wouldn't work for the BBC on a personal level.
38:14We've met some BBC journalists here and they've been very pleasant, very nice and I've had all the journalists from the major networks, there's individual journalists, I have no problem with them.
38:25How I ended up working for RT, 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.
38:39When the Ukraine conflict started, um the special military operation.
38:45I 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.
38:54I ended up in Lvov.
38:56The Ukrainians tried to um to kidnap me and I managed to make my escape from from there back out um back out through Poland and then to Germany.
39:05Wait, I'm going to ask you to pause, why did they do that?
39:09Why did they try to kidnap you, the Ukrainians?
39:12Well, simply because I was a journalist that wasn't towing their narrative, and the Ukraine conflict is the most propagandized war in history, in my view.
39:26I mean, you look at what happened in even the Iraq war, there was kind of that space within the media field to criticize your government's policy.
39:34When it came to Ukraine, that window or that gap narrowed to the point where...
39:41It 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.
39:52So if you were going there to actually do some proper journalism, and I say that because, you know, with all due respect to those organizations, the BBC, CNN, Sky News, uh you know the the times the telegraph channel for they were doing these kind of um 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 Lvov and repeat the line, repeat the line, but they weren't actually seeing what was the reality on the ground.
40:28They were just stenographers essentially, these kind of copy and paste reports, and It reached kind of insane levels in Britain.
40:39I'm sure it was the same with the United States, but Britain was, they started demonizing Vladimir Putin.
40:45One of the craziest reports I saw was that Vladimir Putin has 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 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.
41:18It was impossible.
41:19The only way to do that was to go to Russia and work for RT.
41:25We have one of our logos, Question More, and that's what we do.
41:30I always say, question more, question us. That's the role of a journalist. So.
41:34I ended up working for RT, I ended up working two years in Donbass on the Russian side, and I was seeing something completely different from the narrative that was being played out in the West.
41:46I was seeing war crimes committed daily by the Ukrainians against a civilian population.
41:51When I was there, they called it Donetsk Roulette.
41:54You never know when a missile might strike you.
41:57And I was seeing attacks on marketplaces, for example.
42:0027 people killed body parts everywhere.
42:04These were like babushkas, dadushkas. Old men, old women, the poorest people in that part of the city.
42:13Um your homemade fruit and vegetables from from their home just obliterated you know arms and legs uh 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 um i gave testimony of of what i'd seen the failures of Minsk 1 and Minsk 2 and the path to peace.
42:40What we're seeing, and what I always say, is what we were seeing in that part in Donbass, is the same playbook that we're saying in Gaza, the same playbook here in Lebanon.
42:54These 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.
43:06They can't fight back.
43:11They don't have the arms.
43:12They don t have the weapons.
43:14The people of Gaza, the people of Lebanon, they weren't sent high marks or storm shadows or these advanced weapons.
43:23These were sent to their oppressors to massacre them.
43:27This is what's happening and it's the very same forces.
43:30In Donbas, it was very simple for me as a journalist.
43:34It was the people that wanted peace, the people who wanted to be able to speak their own language, Russian, people that want to be able to practice their own culture and traditions, if they identified as Russian, and pretty much that was it.
43:50You could put it really as simply as that.
43:53But then...
43:54And the Ukrainian government decided to wage a war against its own people.
43:59I know for some this went back to the start of the SMO, but this has a much, much longer history, starting way back in 2014, the Maidan coup.
44:09You know, all of these things people forget about now.
44:12Conveniently, including the media.
44:14The media actually made them forget about it because, you know, one day there was a neo-Nazi problem in Ukraine.
44:20You know, the Azov and the right sector were carrying out these horrific actions, these horrific killings.
44:27They were terrorizing the people.
44:29And the next day, all of a sudden, Ukraine is a paragon of liberal democracy.
44:36It's incredible.
44:38But people aren't getting the truth.
44:39So 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.
44:49Like 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.
44:58And, you know, I have to say with Russia today, with RT...
45:02I have complete freedom to report exactly what I want and nobody tells me what to say, nobody tells where I can film, nobody tells who I can speak to, who I should speak to.
45:14I have total journalistic freedom and I'm very happy working for RT.
45:19I'm proud to work for RT And we always say that here on the ground, because, you know, obviously, I came.
45:28Kind of sprung into the into the limelight after what happened to me and um but it's not about me journalists should never become the story unwittingly um i did but we always say that you know the our job is to raise the voices of the people of the of this land and we always say that our mic is a tribune for the people and it will continue to be a tribume for the as long as we remain in the field.
45:53It must be such a strange experience for you since you've been in the British media for a long time, conventional media, a newspaper in a country that reads newspapers famously.
46:05All 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.
46:19I mean, what is that as someone who I assume you were raised in the UK?
46:24Yeah. What is that like?
46:29Well, the media field in Britain, and I think it's not just in Britain but if you look at the Western countries, it's very concentrated, it is owned by a very small group of people who own and control the media. They control what you say, they control the narrative.
46:49So, but I think that the change was that the owners of these media organizations are now more and more forcefully pushing their view and their narrative.
47:00And you see it permeating through every word that's spoken on British television.
47:07You see it written in every single word in every newspaper.
47:12There's no divergence.
47:14They're all uniform.
47:16So, you know, of course, Russia, people in the West think that Russia is some kind of...
47:22Authoritarian dictatorship that we're living under the jackpot of Vladimir Putin.
47:27But you've been to Moscow, you know anything but the truth. It couldn't be further from the truth, you see people, I mean, there are very educated people, they are rich again.
47:40We were talking about Lebanon earlier, having this rich culture and history.
47:44I 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 the first human being in space, Meddileyev, the founder of the table of the elements, these huge figures in the field of science, of literature, of art, of music.
48:13And 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 of 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 you know the same the same kind of criticisms you hear in every country anywhere in the world.
48:43They'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 president, and they remember it was a very, very dark time in the country.
48:59And after the collapse of the Soviet Union, up until Vladimir Putin came to power, there wasn't really that kind of national stability.
49:07I mean, Russia is obviously a huge country, 11 time zones, I think it is. So to hold it together is incredibly difficult.
49:14But Vladimir Putin bought 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.
49:28These good relations with other countries on the world stage.
49:32It's not isolated by any stretch of the imagination.
49:35It is only isolated if you think the world is the western powers.
49:40So there is this freedom to criticize, but of course it's hugely popular. And, you know, I think people in the West...
49:50Find that very difficult to understand just how popular Putin is in Russia.
49:59Everything you're saying is true.
50:00I've seen it multiple times.
50:02Even, for example, RT is banned in the United States, it's banned in Europe.
50:10In Russia, you've probably seen, but Vladimir Putin holds a, every year he holds a Q&A for journalists, for members of the public.
50:17Every year the BBC is there.
50:19Steve Rosenberg asks a question, he tries to get a gotcha every year. He fails every year, but he keeps giving it a go.
50:27But the BBC is allowed to operate freely inside inside Russia. I couldn't do the same in Britain. They're trying to arrest me They would they would arrest you about freedom of press if you tried if you practiced what you're doing now in your home country Yes.
50:44If I took an RT microphone into London and started trying to interview people, or if I stood in front of a camera with an RT microphone and started to give a report, I would be arrested.
50:58We're banned.
51:00We're treated as, I don't know, like foreign agents.
51:04So it would be unlawful for us to work there.
51:07We could be jailed, sanctioned, a whole host of...
51:10Things can happen. So we don't have that freedom to operate inside Britain.
51:15I always, you know, this is something that always amazes me because you know the Russian state television was banned in Europe and America because you know we're propagandists or whatever, the Kremlin media machine or you know these kind of tired old tropes that we hear, which is deeply rooted in Russophobia, but what they're really saying is that the people of Europe and and America are stupid.
51:40You know, people are able to disseminate facts from fiction, they're able to watch a news report and decide whether it's propaganda or whether it is true. They can make that decision themselves and they should be able to make that decisions themselves in a free and democratic country that operates with freedom of speech and freedom of the press.
52:02So, you know, it always strikes me as quite bizarre that they keep saying, well, we uphold freedom of the press.
52:09Well, in fact, the European Union has sanctioned a journalist, someone I knew.
52:15No, Hussain Dourou, who is a journalist for Red Media.
52:19They sanctioned him because of his work.
52:23They said he's closed.
52:24I think they accused him of something to do with the Russian state, but it was because of is reporting on.
52:29On Palestine, so there's no way that they uphold freedom of the press.
52:33I myself am being investigated for potential terrorist activities based on my journalism, nothing else.
52:40That's it for my journalistic reports.
52:44So where's the press freedom?
52:47Can I walk into um 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 with band it's an absurdity it is but press freedom is alive and kicking And it's also a little bit bewildering.
53:08It'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.
53:18Why would it be illegal for a Britain to criticize Israel?
53:22What 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.
53:30That's exact, and many others, 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, Menachem Begin.
53:41So actually, Israel owes a great debt to the UK, which is responsible for its formation in the first place, as you know.
53:49So why in the world would British citizens be banned from criticizing Israel?
53:54They owe nothing to Israel.
53:55What is this?
53:59Well, it's a bizarre dystopian situation.
54:04You've probably seen, but in Britain, I guess maybe six months ago, the government moved to ban a group called Palestine Action.
54:13And these were protesters that were throwing paint at airplanes or whatever.
54:17They were trying to stop a genocide.
54:20And Britain prescribed it as a terrorist organization, I think against all the legal advice that they were given. They ignored that and they ahead.
54:27And it became illegal to even support or hold up placards saying I support Palestine action.
54:33So they were arresting like 80, 90 year old women.
54:37They were dragging them away and charging them as terrorists under terrorism offenses.
54:45So I mean Britain has obviously it's invested in.
54:49Israel heavily invested in Israel clearly because 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 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.
55:05They gave away the land that belonged to the people indigenous to that land.
55:09So I think, you know, they talk about this historical debt owed to Israel.
55:14Now, of course, you can go to Germany and some of the European countries, and of course they talk of the Holocaust, and they bear a heavy burden and responsibility for that, or they feel that.
55:25And again, there's this kind of historical debt that they feel.
55:29But in Britain now, it's kind of moved way beyond that.
55:34And like you said, they were in the early days in the formation of the state of Israel, they were attacking Brits, killing Brits blowing up hotels.
55:45So this kind of unraveled support where you can't even criticize Israel, there's no space.
55:53Any criticism of Israel is now deemed either antisemitic, an act of terror, unlawful, and it means that you're ostracized from society, 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, what they want to gain out of the region. So it acts as this kind of Anglo-imperialist outpost and it will back Israel militarily to the hilt.
56:28It will back them politically to the hill. But of course, they're using it to strategically control the entire of the Middle East. I mean this is their historical myth.
56:39I mean, everything that happens in this region is because of the historical mess of the British and the French, you know, back in the time of the Sykes-Picot, carving up of that part of the world, just arbitrarily drawing lines, okay, you can have this part, you can have that part.
56:58And you know the legacy of that lives on today, which is in fact why as a British journalist, I'd say, of Irish origin.
57:07You know, certainly as a Western journalist, I have a historical debt to the people of this land because of what my country has inflicted upon them. And I see that as part of my duty 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 Lebanon and in other countries and for every bomb that falls 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, a bomb is supplied by Britain.
57:48Israel just simply fires the bullets that they're supplied and it's been carrying out these actions with the support and complicity of Britain and the United States and other Western countries.
57:59Do 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?
58:09They should do.
58:10They should feel a great sense of shame.
58:13But now, I don't know 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.
58:26But they all fall in line with the same narrative.
58:29Even the journalists that are coming here, they'll describe...
58:32Dahir, which is the southern suburbs of Beirut, that entire area has been evacuated.
58:36We're talking an area between 500 and 800,000 people.
58:40Mm.
58:41And that whole area has been evacuated.
58:43It's bombed every single day without fail.
58:46Fighter jets roaring overhead, drones overhead, civilian buildings being destroyed. Now for them, this is the southern suburbs of Beirut.
58:53They call it a Hezbollah stronghold.
58:56Now, okay, that use of language is not an accident.
59:00It is deliberate.
59:01They call it Hezbullah stronghold because it justifies the bombing of that area. But this isn't a Hezbollah stronghold.
59:09This is where we live.
59:11These 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.
59:22Yeah, the Western media play a very pernicious role, in fact, in what I believe is this manufacturing of consent.
59:31Because outside of that, Tahir is just a place on a map that gets bombed.
59:35Lebanon is a war zone.
59:37That's how they describe it.
59:38Lebanon isn't a warzone, as we already discussed. Lebanon is as a land of rich culture, rich tradition, rich history, full of the most amazing people you could ever meet anywhere in the world.
59:50The same with the south of Lebanon, they say, well, all these areas south of the Latani.
59:55They're all Hezbollah supporters.
59:57I mean, of course there's strong support for Hezbollah in those areas because they see them as the only organization that is standing up and fighting against Israel, that is defending their land, their territory.
60:11Hezballah was only born in the mid-1980s.
60:16Now, the people of...
60:18Lebanon don't have like a devolution or a fantasy of, you know, or a predisposed to using weapons and guns.
60:26You know, it's not that they enjoy going around shooting people.
60:30They were formed as an armed militia exactly to defend their land, the same as in Ireland, the same as, in fact, you can pick any country that's come under attack from um you know from the from the western powers from Israel from their neighbors yeah that's the origins of these organizations but to call it Hezbollah land which is some of the description that we're we're finding this is as we said the land that Jesus walked in it's a land rich um in culture and history, but the Western journalists are kind of seeing it very much, or speaking about it, or writing about it very, much in those terms.
61:08We hear the same kind of, it's like these dog-whistled, frigger words, you know, ran back.
61:13The Iranian-backed militia, the Hezbollah strongholds, all these kind of things, the terminology that they use, and it's absolutely deliberate to justify Israel bombing those lands.
61:28That's all it is.
61:30So, 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 kind of lines or you don't speak them into a camera now.
61:43And Noam Chomsky, who back in, I guess, the 90s was interviewing a British journalist, Andrew Martin, 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.
62:03I think that's it.
62:06It's true, right?
62:07I 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.
62:12Um, so whether they're embarrassed or not, I don't know.
62:16And to be honest, I didn't care very much.
62:18They may not be capable of it.
62:20So my my last question you don't like talking about yourself, but is about you So Israel tried to assassinate you they failed Just barely I Can't imagine interviews like this make them Less inclined to assassinating you to try again.
62:37Are you gonna stay in Lebanon?
62:41Absolutely.
62:43100% without doubt.
62:44I'll stay in Lebanon.
62:45Lebanon is my home.
62:48My beloved is here in Lebanon, my life is here in there. I always say look, Lebanon isn't my country but Lebanon and the Lebanese people belong in my heart.
62:59And yeah, I'll forever be in the service of the Lebanese people.
63:05They've been good enough to host me in their country.
63:08And I hope that my journalism does them justice and I hope my presence does them just as I always remember.
63:15And it's always important to remember that I'm a guest in this land.
63:20So no, I have no intention of leaving. I have no intention to stop reporting.
63:24We've already been back to the front line. And just two days after the attack, we made sure that we went out because we're not going to be silenced.
63:32And if they think that we're going to be leaving the field, then...
63:37They're very much mistaken.
63:39What a remarkable conversation.
63:41It is one of the great countries and most beautiful countries in the world.
63:45Top five in my opinion, top three.
63:47So I'm grateful you're there to chronicle what's being done to it in our name with our weapons.
63:52It's really evil.
63:54So anyway, Steve Sweeney, thank you very much for doing this.
63:56I appreciate it.
63:58A pleasure, thank you.
Read the essay version →