Joe Rogan on Israel, Palestine, War and Choosing Sides

Partial transcript from JRE #525

When I see death and destruction, I don’t gravitate towards it. I don’t try to study and try to figure out exactly what’s going on so I can pick a side and have a viewpoint. I just get sad that there’s more of this bullshit in the world. I don’t feel like I’m going to fix it with my opinion.

You know, my number one thing about war, my number one thing – take out the context of the civilization they live in, take out the culture they live in and the language that they speak – these people don’t know each other. Why are they fighting to the death? They don’t even know each other. You’re launching missiles at people you’ve never met and they’re shooting back to you… It’s crazy! The fact that we still do it in 2014! I don’t give a fuck whose side you should be on or what it represents – it represents the fact that we’re still retarded. It represents the fact that we still can’t figure out how to overcome our differences without shooting missiles at each other or dropping bombs or setting up IEDs or shooting people at checkpoints or whatever it is, whatever method that they choose to show that, in someway we’re barbarians. That’s what it is. We’re barbarians with way better weapons. It’s fucking crazy.

I understand that sometimes there are acts of aggression and you need to protect people from people more barbaric than us… But, it makes me sad. That’s the only way I know to describe my feelings with anything that happens with war in the news… anytime violence breaks out, like with this Gaza/Palestine thing, I just get depressed at my core. I can’t read about it… I’m not going to pick a side. I’m not. My side is the human side. I’m on the human race side and the human race is not benefiting from this kind of shit.

I don’t know what it would take to cause Palestine and Israel to be cool with each other. I don’t understand it. I don’t know how you can hate each other for so long. How you could have so many different points of view. How you get a guy like Dennis Prager who says, “Palestine will not be happy unless Israel is dead. There is no negotiating…” Oh come on. They’re fucking people! They’re people! I don’t know how they’re communicating. I don’t know if they understand each other’s language. I don’t know how much of this is just deep-seated ancient shit that these people have just carried with them forever but my position on it is I’m not taking any sides. My position is the whole thing is completely fucked. The whole thing is fucked. It’s fucked that people still do this.

– Joe Rogan,
from The Joe Rogan Experience Podcast, episode 525 with Bert Kreischer

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