Daily Wire co-founder Jeremy Boreing responded to criticism of his colleague Ben Shapiro by Egyptian comedian Bassem Youssef on Piers Morgan’s show “Uncensored” Tuesday night.
Before Boreing came on for a scheduled segment to talk with Morgan about The Daily Wire’s new kids entertainment company Bentkey, Morgan discussed the Israel-Hamas war with Youssef, who used the opportunity to attack Shapiro. Youssef sardonically said he “agrees with Shapiro” in order to avoid being labeled a “terrorist sympathizer,” before falsely accusing the Daily Wire host of wanting Israel to kill everyone in the Gaza Strip.
“His solution was … for Israel to annex Gaza and to kill as many sons of b*tches as possible to make sure that this will never happen again,” Youssef said before falsely claiming that Israel killed around 500 people in an airstrike on a hospital, a claim that was spread by Hamas but has since been debunked.
“So my question to Ben Shapiro is how many more sons of b*tches do we have to kill before he is happy?”
Morgan pushed back on Youssef’s accusations against Shapiro, saying the comedian was “conflating different interviews” he had with Shapiro and taking the Daily Wire host’s comments out of context. The Talk TV host then played Youssef a clip of what Shapiro actually said on his show, in which he called for Israel to take out Hamas terrorists, not civilians in the Gaza Strip.
Morgan then brought on Boreing, who was listening to Youssef’s segment and gave him a chance to respond to the Egyptian comedian.
“Well, first of all, I make it a point not to speak for Ben Shapiro. He’s got 20 IQ points on me and speaks for a living professionally, so he’s much better prepared to defend himself,” Boreing began. “But as his business partner, as his best friend, I do feel like I have to respond to the things that Bassem was just saying.”
Boreing then laid out his and Shapiro’s views of the war and what they believe is an appropriate response to the October 7 terrorist attack on Israel.
“First of all, the question of how many sons of b*tches have to be killed to end this conflict, I suppose that the answer is: as many of them as it takes,” The Daily Wire co-founder said. “That doesn’t mean that I or Ben or any decent person in their right mind is happy with the killing of civilians. I posted at the very beginning of this conflict that a woman or a child blown apart in Gaza is just as tragic as a Jewish baby killed in one of the settlements. That doesn’t mean that Israel’s actions or the actions of Hamas are morally equivalent.”
“The tragedy is the tragedy, but the moral equivalency is nonsense,” he continued. “If you entered Israel with the express purpose of targeting and murdering civilians with your own hands in cold blood, that is not comparable to Israel bombing targets in the Gaza Strip and killing civilians as a terrible, tragic consequence.”
“War is terrible. War is an awful thing,” Boreing asserted. “That’s why decent people do not lightly engage in war, and why Hamas should not have incited this war. You know, we can talk about the history of the Israeli conflict. I’m not a professional political commentator. I’m a CEO, I’m a screenwriter, and I’m certainly not Ben Shapiro. I’m not here to talk about the history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but we all saw what happened on October 7, and the idea that Israel was not going to react severely to that, or that Israel should not react severely to that is ludicrous.”
“The idea that Ben Shapiro should be moderating his voice, that Ben Shapiro should be – what, saying what? ‘No, Israel should not respond in this situation.’ That’s nonsense.”
Morgan asked Boreing what he thinks a “proportionate response” would be to the atrocities committed against the Israelis by Hamas, and Boreing responded by saying, “No moral person could possibly call for a proportionate response.”
“Well first of all I don’t know what a proportionate response is or why we would want it. I suppose a proportionate response would be for 3,000 Israelis to go through the fence, gun down innocent Palestinian women and children, burn their bodies, burn them alive, take hostages, rape their women,” he said. “No one wants a proportionate response. No moral person could possibly call for a proportionate response.”
“The purpose of war is to defeat your enemy,” he continued. “The West has, in my lifetime, forgotten the purpose of War because the true cost of war is so terrible. The last time the West engaged in war and won it was World War II, and they did it through incredible brutality. They did it by bringing their enemies to heel. That’s not a thing to ‘rah-rah’ about, that’s not a thing to look forward to. As I said, all decent people should avoid war. But I think the sort of lie of the post-World War II, the post-war consensus lie is that somehow war in which you kill a bunch of people and don’t secure victory is morally superior to war where you do secure victory.”
“I would say that the only way to morally justify a war is to win it,” Boreing added. “Otherwise, your very argument that brought you into the war — ‘this enemy must be defeated’ — ends up being proven a lie. I mean Afghanistan, I think America had every right to go into Afghanistan. The Taliban was harboring Osama Bin Laden and al-Qaeda. Al-Qaeda flew planes into buildings in the United States, killed thousands of our citizens, brought the nation into untold agony, pain, and horror. America had every right morally to go in and destroy the Taliban and Destroy al-Qaeda. But the Taliban now rules in Afghanistan. The war was not won.”
Morgan asked Boreing if he thinks Israel pursued action against Hamas after the terrorist attack without thinking through the “consequences of launching a full air, ground, and sea offensive.”
“I suppose Israel wasn’t really given the opportunity to fully contemplate what the consequences of that action might be because Israel didn’t instigate this war,” Boreing replied. “This war was instigated by a horrible terrorist attack on Israel and a state is put in a position where it has to respond. Now, one might argue that the very fact that Israel has yet to actually launch their ground invasion means that they are actually making a calculation about what the cost will be, what victory looks like. Any rational person, any decent person can engage in a conversation about what is the appropriate response for Israel, of course they can, but this sort of moral equivalency thing — I don’t think it’s a sign of decency to engage in a conversation about moral equivalency.”