Netanyahu's appearance on popular Nelk Boys podcast draws criticism from right and left online
But Netanyahu's bid to appeal to young people appeared to backfire online, where the interview drew widespread criticism from viewers across the political spectrum.
His interviewers, Kyle Forgeard and Aaron 'Steiny' Steinberg, are members of the Nelk Boys, a group of social media influencers known for their vlogs and prank videos. The group, which has amassed more than 8.5 million subscribers on YouTube, attracted even more fans after its content began to highlight more conservative political figures, including President Donald Trump, whom the podcast interviewed in 2022, 2023 and 2024.
Netanyahu's hourlong interview, which dropped on the Nelk Boys' 'Full Send Podcast' on Monday, was met with overwhelmingly critical reception online, with viewers accusing the podcasters of asking softball questions and neglecting to push back against Netanyahu's claims.
Netanyahu and his government continue to face worldwide outrage over the war in Gaza that followed the Hamas-led terrorist attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023.
The podcast's YouTube channel lost more than 10,000 subscribers within a day, according to the social media tracking platform Social Blade. On YouTube, top comments on the episode were critical of the hosts' apparent lack of preparedness.
'I see so much stuff about what's going on in Israel and Iran and Palestine, and to be honest, I just really don't know what is going on there,' Forgeard said in the episode. Steinberg said he was similarly hoping to 'get educated' by interviewing Netanyahu.
At one point, the topic of discussion turned to Netanyahu's and Trump's shared affection for hamburgers. Asked about his go-to McDonald's order, Netanyahu revealed that he prefers Burger King, leading Steinberg to respond, appalled: 'That's your worst take, I think.'
Throughout the rest of the interview, Netanyahu condemned anti-Israel protesters as 'un-American' and contrasted life in Israel with life under the oppressive regime in Iran. He also railed against New York's Democratic mayoral nominee, Zohran Mamdani, calling his proposals for the city 'nonsense.' (Mamdani has called Israel's military actions in Gaza 'genocide' and has said he would arrest Netanyahu, who is the subject of a warrant for his arrest from the International Criminal Court, if he visited New York City.)
Asked why he's 'so hated worldwide,' Netanyahu answered: 'Well, a lot of propaganda. First of all, I'm not hated worldwide.' He said Israel has received a lot of goodwill from many in Europe, claiming that Israel's attack on Iran also 'liberated them, because those Iranian missiles were geared at Europe, too, and ultimately at America.'
'The propaganda is there, I don't deny it,' Netanyahu said. 'But people also have, you know, sometimes the truth beckons. And what Israel did with President Trump is safeguard free societies from a menace. I mean, this Iranian regime hangs gays from cranes.'
On Monday, 25 countries, including Britain, Japan and many European nations, called on Israel to end the war in Gaza — a sign of Israel's traditional allies' dismay over the conflict's humanitarian toll. Close to 60,000 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza since Oct. 7, 2023, according to Palestinian health authorities, with much of the enclave's population driven from their homes and pushed to the edge of starvation.
The Israeli military and government officials have repeatedly accused Hamas of exploiting civilian sites, including hospitals and schools, as cover for its operations, an accusation that health officials and Hamas have denied.
Israel has also faced mounting accusations of war crimes and genocide, including in a case brought by South Africa before the International Court of Justice, the United Nations' top court. The court last year ordered Israel to do everything it could to prevent genocidal acts in Gaza. Both Israel and the United States have rejected accusations of genocide.
Online, clips of Netanyahu's interview drew viral backlash from viewers, many of whom accused the Nelk Boys of platforming 'genocide propaganda' and compared interviewing Netanyahu to interviewing Adolf Hitler.
Far-left political streamer Hasan Piker and far-right white supremacist Nick Fuentes were among those who criticized the latest 'Full Send Podcast' episode Monday during separate livestreams on their platforms.
'You just basically presented someone who is a war criminal, someone who is doing a genocide, in a somewhat neutral light,' Piker told Forgeard and Steinberg in his stream. 'And you can't be neutral when you have someone like Benjamin Netanyahu directly in an opportunity to talk to him. But that's what happened, so there is moral culpability here for you guys individually.'
He added that while he would agree to interview Netanyahu if he were given the opportunity, he would be 'well-equipped' to fact-check his statements and push back against potentially dubious claims.
Forgeard, in response, countered that their style of interviewing could "give us the opportunity to get the biggest people in the world."
"And I think you'll know by the 'Full Send Podcast' when you watch it, it's like, 'Hey, these guys are going to get big guests. We might not necessarily get these guys grilling these people,'" Forgeard said. "And that's just what you're going to come to expect."
Fuentes, in his own stream with Forgeard and Steinberg, also questioned the moral equivalency between himself, who has faced condemnation online for his views and beliefs, and 'a foreign head of state who is killing women and children.'
'This is somebody who's in the process of committing what is effectively an ethnic cleansing and a genocide,' Fuentes said.
The interview struggled to land positively even among some supporters of Netanyahu's military agenda. In The Times of Israel on Tuesday, contributor Elkana Bar Eitan expressed his disappointment that Netanyahu 'blew it' on the podcast, despite the lack of pushback he got from the hosts.
'It was painful to witness how Netanyahu, once a master communicator, missed this opportunity and showed that he's lost his touch, even in English,' he wrote in an opinion piece. 'Despite the friendly atmosphere and softball questions, Netanyahu came across as completely detached from reality.'
A representative for the 'Full Send Podcast' declined to comment.
In a video responding to the backlash, Steinberg and Forgeard said they plan to 'give the other side the opportunity' to speak on their next episode, though it's unclear what guest they're referring to.
'Someone has to do it,' Forgeard said. 'And if we have to take the fall and be the bad guys for having the controversial people on, I think we're willing to do it.'
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
The Guardian
2 hours ago
- The Guardian
Israel trying to deflect blame for widespread starvation in Gaza
Israel is pursuing an extensive PR effort to remove itself from blame for the starvation and killing of Palestinian civilians in Gaza in the face of overwhelming evidence that it is responsible. As dozens of governments, UN organisations and other international figures have detailed Israel's culpability, officials and ministers in Israel have attempted to suggest that there is no hunger in Gaza, that if hunger exists it is not Israel's fault, or to blame Hamas or the UN and aid organisations for problems with distribution of aid. The Israeli effort has continued even as one of its own government ministers, the far-right heritage minister, Amichai Eliyahu, appeared to describe an unapologetic policy of starvation, genocide and ethnic cleansing that Israel has denied and said is not official policy. Amid evidence of a growing number of deaths from starvation in Gaza, including many child deaths, and shocking images and accounts of malnutrition, Israel has tried to deflect blame for what has been described by the head of the World Health Organization (WHO) as 'man-made mass starvation'. That view was endorsed in a joint statement this week by 28 countries – including the UK – which explicitly blamed Israel. 'The suffering of civilians in Gaza has reached new depths,' the statement said. 'The Israeli government's aid delivery model is dangerous, fuels instability and deprives Gazan's of human dignity. 'We condemn the drip-feeding of aid and the inhumane killing of civilians, including children, seeking to meet their most basic needs of water and food.' Some Israeli officials have been marginally more cautious in public statements, including the prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, who has promised vaguely that there 'will be no starvation' in Gaza. But a recent off-the-record briefing for journalists by a senior Israeli security official has pushed a more uncompromising position, stating that there 'is no hunger in Gaza' and claiming that images of starving children on front pages around the world showed children with 'underlying diseases'. David Mencer, an Israeli government spokesperson, told Sky News this week: 'There is no famine in Gaza – there is a famine of the truth.' Contradicting that claim, Médecins Sans Frontières said a quarter of the young children and pregnant or breastfeeding mothers it had screened at its clinics last week were malnourished, a day after the UN said one in five children in Gaza City were suffering from malnutrition. Israel's attempts to deflect blame, however, are undermined by its single and overarching responsibility: that as an occupying power in a conflict, it is legally obliged to ensure the provision of means of life for those under occupation. And while Israel has consistently tried to blame Hamas for intercepting food aid, that claim has been undermined by a leaked US assessment, seen by Reuters, which found no evidence of systematic theft by the Palestinian militant group of US-funded humanitarian supplies. Examining 156 incidents of theft or loss of US-funded supplies reported by US aid partner organisations between October 2023 and May 2025, it said it found 'no reports alleging Hamas' benefited from US-funded supplies. Israel has also recently intensified efforts to blame the UN for the problems with aid distribution, citing a 'lack of cooperation from the international community and international organisations'. Israel's claims are contradicted by clear evidence of its efforts to undermine aid distribution. Despite international warnings of the humanitarian risks posed by banning Unrwa, the main UN agency for Palestinians and the organisation with the most experience in Gaza, from Israel, its operations were closed down, complicating aid efforts. Instead Israel, backed by the US, has relied on the private, inexperienced and controversial Gaza Humanitarian Foundation; its sites have been the focus of numerous mass killings of desperate Palestinians by Israeli soldiers. Israel's attempts to hamper with aid efforts have continued. Last week it said it would not renew the work visa of Jonathan Whittall, the most senior UN aid official in Gaza; and a UN spokesperson, Stéphane Dujarric, told reporters on Thursday that Israel had rejected eight of the 16 UN requests to transport humanitarian aid in Gaza the previous day. He added that two other requests, initially approved, led to staff facing obstruction on the ground as he described a pattern of 'bureaucratic, logistical, administrative and other operational obstacles imposed by Israeli authorities'. All of which has injected a new sense of urgency into the catastrophe in Gaza as UN agencies warned that they were on the brink of running out of specialised food needed to save the lives of severely malnourished children. 'Most malnutrition treatment supplies have been consumed and what is left at facilities will run out very soon if not replenished,' a WHO spokesperson said on Thursday. More starvation deaths appear inevitable.
ITV News
2 hours ago
- ITV News
Why Afghan refugees are being deported from Iran to face Taliban rule
More than a million Afghan refugees have been thrown out of Iran and sent back to their own country, where many face an uncertain fate. ITV News International Affairs Analyst Rageh Omaar reports on the world's unseen refugee crisis. Iran has hosted millions of Afghan refugees for decades. Many of them have known nothing else, other than their lives in Iran. In the past few weeks, this all came to an end. First came the formalities of the paperwork - sending them back to the country they or their parents fled. Then came the shock of confronting the emotional reality of being forcibly deported. Deportations of illegal migrants are a global topic - especially in the West. However, the stark number of Afghans being deported from Iran is startling: 1.5 million sent back so far this year. So why is Iran doing this now? In June this year, Israel conducted a devastating strike on Iran's critical military and nuclear facilities and assassinated senior Iranian military officials. Iran's suspicion is that Israeli intelligence recruited desperate and poor Afghan refugees to be agents, and guide Israeli strikes to their targets. A video produced by the Iranian military shows what they say is a bunker near a military site - with Afghans hiding inside it. So now many, like Maryam, are being forced to return to a country ruled by the Taliban. Mayram told ITV News that Iranian security forces were not allowing Afghans to live or work there. She has returned to Afghanistan and is searching for a home for her family. Her story is the same for millions of Afghans, especially women, returning to a country where there are virtually no humanitarian agencies. And many female returnees are not allowed to be educated or go outside unaccompanied by a male relative. This came after years of Western intervention in Afghanistan to be rid of the Taliban so that refugees could return safely, and not under duress.
Telegraph
4 hours ago
- Telegraph
Macron's pledge on Palestinian statehood is not the way to bring about peace
SIR – Emmanuel Macron, the French president, has pledged that France will recognise Palestine as a state (report, July 25) – without first demanding agreement from all Palestinians and the wider Arab world that Israel has the right to exist. Unless that point is accepted, there will never be peace in the Middle East. Mina Bowater Blandford Forum, Dorset SIR – How can you recognise a state with no agreed borders? This is a reckless move from a G7 nation. Brian Hoffmann York SIR – The humanitarian disaster now unfolding in Gaza must be remedied. No one could possibly exonerate Hamas for October 7, nor for a minute imagine that Israel is not under intense and perpetual threat from its enemies in the region, including Iran. The hostages also go unmentioned. I write this letter as a plea from all those who cannot bear to see how the women and children of Gaza are suffering. It is unconscionable. In 2014, with massive support from the Conservative front benches, I brought forward my International Development (Gender Equality) Act. It imposed a statutory duty on the British government to guarantee the protection of women and children in deprived countries as a cardinal principle of British humanitarian policy. The tragedy of Gaza has gone too far. I call upon Sir Keir Starmer to concentrate on providing the necessary aid, rather than grandstanding like President Macron, with his calls for a Palestinian state. Sir Bill Cash London SW1 SIR – As one of the 82 per cent in Israel who want the hostages home and the war against Hamas to end, I have been struck by the pronouncements of David Lammy, the British Foreign Secretary, on the matter. Israel has negotiated with terrorists, and bent over backwards making major additional concessions so that a ceasefire could succeed. Yet Mr Lammy stood up and stated that, if there was no ceasefire, he would punish Israel. Hamas, as expected, decided to move the goalposts, making further absurd demands, and talks have now collapsed. Britain and the world deserve better than Mr Lammy's naivety and incompetence. Michel Norman Hod Hasharon, Israel SIR – I fundamentally disagree with A Lloyd (Letters, July 23), who asserts that 'the Israeli government has been responsible for the deaths of thousands of innocent men, women and children'. The responsibility for those deaths and the ongoing suffering lies squarely with Hamas. Israel will never abandon the hostages and will always defend itself, whatever the consequences. Alan Tomlinson Cheadle, Cheshire SIR – Hamas's attacks on October 7, its hostage-taking and its targeting of civilians are indefensible. But they do not justify Israel's punishment of an entire population. The idea that Hamas can be destroyed to bring about peace is dangerously naive: like the heads of the mythical Hydra, it will emerge again. From the ashes of Gaza, something even more dangerous may rise. Violence breeds extremism. If our Government truly believes in human rights and international law, it must demand accountability from Israel. Suzanne Temperley Sale, Cheshire
