Fmr. CIA officer Dr. Bianca Adair on intelligence failures

Identity theft shows no signs of slowing down. In fact, more than $29 billion were stolen last year alone.

That's a criminal success story and a wake-up call for everyone. It can be dangerously easy to steal your identity. LifeLock makes it easy to help protect yourself.

If you become a victim, a dedicated U.S.-based restoration specialist will work to fix it. Join now and save up to 25% off your first year at lifelock.com slash FOXPOD. LifeLock. Identity theft protection starts here. Last year, identity thieves stole more than $29 billion. LifeLock makes it easy to help protect yourself against identity theft, alerting you to threats you may miss on your own.

Save up to 25% your first year at lifelock.com slash FOXPOD. Hi, we are back. Dr. Bianca Adair joins us right now.

She's Director of the Intelligence Studies Program at Catholic University. Dr. Adair, thanks so much for joining us. So far, we look at today's day of rage that Hamas called for. In Yemen, they're responding, in Jordan, they're responding, in the West Bank, they're responding, and we brace for ourselves for the unknown here in America. What are your thoughts?

Hi, good morning, and thank you so much for having me on today. My thoughts are, unfortunately, the ideology of Hamas and the way in which they have manipulated propaganda is impacting not just the countries that we've been able to see, Yemen, not surprising, by virtue of their own relationship with Iran, but also, sadly, the United States. And I think the deepest concern that I have for any Western country is to really start to reflect internally as to why that type of propaganda and that type of ideology has somehow become mainstream, and especially in the United States, mainstream with our college students and on our college campuses. Are you finding that a Catholic? No, we are not, thankfully.

We are very blessed. We have great students that do understand and they're taught, as well as we live, what is right and what is wrong, and there is really no ethical ambiguity, as you'll see with the CUA president's message yesterday, with a very strong stance on what Hamas did and its terrorism, but also the right for Israel to defend itself, keeping in mind that in Catholic doctrine, just war, which comes from the Augustinian thought process as well as St. Thomas Aquinas, underscores the ability of any country, Israel notwithstanding, to protect itself. So we send, we have here in New York, we've had four days of protests.

We have colleges coming out for the Palestinians in Columbia, NYU and Hunter College. It's embarrassing. So one of our reporters for Jesse's show went out and asked people, what are you doing? What's your cause? Listen.

What's going on here today? Protest in solidarity with the resistance attack on the settler colony that is Israel. We didn't have no freedom at all. That's why Hamas, you know, did that.

You know what I mean? Hamas, whether you like them or not, has been warning Israel to oppress our people, to oppress our people, will respond, will respond. And how do you feel about that? I'm happy that my people are responding and they're fighting back. What is your reaction to the music festival this week where a lot of innocent people were killed? We don't want innocent people to die, but it happens. You know, it's war. I don't condone that. You know, I don't condone violence.

I don't condone rape. But that's what's happening over there. I know.

It is what it is, you know. These festival goers are not innocent civilians. They are settlers. So they deserved it? Yes, every, every settler.

Yes. So that's the mindset. What do you do with that? Well, first off, I want to highlight, I did actually watch those when they were broadcast yesterday and I was mortified as well as the students commentary that was coming from California.

What you do with it, I think, is there are a couple of things that really need to be done. One is that we do need to look at how professors are teaching these classes. I personally teach a class on U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. And when we discuss the issue of Palestinians and the Israelis, we do not begin that conversation in 1948, actually push it back into the 1930s. And the shocking role that the Palestinian Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, I mean, Al Hussein had in terms of his relationship with Nazi Germany and a desire to have the extermination of Jews in Palestine. This beginning, the process beginning in 1930s was his call for this and his desire. Once students start to understand contextually what is going on and getting into the Holocaust, I can tell you to a person in my classes, they have been shocked that they are not taught this aspect of that dynamic in the Middle East.

So we have a couple of things we have to do in that regard. And I also I have to admit, as I was watching yesterday, I was thinking of the de-radicalization programs that occur both in Europe throughout the Middle East. Are we at the point where we're going to have to start considering this by virtue of the level of hate speech, by the level of attacks that are going on against the Jewish community and doing so in the name of the very ideology espoused by Hamas? I mean, if you go to NYU, your parents are paying $91,000 to get this type of education. I mean, you don't find this hanging out with the Crips and the Bloods and you say, well, these poor kids have no parents. You get highly, you know, very well off people learning this anti-Israeli, anti-American doctrine. And it's no longer niche.

It could be a whole generation. Here's more of this. This is Lawrence Jones who went out on the streets yesterday and he just was listening. He asked the question and let him go.

Why are you here today? Free Palestine. I stand with the Palestinian people unequivocally.

I support decolonization and liberation of Palestinian people and the end of a mass genocide in the Gaza Strip. You're talking about the genocide of the kids being beheaded? That's false. That is actually false. When you see the kids that have been beheaded and the women that are raped, how do you feel about that?

I don't know where to start from that. Israel is notorious for creating propaganda that sides their one-sided massacre against Palestinians. That was already proven that it didn't really happen. It didn't happen. Not verified. Women did not get raped. No.

I have, I've not seen any proof of that. If it did happen, it, I haven't seen it. Like they get attacked for no reason. The children got attacked for no reason. The kids that were beheaded? Beheaded?

Yeah, apparently. Like that's, but they were Jewish kids. Wait, Jewish kids? The US military money that goes there, $4 billion a year, should stop going to Israel to support their war crimes. So, so they don't believe it, Israel makes it up and anything bad, we're just going to go there.

And I would say they look to be about 500 people there. Yeah, I watched that also. And again, just shocked, but not surprised, shocked because it's in the United States. And to be fair in watching, I read regularly the Iranian press, and particularly some of the stuff that comes up from the Supreme Leader and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, they're using this as propaganda. It's terrifying in so far as you have, especially the young man who had no idea what babies were beheaded.

I mean, the fact that he could very casually bring that up as if it's completely normal is shocking in and of itself. But the other part underscores that these students are not being guided in a way to really truly investigate all of the sides of this, and understand that there is a propaganda campaign going on by the terrorists. And at the center of all of this world is Iran. Those connections are not being made for these young people to realize that when they're going out and doing and saying the things that they're doing and saying, which again, really just defies logic and defies the intellectual communities they're supposed to be a part of, the problem that you run into is they don't realize that what they're doing supports Hamas. It supports Hezbollah.

And at the center of all of that is the support of the IRGC Quds Force. Identity theft shows no signs of slowing down. In fact, more than $29 billion were stolen last year alone.

That's a criminal success story and a wake-up call for everyone. It can be dangerously easy to steal your identity. LifeLock makes it easy to help protect yourself. If you become a victim, a dedicated U.S.-based restoration specialist will work to fix it. Join now and save up to 25% off your first year at lifelock.com slash FOXPOD.

LifeLock. Identity theft protection starts here. By the way, we're talking to Bianca, Dr. Bianca Adair, a director of intelligence studies program at the Catholic University. So Dr. Adair, let's look at what's happening right now. There's a fear among everyone that wants Israel to be successful, that Hezbollah is going to get in and start shelling from the north. If that indeed happens, the U.S. says you better not because we're going to get involved. And Iran says if that happens, we're going to get involved. In fact, Iran said if you freeze that $6 billion, we're going to start targeting your assets in the region.

That's our 10,000 troops in Syria and an unknown number in Iraq. What's your reaction to both those scenarios? Well, first and foremost, it doesn't surprise me in the least. On October 9th, one of the Hezbollah clerics actually already said that Hezbollah would get directly involved as soon as Israel began a land invasion in Gaza. This came out.

This is in the IRGC papers. They covered it. And so that isn't surprising. The second piece of it is what is going on with respect to Iran. Iran, between September 21st and September 22nd, and then there for an unspecified time thereafter, Iran was already going through its simulation with its troops in Syria, North Syria and on the border with Iraq, which really triggered some alarms that, in fact, the Iranians may be getting ready to have the Shia militias that fight with them in Syria attack the U.S. troops. What this tells you is that Iran was already planning for all of this in advance of these attacks in October because Iran is not stupid.

They know exactly what will happen once you conduct an attack like this against Israel. The use of the $6 billion now as a threat is kind of a lesson learned. When you negotiate agreements with Iran, they will use it against you. This is a pretty normal thing that they have done, which means that you're kind of you're between a rock and a hard place when you're dealing with Iran in the international community, because they don't have any problem with having this dual track foreign policy in which, yes, they'll negotiate these agreements, and then they'll use it to slap you in the face to try to paralyze the United States out of fear of the loss of life. And at some point in time, to be completely frank with you, we need to stop reacting to Iran and start shaping the battlefield the way that we need it shaped, not the way they want to shape it, which is something they've clearly done.

Oh, that's great advice. So having said all that, the $6 billion is frozen. We hear from The New York Times and Washington Post, places that the administration likes to leak from, and we also know they're able to sell almost all their oil and build up their reserves.

They got $70 billion in reserves as opposed to $4 billion after they left off. What I was encouraged by is evidently the Iranian leader and MBS of Saudi Arabia had a conversation at which time MBS did not say that he is going to stop pursuing peace with Israel. He did not buy into that. It seemed like they were both talking at each other rather than to each other. The fact that the phone call took place shows a reapproachment, but the fact that they did not swear off Israel while supporting the Palestinians, I think is also significant, don't you?

Absolutely. And I think if you go back and you watch Brett Baer's interview with MBS, you see with MBS, he's pretty sophisticated, but to be fair, the Saudis have demonstrated this level of sophistication with Iran. They don't feel required to in any way pander to anything that Iran wants. And in this case, MBS understands that peace is the way in which you end up with a strong Middle East and that's through the economy and these types of things. So MBS is not going to join in to what Iran wants to do. Keeping in mind that even during the period of time when Khomeini was involved in the Islamic revolution and shortly thereafter, Iran has attempted to supplant Saudi Arabia as the true leaders of Muslims in the Middle East. And this is indicative of the fact that Saudi Arabia and certainly under MBS, they are taking back those reigns and expressing this is not the way to do business. And so I'm heartened by what was reported on with respect to MBS's meeting in Iran. And it doesn't surprise me, but we should realize that Iran will start feeling a lot more pressure and a lot more heat, in which case we do need to be prepared. Our military needs to have a plan. It seems to me it's not an if, but a win scenario.

The particularly Shia militants start trying to conduct attacks against our troops and they will go to those outposts to try to hit first. Right. We do have to be ready. There's been 80 such and such strikes at us.

We've only answered four reportedly and it's not been denied by the administration. Dr. Bianca Adair, as much as you want to look at history and give people perspective, it's also very important to ride the news and get the right word out. Thanks so much for being here. Thank you so much.

I appreciate it. At just 30 years old, the founder of FTX was one of the wealthiest people in the world. That all changed in November 2022 when the company collapsed and filed for bankruptcy. Now Sam Bankman-Fried stands accused of committing one of the biggest financial frauds in U.S. history. Join me, Kelly O'Grady, every Monday and Thursday as we follow the trial of Sam Bankman-Fried. Subscribe today wherever you download podcasts or at FoxNewsPodcasts.com.