Judging Freedom - Aaron Maté: Biden and Rafah: More Deception

Episode Date: May 29, 2024

Aaron Maté: Biden and Rafah: More DeceptionSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Thank you. Hi, everyone. Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom. Today is Wednesday, May 29th, 2024. Aaron Mate joins us now. Aaron, as always, my dear friend, thank you very much for your time. You have written a fascinating piece, which I think came out on your Substack venue in the past 36 hours or so, about President Biden, RAFA, red lines, Biden's understanding, Biden's deception. Does the United States government, has it articulated, has it pointed to a red line over which the IDF cannot cross before it will take some action? Well, Biden did use the words red line, but in terms of specifying what that means, he did not. He talked about if they go in and have a major military operation inside Gaza, inside Rafah, then we're not going to supply the weapons to do that. But they wouldn't define what a major military operation means. And they also admitted that they've already given Israel enough weapons to go into Rafah anyway, therefore making the weaponry meaningless. The one thing that Biden said that Israel cannot

do is he said, this was back a few months ago, he said, we cannot have another 30,000 dead Palestinians, which presumably is a green light for another 29,999 dead Palestinians, because that's essentially what he's presiding over now. And this latest massacre in Rafah, one of several at a tent camp for displaced people, people literally burned alive, is just the latest display of the fact that there are no red lines. And even if there were, Israel wouldn't care, because after Biden used the word red lines, Netanyahu immediately said he would ignore them anyway, even if they were real, which they're not. Before we get into the facts about this catastrophe with the 45 people burned alive, you have studied this probably more than any other journalist of whose work I am aware. Can you tell me what Joe Biden's position is on the IDF in Rafa.

His position is basically they can do whatever they want. And no matter what Joe Biden says publicly about having concerns or being frustrated, it just doesn't matter. You know, Tony Blinken, a few weeks after Biden said he had a red line on Rafa, Tony Blinken said, we don't talk about red lines when it comes to Rafa. So basically what Tony Blinken was saying was that Joe Biden was lying, just like Joe Biden was lying when he claimed to have seen photos of beheaded babies and other atrocities that did not happen on October 7th. Did he ever retract that nonsense?

The White House quietly retracted it. They said that Biden was referring to what had been told by Israelis, but they never formally said that Biden made a false statement. Okay. Chris, can you play Jake Sullivan? This is an interview now.

This is seven or eight months ago, I think, on safe places. The U.N. says evacuating civilians to the south is, quote, impossible and potentially calamitous. Realistically, Jake, where are people supposed to go? Are they not trapped inside Gaza at this point? The critical thing from our perspective is that there be safe places for civilians to go that will not be subject to military bombardment, where they can be safe physically and where they can have access to the essentials, to food, water, medicine, shelter. All right. That was October 15th, 2023. So that was a week after

October 7th. The intimation is that there are safe places and the Palestinians can trust the IDF as to what these safe places, these safe zones are. They sent everybody down to the South. Now they're invading the South. Who could take the word of the IDF on anything, Aaron? Only the Biden administration, which is completely complicit in the IDF's atrocities. This idea of fleeing to safe zones, there are no safe zones inside Gaza. It's entirely a death camp. And the latest illustration of that was the fact that this tent camp for displaced refugees that was just bombed by Israel, that was in a supposed safe zone.

It was very near warehouses belonging to UNRWA, the UN Refugee Agency inside of Gaza. So this idea of a safe zone, it's just as meaningless as Biden's fake red lines. And recall that a condition for the U.S. supporting Israel going into Rafah was that Israel was going to give Jake Sullivan and Blinken and Biden a credible plan for the protection of these civilians. Where is that plan? We haven't seen it. All we've seen is anonymous White House officials and Jake Sullivan coming out and saying that, yes, Israel started to address our concerns about there being a credible plan to protect

people. But where is that plan? Well, the reality of that plan is in the burned corpses of all these people just massacred with U.S.-made weapons. Does Israel claim that it bombed this refugee-tented area because it thought that there were two Hamas leaders hanging out in a tent? I mean, Aaron, do Hamas leaders hang out in tents, or are they 70 meters below the surface of the earth? Well, exactly. Hamas, as we know, they have tunnels. But look, even if there were two senior Hamas members, as Israel claimed, would that justify massacas member somewhere in the vicinity, it's okay to drop these 2,000-pound bombs that rip people to shreds and burn them alive, as was the case at this tent camp inside Rafah.

Now, to prove its case, Israel put out its latest intercepted recording where they happened to magically come across a conversation inside Gaza of people confirming every single Israeli talking point. They've done that before when they bombed a hospital many months ago, and all of a sudden they came out with a recording of two Palestinians purportedly in Gaza saying that, oh yes, this was our rocket which misfired. This time on the tape, these two voices say in Arabic that yes, the Israelis dropped a very small bomb with a very precision strike. It left only a very small crater showing how precise it was. And what happened was it hit our bombs. And that's why all these people died. And also they threw in that there's also a pile of cash, of Hamas cash, just sitting there, just for fun. Why not? It's so obvious that this is scripted audio.

Israel is basically producing narrative fiction. And that's the scope of its investigations that the Biden administration is claiming that we have to pay attention to and take seriously. Here's Joe Biden. Chris just found this on. Are there red lines, Mr. President, or aren't there? What is your red line with Prime Minister Netanyahu? Do you have a red line? For instance, would invasion of Rafah, which you have urged him not to do, would that be a red line? It is a red line, but I'm never

going to leave Israel. The defense of Israel is still critical. So there's no red line. I'm going to cut off all weapons so they don't have the Iron Dome to protect them. They don't have. But there's red lines that if it crosses and they cannot have 30,000 more Palestinians dead. That is gibberish other than the last part, which you have highlighted earlier, which probably means 29,999 uh, acceptable to him. Was there an actual pause in the delivery of 2000 pound bombs to Israel? And if there was, is that pause still in effect? There was a pause on that one shipment, uh, which included 2000 pound bombs,

but the Biden administration made clear to tell the Washington Post that Israel had all the U.S. weaponry needed and then some to attack Rafah if it wanted to. So therefore, it could cast U.S. objections aside. That's what the Washington Post reported. So Biden's officials wanted to make clear that his so-called pause was meaningless. It was purely symbolic. Then, just to make sure everyone got the message, they followed it up with approving another $1 billion arms transfer to Israel, including tank ammunition, mortar rounds that blow people to shreds. And Tony Blinken, State Department, put out a report, congressionally mandated, on whether or not Israel is complying with international law. And it offered the most incoherent conclusions I've ever seen. It found that, yes, it is reasonable to believe that Israel is violating international law with our weapons. But unfortunately, there's not enough information to reach a definitive conclusion. That was the mealy-mouthed assessment of Tony

Blinken's State Department, which also found that, yes, Israeli actions are contributing to aid not reaching Gaza, but there's no concrete evidence that Israel is violating international law and cutting off aid. It's just an absolute complete joke. So yes, there was that one pause by Biden on one weapon shipment, but they immediately made clear that it was symbolic. They immediately made clear they were shipping other weapons, and then they made sure that there could be no congressional obstacles to shipping even more by putting out that incoherent mealy mouth report. Have they resumed shipping 2,000 pound bombs? Because 2,000 pound bombs cause massive destruction.

You drop a 2,000 pound bomb in an urban area, you are targeting civilians and their infrastructure. No dispute about it. Biden can say what he wants. By the way, he sounded like he was speaking gibberish. That was a year, that was seven or eight months ago in the interview we just played. But it's clear what 2,000-pound bombs do. Have those shipments been resumed as far as your research tells you? As far as I know, that one shipment that was paused was still paused. But I have no doubt, based on everything we've seen so far, that if Israel says, hey, we actually really need that 2,000-pound bomb package that you paused, they'll find a way to get it there. Just as they found a way to send all these weapons without congressional scrutiny by sending them in smaller packages.

Remember that? When they were doing that a few months ago, they were caught basically avoiding congressional review by breaking up the packages into smaller bits to therefore fall below the threshold that would require them to inform Congress. And keep in mind, the munitions made by Boeing that were used to slaughter people at this tent camp just a few days ago, those were supposed small bombs.

So even these supposed small bombs, the Biden administration keeps talking about they want Israel to use, they cause massive carnage. Prime Minister Netanyahu says the attack on the tent that killed 45 people over the weekend, most by incineration while still living, was a tragic accident. Do you believe that? Well, no. By definition, I believe nothing coming out of Netanyahu's mouth when it comes to excusing his behavior and his crimes, but of course not. Israel has Gaza totally surveilled. They know where everybody is. There's no way this was a mistake. They come up with any excuse to justify slaughtering people because you know these are not mistakes of a war campaign against Hamas these are the deliberate goals of Israel's war not on Hamas

but on the Palestinians of Gaza they want to slaughter as many people as possible and make their territory uninhabitable to teach a lesson to Palestinians and anybody else that if you resist our occupation we will commit mass murder and that's what they're doing. Here's a Republican who ran for president of the United States or ran for the Republican nomination, who's obviously a strong supporter of Joe Biden, signing, signing artillery shells, saying, kill them all. Watch this. They need to finish Hamas. Don't stop until they finish. But also make sure that that security is intact so that it never happens again from Hamas or anybody else. And so I will always push America to do what I think is the right thing, which is you stand by your friends.

Sounds like she's still on the campaign trail. She says, aye, aye. There it is. She signed it. Finish them. America loves Israel. Always Nikki Haley. And that's her crouching, actually signing it.

How repellent is this in your view, Aaron? It's just unbelievable. She's well aware that these bombs have been used to slaughter innocent people now for months on end, tens of thousands of them. And yet she's literally signing one of these instruments of death. And just incredibly, in our presidential contest, we have no difference between the two major candidates. They're basically out-competing themselves to see who can cheer on the slaughter of more Palestinians. Trump sometimes criticizes Biden for not going far enough in supporting Israel. Occasionally, Trump has made a comment about how this war has to end, but then he

immediately walked that back with bellicose comments. And Nikki Haley certainly supports Joe Biden's policy, but she's now rumored to be in the running for a position once again in Trump's cabinet, even though she spent so much time now attacking Trump. It just shows how when it comes to these matters of mass murder, of hegemony abroad, everyone, all these candidates, whether they're Democrats or Republicans, put their differences aside and they come together in unison. That's the point where someone like Nikki Haley can go over and sign weapons that are purchased by a Democrat, Joe Biden, to drop on innocent people in Gaza. Those shells she's signing are the biggest we manufacture, 156 millimeters. They are the

biggest, the deadliest, the most destructive. Looks like she signed several of them. I wonder if she even can imagine the terror, horror of war, which is part of the allegation against Prime Minister Netanyahu by the International Criminal Court if the judges accept the indictment and issue the arrest warrant. You can tell from reading that report that whoever wrote it put a lot of effort into coming up with some sort of meaningless statement that could somehow pretend to touch on reality. So what they said was in the report, the language is something that, to the effect of Israeli action or inaction, has contributed to the shortage of aid inside Gaza. Israeli action or inaction. So what do they mean by action or inaction? Do they mean that Israel didn't work hard enough in delivering aid to Gaza? It's incredibly ambiguous. They just leave out the fact that Israel, as their leaders have vowing to deprive Gaza of food,

fuel, and water. That gets overlooked by Tony Blinken's report, who just vaguely says that Israel might not be doing enough to aid into Gaza, and therefore we can't say that they're violating international law. Nobody will ever take this administration seriously when history is written, but how many more innocents will die horrific deaths before history is written? I know we're off of red lines, but I forgot to run this. This is that wacky Matt Miller, the spokesperson for the State Department, the one that the writers all claim reminds them of Dracula. All right, however he looks, he looks.

You can say what you want about him. But here he is refusing to answer about red lines. Is there actually a red line? I mean, do you have like a yardstick by which you measure a red line that Israel may cross or may not cross? So the national security advisor to the president spoke to this last week from the White House podium and made clear that there is no mathematical formula that you can apply, but it's something that we will be watching very closely and discussing with our Israeli counterparts. So in theory, Israel can strike anywhere, basically, and say there are Hamas opportunities. So I'm not going to deal with your theories. I'm going to deal with reality. And what we have said is how we will assess their compliance with this question. But that is plausible hypothesis.

No, it is not. I'm not going to deal with, I think you know I don't deal with hypotheses. I try to deal with facts from this podium. Do you ever go to those Q&As the way Max does, where they never call on them? I haven't had the opportunity yet. And I imagine it's a really difficult experience to sit there and watch this guy invent excuses for not answering the most basic questions and come up with ways to justify violations of the basic tenets of human rights law and just being a human being. He talked there. He referenced Jake Sullivan's comments. Jake Sullivan's already addressed this issue of red lines. And he quoted him saying there's no mathematical formula. Well,

that right there, it just has a tangent. That contradicts Joe Biden's red line we heard before, where he said that we can't have another 30,000 Palestinians dead. So if Jake Sullivan is saying there's no mathematical formula, that means that Joe Biden's already offensive claim that 30,000 dead Palestinians would be too much, but presumably one less than that would be okay. But even that is not even a red line. So Joe Biden is actually right there. Even his own claim about 30,000 dead Palestinians is not even an actual mathematical formula, according to Jake Sullivan. And then Jake Sullivan said, what we're going to do is look to see if there's death and destruction or whether they've been pinpoint in their accuracy. So what Jake Sullivan is saying is we're going to do absolutely nothing.

We're going to arm Israel to the teeth. And post facto, after they commit death and destruction, like we just saw at that tent camp in Rafah, then we'll go look to see if there is some. So he's basically saying we're going to be complicit in mass murder. And after the fact, we're going to go back and look and see if there was indeed the mass murder that we enabled and authorized from the start. Before October 7th, there was an effort underway instigated, I believe, by the Biden State Department to bring about the normalization of relations between Saudi Arabia and Israel. Here's what the Saudi foreign minister had to say about the status of that relationship now. Cut number one. Israel doesn't get to decide whether or not the Palestinians have a right to self-determination. This is something that is enshrined in the United Nations Charter. It is something that

is enshrined into international law. It is also a founding principle of the United Nations decision to found Israel. So, you know, it is absolutely necessary that Israel accepts that it cannot exist without the existence of a Palestinian state, that its security is served by building a Palestinian state. So we hope sincerely that the leaders in Israel will realize that it is in their interest to work with the international community, not just to strengthen the Palestinian Authority, but to finally establish a Palestinian state along the 1967 borders, as everybody understands, is the right thing to do. Isn't that a view embraced by at least 145 or 150 countries throughout the world?

Yes, it is. There was recently a vote on this at the UN in favor of Palestinian statehood, and the only two holdouts, I believe, were Israel, obviously, and the U.S., who have consistently voted against resolutions for Palestinian statehood for decades now. I mean, that tells you everything you need to know about the professed U.S. commitment to a two-state solution. Every time there's an opportunity to tangibly advance that prospect, they vote against it at every single turn. So because they want to support Israel as it takes over as much West Bank land that it wants, because Israel wants to keep these massive West Bank settlements,

keep a Palestinian state impossible. And this pursuit of this so-called normalization deal with Saudi Arabia throughout this, you know, more than six months of mass murder, seven months of mass murder. It's one of the most bizarre displays I've ever seen because as we're watching Gaza be destroyed, the Biden administration wants us to take seriously this effort to reach some

grand bargain with Saudi Arabia that talks about a pathway to a Palestinian state and be excited about that. Well, when right before our eyes, Israel is slaughtering people with U.S. weapons. And there's also all this talk about what a post-Gaza war Gaza will look like, who is going to rule it, is it going to be an international peacekeeping force or an Arab force, will it be a U.S. force, when right now what's unfolding before our eyes is the most horrific thing many of us have seen in our lifetime, hopefully we'll ever see in our lifetime. This administration is completely on a different planet, thinking they can proceed with all of these side transactions, which are never

going to happen, especially while they are enabling this genocide inside Gaza. Just to switch for a few minutes before we conclude over to Ukraine. President Zelensky made a very, very stylish, the CIA must have produced it, and MI6 must have written it, or maybe the Washington Post wrote it, I don't know, seven-minute plea for President Putin to come to a peace conference. He famously pronounced it piss conference, and everybody's laughing at him. That's just the way he pronounced the word, in Geneva or in Switzerland somewhere. Will President Putin deal with President Zelensky now that he's out of office? I didn't know that Zelensky asked Putin to come to this summit. But it's odd for Zelensky to do that, if that's what he said, because he's signed a formal decree ruling out any talks with Russia so long as Putin is in power.

He's basically saying that we're not going to have negotiations unless there's regime change inside Moscow. In other words, there will never be any negotiations because regime change is not happening. So Zelensky is typically incoherent. These peace summits that he keeps organizing have gone absolutely nowhere because he's refused formally to speak to Russia, the country that he is at war with. And the one time he did speak to Russia, we know what happened. The US and UK stood in the way. So these so-called peace conferences that he organizes, it's just a facade.

The issue is, do you want to negotiate with Russia or not? And if you do, the first thing to do is rescind your decree and re-engage in the process that was blocked back in the spring of 2022, two years ago. Imagine how much carnage could have been avoided had Ukraine and Russia been able to finalize that deal. That's the deal that Boris Johnson and Joe Biden said, you know, tear it up because we have your back. And we're going to play the clip. It's seven minutes long, but we reduced it to 90 seconds. And I may have misspoken. He may be inviting, you'll hear it yourself, President Xi of China, not President Putin, to his so-called peace summit. But tell me what you think of this. This is Hollywood on the Dnieper River. Does Russia want a dialogue? Ukraine has the world's largest

experience of lies from Russian during negotiations. Lies that in particular was Russian cover up for preparing this war. And that's exactly why global efforts are needed. Global peace summit of the leaders whom Russia will not be able to deceive. Summit that will show who in the world really wants to end the war and not just claim the ceasefire, which will inevitably be broken by Russian rockets and artillery, just like as it was dozens, dozens of times before. To President Biden, the leader of the United States,

and to President Xi, the leader of China, we do not want the UN Charter to be burned. Please show your leadership in advancing the peace, real peace, not just a pause between the strikes. The efforts of the global majority are the best guarantee that all commitments will be fulfilled. Please support the Peace Summit with your personal leadership and participation. For all of us, it should be a pleasure to make peace. I don't know what he hopes to achieve by this Hollywood-esque statement. It can't be for domestic consumption unless there's a version of it in Ukrainian or in Russian. But I just wanted you to see the latest.

So my question to you is, who takes him seriously today? Well, his global celebrity really is fading. Recall, he was the Time magazine person of the year back in the first year of Russia's invasion. But now he's widely laughed at and he's widely mocked. When he came to the U.S. last fall to lobby for more U.S. weaponry, Oprah Winfrey turned down his request for an interview. That's where Zelensky's at. But he makes a few substantive claims that are just not true. And by the way, so I think in terms of who he's invited, that's what we're seeing there. It was President Xi of China. I don't think he's invited President Putin because he's ruled out ever speaking to Putin so long as he's the leader of Russia. But he talks about how Ukraine was deceived by Russia before the invasion.

What happened before the invasion is pretty clear. We have a good record of it now. First of all, the Ukrainian government, under pressure from ultra-nationalists and neo-Nazis, refused the most basic thing under the Minsk Accords, which was the peace deal to end the conflict in Ukraine that erupted in 2014 after a U.S.-backed coup. He refused to speak to the leaders of the Donbass republics that broke away with Russia's support and fought the post-coup government. And the whole point of the Minsk Accords was that there should be dialogue directly between Kiev, which Zelensky was the head of, and at the time before the invasion, not when Minsk was signed, but he inherited the Minsk Accords and claimed to support them. There's supposed to be dialogue between Kiev and the leaders of the Donbass republics directly. And Zelensky and

his government said, we will not speak to them. We won't even talk to them. So not only will we not fulfill our basic obligations under the Minsk Accords of having new elections, we're not even going to speak to these heads of the republics because they didn't want to recognize that these were actual Ukrainians. They wanted to keep up the fiction that this conflict inside Ukraine was all just the work of Russia. And so therefore, it was Russia that had to negotiate directly. When really, the whole problem was you had people inside Ukraine who wanted their rights respected. They wanted to be able to speak the Russian language, and they didn't want a government in Kiev dominated by ultra-nationalists and fascists, as Foreign Policy Magazine once put it long ago. But Zelensky refused to speak to them. He also said that after European leaders proposed to him that he just

declare neutrality, say we're not going to join NATO, he refused to do that too. That happened right before Russia invaded. So this idea that Russia was deceiving Ukraine and that Russia was never serious about negotiations, Russia wanted implementation of the Minsk Accords, which everybody claimed to support. The problem was, ultra-nationalists inside Ukraine did not want to support the Minsk Accords because that would have recognized the equality of Russian-aligned Ukrainians in the East. And luckily for them, and unluckily for the world, they had the backing of Washington, which is really the only constituency that ultimately mattered.

One of the best explanations that I've heard, Aaron. Thank you very much for it. Thanks for your great piece on Biden and his deception over the red lines. And thanks for your time with us today. All the best, my friend. Choose well, Judge. Thank you. Of course.

That is it for today. Tomorrow, this is no criticism of the very smart people that we have on the show, but tomorrow is really Thursday, Big Brain Day. At 9 in the morning, Dr. Gilbert Doktorov, one of the world's authorities on Russia. At 1 o'clock in the afternoon, Professor Jeffrey Sachs. At three o'clock in the afternoon, Professor John Mearsheimer. And at four in the afternoon, he's just as smart as the others, the inimitable Max Blumenthal. Judge Napolitano for judging freedom. Paul Tano for Judging Freedom. Thank you.