Judging Freedom - Aaron Maté (TheGrayZone) : US Provokes Moscow and Middle East

Episode Date: February 28, 2024

Aaron Maté (TheGrayZone) : US Provokes Moscow and Middle EastSee 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, February 28th, 2024. Aaron Maté will be with us in just a moment. Is the United States provoking a war in the Middle East? Is it provoking a war against Russia? Have we already started a war against Russia? But first this. How do you really feel about your financial future right now today? Stable or uncertain? Despite all the happy talk that the Fed and the banks want you to buy into, I believe that 2024 is going to be a very unstable year, politically and financially.

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move portions of their retirement savings into Lear gold and silver IRAs. It's easy to do and it's tax and penalty free. Don't be caught off guard. Experts predict the markets may tank again. You'll be happy if you have protection in place. So call Lear at 800-511-4620, 800-511-4620, or go to learjudgenap.com and tell them your friend the judge sent you. Aaron, thank you for joining us, my dear friend. Both Ukraine and Israel, of course, are profoundly in the news. We'll start with Ukraine, if you don't mind. How desperate is the Ukrainian military? How much on its last leg are they now, notwithstanding President Zelensky's comments over the weekend with the disparity, with the crazy numbers that he put out there, numbers of Russians killed and numbers of Ukrainian servicemen killed?

Well, we're just coming off of Ukraine's loss of Avdiivka, which is a vital town for control of the Donbass region. I recall that for the eight years preceding Russia's invasion, Ukraine was using Avdiivka to shell Russia's allies in eastern Ukraine while refusing to implement the Minsk Accords, which could have avoided this entire mess that we're in right now. So Ukraine's loss of Avdiivka is very significant. And in the process, they reportedly lost hundreds of soldiers because they did not carry out the withdrawal properly. Another aspect overlooked in all this is that a key force for Ukraine on the front lines of this fight at the end was the 3rd Assault Brigade. What's the 3rd Assault Brigade? It's the Azov Battalion, just under a new name. And under U.S. law, the U.S. cannot support the Azov Battalion.

This was passed years ago, before Russia invaded, back when we were allowed to point out that Azov is a neo-Nazi militia. Now they're still integrated in the military. They're still led by this character, Andrei Belitsky, who was previously talked about the leading Ukraine's mission on behalf of the white races to rid Ukraine of the inferior races, Russians, Jews. So all this is overlooked because the U.S. is so deep in this proxy war. And we put Ukraine in this position now where it's going through these catastrophic losses. There's word today of Russia taking more villages. And this was to be expected. The U.S. predicted this before pushing Ukraine into its counteroffensive last year.

Everyone knew that this was the result. But the policy has always been to use Ukraine to bleed Russia. So therefore, Ukrainian lives are just expendable. Here's Victoria Nuland over the weekend. We have a number of clips of her. I find her repellent, but I'll let you comment on it. Cut number eight, Chris. Vladimir Putin is wrong. Ukraine, as we saw in the news, has been forced to withdraw from Avdeyevka. Kharkiv, one of Ukraine's proudest eastern city, a Russian-speaking city, is bombarded daily in an effort to disable it. And Ukraine's economy is still fragile, with almost 100% of tax revenues going to defense now. Vladimir Putin, in addition to planning anti-satellite weapons in space and bearing responsibility for the death of his most

popular opponent, Alexei Navalny, thinks he can wait Ukraine out, and he thinks he can wait out all of us. We need to prove him wrong. There is such a blatant lie in there when she says Kharkiv is being bombed. Kharkiv is being bombed by the Ukrainians because it is filled with Russian-speaking, Russian-culturally attached taking Russian culturally attached people. She has a personal stake in trying to get Congress to funnel another $61 billion into this proxy war because she has made responsibility for the crisis we're in. 10 years ago this month, Nuland played a key role in US backing of the Maidan coup. She was caught on tape plotting with the U.S. ambassador about who the next Ukrainian leader should be and was ruling out some of her allies in Ukraine's ultra-nationalist neo-Nazi contingent because she recognized that they were too extreme to go into power, even as she was encouraging them

to overthrow the government. And so now, because she also played a key role in blocking the subsequent Minsk Accords, undermining them after they were reached, which could have ended the war in the Donbass that began after the Maidan coup. Nuland is desperate to keep this war going for as long as she can. But again, this notion that somehow Ukraine, after putting all of its chips

into this counteroffensive last year, which failed miserably, Ukraine basically lost territory in that rather than getting territory. That now possibly that Ukraine could gain more with just some more money. It's just a fantasy. And mentioning Kharkiv is interesting

because in the fall of 2022, that's when Ukraine surprised many people by actually recapturing the provinces of Kherson and Kharkiv from Russia. And that was the point when General Mark Milley, the top U.S. military officer, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, came out and said, this is wonderful.

This is the time for Ukraine to consolidate its gains at the negotiating table and negotiate with Russia. But there was no mood inside Washington for negotiations. So people like Victorian and Antony Blinken led the way in opposing Milley. And so not even the top u.s military officer who knew very well what the situation was on the battlefield who knew that ukraine could not go any farther than that not even his counsel was enough to get people like

newland and blinken and biden to to you know get off their desire to use ukraine to bleed russia and now newland's desperate to keep this war going because she knows it's not going well. Here she is again. This is in the same talk over the weekend. Please listen to what she says at the end, which is preposterous, I submit, that as a result of American involvement in Ukraine, you ready for this? The U.S. is a safer place. Without sending a single U.S. soldier into combat and investing less than one-tenth of one year's defense budget of the United States, we have helped Ukraine destroy 50 percent of Russia's ground combat power, 50 percent, and 20 percent of its vaunted Black Sea fleet. Ukraine has taken off the battlefield 21 naval ships, 102 Russian aircraft, and 2,700 Russian tanks. By every measure, Ukraine's bravery and strength, its resilience, has made the United States safer too.

That preposterous argument, is it not? Of course, and notice what she did not mention. What has been the toll fodder? How much of Ukraine has been taken and will never be returned? And how will this impact Ukraine's future? How many generations of Ukrainians have been wiped out? How many people have been left widowed and without their loved ones as a result of fighting on when there are reasonable ways to avoid this? Again, before Russia's invasion, there were the Minsk Accords. There was the draft treaty put out by Russia in December 2021, which could have been negotiated. Newland and Biden administration said no. Afterwards, there was the peace deal reached in the early weeks in Turkey, which the US and UK blocked. So she's ignoring there the toll that

has resulted from her own policies. And then just taking our argument at face value, how does it benefit US security to kill all these Russians? Is Russia going to invade the US if we don't use Ukraine to fight them there? It's such a ridiculous argument. No one takes it seriously. If anything, it makes the world more dangerous because we're talking about the world's two nuclear powers. How is it in anyone's security to have these two countries, which can destroy the planet many times over, on the opposing sides of a proxy war? It's insane. What is your understanding, Aaron, of the Ukrainian and Russian casualties? President Zelensky said over the weekend, 31,000 Ukrainian casualties. Colonel McGregor says 500,000 by casualties. He means dead or so wounded that they can't go back to the battlefield. Where do you think those numbers are?

Well, true numbers. Yeah, we know just that Zelensky's figure of 31,000 dead Ukrainians is just, it's such an insult to all those people who've been shipped off to die because he couldn't stand up to the ultra-nationalists inside his own country and implement the Minsk Accords and then end the war when he could have after Russia invaded, when there was a peace deal reached in Turkey. And that's when he succumbed not only to ultra- nationalist pressure, but to pressure from Boris Johnson and the Biden administration. So he's insulting their memory by claiming that only 31,000 people have died. I have no idea what the exact number is. I defer to the experts on that, but certainly it's far higher. I mean,

why else would then Zelensky now be talking about drafting another 500,000 people and lowering the age of encryption and literally pulling people off of the streets. As we've seen the video footage that people are being forced to go off to die in Zelensky's war. Well, Colonel McGregor's numbers are based on some group in Ukraine that monitors obituaries and grave sites. It's pretty objective. It's not subjective. We're going to play a clip for you. I don't even have to tell you who it is. It's in French, but it's translated. Number 11, Chris, I need to know what you think of this. There is no consensus today to send ground troops in an official, endorsed and sanctioned manner, but in dynamic terms, nothing should be ruled out. President of France talking about sending in ground troops, nothing should be ruled out. President of France talking about sending in ground troops, nothing should be ruled

out. How dangerous is a public statement like that? It's dangerous, but at the same time, I don't think anyone takes it seriously. Russia certainly doesn't take it seriously. There's no way Macron is going to send off French soldiers to get killed by Russia. They get wiped out. Everybody knows that. Macron is just out of control. He's trying to look tough to compensate for the fact that he wasn't strong enough to stand

up to the US when they were undermining the Minsk Accords before Russia invaded and blocked any reasonable opportunity for peace. Macron actually tried. He actually tried before Russia invaded for a diplomatic solution. There was a report in the Wall Street Journal a while ago saying that right before Russia invaded, Germany and France proposed to Zelensky that he just accept neutrality and he'll receive security guarantees in return. It was very similar to the deal that was almost reached in Turkey shortly after Russia invaded. And Zelensky said no, because Zelensky knew that the US wasn't behind that proposal. So therefore, he didn't have much room to accept it.

And rather than standing up to the U.S. and Ukraine's ultra-nationalists and try to implement the Minsk Accords, which France actually brokered with Germany, Macron's been all over the place. And I was trying to compensate, backed in like a tough guy and pretending he's going to send troops into Ukraine. It's a joke. I think I may have gotten this from the gray zone. I'm not sure. A retired German general and former chair of the NATO military committee saying publicly, Putin has never sought to conquer Ukraine. He only wants to return the Russian parts to Russia. How does NATO and the West react when one of their former, he's retired, senior generals, four-star German general, makes a statement like that? Well, they're aided by a reliable US media class, which will not report any dissenting voice like that. And yes, I do believe you're referring to a former German general who just talked about how the size of the force that Russia sent into Ukraine when it invaded was not nearly enough to take over the country, to take over Kiev. The goal of Russia,

as it was very obvious early on, was to compel Ukraine to enter into negotiations that it was refusing. Namely, it was refusing to speak to the leaders of the Donbass rebellion. It refused to treat them as equal partners, as they were required to do under the Minsk Accords. And that's why immediately after Russia invaded, four days after Russia invaded, you had negotiations going on in Belarus. And later on, a Ukrainian intelligence official later revealed that he actually sent some of his people there to those negotiations, not to negotiate seriously, but to buy time so that Ukraine could prepare to fight. Which reminds me of what Angela Merkel said about the Minsk Accords, which she helped broker when she said that actually we actually never intended to implement the Minsk Accords. That was just used to buy time for Ukraine to fight Russia, which, by the way, I don't even think she meant. I think she was just saying that to placate warmongers inside NATO.

But that's just a reflection of how hostile all these parties are to peace. And that's why voices from the heart of the establishment, from the German general who spoke to all the voices you regularly feature on your show, all these former U.S. intelligence officials and Western officials who have spoken out against their own government's policies. They never get a hearing inside the U.S. and Western media. It's all people who favor the proxy war. Right. But it does scare me when Rishi Sunak, the prime minister of Great Britain, says we're thinking of sending an expeditionary force. It's not expeditionary. That's just their phrase. They're thinking of sending troops. Scott Ritter says, okay, you could put the entire British military in MetLife Stadium, a football stadium near where I live, where the New York Giants and the New York Jets play, and there still would be a few thousand seats not taken. That's how small and insignificant it is. I hope that a statement like that is made

for domestic politics and he doesn't expect the West to take it seriously. I think it is for domestic purposes and it comes down to all these people being united around refusing diplomacy with Russia. So if your official policy is to not have any diplomacy, as is literally enshrined in a decree by Zelensky, and Putin actually recently mentioned this in his interview with Tucker Carlson. He said that Zelensky really needs to rescind his decree that rules out any negotiations with Russia so long as Putin in power, which is Ukraine basically saying that we're not going to have negotiations with Russia until there's regime change in Moscow, which is just insane. But that really is the policy of NATO right now. So in the absence of any minimal commitment to diplomacy, they have to come up with tough sounding statements like this, talking about things that they'll never actually do. Sounds like that decree was written by Victoria Nuland. We're going to switch over to Israel and Ukraine, and we're going to run a clip.

It's a little long, but I'm going to talk over it after we watch the first few moments of it. It's an airdrop of food and supplies by the French Air Force and the Jordanian Air Force. On one of the planes is the king of Jordan himself, personally pushing this stuff out the plane. And then a parachute opens and it lands in the Mediterranean Sea. And these poor souls in Gaza are out there in glorified bathtubs and rafts like we had as kids in the summer and swimming pools to grab this stuff and paddle it in and get it to the shore. And then there's such a kerf paddle it in and get it to the shore.

And then there's such a kerfuffle to try and get food. These people haven't eaten in weeks. Okay, I don't want to over-exaggerate it, but watch this. We are seeing hundreds, maybe thousands of people on a beach. Now we see the supplies being pushed out of the Jordanian plain. We'll run another clip in a few minutes and you'll see that the king himself, the king of Gaza since you last assessed it for us about a week ago? Well, the warnings from the United Nations have only worsened. And there are wide-scale reports of people dying of starvation, including infants. It's a complete crisis. It's not a territory that's on the brink of starvation. There is starvation. And you can see it there

from these horrible scenes of desperate people. And that's a result of the U.S.-Israeli policy of blocking aid to Gaza and using it as, quote-unquote, leverage over Hamas. I mean, this was confirmed recently. There have been these ceasefire talks going on in Paris, and one of the proposals put out by the U.S. is that if Hamas agrees to U.S.-Israeli terms, then Gaza will see more humanitarian aid. That's an acknowledgment that humanitarian aid is being used as a weapon, and humanitarian aid is not conditional.

It's not something you can hold up for political goals. You just provide it because that's what you're required to do on an international law. And just to underscore the point, you have Israelis even blockading aid trucks at the crossing with Gaza. Isn't that a war crime, blockading an aid truck to a civilian population? Absolutely it is. But we're talking about two rogue governments that don't care about international law. They've flouted the ICJ, which recently ordered Israel to allow in humanitarian aid without conditions to stop committing acts that could be considered genocide. Israel's continued the killing spree as normal. And just what I receive anecdotally, when I'm able to hear from my friends in Gaza, most of them now are in the north. One of them found some canned food the other day, and that was like a miracle to them.

And he's with a family of 11 people, and they're sharing a really small amount of food. And by the way, the prices of food are massive. So even if you can find food, there are many people who just can't afford it because it's so scarce that the prices are massive and out of reach for most people. How is the IDF treating female Palestinian captives? Well, there have been reports of torture, of sexual abuse. Some UN experts recently put out a press release about that. Of course, that was widely ignored here in the US. All the people who claim to care about alleged sexual violence by Hamas, Hillary Clinton and all those types, said nothing about this, even though the claims lodged against Israel

are actually credible. And as we've shown at the Gray Zone, other places have shown too, this allegation that Hamas committed this pattern of sexual violence on October 7th, it's undermined by all the available evidence. There are no purported survivors who claim they were victims of this. The purported witnesses who claim they saw this

have all told contradictory tales, and there's no forensic evidence either. So by all appearances, this is just another scam to manufacture consent for what israel is actually doing before our eyes which is committed genocide uh scott ritter uh claims from his sources uh that more israelis were killed on october 7th by the idf than by hamas are you able to comment on that? Well, I would just refer people to my colleague, Max Lumenthal, who's reporting on this. He's done extraordinary work, you know, based largely on the accounts that have appeared in Israeli media, but are censored here in the U.S.,

talking about how Israel fired on its own people. In terms of the proportion, who killed more, I have no idea. It makes sense to me that the image we saw of burned vehicles, it didn't strike me as plausible that Hamas has the military capability to cause that kind of damage. It seemed, just as with the damage to some of the homes, that this was caused by Israeli helicopters and tanks. And there's witness testimony to corroborate that. But in terms of the exact numbers, I can't say. But what I can say is that Max Blumenthal has done excellent work on this, so has the Electronic Intifada and other websites that have dared to break the media blockade about this really overlooked aspect of October 7th,

which was the role of Israel in killing its own people. I'm going to play a clip from Prime Minister Netanyahu on one of the American talk shows. I forget which one. Over the weekend, it will aggravate you. It aggravates me. But I want you to comment on it. It's that same mantra he always repeats. This is like many 9-11s.

This is what happened to us. We didn't do anything different from what the Americans did. Well, you'll hear him. What would America do, Margaret, if you face the equivalent of 29 11s, 50,000 Americans slaughtered in one day, 10,000 Americans, including mothers and children, held hostage? Would you not be doing what Israel is doing? You'd be doing a hell of a lot more. And all Americans that I talk to nearly all say that. So Israel has gone to extraordinary lengths, calling up people, civilians, Palestinians in Gaza,

telling them, leave your home, sending pamphlets. We have done that effort. Hamas tries to keep them at one point. We'll clear them out of harm's way. We'll complete the job and achieve total victory, which is necessary to give

a secure future for Israel, a better future for Gaza, a better future for Gaza, a better future for the Middle East, and a setback for the Iran terror axis. That's in all our interests. It's in America's interest too. About as big a concoction of lies as I've ever heard out of his mouth. We are concerned about the civilians in Palestine. How many have they slaughtered by now? 25,000? Yeah, that's the official toll. The official toll is around 30,000 now.

But of course, that's a conservative estimate because Hamas has been, because Gaza has been so destroyed and so many people are still under the rubble. So the official toll, I think, is an undercount. But in terms of what he says there, it's based on just a false premise that unfortunately is never corrected on establishment news shows like that. We're not talking about two equal parties. We're not talking about Israel responding to an attack by an equal party. We're talking about Israel responding to a resistance movement in territory that it's occupying. And occupiers don't have self-defense rights. They have obligations, namely to end the occupation. So the response that Israel

should have done in Gaza was to negotiate an exchange of prisoners and to end the occupation of Gaza and the West Bank. On October 7th, they had self-defense rights. I mean, no one would argue that Israel can just let militants kill their people. So on October 7th, fair enough, that's when you respond. But by the way, you don't respond by killing your own people in the process, which is what Israel did. But it's not October 7th anymore. We're talking about more than four months later, Israel slaughtered tens of thousands of people, left Gaza uninhabitable because it's not defending itself. It's trying to ethnically cleanse the territory that it's already occupying. And that's not self-defense. And unfortunately, that false premise is never, ever pointed out on corporate TV. You can't point

out that Israel is an occupying power. In terms of what he says there about what the U.S. would do, I actually don't believe him. I have plenty of criticisms of U.S. foreign policy. I don't think the U.S. would be as cruel, as heartless, as barbaric as Israel has been in Gaza, bombarding this defenseless, besieged, small bit of land, making it uninhabitable, blocking humanitarian aid, and openly bragging about it, as so many Israeli officials have done. I don't think the U.S., for all my criticisms of the U.S. government, I don't think the U.S. would be that evil. Aaron Matei, thank you, my dear friend. Thanks for your time and your analysis as always And again, I hope you'll come back with us next week

Absolutely, thank you Judge Of course Another gifted and brilliant young man Who has direct contact with people in Israel And with poor souls in Gaza Coming up at 6 o'clock Eastern, Ryan Dawson. Who's making all the money off of this, off of these wars? Take a guess.

Judge Napolitano for judging freedom. I'm out.