Judging Freedom - Aaron Maté : War and Congressional Democrats

Episode Date: April 24, 2024

Aaron Maté : War and Congressional DemocratsSee 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, April 24th, 2024. Aaron Maté is here on the freedom of speech in America on American college campuses. And Prime Minister Netanyahu's calls for crushing it. 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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I have a lot of questions for you about Hamas being reconstituted in the northern part of Gaza, according to the Wall Street Journal and Prime Minister Netanyahu's threats to slaughter more Gazans, this time in Rafah. But the breaking news is that the prime minister himself recently called for the silencing of free speech on American college campuses. Before I run the clip, which is very disturbing, what's your take on what's happening on American college campuses? You and I live in the New York City metropolitan area, and we are familiar with what's going on at the Columbia University. If I were on the law school faculty, I'd be marching with the students. What's your take?

I'm just very heartened by the courage and the moral leadership from these brave young people setting up these encampments, not only at Columbia, but at many other schools. Harvard just recently became the latest, I believe. And this is exam season for students. They have a lot going on, but they're just so outraged at the genocide being waged in their name that they're doing something about it. And they're recalling the best traditions of this country. College campuses were the source for so much anti-war protests during the Vietnam War and many subsequent foreign disasters and foreign conflicts.

So it's just so heartening and encouraging to see young people carrying on in that tradition against really serious intimidation. At Columbia, you have now police assembling and the threat of a raid to break up the encampment. At NYU, you saw police come in and arrest people and then literally construct a wall, an apartheid wall, you might call it, to keep students out. And not only are they facing physical threats, but also in the media being demonized as anti-Semites. There's a huge propaganda campaign right now being pushed by established members of both political parties to portray these protests as anti-Semitic. Joe Biden said it. Senator Tom Cotton said it. Senator Tom Cotton said people who are foreigners taking part in these protests should be deported. So there's a huge consensus right now from the

establishment to demonize these young people, but they're not being intimidated. And I'm just very encouraged by that. Senator Tom Cotton even encouraged having fistfights. It seems to me the whole purpose of government, I'm going back to the Declaration of Independence, is to protect the exercise of our rights, foremost among which is the freedom of speech. Without that right, we'd all have British accents. We would never have had the American Revolution. Well, here's what Prime Minister Netanyahu said about two hours ago. It's a video tweet, a video X, call it today. It's about two minutes long. It's horrific. I want everybody to watch the whole thing. What's happening on America's college campuses is horrific. Anti-Semitic mobs have taken over leading universities. They call for the annihilation

of Israel. They attack Jewish students. They attack Jewish faculty. This is reminiscent of what happened in German universities in the 1930s. It's unconscionable. It has to be stopped. It has to be condemned and condemned unequivocally. But that's not what happened. The response of several university presidents was shameful. Now, fortunately, state, local, federal officials, many of them have responded differently, but there has to be more. More has to be done. It has to be done not only because they attack Israel.

That's bad enough. Not only because they want to kill Jews wherever they are. That's bad enough. Not only because they want to kill Jews wherever they are. That's bad enough. It's also, when you listen to them, it's also because they say not only death to Israel, death to the Jews, but death to America. And this tells us that there is an anti-Semitic surge here that has terrible consequences. We see this exponential rise of anti-Semitism throughout America and throughout Western societies as Israel tries to defend itself against genocidal terrorists, genocidal terrorists who hide behind civilians. Yet it is Israel that is falsely accused of genocide, Israel that is falsely accused of starvation and all sundry war crimes. It's all one big

libel. But that's not new. We've seen in history that anti-Semitic attacks were always preceded by vilification and slander, lies that were cast against the Jewish people that are unbelievable, yet people believed them. And what is important now is for all of us, all of us who are interested and cherish our values and our civilization to stand up together and to say enough is enough. We have to stop anti-Semitism because anti-Semitism is the canary in the coal mine. It always precedes larger conflagrations that engulf the entire world.

So I ask all of you, Jews and non-Jews alike, who are concerned with our common future and our common values, to do one thing. Stand up. Speak up. Be counted. Stop anti-Semitism now. Wow. Where to start with this, Aaron? There's so many lies in there. Starting with the notion that somehow these protests are anti-Semitic, anti-Jewish. There are so many Jewish students taking part in these

protests. At Columbia, you can see images of people doing Jewish ceremonies. It's Passover right now. They've been honoring that. On the Sabbath, they honored that as well. But even if there weren't a single Jewish person there, a Jewish person of conscience taking part in these protests, even if there weren't, still the claim of anti-Semitism would be just as ridiculous. Because what are these people actually there for? They're there to protest mass murder, the industrial slaughter of children in Gaza. That's what everyone is opposed to. And the fact that Netanyahu feels compelled to make a video slandering them and urging action against them, it speaks to how dependent he is on U.S. support and how fragile his entire operation is because he knows

what he sees in those protests is moral leadership, which threatens his genocide campaign. He's worried about it spreading. He's worried about other people following suit and catching on and joining the wave of moral courage that it takes to put your body on the line to protest the mass slaughter that he's presiding over. So that's why he feels compelled to come out and make this video because he knows that he cannot do his mass murder campaign without US support. And he knows what happened during the Vietnam War when massive student protests helped build the momentum to finally put an end to that horrible war. And he's trying to avoid a repeat of that. And so many other cases where grassroots movements have had a positive force in the world. So therefore he's resorting to the

lowest libel possible, accusing people of being anti-Semites. And then he says Israel's falsely accused of genocide and starvation. Well, the ICJ disagrees. The International Court of Justice said there are reasonable grounds that Israel might be committing genocide and that this should be investigated further. So many human rights groups have said that Israel is deliberately starving the people of Gaza. Israeli officials have said they're deliberately starving the people of Gaza. So all Netanyahu has is this blatant attempt to weaponize the horrible history of anti-Semitism, the history of the Nazi Holocaust, which he has the, just, it's so shameful to try to invoke the Nazi Holocaust, to try to demonize people who are protesting a current Holocaust that he is waging. And he has to call for censorship

of these people, which is not the first time he's interfered in U.S. domestic politics. It's amazing how we let this country, this fanatical country, have such an influence on domestic issues to the point where they feel entitled to go ahead and call for censorship of people protesting their crimes. Thank you for a brilliant and articulate dissection of what he said. I know you hadn't seen that before because it just came out. So your comments were from your head and from your heart, and I thank you for it. It was difficult for me to watch it and difficult for me to play it, but those who are viewing the program

understand that we have to expose him for what he is, the head of a criminal government that runs an apartheid that is engaged in genocide, all financed by the American taxpayer. Particularly as of, I think, Saturday night or yesterday, whenever Joe Biden signed the latest tranche of cash into law, which is now in the $20 billion, with a B dollar range, going to Netanyahu's government. Is he moving forward with his invasion of Rafah? This podcast is sponsored by Talkspace. You know, when you're really stressed or not feeling so great about your life or about yourself, talking to someone who understands can really help. But who is that person? How do you find them? Where do you even start? Talkspace. Talkspace

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Now get $80 off of your first month with promo code SPACE80 when you go to Talkspace.com. Match with a licensed therapist today at Talkspace.com. Save $80 with code SPACE80 at Talkspace.com. Match with a licensed therapist today at Talkspace.com. Save $80 with code SPACE80 at Talkspace.com. That seems to be a foregone conclusion. There was a recent New York Times article saying that an invasion of Gaza now looks inevitable. What's inevitable about mass murder? Well, in the U.S., where support for Israel is reflexive and it's unconditional, I guess mass murder is inevitable. And Biden, who previously kind of said that invading Rafah was a red line, that's long been forgotten. And now we have meetings going on between U.S. officials and Israel on how to carry out the invasion of Rafah. And the U.S. claims they're trying to, you know,

impact Israel's plans to make it more humane, to make sure there's safety for civilians. How has that gone so far? That's been the line we've gotten from since the genocide began, that the U.S. is in talks with their Israeli counterparts. They're talking about ways to reduce civilian casualties. Well, the result is the destruction of most of Gaza, the slaughter of tens of thousands of people, the killing of so many children. Even to say the official toll, which is around 14,000, to me is insulting because it's an undercount. The actual toll is far higher.

So all indications are that, yes, this invasion of Rafah will go ahead because Biden refuses to impose any conditions at all in Israel. I mean, that's just what it comes down to. Biden just caught between two competing forces, the AIPAC crowd on one hand and Michigan on the other hand. He can't get reelected without that state. And there's a huge Arab population there that is just not going to tolerate this and not going to vote for him.

Absolutely. I think the Democrats think that if they just say Trump enough times, that that will get people to forget that Biden's presiding over a genocide. I don't think that strategy will work out for them, but that's what they've apparently decided on. The Wall Street Journal says that Hamas is resurgent in northern Gaza. Are your sources consistent with the journals? I don't have any special insight there. I'm just, I have to say, I'm surprised. I really did not think that at this point,

more than six months in, that Hamas would be so resilient. But that just speaks to, I guess, how in these conflicts where you have an occupier fighting a resistance that is fighting, whatever you think of Hamas, they are fighting for the freedom of their people. That's ultimately what Palestine is facing. They're under colonial rule from a belligerent military occupation. And even though there's a huge military disadvantage,

sometimes that resilience that comes from fighting for your freedom, for liberation, can make a difference. And apparently it looks like that's what's happened so far because by all accounts, and the Wall Street street journal i think reflects the consensus amongst intelligence officials we've been hearing this for a while that yeah hamas has held out and israel has not suffered the death blow to hamas that they're claiming in public that they've inflicted well here's somebody that you and i probably never thought we'd agree with this is is John Sowers, who is the former head of MI6, the British version of the CIA, in an interview just this past weekend. So he's retired now. He's free to say whatever he wants, saying that Hamas will soon reconstitute and it will have plenty of volunteers.

Cut number 10. I think Hamas will be able to reconstitute its military forces. There'll be plenty of volunteers for Hamas battalions emerging out of this conflict. And the only real answer to both Gaza and the West Bank is to have an authoritative Palestinian leadership, which takes responsibility for those territories in the context of working towards a Palestinian leadership, which takes responsibility for those territories in the context of working towards a Palestinian state, which lives alongside a secure and peaceful Israel. I can't imagine a former head of the CIA speaking that way. It makes me wonder if that's the advice that's going to British prime ministers, and it's going in one ear and out the other. Well, leaders are famous for hearing what they want to hear. And I don't know if that's making it to the top of the British leadership, but certainly anybody with their eyes open can see

that that's the reality, that Israel's not been able to accomplish its stated military goals. It's only been able to accomplish slaughtering defenseless people, bombing their hospitals, bombing their mosques, bombing their schools, bombing their homes. And the speaker there, the former MI6 head, his, I think he's correctly assessing the current state of things, but I think he's not going far enough in terms of what the solution is. It's not just about finding a cohesive Palestinian leadership, although that is important. And the first step would be getting rid of the corrupt Palestinian Authority leadership in the West Bank, which has acted as a collaborator with Israel, led by Mahmoud Abbas, who's just done absolutely nothing to advance the liberation of his people. The answer is to first grant Palestinians self-determination and their freedom, which has long been denied them. It's not about a vision of a Palestinian state

somewhere off in the future. That's just an excuse to delay giving Palestinians their freedom. And for any sustainable solution to this horror in Israel-Palestine, it has to start with granting Palestinians their basic rights, which means their freedom. When Linda Thomas-Greenfield, the United States ambassador to the UN voted against and thereby vetoed the UN resolution calling for a Palestinian state. She said, we can't do it because the Palestinians are controlled by a terrorist organization. Was she talking about the Netanyahu government? Yeah, I mean, by that definition, no state or very few states would have the right to statehood because on the grounds that they support terrorism. I mean, look what Israel's doing. Look

what the US supports around the world and has for so long. So that's just an excuse. And that's a part of the double game that the U.S. plays of pretending to care about a Palestinian state. But anytime there's an opportunity to do something, even nominally in that direction, because that's all that UN resolution was, it wouldn't have granted Palestinians a statehood. It just would have granted them recognition of statehood at the UN. The U.S. can't support it because they won't do anything that actually advances the goal that they claim to support, which is Palestinian statehood, because their actual agenda is just backing Israel, which means backing Israel and doing whatever it wants, stealing as much

West Bank lands as it wants and making Gaza uninhabitable for the people who live there. Do you have a feel for where the Democratic Party in the U.S. is on aid to Israel, the dilemma that they're in? I mean, are they becoming Republicans? Well, you know, the state of the party, it's a bit better than they were on the Ukraine war funding, where every single Democrat in the House voted for that measure to give Ukraine 60 more billion dollars to prolong this proxy war. And most of them waved Ukrainian flags on the floor of the House. And I misspoke. The money is actually not for Ukraine. The money is for the military-industrial complex in the name of Ukraine.

And every single Democrat voted for that in the House, including the entire Congressional Progressive Caucus, the squad. People who, by the way, for 24 hours in October 2022, claimed they favored diplomacy with Russia, but then went through their letter under pressure from neocons. And now they're all voting in lockstep to fund this Ukraine proxy war even more. But on Israel, it is better. You had dozens of Democrats voting no on this measure to arm Israel further, including some Democrats who previously have been staunch supporters of Israel, including Jamie Raskin of Maryland. I don't think that's because they've developed the conscience. I think

it's a reflection of their base, that the grassroots of the Democratic Party is not tolerating their president's complicity in mass murder. So I do see signs of progress there. Unfortunately, though, when you look at the totality of their votes, when they're at the same time funneling tens of billions of more dollars into this Ukraine proxy war. It's not a very positive state of affairs inside the Democratic Party. Here's the scene on the floor of the House of Representatives after the vote. Now, the vote was for 95 billion, 5 billion to Taiwan, about 25 billion to Israel, about 65, 61 billion to Ukraine, and some other stuff in there uh as well but the the person tallying the votes is not the speaker it's another member of congress unidentified but

watch what happens i missed it thank you okay the house will be in order the house will be in order the chair would remind my colleagues to observe proper decorum. Flag waving on the floor is not appropriate. The House will be in order. Without objection, a motion to reconsider is laid on the table. For what purpose does the gentleman from Florida rise? The gentlewoman from Florida. The gentleman does not recognize colleagues. No, I'm going to. The house will be in order.

The person who said put the damn flags away was a Republican who voted against all the aid that the Biden administration has since signed into law. I thought it was just so childish for a deliberative body. You can't really call the House of Representatives a deliberative body. They gave Thomas Massey and the others about five minutes to speak against this, and nobody was listening. It's not like Parliament, where they go back and forth with each other for hours, and they talk about the various points. There was no serious, meaningful consideration of the ramifications of this, the tens and maybe hundreds of thousands

of people that will die even if this stuff, if this equipment gets there. Exactly. And I think that's the most tragic part of this display of, on top of waving the flag of a foreign country inside the US Congress, they're waving the flag of a foreign country that they're actively destroying. It's being used for the explicit goal, the Biden administration does not hid this, to weaken Russia. Not to defend Ukraine, but to weaken Russia. If they cared about defending Ukraine,

they wouldn't have blocked diplomacy at every turn before Russia invaded, after Russia invaded. After General Mark Milley, the chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, even he said in the fall of 2022, we should negotiate with Russia. All of that was ignored to be able to sacrifice young Ukrainians and old Ukrainians too, because they're being sent off to die as well for the goal of bleeding Russia.

So there's something so especially sadistic about waving the flag of a country that you're actively destroying. And that's what this new funding ultimately guarantees, that more Ukrainians will die. And for what? Because we've already tried the whole route of trying to pump Ukraine with weapons and have them take back territory. They achieved it in the fall of 2022. That's when they should have negotiated, according to Mark Milley, but they didn't. They went further and then we had the counteroffensive, which was a massive disaster. So why would we think that funneling more money into Ukraine

when they've lost so many people, they've lost more territory, would be any different than the failed counteroffensive of last year? No one's able to explain why. All we're getting is just deceit and delusion. And the saddest thing is that Ukrainians will pay the price. Hidden in this bill, because there was zero debate on this on the floor, is authority for the president of the United States, whoever it might be, Joe Biden, Donald Trump,

whoever it's going to be in the future, to ban TikTok. Well, this is just absurd. I wrote a piece a couple of weeks ago, can the Congress ban TikTok? And I made the constitutional argument. Hey, guys, did you forget the Constitution? Congress shall make no law

infringing upon the freedom of speech. But how dangerous is it for the Congress to authorize the president on his or her own to ban any venue or platform which the president says is owned or dominated by a foreign interest? If you listen to the speeches that we've seen on the congressional floor about this, they all basically make it plain that the reason they're doing this is because they can't control the messaging on TikTok, that there's more messaging on TikTok that is critical of Israel, that is even critical of Ukraine, and they can't handle that. They cannot handle any dissent from the prevailing narrative. It's a straight up authoritarianism. And therefore, they're resorting to the authoritarian tactic of censorship.

That's what it's all about. They can't control what young people are saying on this one app. So therefore, they're going to try to ban it. And I have no doubt that if Twitter continues to go the route of disobeying censorship orders as they have recently, although not as much as they could, but certainly it's been a bit better, I think, under Elon Musk than it was under the previous ownership when it comes to obeying censorship orders. I have no doubt we'll see similar measures. It's just that's what an authoritarian does when there's any dissent inside a democracy where they need the consent of the people to be

able to carry out their crimes, or at least they need people to be marginalized and sufficiently duped to be able to carry out their crimes. If you can't control what they're saying and seeing, then you have to censor it. That's what it comes down to. Recently, the IDF general who was in charge of military intelligence, resigned and did a mea culpa that October 7th is his fault. Do the Israeli people believe this? Is it not Netanyahu? Is it not more Mossad than this general? I mean, don't we now accept and understand that the Israeli government knew the 7th was coming or knew it was happening as it was happening. It did nothing to stop it except kill its own people.

It's well established now that there were multiple warnings about a Hamas operation before October 7th. It's well established that Netanyahu diverted forces from enforcing the siege of Gaza to the occupied West Bank because he's obsessed with colonizing the West Bank and stealing more of its land, which he's continued to do, by the way, throughout these six months of genocide. And so it's definitely widely understood in Israel that Netanyahu is at fault. And that's why he has the incentive to keep this genocide going for as long as he can. And yeah, he might find some fall guys, but I think it's pretty clear inside Israel that there is a target on his back politically. And that's why he has to keep this horrible mass murder

campaign going. Does anybody believe that it was this general's fault? That's a great question. I mean, certainly anybody in a senior position in the Israeli military, especially intelligence, does have responsibility because there were these warnings. But it does start at the top. This was Netanyahu's policy. He put these people in place. He was likely aware of all these warnings. Again, he was more concerned and more obsessed with stealing land in the occupied West Bank. Just going back to Ukraine again before we end, the New York Times reported just a few hours ago that the United States secretly sent a long-range sophisticated missile system to Ukraine, which they operated. These are missiles

that travel between 190 and 200 miles, and they struck and damaged a Russian airfield. Now, if the New York Times knows about it, then surely the FSB and President Putin know about it. How dangerous and reckless was this for Joe Biden personally to have signed off on sending this offensive weaponry to the Ukrainians? I haven't seen this report yet, so it's news to me, but it's not surprising. This is a government that the U.S. government helped overthrow an elected president in Ukraine 10 years ago. Since then, according to the New York Times, a recent disclosure, they've established 12 secret CIA bases. They funneled tens of billions of dollars worth of NATO weaponry into Ukraine.

They've helped with targeting. U.S. officials took credit for Ukrainian killings that killed Russian generals. So this is consistent with that, this willingness to risk world war for the goal of bleeding Russia and using Ukraine for that goal. So it's no surprise to me at all that there's a deeper level of U.S. military involvement than we previously knew. It's inevitable. These people are obsessed with regime change because Russia happens to be a deterrent U.S. hegemony. So therefore, nothing is off the table, including risking world war and the risk of Armageddon, which Joe Biden recognized. Remember, there was a fundraiser where he spoke at James Murdoch's house. He said, the world's never been closer to Armageddon at this point

now than we have been since the Cuban Missile Crisis. Yet Joe Biden's policies at every turn has been not to mitigate the risk of Armageddon, but to fuel it. Here's a very sobering analysis of all of this, not inconsistent with what you just said, from Sergei Lavrov himself, the Russian foreign minister, cut number one. Currently, the United States and its NATO allies persist in their fixation on dealing a decisive blow to Russia. They seem prepared to keep opposing our nation, using Ukraine as their last stand, so to speak. Simultaneously, Western nations are precariously teetering towards a direct military confrontation involving nuclear powers carrying potential catastrophic outcomes. Pretty clear. Biden will not allow Zelensky to negotiate. Yeah, and Biden himself will not entertain any serious avenue of negotiation.

And Lavrov recently said something that I think bolsters what a frequent guest in your show, Ray McGovern, has been talking about. Ray McGovern was, I think, the only person in the West to flag a really important incident right before Russia invaded, where even though the U.S. rejected Russia's draft treaty, which they submitted in December 2021 in a bid to avoid an evasion, even though they rejected that, the Biden administration did say that they'd be willing to discuss the placement of offensive missiles inside Ukraine with Russia. And Putin took that as a positive step. And in those crucial weeks before Russia invaded, there were talks between the U.S. and Russia, and it looked like, okay, maybe at least on these missile placements, they're going to come to some kind of agreement and actually maybe revive some of what was lost by the U.S. walking away from the INF Treaty, which Donald Trump did under pressure from his neocon cabinet, including John Bolton. the person that pointed out that even on that narrow issue of negotiation where Biden expressed some willingness initially to negotiate, that Biden walked that back. That after Biden said, we'll talk about that and we have no intention of putting offensive missiles in Ukraine, even that was actually walked back in those crucial weeks before the war. And Ray McGovern,

I think, is the only person in the West who pointed that out. And Sergey Lavrov in a recent interview said that, yes, Blinken told him that, yeah, we might have missiles inside Ukraine, but we're willing to discuss limits on them. So that was the U.S. concession, according to Sergei Lavrov, if I heard him correctly. Yes, we're going to have missiles inside Ukraine right next to you, but we're willing to discuss limits on them. Imagine Russia saying to the U.S., we're going to have missiles in Canada or Mexico, but we're willing to discuss limits on them. I mean, Canada and Mexico would have been destroyed even at the thought of that. Correct.

We're supposed to think that Biden has been engaged in diplomacy, when really that episode illustrates that this has been about war all along. Ray McGovern's a great man, and you are as well, my dear friend. Thank you very much for your time and for your analysis. And knowing McGovern, as we both do, he'll be ecstatic with the comments you just made about him. Well, Judge, it's always a pleasure. Thanks for having me. Thank you, dear friend. I hope we can see you again next week. All the best. Coming up tomorrow, another interesting day for you. Let me just grab my calendar here. At 8 o'clock tomorrow morning, Eastern Time, Tony Schaefer.

At 3 o'clock in the afternoon, Professor John Mearsheimer. And at 4 o'clock in the afternoon, Aaron's good buddy and the inimitable Max Blumenthal. Judge Napolitano for Judging Freedom. Thank you.