Judging Freedom - Col. Karen Kwiatkowski: Truth Diplomatic Deceit, Political Awakening, and the Power of Freedom

Episode Date: November 29, 2023

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Resolve to earn your degree in the new year in the Bay with WGU. WGU is an online accredited university that specializes in personalized learning. With courses available 24-7 and monthly start dates, you can earn your degree on your schedule. You may even be able to graduate sooner than you think by demonstrating mastery of the material you know. Make 2025 the year you focus on your future. Learn more at wgu.edu. Hi everyone, Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom. Today is Tuesday, November 28th, 2023. My dear friend, Lieutenant Colonel Karen Kwiatkowski joins us now.

Karen, always a pleasure. Thank you for coming back to the program. The exchange of human beings between the Hamas and the Israelis seems to be going on a few more each day. And the Qatari foreign minister spokesman, of course, this is a very fresh video of Israelis who had been captured being returned, brought to an Israeli hospital by an Israeli army helicopter. The Qatari people seem to be hoping that these temporary truces will become longer and longer and longer. But what I want to ask you about is the concept of deception. Are these truces really because Benjamin Netanyahu cares about the Israeli hostages or because of political pressure on him? Are both governments regrouping and getting ready to kill more, or do they really want peace? Why do we call the Gazan human beings restrained by the Israelis prisoners and the Israeli human beings seized by Hamas as hostages? Does Bibi Netanyahu believe that all men are created equal? Okay, I've asked you a lot of questions at once, but you have written a very, very, very thought-provoking piece about some of the dissonance that comes together at moments like this.

So take the ball and run with it, Karen. and many in the Jewish leadership and probably a good many of Israelis themselves do not consider Palestinian life to be equal in any way, shape or form to Israeli life. It is something that we have plenty of evidence of long before October 7th. The way that Palestinians in Israel are treated and certainly the way they don't receive justice in terms of when they are picked up off the street or when things happen, it's a very lopsided situation. Palestinians have very little power. They get very little respect and they are largely disliked by, I can't say for sure, but I'd say many, if not the majority of the Israeli people who see them basically as people that shouldn't live there anymore. They really want to see them gone. And that's what Gaza is about. You know, we still haven't gotten to the bottom of why the border was so open on October 7th. But clearly, this opportunity, Netanyahu and many of his supporters and his government are taking full advantage of to do something which is very popular in Israel, but it's also very murderous and genocidal.

It is very repulsive. It is the very thing that the United States kind of has in the past stood up against. But in this case, we say nothing. We actually are supporting Israel in what they're doing. And what they're doing is clearing Gaza, completely clearing it in order to basically from the river to the sea, which originated as not a Palestinian saying, but as an Israeli saying. So, you know, what are you going to do? We're not allowed to say it. If we look into why it's said, it is about Israel's vision for itself, perhaps the Zionist vision of Israel, which is that land was somehow deeded to them by God many millennium ago. And it's their land to take. And they have the deeds, which is why the Palestinians hold

the keys to their houses, the ones who have been removed from those homes. They say, we have the key, but I guess the Zionists have the deed. Of course, they haven't produced it and they're taking it. And they have the power, military power, and apparently the political power right now to go ahead and proceed with this. So it'll be interesting to see how much the rest of the world will tolerate. The New York Times reports that more women and children have been killed in the Gaza Strip in eight weeks than civilians, men, women, and children, have been killed in the Ukraine war in 18 months. That's an extremely, extremely telling comparison. President Putin, for all the trashing he gets from the West,

is far more careful and deliberate and patient. Three words he had never even used in the same sentence with the name Benjamin Netanyahu. That's right. And what it shows is also that the United States leadership also does not believe that all people are created equal, not in any way, shape, or form. The Ukrainian civilians that have been killed accidentally, clearly we know the Russians have been killed accidentally. Clearly, we know the Russians have been as careful as they can be in a combat situation. And they have kept the number of civilian deaths relatively low, given what they could be.

So, but every single Ukrainian death that the Russians are responsible for, a Ukrainian civilian death, oh, those are in the front page of the newspaper. Those are heartbreaking, disastrous, terrible things. But our government is not blamed for the death of Ukrainian soldiers, the destruction of the Ukrainian army, which it has done, the further corruption of the Ukrainian government. We say nothing about that. So because Ukrainians, we told them, let's you and, you know, why don't you and him fight? That's what we told Ukraine to do. So we didn't

care anything about the value of Ukrainian life. So, you know, the Zionists have no, have no, you know, they're not the top dog and think in believing people are not equal and having contempt for Palestinians. The Americans have contempt for Ukrainian life. We have contempt for Russian life. Wasn't it one of our senators that said, if a Russian dies, it's the best money we've ever spent? We didn't have to kill him. I mean, we have contempt for you all. Two senators, Mitt Romney, at one time the Republican nominee for president of the United States, and Richard Blumenthal from Connecticut, two senators that don't usually agree on things, both said the same thing. Best money we ever spent, Ukrainians dying and no Americans being killed. No Americans that Joe Biden at least will acknowledge. You know, just to segue into Ukraine

for a minute, Colonel McGregor and I discussed an interview given by the recently retired four-star German general who was the commander in chief of NATO. And you know he's retired by what he said. He's blasting European leadership for even suggesting that NATO has meaning any longer. Blasting the Americans and the British for sabotaging the Minsk Two Accords, for interfering with an amicable handshake agreement between the Russians and the Ukrainians, which would have avoided all of this death and bloodshed. And blasting the European elites who somehow think that Ukraine can still win this war, even though elections have been canceled and borders have been closed so people can't leave. And they're about to impose a draft on everybody, both genders from age 17 to 70, and there's a public dispute between the Commander-in-Chief of the military,

General Zelensky, and President Zelensky. I guess when you're in uniform and you work for them, you keep your mouth shut, but the minute you leave, you can say, much of what I did, I now renounce. Yeah. Well, you know, the generals and anybody in uniform, particularly this guy who ran NATO as a experienced general, that's not what NATO is run by now. The head of NATO is a civilian who's never even worn a uniform, as I understand it. So it is a political organization that doesn't understand the reality of the use of force. You know, it hasn't imagined it. It's a cartoon kind of interpretation of what the use of force entails. We do this and, you know, they think it's all controllable and they don't have the experience that kind of produces wisdom,

which clearly this former head of NATO has and is speaking about. But that's what's really lacking is wisdom. And certainly in Europe, it's a disaster. I think they have – I don't think Europe's going to recover from what it has gone along with. I'm not sure this country's going to recover. Well, this German general, name escaping me, is of the same view as what you just said about the absence of recovery. And, of course, as we're seeing the rise of the right, wherever that takes us. One of those elections that you and I applaud, although we disagree with them on Israel and Ukraine, is the fellow in Argentina who is a serious, serious Austrian libertarian

and serious believer in civil liberties and restraining government. I don't know if he's going to be able to do that in Argentina, but he won with a huge majority, and we'll see where it goes. And he and you and I have some friends in common, the national and international academic world of Austrian economists. I know you were ecstatic about what he did because you wrote about it in a recent. Yeah. Oh, and I got feedback from a reader, a libertarian who says, no, you're all excited about Millet's victory. He's not a libertarian. And I'm like, you know, I'll tell you what, he wants to end a central bank. He wants to promote actual popular freedom for his people. He wants limited government. What more can you ask for? It's a wonderful standard to aspire to. But also we're seeing other elections with similar messages finding that popularity. I think one of the Norwegian, Danish, I can't remember. There was another election where a limited government kind of guy was the top guy. And I just saw another one and I can't remember what country it was. So, you know, we're seeing people who have wisdom and common sense, which our governments

don't have. And this is, you know, it's not even about Biden because it's fun to make fun of Biden like he's senile and he has no sense. Well, most of our governments, they're not senile, but they don't have wisdom. They don't exercise wisdom. Collectively, they don't produce more than the contributors. It's like it's lowest common denominator kind of answers that we get from most of our governments. In your recent piece, you describe an event that normally would have been unnoticed, but it happened in New York City and it became a big deal in the media here in the New York City metropolitan area in which an American who's also an Israeli tore down or got in an argument with a halal dealer. Ironically, this happened across the street from Fox News, where I used to work.

I don't think it had anything to do with Fox. But the argument was captured on video. The Americans' language and behavior was really very, very attacking and very hateful. Now it turns out that this guy was an official of the Obama administration and had a very high-ranking national security clearance like you did on the National Security Council of President Obama. And he's working for one of those phony think tanks that's really funded by the government. And they fired him because of his hate. And you drew this in as a metaphor for i'll let you take it well a couple of things stood out one is that

this guy's job when he served in the state department both the clinton state department and the obama state department was working on israel palestine relations working on the so-called two-state solution that has been official American policy for I don't know how long. So here's a guy who clearly despises Palestinians and has nothing but absolute horrendous contempt for all of them, people he doesn't know. It's just, I hate all of you. And he's working the nuts and bolts of our foreign policy, that on the surface, what we're saying is, oh, we think Palestinians are equal.

We want them to have a state that can be contiguous and can be governed and can be a prosperous place. That's what our government says. In fact, the people making that policy are people like this guy. And he hasn't changed. He is reflecting who he really is. And what surprised me was that they did fire him so quickly. They are sensitive to what these things look like,

because our whole society is very, you know, we're very woke, whether we want to be or not. We know, hey, certain things you say actually hurt people's feelings. And oh, we should not say things. Even if they're truthful, we shouldn't say things that hurt people's feelings. And, oh, we should not say things. Even if they're truthful, we shouldn't say things that hurt people's feelings and, of course, offends the government. We shouldn't say things that offend government constituencies. So we're sensitive to that. The whole country is, much of the world is. So we see what that video was amazingly powerful because the reaction to it was this guy is a terrible person. Now, he did lose his job. I don't think he'll be punished by the law.

He was caught up in the Democrats' hate speech. What is hate speech? I don't think it exists. It's speech that you don't like. But hate speech crimes are partly why, you know, in throwing stalking in there, it is partly why he did lose his job and he is in the news for that reason. Now, interesting, he lost his job because of an ideology, the concept of punishing people for a speech that you hate that he had, of course, showed that or the present behavior on that street corner showed that he was never sincere in the other job. This guy no more wanted the two state solution than the man in the moon. And yet he was one of the supposed attempted architects of it under Clinton and Obama.

Speaking of Clinton and Obama, here is I never thought I'd agree with this guy. Here is former president, I realized today's the day it was the wife's funeral, but here is former president Jimmy Carter in 2006. His new book is called Palestine, Peace, Not Apartheid. President Carter, why did you use the word apartheid in the book's title? Well, let's look at the entire title, if you don't mind. The first word is Palestine, which involves the land that belongs to the Palestinians, not the Israelis. I didn't refer to Israel because there's no semblance of anything relating to apartheid

within the nation of Israel. And I also emphasized the word not, that is peace and not apartheid. That's what I hope to accomplish with this book is some move toward that goal. But there's no doubt that within the occupied territories, Palestinian land, that there is a horrendous example of apartheid. The occupation of Palestinian land, the confiscation of that land that doesn't belong to Israel, the building of settlements on it, the colonization of Palestinian land, the confiscation of that land that doesn't belong to Israel, the building of settlements on it, the colonization of that land, and then the connection of those isolated but multiple settlements,

more than 200 of them, with each other by highways on which Palestinians can't travel and quite often where Palestinians cannot even cross. So the persecution of the Palestinians now under the occupying territories is, you know, under the occupation forces is one of the worst examples of human rights deprivation that I know. I guess you're not going to see that on Israeli state television. But what did you think? A president for whom you and I have had not much respect at all, making a statement 20 years ago, 18 years ago, which is quite relevant today. It is. In fact, I think if anything, it's gotten worse. The settlements have expanded and become more violent in many ways, more directly backed by

the government in whatever they choose to do, whatever justice they want to meet out to the Palestinians that are there, whatever punishments that they want to inflict upon them. So yeah, clearly Carter's absolutely right. 18 years ago it was, and he's writing then about what had been going on for the previous generation. So there's no doubt about it. Why Americans don't, don't recognize this, I'm not, I'm not clear. It's possible because we can't imagine it. We should be able to imagine it, but we don't know our own history very well. It's kind of, you know, it's similar to what we did with our own native population over a long period of time, the reeducation, the isolation, the moving them further and further away from any useful land that the

government wanted. And then if we did accidentally put Indians on land we wanted, we would then take that away and move them elsewhere. So not considered people that weren't considered to be equal to us at all. But the interesting thing, I think, with that comparison is we also wanted to Christianize the Indians because when this was a Christian country back in our past, Christianizing the heathen is something, that's what Christians do. But the Jewish religion is not about causing other people to join Judaism.

In fact, it's quite difficult to, if you're not born a Jew, if you're not a Jew already, it's very difficult to become one. And it's not clear that you're ever equal to a natural-born Jew. So their attitude with the Palestinians is much worse in that respect. We thought with the Indians, we could assimilate. We could Christianize them, whatever. And, of course, those that wanted to live in a certain way, we can isolate them and deprive them of their autonomy and abuse them, of course. But we did intermarry with the native population. That's something that happens in Israel, but rarely, and it's not encouraged. Yeah. So what they're doing is far worse,

actually, I think, and I could be wrong, but I think it's far worse than what was done to our native population. And like you brought up with the, you mentioned Teddy Roosevelt, I think, in a previous show, and he said, we don't do that anymore, but we do. Americans do that because we are supporting Israel, and Israel is absolutely doing that. Are we as morally culpable for the efforts to rid Gaza of every vestige of Palestinian life, as is the IDF, because they're using our equipment and guns and ammunition with which to accomplish that goal. Yes, we're absolutely morally culpable for that. And also, we're selling small arms and machine guns. We're having American machine guns in the hands of settlers. And we've been doing this for years and years.

So our weapons are part of the conduct of the IDF. The weapons that the federal government authorized American manufacturers to sell to the Israeli government so it can give them to Israeli settlers on the West Bank are unlawful to own in the United States. They are literally machine guns where with one squeeze of the trigger, all of the ammunition comes out. The weapons in the United States, it's one squeeze per round. This is one squeeze per magazine, which theoretically the military, I would imagine, this department don't want to acknowledge it. Talk to me about the concept of deception by governments with respect to truces. We know these two governments hate each other, or whenever you can consider Hamas a government.

We know they don't believe each other, yet they laid down their arms for four or five days. Do truces have a way of expanding, or are they just a facade during which these governments regroup? I think that's what they're used for, because, and this is why I think the president wasn't allowed, no American was allowed to use the word ceasefire, because it has, I guess, ramifications. And I've learned this from watching your guests on this show, but the truces are times of putting yourself together for the next phase. And certainly for Hamas, the more time that passes and people can understand what Israel is doing in Gaza, what they intend to do, what they are doing, that that will serve their purpose. And of course, for Israel, if they can get a good many of their women and children hostages back, they'll sacrifice the men, I'm sure. And that will be enough to shut their own

people up, you know, and then they'll go forth with what they intend to do. And they're both taking, both sides are gambling on what the world opinion will allow them and what support world opinion will provide them. And I think time is not on the side of the Israelis in this, but it's a very small place, Gaza. Two million people is a lot of people, but you can kill that many people. They can do it. And they're trying to do it. I mean, they are absolutely working very hard to eliminate the native population of Gaza. And then they're going, they've already said, they will run security over Gaza. And the next thing they will do is they will populate and rebuild Gaza as part of the Jewish state. And for many Jews, this is a popular thing.

And then they say, oh, well, we only have to worry about the West Bank, and we'll take that next. Of course, they've already got most of the West Bank. So you talk about Joe Biden and his tightrope here. He's been a supporter of the Israeli government, no matter which government it is, his entire public life. And he flew to Israel within days of October 7th. Yet the public policy of the government over which he presides is the two-state solution. He wanted the ceasefire because he wanted the hostages returned. Hostages, prisoners, human beings held against their will. They should be called by the same terminology,

but there's no sense getting Orwellian here. So here's Admiral Kirby, who theoretically speaks for Joe Biden, saying that the ceasefire benefits Hamas. All along, you've been very clear about concerns that a broader ceasefire would only benefit Hamas. Sullivan was pretty clear yesterday in saying that Hamas has been able to gain some benefit from this. How concerned are you that the longer this truce lasts, now six days, that Hamas will benefit? And how do you weigh that?

MR. That's a real risk. You have to expect a group like Hamas, a terrorist group, which clearly doesn't abide by laws of war, will try to take advantage of any pause in the fighting for their own benefit. So we're watching that closely, as well as our Israeli counterparts. You can bet that they're watching that closely. But – and I don't want to speak for the Israelis, but I mean, this is a calculated risk that Prime Minister Netanyahu and his war

cabinet are willing to take in order to get those hostages out. So it's a balance. And as you've also heard the Israelis say, that once the pauses are over, they intend to go right back at military operations. Both sides are going to go right back at military operations. I mean, you know that. They would be fools not to regroup during this downtime. Does any government but the Israelis shoot its own people rather than allow them to be taken as hostages, the so-called Hannibal doctrine. Yeah, that's interesting that it happens often enough that it is part of doctrine.

That's what makes it, I mean, that's kind of, you know, we have movies in this country that will show where we would sacrifice our own people, and it's not shown in a positive light. It's not something that we see as heroic at all. It's a failure. That's how Americans view that when we've thought about it, when we've seen it or thought about it. And it's actual doctrine in Israel that they're allowed to sacrifice their people to meet whatever the government says is their national security mission. This is really a vicious death march being prosecuted by Israel on Gaza. And it's going to be hard to stop it, I think. It's going to be really, really hard to stop it.

Karen, always a pleasure, no matter what we're talking about. Thank you very much for your insight. Thanks for becoming such a fan favorite, my dear friend. Well, thank you. Thank you, Judge. Okay. We'll talk to you again next week. We have our usual busy week coming up for you. Professor Sachs, who's somewhere in the Middle East, Professor Mearsheimer, Professor Sachs, who's somewhere in the Middle East, Professor Mearsheimer,

Scott Ritter, and of course, on Friday, the Intelligence Roundtable. Judge Napolitano for Judging Freedom. Thanks for watching!