Judging Freedom - COL. Lawrence Wilkerson : Could Israel and Saudi Arabia Disappear?

Episode Date: September 24, 2026

COL. Lawrence Wilkerson : Could Israel and Saudi Arabia Disappear?See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Undeclared wars are commonplace. Tragically, our government engages in preemptive war, otherwise known as aggression with no complaints from the American people. Sadly, we have become accustomed to living with the illegitimate use of force by government. To develop a truly free society, the issue of initiating force must be understood and rejected. What if sometimes to love your country you had to alter or abolish the government? Jefferson was right? What if that government is best which governs least? What if it is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong? What if it is better to perish fighting for

freedom than to live as a slave? What if freedom's greatest hour of danger is now? Hi everyone, Judge Andrew Napolitano here for judging freedom. Today is Thursday, September 24th, 2006, Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson will be with us in just a moment. Just how bad are things in the Middle East? Might Saudi Arabia and Israel be struggling for survival? But first this. What if you could build a plan B legally for your money, your family, and your future? On October 1st and 2nd, Mikhail Thorpe, founder and CEO of expat money,

is hosting the expat money summit. McKell has spent more than 26 years living, investing, and doing business around the world, traveling to more than 110 countries, and helping thousands of people diversify internationally. This year's theme is freedom is rising in Latin America. You'll hear from residency experts, attorneys, investors, and expats about second residences, international real estate, offshore banking, asset protection, tax optimization, and global investing. These are practical legal strategies for anyone who wants greater freedom and more options in an uncertain world. The summit is completely free to attend, but you must register in

advance. And if you want the VIP experience, my listeners can save 20% on VIP tickets. Just use discount code judge when you register. Join us on October 1st and 2nd. Reserve your ticket today at escape with a judge.com. That's escapewithajudge.com. And remember to use code word judge for your VIP experience. Colonel Wilkerson, welcome here, my dear friend, and thank you again

for the happy time that we spent with each other earlier this week when you were here in New York City. Before we get to the tumult in the Middle East and the stability or vanishing stability of Israel and Saudi Arabia, I must ask you about President Trump's speech to the UN in which he threatened to annihilate 91 million people. Our colleague and friend, Professor Sachs, has called it deranged.

You must have your own thoughts, Colonel. That's a good term, Judge. In the 81-year history of the United Nations, I don't think anything like that, even Grushchev back in what, oh, what, 62 or whatever it was, that he took his shoe off allegedly and beat his desk. And I think that was in the UNGA. That didn't come anywhere near what Trump did. It was despicable.

It was deplorable. It was uncalled for. And it cements in the world's mind. The image of the empire is. being utterly out of control. Again, Jeff Sachs agrees with you. I'm going to play a little clip from him. He makes an interesting point that our constitutional order is broken if one human being has the ability, A, to threaten to kill innocence,

a war crime, be to threaten it in a venue where such threats are prohibited, and C to carry it out with no checks whatsoever. Chris, cut number 21. I shuddered then and I shudder now that a president of the United States can stand at the podium of the UN General Assembly, speaking to world leaders in a language of annihilation of other countries and of sending them to hell. It was, you ghastly, unprecedented, totally disgusting, disgraceful for the United States. But I would also say a measure of how broken the constitutional order of the United States is. Trump basically said, like a madman, which I think arguably he is, that he and, And he alone will decide the survival of Iran.

I certainly could never in my lifetime imagined coming from a president of the United States or anybody standing at the UN podium because what Trump said was odious and completely in violation of every religious, moral, ethical, and legal standard that we have in this world. It was also a measure of the brazen collapse of our Constitution. Do you hear any members of Congress condemn a threat to murder 91 million people, whether the Republicans or Democrats? I haven't heard of any so far. I'm sure there's some Democrats who are going to do it if they haven't already done it. Let me say, too, that that was a remarkable thing as far as far as.

as my memory goes. That's the first time the leaders of two nations at war with one another have appeared at the United Nations. I'm pretty sure I'm correct about that. Yeah. And if nothing else, it demonstrated what people say who know this system really well. If we didn't have it, we'd have to invent it because it is absolutely necessary. And as feckless as we may think it is, it is got to be there. Otherwise, we wouldn't have any place at all to do this sort of thing. But directly to your question, I think we have subverted the Constitution to the point that I am fully expecting a full subversion of it come the midterms. when Trump decides and the Republicans decide to follow him in mass, that everything is going against them.

And the only way to keep it from doing so and to resurrect their power is some sort of coup. My goodness, Colonel, are you suggesting that you have a realistic fear that Donald Trump and the Republicans will not accept the outcome of an election that hands control of the Congress to the Democrats? And the further he goes into the dumps, as it were, I think the more the possibility is there. You know, I've said many times January the 6th did not fail because the system held. It failed because the coup plotters were incompetent, and their incompetence was most demonstrated and most serious. In the fact they did not assure that they had those instruments of state power necessary throughout 5,000 years of history. or any coup to, quote, succeed, unquote, on their side. This time, with Hegseth having fashioned it very carefully,

with ICE having become the Praetorian Guard, the brown shirts, if you will, they have state power. The clip that we just showed, Chrissy can put it up, that is Nikita Cruz, Jeff, in October of 1960. So this is right in the middle of the middle of, the Kennedy Nixon quest for the presidency. He's in the United Nations, and he's bombastically expressing his views

by taking his own shoe off and pounding it. It reminds me, you'll remember this. You may have been running the State Department at the time. Oh, not that old. No, no, I don't mean this one, but what I'm about to tell you, I know you're not that old, God love you. When a reporter in Baghdad threw his,

show at President George W. Bush, you remember that. You might have been there when it happened. No, I remember that. It was a joke in the State Department for a while. Well. Bush handled it really well. Yeah, he did. He was very, very common, even humorous about it. Like, much, throw another one, bring it on. And he ducked very adroitly. Yeah. Is Trump's Iran strategy, whatever the hell it is, backfiring? He doesn't have a strategy, Judge. You know, they're talking about talks, direct talk.

There are no direct talks. There are no direct talks at all. There are in different rooms. And the emissaries are going in between them. Yeah. Good duck there, George. Right, right. There's no diplomacy going on, and there's no diplomacy going to go on

because the Iranians do not trust this administration, period. I'm not sure they would trust any administration now. And when you're on the winning side, and it's clear you're on the winning side, you aren't going to go back into a duplicitous set of negotiations at all. You'd have to be assured that, for example, the MOU was re-examined, solid, and there was a real chance of it being actualized. They know that's not going to happen. So I go back to that headline in Haretz back on one March, I think it was. All the Iranians have to do to win is not lose. All the Israelis and U.S. have to do is achieve a spectacular victory.

They ain't going to do that, so we've lost. So later today, Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu will address the UN. Yesterday, Iranian President Peschkin threw down the guntlet. I mean, he touched the third rail of him. American politics when he said, I don't remember hearing this publicly before, what we all know, but what our colleague Joe Kent has told us people in the government are prohibited from saying publicly, which is that Israel has nuclear weapons. But here is President Posachkin. It's very articulate in my view. You're going to hear an English translation. It's almost a minute and a half

long. Chris, cut number six. proved that we have proven that we're not afraid of fighting of war one a war that is defensive in nature and we will stand in defense of our beloved Iran our homeland until our last breast ladies and gentlemen the topic of this gathering is mutual trust that cannot be achieved through words only but by abstaining from using double standards atomic and nuclear bombs are in the hands of the Israeli regime but the inspectors are requested to come to Iran Israel has murdered savagely over 70,000 innocents in Gaza but Iran while behind the table of negotiation was bombed Israel has

the bombs, has weapons of mass destruction. Not a member of the Nonproliferation Treaty. During her shameful life has not allowed a single inspection, but they are rewarded by all the means necessary for them to be able to bomb any capital in the region at will. I will repeat the nuclear weapon is in Israel, but the inspectors in Iran. And those weapons include now 40,000 different varieties of 2,000-pound bombs that we're going to send them, unless the Congress grows some spine and stops him from doing it. And I suspect even if that were to occur, we would ship the bombs anyway.

Well, here's Prime Minister Netanyahu. This was 14 years ago in September 2012 at the UN. Oh, I didn't write, but we had audio. All right, well, he's going to show you what he claims is a bomb and what he claims can be a fully actionable nuclear weapon in weeks. This is 14 years ago. We know from Tulsi Gabbard when she was DNI, Director of National Intelligence,

that the entire U.S. intelligence community has concluded they haven't been developing a bomb since 2003. So I don't know what he's going to say this afternoon. He's probably going to disregard what the president of Peschkin challenged him to address yesterday. What's he going to do, Larry, admit that the Israelis illegally possess a nuclear weapon, that the United States government has illegally given aid to a country that has a nuclear weapon and hasn't signed the nonproliferation treaty, that they stole the technology from the United States?

Is it going to admit all that? Of course not. I think your comments are to the point, but I think what we're looking at here is a total condemnation of Israel already having occurred. I don't think you could say that there's even 20% of the world community that agrees with Netanyahu or that abides by what he is. done and is doing. Now, though, the problem is that same condemnation and that same disgust applies to the

empire, to America. The world thinks that we are a threat to their future. The world thinks that we are the worst people on the face of the earth. You should have seen the Iranian people. I was able to look at a video of their watching their president's speech. And it was like, it was like children being really led to water to drink or, you know, Coca-Cola or whatever, because they were so enthused and so happy to see that this message was finally being delivered and being delivered at an adequate podium, an adequate site, and to an adequate audience. and in the face of, as it were, the empire.

That's what this is all about. We are condemning ourselves to be the same world pariah that Netanyahu has made Israel. And let me quickly add that the Jewish members of the state of Israel in preponderance have made happen. That's where we are now. We are self-identified. We are worldwide identifiable.

with this man and this country and this disgusting history. What is the significance, colonel, of the military, the recent military victories of Anzara, of which the Houthis are the principal military arm in Saudi Arabia in the past couple of weeks? I think we're looking at a complete possible transformation of that part of Southwest. Asia, at the end of which Iran will be the triumph, for it will be the power to be reckoned with. I hope it doesn't go to its head. I don't think it will. It will be as powerful as it was, and even more so, without the United States necessary

when it was under the Shah. And everyone in the region is going to have to recognize that. How Tehran handles this is going to be important, because they will be the power to be reckoned with in the Persian Gulf region and indeed in Southwest Asia. The other countries will be gone, I think, or very, very much change. My fear, Judge, is that what Gandhi Rice talked about when Mabarak collapsed in a euphoric sort of way that the administration Cheney in particular didn't like very much, that the time had come to bring democracy to these tyrants in the region, I'm afraid that since

There are no institutions. There's no history, no fabric. The only democratic state in the entire region, Judge, is Iran. Look at it for a while. Look at the elections. Look at the Majlis. Look at the Guardian Council. Look at all the things they do that are democratic. They're more democratic than Israel, I have a hope to be. But you don't have that tradition on the other side of the water. So this is going to be a French Revolution type thing. They're going to bring these royals out in the street and hang them.

or cut their heads off with swords or whatever. That's what's going to happen. And the Houthis are going to bring it about. It's going to be a disaster for all these kingdoms that are run like they were, you know, a pleasure palace for the rulers. It'll be Mubarak times 10 or 20. And who picks up the pieces after that? We're not going to pick them up.

I'll guarantee you. We're going to play Prime Minister Netanyahu from last year at the UN in a moment. but before we do, the Financial Times reports this morning from on the ground in Riyadh that President Trump's thrice, there were three phone calls, refusal to aid Saudi Arabia in resisting the Houthis, quote, will not be forgotten. Is this a fracture in the U.S. Saudi relationship, Colonel Wilkerson? Probably. It's going to be a fracture that isn't going to heal, too. I can almost guarantee you that the only country in the region, other than Iran, that has a prospect, I think, of surviving this and coming out on the other side, halfway decent, if others don't impact them, that's Oman, because it's a well-run country. It's not such a tyranny as the others are. The others are terrible. And I mean that from UAE to Kuwait, even King Abdullah and Jordan, who finally found his spine at the United Nations and think he ever was going to. But there's not a country there that doesn't deserve to be catastrophically changed.

My concern, as I said before, is that this is like the French Revolution. There's going to be a lot of blood in the street afterwards, and who's going to pick up the pieces? because there is no tradition whatsoever, no institutional fabric, no reason for these people to go down the road of democracy or a reasonable facsimile thereof. Iran could teach them, as I said, more about it than any other country in the region, certainly not Israel. So Iran will be the hegeman. I don't like that term, but Iran will be the country to be reckoned with. They'll all have to reckon with it. And maybe, maybe Ansarala will present another picture on the other side of the Gulf that can reasonably unify Yemen and bring some kind of peace to this very, I mean, Judge, this has been going on for so long, and we've been instrumental in this, too.

Under Saudi guidance and Saudi leadership, we have essentially been the power that continues to sustain this, bloody war in Yemen, which has seen cholera. It's seen massive killing of civilians. It's Mercy Corps people told me at this tabletop we had on the Red Sea that it was the worst thing they had seen in their existence in terms of killing innocent civilians and children and blowing up schools and other things. I'm sure now that our attack on Iran has equated itself to that. But these are terrible conditions and we have been behind all of them. As promised here, it's a clip from Prime Minister Netanyahu last year where he's boasting about death by pagers.

We've hammered the hootis, including yesterday. We crushed the bulk of Hamas's terror machine. We crippled Hizbalah, taking out most of its leaders and much of its weapons arsenal. You remember those beepers, the pagers? We paged Kizbalah. And believe me, they got the message. And thousands of terrorists, thousands of terrorists dropped to the ground.

We destroyed Assad's arguments in Syria. We deterred Iran's Shiite militias in Iraq. And most importantly, and above anything else that I could say to you that we did in this past year, in this past decade, we devastated Iran's atomic weapons and ballistic missiles programs. Yeah, you sure did. Was he even know what he's talking about? No.

This is a year ago, almost to the day. And that's his cheering section in the back. You'll know. Correct. There were about six of them because the rest of the hall was empty. Absolutely. Absolutely. He is next to Trump. The difference is Netanyahu knows he's lying. He knows he's telling the wrong story. He knows he's doing what he's doing. I'm not sure Trump does. Increasingly, I'm not sure Donald Trump knows what he's doing. Wow. So I'll get back to the first question I asked you.

is Trump's Iran strategy backfiring? And your answer then was and is now what strategy? Exactly. I don't think he has one. I think he has components of one. And they vacillate between, I'm going to destroy you. Oh, I'm having really good talks with them now. All of which is probably fabricated, even that I'm going to destroy you, unless he's talking

about nuclear weapons, which does bother. me, especially when you've got Elbridge Colby and Jonathan Pollard in Tel Aviv talking about using nuclear weapons too. I don't think that's a possibility, but I don't discount or not consider anything with Donald Trump and the gang he's got around him, particularly Russell and Stephen Miller, who I think are fundamentally running the United States government. How can Iran negotiate with the U.S. when this is Marco Rubio is what the U.S. government thinks of them.

I think it's really important to remind everybody at the end of the day. At the core of all this, we talk about oil, we talk about the Straits of Hormuz. The central issue here is Iran is run by lunatic clerics, okay, by lunatic clerics that have a radical view of their religion. A few moments later. Strike and strike and strike and strike and strike and strike and strike and strike and strike and strike and strike until you have victory. for I hear the sound of victory. Person is the president's a Christian advisor in the White House.

What a contrast. What a stark contrast. They said it all. I can't add to that. Well, they demonstrated who the lunatics are. Yeah, to call, and it's not clerics now. I'm sorry, Marco, you haven't been paying attention. Maybe it was clerics before, but even then I wouldn't agree with your characterization of them. What's running Iran right now is the most resolute group of people who survived the bloodiest war in the modern age for that region and who are hardcore, competent military professionals. That's what's running Iran. Not your clerics, dude. Colonel, may I add a phrase? You tell me if you agree or disagree. And which enjoys broad, wide, deep support amongst the Iranian public.

Absolutely. And with every U.S. bomb that drops that support, it's more steady and more constant and wider. Wow. Colonel Larry, always a pleasure, my dear friend. I hope you'll come to New York more frequently, Lisa, we have another nice dinner. Well, you know, I forgot to do it the dinner. I promised I was going to do it.

Oh, you just kissed my head. Giss you on the top of your head, like at that other restaurant a year ago. I might have gotten thrown out of the club for that. You might have. Colonel, a pleasure, my dear friend. Thank you for accommodating my schedule today. We'll look forward to seeing you again next week. All the best.

Thank you. Sure. On all of this, and you can expect, analysis of the speeches of President Zelensky, Prime Minister Netanyahu, and President Trump at the UN from the Golden Boy at 2 o'clock this afternoon. Max Blumenthal. Judge Napolitano for Judging Freedom.