Judging Freedom - LtCOL. Karen Kwiatkowski : American Cowardice Over Israel.

Episode Date: September 16, 2025

LtCOL. Karen Kwiatkowski : American Cowardice Over Israel.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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That's an equivalent to $15 a month. Limited time new customer offer for first three months only. Speeds may slow above 35 gigabytes on unlimited. plan. Taxes and fees extra. See Mint Mobile for details. Hi, everyone, Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom. Today is Tuesday, September 16, 2025. Colonel Karen Koukowski will be with us in just a moment, but first this. My friends, if you care about your liberty and your right to control your own future, you need to hear about this. From October 10th to 12th, Mikkel Thorpe,

host of the expat money show is bringing together top experts from around the world for the expat money online summit and it's completely free to attend you'll learn how to legally protect your wealth secure second residences and citizenships reduce your tax burden and own property abroad all to safeguard your freedom this year's focus is on latin america where opportunity is booming argentina is shifting to free markets. El Salvador is undergoing a dramatic transformation, and Panama and Paraguay are offering simple residency programs. A plan B is no longer optional. It's essential. Reserve your free ticket at expatmoneysummit.com. And if you want VIP access with special perks, including lifetime replay access and exclusive VIP panels, use promo code judge. for 20% off your upgrade. That's expatmoneysummit.com promo code judge. Karen, Colonel Koukowski, welcome here, my dear friend.

Do you have any idea why before this fellow Tyler Robinson, the one charged with murdering Charlie Kirk, was even caught? Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu felt the need to go on international television and to deny that the Israelis murdered Charlie? You know, we have to- Who else would do this? Who else would go on and issue such a denial?

There's a saying that when you wait until the government denies something and then you know it's true. So that's a very common saying. We talk about our own government that way. And so for him to do that so quickly and so emphatically, before really people, even had a chance to react or even think about what had happened. I mean, it was so shocking. That actually is, it adds unwanted attention to Israel's potential or possible role in this. You know, it's very disturbing, actually.

Scott Ritter argued just a few minutes ago that Israel has totally lost the international PR war and it's beginning to be manifested in their desperation, one act of which was this Netanyahu denial that he had anything to do with the murder of Kirk. There are other things I want to ask you about Netanyahu and Kirk, but you probably agree. And I don't know what the effect of this is losing the PR war, but they have lost it, have they not?

Oh, yeah, that's clear. And, you know, actually, I was watching Netanyahu earlier today. It was, well, a video from recently, anyway, talking about his economic isolation. And he ended up talking about cherry tomatoes as being an Israeli invention. And I actually had to look that up. And it was interesting. They didn't invent cherry tomatoes. But the fact that he was kind of talking and continued to talk about crazy things,

I think he's at the end of his psychological rope. I mean, even psychopaths have their limits. If you stand with the government of Israel today, you stand with genocide. There's no way around that. Not at all. It seems much to the chagrin of the Trump people that even some of their own base are beginning to recognize that, the late Charlie Kirk is an example. Yeah.

You know, I didn't know Charlie Kirk. I knew of Charlie Kirk, occasionally watched his, you know, short videos, his question and answer things and debates. But I wasn't really a follower of his, but I knew of his import because of the Turning Point USA, because that's been around for a little while and has done a really wonderful job of getting the Christian conservative. message and reaching younger people with it. And also, Charlie is a young conservative, which means in some ways, despite his evangelical Christianity, which was important to him, he was very

tolerant of, you know, things that the older conservatives, people my age perhaps, were not, you know, more socially liberal in some ways. I mean, not really, and a little bit libertarian also, which is what is very attractive and unifying amongst many young people. So Charlie's, I knew about him because of his influence. I did not follow him closely. And part of it was I believed him to be a Zionist, a Christian Zionist. I mean, that's what I thought he was. And so I didn't follow him too closely because I don't, you know, I don't really abide by that. Now, I wrote something that's on Judge Knapp, and I link to a clip of Charlie talking about the October 7th standdown in Israel of the security. And Charlie was asking about that. Of course, it's all verified that there wasn't a military stand down on October 7th, that warnings were ignored, et cetera.

But Charlie suggests what many others have suggested, that, you know, this was a political move. I mean, he needed an excuse for a war. Netanyahu needed to stay in power. And a lot of this is very predictable. So Charlie didn't say that's what it was, but he said, we kind of need to ask those questions. I was shocked because I said, well, Charlie must not be the Christian Zionist I thought he was. And it turns out, of course, that, you know, as a rational thinker, as someone who hears all sides of the debate and debates very effectively, that's what he was known for. Because of that, he has come to a similar conclusion that many of us have done. So that concerned me a great deal because if you think about APAC and

Israel losing their popularity, not just all over the world, but particularly amongst the younger generations of Americans. And we are Israel's only ally that matters. If they lose the next generations of people who will be the governors and the state representatives and the congressmen and the president in the future, if they lose them, Israel's got nothing. So it is a serious, issue for Israel to continue their propaganda war, which Charlie was not participating in. Here's the link that you spoke about. It's about a minute and a half long. It's very telling. It's Kirk on October 23, 23. So it's three weeks, two weeks after October 7th. Chris, cut number one. So I've been Israel many times. The whole country is a fortress. When I first heard this story, I still

have the same gut instinct that I did initially. I find this very hard to believe. I've been to that Gaza border. You cannot go 10 feet without running into a 19-year-old with an AR-15 or an automatic machine gun that's an IDF soldier. The whole country is surveilled. I think some questions need to be asked. Was there a stand-down order? Was there a stand-down order? They're live-streaming the killing of Jews. Was that somebody in the government say, stand-down? That is a legitimate non-conspiracy question. The whole country is the IDF. The whole country is. The essence is this. This is the closest thing to the Holocaust that any of us have lived through. But the fact is now Bibi and the Israeli hard right government has a mandate, I've got to be careful

the way I say this, they're going to try to ethnically cleanse Gaza. I mean, that's, and I don't use that term lightly, okay? They're talking about, basically removing 2.5 million people from there. Okay. There are some serious questions here's Patrick. And let me tell you, my pattern recognition over the last five years has become pretty sharp. COVID, Maui fires, you know, Epstein. When I see a story and it doesn't click, our guts are usually right. Yeah. Well, his guts were right from your perspective. in mind. Max Blumenthal on this show yesterday, which had an enormous audience, presented inside stories from a friend of Kirk and from somebody in the White House

about how APAC at the direction of Benjamin Netanyahu offered Kirk a huge amount of money, which he declined. And then they attempted to intimidate him, and he politely excused himself from their efforts. that intimidation. He told a friend he couldn't stand and didn't trust Netanyahu and was afraid of him. Yeah. You know, for me, I was not on the computer. I wasn't watching it and I heard about it after it happened, his assassination. But what had been on my mind, of course, was the one that had happened on the ninth, which was in Qatar, you know, the assassination or attempted assassination that Israel conducted of the Hamas negotiating team in Qatar.

which is the U.S. ally. And that's somewhat significant and somewhat weird, but that happened. And people were talking about that. I was thinking about that. And the article I wrote actually was about that. But what I felt, and this is not intellectual, this is the gut feel, was that the demonstration of high-powered, long-range, one-shot, kill-shot above his body armor, you know, right in the neck. And then the immediate disappearance of this guy, to me, it looked professional and it looked like a hit. And there's only one reason we do professional hits. And that is to, well, one, to solve a problem, right, to solve an isolated problem. But you can't solve the Charlie problem by killing Charlie, as his wife made very clear. But what it is is to send a

message. And much like the message was sent in Qatar, which Israel actually articulated. They said, know, any of your capitals, any capital around the world, any place in the world, we will strike our enemies. Now, Israel has said that before, and his spokesman for the government and members of the Knesset said that, again, after the Qatar attack on the ninth of this month. So that's what was on my mind, a demonstration shot. And if that's the case, and again, this is not intellectual, this is my feeling, that the message was being sent not to Charlie's people not to TPUSA, but to Trump. That he is, because also think about how similar that was. And I mean, I don't think Trump, this escapes Trump in the least. I think this, I think,

I could be wrong, but I think this is how Trump viewed it. I think when Trump saw this, it was a demonstration of, he better stay in line because Charlie didn't. And, and, you know, you can say, well, why would a country do that to another country? Well, Israel's not just any country. And one of the great foretays, and I think Bumanthal, of course, made this clear, you know, they are professional assassinators. They have done it from the beginning. They do it in every country around the world. They don't care where or who. They kill the innocent. They know how to assassinate. It's kind of their, it's kind of their trademark, really. And so it's not unusual that people would suspect them. And maybe because it is Israel's trademark, maybe that's

why Netanyahu felt like he had to say, oh, we didn't do that one. Well, is there any ability to distinguish between the United States government and the genocide of the Netanyahu regime? No, no, we own that. The United States owns that. They could not, without U.S. aid and money and backing at the U.N., they would not have been able to sustain the genocide, the ethnic cleansing, the mass movement, the destruction of Gaza, they would not have been able to do that without continuous and stepped up American support, aid, military weapons, trade, sanctions of enemies, you know, discouraging others. You know, we've got Europe now coming to a very late conclusion that perhaps they could recognize Palestine or perhaps like Spain is doing, they can stop shipping weapons to Israel two years into this thing.

And one of the reasons that hadn't happened sooner is because the U.S. also pressured Europe and other countries that the U.S. has holds sway with to not shut the valve, you know, to not to turn off the faucet to Israel. So, yeah, we own it. We own it. And unfortunately, for Americans who don't pay a lot of attention to it and don't really understand, The rest of the world knows that we own it, okay? And that's part of their reality now. It may not be a part of our reality just yet, but it is the assessment of the world that we own it. Israel could not have done this without us.

And Trump, for all his talk of peace, has been totally bent over on this one. He is totally submitted enthusiastically, I think, which is a real shame. And I don't think that is who Trump is as a person, but as a president, he certainly has he owns this i want to pay a clip for you from just three days ago of the attorney general of the united states actually it's yesterday of the attorney general of the united states uh manifesting an utter ignorance of the first amendment chris cut number 13 there's free speech and then there's hate speech and there is no place, especially now, especially after what happened to Charlie, in our society.

Do you see more law enforcement going after these groups who are using hate speech and putting cuffs on people, so we show them that some action is better than no action? We will absolutely target you, go after you, if you are targeting anyone with hate speech, anything. And that's across the aisle. So what she is calling hate speech is absolutely protected. This is speech that demeans, aggravates, offends, insults.

Often the demeaning is because of an immutable characteristic of birth on the part of the target of the speech. But in reality, there is, according to my Princeton classmate and former debate partner, Justice Samuel Alito, the most conservative member of the court, arguably, there's no such thing as hate speech because all speech is protected. That's right. That's right. Yeah, I'm very surprised to see that. But Pam Bondi, I mean, she's, I know that she's connected to Trump and that's how she got that job. But yeah, she didn't get it on her constitutional knowledge, nor on her strong standards of the Constitution or what makes this country great. You know, they want to make America great again. They need to understand what made it great. And obviously, free speech,

the First Amendment is a big part of that. There is a possibility that, well, it's not a possibility. It's going to happen because Charlie was assassinated and they're going to, it looks like they're laying it on the left wing folks, you know, the people that are so unhappy and domestic terrorists, they're going to call them all those things, that they'll go after those people. But that's not what it is, because they will go after everybody who expresses an opinion that's contrary to the Washington's desired opinion. Well, suppose I stand on a soapbox outside of the office building where I am now and condemn the IDF behavior in Gaza. A time will come when the government will want to silence me from saying that. You can already be arrested for that in London.

What you just described, condemning the IDF or criticizing them for their conduct and their execution of this genocide, this was part of the free speech that Charlie was protecting, that Charlie was upset about from what I've read and what I understand, that they were saying, you can't say this. His Israeli sponsors Netanyahu, the folks that were saying, oh, no, we need, Charlie needs to step up for Israel or go back to stepping up for Israel. His concern was we have to be able to speak freely. And I think you saw it in that clip of Charlie with Patrick Ben, David. You know, he said, I have to be careful about how I say this. But he was free speech, it was extremely important.

And Charlie, of all people, the way he dealt with differing opinions, his debate style was really something that more people should emulate. You know, he tried to understand the other side. And that requires, that requires not just courage, but. an acceptance that people are going to say things that you may not like. And that's what the First Amendment protects and looks like Bondi's going after that. You know, Colonel, it really particularly offends me as a lawyer and former judge and self-professed absolutist on speech, meaning you can say whatever you want, that we do not have an independent justice department. We have them the one that works for the political wing of the White House.

House. So I have mocked her saying she flapped constitutional law. I don't really think she did. I think she's just saying what she thinks her boss wants to hear. She must know. She must know. These cases are in the basic course on the Constitution. The type of speech she wants to prosecute is absolutely protected, but she's trying to make her boss feel better about it. Here's what her boss said today to Jonathan Carl from ABC News. I know Jonathan, he says, meek and mild as a lamb. But watch what Trump said to him when Jonathan asked the president

about Pam Bondi going after hate speech. Cut number 15. Pam Bondi's saying she's going to go after hate speech. Is that, I mean, a lot of people, a lot of your allies say hate speech is free speech. We'll probably go after people like you because you treat me so unfairly. It's hate. You have a lot of hate in your heart. Maybe they'll come after ABC.

Well, ABC paid me $16 million recently for a form of hate speech, right? Your company paid me $16 million for a form of hate speech. So maybe they'll have to go after you. Another person in the government, unfortunately, the chief law enforcement officer of the land who doesn't understand the First Amendment. No, no. Well, I mean, he doesn't even, he's admitted that he hasn't even read the Constitution. So Trump is showing his ignorance there, but it's very dangerous.

And the media is no help with this. You know, you'd think that if we had an independent media, even mainstream media, they had a spine, they weren't bought and paid for. If they weren't 99% off to the left side of things or they can't see straight, these would be the defenders of free speech, because that's their business. But much as we've seen with their inability to stand up with, you know, for the journalists in Palestine, you know, they have no spine and they have no ability to defend free speech. So who's going to do it? It's probably going to be you, Judge. You're going to defend it. and people who care about the issue will defend it.

But it's going to be costly. It looks like it's going to be costly, and we're going through a time where we're going to have to relearn what the First Amendment says, and it's not going to be easy on a lot of people. Colonel Koukowski, thank you, my dear friend. Always a pleasure, no matter what we're talking about. Thank you for the great piece that you just wrote

that you posted at Judge Knapp. If you haven't read Karen Koukowski's pieces, she's very cerebral. She can also be funny. You always learn something when you read them. And I commend all of her work to you, and I'm privileged to host each of your weekly pieces. Thank you again, Colonel. Well, thank you so much, Judge. Sure.

We'll see you again soon. Busy day for you tomorrow, starting at 8 in the morning, Professor Gilbert Doctor-O at 11 in the morning from China, Pepe Escobar at two in the afternoon, Colonel Larry Wilkerson, at three in the afternoon, Phil Giraldi, at four in the afternoon, Professor Jeffrey Sachs. Judge Napolitano for judging freedom. Thank you.