Judging Freedom - Matt Hoh: Can Gaza Be Saved?

Episode Date: April 9, 2024

Matt Hoh: Can Gaza Be Saved?See 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 Tuesday, April 9th, 2024. Matt Ho joins us now for his regular weekly appearance. Matt, always a pleasure, my dear friend. I know that you have been involved in a flotilla, the purpose of which is to provide aid to the starving people of Gaza. Tell us about its progress and its hopes. Thanks, Judge. So I'm involved with the International Civilian Aid Flotilla to break the siege of Gaza. This is an emergency mission from the Freedom Flotilla Coalition, and many people may be familiar with this. Since 2008, the Freedom Flotilla Coalition has been launching ships in attempts to break the Israeli blockade,

the Israeli siege of Gaza. So later this month, we will be launching a flotilla of both cargo and humanitarian observers. The humanitarian observers include many people with needed backgrounds, such as healthcare or engineers, to go to Gaza, break the siege, and get much needed assistance to the people of Gaza who are suffering, as we all know, from this deliberate starvation campaign as part of the larger genocidal operation of Israel. Now, it's called a flotilla. Is it actually a ship or is it more than one ship? Will you be on the Mediterranean going eastward to land on the shores of Gaza in defiance of the Israeli military? Absolutely. That's exactly the case. Multiple ships heading towards Gaza, more than 5,500 tons of cargo, including cargo that the

Israelis are not letting in otherwise. I think many people are familiar with Israel's blockade, how they will not allow in many things such as anesthesia or diapers or medical scissors. Why would they not allow anesthesia or diapers in? Because they're cruel, Judge, because they're brutal, because this is what collective punishment looks like this is what an ethnic cleansing campaign does to make things unlivable or unhabitable this is what people committing genocide do this is what you do to people who you believe are subhuman is you limit what they're able to live on right so we will be bringing those types of things and 50 to 500 tons of cargo just to give people an idea of how big that is, it is the world's central food kitchen, the barge they brought to Gaza, that was 200 tons.

So you're talking about 5,500 tons. So several orders of magnitude, many orders of magnitude greater than that. But the purpose, Judge, is to get this cargo ashore, right, to help the people of Gaza to ameliorate the conditions. But the reality is, is that unless the entire siege is broken, until Israel opens up all ports of entry, whether it be on land or on water, this starvation, this genocide will continue. So just as important it is to get this cargo ashore and help the people, it's also important the mission is to break the siege, to break the blockade. This is an illegal blockade of Gaza. The Israelis have been conducting since 2007.

It is in clear violation of international law. This mission is in compliance with international law. And we would argue that we are following the instructions that the International Court of Justice issued in both January and March to provide all humanitarian assistance as possible to the people of Gaza in defiance of Israel's genocide. And what happens when you land? I mean, do you have security? Do you have a means to repel the IDF? Or do you expect them to allow you to come ashore? Well, this is,

well, first, make clear, I'm not going on a boat. So the biggest danger I'm going to be in, Judge, I'm going over there to help administratively. Biggest danger I'm going to be in is, you know, eating too much baklava or something, right? You know, so, but for the people- You should be, because you're so good in front of a camera, you should be the public face of this for the media. Thank you. However I can help out, I will. But for the brave men and women who are going on these boats, they understand the severity of what they're entering into, right? No, no- Is Medea Benjamin going to be on this? Medea Benjamin's going to be on this. Well, the Israelis will have their hands full if she's there.

Anne Wright, who has done these boats before. Anne Wright, former U.S. Army colonel and former diplomat. Anne Wright will be going as well. She has done these boats, these missions before. Huweta Araf, who actually is an Israeli citizen, she has done eight of these missions before. And what has happened is the Israelis intercept these boats quite aggressively. They take control of the boats, often in international waters. So they are essentially hijacking these boats. Just add that to the list of all the international law and violations they are, you know, the violations of the international law they are conducting. And then they bring the boats to Israel, usually the port of Ashtad, and they then deport the participants. We expect that is how they will proceed unless, of course, the international

community starts to really act. And we saw that today, Judge, with Turkey, where Turkey has first nation, six months of this genocide, Turkey, the first nation to finally enact some degree of trade sanctions against Israel. What did Turkey do today? Well, Turkey today issued a list of 54 items they are no longer going to export to Israel. These are mainly construction, iron, wire, rebar, things like that, marble, I think. I think there's some other commodities on there like jet fuel. So nothing that is going to cause the genocide to come to a stop because Turkey stopped its exports. However, the symbolic nature of this, Turkey at least taking the stand, this is something that is really important. And it needs to be followed by other nations.

And so for all the rhetoric we're hearing from these nations, it's great that Nicaragua is taking Germany to the International Court of Justice this week to try Germany on being complicit in genocide. That absolutely needs to happen. It's really great that Palestinian statehood is going to come up again in the Security Council at the end of this month. It's great that the new Irish prime minister essentially denounced Israel today in his statements, but we need more nations to actually act. And one of the things we're calling on is for the international community to support our mission, demand that Israel allow us to enter. And if they do not allow us to enter, that they be held accountable for further violations of international law, including this deliberate starvation, this ethnic cleansing, this genocide

of the people of Gaza. Okay. Well, needless to say, I wish you the best. I wish you a safe time. And I hope that you can come on the show from wherever you're going to be in that part of the world. And I hope that you can put us in touch with Medea. Absolutely. She's, you know, I'm a fan of hers.

She's a friend of the show. And there are many, many viewers of this show. Typically, those that love hearing you would also love hearing her. I'm transitioning now. Last week on this show on Friday afternoon, Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson made a rather startling statement, and I wonder if you agree with him. I'm going to play it for you so you'll hear it, so there's no surprises. It is his view from the intelligence he's seen that the CIA was behind the Krokus concert hall attack outside of Moscow.

Here's Colonel Wilkerson late last week. This looks a lot like what Nord Stream turned out to be, a U.S. operation. Only the CIA led it. Let's face it. We have done as much to create and to nurture ISIS as anything else on the face of the earth, whether it be Aba Musab al-Zarqawi or any of the instigators of the so-called ISIS consulate in the beginning. We've used ISIS. And when I say we, I mean that agency called the CIA, the same agency that does so many nefarious things in our name. And they have worked ISIS and worked operatives from ISIS in order to do other things.

And I'm hearing, and it makes a lot of sense to me, and I'm watching the behavior and the signals coming from Moscow, which are usually very indicative of the truth when it's something like this. And I think that's what Putin believes. And I think the intelligence community in Russia, whether it's the GRU, the NKVD, the KSB, the FSB or whatever, they believe it too. And that makes this Ukraine conflict a different conflict as of that killing of that many Russians that close to Putin and blame lying, at least in part, with the people who orchestrated it being the CIA. The people who orchestrated it being the CIA, analogizing this to the Cy Hersh version of the destruction of the Nord Stream pipeline. What's your take, Matt? I don't know, Judge, because certainly the Islamic State has all the agency they need,

all the reasons they need to attack Russia. They've done so. I mean, a long history of Russian and Islamist, jihadist reactionary conflict goes back decades. There's no doubt that the United States is responsible in the sense that the Islamic State is America's Frankenstein Munster. We trace that back through the U.S. basically forming al-Qaeda in Afghanistan in the 1980s to fight the Soviet Union. I mean, as well as the overall policy ideas that this type of force, that using this type of Islamic revolution, if you will, to bring down Russia, which was Zygmunt Brzezinski's plan beginning back in 1979 before the Soviet Union invades Afghanistan. Well, those thoughts are all still prevalent within the American intelligence community, within the American foreign policy community. So whether or not the Americans were directly involved in this, that there is an email chain that you can find the Americans on or not, I don't know. But I do know that this is the

consequence of decades of American foreign policy that extends through Afghanistan, Iraq, particularly Syria, as Larry Wilkerson was just explaining. I'll tell you a story, Judge. In 2012, summer of 2012, a buddy of mine who's with Defense Intelligence Agency, pretty senior at this point, responsible for one of those countries over there in the Middle East. And I meet up with him. And I've never seen him this way. I've known him for a number of years. He had been in the Marine Corps. And what's going on, man? And he is despondent. And this was July of 2012. And he tells me that this is what we're doing in Syria. We are using these jihadist forces against Assad's government and they think it's going to work.

Right. And of course, it doesn't work, because why would we think that these jihadists, al-Qaeda, Islamic State, whatever you want to call them, whatever they're calling themselves, that somehow that we could control them and have them only go west and destroy Assad's government and not turn around and cross the literal land and the line in the sand and go back into Iraq, where most of them came from, which is exactly what started happening. Right. And it culminates in 2014 with Islamic State's capture of Mosul. So, I mean, this is a policy, this idea of using these people, thinking we can control them. That has occurred over and over and over again through generations of American intelligence operations and U much of that foreign policy in the last talk that she gave before she left the State Department in which she alludes to, listen to this word, we didn't pick on this word when we've listened to this clip before, Matt, Victoria Nuland referring to asymmetric warfare against the Russians. And then, of course, she gets to the very end of it where she says a nasty surprise on the battlefield. I don't know what she means by battlefield in her own mind, whether she means a concert hall or an actual field where troops are dug in. But here she is. With the $60 billion supplemental that the administration has requested of Congress, we can ensure that Ukraine not only survives, but she thrives.

With this support in 2024, we can help ensure Ukraine can continue to fight, to build, to recover, and to reform. With this money, Ukraine will be able to fight back in the east, but it will also be able to accelerate the asymmetric warfare that has been most effective on the battlefield. And as I said in Kiev three weeks ago, this supplemental funding will ensure Putin faces some nasty surprises on the battlefield this year. I don't know. Your buddies in the intelligence community tell us that if they were going to plan something like this, she's the last person they would tell because she likes to talk. On the other hand, she did use some code words in there, asymmetric warfare and nasty surprises. And this was 10 days before

the original plan for this and three weeks before it actually happened. Right. And she has been involved in these types of things before. She was very much involved, probably one of the, I shouldn't say probably, one of the prime conductors of the 2014 coup in Kiev that overthrows a democratically elected government and really sets forward in motion these last 10 years of crisis, you know, crisis, violence and war. She is a smart lady. She understands what she's saying. She doesn't say asymmetric warfare mistakenly, right? So she knows that anything in terms of sending longer range missiles, Abrams tanks, that's not asymmetric warfare. She knows that. She also, Judge, uses what strikes me is her use of the word battlefield. And if you recall, when she was a part of the Bush administration 20 years ago, a deputy national security advisor for Dick Cheney, the Bush administration, which the Obama

administration continued, but the Bush administration had this concept, this policy, this doctrine of a global battlefield. The battlefield was everywhere, according to the Bush administration, whether it was actually in the confines of a firefight, whether it was in a city or a rural area, whether it was in the United States itself. The world, the global war on terror extended across the globe into every space. And so certainly I think when Newland uses that term battlefield, I think that's what she's talking about. Would the CIA look the other way knowing that 140 young people at a concert, not military target by any stretch of the imagination would be slaughtered. I don't, you would like to think that your fellow countrymen would not have that type of the ends justify the means mentality that would allow for such a thing, let alone be so foolish to think such a thing would work or so stupid to think such a thing

would work. But we do. There are Americans who think that way. Many of them are in government. Many of them are at the State Department. Many of them at the CIA. You know, one of the things, the consequence, Judge, you have over decades of failed policies, of these ruinous wars, of these counterproductive, illegal, immoral wars of failure, is that the good folks get out, right? And who remains? The people who actually believe in this nonsense, the people who actually believe that Iraq was worth fighting or that Afghanistan, we could have won if we had just done it better, right? You have those people who are in these positions and they actually believe in the idea that somehow you can terrorize your enemy into submission, right? We're going to cause Vladimir Putin such grave consequences of horror within his own country that his people are going

to rise up and remove him from power, right? The same nonsense that these people believe how sanctions work. We're going to make the economy so miserable that they're going to rise up and, you know, we're going to bomb them and they're going to rise up and we're going to bomb them and they're going to rise up and they're going, and it's never happened anywhere in the history of the world, right? I mean, so what you have is you do have men and women in the United States government who think this way. And so while you would think it was something that was inconceivable, something that Americans would not do. I rest assure you that there are many within American government, both past and present, who would, if not eagerly, be willing to go along with something like this.

The other thing, Judge, too, I think how it happens is that it gets set in motion. The United States blesses off on it. And then those who do the actions, well, they're on their own. There's also this idea too, though, that's parallel to that, that we can control them at any point we can pull them back in, which as we've seen with, you know, numerous examples, this is the idea of blowback that you can't control them. It's in general, and we've talked about this before, in case of war, you have men and women who believe they can control war. They believe they can control violence and violence has an agency. War has an agency all its own. And it makes, it makes those who are attempting to control it actually be controlled

by war, by violence themselves. And we've had, you know, of course, example after example, I think, you know, you know, this history with the jihadists being a prime one. But so I think where it is repulsive, the idea that the Americans could somehow be about the idea of repulsion, it's repulsive, that what we were talking about with Victoria Newland would be true, it still is very possible. And I would not put it past this woman or any of her ilk to include, you know, others, Condoleezza Rice, Hillary Clinton, you know, as well as all their male counterparts, you know, throughout these decades in American power who have gone along with similar things. I would also say one last thing. What essentially is the difference between slaughtering 140 people

in a concert hall, with slaughtering hundreds of thousands in an unwinnable war in Ukraine, with invading, say, Iraq and killing a million people? What's the actual difference in all of that? There's not. The scale of horror in these things comes down to the numbers killed, but the, the horror, the terror in all of it exists. And these people believe that they can control that and use that for their purposes. It's terrifying. I'm going to ask you about the IDF and AI, but we just got word of we have the tape here of a, of a sort of a, I wouldn't call it an invasion, but a sit down in the Senate office building and in the Senate cafeteria with our friends with blood on their hands.

I wonder if you recognize any of them. There's Medea Benjamin right there. Yep. And apparently they're chanting, Gaza doesn't eat the senate's not going to eat i don't know how they got where they did i've been to the senate dining room you probably have as well you go through three levels of security to get there somehow they got there they're very they're very good at what they do and i'll say this judge they need to keep it up and not not the folks who are getting on Fox News,

but people around the country who are every time Joe Biden or Kamala Harris shows up for a campaign rally here in Raleigh, North Carolina, in Tucson, Arizona, in Bend, Oregon, wherever they're going, people need to keep showing up and keep disrupting those appearances because those local appearances, those campaign appearances being disrupted, they might not get on CNN or MSNBC. That's not the point. But they do get on local news. They are on the ABC, NBC, Fox, you know, affiliates. They are on local radio. And that is terrorizing the Biden reelection campaign. That is causing such problems

with the Biden reelection campaign that every time he shows up someplace or Vice President Harris shows up someplace, they are met by protesters outside. And then inside the event, it's disrupted. It ends up on local news and it is just causing a great deal of terror, if you will, for the Biden re-election team. And so people need to keep that up because it's having a very real effect. And, hey, this is what democracy is. That's what democracy looks like. And God bless those people who are doing that. And if you're one of them, keep it up. And if you're interested, please find a local group to join and support them in those actions. So an Israeli journalist, I don't know if he has biases, but an Israeli journalist reports, and the government is not denying it,, which has identified Hamas members and people supposedly sympathetic to Hamas has assigned numbers to them.

100% is must be killed at all costs. One is obviously the other end of that spectrum. and when the computer locates them through some facial recognition, no matter who's around them, they could be at home with their family, they could be in a hospital, they could be in a mosque. If there's any mosques or hospitals still standing, the drones come in and destroy the person and everybody around them. Right. A new era for warfare.

I mean, is the Netanyahu administration going to blame a machine or blame a computer? Some human being is setting this off, is approving this, has constructed it, has crafted it, has authorized it. Right. And from the reporting, what we know is that, yeah, at the senior levels, this was authorized, right? As you say, it was created, it was crafted by humans, set in motion by humans. But then in terms of the process from what the reporting is coming from is really military and intelligence officials. You know, maybe maybe a human looks at this for 20 seconds before they say, yes, approved. So it really is an automated machine process. And what I'll say to people, if people remember the film Terminator and Skynet, the artificial intelligence that goes on a genocidal campaign against people, right? The only difference between that fictional story, basically, from 40 years ago with Arnold Schwarzenegger, and now is an internet connection between these AI software and the drones themselves.

That's all that's needed is to link directly. And you have robotic, automized warfare. Here is this Israeli journalist talking about maximum 20 seconds of deliberation per target. Cut number 10, Chris. And they implemented, again, minimal supervision on the machine. One source said that he spent 20 seconds per target before authorizing the bombing of the alleged low-ranking Hamas militant. Often it was also a civilian, killing those people inside their houses. And I think... And the thing about it, Judge,

just to really hammer point of how this is a genocidal campaign, the evil that is existing in this, the inhumanity, is there's another program. So we know of three Israeli AI programs, Gospel, this one that's been reported, Lavender, and then Where's Daddy. Where's Daddy is the program that finds these people and directs the airstrikes against them. So uses that facial recognition you're talking about. It's called Where's Daddy because the prerogative was to kill these people when they were at home with their families. And you said how they assigned a scale for how important these targets were,

these people were, scale of one to a hundred, say, down at the very low end of the people, the lower ranking members of Hamas that they were targeting. So basically men who are just carrying rifles, they were authorized, the Israelis were authorizing machines to kill up to 15 civilians. So just a dude carrying a gun, the machines could kill him and up to 15 people around him, his family essentially, because again, where's daddy? When are they going to strike? When he comes back home. Is there some mockery involved by calling these things gospel, as in the New Testament? And where's daddy, a plaintiff cry of an infant waiting for the father to come home from work at the end of the day? Is this to mock their victims? I think it is.

I think it also shows their self-righteousness. It shows their superiority and it shows their inhumanity in this idea of calling it where's daddy when the idea of it is to strike and to kill and to murder these people when they are at home with their families. So just as you're saying, Judge, the cry of an infant, where's daddy? When daddy comes home, we're going to kill you with American, Judge, the cry of an infant, where's daddy? When daddy comes home, we're going to kill you with American supplied bombs and missiles, of course. And on that extreme end, where you're talking about Hamas battalion commanders, brigade commanders, the important people, I guess, the Israelis authorized the machines, again, because this is machine control, the machines, the computers, to kill up to 300 people.

And if we remember, go back about four months, five months ago when the Israelis were bombing the Jabala refugee camps, refugee camp, dropping 2000 pound bombs in the midst of high rise bombers. That's what they were doing. They would locate one or two Hamas commanders there and they would say, well, we can kill hundreds of people as well. It doesn't matter. This is what we're authorized to do. This shows that there's two parts to this genocidal campaign. One is the ethnic cleansing. Right. Get to make the land unhabitable. Get the people out of there. Destroy all their infrastructure. Kill all their doctors. Kill all their poets, et cetera. Collapse their society. their society or destroy their society. The other aspect is collective punishment, right? And this is exactly what it is. We are going to find members

of Hamas and we are going to punish everybody around them, whether or not they actually are involved or not. If you're just in proximity to someone that we think is a Hamas member, and in this story, it's really important. The magazine is called 972 for people to read this story. If in the story, you see that the Israelis knew that the machines were making mistakes, that they were targeting killing people that had no connection to Hamas, let alone the people that they claim were connected to Hamas. This would be what I don't think judge in an American court would stand up. A lot of it's all circumstantial, that someone happened to be within proximity of somebody else at a certain time. And, OK, that makes now a target because they were somehow tangentially or circumstantially connected to someone else, we suspect, of being a Hamas member.

But that means now we are going to eradicate their entire family and not just their family, but their neighbors as well, their community. And this is the crux of this genocidal campaign. secure facility pressing a button on a computer are of the same view that the Palestinians are subhuman as the politicians who sent them there. I think in many ways, Judge, they're coming out of the same culture, the same decades that have had both two parts to it, right? A militarist bent and an ultra-nationalist or ultra-religious bent, the idea of the origin story of modern Israel, the necessity of it, right? The horrors of the Holocaust, that informs some of it, but then the decades of a culture that has deemed itself as redeeming its destiny, right? That provides you with the authority to do this to others. And you see this in statements, not just from settlers, right? But from Israeli soldiers,

Israeli members of the public. These are people who, you know, Israel as a country writ large is supportive of what's occurring. We see this in the mass, mass number of videos coming out of Gaza, where these Israeli soldiers are mocking, as you say, humiliating, doing everything they can possible to just create these degrading and disrespectful desecrations on video. But the other part too, is that the general public judge, as we know, is in support of what's occurring here. You know, a few weeks back, 68% of Israelis said that they support food not being allowed into Gaza. So more than two-thirds of the Israeli public is supportive of the deliberate starvation campaign. But it extends even further as a good Times of Israel poll that came out yesterday talks about how angry people are at Netanyahu. How also to Ben-Gavir and Bezal Smotrich, the leaders of the far right.

They want that, you know, the majority of people want to see them gone as well. However, what you also see in there, the thing that I took away was that almost half of Israelis are in favor of a military campaign against Lebanon. 48% of Israelis in this poll support a military campaign against Lebanon. That is just amazing considering the results of Israel's two previous military campaigns against Lebanon, one of which the first one creates Hezbollah, you know, but the this idea, though, that the people of Israel are supportive of this is borne out, you get a Benny Gantz or even a Yair Lapid who is going to pursue these same policies. And so this idea of being, even if the whole world's against them, as long as we have the Americans, then we can be fortress Israel. And the other thing, too, is I think for the Zionists, they see this as their best opportunity. They will never get another chance like this to carry out these phases of the Zionist plan, of this expansion of greater Israel, of the eradication of Palestine than they're getting right now.

And so, of course, take that opportunity. Matt, thank you very much. Safe travels. Godspeed. We'll look forward to hearing from you when you're on the other side of the world. All right. Thanks, Judge. Thank you. All the best. Coming up at three o'clock Eastern, Karen Kwiatkowski on many of these same topics and at 430 Eastern today, Scott Ritter. Judge Napolitano for judging freedom. Thank you.