Judging Freedom - Matthew Hoh: How the Media Distorts Gaza.

Episode Date: January 17, 2024

Matthew Hoh: How the Media Distorts Gaza.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, January 16th, 2024. Matt Ho joins us now. Matt, always a pleasure. Thank you for your time, my dear friend, and the consistency with which you give us such good analysis. Do you think that the United States is the unindicted co-conspirator in the South Africa versus Israel case at the International Court of Justice? Oh, undoubtedly. Undoubtedly. I mean, who else could it be? The amount of support that the U.S. has and is giving to Israel is, Israel could not be doing what it was doing without the U.S. There's just no way. I mean, we know that three or about three

cargo planes land every day in Israel with weapons. We know a cargo ship arrives every second or third day. We've seen the blocking of ceasefire resolutions and other actions by the UN, by the United States. We witnessed the actions of the U.S. Navy against the Yemenis to try and stop the blockade of Israeli ships by the Yemenis in the Red Sea. I mean, just the amount of support that the U.S. is giving to Israel is momentous. Israel would just simply not be able to continue doing what it's doing if the U.S. removed itself from the picture. And so this idea that the United States is a co-conspirator or is complicit or is an accessory, however it's best described as, is absolutely the case. And it would be a farce if the United States was,

is not, was not named or is not named as a co-conspirator of being complicit in genocide. It's distressing what's happening in Yemen. And you mentioned it. I was going to ask you about it, but since you mentioned it, is this not, pardon me, is this not the unilateral expansion of the war by the United States of America? Today, we bombed Yemen for the third time. I don't even know if it's out in the press yet. I just saw it a few minutes before we came on air. Well, Joe Biden is now, you know, Joe, every American president this century has

bombed Yemen. So Joe Biden has gotten onto that roster. This is an expansion of the war in such an obvious way, but the way it's resisted, the way that the explanation of what's occurring there is doctored and misreported. How know, how many news articles can we read about what's happening in the Red Sea? And there's almost no mention of what's happening in Gaza and how the two are connected. You know, I mean, so just falling into those tropes of that the United States needs to be halfway around the globe because the people over there are savages, they're pirates, they can't be trusted. The civilized must go forward and protect itself from the uncivilized.

You know, we need to be at the edges of an empire. I mean, all the same tropes keep coming back over and over again. And that's just used to completely hide or disrupt the understanding that this is a unilateral expansion of the war by the United States. I mean, the United States, along with its puppy dog, Britain, bombed what? Close to 100 targets over the last three or four days in Yemen. I mean, how can you describe that as anything other than an act of war? And more importantly, the point that you're getting at, Judge, an expansion of this Israel-Palestine war into a regional war.

And Yemen's in the United Nations. It's an act of war against another member of the United Nations, which makes it an unlawful expansion of the war. Just done it on his own. He didn't go to Congress. He didn't go to the UN. Right, right. And done to protect Israeli shipping, to ensure that the Israeli ships can transit the Red Sea, to stop the bleed out of the Israeli economy that's occurring right now, because Israel has taken a huge economic hit over the last several months since the October 7th attacks and since the start of their ethnic cleansing campaign. It's done to protect commercial shipping. It's done with this argument that somehow it is more important to protect the maneuver and navigation

of commercial ships than it is to stop genocide. It is this perverse logic of property over life. Right. And the way it is done with the moral authority being presented by the U.S. that somehow we are on a righteous mission here in the Red Sea to make freedom of navigation safe for all who want to enjoy the fruits of commerce. You can see that the arguments for this are just so, it's sickening. But this is just another extension of all the sickening things we have seen, say, just last year, whether it was we're going to support the Ukrainians and they are going to punch through the Russian lines. And, oh, well, they've lost an entire generation of young people and their land is devastated, their economy ruined. Oh, well, you know, and same with the arguments for what's occurring in Gaza. We are going to support the Israelis in their self-defense, you know,

as they kill 100 children a day, we're going to call this genocide self-defense. So it's just more of the same. You've made a very strong argument, and our colleagues Max Blumenthal and Scott Ritter and Professors Mearsheimer and Sachs have made the same argument that Israel would be nothing militarily without the United States. And Max has famously said Joe Biden could stop the war while we're streaming this show with the right words on a phone call to Bibi Netanyahu. Having said that, I want you to look at how differently things looked in 1992. This is General Matty Pallad, a retired Israeli general. I forget the son's first name, but his son is an anti-war activist.

Now you probably know the son. Miko. Miko. Miko. Right. Miko. I was in Miko took me to Palestine. So here is the general's son, which is the name of Miko's book.

Here is the general himself. This is about a half an hour long, but we've cut it down to about a minute and a half. It's in San Francisco. It's at an international conference about Israel and Palestine in 1992. What he said then was profound. This is the situation we have to live with and I have no doubt that the direct consequence of the occupation. Anyone who said occupation corrupts was absolutely right.

And we are occupying the West Bank and the Gaza Strip for the last 25 years and this is corrupting us, maybe even more than the American aid. Well, I would like this to be eliminated altogether. I think that we should pay for our arms out of our own money. But in any case, this is one of the most damaging gifts that we get from the United States. So occupation and cash corrupt and absolute occupation and endless streams of cash corrupt. Absolutely. If I can paraphrase the great Lord Acton. Yeah. I was struck by that was from from 1992, and that was 32 years ago,

but at the time General Paleb was speaking, it was only 25 years since the occupation of the West Bank, East Jerusalem, the Gaza Strip by the Israelis after the 1967 war, during which General Paleb was the chief of staff of the Israeli army. So he speaks with an authority that few have on, you know, certainly that war, but also to what comes from that. But so the distance in time. So General Paleb was saying is in 92, how corrupt it was, how what occupation has done to the Israeli soul, if you will, let alone its executive functions. What then has come since then, in the three decades since, like how has that corruption just been compounded? What has it spun off? And we've seen what it has spun off. Well, his successor, I don't remember the name, a major general now retired as the one

who referred to the Gaza Strip as an open air concentration camp. When I first used that, some of my American Jewish friends were jumping all over me on it. And we found out the originator of it. I don't remember his name, but it's whoever succeeded to Piled, now retired, candidly referred to it as that. And it has become that since the Piled days. Right. And I think, you know, in that particular case, too, the description of it was very apt because a lot of times people will say

open air prison referring to Gaza because there is a sensitivity around the world concentration camp, which is which is fine, which is right. But we understand who are who's put in prison. Well, people have been found guilty of crimes. Concentration camp, who goes in the concentration camp? People who are not guilty. People who are only guilty of their identity. So when you look at what the Israelis have done over the last decades since the 67 war, the occupation of Gaza, why does that mean that this is a concentration camp? Well, look what they've done to these people. And why have they done it?

It's been because of the Palestinians' identity. But more importantly, it's because of this occupation, this colonization, this desire to conquer and to make theirs. And what comes with that, though, just as General Pallad was saying, was because the act itself is so immoral, the act itself is so craven and despicable, any actions that come from it, this you're talking about, you know, the fruit of the poison tree here, the first act itself was immoral, it was sinful, it was wrong. So what can come from it that could be right or just, it has to itself be wrong, immoral, you know, because of the way the gains were realized. Right.

Ill gotten, you know, and even so you make that extension back and you just continue to unravel the last 100 years in Palestine, this war on the Palestinians, as it's rightly called. You know, as you as you understand the context, the background, you can see how there was a lot of this has to do with the support of Americans, because again, the Americans make this all possible without the American support. None of this is possible, not just this genocide in Gaza, but the whole occupation. When I was in Hebron, Judge, with Miko, with Miko Pallad, and we got in some trouble there and the Israeli army showed up. Well, there was a settler who was in all our faces in Hebron, this Israeli settler. He was from New York.

I can't remember if he was from Brooklyn or Queens or the Bronx or where. He was from somewhere in New York City. And he was so delighted, so proud, saying that his little Jeep that he drove around in on had come from the American military. You know, our great President Trump has given us the money to buy this equipment. It doesn't matter if it was Trump, it could have been Obama, it could have been Biden, it could have been Bush. It's all the same in terms of the support for Israel. You know, so you just see this corruption, not just in the sense of like the brutality of it, the more the physical horrors of it. But what comes of like the whole corruption of any type of of ability to administer in any way that's just or right or moral itself. So I think that those comments from General Pollet are really, you know, to me,

it's really quite striking how precise and how accurate he was with that description of what was occurring. You and I and our other colleagues have opined that the Israelis are losing the PR war due to their brutality and relentlessness in Gaza. Yet this loss of the PR war is in spite of the fact that major mainstream media prefers to air the Israeli side of things rather than the Gazan side of things. I'm going to unleash you on this in a minute, but I have to tell you, I don't know if you had this experience. We attempted to watch the arguments before the International Court of Justice. You couldn't watch them. They weren't on any Western media at all when the South African presentation was being made. You had to go to Al Jazeera, but you could get them on Western venues when the Israeli

presentation was made. Our friend and colleague Alistair Crook, who lives in Italy, told us in all of the EU, as well as the UK and the US, you couldn't watch anything said by the South Africans unless you went out to Syria. I guess you're not surprised. No, I'm not. I saw some of that as well on Friday. Where I was, actually, ABC News, their online streaming 24-hours news was on. For where I was, I could observe it for more than two hours. And there was no mention at all of any of it. Day before you hit the 100-day mark, the Israelis are making their comment, they're making their presentation at the ICJ, and nothing at all on ABC News about Israel, Palestine, Gaza, any of it.

So there's even a worse aspect to it where you get past the bias is that there is also a pronounced interest in ignoring it. And I think that is ultimately the PR strategy of both those in Washington, D.C. and those in Tel Aviv, or I guess Jerusalem, as we need to call it, because that's what they claim their capital is, that we will preach to a constituency whose support we need, who we depend upon, who give us our resources, and the rest we will ignore. And I think you saw that, Judge, in the Israelis' ICJ's presentation, which the journalist Jeremy Scahill had a terrific write-up on, but which the headline described the Israelis as being an alternative reality. And I think that's where many of us,

how many of us viewed it as well. But the thing for the Israelis, I think, and for the Americans and for the Australians, the Germans, those elites in power, basically, who are continuing to support Israel, who are in the vast minority of the world in the world, whether by nation or by population. I think the desire is that we need to throw the red meat to the dogs, right? We need to give our people what they want. So we will say South Africa is Hamas, that the genocide is not against the Palestinians. It's against us. So we will victim, we will play the victim. We will demonize others. We will, you know, promote the whole us versus them, you know, dichotomy that exists to allow us to claim our role in the world. You know, I mean, I think that's what is geared towards those who are in support and always will be support of Israel is continuing to throw them that, continuing to give them that. While the rest of the world, you say, we don't care. And they have said that. Benjamin Netanyahu over the weekend actually said

something that I think falls in line with what we're talking about here, where Netanyahu said he told Tony Blinken, the American Secretary of State, this is your war too. You're involved in this. And we are brothers of the light versus brothers of the dark. That is part of his strategy to Biden into a corner. This is your war. This is your war too. Do you think that American intelligence agencies have anything to do with the tamping down of the negative coverage by American media? Or do you think it's just the bias of the has been going on for so long that the organism that it is is just a melding of all these different aspects of all these different parts. And if you were to pull them apart, unravel it, Judge, you would get, yeah, certainly the bias of the editors and the

owners, certainly the role that American intelligence plays, as well as Israeli intelligence plays, in manufacturing the narrative and then sustaining that narrative. There's the access journalism parts of it. I'm afraid if I act like Max Blumenthal and go to the State Department and ask those awkward and inconvenient but very honest questions, I'm not going to get invited back into the State Department. And God forbid, I won't get to go to the White House Correspondents Dinner or the White House Christmas Party. So I think there's so much of all this. Then too, the role the arms companies play, the campaign contributions, and especially the role the Israeli lobby, how much that money

the Israeli lobby has. It's on one side, it's money that can be used to bribe, to buy. It's the other side, it's money that can be used to chase people out of power, to keep people out of power. Who are the worst journalistic offenders? I guess we're talking about management. We're not talking about individual persons. Or are they all the same? ABC, CBS, NBC, I hate to say it, Fox, New York Times,

Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, all in the same category or some worse than others? I think that major establishment American media, corporate media, legacy media, we want to describe it. In particular, the ones you just mentioned, Judge, I would add in there, NPR and PBS as well. They are the establishment. And who are their allies? Who are their friends? Who do they go to the White House correspondent dinner with or mingle at the White House Christmas party with? It's the people within the establishment that are adjacent to them.

So you're talking about the defense industry. You're talking about the fossil fuel companies. You're talking about the banks. I mean, so they intermarry, they intermingle, they have relationships. If you look at the board of directors, you can see that there's a cross-pollination among these boards of directors of people from the various constituencies within the establishment. So they're all colleagues. And what's good for the elite on my left and what's good for the elite on my right is certainly it must be then good for me as well.

So there's all this type of social evolution that has occurred to, I think, create and inform this media establishment made up of those networks and platforms and outlets that you just described. But the bias is clear. And The Intercept published last week a really great piece by Adam Johnson and Othman Ali. This follows up on a piece where they are analyzing the television networks, in particular CNN, MSNBC and Fox, and how they covered Israel's war against the Palestinian people. And, you know, what they found by then looking again at how The New York Times, The L.A. Times and The Washington Post cover the war was this extreme bias. And quite remarkably to me, the bias was more extreme in the print journals or the newspapers than it was on the cable news channels. And we can get into those numbers. Just to lighten things up a little bit,

Bobby Kennedy gave a speech recently and someone you and I and our audience knows well was there. I don't know if you've seen this, but here is Professor McGovern expecting to be arrested and disappointed that he wasn't. Only age of five that are dead, okay, that are dead. And you're asking me to get out because you don't want this candidate to address the question. He's chicken to address the question. And what does he do?

He repeats. Repeats. Israel lobby. Israel lobby. Go to the right, please. So he said to me, I thought there'd be Secret Service there who would yank me out. But Joe Biden will not allow the Secret Service to protect Bobby Kennedy yet. And so these were PR people that were gently nudging Ray out.

We're trying to get the clip of him actually standing up. He apparently started Bobby by challenging him in the middle of the speech. Yeah. And I think I've shown this before. I keep it on the wall next to me, judge. It's the, the Bolo from.

Oh, right. Right. When that the state department security folks put out for Ray. Right. All points bullets. And this guy's dangerous. Watch out for him.

It does say that on here. It says if. Yeah, it describes him. I don't have my glasses on, but just like you said, it describes him as being dangerous, as being this radical. You know, and what had occurred with this was back in the Obama administration. Ray had stood up and silently protested Hillary Clinton and silently protested. Didn't even say anything. And they hauled him out and they beat him up pretty good, basically. I remember seeing him not long after that. His entire arm was black and blue. But this is what they're afraid of. And this is, you know, because I think it also angers them when this occurs, because this is not just it's not just the audacity of truth speaking the power. Right. And how dare you? Who are you to speak this way to us? because this is not just, it's not just the audacity of truth speaking the power, right?

And how dare you, who are you to speak this way to us? But it's also, I think, Judge, the great fear that, oh my God, the truth might get out. Someone may hear what this guy McGovern's saying and then start to look into things. Chris, do we have Medea Benjamin in front of Congressman Raskin? Do we have that clip?

No, okay. And maybe you've seen that. We'll show it to you next time. Yeah, I've seen that. Medea Benjamin in front of Congressman Raskin. Do we have that clip? No. Okay. And maybe you've seen that. We'll show it to you next time. Yeah, I've seen that, where Medea is standing next to Raskin. And he's condemning authoritarianism, and she's holding a sign silently saying nobody's above the law. She doesn't even mention Israel by name until they start yanking her out. Right. Only in America. And this is this is in front of the Capitol building, the quintessential place for the the unadulterated free expression of political views.

And they silenced her. We're trying to get her on. I know she's a friend of yours. If you can put in a good word, we'd appreciate it. We'll do. Of course. Of course. So thank you, Matt. It's always a pleasure. My dear friend, I enjoy these. And I know the audience does immeasurably because I can see what they write and I can see the numbers that flock to you. So we'll have you on again next week, of course, if you can make it. And thanks very much for joining us. All right. Thank you, Judge. OK. Coming up at four o'clock today, our young new phenom, Carl Anzalone from antiwar.com on these similar topics. Here's the question for Kyle. Has Bibi Netanyahu painted Joe Biden into a corner? What do you think? Judge Napolitano for judging freedom. MUSIC I'm