Judging Freedom - Max Blumenthal: Evils Of the IDF

Episode Date: February 29, 2024

Max Blumenthal: Evils Of the IDFSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

What is the future of the Palestinian community? I mean, you just have to see what's going on in Gaza. They're killing children, destroying all of the civilian facilities, the hospitals, the schools. 1.7 million Palestinians living in Gaza have been made homeless, completely displaced. And the idea of saying, so what's there for them to come back to? How are they going to live? What are they going to do? No water, no bread, no schools, no hospitals, no facilities. This is the plan ultimately. so so so so so

so so so so so so so so

so so Hi, everyone. Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom. Today is Thursday, February 29th, 2024. Max Blumenthal joins us now. Those opening comments, which really get to you, were the voice of our friend and colleague Alistair Crook. For those of you that haven't heard that before, that is posted on the website, Judge Knapp and Judging Freedom. Max's voice is on there. Aaron's voice is on there. Many of the voices you'll recognize, my own is on there. It's about 30 of us. We didn't make it. Someone made it and did an absolutely fabulous and moving job. Max, I think your wife's voice is on there as well, each for 15 or 30 seconds describing the horrors in Gaza as we see them. But Max, welcome here and thank you for joining us. I want to get to the breaking news. You'll know more about this than anybody. This either happened yesterday or today. I think it was today where many, many Gazans were online in a place where they believed they would be safe in order to receive food and

water, and they were slaughtered by the IDF. Take it from there, please. Yeah, this is one of the most gruesome massacres among a countless number of massacres. There've been so many that I've lost count, but over a hundred have been killed so far. And these were men who were waiting at a spot in Northern Gaza where they had hoped that they would be able to receive bags of flour. They had been using animal feed to keep their families alive for the past two months in an area that is completely besieged by the Israeli military, where they've all been ordered to leave permanently, where their homes have been mostly destroyed. And they knew that they faced danger and death. But if you're a father, you're going to go out and try to quell

the hunger pains of your children no matter what. And as they arrived, they were shelled by tanks and killed as aid trucks were scheduled to arrive, the rare aid truck. Israel is in damage control mode. It's now claiming that they died from a stampede and were shot by looters or criminal bands. And the fact is criminal bands are taking advantage of the situation because Israel continuously kills the police forces in Gaza that have been attempting to secure these aid trucks because they say, well, those are Hamas operatives and the U.S. is allowing them to do it. State Department spokesman Matthew Miller this week declared that Israel has the right to hold Hamas accountable in killing those police

officers, which clears the way for this kind of chaos we're seeing, along with Israel effectively blocking aid to northern Gaza. Less aid has gone into Gaza in this past week and in this past month than at any point since October 7th. And that's also on the United States, which is not putting any pressure on Israel. is with a group of Israeli settlers who have been blockading aid going from Israeli and Egyptian territory into Gaza with the full support of the Israeli military, which allows them to even erect moon bounces for their children to play while they're preventing aid trucks from going in. And today those settlers are now holding a march, declaring their intention to build settlements in northern Gaza once it's ethnically cleansed of all of those men and all of those families who are being killed just fighting for a bag of flour. In fact, someone I know, a colleague of ours who we've interviewed at The Gray Zone, a journalist named Motasim Dahloul, has been among those groups of men seeking flour at these aid sites, which are consistently bombed by Israel.

And while he was out getting a bag of flour yesterday, Israel bombed his street and killed his pregnant wife and killed his young daughter and wounded his son. So that's what they're going through. That's your U.S. tax dollars at work, creating a humanitarian catastrophe and murdering those who are seeking nothing more than a bag of flour. Here's a comment from a person who was there when this happened. It's in Arabic, but there is an English translation. Cut number one, Chris. We have come here to get our hands on some aid. I've been waiting here since noon yesterday. At about 4.30 in the early morning, trucks started to trickle in. The Israelis just opened random fire on us, as if it was a trap. Once we approached the aid trucks, the Israeli tanks and warplanes

started firing on us. If this continues like this, we do not want any aid delivered at all. Every convoy coming means another massacre. Every convoy coming means another massacre. These war crimes are profound, Max, but are the convoys now being used as a trap in order to draw civilians so that they can be murdered, like shooting fish in a barrel? I mean, they're certainly being used by Israel, attacking them with quadrocopter drones, tanks, their air force. They're just directly slaughtering them on Israeli telegram channels. There are several telegram channels which exist to celebrate the massacre of Palestinian civilians in Gaza. They're celebrating this latest massacre.

Thomas Friedman, not exactly a pro-Palestinian militant, has said that Israel's intention is to reduce the number of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip in order to more easily control them in his latest column. It kind of sounds like genocide to me. And while all of this is happening, USAID Director Samantha Power, who lambasted the Clinton administration and specifically officials like Susan Rice for refusing to quit and sitting on the sidelines as genocide occurred in Rwanda is having photos taken of herself in UN warehouses in Jordan, complaining that the aid is not getting in to the Gaza Strip. In other words, it's as though the U.S. has nothing to do with this. And Samantha Power is completely washing her hands of this while the U.S.'s State Department

is circumventing Congress in order to provide Israel with the licenses to buy those tank shells that it's using to slaughter people when they go to get a bag of flour and to attack the aid trucks themselves. So the U.S. is fully responsible for this catastrophe. U.S. officials have privately complained to Axios that Gaza is turning into Mogadishu because the aid situation is so bad. Well, whose fault is that? And what happened in Mogadishu when aid trucks were coming under attack by criminal gangs? The U.S. waged a military intervention. In this case, the U.S. is arming the criminal gang that's attacking those aid trucks, the main criminal

gang, and that's called the quote-unquote IDF. The quote-unquote IDF is the biggest gang of terrorists that the world has seen because they act under the guise of some legitimate state authority. It's utterly reprehensible. How much longer will this go on before some state actor intervenes? Well, you see some state actors doing what they can to intervene. King Abdullah of Jordan did a photo op of himself dropping aid over Gaza. They do these airdrops. Egypt has attempted some airdrops too in central Gaza. In one case, Egyptian airdrop in central Gaza was torched by Israeli white phosphorus shells, killing many people attempting to get the aid. People have been shot attempting to swim out to the sea to get the Jordanian aid. It's not enough to prevent the mass death in a situation where the

UN says that 576,000 people in Gaza right now are on the brink of famine. And you can just follow the Twitter account of our colleague Motasim Dalul, who's there in northern Gaza, tweeting in English about his daily struggle to find a bag of flour to keep his family alive and how they're just slowly being killed. This is happening to every single family in this area in northern Gaza, where Israel aims to actually create a quote unquote buffer zone. That means to ethnically cleanse everyone, push them south, and not allow them to return to their homes where previously most of the population of Gaza lived. And the United States is allowing this to happen. It's doing nothing. Joe Biden said while licking an ice cream cone that there'd be a ceasefire by Monday, and his own administration had to walk that back. How about the optics of that? While all these people are starving in Gaza, he's licking an ice cream cone

and casually commenting on a ceasefire that the people who actually control Joe Biden say isn't going to happen. We have that clip and it is repellent, but here it is, cut number two. Can you give us a sense of when you think that ceasefire will start, sir? Well, I hope by the beginning of the weekend. I mean, the end of the weekend.

At least my national security advisor tells me that we're close. We're close. We're not done yet. And my hope is by next Monday. Are they close to some sort of a ceasefire or is this typically the case the president doesn't know what he's talking about? I mean, I have no idea what is possible, but I don't see the U.S. putting the kind of pressure on Israel, if you watch the briefings day after day, is that they're pushing for a humanitarian pause and they're actually weaponizing hunger to try to force the Hamas authorities that control Gaza into accepting something less than a ceasefire. They're saying, I mean, this is what the spokesman Matthew Miller, who's by the way, Bob Menendez's former spokesman, gets up and says every day is that it's Hamas's fault that there's famine because they won't accept a humanitarian pause.

And what happens if there's a pause? Then they have to let out, they let out the Israeli captives, they get some kind of prisoner swap, and then they lose all their leverage. And then Israel has the ability to go back to war, continue destroying the Gaza Strip and killing the leadership or pursuing the leadership of Hamas to kill them. And Hamas is then stripped of all leverage. So it just doesn't seem like the terms are workable when the U.S., as usual, is acting as Israel's lawyer. What is the standing of Netanyahu? Is he still the, I guess he is, the puppet of Smotrich and Ben-Gavir, but is he still in the position as he was the last time we talked of desperately needing to extend the war in order to preserve his position in power and even his personal liberty.

Well, Benjamin Netanyahu will always be in the position of needing to extend the war for as long as possible because it's the only way he can maintain immunity from criminal prosecution as well as exemption from the investigation into October 7th, which will substantially fall on his back and paint him as a complete political failure. So that's always going to be the case. But the tension inside, not just Netanyahu's coalition, but inside the war cabinet is reaching a boiling point. This week, as worshipers are due, Palestinian worshipers are due to go to the Al-Aqsa Mosque. And Idmar Ben-Gvir, the fanatical

extremists, the leader of sort of some of the most extremist settlers in the West Bank, who is an Israeli security minister in charge of the Israeli police, at least nominally, is trying to limit the amount of worshippers who can go to Al-Aqsa in order to provoke Palestinians. And key members of the war cabinet, Benny Gantz, Gabi Ashkenazi, even Yoav Galant, the defense minister, are simply telling Ben-Gavir, no, you can't do that because we can't risk this amount of tension while we're already fighting on our southern and northern frontiers. So Ben-Gavir is being sidelined by people who are not actually in Netanyahu's coalition. And the tension continues to boil. Not to raise your blood pressure, but here's former Secretary of State and Director of the CAA, Mike Pompeo,

responding to the diplomacy by ice cream cone, but he's responding by saying there should be no ceasefire. Cut number three. I don't know what President Biden is thinking. I don't know why he would sell out Israel in this way. Israel needs to complete this task. It's not only in Israel's best interest, it's in the Gulf Arab States' best interest. It's in America's best interest as well. You know, Bill, these Hamas guys, they are literally an extended arm of the very Iranians we were speaking about earlier. That's the task at hand, and the president should not be halting them or hindering them. He should be encouraging them to finish this task quickly.

What a repellent dope to make a statement like it's in America's best interest to slaughter Palestinians. Look at what happened in the Democratic primary in Michigan, Joe Biden. How could this possibly be in America's best interest to slaughter Palestinians? I don't know what Mike Pompeo's bag is a settler influencer who actually filmed himself licking an ice cream cone with an Israeli tank crew that was shelling Palestinian civilian neighborhoods in Gaza and just laughing while he licked his ice cream cone. So licking ice cream cones, and I guess the self-licking ice cream cone of the US military industrial complex seems to be an ever present theme here. But Mike Pompeo, he's playing politics. We'll hear this message from Trump throughout the campaign. If there is a ceasefire that Biden

sold Israel out, they're always going to try to outflank Biden, however much he gives Israel. They're always going to try to say that he could have given Israel more. Mike Pompeo is also an ideologically committed Christian Zionist who has said that Israel is fighting the forces of Satan in Islam. But what is the reality? The reality is that it's unclear if Israel can actually go into Rafah and achieve anything other than a massive bloodbath like the kind we haven't seen anymore. Their army, as we've seen, is incredibly unprofessional. They have some of the best military gadgets in human history. They know how to use drones. They know how to fire missiles into multifamily apartment blocks and kill lots of people. But the soldiers on the ground who are reservists

are completely unprofessional. They're basically a terrorist militia that enjoys taking selfies with women's underwear in the homes they've looted, playing with children's toys, just blowing things up, they're not going to be able to actually hunt down Hamas leadership, liberate hostages. They're completely concocting the numbers of Hamas operatives that they kill out of whole cloth. They have no idea what they're dealing with. There are still, according to U.S. intelligence, some 5,000 Hamas fighters still in northern Gaza where Israel claims an operational hold. You can follow the telegram channels of the Al-Qassam brigades and the Sarai Al-Quds brigades of Palestinian Islamic

Jihad and see them in combat with Israeli forces in the north every day. So the idea that Mike Pompeo upholds that Israel can somehow finish the job is a delusional fantasy wrapped in a gigantic crime, which is why we're even hearing members of the Biden administration warn about Israel going into Rafah. They're just not doing anything meaningful or concrete to prevent them from doing so. I want to switch gears just slightly. Does the New York Times still claim that on October 7th, there were rapes and sexual violence committed by Hamas fighters on Israeli females? Well, I predicted when I started to debunk and dismantle the now notorious New York Times investigation into sexual abuse by Hamas on October 7th, the piece called

Screams Without Words, which should be more aptly titled Screams Without Evidence, that the lead author, Jeffrey Gettleman, and his team would have to publicly respond to my debunking. And that's happening now in various ways. New York Times leadership has now come out through a spokesperson, a spokesman, and said that they believe that sexual assault took place on October 7th. So they've actually walked back the more absolute language that they used in that piece. And that's because not only have we debunked their sources, but a new scandal has erupted where the Israeli researcher that helped Jeffrey Gettleman get his sources, that went to hospitals to investigate, that compelled supposed sources and supposed witnesses into participating in this investigation in the first place.

Anat Schwartz has been exposed not only as a journalistic novice with practically no journalistic experience before the investigation began, But as someone who liked posts by fanatical Zionist agitators calling for transforming Gaza into a slaughterhouse, and she fell under investigation from the New York Times, finally there's an investigation into this piece, but it's sort of over a sideshow. And the paper is not cutting ties with her. But one of the most explosive aspects of this latest leg in the scandal around this story is

that Anat Schwartz, the researcher, gave an interview in Hebrew to an Israeli newspaper called Ynet, the biggest newspaper in Israel, on how she got one source to participate. And it's a source who is not credible. And the source said, well, she came to me and said that if you participate, you will help Israel's Hasbara, meaning Israel's propaganda efforts. So the New York Times was actually going to sources and saying, come, you know, give us your evidence or your testimony because you will help us, you will help Israel justify its assault on the Gaza Strip through this investigation. That is just unbelievable journalistic malpractice on the part of the New York Times. And they are not investigating themselves for that, nor are they investigating the fact that witness after witness provided demonstrably false testimony. But as I said from the beginning,

they would have to answer for this and they're doing that. This is old media today. Those stories are out there and they're embedded in people's brains. We had a clip of the woman that runs Code Pink, Medina. Medina, I'm sorry. Approaching US senators in the hallway of the Senate and two of them, both Republicans, commented, well, and two of them, both Republicans, commented, well, when they attacked them, they raped people. And she said, it's not true. And of course, they just walked past her. I don't know if they just threw that at her or if they actually believe it, but that's the way propaganda works. You know this better than almost anybody. But were you surprised that 100,000 Democrats in the state of Michigan voted none of the above or uncommitted when the other Democrat running for the Democratic

nomination is the sitting incumbent president of the United States who won Michigan last time around? In the city of Dearborn outside Detroit, Joe Biden went from 83, 85% of the vote in 2020 to 4% of the vote in 2024 in the Democratic primary with almost the entire city voting uncommitted. To vote uncommitted in Michigan means you're protesting explicitly. You're stating your opposition to Joe Biden's involvement and support for Israel's genocide in Gaza. It's a campaign that was organized by local Arab and Muslim activists in a state that has the highest population of Arab Americans and Palestinian Americans. But I personally know people who are non-Palestinian in Michigan who previously voted for Joe Biden. My wife's family is from Michigan who voted uncommitted this time or who simply

stayed home because they couldn't bear to vote for Joe Biden. So this is enormously significant. It's not just going to be limited to Michigan. And what people are saying is they feel totally powerless and voiceless within a deeply undemocratic Democratic Party that is officially pro-genocide. Who does Biden listen to? How will he respond to this? Well, we can see in the aftermath of this unprecedented, I think, grassroots political intervention in an American political primary that the Biden administration hasn't even acknowledged that it's taken place. They haven't even addressed that community at all. They have nothing that they can say to them. They're ignoring them and they're essentially writing off Michigan in the general election. Who is Biden

really listening to? Well, earlier this month- Jake Sullivan and Victoria Nuland. Well, I wouldn't even say that. These are public facing political officials who we know of, who came in with the administration. We knew they were going to be there. Joe Biden on this question of Gaza is listening to Haim Saban, who is one of the wealthiest, most consistent, high value donors to the Democratic Party. And Joe Biden just attended a fundraiser at Haim Saban's home in Beverly Hills, California earlier this month, co-hosted by Hollywood mogul Casey Wasserman, in which to enter, it cost up to $250,000. Joe Biden in January raised $42 million alone. I mean, think about that. His approval rating is lower than 42%. He has historically low approval rating. The Democratic

Party grassroots is demoralized. He's a source of constant mockery on, even on now on Saturday Night Live, they just show him collapsing on a basketball court. Yet he's raising record amounts of money. And it's from people like Haim Saban, who has said, I'm a one issue guy and my issue is Israel. So Biden's listening to the donor class. He doesn't care about the grassroots. He doesn't care about the people in Michigan. And he's going to have to pay a price for that.

Well, he'll pay a catastrophic price. But the other side on Israel is just as bad. Republicans are just as repellent, and Donald Trump will probably do this if he's elected, if he's the nominee, if he's not in jail, if he's elected and inaugurated, we'll do the same thing. Exactly. We'll be back here in a year from now, in February of 25, having the same conversation, but it'll be about Trump. Were you surprised at the outpouring of grief over the suicide of Aaron Bushnell at the Israeli embassy in Washington, D.C.? Well, it's not just an outpouring of grief. It's a sense of identification with Aaron Bushnell. And I talked just now about the feeling of voicelessness and powerlessness of so many in this country, which led 100,000 people to vote uncommitted in Michigan alone. And that's how people feel watching a genocide being live streamed. Aaron Bushnell said in his last Facebook post that you ask yourself what you would do during the days of chattel slavery or the Trail of Tears or the Holocaust, the Jewish genocide in Europe during World War II. Well, you're doing it now, referring to the Gaza genocide.

And so many people feel compelled to do something to try to stop this, but they have nowhere to turn in this country and they feel metaphorically like they're engulfed in flames as they watch people have their homes burned down to be physically exterminated and even immolated in the Gaza Strip while they're seeking out a bag of flour. It's that feeling among people, especially young people, that's unprecedented now because they're able to watch a genocide being live streamed that Aaron Bushnell channeled live streaming his own suicide. I personally can't sanction any act like that. If I were present, I would have tried to have stopped him. But this was how he felt and he was willing to, he demonstrated that he was willing to sacrifice his life to make that point. Now it's significant also because he was not just a political activist and he was not

in Palestine. The Palestinian diaspora and people in the Gaza Strip are also identifying on a very intimate level with Aaron Bushnell, an American who is an active duty member of the U.S. Air Force. That is unprecedented. Palestinians actually have many American heroes who they uphold as some of their highest martyrs. Rachel Corey, an American from Olympia, Washington, who went to the Gaza Strip to Rafah to make a stand in front of a bulldozer that was going to crush the home of a local doctor whom she had befriended as a member of the International Solidarity Movement. Tom Herndl, a British citizen who is also working to defend the homes of Palestinians being demolished at that time in 2002 in Rafahah was shot in the head by an Israeli sniper. He is a hero of Palestinians. Vittorio Aragoni, who revived the international solidarity movement, actually taking a boat filled with aid, breaking the Israeli siege of Gaza to Gaza, then staying in Gaza to try to organize further aid shipments, who was murdered under very mysterious

circumstances in 2011. He's remembered on murals across occupied Palestine. And now you have someone from outside Palestine who has never been there, who gave his own life in protest of the genocide of Palestinians, Aaron Bushnell, who came from the ranks of the US military. This is unprecedented. It's enormously significant. And it speaks to the gravity and seriousness of the US role and the role that the US military is playing in this genocide. And I think it's something that should frighten people within the leadership positions in the U.S. military. Do you have any knowledge of what happened at the scene? I mean, did they try and save him or did they approach him with guns drawn?

I mean, this is something that took security by surprise. There were DC Metro police who attempted to save him. And then there were Secret Service police officers who drew a gun on him as he was burning alive. Another symbolic image that resonated with a lot of people who've had negative experiences with the police. I've had very negative experiences with the secret Service Police specifically. But, you know, I wanted to address something because you pointed to a document that I tweeted in your interview with Scott Ritter, which is a great interview, very powerful comments by Scott. The military document.

Yeah, this was a military document that was leaked to The Intercept. And it shows that some Air Force service members were deployed to Tel Aviv. The Intercept speculated that they were involved in targeting. The Air Force denied that. We've also seen a photograph tweeted by the White House in October that showed Joe Biden embracing members of the Delta Force Special Forces, U.S. Army Special Forces in Israel and declaring that they were part of the U.S. response to, quote, Hamas terrorism. And then the White House promptly deleted that post because those Delta Force team members were there secretly. So my point in

tweeting that document was to simply show that on an institutional level, the Air Force and the U.S. military as a whole was implicated in this genocide, that it was involved at some level. I never said that Aaron Bushnell had been personally deployed to Israel or that he had orders to go and that he was protesting his personal orders. obvious was that the U.S. military is not a bystander. And I've seen a lot of especially conservative accounts on Twitter mock Aaron Bushnell as some kind of crazy person for protesting and committing suicide over some other country's war. That's not the case. This is an American war that involves the American military with Israel, essentially as a proxy terror militia. And so I don't know if anyone misinterpreted my tweet, but one of the coauthors of that Intercept article, Matthew Petty, is behaving in a very petty manner in misinterpreting what I intended to say, as though I intended to say that Aaron

Bushnell was personally being deployed. I never said that. Should have been obvious. So I just wanted to clear that up. Well, I may have been one of those misinterpreters, and I apologize for it and very much appreciate your correction. You have established a big picture, which is grave indeed, that American troops are there, that nobody knows about it, that Congress didn't authorize it, you're so eloquent and so articulate and you know so much about all this. My hat is off to you, as you know. And I'm deeply and profoundly grateful, as are the many, many thousands watching us for your time today. All the best, my friend. Thanks. And thanks, as always, for giving me a platform.

Of course. You're always welcome here. Take care, Judge. Oh, boy. Some of the stuff's a little on the emotional side. Coming up, this is our heavy hitter day at 2.30 Eastern, Professor Jeffrey Sachs. At 3 o'clock Eastern, Colonel Douglas McGregor at four o'clock Eastern, Professor John Mearsheimer at five o'clock Eastern. Where has he been? Scott Horton. We'll see you. Judge Napolitano

for judging freedom. Thank you.