Judging Freedom - Max Blumenthal: How Israel Uses and Abuses the Media

Episode Date: October 15, 2024

Max Blumenthal: How Israel Uses and Abuses the MediaSee 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, October 15th, 2024. Max Blumenthal joins us now. Max, always a pleasure, my dear friend, no matter what we're about to discuss. Can you tell us the latest on your colleague, Jeremy Lafredo was in Israel, Palestine, arrived soon after the Iranian missile attacks on Israel, the Iranian retaliatory missile attacks, which I believe were October 1st. And he went to report on them, as any reporter would, and covered the locations of the strikes. The thing is, Jeremy wasn't doing anything particularly unique, although his video was very thorough and well-produced. A reporter from PBS, Nick Schifrin, who presumably was credentialed by the Israeli government, had already reported the location of a missile crater outside Mossad headquarters.

And Jeremy also went outside, well outside the Nevatim airbase in southern Israel to show the remains of a ballistic missile. Didn't do anything else beyond that and was arrested days later with three other reporters or four other reporters at a West Bank checkpoint by the Israeli military. They abused these reporters. Some of them were roughed up. One apparently had guns held to his head at one point by the soldiers. They were taunted, humiliated. Then after 11 hours, all the reporters except for Jeremy were let go. And Jeremy was accused by the Israeli police of supporting an enemy during wartime because he showed the locations of these missile strikes as so many other journalists, including Israeli journalists, had.

Jeremy has been before two Israeli magistrate judges. Both ruled that he did not violate military censorship policies and called for his release. But Israel's holding him in the country till at least October 20th. He's since been interrogated twice about his video. And it's not clear to me what they could possibly accuse him of. In fact, an Israeli reporter from the most mainstream publication in Israel, Ynet, came forward and testified that he published Jeremy's entire video in his article and that it cleared military censorship policy.

So I have no idea what they could possibly have on him. Every publication, Washington Post, New York Times, even Ynet has published satellite images showing where the Iranian missiles struck. But the Israeli police seem to be trying to claim that Jeremy, by showing these locations, somehow aided Iran and therefore aided an enemy. And I think this is just completely political. It's about targeting Jeremy. It's about targeting

possibly even the gray zone. And the United States State Department, the U.S. State Department has not called for his release. Wow. Compare this to, what's the name of the fellow from the Wall Street Journal? Evan Gershkovich, who had been arrested by the Russians, according to Ritter and others, with substantial evidence of receiving national security secrets. Another topic for another time. Did Jeremy publish anything that hadn't already been published and cleared? Did Jeremy publish anything that was even arguably a national security secret? No. I mean, he published Google map, like Google map coordinates of the locations of two strikes that he publicly, that he visited. But let's say Iran was trying to recalibrate their strikes.

Then all they have to do is geolocate the strikes using open source intelligence based on the images that were in his video, but were also in PBS videos and so many other videos or in the social media videos. But other outlets went even further, including the Israeli Ynet. They published satellite images of where the missiles hit, as did the New York Times and the Washington Post. So there is no basis for this investigation into Jeremy. And they keep calling him in for a new interrogation every day. They're holding his phone. They've invaded his phone. They're holding his laptop. They're holding his passport and they're holding his wallet so he has no access to finances. And again, the State Department,

while they're monitoring this case and they seem to be showing up at the various hearings, they haven't called for his release as they would for Evan Gerskovich. What did the IDF do to him? Was it abuse? Was it torture? Was it confinement alone? I mean, it seems that the other reporters, some of the other reporters were more harshly abused.

There was a female reporter with him, and the soldiers said to her in Hebrew that they wished that Hamas had raped her. Another reporter had two guns drawn on him. Another reporter produced physical evidence that he was beaten, showing bruises on his body. Jeremy was blindfolded, blindfolded harshly, and kind of roughed up and insulted and taken around. But right now it's more like they're playing, they're attempting to play some kind of psychological games because they don't have a case. There's nothing there. Do they know that he's an American and do they know that he works with the gray zone? I assume so. I know they know he's an American. And does the State Department know he's an American? And who's representing us here?

Where does greater Israel start and where does it end? Because if this had happened inside official enemy territory, North Korea or Russia, and Jeremy was doing something much more provocative, I don't know what that could have consisted of. I guarantee the State Department would be making this a massive international cause and putting it front and center at the heart of the Biden campaign's crusade for press freedom. But the response so far has been absolutely muted, where the State Department in its only public statement about the only U.S. reporter who has been detained, arrested, and investigated by Israel since October 7th, all they've said is they're monitoring the situation. Is this because the State Department doesn't like us because we've asked tough questions of them at State Department briefings? Probably.

So does the State Department represent American citizens based on political prejudice? These are all pertinent questions. And I think everybody who's monitoring this case, and that includes the Committee to Protect Journalists, Freedom of the Press Foundation, and multiple outlets, international outlets, want to know, will the State Department defend its citizen against a country that has previously targeted and killed U.S. citizens who are journalists like Shireen Abu-Akhle. Switching to a slightly different topic, what happened at the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital? Well, this is a hospital in Darabala, which is one of the last public hospitals still functioning. And what we see there is what we've seen around other hospitals in Gaza that Israel doesn't like, which is that people gather in tents around the hospital because they see it as a place of safety where they can get services. Everybody's sick in Gaza. And Israel bombed those tent encampments.

And while the death toll wasn't as massive as, for example, the bombing in December in the Maghazi refugee camp that just killed 250 people in one blow for no apparent reason, several tents on fire and burned people alive on camera, including a young man who was 18, who had just graduated from medical school a month before and had been writing in his diary about how many times he had cheated death. And you can see him just being burned alive on camera in a really clear, harrowing image that distills the Holocaust that people are living through in Gaza. And I think so many people on social media were captivated by this image, and it's why we're talking about it now. Here's a journalist whom you may know describing what she saw, cut number nine. They burned people alive. I don't know. They picked this muscle to cause this fire at this time of the night to kill people while they are sleeping. And then these people are waking up, watching their bodies burning, turning into black,

and having their last breath in front of the camera. That's what happened. They did this. They did this. I know that you will not be able to watch the videos, to watch the videos, to watch the pictures, to hear them screaming while they are burning and no one can do anything for them. But the Israeli army did this. Do you do you know her or have any reason to doubt or support her eyewitness testimony.

Well, that's Bisan Aouda, who has been doing a lot of first-person testimony, but also documentation of crimes people in Gaza have suffered since October 7th. And her videos and reporting, which has been as good as any reporter's, probably more courageous than most Western reporters, has won an Emmy. Despite major objections from the Israel lobby, she won a major award for her work. So I think it was an Emmy. It might've been a Pulitzer Prize, but she's been widely awarded, but we don't need to rely on her testimony. The video is there for everyone to see. The images are there. And it's just an image that captures what has happened to Gaza. I mean, the term the Holocaust was sort of chosen to market

the very real genocide that Jews experienced in the Holocaust, but Jews experienced in Europe during World War II. Jews experienced this alongside Roma people, alongside Russians who were targeted by fascist forces, alongside dissidents, so many other people. But this term was chosen to particularize the Jewish genocide and to market it. And it's been weaponized by Zionist forces in order to advance or in order to legitimize Israel's existence as a Jewish ethno-supremacist or exclusivist project and weaponized to shut down those who want to publicize the crimes against Palestinians. But we can clearly see, if you look at the definition of the word Holocaust, which simply refers to a massive conflagration that consumes life,

that that is what people in Gaza are living through and dying through right now. And the young man who was consumed in flames on video was someone who really represented the hope of Gaza, who wanted to heal people in his life, who had just completed a medical degree, who was the pride of his family. a terrorist, as Israel alleges when it claims it attacked a Hamas command and control center. So we're really getting to the essence of what Israel is doing in Gaza here. Recently, four young IDF soldiers, each age 19, were killed when a Hezbollah drone hit a dining hall at an Israeli military facility and about 70 Israeli IDF were injured. These numbers are minuscule compared to the slaughter that Israel has caused. But how impactful, if at all, has this been inside Israel? Well, it speaks to the capabilities of Hezbollah after Israel had two or three weeks of triumphalism following the Pager attacks, following the assassination of Hassan Nasrallah, and his apparent successor, Hisham Safaeddin, as well as an IRGC high-ranking officer. It turns out, as I knew, that Hezbollah wasn't crippled at all and that it still maintained capacity to do serious damage inside Israel. And it hasn't bent, as we see from the

statement that Hezbollah's leadership has issued today, it hasn't bent from its central demand, which is a ceasefire in Gaza. If there's a ceasefire in Gaza, they go north of the Latani River, according to UN agreements, and only on the location of this base in Binyamina between Tel Aviv and Haifa, but on what was taking place there, which was a luncheon for the Golani Brigade, which has caused so many atrocities in Gaza and which is now fighting in southern Lebanon. of staff Herzl Halevi was to be on site. The drone attack was sophisticated. It penetrated Israel's multi-layered anti-aircraft defenses. One drone attacked first with a rocket and then conducted a suicide drone attack and struck the base. This was consistent with Hezbollah's doctrine, which is to attack military targets. They're targeting military targets across Israel according to the intelligence they've acquired. So Hezbollah is still standing. It's still on its feet. It's not going away. And anybody who says that or thinks that Israel can wipe it out, when it has failed to wipe out a much weaker force in Hamas in Gaza over the course of more than a year, there is just

completely delusional. And how is Israel responding? It attacked a Christian village in northern Lebanon, killing, I think, over 20. It is attacking in the Bekaa Valley in Saida, killing civilians. And it continues to conduct its Holocaust of children in the Gaza Strip, but it cannot end Hezbollah as a military viable force. I want to talk to you about the use by Israel of Western journalists to propagate its propaganda. And we'll start with something I know you're familiar with, Chris, cut number 10. On October 7th, as news of the Hamas military attack on Israel started to emerge, the Israeli PR machine went into overdrive. Its propaganda blitz was predictable,

and its objective was clear. Shock the Western public into supporting Israel's plan to carry out the wholesale destruction of the besieged Gaza Strip. In its campaign to manufacture consent for mass death, the Israeli government found no greater ally than the unquestioning marionettes that serve as the faces and voices of U.S. mainstream media. At least 40 babies were killed. Some of them, their heads got off. He said he's never seen acts of brutality like this. They cut heads off children.

Toddlers and children, and yes, they cut off heads. They cut off heads. Israeli Prime Minister's spokesman just confirmed babies and toddlers were found with their heads decapitated. Atomic turning reports of babies being killed. Babies and adults decapitated. Babies and adults burned to death. The head babies burn women, literally decimate them. Dozens of children bound them up, burned them, and executed them. Boy and girl, six and eight years old, and their parents.

The father has eye gouged out in front of his kids. Mother's breast cut off. The girl's foot amputated. The boy's fingers cut off before they were executed. She was pregnant woman. Stomach is butchered up and a knife is still stacked in that baby. Little kids were beheaded. We didn't know which head belongs to which kid.

Bastards put these babies in an oven and put on the oven. They baked their baby in the oven and kept the woman alive so that she could hear the screams of her child melting. The little children that were put in the oven. Women sexually assaulted and brutally killed. Pregnant women, cut open. Guys, the things they're having are so sick. These depraved savages,

raped women, murdered children, executed entire families, burning some of them alive. Sheer evil. They are savages. Hamas is ISIS. We are fighting human beings, and we, the trailer to your excellent documentary, Atrocity, Inc., How Israel Sells Its Slaughter of Gaza. Who's behind all of those? Well, was any of that true? Absolutely nothing you saw in that trailer except what I said was true. I mean,

and by this point, it should be self-evident except that you have Kamala Harris and so many other major national politicians across the West still stating these lies that have been debunked, even retracted by the White House, retracted by major publications, debunked by Israeli media. So I thought it was necessary to make this film, to release it on October 7th and show how the media colluded with apartheid Israel in a campaign to shock the Western public into supporting what was stated from the beginning to be a genocide, to besiege the quote-unquote human animals, as the Israeli defense minister put it. The warning signs were all there about what Israel was planning to do, and the media helped them create the space to do it. And now

they're all shocked at what Israel's done, and they're all pulling back or they're silent about it, but they need to be held accountable. And so I made this, I documented how the lies were debunked, where they went wrong. One thing I focused on in particular was the New York Times article we've talked about before, Judge, which was sort of the culmination of the hoax that Israel rolled out, alleging that Hamas carried out systematic sexual assault on Israeli women on October 7th. And the New York Times hasn't really issued a cohesive public statement explaining how that article got everything wrong and they haven't really meted out accountability to the key author, Jeffrey Gettleman. But today, the New York Times issued a long statement standing by a correct and good article, investigative piece it did. But at great length, with great detail, explaining why it was standing

by this article, which documented how over 50 children in Gaza had been taken into the hospital with bullet wounds to their heads, shot by Israeli snipers. Why is that? It's because they respond to the Israel lobby and to its pressure, but they're not going to respond to us when we expose how the New York Times actually did the bidding of the Israel lobby in creating political space so that the snipers could shoot those kids in the head. And that's what it did by pushing the mass rape hoax. How did Israel, how did the Israeli government get all of these mainstream media figures, some of whom I've known for years, to make all these outlandish, unfounded, untrue, horrific statements? Number one, sort of anti-Palestinian racism courses through the veins of mainstream American newsrooms. And they assume that Hamas are a bunch of barbaric savages, as Israel says they are, and that they would have done all of these things,

and that they don't have political objectives objectives and that there is no historical or political context to the October 7th attack or military objective. Number two, there is a passionate attachment to Israel and to Zionism is very strong within, still within modern American newsrooms, particularly among older journalists, and especially among upper management. And that was definitely the case at the New York Times, where you had a manager and a publishing family that were that were pro Israel, even when there were elements in the newsroom that were actually disgusted by what Israel was doing. And then you had this hack, Jeffrey Gettleman, who goes in and gets an Israeli fixer who is named Anat Schwartz, who was later fired for pro-genocide tweets,

which I guess the New York Times failed to vet, who had never written an article before, who was the aunt of the other fixer he relied upon, who was an Israel-based food blogger. And these characters slapped together one of the biggest pieces of journalistic malpractice in recent history, manufacturing consent for a genocide. And they still haven't retracted it or even issued the kind of public statement they have to do when they're coming under Israel lobby pressure for a fundamentally correct and important investigation on the crimes that have occurred in recent months in Gaza. But I mean, I think it's pretty obvious to everyone. I remember a year ago today, Judge, I was watching CNN

and I wrote a long tweet expressing horror that CNN had obviously called in its most Zionist anchors, Jake Tapper, Dana Bash, and Wolf Blitzer, who was a former AIPAC staffer, to dominate the airwaves and did not allow a single Arab or Palestinian to speak a week after Israel's slaughter in Gaza began. And then they interviewed Israel's president, Isaac Herzog, who declared that there are no civilians in Gaza. They are all essentially aligned with Hamas, that this is a battle between good and evil. And Dana Bash comes on screen after Herzog and declares, I think it really hit home what the Israeli president said. This is indeed a battle between good and evil.

So this is what we got from CNN. And where are we today? They have a direct role in this Holocaust, and they need to be called out. Very few people are calling them out as effectively as you, Max. I know you just got back from Turkey, and I want to ask you about your trip. So you may not have seen this because it was run on PBS last night. It's a very, very interesting comment about Prime Minister Netanyahu from, of all people, Nancy Pelosi. I'd like your thoughts on this.

Chris, cut number eight. Sadly, since then, we've seen many casualties of noncombatants, children and families in Gaza and now some elsewhere in the region. And it's just intolerable. But right now we have to live with the circumstances that we have. We've all been talking about a two-state solution for a long time. The current leader in Israel does not agree to that, even though for about 30 years, since like 93, we had been talking about that. I don't know if Netanyahu wants peace.

I don't know if he's capable of peace. I don't know if he's afraid of peace. But he has gone off the course that we all thought we were in as we support Israel. That's about the strongest criticism I've heard from any, I'm not talking about Thomas Massey or the progressives in the Congress, many sort of mainstream Democrat or Republican. I don't know if he wants peace. He's gone off course. Yeah, I actually did watch that, which shows like that I have no life. I wasn't going to put it that harshly. I was going to say it shows that you're always on top of these things, Max, no matter how little sleep you've had.

I think I was the only person under 60 watching PBS that late at night. Oh, it's about Turkey. Well, just responding to that first. Oh, sure. Well, just responding to that first. We always hear this from the congressional Democrats, and Pelosi also lit into Netanyahu for basically attacking Biden during his congressional address when he got more standing ovations than any U.S. president ever did in their State of the Union. But what do they actually do? In reality, the Biden administration is propping up Netanyahu. They could topple him in a second, but they don't want to do what has to be done because there's no separating Netanyahu at this point from Israel. There is no Israeli leader in the cabinet or anywhere else who supports an actual Palestinian state. And by the way, in the Likud party's charter, the charter of Netanyahu's

party, it declares that Israel exists between the river and the sea and that there is no Palestine. And Netanyahu has always been faithful to that. So he's never acted off course. He has campaigned on preventing a Palestinian state and the U.S. has never undercut him in any way. Just look at what Biden did. He gave Netanyahu the fad system complete with 100 American troops to operate inside Israel as human shields or human tripwires if Iran counterattacks. Why not give that to Netanyahu after he gives you something? Look at the way they're conducting diplomacy. They give him the terminal high altitude anti-aircraft device, which is vaunted.

They put American troops into harm's way. And then a day later after announcing that, Lloyd Austin and Tony Blinken send a letter to Netanyahu warning him that he better allow U.S. humanitarian aid into Gaza or else they're going to have to start following U.S. law after over a year and restrict arms sales. They just gave him the weapons he wants and U.S. soldiers. So how is this in any way undercutting Netanyahu? It's not. They always negotiate with them on the front end. They always give him a bear hug. And then they complain afterwards when Netanyahu does what he always said he was going to do. So this is pathetic. At least with Trump, you know what you're getting. And he says that he's going to give Netanyahu the store because Miriam Adelson paid him to.

Yeah, and on Turkey, it was interesting to be at a conference I might not have been invited to years ago because of my reporting on Syria and Turkey was very aggressive in Syria. It was part of the conference sponsored by the Center for Islamic and Global Affairs. And I think its director, Dr. Samuel Arian, who was for time a political prisoner in the United States, now lives in Turkey, is a big fan of your show, because he also invited Scott Ritter, who gave an excellent address on the situation. Alistair Crook was invited, but he couldn't join. We had Larry Wilkerson, who delivered a really powerful speech, and other eminent academics and commentators. And there was unity in the room on the need to support Palestine from people of many different factions, whether it was leftists, Islamists, former US military officers like Larry Wilkerson, and frustration, deep, deep frustration in Turkey with not just Israel or the US, but with NATO in general, Turkey as a NATO state, very frustrated. And I

spoke to people who are close to the Turkish leadership there, who basically say that, you know, we would like to get out from under this system, which prevents us from doing anything meaningful to assist our brothers and sisters in Palestine, as Muslims and as people who simply are humanitarians. But our economy will be utterly destroyed, not only by NATO, but by the fact that it's integrated into the global financial system through Tel Aviv. So you see this kind of yearning in these mid-level powers like Turkey for the strengthening of something like BRICS and the multipolar world order. But Turkey's going to join BRICS next week, isn't it? It will certainly apply. The problem is BRICS, what the financial power it represents is still outmuscled by the Western transatlantic financial system.

So it doesn't present enough of an alternative for Turkey to go all in and risk the financial onslaught. But you can still feel it. These countries want to embrace their values, but they have hundreds of millions of citizens to take care of. As well as Syrian refugees. I mean, I saw Syrian refugees everywhere around Istanbul, and they have the Kurdish situation where they feel sort of encircled. But it was really fascinating. Well, thank you for all your good work, Max. It's always a joy for me to chat with you and to have more than 100,000 people watching, even if what we're discussing is so sad and horrible. But thank you very much. Keep us informed about Jeremy Lafredo. He's in our prayers. All the best, my dear friend. Yeah, hope to announce something good on the next show. Thanks for having me on, Judge. Of course. Of course. Coming up at four o'clock this afternoon on many of these same topics,

former Ambassador Charles Freeman. Judge Napolitano for Judging Freedom. Thanks for watching!