Judging Freedom - Max Blumenthal: IDF Murders an American

Episode Date: September 12, 2024

Max Blumenthal: IDF Murders an AmericanSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Resolve to earn your degree in the new year in the Bay with WGU. WGU is an online accredited university that specializes in personalized learning. With courses available 24-7 and monthly start dates, you can earn your degree on your schedule. You may even be able to graduate sooner than you think by demonstrating mastery of the material you know. Make 2025 the year you focus on your future. Learn more at wgu.edu. so hi everyone judge andrew napolitano here for Judging Freedom. Today is Thursday, September 12, 2024. Our dear friend Max Blumenthal joins us now. Max, a pleasure. Thank you very much for being with us. believe that the IDF can fairly investigate its own murder by putting a bullet in the head of an innocent, unarmed American woman? Well, apparently the Biden administration does, just as every administration of my lifetime has. And this isn't the first time that the U.S. asked the Israeli military to

investigate itself after it killed an American. The Israeli military killed an American citizen on the Mavi Marmara part of the Gaza humanitarian aid flotilla back in 2009, back in 2010, in the high seas, in international waters, in a commando assault on a humanitarian ship headed for Gaza. The Obama administration asked Israel to investigate itself and it found itself innocent of all charges. Once again, after Israel killed Shirin Abu Akleh, a well-known, one of the most esteemed journalists in the history of Palestine, correspondent for Al Jazeera, who was an American citizen who was frequently in contact with the State Department. The U.S. allowed Israel to investigate itself. And it clearly aimed for her and shot her in the head.

That's what several forensic investigations found. And now we have a 26-year-old woman who is an American named Isinor Ege, who comes from the U.S. to the Nablus area, where Israel has legitimized a settlement, stealing Palestinian land. She went with several other activists, and she was shot in the head, according to 13 eyewitnesses interviewed by the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, she was targeted directly. There was no conflict taking place. There was no reason to fire on her, no reason for live fire. No one had any weapons around her. I actually know someone who is with her, Yonatan Pollack, who is one of the most courageous Israelis I met. He is a leader of the small band of Israeli

anti-Zionists that go into Palestinian territories to defend Palestinians against land theft. He's one of the only Israelis who can walk through any Palestinian city with total respect of Palestinians. But he's also someone I've always known as credible, who supplied me with credible information as a journalist when I was working there. And he said that she was targeted by an Israeli sniper. And now we have President Joe Biden being interviewed on the tarmac declaring that Israel has said that a bullet bounced off the ground and they accidentally shot her. He's exonerating Israel for killing a US citizen after declaring that if you shed an American citizen's blood, we will punish you harshly. This is the total disrespect that

Americans get if they approach Palestinians in a humanitarian way, as opposed to Hirsch Goldberg Poland, an American who went to Israel to fight in Israel's military, was captured by Hamas and died in Hamas custody, and Tony Blinken called him an American hero. When Eisenhower-Ege was given the closest thing you can get to a state funeral in the Palestinian city of Ramallah, it showed that she gets more respect on the streets of Palestine than she would from her own government in the United States. And that says a lot about our relationship with Israel. I know you're familiar with the spokespersons for the Department of State, and I hate to put you through this, but this is classic. And you, of course, have grilled this guy.

I don't know, do they still allow you at these briefings? Or do they keep you out because your grillings are too aggressive for them it's been a minute since i subjected myself to this level this is uh v don patel i don't know who's worse he or miller but he won't condemn he won't condemn the murder of this young woman do you actually condemn the actual act of killing an American citizen protesting the aggression of, let's say, the Israeli occupation army? Condemn the act of the killing itself. Do you condemn that act? Let's just be very clear. Of course, we would condemn the death. We would we we the death of any American citizen is heartbreaking.

But let's be just very precise and clear that I am not going to speculate on what transpired on Friday. As those facts and those processes are still being determined and adjudicated, and we're going to let that process play out. It is troubling. it is tragic, and it's certainly, there is a responsibility here to share as much information as possible so that Ms. IG's family has the most appropriate accounting of what exactly transpired and what happened here. But Saeed, there is a process, and I'm just not going to get ahead of that. And I will, I'm not going to speak on behalf of our partners in Israel. So you actually condemn the act of the killing, the murder of an American citizen?

Of course, Saeed. The murder of any American citizen we would take issue with. Okay. Would not have not do condemn. What's wrong with these people? Yeah. What is wrong with them? This was an issue where the family found that the biggest obstacle for them receiving justice, and not just justice,

but answers, was the State Department of their own government. The IG family asked for an independent investigation, and the State Department just handed it off to Israel. Joe Biden went ahead and accepted Israel's word that they may have accidentally shot her, which is a simply bizarre statement, which means what, where they were aiming for a Palestinian and shot her? No eyewitnesses were interviewed in that investigation, none. And it's not clear that the State Department interviewed anyone. And let's remember that Eisenhower IG was a member of the International Solidarity Movement, which brings Americans,

and if you're a young person watching this and you want to do something good for Palestine, sign up for the ISM and you can go to the West Bank and defend Palestinians against Israeli land theft and settler terror. That's what she was doing. But you're taking your life in your own hands if you do that. Rachel Corey was one of the first members of the ISM to go into the Gaza Strip. And in 2002, while she was defending her friend's house, a Gaza physician against an Israeli bulldozer that was bulldozing hundreds of homes in the Philadelphia corridor where the Israeli military is today in southern Rafah, southern Gaza Strip. The bulldozer ran her over and crushed her body deliberately. And I've watched that tape again and again and again because I sat in the courtroom in Haifa, Israel with Rachel Corey's

parents about over a decade ago, Cindy and Craig Corey, two extremely brave people who were suing the Israeli government for $1 for an admission of guilt. And they had to watch that tape again and again and again to try to demonstrate to an Israeli judge that this was deliberate. Of course, they lost their case inside Israel and could not get that $1. But it's very clear. And Tom Herndl, a British citizen with the ISM, was shot by an Israeli sniper in the head. I know his mother as well, Joyce Herndl, who's still seeking justice for her son. They've killed Westerners from the governments that back Israel, whose leaders like Keir Starmer, Joe Biden, and Kamala Harris and Donald Trump have taken hundreds of

millions of dollars from cutouts for their apartheid government. And that's why the families of those cut down in cold blood, murdered, basically assassinated by Israeli forces can't get justice. Is, switching gears slightly, is torture still going on and being filmed in Israeli prisons? Well, there are some new torture tapes that just emerged from the Megiddo prison, which was run by, we saw Israeli border police in this prison, laying Palestinian men down with their hands bound behind them to be terrorized with attack dogs Abu Ghraib style. These are the forces that operate under the control of the biggest

fanatic, at least open fanatic, to ever serve in an Israeli ministerial position, Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir. And it really shows how corrupted and degenerated the Israeli police have become under his control. They were proud of this display. Many Israelis supported this Nazi-like torture. And it really appears to be, it really appears like you're watching some kind of past Holocaust film with German shepherds attacking shirtless men bound on the ground and masked soldiers glowering over them like death squad members. And this is Itamar Ben-Gvir's police, which are simultaneously allowing a crime wave to sweep Israeli cities with

record numbers of homicides. And they basically just disappeared from cities where there are large numbers of Arab citizens. How would you analogize this level of police to American police? Is it like NYPD? Is it like Border Patrol? Is it like state police? Is it like FBI? What are they that Ben-Gavir can control them? Well, there are different levels to the occupation. I mean, within that West Bank, you have three areas, A, B, and C. Then you have East Jerusalem. So the Israeli military operates in B and C. Then the Palestinian authorities like the Vichy occupation subcontractor in Area A. Then in East Jerusalem, you have the border police who happen, and they

can also go operate in the West Bank. They're extremely vicious. They're notorious for abuses. They tend to come from the lower sectors, socioeconomic sectors of Israeli society, and have more racist attitudes towards Palestinians and Arabs. And Ben-Gavir has a lot of support among them. But Ben-Gavir also commands his own personal militia of settlers who've been given army uniforms, like settler terrorists and US M4 rifles, to go out and terrorize Palestinian villagers and depopulate villages. And this is what was happening in the previous segment we were discussing outside Nablus, where small villages are being depopulated and this group of activists went in to defend some farmers trying to hold on to their land.

So this is a U.S.-supported policy, even as the Biden administration makes feints and vague motions towards sanctioning and condemning Ben-Gavir. He's got his control over the police. And even after he goes, if this coalition cracks up somehow, the police could, large sections of the police, including the border police, could remain loyal to Ben-Gavir. And who knows what will happen to this personal militia he's commanding. What is the economic condition in Israel today? What is life like? It's no longer a liberal country. I mean, are restaurants open? Can you go to nightclubs in Tel Aviv? Are there sufficient manual labors? Are small businesses flourishing? Is investment money still coming in? Well, a lot of questions there.

Tel Aviv does feel normal now. And that's the point of Tel Aviv. It's sort of an R&R city for a military Spartan state where you can pretend that you're in Europe and go to a rave and play paddle ball on the beach while Palestinians are being slaughtered not far away. And I think that's what explained the disproportionate belligerent Israeli response to a single drone flying all the way from Yemen, 4,500 kilometers or so into Israel, sorry, 1,500 kilometers to Israel and actually striking a target inside Tel Aviv

because Tel Aviv cannot be scathed. Once Tel Aviv feels one 100th of what Gaza feels, then the entire Israeli experience of being what Theodor Herzl called a rampart of civilization against barbarism. Essentially, a European carve-out within the Middle East disappears, and everybody starts to leave. At the same time, the poorer segments of Israeli society, those who are less fortunate, can't afford to live in Tel Aviv. Tel Aviv is very unaffordable for the middle class.

The people in the North who depend on government welfare and in the South, but particularly in the North, are suffering. Many of them can't go home and they continue to live in hotels or temporary housing. And that's why there's a lot of pressure on Netanyahu to make some kind of a deal so everyone can go home. But it's important to understand what the Israeli conception, the Jewish-Israeli conception is of a hostage deal. I think it's different from ours, and it's different from that of the Palestinian factions led by Hamas, which want a permanent ceasefire. The father of one of the hostages, who's actually a prisoner of war, her name is Liri Albag. She was a spotter in the Israeli military in the Gaza division enforcing the siege, basically a concentration camp guard outside Gaza when

she was taken captive on October 7th, went on a Israeli talk show on Channel 14, which is Israel's version of Fox News, but probably more extreme, and said that he wants a deal to get his daughter out so the genocide can continue in Gaza. And as far as he's concerned, everyone in Gaza, every single person is Hamas, including children and babies who will eventually grow up to be Hamas. And so the deal is just a way of allowing the genocide to continue in a legitimate way for many Israelis. At the same time, Netanyahu is under unprecedented pressure because of the economic and social situation. I was reading an article in Haaretz about a most unpleasant visit Netanyahu paid to the parents, the home and siblings of one of the hostages that died in captivity.

And, of course, they threw him out, not physically, but they asked him to leave. There was a lot of shouting and yelling. And in the course of this, Haaretz printed a new nickname for him, which I have not seen before. I don't know what it is in Hebrew, but in English. Have you heard this? The Hangman of Gaza Street. I haven't. Yeah. Is the IDF probing, I'm going back now, friendly fire on October 7th? Well, there have been probes, but there hasn't been, there can't be a parliamentary inquiry right now, which would deal the most devastating blow to Netanyahu. We see that

Hillary Clinton is criticizing Netanyahu for his failures on October 7th in a new book she's released, that there have been new resignations, high-level resignations in the Israeli military over October 7th, but there's been no accountability for Netanyahu. Australian state media, ABC, has published a new report coming to the same conclusions I came to in October back when I was attacked for putting on a master class in manipulation, according to Haaretz, back when the Washington Post accused me of October 7th denialism, and Australia's ABC found that Israel killed hundreds of its own citizens, hundreds, through the Hannibal Directive, which authorizes them to attack their own citizens if they're taken captive. So how many hundreds? Was it a majority of the 1,200 who were

killed? A plurality? What is the actual death toll of those killed by Hamas? How many were killed at the Nova Electronic Music Festival? And why does Kamala Harris keep running around lying as she did in the debate, accusing Palestinians of mass rape on October 7th? No matter how much of this media comes out, it seems like this refuses to become the scandal that it deserves to be. And I should also mention really quickly on the issue you brought up of the outrage of the hostage's family at Netanyahu. Netanyahu is leaking fabrications into the Western press, posing as, he's leaking them as a senior administration official or senior Netanyahu official. And he fed a fake story to the Jewish Chronicle, which is a British pro-Israel publication, that Yahya Senwar, the leader of Hamas, had a plan to escape along with all the hostages through the Philadelphia corridor where the Israeli military is occupying right now between Gaza and Egypt to escape to Iran. It was a completely insane story published under the byline of a reporter named, I think, Eitan Perry, whose entire biography is made up. in Tevi hostage rescue, fake news to fake reporters in fake pro-Israel papers to justify not making a hostage deal. And it's all about the Philadelphia corridor for Netanyahu. Here's Vice President Harris during the debate. This is hard to listen to because

this has been debunked by you and others, but here she is with her view. I don't know if she honestly believes it. Hamas, a terrorist organization, slaughtered 1,200 Israelis, many of them young people who were simply attending a concert. Women were horribly raped. And so absolutely, I said then, I say now, Israel has a right to defend itself. We would. And how it does so matters.

Because it is also true, far too many innocent Palestinians have been killed. Children, mothers. What we know is that this war must end. Cy Hersh gave her an A plus on demeanor throughout the debate, but an F minus if there is such a grade because of that. I love those AI apps and their emojis that accompany all the transcriptions. Really helpful in watching Kamala. Yet there was no fact check from the moderators. David Meir from ABC fact checked Donald Trump after virtually every sentence, but there was no fact check on that. And I think that's partly because mainstream American media still doesn't accept our thorough clinical debunking of the October 7th mass rape hoax that was put forward by Israeli

media. So Kamala keeps repeating it. She said this at the Democratic National Convention. She says it in speeches again and again. Anytime she's asked about Israel and Gaza, she brings up this mass rape hoax. It's highly unusual. It's a blood libel against Palestinians, and she's never going to get fact-checked. Yeah, she brought it up in her first and only interview with Dana Bash, and it really shows the utility of this deception, of this hoax, in continuing to justify 2,000-pound bombs being shipped by the U.S. to Israel, like the one that created a gigantic crater in the Moasi tent camp where close to 50% of all Palestinians are taking shelter in the Gaza Strip, killing over 50 people and burying tents so far under the ground that rescuers couldn't find them. This is what Kamala

Harris is justifying. And you can really see in the debate, if you watch it closely, that she is one of the most neoconservative-oriented, militarily belligerent Democrats to ever secure the nomination, as much as Hillary Clinton. And she appears to be intoxicated by the power that she could attain as commander-in-chief. If you listen closely to her closing statement, there's almost an erotic fascination in her voice when she uses the words, when she refers to the U.S. military as the most lethal fighting force in the world. There doesn't seem to be a whole lot of critical thinking within Kamala Harris's mind about the need for diplomacy on Ukraine, the need for diplomacy on the Korean Peninsula, or the need to possibly do an arms embargo to exert some scintilla of leverage on Israel to end a genocide that's been going on for 11 months. This is a dangerous character. I don't think it's going to end no matter who is elected president. In fact, if Trump is elected, it might actually be accelerated, the arms to Israel. Last question. I thought I heard you say this. I'm not sure if I heard it right. Not here, but elsewhere, I think was on the gray zone. You reported that there are

tax-free foundations that are gathering tax-free dollars to pay the legal defense for the IDF rapists. So a couple of questions. I didn't know they were being prosecuted and they need a legal defense. And are these tax-free dollars American dollars? Are Americans able to write this off on their own taxes? Or is it Israelis writing it off on their taxes? Well, you actually are, as an American, able to support settlers in Israel through foundations that are legitimized by the IRS as 501c3s that explicitly support the settlers, which is odd. But this, what we're talking about here is an Israeli nonprofit where the Israeli government has given tax-exempt status to an organization, a religious nationalist group that has raised over, I would say over $150,000 by this point from Israeli citizens for nine soldiers who are

credibly accused. And when I say credibly, I mean, it's almost beyond debate, accused of sodomizing Palestinian prisoners. I mean, they're ringleader of this band of rapists from Israel's Force 100, which is a shadowy, hooligan-like rogue unit within the Israeli military that operates within the State Teman torture camp. Their ringleader has boasted about sodomizing Palestinian prisoners. And his wife has even come out in Israeli media and said, you know, what do I care? It was just a terrorist's butt that got destroyed. I mean, so sick. But I mean, you can really see a portrait of a sick society here when you see how many Israeli citizens are coming forward to support them against their potential prosecution, which has been postponed and suspended because there were pro-rape riots in the Israeli military

base by their supporters, preventing them from ever going before a judge. And you've got Israeli ministers and the son of Netanyahu, Yair, call for their support. Deeply sick society and a completely worthless US media, which spun out the mass rape hoax on October 7th and is dedicating little to no ink on this mega scandal in which there's actual video footage of them committing these heinous crimes. Let me remind our viewers that if you really want to learn what's happening in Israel. The gray zone is the place to go to. Max and Anya Parampol and Aaron Mate are second to none in their ability

to gather facts and their personal courage. I'm not saying that because we're friends and colleagues. I'm saying it because I honestly believe it. Max, thank you very much for your time. My best to your colleagues, as always. They both were on the show this week, but we saved the capo di tutti capi, the boss of all bosses, till the end.

Appreciate that, Judge. Looking forward to seeing you in Kingston, New York, on the 28th. You got it. All the best, my man. Have a nice evening. Take care. Coming up tomorrow.

Where's my note on tomorrow? Here it is at three o'clock on Friday afternoon by popular demand. Ask the judge. So producer Chris will come on a little before Chris, a little before three to start gathering your questions about anything you want that we discuss on air. And I will do my best to answer them. And if I see a follow-up from the questioner in the screen, I'll go to the follow-up. And then at four o'clock, the regular end for the week,

the Intelligence Community Roundtable with Larry Johnson and Ray McGovern. Please like and subscribe. Please ask your friends and relatives and colleagues to do so. We're just about at 440,000 subscriptions. We need more likes. And our goal, of course, on subscriptions is a half a million by Christmastime. Thank you so much, my dear friends. Judge Napolitano for judging freedom. We'll see you next time.