Judging Freedom - Max Blumenthal : Is Israel Aiding Ukraine?

Episode Date: June 12, 2025

Max Blumenthal : Is Israel Aiding Ukraine?See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

you you Hi, everyone. Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom. Today is Thursday, June 12th, 2025. Apologies for the delay. Apologies for the slightly different look, the usual internet gremlins, and thanks to producer Chris, we've overcome them. Max Blumenthal is here with us today, but first this. The team at Palantir's booth was clearly on edge. Almost every time a reporter asked them about the new spying contracts they'd raked in under Trump. Palantir's staff would instantaneously call conference security and DC Metro police. I didn't ask about your CEO saying that he kills tons of people in Gaza.

I didn't ask them any questions. Palantir even called the cops on me, simply for filming their attempts to get other reporters ejected. Though Palantir demanded my ouster from the AI Expo, I was allowed to re-enter, for just long enough to attend a panel that amounted to 30 minutes of relentless pro-Israel pablum. It featured the Vice President of the Right-Wing Heritage Foundation, Victoria Coats, Coats was joined on the panel by Amos Yadlin, the former Director of Military Intelligence for Israel, who's credited with loosening his country's rules on targeting the residents

of Gaza and Lebanon by designating them as quote-unquote, the terrorists' non-dangerous neighbor rather than as civilians. I attempted to question Yadlin about his role in setting the stage for Israel's ongoing bloodbath in Gaza, where a majority of the almost 60,000 dead are women, children, and the elderly. Mr. Yadlin, can I ask a question? Max Blumenthal from the Gray Zone. You were the subject of a New York Review of Books article about how you and Asa Koshir

helped loosen the principles of distinction on killing civilians. And I wanted to ask you, like, how you saw, how you see your role in the current genocide where thousands of children are being killed? Did you help inspire the genocide? What's a genocide? What's the definition of a genocide? The deliberate attempt to exterminate a people. What Israel's doing.

I just want to know the definition. It's also a Holocaust. A Holocaust? My grandparents are Holocaust. And you're supporting the new Holocaust. You're supporting the new Holocaust. Hey, get her away from me. I just asked the speaker a question. Hey, get her away from me. I just asked the speaker a question.

I'm having conversations with you. Get this Holocaust supporter away from me. I'm a Holocaust survivor. I'm talking about Holocaust survivors. And you're continuing the Holocaust. You're continuing the Holocaust. Do you know what a Holocaust is? Tens of thousands of slaughtered children. Yet ethnic cleansing.

It's what's happening in Daza. Let's go, let's go, let's go. What's interesting here is how few reporters are actually at this place when you have the heads of intelligence, the AI warlords that are getting the biggest government contracts. You have Palantir, which is stock is surging, and it just got a massive contract, it has a massive contract from the Trump administration to take Americans' data. And you have the former head of Israeli military intelligence, you have the Israeli embassy, the Ukrainian embassy, Taiwanese officials, and there's hardly any reporters here.

And one of the few reporters, the few reporters who are inside who are asking questions of any of these AI warlords, foreign governments that are committing genocide like Israel are being escorted out by police and having their badges taken away. What was going on there, Max? Sorry, was there a question? Oh yeah, what was going on there? What were you trying to do there and why did they throw you out and why weren't there any other reporters there? I didn't, yeah sorry I didn't hear the full, but I think you're asking about the AI Expo that I attended last week.

Yeah, yeah, what was it and why did they let you in and then throw you out? They didn't like your questions and therefore they're gonna throw a bonafide journalist out? Well, you would have thought there would have been hundreds of reporters descending on this conference of the Special Competitive Studies Group, which was founded by Google co-founder Eric Schmidt and brings

together a who's who of military contractors comprising basically the future of the US national security state. You had the head of the Pentagon Joint Chiefs at this conference. You've had the chairman of the Navy on stage with Palantir's chief lobbyist, Mike Gallagher. And yeah, Palantir, Metta, Google, all of the creators of the spying and death tech architecture of the future were on hand along with a group called Rhombus Power, which is marketing generative AI, which claims that it can predict major world events, allowing intelligence to carry out basically future warfare that predicts the future. So Palantir was front and center at this conference

and the conference took place about two to three days after the New York Times published a front page expose on the Trump administration, giving major contracts to Palantir to integrate the private data of Americans across government departments through two programs called Foundry and Gotham, which many MAGA supporters were even calling a social credit system, a violation of privacy. They also have contracts with ICE.

They have contracts with the IAEA, which I hope we can talk about in a minute, the International Atomic Energy Agency, Palantir is basically becoming the backbone of the entire Western transatlantic national security state, and they're active in Gaza. So the few reporters that were there at this conference, and we're talking about less than I can count on this hand, were very interested, as soon as they walked in the Expo Hall, in trying to talk to someone at Palantir's booth.

And I watched as one reporter named Jessica Lemer-Surriere from France 24, which is like France's version of the BBC, walked up and started trying to ask questions. They immediately called the cops and conference security. And then Palantir staff, I mean, we're talking about high-level figures at Palantir, stormed out of this booth which had no recording signs over it and fingered me to the cops as well and I was taken out of the exhibition hall simply for filming this interaction. So I talked my way back in and then was later thrown out because I tried to ask

a question of Israel's military, former military intelligence chief, Amos Yadlin, who was on stage for this ridiculous pro-Israel seminar. They called it a fireside chat and no one asked any real questions of him. He was treated as some sort of expert commentator as if he hadn't been deeply involved in establishing the groundwork for the current Gaza genocide by publishing influential papers and documents loosening the rules on Israel's ability to target civilians intentionally and releasing Israel from any Geneva Convention's obligations. So when I tried to ask him about that, a aggressive Zionist fanatic cry-bully woman started shrieking at me

that I didn't understand what genocide was and because she would not unattach herself from me, I was finally removed from that conference, stripped of my badge. Basically very few reporters were left standing by the end of that conference who were willing to ask critical questions in even acceptable forums. As Palantir, the group that Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, announced about two weeks ago, that would now house centrally the data acquired by warrantless spying on Americans?

So the DIA, the NSA, the CIA, the FBI can just go to Palantir and get this stuff. They don't have to go to the actual entity that produced it. You have that right? It sounds right to me. What Palantir aims to do, according to its CEO, Alex Karp, is to help find things that, to help governments and clients,

they have clients also in like the for-profit healthcare sector, find things that they couldn't ordinarily find through the integration of data. And this can involve some very extra constitutional means by going outside the courts and integrating data between various departments

and allowing some central executive to do this. But what it can also do is algorithmically single out individuals based on their past and their data as potential criminals or terrorists to be targeted with things like Palantir's MAVEN targeting system, which is used across the entire US armed forces to find and kill what are regarded as terrorists.

It could also be used algorithmically to hit people with warrants or tax audits. The IRS is relying on Palantir. As I mentioned, the IAEA is relying on it. And Israel has apparently used Palantir's killing tech to streamline its lavender AI system which directs its genocide in Gaza. This is something that the CEO of Palantir, a fanatical Zionist named Alex Karp, is proud of. When he was publicly protested at a public forum,

he said, well, yeah, we are killing people in Gaza, but most of them are terrorists. And how do we know most of them are terrorists? Well, they won't tell us. That's what I would have wanted to have asked Palantir. How do you determine who's a terrorist and who isn't, especially when Israel doesn't seem to care and I should tell you, you know since I was kicked out of that conference and

since I published my video a High-level Palantir staffer. I think he's director of strategy named Eliano. Eunice has been been direct messaging me on TwitterX expressing outrage and deep dissatisfaction with my reporting. So these appear to be some very thin-skinned individuals, even as their CEO runs around boasting about killing people and has even said that two thirds of the major events that you see take place in within the West relating

to for example the war on terror can be credited to Palantir but they won't ask they won't answer questions and they can't seem to then they when they seem to want to control all reporting about them. Which gears a little bit except at the end of this segment, I have to say that again, my hat is off to you for your personal courage. Now I watched the whole clip, which is about 13 minutes long. We obviously edited it down. And again, I commend your grasp of the knowledge here and your personal courage to get right in the faces of these creeps. Does Iran have Israeli nuclear secrets as seems to have come out this week? Well, that's what they say. And sorry,

I've been looking at the wrong camera here because we're on a different platform than usual. Stream Yard's been down. I don't know if the Mossad took it down because they're so afraid of the judge going live. But such a coincidence that at the moment that the US is evacuating personnel from its embassies, like low level embassy staffers are being called back from Jimmy Johns off the base to evacuate in expectation of some supposed Israeli strike.

Streamyard goes down as well. So I guess we won't be doing a gray zone stream later today. To your question, Iran's Supreme National Security Council, which is the National Security Council operating directly below the supreme leader, Ayatollah Khamenei, has announced an intelligence master stroke, a kind of intelligence version of true promise in which thousands and thousands of secret Israeli nuclear documents, Mossad documents, documents pertaining to Netanyahu's health, and particularly to Israel's secret nuclear program were taken apparently from the Sarek nuclear reactor, which is Israel's announced civilian reactor constructed in 1958 and brought to Iran.

They say it took many months to transfer the documents and process them and now they know what's in them. And they have provided a summary through Iranian media of what's in these documents. And today, for the first time, we actually got to see some of the raw documents pertaining to the IAEA, the International Atomic Energy Agency. And the reason that I think these documents dropped is because the IAEA passed a very stringent and clearly politicized anti-Iran resolution, which claims that Iran has not been abiding by its obligations under the Non-Proliferation Treaty. We've covered this extensively with Gareth Porter in the past, who is one of the foremost scholars

on the issue of Iran's nuclear program and the Israeli US attack on Iran. And many of these allegations that are recycled in the IAEA resolution, Gareth has sourced to Israeli fabrications and Israeli political pressure and now we see with some of these raw documents that have come out that Israel has had secret communications with Rafael Grossi, who is now the chairman of the agency, since before he was director,

before he was director general. So back in 2018, in September 2018, Yukio Amano was director general, and they became, he became ill mysteriously, and then died a few months later. And during that period, there was a big lobbying push and competition among other staffers and figures

associated with the agency, like Grossi, who is from Argentina, and they needed to get the Americans on their side. And one of the documents shows that the Israeli representative at the time for the IAEA, whose name was Merav Zaferi-Odiz, was soliciting private meetings with Grossi, apparently to groom him as he vied for the leadership. And then he eventually became the leader.

He has passed several anti-Iran resolutions or resolutions that were very harsh against Iran, first in February this year and then this week. He's also said that he's refused to address Israel's secret reactor, its weaponized program at Dimona and said, well, because Israel didn't sign on to the NPT, they can, we can't deal with that at the IAEA, which is exactly what Israel wants to hear. But meanwhile, making all these picayune allegations against Iran, which are helping make the case for a Israeli US bombing campaign. And that's exactly what Merav Zaferi-Odi's in these documents, which have been been leaked by Iran appeared to be pushing grossy to do years ago so I think these documents are significant what we haven't seen which I think is the most explosive allegation.

Iran has made. is that IAEA had actually provided Israel with information on who Iran's top nuclear scientists were, their identities. And in 2019, I don't know if you remember, Netanyahu delivered a PowerPoint presentation claiming Iran was weaponizing its nuclear program. And for the first time, this was in Israel, in front of a PowerPoint

he he spoke the name Mohsen Fakhrizadeh for the first time during that presentation a year later the Mossad assassinated Fakhrizadeh with a remote controlled drone machine gun smuggled into the country attacking his convoy. And so now Iran with the help of these documents from Israel is making the claim, putting two and two together, that Israel got this information about who these scientists were through the IAEA. That is an explosive claim and would, if proven, discredit the IAEA as a honest broker in this situation. And already Iran has announced plans for a new nuclear facility in response to this harsh resolution from the IAEA. States getting ready to attack Iran?

I don't think so. I think what Trump is doing, but I mean, I could be proven wrong and he embarrassed in a few minutes. We don't know what's going to happen, but I think that Trump is using Israel as in its traditional role as kind of the mad dog in the in the in the region to intimidate Iran in order to weaken Iran's negotiating position and get it to agree to temporary enrichment of uranium at some lower level like 3.67. Because Iran is refusing to compromise on that point. refusing to compromise on that point because it doesn't pertain to its obligations under the non-proliferation treaty. So it looks like Trump is staging all of this as a negotiating tactic, as a pressure tactic. It's not going to work. Iran seems to be very militarily confident and also diplomatically confident if you look at its jousting with the IAEA. And Israel itself has concluded, it appears they have concluded, I think the head of the Shin Bet spoke to Netanyahu today and said that

it would be impossible to dismantle Iran's nuclear program without US assistance. I think it would be impossible to do without the use of thermonuclear weapons, at least tactical nuclear weapons. Channel 12, Israeli outlet, published a piece a week and a half ago by the head of the Institute for National Security Studies, which consults for the Israeli Ministry of Defense.

He concluded that Israeli strikes even with US assistance would only delay Iran's nuclear program from producing a weapon by six months to one year. So I don't think Israel can achieve anything other than regional warfare and Steve Witkoff according to Axios, this is Trump's negotiator, has told Republican members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that Iran could cause massive casualties inside Israel in any retaliation for an Israeli strike. Kind of warning telling them especially Tom Cotton who's just a complete Israeli tool to kind of tone down the rhetoric. Pairing to order an attack, not withstanding the evidence that the

retaliation or even the, the pre attack would be catastrophic for Israel. Well, Netanyahu's life mission is to drag the U S into a war with Iran. And he would certainly be willing to sacrifice a segment of the Israeli public in order to achieve that goal. And you can see what he would do. I mean, he's the ultimate cry bully. He would attack, attack. Then if Iran actually manages to do damage and remember Iran missed Mossad headquarters by just a few meters during

true promise to then he would tell the US we are existentially threatened. We will all die tomorrow. This will be another Holocaust unless you do something and the pressure would be brought to bear on Trump would be unprecedented. So that's a scenario I think Netanyahu would want to entertain. It also, a regional war would secure Netanyahu's position. I think the vote that Netanyahu just survived in the Knesset by a very narrow margin by like one vote stabilizes his coalition. It was a vote over in listing ultra-orthodox males who comprise 13% of Israel's Jewish population in the military. Well, they worked out a compromise, which keeps one of the ultra-orthodox

parties, United Torah Judaism, in the coalition. And that means Netanyahu survives for the moment, which I think lowers the risk of an immediate strike because if Netanyahu ordered a strike today, he could have delayed that vote. The public might circle the wagons around him, but you know, he survived. So there's no, there's no opportunistic political need right now for an Israeli strike. But militarily speaking, there is a need from the Israeli point of view. Their strike in 2024, where they claim to have dismantled several S 300 anti aircraft systems of Iran, actually only dismantled several S-300 anti-aircraft systems of Iran,

actually only dismantled, this is from the Israeli perspective, only dismantled the radar systems, and Iran has managed to or will manage to repair those in the very near future, so they feel like they have this tight window to attack, but again, they can only set back the nuclear program according to their own intelligence by a few months. How corrupt is the IAEA and who runs it? Well, I mean, it's it's it's corrupt because the United States has so much influence over it.

Same as with the OPCW, the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, which as Aaron Mate amply demonstrated was basically used as a tool to achieve regime change in Syria and even validate staged chemical attacks. So the IAEA is clearly playing the same role here and as we're seeing from these documents its director rose from the the from from a lower position well first of all Yukio Amano the his his predecessor was hated by the Israelis and there are conspiracy theories that Amano was even killed by Israel after suffering this mysterious illness. And Grossi now clearly was subjected to Israeli influence.

If these documents are to be believed, I haven't seen him respond to them. And just look at his performance this whole year, where he is almost single-handedly helping drive the Israeli case for attacking Iran. Uh, is the Israeli government supplying arms to the Ukrainians? Yes. Uh, and the Israeli government has been supplying arms to the Ukrainians.

been supplying arms to the Ukrainians. I was one of the select few reporters in English covering the story of Israel arming the Azov battalion, the neo-Nazi battalion, which was on the front lines of the Ukrainian military's attack on the pro-Russian separatists in the Donbass. And I was actually personally attacked by the Ukrainian embassy in, I believe, Germany for reporting that story. And then last year, or yeah, I think it was last year, there were reports in US media that Israel had agreed to transfer patriot batteries to Ukraine.

And now that has been confirmed and the Israeli ambassador to I believe the Israeli ambassador to Ukraine has personally confirmed that Israel's arming Ukraine. So Israel always had this this pose of neutrality in order to keep Russia on its side and that was very important in Syria, where you had Russia kind of managing Iran and keeping Iran from having too much influence inside Syria.

And now the facade is over. It's very clear that Israel has sided with the US and with the collective West. It has 1.5 million Russians among its own population, lawmakers in the Knesset who actually side with Russia. Naftali Bennett, the Israeli member of parliament, opposition figure, attempted to broker some kind of peace deal early on. But that's all gone.

And it's clear that Israel is supporting Ukraine. kind of peace deal early on. But that's all gone. That's all gone. And it's clear that Israel is supporting Ukraine. So the question is, what will Russia do? Will Russia do anything? Because Russia was de-conflicting with Israel in Syria. Russia was weakening the IRGC presence in Syria. What will Russia do to retaliate? Questions, my dear friend.

Thank you, Max. Thank you for putting up with this new system that Chris put together the last minute. I don't know if we'll be back on Stream Yard or not. I don't know if it was some intentional attack. It wasn't intentional. They are international, but appreciate your patience. And as always from that clip, that-minute clip we watched not only your patience But your personal courage all the best my friend. Thank you. Thanks a lot. And thanks to Chris for putting together last minute

And thank you for watching us in this new Unique system that that we have coming up tomorrow Friday at 8 in the morning that we have coming up tomorrow, Friday at eight in the morning, Professor Jeffrey Sachs at four in the afternoon, the Intelligence Community Roundtable at four thirty in the afternoon, Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson. And sometime during the day, we'll let you know when Professor John Mearsheimer, Judge Napolitano for Judging Freedom. freedom.