Judging Freedom - Max Blumenthal: Israel Directly Interferes in US Politics.

Episode Date: April 25, 2024

Max Blumenthal: Israel Directly Interferes in US Politics.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Thank you. Hi, everyone. Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom. Today is Thursday, April 25th, 2024. Max Blumenthal joins us now. Max, thanks very much for your time, my dear friend. Much appreciated. What are your observations of the freedom of speech or the lack thereof on college campuses today when students in groups choose to express their opposition to the slaughter in Gaza? Well, I was just up at the campus of George Washington University after a State Department briefing. And I just walked a few blocks away from the State Department. This is a State Department feeder school. The Elliott School is right across the street from the State Department. And the central lawn was packed with students from across the

District, Maryland, Virginia, the DMV area from many schools. They were completely peaceful, completely disciplined, just exchanging ideas, singing. They were flanked by a group of pro-Israel students, including one who is clearly trying to provoke confrontations. The media was there. There was not much of a police presence. But this was not the second Holocaust that we've been hearing about from the likes of Joe Biden or Benjamin Netanyahu. It was something that was exemplary, that should be celebrated, where students are being critical thinkers and they're speaking out for justice. They're the flower of American youth and they're being condemned across the board by elite forces. Now at Princeton University, students have been told that if they try to set

up tents or gather on campus, they will be arrested and they will be removed from campus, banned. They won't be able to get their diplomas. We see what's happening at the University of Texas under the iron fist of phony conservative Greg Abbott, who has ordered the Texas state troopers to brutally assault students who are like, some of them like weigh 120 pounds and are just getting tossed around like driftwood for absolutely no reason in his mind, other than that they are anti-Semitic. He's calling them anti-Semitic and that justifies police repression. So because of their speech, they deserve brutal repression. That is a direct violation of the First Amendment. And at Columbia University, what we see, what has happened there is students were not only arrested on campus by the NYPD when no violence and no threat to anyone had been demonstrated, students were arrested and were

banned from entering the dormitories that they rented, which seems to be a violation of a New York City housing law. They've been given no due process. So all kinds of constitutional rights and laws are being violated here. And Joe Biden and the Biden administration has made it its assessment that these students are blatantly anti-Semitic in the words of Joe Biden, based on a bunch of shady and very dubious videos, many of which have been discredited, being put out by the Israel lobby. You know, I can't stand Speaker Mike Johnson, and I hate to give him any exposure on this show, but here he is yesterday. This is cut number nine, Chris, at Columbia University, surrounded by a bunch of his

thugs from the House of Representatives condemning legitimate dissent. If this is not contained quickly, and if these threats and intimidation are not stopped, there is an appropriate time for the National Guard. We have to bring order to these campuses. We cannot allow this to happen around the country. We are better than this. We are better than this, and I'll ask the president to do that, and I'll tell him that very same thing.

And I genuinely believe there's bipartisan agreement on this. We'll stand for what is good and what is right. It does not matter who shouts in our faces. We what is good and what is right. It does not matter who shouts in our faces. We're going to do what is right by America. We respect free speech. We respect diversity of ideas. But there is a way to do that in a lawful manner. And that's not what this is. So shaking your fist in the tyrant's face, quintessentially protected from the time of the American Revolution, is not lawful in his opinion. What business is it of the Speaker of the House what happens on the campus of Columbia

University other than to encourage more lawlessness by the police? I mean, even hate speech is protected under the First Amendment. It doesn't matter. It doesn't matter if you can demonstrate that this is anti-Semitism, which it isn't. Here's what happened. Same thing that happened after October 7th. Lawmakers were presented with grainy videos and frightening images, which they did not have the mental capacity or critical faculty to properly assess. And they were told that these were violent terrorist students at Columbia University. All of the videos in question that were considered anti-Semitic or violent took place off Columbia's

campus, did not show students. We've demonstrated at the gray zone that some of these videos were outside agitators who may have actually been pro-israel masked as palestinians and the one major act of violence a girl being pro-israel girl being poked in the eye this was reported in the new york post was fake the video doesn't show her being stabbed sorry stabbed in the eye doesn't show her being stabbed in the eye at all't show her being stabbed in the eye at all. And then she went on Piers Morgan right after this and her eye was fine. So it's basically Joe Biden saying he saw photographs of beheaded babies all over again. And they're acting on that basis. Mike Johnson is flanked by Elise Stefanik, New York representative, whose key donors are from not just AIPAC, but the Zionist Organization of America, which is the Likud lobby. They're even more right-wing

than AIPAC, more militaristic, direct line to Netanyahu. Much of the money comes from the Sheldon and Miriam Adelson Foundation. And those are the people that wrote Mike Johnson's speech, where he said that these students will not even acknowledge that babies were burned alive by Hamas in ovens, a complete lie, a total fabrication. So it's fabrication on top of fabrication in order to not only justify a genocide in the Gaza Strip, but to roll back constitutionally protected freedoms in the United States so that apartheid Israel and its operations and its support base in the U.S. will not be interrupted. The special relationship with Israel, I've been saying this for over a decade, for the

special relationship between Washington and Israel to continue. Democratic freedoms have to be rolled back in the United States. The Israel lobby is the greatest existential threat to free speech in the United States. And we can see it playing out for our eyes with that scene of Mike Johnson at Columbia. Here he is again, using the horrific, fanciful, fictional images that you just talked about. Number seven. The point we tried to make today is that this is not who we are as Americans. This is not an expression of the First Amendment. This is not an exchange of ideas.

This is threats and intimidation of violence against Jewish students for who they are, for their faith. And that's a terrible trend that's going on in the country right now. We have these similar types of activities and what are becoming violent protests on campuses around the country. And members of Congress, I believe, have an obligation, a responsibility to speak about this and to demand that it come to an end because it's not good for us. The main thing they were chanting was free Palestine. How is that anti-Semitic? Well, what's anti-Semitic is that Hamas endorsed this protest today. Within the last two hours, they issued an endorsement statement

and heralded the students here and said, this is the next generation of leadership in America. If you're getting endorsed by Hamas, that's not a good look. It's not a good sign. Some of these students apparently are unaware of the atrocities of October 7th, or they're denying it. They deny that women and children were brutally raped and murdered, that infants were placed into ovens and cooked alive. The things that happened there are unspeakable, and yet they're out there waving flags for the very people who committed those atrocities. This is not who we are. He's made it all up, and there probably are

members of Congress that believe that nonsense because they want to believe it. So let me get this straight, Mike. You have the freedom of speech, but if Hamas endorses you, you lose the freedom of speech? What an absurd argument for a person who's two heartbeats away from the presidency, Max. and doesn't care how the constitution works i don't know how he got into that position but constitutional constitutional minded conservatives who supported the tea party how are they not an open revolt over this yeah they should be only very few they should all be an open revolt over this and the progressives should be revolting against this well you do see you know you see some of that but then you see a progressive like Ro Khanna declaring that he will protect Mike Johnson's leadership because he supported ramming through something like $60 billion for Ukraine, which is just a way of laundering money for the military industrial complex and the big five at Lockheed and Raytheon. So this is, I mean, we're seeing so many layers of manipulation here. That tall tale of babies

being baked in ovens, invoking the Holocaust, which has just been completely discredited, even in Israeli media, was fed to Mike Johnson to get him on board with pushing the billions of dollars for Israel to continue perpetuating genocide in Gaza. And so were the atrocities in Bucha hyped on the front page of every newspaper in Bucha, Ukraine back in April 2022. Why? Because there was a move between the Russian and Ukrainian leaderships to negotiate an end to that conflict. And now Foreign Affairs, the journal of the Council on Foreign Affairs, the Council on Foreign Relations, has acknowledged that the hype around mass graves in Bucha contributed heavily to disrupting and sabotaging negotiations between Russia and Ukraine as the West pushed Ukraine to continue this disastrous war. So we heard so much about mass graves there

in Bucha in European, in central Ukraine back in April, 2022. There are mass graves being unearthed across the Gaza Strip and the Biden administration refuses to call for an independent investigation into those graves. They want to bury those mass graves and the media is barely making any noise about it. For the same reason we heard so much about the mass graves in Gaza, It is to continue extending a disastrous war, which the United States and Mike Johnson and Joe Biden and Donald Trump, who's now an official member of the Uniparty, are all underwriting. Here's Netanyahu at his worst attempting to influence American domestic politics. It's about two minutes long, but I want to hear your comment. Let's call it the end.

Yes. What's happening on America's college campuses is horrific. Anti-Semitic mobs have taken over leading universities. They call for the annihilation of Israel. They attack Jewish students. They attack Jewish students. They attack Jewish faculty. This is reminiscent of what happened in German universities in the 1930s. It's unconscionable. It has to be stopped. It has to be condemned and condemned unequivocally. But that's not what happened. The response of several university presidents was shameful. Now fortunately, state, local, federal officials, many of them have responded differently, but there has to be more.

More has to be done. It has to be done not only because they attack Israel, that's bad enough. Not only because they want to kill Jews wherever they are, that's bad enough. It's also, when you listen to them, it's also because they say not only death to Israel, death to the Jews, but death to America. And this tells us that there is an anti-Semitic surge here that has terrible consequences. We see this exponential rise of anti-Semitism throughout America and throughout Western societies as Israel tries to defend itself against genocidal terrorists, genocidal terrorists who hide behind civilians. Yet it is Israel that is falsely accused of genocide, Israel that is falsely accused of starvation and all sundry war crimes.

It's all one big libel. But that's not new. We've seen in history that anti-Semitic attacks were always preceded by vilification and slander, lies that were cast against the Jewish people that are unbelievable, yet people believed them. And what is important now is for all of us, all of us who are interested and cherish our values and our civilization to stand up together and to say enough is enough. We have to stop anti-Semitism because anti-Semitism is the canary in the coal mine.

It always precedes larger conflagrations that engulf the entire world. So I ask all of you, Jews and non-Jews alike, who are concerned with our common future and our common values, to do one thing. Stand up, speak up, be counted. Stop anti-Semitism now. Free speech for me, but not for thee.

Well, he's cheapening anti-Semitism. He's using Jews across the West as human shields for his genocidal apartheid machine. And many of them are rejecting it. Just up at George Washington University, there was no shortage of Jewish students, self-identified Jewish students, and just Jews from the broader community coming out to support them, holding up signs, declaring that they're Jews supporting the liberation of Palestine. So Netanyahu can hardly claim to speak for Jews around the Netanyahu can hardly claim to speak for Jews around the world. He can hardly claim to speak for Israelis. He was elected by a

bare minority of Israelis and his coalition is razor thin. It hinges on some of the biggest fanatical Jewish nationalists on the planet. But beyond that, there's an equally disturbing dynamic at play, which is that he is speaking as though he's president of the United States or at least a senator. And the Israeli foreign ministry on its Twitter account demonized the students at Columbia as terrorists and endorsed a call to send the National Guard against them Kent State style. We're seeing the Israeli opposition leaders like Yair Lapid call for the same thing. We've seen Michael Oren, who was a neoconservative American pseudo-intellectual who gave up his American citizenship to serve as an Israeli official. He is called, he's right now an Israeli official in the government. He's called for the FBI to investigate the students at Columbia. This is meddling. This is interference in American politics that makes whatever Russia

did with its $160,000 of Facebook ads, most of which came after the 2016 election, for which Russia was sanctioned by the United States government, look like child's play. And today at the State Department, the great reporter, Saeed Arakat, asked spokesman Vedant Patel if he considers any of this to be an act of interference, and Vedant Patel refused to even state that. It's pathetic. It is a complete abandonment of American leadership to allow these foreign apartheid officials to get away with calling American college students Nazis and terrorists and to goad American officials into sending troops on them. We are now seeing Georgia state troopers tase handcuffed students at Emory University, tase them while they're powerless on the ground, basically torturing them.

Brutal Texas state troopers, the ones who failed Uvalde children, the children at Uvalde, brutalizing students at UT Austin on behalf, let's be real, on behalf of apartheid Israel. They're doing this for a foreign nation whose cutouts are paying leaders like Greg Abbott, paying leaders like Brian Kemp in Georgia. These are all tools of Netanyahu. That's why Netanyahu thinks he can speak like he's the president of the United States. It's time for someone to rise up from the American people and take this country back and tell Netanyahu to shut the hell up and get the hell out of our country. I'm going to guess that when you were at Patel's press conference earlier today, he did not call on you. Today was bring your child to work day. And so one proud journalist brought his 12 year old

son and Vedant Patel called on a literal child instead of me who asked whether we're giving Ukraine enough weapons. It was a real tough question. So yeah, I got passed over for a literal child at the State Department. Well, you have millions of followers elsewhere, and I'm happy the government is afraid of you switching or transitioning ever so slightly the resignation of the IDF general nominally in charge of military intelligence. What's the backstory on that? Was he pushed out? Was he really in charge of military intelligence? Or is this to mask BB's October 7th failures? Well, no one can hold Netanyahu to account right now. So this is someone who's taking the fall, who clearly should be held accountable by Israelis. It was a massive

failure. And this is just all about October 7th. We're going to see more heads roll. They're going to continue to roll throughout the year. And ultimately, Netanyahu will not be remembered well for that, even by Jewish Israelis. He's just so politically cunning and there's no clear successor to him. And the people surrounding Biden who control Biden, who has to be basically held by the hand in order to know where he's going by AOC, they are so callow that they are afraid to even replace Netanyahu. They've created this kind of mock dispute with Netanyahu as a way of mollifying the Democratic Party base, which- The thing that Chuck Schumer ranted about? Yeah, but they don't really want to see him out. They're afraid of destabilizing

the Israeli political system. And they understand that the Israeli political system is completely based around Likud. And so any leader that could potentially rise to the top, someone like Naftali Bennett, they originally came out of Likud. And Netanyahu is Mr. Likud. There's no clear successor behind Netanyahu because of that dynamic, that it's effectively a one-party state because Netanyahu has been so effective, Francis Urquhart style, in shiving all potential rivals. Look at what he did, for example, to Gideon Saar, who is said to be a potential rival. So I think we're going to see Netanyahu try to wage war on Gaza and Lebanon simultaneously for the rest of the year. They're already talking about going into Rafah. And the Biden administration, instead of stopping that assault, is now saying, well, we're going to try to manage the assault and make it a little less brutal. What has become of the Democratic Party in the United States, which once stood for the type of dissent that the government is now

suppressing? Yeah, I mean, you can have issues about liberalism or the democratic party, but when you look back even to the Bush era of the democratic party, the second Bush era, or even the first, there was an anti-war wing, uh, that strongly opposed the Iraq war, Ted Kennedy, for example. John Kerry voted against the first Gulf War. A lot of people forget that. There was no opposition to the Patriot Act after the shock of 9-11, but ultimately some opposition might have materialized. There were always liberal intellectuals who maintained some prominence who were civil libertarians. And what we've seen is a succession of confected crises, which have returned the neoconservatives that emerged from the office of

Georgia Democrat Senator Scoop Jackson to their original home. First, it was Russiagate, completely fabricated Trump-Russia scandal, which made the Democratic Party the home of McCarthyism as it was, and the home of militarism. This fanatical drive for war with Russia over Ukraine emerged straight from the narrative of Russiagate. Jake Sullivan, a lot of people forget, he was Hillary Clinton's campaign manager. And he really believes that they would have won if it weren't for Russia, which helps explain his neoconservative hawkishness towards Russia today. And you also had the COVID event, which was, in my view, kind of a beta test for a massive rollback of civil liberties. Donald Trump rolled over for it, but the Democrats, especially the Democratic governors,

were the ultimate branch Covidian cultists, and they surrendered whatever civil libertarian impulses had existed in liberalism at that point. And there's almost nothing left now to challenge this assault on free speech by the Israel lobby. Going back to Israel itself, is Netanyahu preparing to invade Rafah? And if he does, what will the consequences be? Netanyahu has to invade Rafah for so many reasons to appease the bloodlust of the Israeli public, which supports an assault on Rafah by a margin of over 80%. He has to do so because he's promised this fleeting, this delusional concept of victory, and he's promised to destroy the four remaining battalions of Hamas and Rafah. It's impossible. He has to do it

because he refuses to negotiate a permanent ceasefire for the release of hostages. So he's still chasing the fantasy of liberating them militarily. And he has to do it because he needs to extend this war to save his own political future as Israel continues to escalate on the northern border with Hezbollah and Lebanon. And so again, the Biden administration is just going to try to manage this assault. And the absurd thing that Israel is saying is, oh, we're going to evacuate those million people there and just, we're going to attack them somewhere else. They don't understand. They don't, the Palestinians aren't going to move because Israel tells them to. And they're certainly not going to move to the Sinai desert in Egypt.

Is Netanyahu still personally unpopular with the Israeli public? Again, I mean, there's no clear successor to Netanyahu. So however hated he is by a plurality of Israelis at this point, it doesn't really seem to matter to me within the Israeli parliamentary system and within the kind of one-party state that Netanyahu controls, where every party kind of in one way or another emerged out of Likud, every party that has any power, and all the parties that were once the opposition to Likud, like Labor, for example, the Merits Party, they have completely disappeared. Do you see a significant peace movement in the United States, whether it's from the bottom up,

starting with the students or with defections from the Joe Biden group? Well, there's no peace movement within the Democratic Party. We can see that because the only no votes on both funding for Ukraine and funding for Israel, military aid for Ukraine and Israel, all 21 were Republicans, including Marjorie Taylor Greene, who is a pro-Israel fanatic, Lauren Boebert. I mean, people you would have never expected because they're doing it on the basis of their principles as members of the Freedom Caucus. So there's no anti-war wing within the Democratic Party at all, at least among elected members. But what you're seeing on campuses across the country is the rebirth of an anti-war movement. They're not just challenging

Israel or investments that these schools have in Israel. They're challenging investments in the arms companies that are supplying Israel, which are also supplying Ukraine, they are speaking it. There is some political immaturity among the students and they can appear cartoonishly woke. That's all true. But at the same time, just what I heard at George Washington University, they are speaking an anti-imperialist language and they are just as hostile as any libertarian is to spending $60 billion on Ukraine, which is going back to the same arms companies that are currently making genocide possible in Gaza. So I think this is a huge moment for the anti-war movement and it's going to escalate and play out in a dramatic fashion at the Democratic Convention in Chicago, with the historic moment of 1968 looming in the background.

Right. How fitting that the DNC should be in Chicago. Going back to Israel and Gaza for a minute, I really never heard of this fellow before last week. You probably know him or know of him. Ambassador David Satterfield now holds some senior position in the State Department, but here he is speaking nonsense about Gaza and Israel. Cut number four, Chris. We believe the future of the Palestinian people of Gaza lies in Gaza, not anywhere else. Egypt has made very clear, preceding October 7th, that they also believe the future for Palestinians lies in Gaza, not in Egypt. We understand that point.

We respect it. So does the government of Israel. What is he talking about? So does the government of Israel. If it was up to the government of Israel, Gaza would be a front lawn for their mansions. Well, and he's using non-legal language. We respect that point. We understand it. But it's unclear where the red line is and what they're doing to prevent a forced exodus or ethnic cleansing of Palestinians to Egypt. But here's someone who was put in soon after October 7th to oversee, right under Tony Blinken, the dual policy of giving Israel all the weapons it needs to commit genocide and giving people in Gaza all the bread and flour they need to continue to feed themselves until their time comes when they're killed. And currently, 5% of the population of the Gaza Strip has either been

wounded or killed in the last six months or so. Satterfield has presided over one of the most disastrous failures in US foreign policy history with the humanitarian mission to Gaza, because currently 1 million people are still on the brink of famine, particularly in northern Gaza. That's on his record. So nothing he says can be believed. And he's facing a massive catastrophe as long as this war continues. The one thing they won't do is negotiate a permanent ceasefire. Today at the State Department, the spokesman Vedant Patel accused Hamas of moving the goalposts by demanding a permanent ceasefire. It's like, where are the goalposts? They're the ones negotiating at the table, not you. You're supposed to be a broker. You're supposed to be determining what's fair and what's not.

And they're not going to accept six weeks or something of a genocide vacation so Israel can come back in, lay siege to the Gaza Strip. By the way, Satterfield doesn't seem to accept, and the Biden administration doesn't seem to accept, that Israel is responsible under international law and specifically the Geneva Conventions for the welfare of the population that they occupy. Because every time, whether it's Blinken, we had our correspondent, Liam Cosgrove, ask Tony Blinken to his face at the State Department, or one of his spokespeople, Matthew Miller, asked by Sam Husseini, whenever they're asked, do the Geneva Conventions apply to Gaza? They refuse to answer the question. And that's because they are going to continue to act, the United States and the US taxpayer will continue

to act as a subcontractor for the Israeli occupier, helping to displace the costs of occupying and feeding Gaza on behalf of apartheid Israel. So that's really the scandal for me. Max, let's address some group of college students together. We'll bring the house down on the virtues and values of the freedom of speech. What's happening is just deplorable, and it's got to be called out at every opportunity. I'm an alumnus of Princeton university and I'm not surprised, but I'm scandalized by what you said.

The president down there said earlier today, if you dare protest in a manner of which we disapprove, you're out of here. It's got to be stopped. I'm an alumnus of Penn. I'm not surprised at all. It was clear how the sausage was made when I was there back in the 90s and that they want everything to go back to the 1990s when there was no protest on campus, when there was no conflict. They don't want critical thinkers.

They want to prepare the future captains of finance, the future conformists, and it's just not going to happen any longer. So we'll see what happens. I think we're witnessing the rebirth of an anti-war movement on these campuses. And wherever you stand, left or right, it's important to unite around this and to unite against the meddling of a foreign apartheid state. Whatever you think of the students, if you're an American, they're Americans. Let's decide our own future together and not let Israel interfere in those decisions. Thank you, Max. Beautifully said.

Thank you, my dear friend, for all your courage and for all your intellect that you share with our viewers. We'll see you again next week. Thank you, Judge. Of course. These are dark, dark times when the freedom of speech can be suppressed because the government analyzes the content of the speech and the government disagrees. And then the government uses its powers to manifest that disagreement by crushing the freedom of speech, it infuriates me. And I'm serious. If Max puts together the right group and the largest number of students, I will happily be there, and you'll be there too. Tomorrow afternoon, the end of the day, the end of the week, 2 o'clock in the afternoon, the roundtable.

Larry Johnson is speaking before the United Nations Security Council tomorrow. We'll have some clips for that for you if we can get it. Matt Ho will be joining Ray McGovern on the roundtable. And at 3 o'clock, summarizing all this up, he's as furious as I am, Colonel Larry Wilkerson. See you tomorrow. Judge Napolitano for judging freedom. Thank you.