Judging Freedom - Max Blumenthal: Israelis Killing Their Own - #HannibalDirective

Episode Date: July 11, 2024

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Thank you. Hi, everyone. Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom. Today is Thursday, July 11th, 2024. Max Blumenthal joins us now. Max, always a pleasure, my dear friend, and thank you very much for sharing your time with us. We've been running this clip, which I know you've seen, but I'd like to start with it. Chris, cut number nine. The difference is that now, finally, an Israeli newspaper, Haaretz, has acknowledged this, and more Israeli military sources have come forward.

The reporting from Maharetz says, according to one source, that the order was to turn the south of Israel, that frontier with Gaza, into a killing zone, which is exactly what happened. It underscores that Israel has no concern for civilian life, not just inside Gaza, but also its own people, because it did not want to have Hamas take captives that could be used for negotiations to free Palestinian hostages. And that's been lost here. There are thousands of Palestinian hostages in Israeli dungeons. And a major goal of Hamas here was to take captives and use them as leverage to free Palestinians who have been in Israeli dungeons for years and years and years.

And excuse me, I didn't interrupt you. I did not interrupt you. I did not interrupt you, despite your many falsehoods. No, but what you're saying is disgusting. Excuse me, excuse me. You're whitewashing Hamas's murder. And you're whitewashing mass murder, which is the whole point of suppressing the truth about October 7th. Now, he is our friend, and we know how thorough his reporting is and your reporting.

The two of you were mocked back in October when you reported this, and now Haaretz has reported it, and the Netanyahu government hasn't even disputed the Haaretz report. But whitewashing mass murder is the phrase that went viral. Well, that was Jonathan Conricus who kept interrupting Aaron. And it's not just some pro-Israel pundit. This is someone who's directly involved in the Gaza genocide, who not only according to me, I mean, I exposed him initially, but according to CNN, which got the tip off from me, planted weapons inside al-Shifa hospital to portray it as a terror base to justify the Israeli army's raid on that hospital and the destruction and demolition of virtually every

other hospital in the Gaza Strip. So this is a war criminal who's interrupting Aaron. This is a guy who should be, if the people were actually in charge in the United States, extradited, thrown in a supermax prison and have to have kosher soap on a rope for the rest of his life, not someone who deserves to be in debates. So that was just bizarre for me to see Aaron actually have to go up against someone who's actually a war criminal. But stepping back, Aaron is talking about one of the biggest scandals of the war. And I'd say one of the biggest scandals of the last year or so. directive, the mass Hannibal directive, which was that every Israeli soldier, anyone in the field on October 7th was given permission to abandon all firing regulations and encouraged

to attack any car that was returning to the Gaza Strip, including with artillery. We didn't learn this from Haaretz. Haaretz reported a lot of the reporting that we put together at the Gray Zone, Electronic Intifada and others did, and therefore validated it and vindicated us after we were attacked by, not once, not twice, not three times, but four times by Haaretz itself. But they're not going to retract those articles. There's going to be no accountability for those who called me a master manipulator, a propagandist, and so on, for actually reporting this when it was early on and therefore inconvenient because Israel is an attack that was referred to by Vice President Kamala Harris as the worst atrocity against the Jewish people since the Holocaust. Those were her exact words. And now we know that Israel was directly involved in that worst atrocity against

the Jewish people since the Holocaust and may have killed hundreds of its own citizens. It's a huge scandal. And while you were doing your intro, Judge, I decided to look at the front page of the Washington Post because the Israeli Army just released its investigation of failures on October 7th, which is why that Haaretz article had to come out. Right. Right. John Mearsheimer told us that report was coming out any day now. And here it is, 20 minutes after we finished our conversation. Have you had a chance to look at it? Yeah. So I was skimming through the article and I was wondering when they would mention the Hannibal directive in the Washington Post. And you have to get to the final series of paragraphs to get to some of the most scandalous

events on October 7th, for example, that one of the highest ranking generals in the Israeli military, Brigadier General Barak Hiram, ordered an Israeli tank to fire on a home filled with Israelis who were held captive by Hamas militants, killing 14 Israelis. This was a scandal that we helped expose, at least in the English language, at the Gray Zone, which was censored in Israeli media. And now it's buried nine months later in a Washington Post article. I would think this would be a bright screaming headline that Israel may have killed hundreds of its own citizens. So the cover-up continues. Did the Netanyahu government challenge what was do is prevent a parliamentary inquiry, a Knesset panel. It's trying to prevent the Israeli Knesset from impaneling investigators to carry out an investigation into October 7th before the war is over. And it's another reason why Netanyahu keeps dragging this war out, why Israel is slaughtering so many people across the Gaza Strip is to prevent ceasefire from taking hold, basically trying to twist Hamas's arm. And what would happen if there was a Knesset inquiry, these tend to be more withering and more independent than army inquiries or army investigations. For example, the Knesset found that Ariel Sharon was at least indirectly

responsible for the Sabran Shatila massacre in a Palestinian refugee camp in Beirut in 1982. So I don't think Netanyahu's issued any denial about the Hannibal directive, but these were orders that came from the military and not Israel's quasi-civilian leadership. So it isn't something Netanyahu's necessarily worried about. And I also think most Israelis aren't really aware of the full extent of the scandal because their media hasn't really touched it. Has the Haaretz article aroused the Israeli public to recognize how ruthless and murderous the government is? I don't know about that. There was a previous article by Yediot Aronot, which is an even bigger paper than Haaretz. Haaretz caters more to the kind of like liberal upper class in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. Yediot Aronot is more mainstream. And they found

months ago that over 70 cars were attacked by Israeli Apache helicopters. These are cars containing Israeli captives. And what we have seen is some of the family members of those being held captive in Gaza actually accuse, on Israeli media, the Israeli government of carrying out the Hannibal Directive now against their family members. Because what we need to understand from this is this wasn't limited to October 7th. The Israeli military and government does not want Hamas to hold Israeli captives because it gives them leverage. It gives them power over a much more powerful military. And so if they can eliminate those captives now while they're being held in Gaza, then all the better because it denies Hamas leverage.

So the family members have openly, directly accused the Israeli military of targeting their family members. This is as this whole, you know, phony spectacle of every Israeli prominent official wearing a yellow ribbon. You saw Jonathan Conricus debating Aaron Mate. He's wearing a yellow ribbon for the hostages. These people don't care about the hostages. If they did, they would have negotiated a ceasefire months and months and months ago. Here's how frivolous the American State Department treats this. You probably know both of the people in this clip. Cut number 14. I wanted to ask you first if you read or heard about the Haaretz report on Israel employing the Hannibal directive on October 7th?

So I did see that report that moved over the weekend and that's the limit of my knowledge of seeing that report from Haaretz. Does that make you change your position or your perspective on what really happened that day that the Israelis may be responsible for killing a majority of the people that died on that day? Boy, it certainly does not, Said. I don't think there's any question. I don't think there's any question that it was Hamas. Just let me finish. I don't think it's any question it's Hamas that is responsible for the overwhelming number of

deaths on October 7th. Spokesperson for the foreign policy arm of the United States government. Well, it's fascinating to watch, and you may have played this clip like two weeks ago, Judge, but it's fascinating to watch Matthew Miller go from denying that he even knew the Hannibal Directive existed and brushing it off as some kind of wild conspiracy theory to now having to deny that the Hannibal directive was responsible for the majority of civilian deaths on October 7th. So he now knows it's real. And it does appear that the conspiracy theorists were at least right that many people were killed. What I'm missing though is, yeah, it looks like a lot of people were killed at the Novo Electronic Music Festival. There is some footage of people being killed, but I haven't really seen that much showing people being mowed down.

What I have seen are these photos that the Israeli government disseminated of hundreds of cars that were roasted in which Israelis were burned alive in these cars. And they thought we were so stupid that we would think that Hamas militants with their small arms could have done all that. Now we know that's not what happened. So many people must have died. And if you shared that photo up until recently on Twitter, you would immediately be hit with a community standards note declaring that Hamas was responsible for heinous atrocities on October 7th. So, again, we're witnessing an official cover up of one of the most decisive events in recent history. Yes. Switching gears a little bit. The report from The Lancet explaining how 186,000 people, not 37,000, 186,000 people are dead a ratio of between 3 and 15 deaths by other causes for every one death by violence, when the causer of the violence also cuts off food, water, infrastructure, housing, and medicine, which is what happened here. Well, I have no way of counting.

My interpretation of the Lancet report was that it was a projection of the death toll going forward, which would make sense, be very logical, if you consider the conditions in Gaza, in which all aid and food and much food is being blocked deliberately by the Israelis. We know that's been happening. I know from sources on the ground that no food, two weeks ago, nothing was going in. So when we're thinking about death in Gaza, we're not just thinking about deaths by artillery and missile fire, airstrikes, although that has caused an enormous amount of death. We're also thinking about excess deaths, deaths by disease, deaths of people over 70 who may have lived for another 5, 10, even 15 or 20 years, but who just simply die from exhaustion. Right now, Israel keeps forcibly evacuating people from Gaza City, telling them to march south. It's evacuated people from Han Yunis. It's very hot there. There's not a lot of potable water. Disease is everywhere, especially in the tents. People are getting skin infections because they can't wash.

And so if you're an older person, I mean, just think about how hard it is already to do a move, to pick up all your belongings and move in the summer. And imagine that you have nothing and you're in a war surrounded by hundreds and hundreds of people, many of whom already carry contagious diseases. The death toll is going to be inevitably enormous. And there are so many people under the rubble, including people I know who haven't had their bodies extracted yet. So we just don't know about the full extent of savagery during Israel's Holocaust in Gaza, but we can be sure that Lancet is not wildly overestimating. At least it would seem logical that this number would eventually. The savagery is overwhelming.

Do you know the status of the applications for arrest warrants for Prime Minister Netanyahu and Defense Minister Gallant? Nobody does. I keep asking, what's going on with that? The application was filed, but the ICC hasn't issued any ruling on it. And so people in Gaza are saying, what happened to this? We thought this might provoke, trigger a ceasefire. Who knows? All I know is George Clooney, who is the husband of the researcher

Amal Clooney, who presided over that application to the ICC or gathered research for the ICC prosecutor, Kareem Khan, to indict Netanyahu and Gallant. All I know is that Clooney is caught up in a partisan buffoonery, issuing letters calling for Joe Biden to step down on behalf of the Hollywood elite. So there doesn't seem to be a lot of action there. And of course, there's no enforcement mechanism. Israel isn't going to go along with it. It's not a party to the ICC Rome statute. Switching gears to Ukraine, as we speak, the president is finishing hosting NATO, celebrating its 75th anniversary in Washington, D.C. He's made some rather startling statements.

Here's one of the more startling ones, and I'd like your thoughts on it because it uses a number here that I did not know was true. Cut number six, Chris. Even before Russian bombs were falling in Ukraine, the alliance acted. I ordered the U.S. reinforcements at NATO's eastern flank. More troops, more aircraft, more capabilities. And now the United States has more than 100,000 troops on the continent of Europe. I mean, that number to me is startling. Yeah.

Are they a tripwire? You know, when all else fails, they take you to war. Does he want the Russians to shoot at some of these troops and then he's got an excuse to start a war and he can run for re-election as a wartime president? Well, it's shocking. I mean, when you think about where those troops are as well, how many of them are actually inside Ukraine or at the Yaroviv base just over the Polish border, which is not a NATO state. We've seen Ukraine become NATO-ized without being a formal member of NATO itself. What do the German people think about US troops being on their soil? What does it actually say about Europe when Biden boasts that 100,000 troops are there? Would Americans be happy to see 100,000

foreign troops on their soil? Of course not. He's boasting about the castration of European sovereignty and Europeans are getting sick of it. They're getting sick of NATO. Meanwhile, NATO continues to expand and it's not just expanding towards Russia's borders and frontiers. It's expanding all across the globe by design. Biden sees NATO as not a North Atlantic alliance, a defensive alliance based around the North Atlantic. He sees it, as everyone around him sees it, as a global military alliance against the anti-American front. It's the pro-American front versus the anti-American front. It's what George W. Bush said after 9-11, for which he was panned by liberals and Democrats. You're either with us or you're against us. And so Biden has plunged us

into a new or consolidated a new Cold War through NATO, which plans to expand to Japan and which is opening a liaison office in Jordan, which is nowhere near the North Atlantic. Why is it opening in Jordan? Because of Iran, in order to protect Israel's strategic depth. Why is it opening in Japan? Because of China. And all we heard throughout these past few days was China is enabling Russia and therefore China needs to be contained and countered. And so NATO, I don't know what it should be called. It should be the globalism alliance. Right. There's nothing North Atlantic about it. But Max, don't you understand that all of this is Putin's fault, according to Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin,

number 17, Chris. In the wake of Putin's imperial invasion of Ukraine, we've bolstered NATO's forward defense posture with more troops at high readiness, larger exercises, sharper vigilance, and multinational battle groups in eight countries. NATO is now larger than ever. And our new allies in Finland and Sweden have brought the Alliance's membership to 32. And make no mistake, Putin's war is not the result of NATO enlargement. Putin's war is the cause of NATO enlargement. If that's not enough for you, here's Tony Blinken who spoke right after he did.

We are building a well-lit bridge for Ukraine to cross over to join NATO, number 18. We have an incredibly robust package that will be unveiled over the next couple of days at NATO that builds a very clear, strong, robust, well-lit bridge to NATO membership for Ukraine, including, as you mentioned, the first time NATO's dedicated a command to helping an aspiring country join the alliance. This in and of itself is extraordinary. Your thoughts on these two? Well, obviously, whoever wrote Lloyd Austin's comments was completely ahistorical. And how many countries joined NATO between the verbal agreement between Jim Baker and Gorbachev to not expand beyond Germany, between the time of that agreement

and 2014, when the US backed a coup, the Maidan coup in Ukraine, which set Ukraine on the path to war by removing a democratically elected president by force and imposing an ultra-nationalist oligarchic regime. There were many, many countries, and one of those countries was Hungary, which I believe joined in 1996. Last week, Hungary's president, Viktor Orban, hosted Vladimir Putin for what he called a peace meeting or peace conference to talk about resolving the Ukraine war. And NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg, EU Commissioner Ursula von der Leyen, and German Chancellor Olaf Scholz all condemned Orban as though he had stabbed NATO and the EU in the back. And it really shows you what NATO is. Orban said it himself. It's just basically

a war alliance. The West has hosted a fake peace conference with Zelensky, I don't know, was it in Geneva, where Russia wasn't even invited to participate and all that was discussed was providing Ukraine with more weapons. So the ahistorical refusal to cede to history or to Russia's point of view just sets the stage for more escalation and really explains why Putin and the people around him felt like it was so necessary to embark on this special military operation, as they call it, because there was simply no partner on the other side to enforce the Minsk Accords. It was just going to be a constant NATO buildup on their borders, something the United States would have never accepted from any adversary. What to make of the saber rattling

that has come out of Washington this week? Don't they recognize that the Ukrainian military is on life support? Well, that's the concern is like, what's next? What's next? George Soros wrote a disturbing op-ed on the NATO and the New World Order, in which he, kind of in passing, referenced Eastern European manpower as important to the future of war because Western powers did not want to lose their own men, but they would volunteer or provide materiel and tech. So basically Eastern Europeans are just Slavic cannon fodder for the Western powers. And that's what's happening in Ukraine. You also see a backlash within the Balkan region with Slovakian President Robert Fico, who was recently the target of a very unusual assassination attempt, declare that he would not accept Ukraine into NATO, that there

was no way Ukraine could join. And NATO itself, NATO leadership knows Ukraine is too corrupt. It's too dangerous. So they're just going to continue to NATO-ize Ukraine, drive this war, let the Slavic under-mention, who they obviously don't care about, whose lives don't matter, continue to be thrown in vans and shipped off to the meat grinder for as long as possible. And if there is a second phase, what disturbs me is all this talk we see in Western countries from the UK to the US of a draft. We heard from outgoing Prime Minister Rishi Sunak the call for universal service, including a draft in the UK. And the US is now for the first time, since I think Vietnam, no one is allowed to just register for selective service. It just happens automatically. And this is at a time when just a few weeks ago, Ursula von der Leyen went to Finland

and toured a bunker, a nuclear bunker, and declared that Finland is leading the way for Europe. That's the future that she and the fanatical neocons around her want for Europe. And so I wonder, we also heard Emmanuel Macron call for French troops in Ukraine, and he got a stiff rebuke from the French public. But I wonder what these maniacs have in store for the common working people of Europe. Finland, that would be the country that has 15 military bases that the United States will now occupy along the Finnish-Russian border. And what do they expect Putin to do about this? Nothing? I mean, Finland has had a very, very peaceful existence since World War II, and it's decided to volunteer something like 800 kilometers of its border with Russia to NATO for a massive military buildup. Sweden as well. What kind of suicidal leadership is this? And Sweden separately entered into a mutual defense pact or a defense pact with the United States, which is essentially going to allow their country to be occupied by the U.S. military even further.

Yeah, I don't know what's going to happen with the draft. I have always condemned it. The Republicans in the House are in favor of it. They're in favor of a gender-free or gender-neutral draft. It doesn't matter what gender you are. And as you say, they're in favor of the automatic registration. You know, the government knows everything about us. As soon as you turn 18, you're registered.

Right now, you're supposed to register. If you fail to, it is not a crime that can drive you crazy, but they can't prosecute you. But the Republican legislation, I don't think it'll pass the Senate. The Republicans oppose affirmative action for everything except the military. Right, right, exactly. And I guarantee you, if the U.S. got into a war, a real heavy, a hot war with a powerful country like Russia, we would start to look like Ukraine. The middle and upper classes would be able to get out of fighting in the war, and the U.S. would open up its prisons and empty its prisons onto the battlefield.

It would shut down all independent media and begin punishing all dissenters. And we would lose whatever's left of the First Amendment and any shred of democracy we have, and we're already on the way. We're already on the way. I'm sorry to say that. Since I won't be seeing you, we won't be seeing each other because I'm going away for two weeks until after Netanyahu comes here. Are you aware of any large demonstrations, predominantly by young people, that will protest his presence in the United States? Yeah, there are buses going out from other cities to surround the U.S. Capitol. So we'll see what happens. It was unfortunate there weren't more demonstrations against NATO in Washington. But if you actually went around Washington, downtown DC, entire

sections of downtown were shut down by militarized police in order to allow Justin Trudeau to go jogging in his jogging shorts. And it really was kind of a good, like a microcosm for what NATO is doing to the entire globe. Parts of Washington, D.C. were shut down so that the Canadian prime minister could go jogging. And so that NATO ministers and NATO officials could gather without having to interact with the public. I mean, the circumference of the Washington Convention Center was just completely cordoned off from the rest of the city.

And this really shows you what NATO is. Thank you, Max. Thanks for all of your courage and your intellectual fortitude. I'll be away for two weeks. We'll look forward to seeing you again at the very end of July or early August. All my best to you and your family. Thank you, Judge. Enjoy your time away. Thank you. A great man worth waiting for at the end of a long week. Coming up tomorrow, ah, tomorrow at nine in the morning, the Intelligence Community Roundtable, McGovern and Johnson, and at 10 in the morning, also worth waiting for Colonel Douglas McGregor. Johnson and Napolitano for Judging Freedom. Thank you.