Judging Freedom - Max Blumenthal: Israel’s Abuses Continue

Episode Date: October 30, 2024

Max Blumenthal: Israel’s Abuses ContinueSee 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. Hi everyone, Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom. Today is Wednesday, October 30th, 2024. My dear friend Max Blumenthal joins us now.

Max, a pleasure. Welcome to the program. I want to talk to you at some length about Israel's continued abuse of prisoners, but I would like to start with breaking news. This is from The Guardian. Although this happened yesterday, the news just broke. And I'll read the opening paragraph, if you don't mind. An Israeli airstrike in the town of Beit Lahaya in northern Gaza has killed at least 90 people and destroyed several residential buildings. The strike comes as Israel's siege and renewed aerial and ground operations in the north of the territory moves into its third week. Medics estimate that nearly 800 people have been killed

since the siege began at the start of October. Quote, no one is coming to save them, close quote, citing a medic. Blackouts hide horrors of the siege of North Gaza. The United States, I don't know who, Max, calls the strike horrifying. Horrifying as if they had nothing to do with it. Right. I mean, this was a strike carried out with u.s warheads u.s weapons likely u.s logistics and what we're seeing in baitlahia which is a city at

the northernmost point of gaza next to jabalia which contains the Jabalia refugee camp which has been under siege, is the implementation of a plan that has been put on paper which is no different from Plan Dalet, the plan put forward to carry out the original Nakba or ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in 1948, except that it's actually even more sadistic, more lethal, more brutal. And it was presided over by one of the most influential ideologues in the military intelligence apparatus of Israel, who's a retired brigadier general named Giora Eiland, who's housed at the Institute for National Security Studies, a state-funded Israeli think tank. But what we're seeing on the ground is the plan being carried out by right-wing religious

nationalist messianic settler activists who represent the future of the Israeli army. And this was all exposed by an investigation by Israel's Channel 12. The plan is surrender or starve and die. And Israel is attacking all civilian infrastructure. They bombed this house in Beit Lahia, excuse me, that had 150 people in it. And they killed 100 people. They were all internal refugees who've been made refugees again and again, who are sheltering in this home. And they were destroyed with a 500 pound dumb bomb. This has been happening day after day.

In the last week, Israel has killed about a thousand people in the north Gaza. But beyond that, no water has gotten in since early October. No water, no food, no aid. The Kamal Adwan Hospital has been under siege. The director of the hospital had his son executed inside the hospital by Israeli forces. And patients have been taken out. There have been mass kidnappings, men taken to torture camps. What we're seeing in the north of Gaza, as if we thought the Gaza genocide couldn't get more horrifying, is one of the most gruesome instances of ethnic cleansing in our entire lifetime. And no one in Washington or Brussels or London is doing anything at all to stop it. If anything, they're just aiding and abetting.

Why does the U.S. just call it horrifying but continues to fund it? I guess it's because of Joe Biden's bizarre allegiance to Netanyahu. Is the Arab street aware of this? Are there videos of what you've just described making the rounds outside the United States and in the Middle East? Well, it's not just making the rounds. It's having a permanent, lasting impact on the way people of all political stripes across the Middle East and the Muslim world, all the way to Malaysia, see the rules-based order, the liberal order that has been espoused by the United States and enforced since World War II. And what I'm hearing from friends of mine from Turkey to Jordan and elsewhere who are pro-Western, who sort of saw the West as a flawed place, but a place that provided a bastion of individual freedom, is that they're disgusted. They're finished. And the liberals of the Arab and Muslim world now can see the hypocrisy that everyone else in their own societies saw within what the United States preaches around

the world because of the sheer horror of Gaza. I mean, this is something historic, not only because of the sadism displayed by Israel towards the civilian population, but because of the documentation, because we've arrived at the advent of social media to the point where everyone has a camera phone and they can document in the streets of Gaza City, for example, a boy trying to save his grandmother who's been wounded in the street by an Israeli sniper and then being shot himself. Everyone has a cell phone and everyone sees the footage. Everyone saw the footage yesterday of a woman whose body was draped outside a window of this home that was this residential structure blown up in Beit Lahia, of a girl no older than 12 years old in a fetal position in her last

moments. It's more graphic and vivid than we've ever seen before, and it's having a lasting impact which has shattered the rules-based order, I should say exposed the hypocrisy that was always there. Just got word that the U.S. ambassador to Lebanon, a woman named Lisa Johnson, of whom I've never heard, last night publicly encouraged Lebanese to engage in an internal uprising against Hezbollah in order to support Israel. Have you ever heard of a U.S. ambassador encouraging people in the country to which she was the ambassador to engage in an uprising against one of the political groups in the country? I mean, this is utterly insane, but it's what the U.S. does across the world. It's what they're doing in Georgia right now, where they've interfered in Georgia's election to remove

Georgian Dream because they're said to be too close to Russia, which happens to be right next door. But they're doing it openly in Lebanon because they sense that there's an opportunity. And Lisa Johnson, who is really speaking on behalf of the U.S. envoy to Lebanon, the former Israeli soldier, Amos Hochstein, who is supposed to be a neutral mediator, senses that Hezbollah has been weakened. And this may be because they're believing the Israeli propaganda or because it indeed has. And so they're just going gung-ho for regime change. And regime change in Lebanon means that they are demanding that Lebanon hold new elections, elect a caretaker prime minister, elect a new prime minister, and get rid of the parliamentary speaker Nabi Berri from the Amal movement, who, while he has pushed back on Iranian influence in Lebanon, is considered too close to Hezbollah. So this is the kind of messianism that we're seeing from the

U.S. They want regime change in Lebanon, in Gaza, and they're willing to even entertain it in Iran. And why are they doing this? Because that's what Netanyahu and the people around him believe. They sense that they are at a pivotal historical moment and that they can actually possibly move towards their dream of overthrowing the revolutionary Islamic government in Iran. And I think this is going to blow back very badly on the U.S. because Hezbollah is not a force you can just disentangle from Lebanese politics because it is such a core part of Lebanese society. And Lebanese people outside the fray of Hezbollah see it as a defender of sovereignty, while the Lebanese army itself is legally forbidden from confronting Israeli forces.

You mentioned a few minutes ago, Max, when we were talking about this horrific destruction in this town in northern Gaza, that people are fed up. Talk to me for a minute or two about Jordan. Did the king of Jordan further destabilize his own monarchy by allowing Israeli fighter pilots to fly over Jordanian airspace in order to reach Iraq, where they were unwelcome, and from which they attempted to fire at Iran? Well, Iran is furious that Israeli aircraft flew over Iraq and that the U.S. allowed them to do that. Oh, is the U.S. in charge of Iraq? Did I miss something? This is going to lead to an escalation from the Iraqi resistance factions. And we recently saw Qaithab Hezbollah, which is not connected to the Hezbollah in Lebanon, sign up or align with the Yemeni Ansarallah or Houthis in a pact against Israel. From the point of view of Jordan, it's not just allowing Israeli overflight. In recent days, the Jordanian monarchy has actually shot down drones that were heading

to Israel, just as in April, they helped the US and Israel shoot down Iranian ballistic missiles, which were part of Iran's retaliation against Israel. So they're losing credibility, if they ever had any. King Abdullah's losing credibility. And remember, his grandfather was assassinated for selling out the Palestinians in 1948 by making a secret deal with David Ben-Gurion to sell the Palestinians out and divide the land up. So there are so many scenarios that we can't predict right now. But for the first time, I'm considering a scenario, while faint, highly, probably unlikely, but still worth considering, that the Jordanian monarchy could collapse under the weight of its own people and under regional pressure because its role as a vassal of the U.S.

and Israel has been so exposed. I know he's personally wealthy, but do you think he receives, I'm talking about the king, support from the CIA CIA. Is he in collaboration with the CIA for years? I mean, of course. I mean, every age, every three letter agency is mobbed up with King Abdullah and Jordan, as well as the Brits. He's half British himself. He's got blue eyes. I think he speaks Arabic with the kind of, with an accent. He's part of the Hashemite monarchy, which was imposed on the people of the Middle East because they were kicked out of Iraq by the British colonial authorities. And every year, there's a special forces convention in Jordan with demonstrations and drills called SOFACS. Jordan is just basically a staging ground

for all of the Western special forces that act against the Arab people, act against Arab people fighting for their own sovereignty. Jordan would collapse in a second without Western aid. The NGOs that help sustain the middle class there would collapse. So you're looking at a Western project. If you talk to Palestinians in the West Bank, they'll say, Jordan and Israel, same computer. That's what I would hear all the time in the West Bank. Interesting. Very interesting.

Switching gears, I know that Jeremy Lafreda was back home. He's from New Jersey. The local New Jersey papers where I live, even though I live at the other end of the state from where his family is, have covered it in a very positive way. Yeah. I know he's back. I know you and Aaron Mate interviewed him, chatted with him at the Gray Zone the other day. Why does he think he was arrested? What did they do to him? And how is the IDF treating prisoners in general? What did he see that we should know about? Well, Jeremy was held in the so-called Russian compound in Jerusalem, which is right there in

the center of Jerusalem and is a traditional site where Palestinians are held in solitary confinement and tortured. He heard a Palestinian being tortured in an adjacent cell while he was held in solitary confinement for three days. I don't know if you could define it as torture. It's an open question. He was held in a cell for three days without anything but a small cup of, one cup of water, one cup of pudding for three days. And soldiers took him out and taunted him and forced him while shackled to pose for selfies with them and photos that they would send to their buddies of him sitting in front of an Israeli nationalist banner that read, together we will win. It's certainly abuse. And then he was taken out and subjected to several long interrogations where it appeared that the Israelis were accusing him of being some kind of deep Iranian spy. I just started to go through some of the Facebook messages we get

at the gray zone. And there were threats from average Israeli citizens telling us that they were going to harm Jeremy if they saw him in the street. He was receiving these threats through social media. This is because of Israeli media about him. And it was all based on lies. It was completely false. He was charged with supporting an enemy during wartime, which carries a maximum penalty of death or life in prison. But fortunately, he's out. One of the wildest things Jeremy told me was that the US embassy sent a social worker to see him while he was held in prison. And the social worker was an Israeli. And all they did was attempt to interrogate him and shouted him, why did you try to harm Israel? So that's all we know that the U.S. embassy did for him.

But fortunately, he's out. There's a solid reporter in New Jersey who's been covering this for the local press and understands this represents an escalation of Israel's war on journalism, which has seen the murder, assassination of possibly 180 journalists in the Gaza Strip. The Israeli army has just listed six Al Jazeera employees, reporters, cameramen, who are the only international reporters in northern Gaza, where they're carrying out this ethnic cleansing plan we talked about at the top, as terrorists who are either operatives of Palestinian Islamic Jihad or Hamas so that they can assassinate them. So they've marked journalists for death openly. And meanwhile, you have Israeli journalists who are in the field, like a Channel 12 journalist who has recently filmed blowing up homes in Lebanon.

So as usual... The journalist was blowing up homes in Lebanon? anyone could find this video on Twitter or social media, was filmed detonating explosives to blow up homes in Lebanon with the Israeli army. And there's another reporter from Ynet, Yediot Aronot, who recently gave an interview in Hebrew describing how he actually was when he went into the reserves during this war after October 7th and tortured Palestinians at one of Israel's torture centers. So you have Israeli reporters doing exactly what they're falsely accusing Palestinians of. And you have a U.S. reporter, an American citizen, Jeremy Lafredo, who nearly faced a trial for his own life on the basis of completely concocted allegations after two judges cleared him of all wrongdoing.

Do you think Jeremy was arrested because he works for you? Definitely. I mean, I think the amount of propaganda smears and just straight up defamation that's been directed at us because we get in the way of the U.S. national security state and all of its proxies must have contributed to the false allegation that Jeremy was some kind of Iranian spy. There was an Israeli outlet called I-24 who had a reporter who I believe is a Mossad asset named Benjamin Weintal, who used to work at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies in Washington, which has been identified by Israeli intelligence as an Israeli asset. And he published a piece stating in the headline that the gray zone is funded by Russia and Iran. And as soon as they get that headline, the Israeli police can target any gray zone reporter. smear piece that didn't even allege that were funded by Iran or Russia, but still made it onto the pages of the Washington Post, which has just lost 200,000 subscribers after already losing half of its readership because it refused to endorse Kamala Harris. So I think the Washington

Post, my theory is that the Washington Post, which says democracy dies in darkness, is getting reporters like ours jailed and putting their lives in danger with these smears. And they should be held accountable. Last weekend, the Israelis purported to retaliate on Iran. Defense Minister Gallant promised the troops in a video that he recorded and was shown to them a crushing blow. It apparently amounted to nothing. Apparently, many Israeli planes turned around. They were confronted with some sort of radar or high-tech defense

system with which they were unfamiliar, and it apparently caused no damage at all. And we haven't heard a peep from the Israelis about this since then. How do you read this? Yeah, I don't know actually whether that's the case or what the takeaway is. And only time will tell because the Israelis are actually touting their operation as a great precision victory that has dismantled four major Iranian S-300 systems, which has left Iran naked and exposed to future Israeli attacks, which could target its nuclear facilities. They also claim to have destroyed like a dozen planetary mixers of solid fuel used for Iranian ballistic missiles, as well as a drone facility. And they claim that that has set back Iranian ballistic missile capacity and drone capacity from several months to one year.

Again, I don't know if that's true. The Israelis lie a lot. They lie all the time. And Iran insists that it is still standing strong. Only time will tell. Iran's ambassador to Iraq, Iran's foreign minister, everyone in Iran's foreign ministry is insisting that they will respond. So if and when Iran responds, I think we'll start to see the truth here. But what Israel has done is left open the door for escalation, and it is putting to the test Iran's capacity. We have to understand Israel has access to the absolute most advanced military technology and platforms thanks to the U.S. And Iran is under harsh sanctions and export controls, which make it hard for it to import anti-aircraft systems. Will Putin and the Russian military

bring the S-400 to Iran? That's a question. There have been reports, I don't know if they're true, that Iran has recently obtained two Su-35s from Russia and is constructing a hardened aircraft hangar to house these. Will that make a difference? Will they ever be able to confront Israeli aircraft? Israel's in-air... What is the S-35, Max? What is it? I mean, it's an advanced Russian aircraft system. And this has major implications for Ukraine and beyond

because Russia's systems are being put to the test. So if Israel destroyed the S-300s, it wouldn't be a good look for Russia and they would want to put better systems in the field. Now, are they capable of putting those systems in the field in Iran when they need all they can get when the U.S. and U.K. are considering giving Ukraine long-range storm shadow missiles and other systems. Russia needs all the anti-aircraft batteries it can get. So we're looking at kind of a world war scenario unfolding here. I want to run a clip for you, half for laughs, half to show you the depths

of human depravity to which a person can sink. You'll know who this is the minute you see his face and hear his voice. Cut number four, Chris. They are our best friend. I worked for Ronald Reagan for eight years. Ronald Reagan said, we have to be there for Israel always because they are always there for us. Hamas is not there for us. Iran is not there for us. They want to kill us. And the Palestinians are taught to kill us at two years old. They won't let a Palestinian in Jordan. They won't let a Palestinian in Egypt. And Harris wants to bring them to you. They may have good people. I'm sorry I don't take a risk with people that are taught to kill Americans at two. I'm on the side of Israel.

You're on the side of Israel. Donald Trump's on the side of Israel. And they're on the side of the terrorists. I didn't know that Iran wanted to kill people in Madison Square Garden. Well, this is the Giuliani that we've always known, that New Yorkers have always known. Ever since he was hailed as America's mayor and granted warm audiences on the Dave Letterman Show

and celebrated, he was still the fanatical neocon racist when he was celebrated by America. Now he's hated outside of MAGA circles. And this was a particularly disgusting display, which didn't register at the same level as an anti-Puerto Puerto Rican joke that a pro-Trump comedian told. What Giuliani is saying here is also just, it's not just consistent with neocon propaganda. It exposes what Israel is actually doing. It exposes one of the darkest aspects of Israel's relationship with the West, which is that it creates constant refugee crises and migrant outflows. And then it tells the West, you take the Palestinians and we're going to work with your intelligence services and the FBI

to cook up phony terror plots to implicate all those Palestinians as terrorists in your own society and fake plots about them bombing synagogues. And then we'll claim that there's all of these, that there's this uptick in antisemitism and it works out for Israel just fine. And the Israel lobby just fine. It doesn't work out for our own society. And so Giuliani is warning that there will be a new wave of Palestinians from this genocide that he supports and that everyone cheering for him supports. Giuliani, who has been on the payroll of the Iranian MEK, the so-called People's Mojaheddin,

which is a front for Israeli intelligence and is funded by Saudi Arabia. At one of their conferences, I think it was four years ago, Giuliani celebrated that because of sanctions, people are selling their organs in Iran. And it's this kind of sadistic talk that I think demonstrates the oligarchic Zionist billionaire forces that are bearing down on Donald Trump, who according to sources recently told Netanyahu, Trump himself personally recently told Netanyahu that when he enters office, he wants the war in Gaza to be over. But the forces bearing down on Trump, which are also probably paying Rudy Giuliani's legal bills, I'm talking about Miriam Adelson and the Zionist

billionaire class, they don't want it to be over. They want to march all the way to Tehran. And so what you saw at Madison Square Garden was an ugly preview of that. The Democrats said this was going to be a Nazi rally. It turned out it the Israeli public is prepared for the destruction that Netanyahu's policies may soon bring about? Are they prepared? The question is, have they been able to bear the brunt? Yair Lapid, the opposition leader, recently declared in Israeli media that the toll of casualties that Israeli soldiers have faced has been covered up and that there's a vast undercount. 12,000 or more Israelis have sought psychological care at a major military mental health facility. The toll of Israeli wounded is much higher than we understand. And this is a very small society. So can they continue to take casualties at the rapid rate they're taking them in Southern Lebanon, where according

to reports in the Jerusalem Post and elsewhere, Israel is attempting to wrap up its ground defense of this week, I think because the death toll and the body count is so high. I don't think so. I don't think so. But the US has always played this role where it's provided Israel with so much, more than I think it even expects, not just diplomatically, but in terms of materiel and money and tech support, that it creates this sense of impunity within the Israeli leadership and entitlement. And Netanyahu is demonstrating that. In preparation for Kamala Harris winning, the Israeli Knesset just passed legislation banning the United States from placing a consulate in Jerusalem to provide consular services to the 300,000 Palestinians who live under occupation in East Jerusalem. So Israel is putting, passing laws, telling the U.S. what it can and can't do with its own consular facilities, while the U.S. continues, the Harris-Biden administration

continues to bear hug it. I mean, this just shows the entitlement that they enjoy, and I don't think they'll face any consequences. Max, thank you very much for your time, my dear friend. You always bring such a wealth of knowledge of what's going on from the inside. It's deeply appreciated by our viewers and personally appreciated by me. All the best. Thanks for the opportunity as always, Judge. Take care. Of course. Have a good week.

Coming up today at 12 noon, a new guest whom you will appreciate very much, who was on the inside of the war in Iraq and Afghanistan, regrets it, and is talking about it. Chief Sergeant Major Dennis Fritz, and at one o'clock, our old pal Karen Kwiatkowski. Judge Napolitano for judging freedom. Thank you.