Judging Freedom - Max Blumenthal | Max takes on the Israeli Press.

Episode Date: January 3, 2024

Max Blumenthal | Max takes on the Israeli Press.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 Wednesday, January 3rd, 2024. Our good friend Max Blumenthal joins us now. Max, thank you for all the time you gave us in 2023 for all your insight and all your courage. And I hope we can continue to do this in 2024, where you are a fan favorite here and elsewhere on Judging Freedom. Why is it that lately I have seen some left-wing American media attacking you. We got attacked, me and my colleague Aaron Mate at the Gray Zone. We got attacked in the Nation by Katha Pollitt, who's sort of the voice of the pussyhat Democratic Party pro-Hillary feminism for challenging Israel's Hamas mass rape October

7th propaganda and meticulously taking it down, clinically combing through their claims and taking them down, exposing their sources. And she just attacked us as conspiracy theorists and rape apologists without even acknowledging our case. So it looks like we're breaking through. And if we remember, Hillary Clinton participated in the rollout at the UN of Israel's propaganda campaign to claim that mass rape took place on October 7th, which is itself a conspiracy to support genocide in Gaza, to win over the pantsuit feminists and the progressive base of Joe Biden in support of this. And so obviously we're making an impact and the Hillary Clinton crowd is obviously shaken by this and they're deploying their media proxies against us. Good, good. I'm glad they're shaken by it. And I'm glad I know the effect you're having because I see it on my fan base, but I'm glad that you're having that effect. Israeli defense minister himself claiming that interrogations revealed, interrogations have

captured Palestinians revealed that Hamas had designated specific Hamas fighters to rape specific IDF soldiers, published in the Washington Post and then rescinded. What is that all about? Yeah, today we published a piece by our contributor, Wyatt Reed, on how the Washington Post actually retracted a claim by the Israeli defense minister at the request of the Israeli defense minister, which shows you how the Israeli government and specifically the wing of the Israeli government that is involved in the worst atrocities of our time in the Gaza Strip is actually guiding the media coverage in the U.S. We've also been dismantling the New York Times front page story alleging systematic rape on October 7th, showing how source after source discredited themselves with information

that can't be backed up by any forensic evidence, which is contradicted by forensic evidence. And now we have the family of the main star of the New York Times front page story. Her name is Gal Abdush, and we've written about her. She was killed on October 7th in a horrible way. There was no evidence she was raped. The New York Times alleged she was raped. And now her sister has come out and said the New York Times manipulated her family, made them think they were just writing about her death, then publishes this big piece about how she was actually raped. And they didn't even know that that was going to be the story and don't believe she was raped. So the whole New York Times piece should be retracted. This is one of the biggest pieces of journalistic malpractice in our time. And yet we haven't heard a single statement, a Joe Biden referring to his empire of lies. It's a great phrase. I guess you could use that phrase towards the Israeli government and towards

mainstream media in the United States. Yeah, they're all bound up together in this kind of genocidal conspiracy to keep this assault on Gaza taking place. As we speak, the north of Gaza is under ruthless bombardment. It's targeting civilian targets. A shelter of civilians was attacked yesterday in the refugee camp of Jabalia. There's a hideous image circulating online of a girl sandwiched between different floors of her house, her body sandwiched, Holocaust-like level imagery emerging from Gaza. And the ambassador, the Israeli ambassador to the UK, Sipi Hoteveli, has said that we are targeting every second home and mosque in Gaza because it's the only way we can target Hamas. So the incitement to genocide is clear. And this is all influencing the regional picture in which Israel's

military campaign against Hamas has actually failed. Colonel McGregor told me just a few minutes ago, Max, and I think you know he's a fan of yours, that the regional picture is very, very grim. The president of Egypt and the king of Jordan are sitting on tea kettles that are about to explode of overwhelming majorities that demand some sort of military action. Egypt's army, of course, is sophisticated, as is Turkey's, as is Iran's. We'll get to Iran in a minute. But what do your sources tell you about the likelihood of some other state actors resisting the IDF? Well, Egypt cannot resist the Israeli army. That's what the Camp David Accords were all about.

Egypt's army is funded and controlled by the United States, and it effectively controls the Egyptian state. And it's dedicated to one thing, stability. So they will not allow, they are pushing hard against the outflow of thousands of Palestinian refugees into the Sinai Peninsula, which is the openly stated plan of two of Netanyahu's key ministers who are the kingmakers of his government, Idmar Ben-Gvir and Smotrich, the finance minister, who are fanatics. The State Department has denounced them, but they're basically the id of Netanyahu. This is Israel's plan. So Egypt has to resist that. And then you have

several developments which influence Israel's inflammatory behavior this week. The USS Eisenhower, the aircraft carrier, has left the region. This was supposed to provide air support to Israel. The U.S. dumped, as we talked about last week, 14,000 tank shells without congressional approval on Israel, probably to be used in southern Lebanon. And Israel's ground campaign in Gaza has faltered. Their window for establishing military dominance there has closed. John Kirby today, NSC spokesman, has come out and said Hamas as an ideology cannot be defeated. It can only be undermined. So the

White House has now said Hamas cannot be defeated. And that was their original stated goal, regime change in Gaza. So what does Israel do? They start shifting everything to the north, assassinate a key Hamas official who was one of the lead negotiators with the hostages, Salah al-Rory, in his office in southern Beirut. They carry out likely terrorist bombings in Kerman at the gravesite of Major General Qasem Soleimani, killing at least 100 people. And they are announcing through the Mossad chief, David Barnea, a wide-ranging campaign of assassinations modeled after the campaign in the

1970s, the War of the Spooks, to eliminate the authors of the Munich Olympic attacks. What conceivable military benefit is served by slaughtering mourners at a gravesite, at the gravesite of General Soleimani in Iran unless they're trying to provoke Iran. Israel is deeply worried at an existential level that its failure to achieve its military objectives in Gaza and its inability to push the population of Gaza out to Egypt so far will prevent its own population from returning to southern Israel. Northern Israel will lead to an end to the financial bleeding inside Israel. There are hundreds of thousands of people actually leaving Israel permanently. A cruise ship left last week of people permanently leaving.

And so they're trying to drag the U.S. in by taunting and tempting Iran to escalate directly. And this has been compelling Trump through Mike Pompeo and Netanyahu to assassinate Soleimani, then killing those who mourned him. And the scenes from Kirman were horrible with families killed in a giant pilgrimage. They are attempting regional war and they're trying to get americans killed how did the israelis do this was it drones i think like most likely through the people's mek uh this is an organization that is sponsored and largely controlled by israel and the saudis and which has the assets inside iran to carry out assassinations as they have of Iranian nuclear scientists over the years. Mariam Rajavi, the cult leader of the MEK, which is a deeply cult-like organization, announced on New Year's that its resistance units will continue attacks

inside Iran. So they're the most likely suspect here. Here's a CBS News report on killing the Hamas leader. I'm going to run it because I'm interested in your thoughts on the interview at the end and what this lady has to say. Our senior Hamas commander killed in Lebanon, an explosion in Beirut, the capital of that country. Several other members of that Palestinian militant group also killed in the blast. You see it on your screen. It's led to concerns that the conflict between Israel and Hamas may now be expanding. An explosion killed seven Hamas militants in southern Beirut Tuesday night, including Salah El-Arouri, a senior commander and one of the founders

of the group's military wing, also wanted by the Israelis and Americans. Israel isn't commenting on the attack, but Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah vowed revenge on Israel, stoking fears of a war with the Lebanese militants. One analyst Seema Shine says would look very different to the fight against Hamas. If you were to compare Hamas's capabilities with Hezbollah's capabilities, how would you compare the two? Ten times more. Ten times more. Do you know her and agree with her? I have no idea who she is. Of course, they never, they could actually reach out to someone in Lebanon,

much closer to Hezbollah, but she's correct. And we have to pay close attention to Hassan Nasrallah's speech today. Hezbollah has been managing escalation. They've been trying not to climb up the escalation ladder. And one thing needs to be said before we assess Hezbollah's capabilities. Any escalation here is the fault of Joe Biden. This is Joe Biden's war. And Joe Biden has allowed escalation to take place because he refuses to push for a ceasefire for political reasons that are inexcusable. And so Hassan Nasrallah is in a position where he has said that Hezbollah would respond to assassinations of key Hamas officials who are in the Dahiya area of southern Beirut, which is where Hezbollah's own offices are and where the Shia population lives. Arore is a very popular figure in the West Bank. He helped start Hamas in the West Bank.

And as I said before, he was a key negotiator on the hostages, which means, by the way, that Israel isn't particularly interested anymore in getting its hostages. Let me just stop you for a second. Israel assassinated the very human being with whom it was negotiating for the release of Israeli hostages held by Hamas. Salah Rory's signatures were on all the agreements with Israel Knesset in Israel, the parliament, whose family members are in Gaza now who are protesting. And today they were heckled by a car with a megaphone basically speaking on behalf of Netanyahu, calling on them to get out of Israel. So Israel doesn't – the Israeli government doesn't care about the hostages. They want to just destroy Gaza. And then they want to pivot north and have a regional war. We just saw the clip from CBS, standard American stuff, saying that he was a terrorist wanted by

Israel and wanted by the United States, not mentioning for a second, he is the human being most responsible for negotiating the release of the Israeli hostages. You have pointed that out and nobody else in the media. Well, yeah, yeah. Senwar, the prime minister of Gaza, the whole strategy of October 7th was get hostages to force Israel to negotiate with us, Hamas, because all diplomatic channels have been closed to us and we're under political siege as well as economic siege. So Arore came out in the same hostage deal out of prison as Senwar did for Gilad Shalit. So that's the backdrop to this. And Israel is determined to close diplomatic channels and expand the war and drag the United States in and get Americans killed. American bases are under

attack across the region because of Israel. That's the one reason, as well as shipping in the Red Sea, which could soon be red with the blood of American soldiers. Let's get back to Joe Biden and American domestic politics. Does the State Department realize that it and the president are caught between younger Democrats who are repulsed by what the Israelis are doing and the Democratic donor base, which controls the Democratic Party and largely the Congress of the United States. Yeah, let's look at Harvard as a microcosm. Claudia Gay, president, just resigned. She was pushed out. She was under attack by the right, you know, who are attacking her as sort of a DEI symbol. But the reality is the Harvard Corporation,

which pushed her out, and which was kind of, she was basically a manager on behalf of the Harvard Corporation. Those are liberals. Those are elite Democrats who represent the intelligentsia and donor class that Biden is accountable to, along with the Zionist billionaire class of Bill Ackman from Pershing Capital, who were creating all the pressure by pulling the money out. So you can perfectly see at a microcosmic level, the forces that are actually guiding Joe Biden and the Biden administration, while tens and tens of thousands of the young progressive base that the Democratic Party once counted on to vote for against the bad orange Hitler, Donald Trump, are out in the streets pledging not to vote for Biden at all. There's a new campaign of Muslim imams launched in 50 states pledging to defeat Joe Biden because of what he's

done in Gaza. So the Democrats and particularly the elite Democrats and the consultant class, they count on young people not voting. They're catering to the donor class and to the boomers who vote on kind of culture war issues. And when November comes along and Biden loses, they're just going to blame those same young people and they're going to blame TikTok and they're going to blame Hamas for their own failures. And by then, who knows what kind of situation the region will be in if a regional war hasn't already broken out. But Biden has already demonstrated his inability to control escalation by refusing to push for a ceasefire. Why do you think they took the USS Eisenhower out of there,

much to Netanyahu's chagrin? I think they thought they had the situation under control in the north. And one of the reasons that I think the Eisenhower was there is because of Hezbollah's capacity to hit Israeli airfields and neutralize Israel's air power in a way that obviously Hamas can't. They don't even have man pads in the Gaza Strip, or to the extent they do, they haven't even been able to hit helicopters. So the U.S. was there to supplement Israel's air power in the case that it went down and they went away. And then Israel said, wait a minute, let's turn up the heat a little bit. We're going to assassinate the key negotiator who happens to be under Hezbollah's protection, operating openly as a political figure.

And then we're going to do some assassinations because guess what? Soleimani's, the fourth anniversary of Soleimani's assassination is the following day. And they're just going to keep it going until they can drag the U.S. in. And Biden is the dog being wagged by his tail. Do you think going to Israeli domestic politics now that the decision over the weekend by the Israeli Supreme Court invalidating the key portions of Prime Minister Netanyahu and Likud's dream of having a judiciary they can control, invalidating it, will accelerate Netanyahu's departure or accelerate or reconstitute the divisions in Israeli society that existed on October 6th? Yeah, I don't think that sort of civil strife has been settled yet.

What Netanyahu and specifically his security minister, Ben-Gvir, who's a kahanist from the extremist Jewish Power Party, really want is to neutralize the judiciary's power, for example, to do anything to hold Israeli soldiers or citizens accountable for violence against Palestinians. And the mood of the Israeli public is on the side of Netanyahu on that issue. The most important thing here to understand is that while Netanyahu is unpopular, he's being blamed by many people for October 7th, there's no one in Israeli politics as popular as him. He is the king of hearts. He's been able to destroy any possible successor. Anyone climbing up the ladder in Likud gets shivved in the back by Netanyahu and his people. So there's no one else there. And the US recognizes that, which is why they're afraid to put too much pressure

on Netanyahu. The alternative to him would be, let's say, the centrists, the blue and white coalition that was opposing his judicial reforms gets in, that's going to be a US puppet regime. And the Israeli vocal majority that supports Likud and even further to the right will see that and civil strife will increase massively. And I don't think the US will be able to control that. So Israel is just a complete political powder keg. It's a massively destabilizing force. And Biden and his people have no idea how to control it and no will to do so, honestly. of the House of Representatives making the absurd argument that you need to escalate war so that you can deescalate it. Watch this.

This is an attack on the whole world because 20% of global trade passes through that sea. Sometimes you have to escalate to deescalate. But this administration is so afraid of escalation. Eventually, Jason, one of these missiles are going to get through. It's going to sink one of our ships. Iran looks like the tough guy around the Middle East. And the United States, once again, under Joe Biden, looks feckless and weak. Where is this belligerence going to take us? They want escalation on behalf of Israel. That's what...

Right. And the host will never say, escalate on behalf of israel that's what right then the host will never say escalate on behalf of who on behalf of what right because the alternative is ceasefire then the shipping goes through then the temperature cools on the northern border of israel then iran gets put iran goes back into the box and everything goes back to a more stable situation. But we can't do that because Israel is guiding these forces in Congress. And it's guiding this administration, whether it likes it or not at this point. So what they're calling for is a direct war with Iran in which the United States would not win, which would mean the United States and Israel lose. This would be a regional war that would almost be characterized as World War III,

and this would be Bibi Netanyahu's dream, American troops on the ground invading Iran. And Khamenei has said, if we must go to war and lose hundreds of thousands of people, we will defend our national interests. The U.S. and this is the same with Russia. The U.S. always counts on Russia and Iran and China to be the adults in the room while they constantly provoke them, organize and support proxy attacks on their people and their territory, arm their proxies on their borders. And then when reality finally crashes through the U.S., as it did on February 23rd, 2022, with Russia's invasion of Ukraine, the U.S. really has no idea what to do. And you can see there, the U.S. has lost. The Biden administration has totally changed its tune, as has U.S. media. Same thing could happen with Iran. Hundreds of thousands of dead later. Right. Max, always a pleasure, my dear friend. Thank you very much for joining us. Thanks for your thoughts. Thanks for your intellect. And thanks for your time.

Thank you, Judge. Sure. We'll see you again next week, my friend. Wow. Smart as a whip and utterly fearless. That's Max Blumenthal, a brilliant and welcome addition to the gifted people that we've been privileged to bring you. Coming up later this week, Colonel Anthony Schaefer, Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, Professor John Mearsheimer, and of course, the Intelligence Community Roundtable and you and me ask the judge. Judge Napolitano for judging freedom. you