Judging Freedom - Max Blumenthal: Netanyahu At His Worst

Episode Date: August 8, 2024

Max Blumenthal: Netanyahu At His WorstSee 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, August 8, 2024. My dear friend Max Blumenthal joins us now. Max, a pleasure, my friend. Thank you for joining us. What is the attitude amongst Israelis about torture, immunity for torture, assassinations, and now Netanyahu threatening a large, wide, regional war? Well, first, I think we should examine the Israeli attitude towards raping male Palestinian prisoners in concentration camps, because many of them seem to openly support this in light of not just reports, documentation, testimonies from the Ste Teman concentration camp that Israel set up after October 7th for men kidnapped from Gaza in the Negev desert. The Israeli public is told that everyone there is from the Nukpah, Hamas special forces unit that butchered babies and raped women on October 7th. Most Israelis, Jewish Israelis believe this hoax.

And the fact is many of those there are just common, innocent Palestinians. One of them was a male Palestinian nurse kidnapped from Gaza. And he was sexually assaulted by a group of Israeli soldiers on camera. I mean, we now have videotape. There's no videotape from October 7th showing Hamas militants sexually assaulting Jewish Israeli women. There's no

testimony. There's nothing. There's no evidence, but we have clear evidence here. And on Israel's Channel 14, which is the pro-Netanyahu voice. It's kind of like, I don't know, during the Bush era, it's Israel's Fox News, Israel's Hannity. An influential pundit argued that not only is the rape not wrong, the only wrong thing is that it hasn't been formalized into policy, and that it needs to be formal policy to revenge-rape Palestinian male prisoners because of what they did on October 7th, believing the hoax. So there's support for torture, there's support for assassination. And if you read Haaretz, the liberal voice of the enlightened Israeli public, they will say that assassinating Ismail Haniyeh, head of Hamas's politburo, a politician traveling on a diplomatic passport to Iran, who is the lead negotiator, was moraligns the hostage issue to basically the dustbin.

So their objection is really strategic and not moral. Is there still a pressure on the Netanyahu government from the families of hostages to bring them home, or have they given up the ghost? Well, they're not giving up. I mean, there are intense protests all the time in Tel Aviv. The families are extremely outspoken. They held their own protest against Netanyahu when he came to Washington that the Israeli assassination machine was willing to take out Hania, the hostages are not even like a peripheral issue. They're not an issue at all here. way that Israel wants to free them is through these disastrous blood-soaked military operations like the one that saw Noah Argomani, a hostage who wound up escorting Netanyahu to Washington, was freed in which over 150 Palestinians were killed in a marketplace in Deir el-Bala. So they don't want to negotiate for these hostages. And it's actually important for them to have the

hostages there so they can continue to use them to foil and delay ceasefire negotiations or ceasefire deals. In light of the assassination of the leader of Hamas, do the Israeli people recognize that the Netanyahu government is not now and never was serious about negotiating for a ceasefire, a ceasefire that would accompany the return of the hostages? In other words, hasn't he shown his hand by killing the chief negotiator on the other side, who happens to be the most moderate of the people negotiating? Yeah. Netanyahu is extremely unpopular now. The majority of the Israeli public is tired of him. They see it. He's getting negative press.

You know, Time magazine has a sort of unflattering cover of Netanyahu right now. But that doesn't necessarily matter because Netanyahu only needs a majority of the minority to govern. And so he needs to cater to the most extreme fringe of his coalition, which happens to be sort of the most dynamic and incipient force in Israeli society, the Ben-Gavirs, the Smotrics, the extreme wing of Likud that wants, quote unquote, total victory in Gaza that would launch a civil war if there was a ceasefire. And he's been able to do that by allowing the police to remain under Ben-Gavir's command. And the police stand down when there are pro-rape riots at an Israeli military base,

and they show up when the families of the hostages stage a peaceful protest outside the home of Yuli Edelstein, who is an Israeli minister from Likud who's in charge of the negotiations. The police show up with batons and brutalize those protesters. So it's very clear what's going on here. Netanyahu is keeping his government together by catering to the Kahanist wing, and nobody else matters in Israeli society. Have any of the torturers, particularly the nine IDF soldiers who I gather were sprung from jail by the rioters, have any of the torturers been confined or prosecuted? No, there have been no prosecutions. The whole point of them being prosecuted initially

was for Israel to put on a legal show for the ICC so they could say, hey, we are able to prosecute our own, hold our own accountable, stay off our backs. We are still the most moral army. And that show has been exposed as the farce that it was when the Israeli president, Isaac Herzog, who comes from the Labor Party, who's supposed to be a left of center figure, actually publicly opposed prosecuting these gang rapist hooligans who exist, who are literal concentration camp guards. So it's not just coming from the right, it's coming from the center, the center left, the opposition to prosecuting them. And the State Department, after this entire farce was exposed, was asked during a briefing, what do you think of all of these reports and video of Israeli soldiers raping Palestinian males?

And they said Matt Miller, the spokesman, smircula, declared Israel has the right to investigate itself for the hundredth time. So it hasn't changed U.S. policy at all. I don't want to get too into the weeds, but isn't the machinery of prosecution in Israel independent of the government? For example, they're prosecuting Netanyahu now. I realize it's held in abeyance while he's prime minister. And aren't there independent, moral, clear-thinking prosecutors who know the difference between right and wrong and don't care about Smotrich and Ben-Gavir? Yeah, I mean, there's this illusion that the military is this independent force that maintains the full respect of Israeli society and yet it's under civilian control and that the military is a professional army. But that was broken down when the protesters were allowed by Israeli police to storm the Beit Lid military base where these soldiers were going to be put on trial. And it foreshadowed, and this was an insurrectionist riot.

It was January 6th on steroids. There was no illusion about, oh, protesters just got lost on their way. They were actually trying to subvert military rule and impose mob rule coming from the kahanist settler wing of Netanyahu's coalition. And they were allowed to get their way. They succeeded, and it foreshadows what's to come if there is a ceasefire deal that Netanyahu is ever forced to sign. So this is the fear of so many in Israeli society. It's what was driving a lot of the protests before October 7th about reforming the Supreme Court judicial reform, is that the Likudnik and Kahanist mob will just overtake Israeli society. And there will no longer be the facade of a rule of law that allows Israel to present itself to the world as Jewish

and democratic. And now I think the mask is off and we see Israel for what it is. It's basically a military dictatorship that will soon, that has presided over the control of the lives of millions of Palestinians, but will now rule everyone over the land under an extremist authority. Well, are all the Netanyahu wars and excesses, assassination and torture and immunity, having the effect of uniting liberal secular Jews with Zionist Jews in Israel? Well, I mean, the Zionist left has been defeated. They don't have the numbers. They don't have any political power. Israel is effectively a Likud Kahanist state. And Meir Kahan. When you say Kahanist, you're referring to Meir Kahan,

the infamous rabbi. Yeah, I think anyone who wants to understand what Israel is today or where it's going should learn about Meir Kahan. Just read what he said. He was an American fanatical rabbi who founded the Jewish Defense League, which was basically a Jewish

terrorist organization that assassinated Arab American leaders in the US. He went to Israel, managed to get a seat in Knesset. Likud opposed him and banned him from Knesset, not because they thought he was an evil racist, although that was their cover story. It was because he was such a threat to their power because he said the truth. Israel cannot be Jewish, exclusively Jewish, in an area where there are millions of non-Jewish Palestinians and be democratic at the same time. So he advocated for a fascist Jewish theocracy that would forcibly expel all Palestinians who refuse to swear total loyalty to the Jewish ethnocracy. And that is the

dominant mentality that most Jewish Israelis uphold right now, and particularly those who are in Netanyahu's parliament. So Kahane has won. Kahane won, for example, in 2009 when the head of the Labor Party, Ehud Barak, supported a bill requiring loyalty oaths to the Jewish state for Palestinians. And he wins week after week. And we're seeing it today. Does the United States government ever second-guess Israel? Or is it just a blind support, no matter what Israel does and no matter what Israel threatens? Look at the behavior of the White House and Kamala Harris on the campaign trail to answer

that question. You had Cori Bush, a progressive community organizer from urban St. Louis, be defeated in an $8 million campaign because AIPAC basically bought a black man, Wesley Bell, St. Louis County prosecutor, to defeat her. They ran the campaign behind stealth packs. Nobody in St. Louis knew all the money was coming from an Israeli foreign lobby. They thought it was coming from the United Democracy Project. Cori Bush was being attacked for supposedly voting against the infrastructure bill. But basically, Israel's U.S. cutouts defeated her. And she delivered a tirade against AIPAC, maybe a little overheated.

And the White House came out through their Black press secretary, Karine Jean-Pierre, and condemned Cori Bush and accused her of extremism. So they basically sided with Israel over an elected Democrat. And at the same time, Kamala Harris is being lauded by her K-hive of vicious fans and newfound low-information Democratic fans because she got sassy and stern and girl bossed a bunch of anti-genocide protesters at a rally who were demanding that she shift U.S. policy and impose a ceasefire. And she said, I'm speaking. And if you keep speaking, Donald Trump will be elected. And so that's all that matters. And the crowd roared. And the crowd roared. So that's how Kamala views them. She's

content to hippie punch, to attack the progressive base. But there's one thing we can be sure of. She would never, ever dare talk that way to Benjamin Netanyahu because she knows where the real power lies. Chris, put that clip up again. Is this a true and accurate depiction? Well, it's not a depiction, a video of what happened in the jail when the rioters burst in to force the release of the nine IDF who had tortured the Palestinian and raped him? Yeah, that's outside the Beit Lid prison. They later broke in. But now we have video of what actually happens in those jails. You can actually see soldiers forming phalanx around the Palestinian who is to be gang raped with their shields. And then men set in on him. The video's been playing on Israel's Channel 13 all week. And the State Department again said, hey, they have the right to investigate themselves.

Does Ben-Gavir run the jails? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Force 100 is a shadowy unit that was formed, I think, during the first Intifada to maintain the Ketziot concentration camp, also in the Negev Desert, which was home to so many Palestinian prisoners. And they became notorious for torture. One person who was a member, I don't know if he was in Force 100, but he was a camp guard at Ketziot, was the current editor-in-chief of the Atlantic magazine, Jeffrey Goldberg at that time. And today, Force 100 comprises some of the most sadistic, hooligan-like elements in Israeli society who are basically being encouraged to torture and sexually assault as a means of revenge for October

7th, to satiate the bloodlust of one of the most, if not the most, hyper-indoctrinated, propagandized, militarized societies in human history after October 7th, when they lost their machismo to Hamas. Our friend and colleague Alistair Crook has summarized everything that you've just described as Mein Kampf in reverse. However, what happens if you compare Smotrich and Ben Gevier to Nazis, or if you compare them to Hitler? What happens on Facebook if you try to say that? Yeah, I mean, Mark Zuckerberg, immediately in the wake of October 7th, signed on to a letter of tech and corporate chieftains who stand with Israel. Among them was Palantir that's helping to provide AI and targeting to Israel to help it commit genocide in Gaza. Mark Zuckerberg's involved in various ways as well.

And Facebook meta has made Zionists a protected minority. And those who denigrate Zionists on meta can have their accounts removed, will be censored, shadow banned, and face other penalties. And one of the explicitly stated pieces of language that's forbidden by Meta is comparing Zionists to Nazis. But Bezalel Smotrich, the finance minister, went on Israeli national TV at a major public conference and declared that the moral thing to do would be to starve two million people in the besieged Gaza Strip to death. Those were almost his precise words. And he said, unfortunately, the world will not let us do it. Those are the words of a Judeo-Nazi, as the great Israeli dissident philosopher, Yeshayahu Leibovich, would have said. And who knows, maybe we could be suppressed here on YouTube for me saying that we're demonetized all the time for calling a spade a spade. What is the state of the economy in Israel now? I mean, stated differently in big picture, how much damage has Netanyahu caused the country he claims to serve?

The economy is in total freefall. I mean, Ben Gurion International Airport has been closed for days, and Israel is bleeding. Its tourism industry is collapsing, which is a major source of foreign revenue, along with a foreign direct investment to the tech industry and the arms industry. The arms industry might be booming because they can export their battle-tested, genocide-tested weapons. The tech industry is bleeding. And Hezbollah's Secretary General, Hassan Nasrallah, has explicitly stated that the waiting is part of the pain that we will inflict on Israel as they wait for our response to

the assassination of Haniyeh and the assassination of senior Hezbollah officials. So what he means is we're just dragging this out for as long as possible to hurt their economy. On the other end, Netanyahu has raised the idea or invoked the specter of Israel as a high-tech Sparta and said we will live life on the sword. So he himself is talking about endless war. Israel and endless war means an Israeli economy that suffers. It means the dream of a first world economy, a first world existence in the middle of the third world fades away. And it becomes an unattractive place for Jews from the West to make aliyah, which means that Israel will suffer a major brain drain.

It already is. And if you live in Los Angeles or you live in Berlin, Israelis are everywhere. So it's anecdotal, but they're clearly leaving. Here's Hassan Nasrallah on August 3rd, cut number one. The enemy and those behind the enemy must wait for our inevitable reaction. God willing, there is no discussion or controversy about this. Guess the key in your view is the waiting.

What do you think will happen? What do you think they'll do? I mean, the Russian government delivered today the most sophisticated missile defense systems it can export to Tehran. So they must be expecting something to happen. Yeah. I mean, I would have to just base my analysis on the public record, which means I don't necessarily know any more than you or anyone in the audience knows. story or perspective to Ibrahim Al-Amin, who is the editor-in-chief of Al-Akbar, which is an independent pro-Hezbollah paper based in Beirut. And what they told Al-Amin is, we will attack regardless of what Iran does. And Iran, according to two senior U.S. officials who are obviously trying to either intimidate or mollify Iran into not attacking, have said that Iran is rethinking a retaliation. I don't know if that is really a story to be trusted. That was fed to Axios through Barak Ravid, who's just a channel for Israeli leadership, particularly in the military security sector. to drop their guard, Hezbollah could be feeding this story in order to increase Israeli readiness

in the north for some kind of surprise. We can't just look at all of these leaks and stories being fed to various publications at face value. I think one of the two most interesting components of the Israeli response that I've seen are number one, Israel has said that if you strike, if you kill civilians, we will destroy Lebanon. We will use disproportionate force. So that means that all the justifications we heard at the state department for all the shipments of 500 and 2000 pound bombs to Israel, that they were needed to strike Hezbollah were false because Israel is going to strike common people in Beirut. They're openly saying it. And number two, Israel is afraid of its Mossad headquarters and Hakiriyah, the defense headquarters, being struck. And Israel

places those in the middle of civilian neighborhoods in North Tel Aviv. I used to eat lunch next to the defense headquarters all the time, surrounded by military operatives in uniform, mixed in with civilians. Israel is the ultimate exploiter of human shields, and now they're weaponizing those human shields to justify disproportionate response. Educate me a little bit on the donor class in America. Would they have preferred a practicing Orthodox Jew like Josh Shapiro on the ticket with Kamala Harris, or do they prefer this happy, avuncular Midwestern Lutheran that she ended up with? Yeah, that's a great question. I don't know if Shapiro is Orthodox, but he's very Jewish.

He reminds me of a lot of guys I grew up with. If you exist in Jewish communal life, you know a guy like Josh Shapiro, and he'll give you the propaganda for Israel, and it will be very thin and superficial. And we know that Josh Shapiro volunteered for the IDF when he was 20, like in a program like Rahm Emanuel joined, that he wrote slanderous op-eds when he was in college about Palestinians being too battle-minded to make peace. It makes it too obvious when he's in there. A-V-I-O-U-S, too obvious, because you have a ardently Zionist Jewish guy and everything, if he's acting on behalf of Israel, if he's

defending one of your genocidal wars, it looks like he's advancing his own ethno-supremacist identity and defending this pillar of it in the face of human rights abuses. Whereas if you have some kind of, as you said, avuncular, happy-go-lucky Gentile like Tim Waltz, who just kind of shrugs, and Kamala Harris, who's obviously too moronic to even answer one question from the press since her nomination, then they can just kind of shrug it off and say, hey, we don't know any better. This is why Netanyahu is running circles around us. At the same time, let's say that the Kamala Harris administration wants to do something symbolic to push back against the big bad pro-Trump Netanyahu. For example, they want to veto a UN resolution on condemning settlement expansion, or they want to pause 2,000 pound bombs. They're going to deploy Josh Shapiro as their Jewish human shield. And that's actually going to be harmful to AIPAC. So I think, and it's kind of counterintuitive, that AIPAC has a much better scenario right now in having someone like Harris, who's been a tool for the Israel lobby, and someone like Waltz, who, while he has shaken hands with the Israeli consular officials and issued his pro-Israel

bona fides, has also said positive things about the uncommitted movement. There are a lot of Muslims in Minnesota, particularly in the Democratic Party. And so he's sort of uncertain, and they're going to put him on the spot and force him to test his loyalty. So I think, you know, AIPAC is sitting pretty right now. It's the APACalypse. Wow. Max, thank you very much. Much appreciated as always. We appreciate your time. Look forward to seeing you again next week, my dear friend. I know you're traveling safe travels. Thanks a lot, judge. See you soon. Of course. Coming up later today, very soon, at 3 o'clock Eastern, Professor John Mearsheimer at 4 o'clock Eastern, the Intelligence Community Roundtable, Larry Johnson and Ray McGovern,

and at 5 o'clock Eastern, worth waiting for, Colonel Douglas McGregor. Judge Napolitano for judging freedom. I'm out.