Judging Freedom - Max Blumenthal : - Netanyahu: The Islamic Republic of Britain?

Episode Date: August 27, 2026

Max Blumenthal : - Netanyahu: The Islamic Republic of Britain?See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Undeclared wars are commonplace. Pragically, our government engages in preemptive war, otherwise known as aggression with no complaints from the American people. Sadly, we have become accustomed to living with the illegitimate use of force by government. To develop a truly free society, the issue of initiating force must be understood and rejected. What if sometimes to love your country you had to alter or abolish the government? Jefferson was right what if that government is best which governs least what if it is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong what if it is better to perish

fighting for freedom than to live as a slave what if freedom's greatest hour of danger is now hi everyone judge Andrew Napolitano here for judging freedom today is Thursday August 27th 2026 Max Blumenthal joins us now. Max, a pleasure, my dear friend. Welcome here. Thanks for accommodating my schedule. I have a lot of questions for you on a variety of topics, but I have to ask you about this quotation you attributed to and sent me a clip of, so he said it, Benjamin Netanyahu. What was he talking about when he said the Islamic Republic of Britain? Well, this was from two weeks ago during a trip to the UK.

on a podcast where Netanyahu was referring to Muslim immigration to Britain and that Britain would become the Islamic Republic of Britain and that it would have to be handled the same way that Israel has handled the Islamic Republic of Iran, where Israel initiated two unilateral unprovoked wars on Iran. So essentially, he was threatening Britain and telling them if you turn away from your special relationship with Israel. And Britain, I mean, right now is effectively occupied territory. If you look at how they're treating Palestine solidarity groups like Palestine action. But Netanyahu is nevertheless threatening that if these Muslim immigrants ever get any measure of political control or some figure like Jeremy Corbyn comes to power, Israel will treat you like an enemy and will wage essentially hybrid war. Israel is already waging hybrid warfare. on the United States. Netanyahu has referred explicitly to the U.S. as the eighth

front in his eight front war. The other seven fronts are on the immediate periphery of Israel. And in his desperate campaign for reelection to hold together the most fascistic government in Israel's fascistic history, he is campaigning not just against the elected mayor of New York, Zoran Mamdani, but he has placed Zoran Mamdani very prominently alongside two of the top figures on Israel's kill list. There is a campaign banner that's being displayed on buildings and billboards across Israel. That's one of Netanyahu's campaign ads that features Naim Kassim, the successor to Hassan Nasrallah, who Israel killed in Beirut in 2020. Naim Qasem is now the Secretary General of Hezbollah is at the top of Israel's kill list, alongside Moshtaba Khomeini, the Supreme Leader of Iran, and Recep Tajib Erdogan, who is sort of like next down the line. He's a NATO leader, president of Turkey, but he's down the line. And then you have Zohran Mamdani in the middle of this banner, and in Hebrew it reads, they want Netanyahu to lose. But the subtext is, these are our enemies, and one of them is the popular elected mayor of New York. So Netanyahu, it needs to be seen as more than just a glib,

uh, somewhat racist figure who's joking around on podcasts and waging sort of desperate, cynical campaign ads. I think this needs to be taken a lot more seriously, especially if you consider the level of incitement by Israeli controlled and pro-Israel forces against the mayor of New York and other figures that are rising in American politics who are calling for a reorientation of the special relationship with Israel. Gee, that would profoundly under the law justify Mayor Mamdani directing the New York Police Department

either to deny him entrance at JFK or deny him entrance to New York City or arrest him. He's threatening to kill the mayor. If you or I threatened to kill the mayor, we'd be locked up in a heartbeat. Well, I should mention, I mean, I wasn't planning on saying this, but you just reminded me that the government of Canada has just denied entry to a key ally of Netanyahu named Ari King. I should say he's a key ally of members of Netanyahu's governing coalition.

Ari King is an important settlement leader who has been involved in personally, physically evicting, removing Palestinians from their homes in East Jerusalem and planting Jewish settlers in their homes. and he has called for extreme genocidal violence against Palestinians. And he was scheduled to give a talk hosted by the quote-unquote Jewish community in Toronto until his visa was pulled at the last second. These are the figures who will come back into power under Netanyahu. You mentioned a few minutes ago the British government treatment of Palestine action. What is Palestine action and what is the American? State Department had to say about it.

Palestine Action is the most effective Palestine Solidarity Group in the world. They're effective because they haven't been just marching down the street with picket signs and making appeals to Western politicians who can either be defeated, intimidated, or bought off. They're taking action themselves. And what they've done is they've gone to

Elbit Systems factories, factories, factories of the Israeli state-owned weapons company in the UK, broke into these factories and vandalized them. They vandalized the clean room, which makes the factories extremely hard to get back online, and they've occupied the factories for days and days shutting down production. They have wounded no one. They have killed no one. They aim to harm no one.

What they aim to do is shut down these factors. and they've succeeded in shutting down four factories, and then they go to trial. And when they go to trial, Palestine action almost always succeeds because they go before a jury, and when they have been allowed to provide context on their activism, to say,

we did this to actually save lives, and the cost of what we did is outweighed by the cost of the mass slaughter of children in Gaza. they win. The jury sympathizes with them. And so what the British state has been doing is prescribing, they've attempted and succeeded in prescribing them as a terrorist organization in order to subvert the jury system and to basically subvert democracy itself. We've been breaking these stories at the gray zone because the British press has been banned from reporting what I'm about to tell you, which is that in the last two or three trials of Palestine action defendants, the jury,

has not been allowed to know that if they convicted them for a minor criminal charge like vandalism, they would then be sentenced by the judge as terrorists. The British press was not allowed to report on these trials or on the pretrial proceedings. So they were literally banned by the judge, so it fell to us. And now the Trump administration, which is effectively controlled by Israel, has designated this British nonviolent direct action. group as a violent terrorist organization, along with two other groups on extremely, extremely thin grounds.

And I'll tell you why I think they're doing this. You know, there are two reasons to be general. I know we don't have all day. Number one is they're afraid of direct action in the United States because it works and Israel's afraid of it. That's why they have the national security policy memo seven. issued by the Department of Homeland Security, declaring that pretty much any form of left-wing direct action is a form of terror, terrorism. And then that gives them the ability to prosecute

defendants and sentence them outside the scope of normal legal procedures. The second reason relates to another case, which is very, very interesting and actually shocking and disturbing, in which the U.S. Department of Justice has indicted and is seeking to extradite one of the most prolific funders of Palestine Solidarity Groups, anti-imperialist media, and aid to Gaza, who is sustaining possibly hundreds of families in the Gaza Strip on the Virgin Starvation. His name is Fergie Chambers. He is an heir to the fortune of the Cox family in Atlanta. They own, you know, Cox Media. And he is an anti-imperialist, a convert to Islam who has been living in Tunisia. He went on vacation to Ibiza in Spain, and he was captured by police and is now being held in a maximum security prison in Spain. And so in order to compel the Spanish authorities to deport Fergie Chambers, extradite Fergie Chambers to the U.S. for their major show trial. This is like the show trial that Trump administration wants of a radical leftist.

they have to prescribe an organization that he has seemingly supported as a terrorist group. So it's retroactive designation of a group as a terrorist organization in order to prosecute an American citizen who has not carried out any, who has not committed any crime that I'm aware of and was running a pretty legitimate foundation. Wow. I mean, you know, just. Yeah, just a pan out of any of this, Max. This is news, news in the U.S., not heard of any of it at all. I heard of there of Rubio declaring them declaring Palestine action, a terrorist group, but I didn't know the background.

I didn't know the relationship with Cox media. Wow. Let me just. Can I just add a few quick things to this? Sure, please. I think, you know, especially your, you're, libertarian viewers will be really interested to know this. One of the other groups that the Trump administration has declared as a terrorist organization is called Atustici Inventati. And it's an

Italian group that provides encrypted web services and encrypted communications for activists. And one third party activist had posted material from a quote unquote Antifa group in Portland. Therefore, the Trump administration is attempting to tie this group to direct action activists in Portland in order to declare that they themselves are terrorists. They're somehow linking them to Hamas. But if we look at this a little bit more carefully, what they're simply trying to do is declare that encrypted communications, set the lay the groundwork for outlawing encrypted encrypted communications where they can't spy on you. So that's what that's about. along with the Fergie Chambers issue where my understanding is we actually released the sealed indictment,

which upset some people who are like propagandists for Trump like Laura Lumer. But my understanding is the indictment is going to be unsealed at any minute, which will prove my point, that this is all, a lot of this has to do with nailing one man. But they're going full bore against the First Amendment, against the Fourth Amendment, against the Fifth Amendment, against the Fifth Amendment. And this is the fallout from the failure in Iran, whereas we've seen time after time in American history when a war has failed or a war has caused enormous social damage. For example, World War I, the King's War, wiping out entire classes of college students that was followed by the Palmer raids, Earl Palmer shutting down anti-war groups by force.

We're seeing that again with the Trump administration where the war is coming home, and they're about to launch a Hueck-style assault on the anti-war movement. Wow. Let me divert from this for a minute, and then we'll get back to Zionists and the Congress. Unfortunately, there's more on that than we had hoped. What is your take on the director of the Central Intelligence Agency spending four hours in the Kremlin this week? Yeah, I don't have any concrete information, but all I can say very briefly is I don't accept the official story that he's warning the Kremlin against attacking a NATO state.

Although Russia is being provoked to attack NATO states because of all the attacks being launched by the elves, the little elves in Estonia and the Baltic states, the drone attacks that are going through Estonian airspace that are attacking. Russian infrastructure, attempting to cause an energy crisis in Russia. But that's not what I think this is about. I think this is about the obsession of the Trump administration, which is, as I've said, like 400 times already in the last 15 minutes, controlled by Israel. It's about Iran and attempting to pry Russia away from Iran, prevent Russia from providing intelligence to Iran on targeting.

I don't know what extent they've done that. Iran has very good intelligence of its own, prevent Russia from collaborating with Russia on drones and other military issues and providing Russia, providing Iran with diplomatic support. So I think this is about Iran. That's just my theory, because that's what Trump is obsessed with right now. And he's run up against, run into a dead end on the economic blockade of Iran because of the midterms. Who is Jared Moskowitz, Congressman Jared Moskowitz, and why was he, can't even say in the news it was below the radar. You pointed it out to me. I didn't see it anywhere else. Yeah, Jared Moskowitz is one of the biggest Zionist fanatics among the Democrats in Congress.

He was a cheerleader for the war on Iran. He is fully aligned with the Israel Firsters in the Republican Party on. on any Israel issue. And at the same time, he's a social progressive. And he's from South Florida. He has been whining about anti-Semitism and calling for speech laws to shut down any criticism of Israel.

He is just basically a guaranteed vote for the Likud Party in Israel. And following a bizarre, secret, semi-secret meeting, I mean, we know the meeting took place between Hakeem Jeffries, who's been dubbed by the radio show, The Breakfast Club, as A-PAC Shakur, because of the amount of support that A-PAC has given him. I know Tupac is dead, but that's a funny nickname.

Go ahead. Yeah, and I wonder what Tupac would say about this sort of icon of the Black Miss leadership class. Hakeem Jeffries is someone who has, paraphrased desegregationist governor George Wallace in declaring Israel today, Israel tomorrow, Israel forever in a speech to a pro-Israel group. And this is a black New York legislator whose father, Leonard Jeffries, was actually a black radical who would have hated this. He's the Democratic minority leader. So he meets with Jared Kushner, which is bizarre enough

because Jared Kushner should be someone that the Democrats are promising to prosecute for insider trading, corruption, warmongering, as they've moved towards impeachment if they capture the Congress. But he has a secret meeting with them. And then following that secret meeting, all these pro-Israel first Democrats get appointed to key posts on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, starting with Jared Moskowitz. So he's the ranking member of the Middle East and North Africa subcommittee. That means if the Democrats win in the midterms, you know, nothing's going to happen in altering the special relationship with Israel, which is what 91% of Democratic voters want, according to every recent poll. Then you got Jonathan Jackson, but he's the son of Jesse Jackson. He's criticized Netanyahu, but he's also said he will not stop taking money from APAC.

He's the ranking member on the oversight and intelligence. subcommittee on that panel. Then you got Debbie Wasserman Schultz, a complete tool of Israel from South Florida. She's on the Oversighted Intelligence Subcommittee. And then Wesley Bell. Also, on the West, he's on the Western Hemisphere Subcommittee. He just got a plum appointment. Who is he? He's the guy that AAC paid like 11 or 12 million dollars. Like they ponied up of 12 million in a Super Bowl-style ad blitz to defeat Cory Bush, not just once, but twice, who was one of the leading critics of aid to Israel in Congress. Wesley Bell is completely controlled by A-PAC.

So this is the Democrats. This is what the Democrats have to offer to their base, complete and utter contempt for a base that turned away from Kamala Harris in 2024, and honestly, they deserve to lose for doing this. Who is Fernando Ceramedo? Why should we know about him? What is his involvement in? I don't think it's Cuba. I think it's Venezuela.

Well, it's everywhere. It's everywhere in Latin America right now. So now we're kind of or seemingly moving from, you know, the Middle East to Latin America. But actually, if you look at all of these recent elections where in the last two years, every right-wing pro-US candidate that Trump has backed in Latin America through overt meddling, interference, and straight-up election rigging, every single one has won. And every time they win, Israel comes in. I mean, it's at the point now where Venezuela's government is now welcoming Israel back in. And Nicholas Maduro, who is in a maximum security prison in New York, who's a political

prisoner of the United States, along with his wife, they have to watch their son, Nicola Cito, go to a synagogue in Caracas and pay homage to effectively pay homage to Israel. Bizarre scenes. Columbia's new president, completely controlled by Israel, but these are also governments that are now allowing the U.S. to carry out military operations on their soil. They've given up their sovereignty. Bolivia, same thing. Honduras. same thing and they're handing over a part of Honduras to crypto scammers and pro-Trump billionaires like Mark Andreson. Behind all of this is someone that almost no Americans have ever heard of who functions as Donald Trump's bag man in Latin America. His name is Fernando Serimedo.

We have a piece about him up at our YouTube channel that explains all of this. But to make a long story short, the ex-girlfriend of Fernando Cerrimeto in Bolivia, where he was a key advisor to the government and was handling all of these different operations. His girlfriend was shot four times in broad daylight by hitmen. She somehow survived. Her name is Nadia Beler, and she spilled the beans about Cerrimetto, that he had not only hired these hitmen to kill her, but that he was running hundreds of millions of dollars in dark money through crypto accounts to basically pay and bribe politicians. He and her helped fabricate stories about opposition politicians and pump them out in media outlets that they were basically launching. They helped keep Javier Millet and

Argentina in power. All of these, they were behind all of these elections. And now this week, Fernando Cerrimeto has just been indicted not only for seeking to kill his ex-girlfriend who had all of his secrets, but for drug trafficking. So Trump's bagman in Latin America has been indicted for drug trafficking, while Donald Trump's so-called Department of War under its DUI hire Pete Hague Seth is now restarted the boat strikes bombing poor fishermen in a pathetic theatrical. attempt to seem as though they're actually against drug trafficking when their main guy is accused of this this is a huge scandal u.s media has barely touched it so if you're watching this you're probably hearing about it first but check out our report at the gray zone about fernando serrimetto and uh stay tuned for more wow what is the uh status of nettingahu's re-election campaign i mean the election is two months from now is it not

Yeah. I mean, we don't know who's going to win. It's like the polls are seesawing, a huge portion of the public that is opposed to Netanyahu. And the figure that is being positioned as the alternative to Netanyahu. And you can sort of see the Democratic Party is getting behind him, gathering, he's gathering a lot of momentum in the Israeli press, key figures. coming out of the Israeli military and intelligence apparatus, the sort of gatekeepers are endorsing him. And he is making these sort of quasi-progressive signals that he would even allow Arab legislators or Arab politicians in Israel to be in some form a part of his government. And he would save Israel's image from Idemar Ben-Givir

and Bezal-Smotric and these fanatics. His name is Gabi Ashkenazi. Oh, I thought you were going to tell me a Naftali Bennett. No, Bennett is a much more right-wing figure who comes out of Likud. Ashkenazi is someone who is more oriented towards the old labor, and he lost his nephew in, I believe, Gaza, and he lost another relative, close relative, or close relative was badly wounded in Lebanon, and he himself was chief of staff of the IDF. This is, you know, the chief of staff of the IDF typically is the most prestigious figure because the most respected institution in Israel that keeps the whole society together and propagandizes the society into supporting genocide is the IDF.

And Ashkenazi, he is no progressive figure. He is the architect of the so-called Dahlia doctrine, which was implemented in southern Lebanon and southern Beirut in 2006. when Israel assaulted Lebanon. The idea of the Dahlia doctrine is disproportionate force and terrorism against civilians to kill as many civilians as possible until they turn against the resistance group, in this case, Hezbollah, and it's named for the neighborhood Dahlia in southern Beirut, that Israel totally destroyed. So that's sort of his legacy.

and then as Chief of Staff at the IDF, he oversaw the first major assault on the Gaza Strip, 2008-2009 Operation Cass Led, which paved the way for the genocide. And I should mention he was also a figure named Gadia Eisencott also oversaw the Dahlia Doctrine. But, you know, he's been involved in some of the most hideous assaults on Palestinians and the Lebanese in recent history,

and he will be no less brutal toward them as Netanyahu was. And in some ways, this makes him more dangerous than Netanyahu, because Netanyahu has lifted the mask on Israel and what Zionism has always been and presented us with the true, hideous core of this onion, where when you peel it back, it gets more and more hideous. And Gaddi Eisencott, he aims to restore, the sort of shiny exterior of the onion and to present Israel once again as a Jewish and democratic

state with the support of a democratic party with key pro-Israel figures occupying these important roles on the House Foreign Affairs Committee while Palestinians, while the genocide continues in Gaza. Wow. Max, another tour de force taking us around the world with analysis that nobody's going to get anywhere else, except from you and your colleagues at Gray Zone. Thank you very much. I'll be traveling next week, but hopefully Chris can work out our weekly commentaries like this. Deeply and profoundly appreciate it. All my best of you and your family, Max. Thanks a lot, Judge. Safe travels. Thank you. Sure. Coming up tomorrow Friday at 8 in the morning live from Tehran, Professor Muhammad Morandi,

at 4 in the afternoon, the end of the day, the end of the week, almost the end of the month, Intelligence Community Roundtable. Tomorrow, Larry Johnson and Scott Ritter. Judge Napolitano for judging freedom.