Judging Freedom - Max Blumenthal : Palestinian Hostages in Israel

Episode Date: May 2, 2024

Max Blumenthal : Palestinian Hostages in IsraelSee 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, May 1st, 2024. My dear friend, Max Blumenthal joins us now. Max, thank you very much. I want to explore in some depth the suppression of the freedom of speech in the United States of America and the involvement of government, of course, in doing the suppression. But before we do, just a few questions about Gaza. Prime Minister Netanyahu, who himself is trying to suppress speech, as we both know, we watched that clip in the United States, has said that he's going to direct the IDF to invade Rafah, whether there's a ceasefire or not, whether Joe Biden wants him to do it or not. There's a million and a quarter people crammed into Rafah. What will happen if the IDF invades? Well, I think we all know what will happen in terms of civilian

casualties. And I think we all know that many of those people will be pushed south towards Egypt. Or they could try to return to where they're from in central Gaza, in northern Gaza, and then face more attacks from the Israeli military, which as even mainstream U.S. media is willing to acknowledge now, has been attacking so-called safe zones. They're just killing everybody everywhere. The reason Netanyahu is going in there is because he says that he needs to destroy the four remaining Hamas battalions. And from a political point of view, he's acknowledging failure to this point. It's been seven months. Not only have they not destroyed Hamas, they haven't produced any of the assassinations of high level Palestinian resistance figures that the Israeli public

has grown accustomed to over the last few decades, which they tout as major victories. Mohammed Daif, the leader of the Al-Qassam Brigades, who is a folk hero in Palestine, is still alive. Yahya Senwar, the head of Hamas's Politburo, is still alive alive he is the person who authorized the october 7 al-aqsa flood attacks abu abayda the spokesman for al-qassam the al-qassam brigades who is a folk hero in palestine when he speaks everyone stops and listens in town squares across palestine he's still delivering manifestos and speeches taunting the is military. And when you have all these battalions in the South, what doesn't go mentioned in US media is that the Israeli military is still taking casualties wherever it is operating in the North. A bulldozer was just hit in Beit Hanun,

one of the Northern most points in the Gaza Strip, the first area the Israeli military attacked after October 7th. Five months ago, Israel claimed an operational hold in Beit Hanun. Nope. Eight Israeli soldiers were badly wounded. Some may die in a TV bomb attack. Also in northern Gaza, the Al-Qassam Brigades repurposed an unexploded F-16 bomb and took out these Israeli soldiers. The Al-Qassam Brigades have put out a poster taunting the Israeli military with a recycling symbol showing the bomb saying, we are recycling your garbage. So the Israeli military, and in the Netzarim corridor where they've tried to seal off the north. They've been taking casualties. So their military operation is a complete failure. And what I can be sure of when Netanyahu goes into Rafah is that they will not achieve any of the stated

objectives of getting the hostages out or defeating Hamas, which is why Tony Blinken, who's in the region now, who's in Israel-Palestine, has said we oppose a major military operation. He understands that Netanyahu is just going in there for personal reasons, political reasons, for narcissistic reasons. To what do you attribute these colossal Israeli failures? Colonial hubris, the impunity that they've been granted by the U.S. since 1967 has produced a mentality of inviolability and arrogance in which the Israeli leadership believes that will always receive, it will not only receive endless support from the U.S., but that they could eventually lure the U.S. into some kind of direct engagement with their enemy

that started with Iraq. They thought they could do so with Iran. We've seen Iran kind of checkmate them. And in the Gaza Strip, they clearly underestimated the Al-Qassam Brigades. And I got to see and learn about the Al-Qassam Brigades capacity in 2014 when I was in Gaza. They actually dealt the tactical defeat to Israel when it attempted for several, for about a week or so, an incursion into Gaza in the Shijia and Beit Hanun areas. And they withdrew because they were taking so many losses. So I think we're just witnessing miscalculation on the part of the Israelis and the Americans. The Biden administration has not learned any lessons from the disastrous regime change wars that its foreign policy team has presided over since Yugoslavia. They've learned nothing from Iraq, that what they're trying to do in Gaza, where they say, we want to remove Hamas, we're going to remove Hamas, we support Israel's goal of destroying

Hamas. It's the same as the debathification project in Iraq that failed miserably and produced the rise of ISIS. It's the same as when they removed Gaddafi in Libya, removing the sole source of stability and destabilized not just Libya, but the entire Sahel region all the way to West Africa, where we're now seeing all these coups. They learned nothing from Syria, where they opened up entire zones of influence and occupation for Al-Qaeda, which still controls Northwestern Syria, and where Jake Sullivan, the National Security Director, declared in 2012, Al-Qaeda is on our side in Syria. These are arsonists, political arsonists who know nothing but regime change, and they don't have a plan. Israel has no plan.

The only way out of this is through a ceasefire that allows Hamas to continue to exist, because you can't just kill everybody. Is it true that Israel has over 10,000 Palestinian hostages, and Ben-Gavir, who holds the job that would be the rough equivalent to the head of the FBI here, wants to murder some of them to make room in the jails. Can this possibly be true? Oh, it's true. They call them prisoners, but they're hostages. I haven't been convicted of any crimes. I haven't even been charged with any crimes. Yeah. I mean, I'm friendly with one of those hostages. His name is Bassem Tamimi.

And if he was going up against any country other than Israel, he would have been nominated for a Nobel Prize. I mean, this is someone who's been leading an unarmed struggle against the Israeli occupation in his village of Nabisala for years. His daughter, Ahed Tamimi, is internationally known. She was jailed after she slapped, as a young girl, she slapped a heavily armed Israeli soldier raiding her home. I've been to that village many times, witnessed them raid homes, take children, literal children, out of their beds and hold them hostage, take them to the children's court. I've been to the trials of these children. I'm talking about literal children, like 12 years old. And this village has been holding

on against settlers that want to steal their land, steal their freshwater spring, push them out. Bassem Tamimi's detention was just extended by six months after he was arrested for six months. He's never been charged. His daughter has never been charged. She got out and she's not speaking to the media. She's so traumatized. And the number of those arrested across the West Bank is double what was in prison before October 7th. These are hostages that Israel is holding as collateral. And now the fanatic who's the linchpin of Netanyahu's coalition, is calling to mass execute them in order to make space in the jails. Let's come to this side of the Atlantic and the horrible events at UCLA and at Columbia University and other universities as well. Is Netanyahu behind

the repression of free speech on American college campuses? I mean, I've been saying if these students were protesting for the climate or something that's officially approved that could advance the imperatives of billionaires who want to like, I don't know, cash in on renewable energy, There wouldn't have been this kind of police response. They would have let them just camp out until the end of the semester, and then they would have mostly gone home. But that's not the case. I mean, we are kind of living in Netanyahu's America. Just look at New York Mayor Eric Adams and the NYPD and their relationship with the Israeli government. If you don't believe that there is an Israeli role here, it was the NYPD that was pushing to go in,

that got the context to go in based on outside agitators being on campus. Eric Adams has pledged total support to Israel. He's gone and visited Netanyahu, but it goes deeper than that. The NYPD has an office in Tel Aviv through its counterterror and intelligence division. And one of the people who's been going in and out of that office, who was a Middle East and North Africa intelligence director for the NYPD is named Rebecca Weiner. She is a professor at Columbia SIPA alongside warmonger Queens, Victoria Newland and Hillary Clinton. So she's a professor at Columbia who's also deputy chief of the NYPD's counter-terror division that has an office in Tel Aviv. And she was basically working in and out of that office for many years before she's in her currentiv. And she was basically working in and out of that office

for many years before she's in her current role. So she was spying on the students. She appears today with Eric Adams at a press conference, and she declares that the students had dangerous ideas. She concocts, she fabricates a claim that a terrorist's wife was working with the students. This is not about students expressing ideas. It is about a change in tactics that presents a concern and a normalization and mainstreaming of rhetoric. Is that her? I'm not just talking about language. I'm now talking about tactics. And that's what shifted our response yesterday. But a normalization and mainstreaming of rhetoric associated with terrorism that has now become pretty common on college campuses. So this relates directly to your column this week, Judge. She's talking about rhetoric. She's talking about speech as justification for bringing a Bearcat vehicle into campus, sending tactical teams in and mass

arresting students and sending them out, not just on NYPD buses, but on MTA buses that were seized by the NYPD. She's not talking about violence. She's talking about speech. And if you're watching this and you don't agree with the students, it doesn't matter because hate speech is protected under the First Amendment. If you think they're anti-Semites or whatever, it doesn't matter. What she's saying, she is just directly urinating on the Constitution. And this is someone who has penetrated into Columbia University to demonize students as terrorists and paint American students as terrorists for

their speech while she's part of an NYPD division that not only has an office in Tel Aviv, but which has been exposed in a series of investigations going back to 2010 by the Associated Press for spying not only on Muslim students in the New York area, but on Muslim students as far away as Yale, which is in Connecticut, and Rutgers, which is in New Jersey. That's what her counterterror division is doing. Is she known on the campus as a police officer who's taken an oath to preserve, protect, and defend the constitution, which includes the first amendment. And is she known on the campus as a spy? Well, she now is, she's a spook. She worked for the national intelligence director at one point while she was affiliated with the NYPD's intelligence and counter-terror division. She's a literal spook and snitch on campus. She is exactly what the students were protesting. And like, if you

watched CNN last night with their live special coverage of the repression of Columbia by militarized NYPD, you would have never heard why the students were protesting, that they were protesting a genocide or that they were demanding that their school divest from things like this, which are directly tied into the war state. All you would have heard is that the students are anti-Israeli. Not that they're pro-free speech, not that they're pro-Palestinian, not that they're anti-war, not that they're against apartheid, not that they're against genocide, not that they think that Netanyahu is a criminal, but that they're anti-Israeli.

That's all you would have heard if you watched mainstream media. Well, she's letting the cat out of the bag right there. She's saying that because she personally doesn't agree with the views of these students, that they have to be repressed, suspended, won't be allowed to graduate, kicked off campus, kicked out of the dorms they paid for. She said it herself. She said these are dangerous views that they hold and she wouldn't want her children learning these views. And so they can't allow that on campus. She was feeding disinformation to reporters about a terrorist's wife being on campus. I don't have time to go into the details there, but it's straight up disinformation. And CBS New York actually retracted their story that was fed to them apparently by her,

but CNN has not yet retracted. So you can clearly see the NYPD is working the media. It's taken control of Columbia's campus at the request of Columbia president Manoush Shafiq, who is actually a British baroness. She came over from the UK to take over this position, which she's mismanaged at every stage. She has demanded that the NYPD remain on campus until May 17th. So Columbia University is effectively under occupation. The views of Rebecca Weiner or Victoria Newland or Hillary Clinton, who are all professors at Columbia, and the body count that comes with them is to keep the government out of the business of evaluating the content of speech. And that's what she's doing. And she's got an armed force who arrived at two o'clock in the morning looking like they were Marines about to storm a hill. An armed force to enforce her opinions of the content of the student's speech.

What did you witness? We'll go to the other side of the United States. I know you've been covering this at UCLA. Well, I want to contrast what's happening at UCLA first with what happened at Columbia. Because it was unusual to me that the students broke into Hamilton Hall, which was when they were holding the lawn. And this was going to prevent graduation from taking place as planned. They were in a very strong negotiating position. And they gave up their negotiating position 12 hours after the NYPD, after Columbia leadership said they were going to lock down campus.

And now there's no encampment left. They gave the NYPD all it needed to justify this raid. So I think there's going to be, there's going to, we're going to need an analysis, a morning after analysis of what actually happened there and whether they were led into a security state trap. At UCLA, what you saw was students actually holding their ground, not giving up their encampment. They're in Westwood in West LA. So they're basically geographically between the very Likudnik, very violent Israeli expat community, which goes all the way out to Ventura County in West LA,

and the neocon pro-regime change Iranian community right there in Westwood. And they were assaulted brutally, starting four nights ago, the Zionists, with institutional Zionist support, including from the Anti-Defamation League, which claims to oppose hate. They were blasting sounds to sonically terrorize these students with the sounds of babies in distress, very irritating music. And then they started being hit with Dodger Stadium level fireworks, which injured and wounded many students. Then these mobs set in on the students. And this was just about 24 hours after Zionist counter-protesters had been wishing that these students be raped, killed, were waving bananas at them to call for the death of one who said

they had a banana allergy. They brutally beat these students with pipes, with metal pipes, with hammers, with rocks. There were young people coordinating pepper spraying of protesters. And I've spoken to some people who are present on the protesters' side who said that the students did not want to play into the narrative of themselves being violent, so they were afraid to even fight back. And you can just look at the video. It's all very clear there. You're seeing criminal assault in broad daylight by pro-Israel elements who were egged on, not only by Donald Trump, who said it's time to clear these protests out, but by Joe Biden, who condemned these students as anti-Semitic for simply using an Arabic word for rebellion

or shaking off, intifada. So basically, our two most visible political leaders set the stage for ethno-supremacist mob violence. And outside of LA, the media is not really treating this as some gigantic scandal. The New York Times referred to it as clashes. Oh, they're just clashing at the White House press briefing today. Where were the LA police when the kids were being brutalized? Okay. University of California police stood down just as the Capitol Hill police stood down on January 6th. And it was so obvious to me that these Zionist hooligans were used as proxy muscle by the police to break up an encampment that university leadership was unable to

dismantle on their own because these were just peaceful students assembled on the lawn. It's been reported by the UCLA Daily Bruin, the school paper, that only five police officers were even stationed on campus. After they were attacked by the Zionists, they just left. They didn't call in reinforcements. LAPD didn't come in. And witnesses to the attack told me that for four hours, students were being brutally beaten with hammers and metal pipes and pepper spray by masked hooligans with no interference from the police at all. Private security, they refused to allow reporters from the school paper to flee into the building where they had their office. And they too were attacked by these Zionist hooligans. So once again, gigantic scandal. I mean, we saw at the State Department last week,

the spokesman Vedant Patel under orders from Tony Blinken, who's really running this operation in this government. Patel was absurd last week. Yeah. He refused to condemn Netanyahu and foreign leaders from Israel for attacking American students and demanding that American federal police wage a military style crackdown on students. He refused to call that interference. And now we're seeing the White House press secretary refuse to condemn these orchestrated pro-Israel ethno-supremacist mob attacks on peaceful American students. So the Democratic Party establishment has just lost its mind. Where's Gavin Newsom? Where's the governor of California? Where's Karen Bass, the mayor of Los Angeles? Great question. I mean, I'm going to be looking at

their response and I can assure you that it will be a kind of vague response just referring to violence without pinpointing the source of the violence. This was orchestrated violence. The Israel lobby was directing this violence. I lived in LA for five years. I saw how the Israeli expat community operates there. Anytime there was like a Jewish peace event that I would attend, I once went to a synagogue to see an Israeli army refuser speak in West LA and the synagogue was besieged and assaulted by local West LA Israeli expats, all former military who shut it down, racially menaced any person of color in that event, prevented the speaker from speaking in a synagogue. And then when security came, they put all their children, they put their children in front of them like human shields to prevent the security from reaching them.

That's what we're seeing. It's reminiscent of violence I've seen from the Venezuelan community here in Washington, who act as kind of a proxy of the State Department, the way that the Cuban mafia in Miami does. Whenever there's a protest against regime change on Venezuela, they come out and violently assault the protesters in a way that U.S. Secret Service police or D.C. police cannot do. And it's also what we saw in Canada, where Ukrainian Nazis were given extremely favorable immigration terms after World War II, because the Canadian government wanted them to serve as strike breakers when there was a massive push for labor, expansion of labor rights in Canada in the 1950s. One of those strike breakers, those former Nazis, was Yaroslav Hunka, who was honored last year in Canada's parliament by Justin Trudeau, Vladimir Zelensky, and Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland. So this is the same thing. Has any public official spoken out against this violence and the failure of the government to address it?

We might have seen some, we've seen some of the members of the progressive squad like Jamal Bowman condemn what happened at Columbia. I haven't heard much about from LA leadership. Thomas Massey has condemned it. But has anybody in Los Angeles in a position of power condemned this and in a position to do something about it?

Yeah. Well, we should be hearing from Karen Bass. There should be a thunderous response and condemnation to this. But Karen Bass is captured by the establishment. She runs as a progressive. She was on the board of the National Endowment for Democracy for many years while she was in Congress. That's the regime change arm of the US government and a CIA cutout. So I'm not going to be holding my breath. These students have been left completely on their own,

all to continue to generate political consent for genocide. And we're not really paying attention to the images out of Rafah, but Israel attacked again last night by air, firebombing people in their tents. And the images of children's bloody bodies are horrible. I should also mention that the daughter of someone who I counted as a friend who was murdered by Israel in his home in an airstrike last December, Rifat Alarier, who was nothing but a professor and a poet, Israel came for the rest of his family last week and murdered them in their home with an airstrike. So that's what these students are protesting. That's what this is about and they've

been left on their own by discredited political leadership that can't even stand up for the most basic aspect of the constitution which makes america special the first amendment right right um i guess this will die down because it's exam and graduation time and in a couple of weeks the vast majority of these students will be home or headed for Chicago. No. What do you think happens next? Well, that's what's happening.

Chicago. And the question is, my question is, will they hold the convention remotely? I mean, the Democrats basically ran Biden's 2020 campaign from his basement. He didn't have anybody. Nobody attended his inauguration. That was basically a remote event. They said, the FBI said, there's going to be QAnon insider attacks after January 6th. So we have to cancel inauguration. We were basically living behind blast walls under military occupation in Washington after that. So I think there's reason to suspect they could do the same at the

convention. And it's not as though the Democratic Party elite wants any challenge to Biden. There's not going to be anyone else nominated. So really, what's the point of holding that convention? Well, they should look to history at the Chicago 1968. Yeah. I mean, the one difference there is that these protesters are pure. They're not worried that they're going to be drafted into this war. They're not just middle-class students who are worried about dying in a pointless war. I are just concerned. I would say they're concerned global citizens who are anti-genocide protesters, who are challenging and threatening the empire at its core. In some ways, that's more threatening than the anti-Vietnam protesters. And I look at that generation that protested the Vietnam War and largely dodged the draft,

the middle-class, educated, baby boomers, they've mostly betrayed these students. Most of them are not standing with these students now and are rejecting the parallels. They are the base of support, the last base of support for Biden. Thank you, Max. It's a terrible, terrible state of affairs, and I don't know how it ends because we don't know what's going to happen in Chicago. And it kills me that these kids, understanding the First Amendment and choosing to exercise the most fundamental of American rights, a natural human right and one expressly guaranteed by the Constitution and by history, have to suffer like this because the people that they

disagree with have all the money. Yeah. And the one thing that really concerns me because of what we saw in 2020 with BLM, with the Proud Boys, that there are elements in the national security state and the political elite that actually want to see a strategy of tension, that want to see violent chaos, political chaos play out in the streets. And that's what kind of concerns me going forward in the election is that they actually could try to play this to their benefit. Well, this will enhance their authority. It's almost like a false flag. If they can say, look, without us, more of this will spread.

Yep. Yep. That's what I did in 2020. I was arguing that there was no violence until the government showed up. Now I have to say there's no violence until the government looks the other way because of what you just described happened in Los Angeles. Police stand down. Yeah. Thank you for reporting on all of this, Max. Thanks as always for your courage. Thanks for your time here. We'll see you again next week. All the best. Thanks a lot, Judge. Okay, coming up next week, excuse me, coming up tomorrow. Let me just check my schedule here. At two o'clock in the afternoon, Congressman Andy Biggs, what's wrong with the Congress? How can the Congress be looking the other way at all of this? Why is the Congress even fomenting a lot of it?

Speaker Johnson at Columbia University and at 315, the great Professor John Mearsheimer. Judge Napolitano for Judging Freedom. Thank you.