Judging Freedom - Max Blumenthal : The Biden War Machine

Episode Date: July 8, 2024

Max Blumenthal : The Biden War MachineSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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gentle guidance and encouragement to create these incredible changes for yourself and see what good can come from them. Trust me, listening on Audible can help you reach the goals you set for yourself. Start listening today when you sign up for a free 30-day trial at audible.com slash wonderyca. That's audible.com slash wonderyca. That's audible.com slash wonderyca. Hi everyone, Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom. Today is Wednesday, July 3rd, 2024. My dear friend Max Blumenthal joins us now. Max, a pleasure. Thank you very much for accommodating my schedule in this short week. Is the State Department funding neo-Nazis in Ukraine?

And is General Petraeus, I know you can't make this up, is General Petraeus celebrating them? Well, General Petraeus, David Petraeus, is the latest to celebrate them after a British Prime, former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson hailed the Azov Battalion or Azov Regiment as heroes. At the Gray Zone, we republished a piece by Noir, which is a newsletter, on how the Stanford extremism project quietly removed the Azov Battalion from its list of right-wing extremist international groups just about a month before the State Department decided to green light U.S. weapons directly to the Azov battalion, which is now the Azov regiment because it's formally incorporated into the Ukrainian military.

At The Gray Zone, we've been reporting on U.S. arms going to Azov for years and years, going back to 2017. I think that was the first time we reported on them getting U.S. weapons. Now it's official. And just for some context, this is an organization, a neo-Nazi militia that not only reveres Stepan Bandera, who oversaw the Lvov pogrom of 1941 through his organization of Ukrainian nationalists, but also oversaw the slaughter of tens of thousands of ethnic Poles who were in the Ukrainian nationalist way because they were Galician. They're also led by someone named Andrei Beletsky, who now heads their civilian unit, the National Corps. He basically had there's like an office divider between him and the Azov regiment authorized by the State Department.

He declared in 2010 that the mission of Ukraine is to lead the white Christian race against the Semite-led Untermenschen. This is a neo-Nazi group supported by Tony Blinken, who's the man who raised him, Samuel Pissar, his father-in-law, was saved from a Nazi concentration camp by the Soviet Red Army, and his son is giving weapons to the grandsons of those who participated in the Holocaust of bullets. I remember a picture of Blinken in a coffee shop somewhere, festooned with neo-Nazi memorabilia, taken down before the Secretary of State entered. Am I thinking about the same people? Yeah. I mean, this is a controversial story, but Blinken was supposedly at a cafe that was honoring the neo-Nazis who massacred ethnic Russians in Odessa who protested the Maidan coup.

They massacred them in a union hall. But I'm not sure about the truth of that story. But we have just down the road from where I've lived in Washington, D.C., is Joint Base Andrews down hosted a charity golf tournament for wounded veterans that featured numerous neo-Nazi members of the Azov Battalion. And they were lauded there, celebrated by David Petraeus. These are the guys with, if you saw them bare chested or bare armed, you'd see swastikas tattooed onto their bodies. Am I right? And other various insignia inspired by the Waffen-SS. What is with the same man who greeted Bibi Netanyahu on October 8th and said, I come as a Jew and he's funding Nazis? Well, it's all a matter of enforcing the rules-based order, I guess. I mean, the Ukrainian army is severely depleted right now. And the Azov regiment are some of the only fighters left who are ideologically motivated.

Anyone can just go on Twitter X or any other social media site and see Ukrainian men fighting much harder to stay out of military police vans as they're being grabbed off the street in cities across Ukraine. They're fighting much harder to stay out of what they call the meat grinder than any other person in the Ukrainian military, except the Azov Regiment, are fighting to defeat Russia. So basically, this is all the U.S. has left. These are the last shock troops, and they're the shock troops of empire. They're the same as the al-Qaeda allied forces in Syria that the U.S. was arming in the largest CIA semi-covert operation since Operation Cyclone back in the 1980s, which was then the largest CIA covert operation to arm the Mujahideen in Afghanistan that became a base of organization for the foundation of Al-Qaeda.

So it doesn't matter. Like the U.S., you know, especially when the Democratic Party is in control and they control the State Department, they preach progressive values. They preach social justice, but they don't care if Nazis or jihadists are fighting on the front lines. All they care about is weakening Russia or China at their softest points. And what is General Petraeus' involvement in all of this? Well, Petraeus is a moron. I mean, that's the first thing we need to understand. He's someone who actually, if you're watching this right now, you can Google David Petraeus and moderate Al Qaeda. He put forward a plan to arm moderate Al Qaeda fighters in Syria during the Syrian dirty war. And it was reported by the Daily Beast, not exactly an anti-war publication because it was such a clownish idea that they're actual moderate members of Al-Qaeda. Then Petraeus, he's a supporter of basically every war. He wants to have skin in

the game. He likes being part of these ceremonies. He probably didn't even know that the Azov regiment has this history of being hardcore neo-Nazis who have carried out attacks inside Ukraine on Roma people, on gypsies, and so on. And this was an event planned by something called the Borderlands Foundation, which is part of the U.S.-Ukraine lobby. And if you go on their site, they have an actual section where you can adopt a Nazi. Of course, it isn't called adopt a Nazi, but you look at the kind of veterans that you can send support to. And these are people who it says in their bio are members of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists. That is the organization founded by Stepan Bandera to assist Nazi Germany in their occupation of Ukraine during World War II. And it's right there on the website.

Has the American State Department accused countries of genocide, which have been far less brutal and far less deadly than the IDF has been in Gaza. Yeah, I mean, let's look at the worst urban warfare that took place in Ukraine. It took place right at the beginning in Mariupol. Okay, throughout the entire time, there were civilian corridors in which people were allowed and encouraged to escape. And one of the biggest scandals for NATO and the Ukrainian military is that the majority of people who left through the civilian corridors in Mariupol went to the Russian side. Why?

Because most of them spoke Russian, and they had been under de facto occupation by the Azov battalion that fought to the bitter end in the Azovstal steel plant. So they were ethnic Russians that the Ukrainian government was bombing and trying to kill. Well, they had been suffering under them for years. There were protests that were violently repressed by the Ukrainian military in Azov starting in 2014. Many politicians in Mariupol were brutally assassinated along with activists who didn't agree with the nationalist regime. But my point is, when large parts of Mariupol were destroyed, most of the population had already evacuated.

You didn't see Russia deliberately targeting civilians in the way that Israel is doing as part of Israel's fundamental doctrine. And there's a Wall Street Journal article which helps elucidate Israel's fundamental doctrine in Gaza, which came out about five days ago. And it's about how Israel is creating bubbles where civilians are allowed to remain safe and everything around those bubbles will be bombed to smithereens. Everyone outside of them will essentially be targeted with assassination or risks being killed. And in order to get into those quote unquote bubbles, you have to pass through filtration points, which means all men are subject, and women as well, subject to interrogation and then being sent to Israel's brutal concentration torture camp in the Negev desert known as Ste Teman, where there are currently hundreds and hundreds of men from Gaza

being brutally tortured. This is already happening. The problem is that right now, there are no bubbles of safety. Nowhere in Gaza is safe. So the U.S. has not only the U.S., but supposedly international institutions like the International Olympic Committee forced Russia to hide its flag during competitions. Russian athletes could not compete as Russians. They've obviously faced other sanctions. Israel is going to face no such penalties in the upcoming Summer Olympics. Why? Why? Because the United States controls all these international institutions, and it's there

to protect Israel as it carries out the most obvious case of genocide that we have seen, not just in my lifetime, but in the lifetime of anyone who has lived, who was born after World War II. I want to get back to Ukraine for a minute, and I'm going to read a statement to you from the leader of a country that is in both the EU and NATO. The Brussels bureaucrats want this war. They see it as their own, and they want to defeat Russia. They keep sending the money of the European people to Ukraine. They have shot European companies in the foot with sanctions. They have driven up inflation.

They have made making a living difficult for millions of European citizens. Viktor Orban, the adult in the room amongst the European leaders. I mean, I give him all the credit in the world for making a truthful statement like that, but he's not going to change. The voters may change Macron's mind, but he's not going to. Yeah, and Macron's getting stomped.

Protests are rocking France. There were borderline riots in Lyon in protest against the incoming national front majority. And a lot of that has to do with backlash against Macron's hardcore policy of, you know, trying to edge out Germany as the leader of NATO, pushing for French troops in Ukraine. after all the idiocy that we witnessed with France in West Africa, where it was winkled out by Burkina Faso and these other countries that

it had plundered for years. What Orban is expressing is portrayed by the West, by the liberal West as far-right authoritarian politics. But what Orban is really expressing is the economic necessity of average Europeans who have seen their standard of living plummet since sanctions were imposed on Russia. These are the boomerang sanctions that have completely failed and have ground German industry to the ground. Also, ironically, severely weakened Germany's green agenda. The Green Party had canceled prior to February 2022, were planning to take all Germany's nuclear plants offline. Now they're going back online along with lots of coal plants because the oil isn't coming from Russia. The EU put out a snitch hotline on Twitter two days ago, asking citizens to snitch on anyone they knew who might be violating sanctions on Russia. And I want to put forward someone who

is the husband of Estonian Prime Minister Kaja Kallas, one of the biggest hardliners against Russia, who was exposed across the board in European media for doing business with Russia. Why? Because Estonia is right next door. Everybody does business with Russia. They have historic relations and their economy has suffered just as Ukraine's has by being forcibly severed by like an umbilical cord being cut from a country that is one of their largest export partners. So it isn't going to work. Before we talk in some detail about Israel, how much longer do you think Ukraine can last? Well, it depends on what kind of Ukraine we're talking about here. Well, a military resisting the Russians. I think we're going to see it continue, not just for as long as the Western elite leadership, the von der Leyen's and the Newland's clique in Washington wants to see it continue because

ideologically, they're zealous about this war. They can't admit that they failed. And there are so many financial incentives for their backers. But we're also seeing Russia adopt a very slow strategy as they grind toward Chasov Yar, which will open up this entire transport corridor to the West and then will lead to the more rapid defeat of the Ukrainian military. So I think, you know, this will continue throughout the year. The New York Times reported on its website just about two hours ago, this, Israeli generals low on munitions want a truce in Gaza.

Yeah, it's funny. What does this tell you about Netanyahu not confronting reality and living in his own bizarro world? of what we heard from the spokesman of the Israeli army, Daniel Hagari, earlier in June, when he said Hamas cannot be defeated. It's an idea. Now we're hearing from more sources who are speaking to Ronan Bergman, who is a New York Times security reporter, who's basically a conduit for the Israeli securitocratic elite, the officer corps. He's quoting a lot of people and the general staff here on background and off the record. And what they're saying is Netanyahu- Is it credible what he's reporting, Max? Well, yeah, it is definitely credible. And here's what's happening.

Netanyahu is keeping them in this war for political reasons. They have to publicly state that they will follow the political leadership or Israel ceases to be a democracy, even though it controls Palestinians through military dictatorship. But neither the military nor Netanyahu have any plan for extracting the military from Gaza with a victory in hand. They've succeeded in making the lives of Palestinians miserable through tactical moves like what we're seeing in Khan Yunus right now. Attacks all around Nasser Hospital, massacres are taking place as we speak, but these have achieved nothing militarily. Israel has previously always had a foe, an adversary that it could control or defeat. And now it faces not only in Hamas, but in Hezbollah,

something that it has failed to harm. And the soldiers who are going back for repeated tours, many of the reservists have been on three tours. And Netanyahu tried to issue an executive order extending their tour by another year. They're starting to become demoralized. Well, that's what McGregor and Ritter are both reporting, that they're exhausted, demoralized, and they want out. These are both elite officer corps and grunts. Well, the grunts are reservists. I mean, Israel has a very small population and it forces all of its men to serve until like 35.

And these are guys who aren't as well. They're not professional soldiers and they're having to go in. They are starting to lose limbs and more soldiers than before in Rafah. This is kind of this isn't something that's conveyed in the New York Times piece, but it's something I'm gathering through sources in Gaza or secondhand. And you can watch also the Al-Qassam and Al-Quds Brigade's channels and see all the operations they're carrying out in Rafah. They're taking out a lot of armor. They're hitting soldiers. They're grinding them down. And it's not ceasing. Meanwhile, Israel is back in Shijia, which is a neighborhood east of Gaza City, where it claimed an operational hold earlier this year. In other

words, they claimed that they had completely defeated the Al-Qassam brigades, wiped out an entire battalion there. And now they're back fighting. There is no way that they can leave and not come back and face Hamas again. It's impossible. And so Israel, what I think they're going to do is try to extract themselves from Gaza without declaring that they have left. Now, here's the other problem. They don't know who to replace Hamas with. First, they tried to get these kind of like the sellout families who are willing to do anything for a payoff. Hamas killed a lot of them. That didn't work out. Then they tried to get like the merchant class to work with them on getting aid in to set up a new regime. That failed. Now they're

trying to go to this group that's basically the youth movement of Fatah, the rival to Hamas, which did some protests back in July 2023 against Hamas. That's not going to go anywhere. They don't have- Bibi has no plan, no plan for the post-war Gaza. Well, he refuses to even commit to any plan and has said that he will not allow the Palestinian Authority to take over. And that's because of the fanatics in his coalition, Smotrich, Ben-Gavir, the fanatics from the Jewish Power Party, who are some of the most extreme figures to ever emerge. Is that the ultra-Orthodox who just suffered a stinging defeat in the Israeli Supreme Court?

Well, no, that's not the ultra-Orthodox. The ultra-Orthodox are actually anti-Zionist, and they had engaged in a kind of marriage of convenience with the ultra-Zionist right in order to prevent themselves from having to go into the army. And their rabbinate, their rabbinical leadership, refuses under any circumstance to allow their men to go into the Israeli army. So this is another problem for Israeli society. But just back to Gaza, Netanyahu refuses to even say the Palestinian Authority should take over. And the majority of Israelis, Jewish Israelis, reject the idea of militarily occupying Gaza ever again, because it was a disaster to begin with. to negotiate, which is what these generals and officers are calling for in this New York Times article. And then the other reason they want to negotiate and end it is because if they faced

Hezbollah now, after being ground down for so long, eight to nine months in Gaza, they don't believe that they would survive that war. Hezbollah has yet to throw its full weight at Israel, even though it fired 100 rockets today into the north, into bases in the occupied Golan. Here's an interesting Q&A. Whatever happened, before we run the clip, whatever happened to the Biden proposal, according to Cy Hersh, Netanyahu proposal, according to Biden, for a ceasefire. But before you answer, you know the questioner and you know the person giving the non-answer who gets angry and smashes his podium with his fist. Cut number six. Can you tell us with certainty that Israel accepts this? Israel itself said that it accepted the proposal that the president laid out.

Did the prime minister say that himself? Did he say that I accept this proposal as submitted and approved at the Security Council of the United Nations? Said, I'm happy to help you look at Google after this and look up who in the Israeli government did or did not say things. One last question. I just want to be very clear that this is a proposal that Israel itself has said that they supported. It's funny because Admiral Kirby said seven or eight times it's an Israeli proposal. Joe Biden said it's an Israeli proposal. Your friend, I say it sarcastically, Patel, says it's the president's proposal. It's apparently going nowhere.

Well, it may be a Biden proposal to defeat Medicare, but I think it's actually an Israeli proposal. Biden certainly doesn't know whose proposal it is at this point. The U.S. is in its traditional role as Israel's lawyer, but that doesn't matter given the facts on the ground. And all we need to know is that Hamas will make a deal if there is a permanent ceasefire and Israel evacuates the Gaza Strip completely. And that is something that Netanyahu refuses to do and has said he will refuse to do under any circumstance. And the Biden administration is pushing the idea of a six-week ceasefire. Now there's a new round of negotiations taking place and the Mossad has forwarded a proposal to Netanyahu from Hamas. And the military, as we

said, is putting unprecedented pressure on Netanyahu. They've come out of the closet and they want a ceasefire. Are we going to start seeing Israeli generals at a Palestine solidarity demonstration in New York City soon? I don't know, but they could have done this much earlier, saved many more of their hostages and captives. But for Netanyahu and the Israeli public, the Jewish Israeli public, which told pollsters in March, only two percent of them thought that the Israeli army had used too much firepower in Gaza, where they're not only committing genocide, but they're also committing geocide, having destroyed the majority of structures in every built-up area in Gaza. That was done to satiate the bloodlust of the Israeli public after October

7th to recover the lost machismo of the Zionist spirit, which had always dominated Palestinians. And now I think the army has decided they've done that and they're setting their sights on Netanyahu. Netanyahu, I don't know if he will be able to wait until November for a Biden defeat or January for a Donald Trump to come in to be able to get more favorable terms from Washington. says that the generals claim they're running out of munitions. They're at the head of the line. They get whatever we have. How can they be running out of munitions? And if they're running out of munitions and we're sending three plane loads a day and can't send more, how does this end? I think this whole war has elucidated the insanity of the U.S. special relationship with Israel and how impossible it is to sustain this apartheid colony at this point when so many of the adversaries that it has literally created

have reverse engineered its technology and are now capable of dealing it much more than a bloody nose. The reason that those tanks are going into Gaza without, if that's even true, without tank shells into an area where there are no tanks on the opposing side. They're basically just hitting buildings and blowing children's heads off. The reason they're doing that is because the army general staff is saving those munitions for Hezbollah and with good reason. So no matter how many weapons the U.S. sends to Israel, it's never going to be enough, especially if Iran enters the fight, which means that the special relationship has completely failed. And on a political level, the U.S. has implicated itself in this genocide. It has shown that the rules-based order means nothing to it at all, and it has lost any moral high ground it had. Its soft power has collapsed.

Within the Arab world, the liberals who hated the Islamist forces and always saw the West as a bastion of freedom and wanted to go on vacation to Berlin, they despised the United States now. You can read it in their writings. They are totally fed up. And so it's been a complete disaster for the U.S. on every level. And now militarily, the military that the U.S. basically helped create is failing in an area where it actually, you know, when you think about it, shouldn't be that hard to defeat a counterinsurgency. It's not like they're in the rocky passes of Afghanistan or the hills of Southern Lebanon, but they can't do it. Max, thank you very much. Great, great analysis as always. And I know this is not your usual time for us, but thank you for accommodating my kid. We're all taking the four-day holiday.

A happy holiday to you and your family. Absolutely. Happy holiday. I hope this country becomes independent someday. Maybe. Right now, we're under the thumb of the Israelis and of a military-industrial complex that absolutely controls the Congress. What do we have? AOC and some progressives on the left and Thomas Massey and some libertarians on the right. And that's it. Everybody else is in lockstep. Yeah. And I don't think we can get them together for a barbecue tomorrow either. No, no. If there is, you and I will be there. Thank you, Max. All the best. My regards to your family. Have a great holiday. You too. Thank you for watching, my dear friends.

Next week, we will have all of your favorite guests on, including the inimitable Max Blumenthal. And then I'll be gone for a couple of weeks in Italy. iPad in hand in case there's breaking news that we need to cover for you. Have a great holiday weekend. Judge Napolitano for judging freedom. Thanks for watching!