Judging Freedom - Max Blumenthal : (The GrayZone) - Who Runs US Foreign Policy?

Episode Date: March 14, 2024

Max Blumenthal : (The GrayZone) - Who Runs US Foreign Policy?See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Thank you. Hi, everyone. Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom. Today is Thursday, March 14th, 2024. My dear friend, Max Blumenthal joins us now. Max, we missed you last week. I was away in Italy. I'm back. You're back with us. The fans are happy. I'm happy. Thank you for coming on the show. Thank you for your analysis. I think while I was away, before we get into the serious matters at hand, you were recognized for your personal courage and excellence in journalism when you received the Pierre Spray Award, an award named after a highly recognized whistleblower and anti-war, at the frontier of the anti-war movement, a former Defense Department official himself. So I congratulate you on that. We have some clips from your acceptance speech, which will run as we move

along. I wasn't there. I would have if I could have, but congratulations, my dear friend, for that recognition. Thanks so much. Who, in your opinion, runs American foreign policy? Not us. Not the American people. The donor class by APEC, is it run by Joe Biden? Is it run by Tony Blinken, the current Secretary of Defense and former political hack? Well, it wasn't run by people like Pierre Spray, who helped design the F-16 and the A-10 and called out the waste of projects like the F-22 and F-35, which are still, and the uselessness of these jets. And they're still being exported and sold to countries that'll never take them out of the box because a lot of this is just about military Keynesianism.

No offense to John Maynard Keynes. And it's all about profiteering. Victoria Nuland was someone who's identified as one of the people who controlled Joe Biden. She resigned from her position as Assistant Secretary of State under Tony Blinken. And she's obviously the architect of the Maidan coup in 2014. And you look at where she was before she was in the Biden administration, she was at Center for New American Security, which is sort of the base of the pro-war Democrats and who funds them, the Pentagon and the arms industry, like the big five, Lockheed Martin,

Raytheon. And she's now wound up at Columbia SIPA, the School for International Policy Affairs, which is her colleague there is Hillary Clinton. And she's going to be somehow teaching after all the destruction she caused students to turn them into good imperial servants. The dean of SIPA is a former Israeli military intelligence officer, I believe, or counterterrorism officer, kind of an ironic term considering how much terror the Israeli military meets out. And SIPA is itself funded by industry, the oil and gas industry, the arms industry, and it's producing cadres for the State Department and Defense Department. So the kind of people that run U.S. foreign policy are bound up with industry, making

money, and basically taking money from us, the U.S. taxpayer, who has almost no say in what happens around the world, just sucking up money from us and laundering it in places like Ukraine to make profits for their funders and the Beltway bandits who are fueling the economy here in Washington, D.C. surprised you obviously recognize yourself, but you're talking about Joe Biden as the largest AIPAC recipient in America and about some startling comments that he made. If you don't mind, I'd like to play that. I could ask you about it, but you're so good in the clip. You're your typical self in the clip. I'd like to play the clip and then let you go from there. Let's go to the videotape. Joe Biden is the largest recipient of Israel lobby money of any active U.S. politician. He's received over $1 million

throughout his career. He identifies himself as a Christian or Gentile Zionist. He said in a floor speech in the Senate that if Israel did not exist, it would have to be invented. We would have to invent it. The way we kind of did. In 1982, Joe Biden shocked the hardline Likudnik Prime Minister Menachem Begin during a closed session of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee when Begin had just invaded Lebanon. All the senators on the committee were badgering Begin, declaring, how could you do this? You're destabilizing the Middle East. And Biden was the lone senator to support him. But he actually shocked Begin when he said, I would go even further than you. I would be willing to kill women and children.

That's according to a new book by Alex B. Ward called The Internationalists. And this incident was described by none other than Begin himself. You at the Women's National Democratic Club just two or three days ago. Does AIPAC still have that iron grip on Joe Biden, even though he's the president of the United States? Well, I spoke there about another incident pertaining to Biden, where Biden appeared in Los Angeles, in Beverly Hills, at the home of Haim Saban for a $250,000 a head fundraiser. As president?

As president. Well, he's going to run again. So he's raised a record $42 million in January alone, which is kind of interesting when you consider how low his approval rating is, how little enthusiasm there is for Joe Biden in the Democratic Party grassroots. But he has done an expert job, or the people who control him, of catering to the donor class. And the donor class is substantially led by Haim Saban, who is a Hollywood mogul responsible for the Mighty Morphin Power Rangers franchise. He is the largest individual donor to Bill Clinton,

Barack Obama, and Joe Biden, the last three serving Democratic presidents. Haim Saban said, I'm a one-issue guy and my issue is Israel. He doesn't care about women's reproductive rights or unions or any of the things the Democratic grassroots cares about. He cares about Israel. That's why he hosted Joe Biden along with another pro-Israel Hollywood mogul named Casey Wasserman. And Joe Biden has been very responsive to their concerns. And that's where I think Joe Biden's interests lie. He is a political animal. So when 100,000 or so people in Michigan, Michiganders, regular people people voted uncommitted in the Democratic primary, the Biden White House made no effort to acknowledge their existence. If anything, what they're doing now is trying to

mollify them about the Gaza genocide that they were protesting by setting up a phony aid port off the coast of Gaza and having Kamala Harris go out in Selma, Alabama and call for a ceasefire. And then as soon as the applause ends, state that it's actually a six-week genocide vacation for Israel's troops and not a real ceasefire. They're trying to mollify them without delivering any concrete change in this genocidal policy, which is in which the U.S. involvement is deepening by the day. The aid plan is absurd, is it not? The efforts to build this floating dock. Why don't they just send 500 trucks?

Well, first of all, why don't they stop the killing and at the same time send 500 trucks? Is the IDF going to shoot at American trucks that are entering from Egypt? Exactly. Exactly. I mean, why not stop the fascist settler mobs from blocking the trucks? They're going out every day. We have a reporter there, Jeremy Lafredo, who told me that yesterday the Israeli military handed out watermelon and drinks to the settlers while they were blocking these trucks. They were almost marching into Egyptian territory. And the U.S., is it sending its embassy staff down there to observe and then complain? No, they're not doing anything. They're concocting another scheme in which the U.S. taxpayer will be forced to pay the cost of Israel's occupation and genocide through a aid

port, which is just window dressing for Israel's assault on Gaza, and will force at least 1,000 U.S. troops to coordinate with Israel's genocidal military in one of the crimes of the century. It will represent actually a U.S. invasion of Palestine. And this is a plan to build this port, which was conceived not by the Biden White House or Mr. Raytheon Lloyd Austin's Pentagon or Tony Blinken's State Department. It was conceived by Israel, by one of its most fanatically genocidal ministers, Israel Katz, when he was transportation minister back in 2015. It was rolled out at the Herzliya Security Conference, which is like Woodstock for neocons in Israel in 2017 in a video presentation. I tweeted

it at the time. And it essentially calls for a complete transformation of the Gaza Strip under Israeli control, in which the elected governing authority of Hamas is totally removed. And the outside world takes on Israel's legal responsibility for feeding and caring for the occupied population. Israel gets to check and vet everything going in and out. And that's what's coming to bear with Biden's insane plan, which won't even take place for another two months. There's another aspect to this plan, which relates to the first issue we discussed, Judge, which is that taxpayers are going to be enriching a little known contractor consisting of former Marines called Fogbo. Instead of having the Army Corps of Engineers do this plan, Fogbo is going to get the contract reportedly. They're

run by a former, I think, Lieutenant Colonel named Sam Mundy, who has gone on Israel lobby trips to Israel, is completely supportive of everything Israel's doing. And it's going to lead to disaster. As the BBC reported, after the goods are offloaded by these contractors, which will be delivered through the U.S. Navy or U.S. military, Israel will be in charge of securing the perimeter of the areas on land in Gaza where it will be delivered. What has Israel been doing with the aid convoys for the past two weeks? They've been attacking the aid convoys and slaughtering desperate and hungry people who are trying to feed their starving children. And so the U.S. is setting the stage for more massacres while justifying Israel's continual occupation of the

Gaza Strip, but this time with the direct involvement of the U.S. military and some shady contractor. This is completely crazy and the plan won't even be able to happen for another two months. So it means that Biden is giving Israel two more months to carry out this mass slaughter. Here's a clip of you at the Democratic women's talk that you gave on March 7th, talking about your late friend, Rafat al-Irir. I think I've pronounced it correctly. My colleague and friend, Rafat al-Irir, who I met in 2013, a poet, a professor of English at Islamic University, was one of my heroes, and I was following his Twitter account avidly throughout this assault on Gaza. Rifat was the first professor at Islamic University, a university founded by Hamas,

to teach Hebrew literature. He also taught the Merchant of Venice and encouraged his students to sympathize, not with Othello, the Moorish general, but with Shylock, the persecuted Jew, who had to compromise his dignity in order to survive in an anti-Semitic society. And his students said that they, as Palestinians, identified with Shylock, the Jew. Rifat brought anti-Zionist Jews to his class and told them, I used to be an anti-Semite until I met these Jews in America who were organizing against our occupation and our oppression.

Now I see things differently. The issue is Zionism. And he taught his students to resist by not being extremists, but by being intellectuals and succeeding inside Gaza, inside this open-air prison. Rifat was hunted down by the Israeli authorities. His direct messages on Twitter were filling with threats from active-duty Israeli soldiers pledging to kill him and his family in December. He fled from a shelter with his family after receiving a phone call from the Israeli military telling him that they planned to bomb his location,

that they had tracked him on his cell phone, and went home to his sister's house where they attacked his home with a missile and killed him and his entire family. His last tweet, Rifat's last tweet, was the Democratic Party and Biden are responsible for the Gaza genocide committed by Israel. Democratic Party and Biden are responsible for the genocide committed by Israel. Let me apologize for having the wrong date up there. That was a simple typo we made.

Your speech was last week. It was March 7th, 2024, not March 7th, 2014. You would be remarkably well-preserved if you looked that way 10 years ago. But back to the serious matter at hand. Were you surprised at Chuck Schumer today calling for elections in Israel from which Netanyahu would not return as prime minister? Or is this meaningless? We all know that when Benny Gantz was here last week, he basically said what Netanyahu says, he's just a nicer human being. and especially if Chuck Schumer is saying it. Chuck Schumer is someone who went before a pro-Israel Orthodox group in New York

back in, I think, 2013 or 14 and said that the people in Gaza don't study Torah. They don't believe the same things we believe, and so they have to be starved out. He's as a fanatical pro-Israel politician as you can get. And also in the same comments in which he called for Netanyahu to be replaced, he also said Hamas is using the civilians as human shields, so they're to blame for the civilian casualties. But the Democratic leadership and the Biden White House have been trying to get Netanyahu out for some time. They clearly played some role in the protests against Netanyahu's judicial reforms in which he was trying to give the executive branch in Israel full authority over the laws of the land.

And now it's kind of coming out and it's kind of obvious. Netanyahu is not following, Netanyahu is not even producing a plan for Gaza, which they find palatable. And he's also someone that they consider correctly to be sympathetic to Donald Trump, someone who wants to actually leverage this war on Gaza to weaken Biden, which is clearly working, and to draw out the war through November so that Biden will continue to lose support from the Democratic grassroots and lose. So Chuck Schumer kind of let the cat out of the bag here. This has never been a secret. Israel's ambassador, Michael Herzog, here in Washington has condemned the Biden administration and said that they're violating Israel's sovereignty. And at the same time, the Biden White House has not done a single concrete thing

to weaken Netanyahu by using leverage. The thing that would clearly weaken Netanyahu the most would be to force an end to the war, force a ceasefire right right they refuse to do it um and just we have to consider who's in netanyahu's war cabinet who would possibly succeed him um it's unclear if there's any clear successor to netanyahu's as popular as him but the biden administration welcomed benny gantzz, the former Israeli army chief of staff, former prime minister, to Washington. And that was an unusual move for them to make. So it looks like they want someone like him to replace Netanyahu. But he's no less militaristic.

In many ways, Gantz is more militaristic than Netanyahu. When he campaigned for prime minister, he ran one of the most genocidal campaign ads in Israeli history, showing the ruins of Gaza in 2014, the attack he presided over, Operation Protective Edge, which killed 2,200 people, just showing the ruins. And it said, Benny Gantz, only the strong survive.

So this is the guy they want to replace him with. I don't really see it as much of a policy shift vis-a-vis the Palestinians. I want to show you a clip from President Biden being interviewed on MSNBC. The interviewer challenges his disastrous performance in the Michigan primary and addresses directly genocide. The answer, if you haven't seen it, is very unsettling and irritating, but I'm anxious for your analysis of it. Cut number eight. Some have said they will never vote for you. One told Charles Blow of the New York Times, and I'm quoting, as bad as Mr. Trump's rhetoric was and him putting a travel ban on five Muslim countries, he wasn't overseeing and actively arming a genocide. Those are tough words.

What's your response to that widely shared sentiment? It's not widely shared. You guys make judgments you're not capable of making. That's not what all those people said. What they said was they're very upset and I don't blame them for being upset. Their family's there. They're people who are dying. They want something done about it. And they're saying, Joe, do something.

Do something. But the idea that they all think it's genocide is just not. That's a different situation. I don't know what kind of an answer that is. It's a non-answer. Yeah. Well, it's more articulate than I expected, honestly. I mean, it's significant that the question is coming from Jonathan Capehart.

This is someone who's basically a paid Democratic Party consultant who's now in a different role on MSNBC. I think he's married to a Democratic Party consultant. He's a party stalwart, a party operative, someone who deeply supports any Democratic nominee to be reelected. And he's putting the issue of Biden's responsibility for genocide at his feet on MSNBC, the chief propaganda channel for the Democrats. And Biden is denying that he has a problem. He's deluded. I mean, look at where he's sitting and the questions that he's getting. And he's deluding himself also into believing that there's any enthusiasm for him at all among the party grassroots. I mean, the only reason anyone is going to vote for Biden within the Democratic Party is because he's not Donald Trump. So you can see the hubris

of Joe Biden in that interview where he's willing to acknowledge that there is suffering in Gaza. He will not acknowledge his own part in that suffering. He disputes the very term genocide and then says that these sentiments are not widely shared within the Democratic Party base. Well, that's also a misunderstanding of how American politics works. It doesn't matter if an issue is widely shared. It matters how intensely it is shared among a group that is passionate and will hammer yard signs and participate and can throw a swing state in your favor. And Biden's thrown Michigan away. So I don't know what he thinks he's going to do to win, but he doesn't seem to have a plan. I don't know how we can win without Michigan and 110,000 ordinary Democrats with little organization voting none of the above when the president of the United States and leader of their party is one of the above is profound.

And he may not recognize that. What is your. I mean, what does he got to get Florida and Ohio if he doesn't get Michigan, oh, Southeastern Ohio is going completely for Trump. Uh, Ohio's like trending red. Florida is very pro Trump. Trump won it in 2016. And then you have North Carolina and Virginia, which could even, I think Virginia will go for Biden, but North Carolina might go for Trump again.

So Biden does, he just doesn't seem to be with it. Right. Here he is being heckled in Georgia called Genocide Joe, number nine, Chris. Some have said they will. Before I begin, I want to say thank you. Thank you. Look, I don't resent his passion. There's a lot of Palestinians who are being unfairly victimized. By him. Well, that's the issue.

I mean, he's been prepped. He's been told you're going to be protested everywhere you go and you need to speak to their pain. And that's what they want to do. Speak to the pain of Palestinians. Set up a phony naval port and show that you're giving aid. We'll do some aid drops from the air. And then they'll just go away. And they're not going to go away because they react the same way you did, Judge, which is

that until there's a ceasefire, we're not going to stop. We're not stupid. A power concedes nothing without a demand. And here's our demand. You're not doing it. So it just, it's an insult for Biden to even pretend that he cares about Palestinians. If anything, Trump would be more honest with them and not even pretend. And that would be, you know, at least more appreciated because you know where he stands. Right. I want to switch gears and go over to Europe. What is your take on the Russian-released, taped conversation of German generals plotting to deliver Taurus missiles to the Ukrainians over the objection or without the knowledge of the German chancellor? Well, Schultz has said this week that there will be no Taurus deliveries.

So this was a pretty significant intervention by whoever intercepted the signals intelligence and leaked it to RT because they've gotten Schultz to step in and say, this isn't going to happen. And what they were going to do would have been insane. They wanted to use long range Taurus missiles to hit like Krasnodar and regions inside Russia, basically terrorize Russia because Ukraine's military is in such a terrible state. I think these were like German Air Force generals or officers at a conference in East Asia. So for all I know, their conversations could have been picked up by Chinese intelligence. I don't know why they were so stupid as to have these conversations at an air show. These air shows are just hives of spooks.

Everyone's under surveillance. Chinese intelligence could have provided it to Russia. And it's out there now. We see the Germans scheming and plotting to continue this disastrous war in which everything they have done has failed spectacularly. Something like 50% of German Leopard tanks delivered to the Ukrainian military have is outrageous. People are suffering enormously and the government of Olaf Scholz has no plan B as, you know, we're getting out of the winter season, but who knows how long it will take for potential energy crisis to set in.

Do you know if the German government... This has just been a political disaster. Do you know if the German government acknowledges that the United States invaded Germany when it destroyed the Nord Stream pipeline? Well, look at what just happened in Sweden, where they closed the investigation without coming to any conclusions just days before Sweden joined NATO. Like, let's put two and two together. Sweden was told to shutter this thing, just shut this thing down, and then you'll get

the big prize and Joe Biden will seat your prime minister next to Jill Biden, Dr. Jill Biden at the State of the Union. And everyone, the entire chamber will rise and cheer for him, just as they previously rose and cheered for Vladimir Zelensky and Juan Guaido. And then you will be on track to absorb Russian intercontinental ballistic missiles after waving away a century of neutrality that protected Sweden from the horrors of so many wars that ravaged Europe. And now the investigation is left to Germany, which means there will be no investigation into Nord Stream. So Germany is actually participating in the cover-up of the destruction of its own critical infrastructure and energy sector, which is why I call Olaf Scholz not the chancellor, but the kuckmeister of Germany. I mean, where is the dignity of Germany's leadership? It's pathetic. Max, you're always on top of your game, my dear friend. Thank you for your intellect and your courage, and congratulations again on receiving that award. Well deserved.

Thanks so much, Judge. We'll see you again soon, and on monday your other half will join us i won't call her mrs max bloom until i know she doesn't use your last name but she's your wife and i'm looking forward to meeting her and i think my viewers will love her as much as they love you maybe a little more she's definitely better looking than me. Maybe a little smarter. All the best, my dear friend. Thank you so much. Thanks a lot, Judge.

He is so smart and so courageous. We are all grateful that he's a friend of mine and a friend of the show. I'm just looking at my calendar for tomorrow. Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson at three o'clock Eastern and the boys, Larry Johnson and Ray McGovern, the intelligence round table at four o'clock Eastern. Thank you for watching. Judge Napolitano for Judging Freedom. I'm out.