Judging Freedom - Max Blumenthal (The GrayZone): Will Biden Stop Wars to Salvage His Presidency?

Episode Date: February 15, 2024

Max Blumenthal (The GrayZone): Will Biden Stop Wars to Salvage His Presidency?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, February 15th, 2024. Max Blumenthal joins us now. Max, my dear friend, thank you for taking the time to come on the show. Since we were last on air together, the Senate of the United States voted a large aid package, about $11 billion to Israel, about $5 billion to Taiwan, and about $61 billion to Ukraine. If the House passes this monstrosity, and if the president signs it, and of course he said he will, he's pushing very hard for it, what will Ukraine do with that money? Their army is depleted. Their government is collapsing. Half of this is going to be equipment that won't even arrive until next year. Look at what Ukraine did just a few hours ago. They used an MLRS, multiple launch rocket system, to attack civilian targets in the Russian border city of Belgorod,

killing infants, killing women, attacking buildings that had no military value at all with checkmate rockets, NATO rockets. And this is what they've been doing. They attacked a Christmas festival in Belgorod this December, killed dozens. So basically they're waging a kind of terror war along with a war of sabotage in lieu of the actual counteroffensive that they're incapable of doing. And as this is happening, they're losing Avdivka. The body count for Ukrainians is outpacing those of Russians by like six or seven to one. So what we're looking at, as long as the U.S. continues to arm Ukraine, is just sabotage, terror attacks on any civilians they can hit with whatever longer range weapons the US provides it.

But the NATO weapons that we kept hearing about a year ago, even six months ago, that were going to turn the tide of battle, they've failed, along with the NATO tactics. And now we've seen the chief of staff of the Ukrainian army be dismissed in favor of someone, ironically, Sersky, who has been criticized by the Ukrainian general staff and by the officer corps because he's considered too Soviet. So, you know, consider the irony there. NATO tactics, you know, combined arms, special forces tactics, we're going to turn the tide of battle, you know, small unit attacks on Russia. And now they've appointed a guy who was trained

in the Soviet Union to replace Zeluzhny. You know, I was going to ask you if these attacks on Russia are due to General Sersky. Colonel McGregor tells me that Sersky's family is Russian and living in Russia. And that, of course, would be, if generally known, and I imagine it is, a basis for your conclusion that he's considered to Sylvia. Yes, yet his troops gave him this nickname, the Butcher, because of the way I would imagine, correct me if I'm wrong, he has treated his own troops, not the way he's treated Russian troops. Well, that's because of his performance in Bakhmut, which I'm sure Colonel McGregor addressed. Bakhmut was totally unnecessary. It was heavily criticized by not just elements within the Ukrainian general command, but by Washington. The Pentagon was trying to divert Ukraine away from Bakhmut, but this was an

obsession of Sersky and apparently of Zelensky as well, because they needed to show a big win. And so they sent so much of what was left of their army into the meat grinder, and there really isn't much left for Avdivka. That's why we're starting to see soldiers with Down syndrome, soldiers who suffer from various deformities being allowed into the Ukrainian forces uh you know laws are literally being changed to allow people who would have never been able to fight in any self-confident military anywhere in the world onto the front lines because there are no bodies left so what what can possibly remain of this war?

I mean, well, let me take a step back. What military purpose is there in attacking families and children in Russia, General Sersky? I would ask him if he were here. The blowback for that is going to be catastrophic. His big need is not artillery. His big need is human beings, which he simply doesn't have and he's not going to get. Well, I mean, where does the money from this Senate bill, which has been sent to the House, where's it going? It's going back to Texas.

It's going to Colorado. It's going to the kind of I-66 395 corridor heading towards Dulles Airport outside west of Washington, D.C., which is filled with all the Beltway bandits and the arms contractors, which is now the wealthiest area in Northern Virginia's wealthiest county of Fairfax County. It's because of this aid to Ukraine. We're seeing record arms sales and record profits. And the stockholders at Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, the major blue chip arms dealer companies, they're doing extremely well. So it would be a real tragedy for them to have to, I don't know know have Ukraine negotiate with Russia and return to neutrality a position that Ukraine traditionally held which would have saved hundreds of thousands

of lives and what was it worth honestly what was it worth for Ukraine to break its neutrality and be led to the slaughterhouse by Victoria Newland and Jake Sullivan and this whole gang of chicken hawks, they lost an entire generation of men. And there's going to be a reckoning in Ukraine for this. There's going to be a reckoning. But right now, as long as the U.S. keeps them in this war, the propaganda is still flowing, the indoctrination, the nationalist indoctrination, all the way down into Ukrainian grade schools is still going, and they're postponing the inevitable. You are so correct on the military-industrial complex. Jake Sullivan, perhaps in one of the truthful things he said, stated, without using these words, but this is what it amounted to,

this is good for American business because the military industrial complex, he didn't use the phrase, is in 40 states. How convenient. It's spread around the United States. 40 states. 40 states senators. 40 states members of Congress. Oh, we got to get our people jobs.

Who cares if the Ukrainians slaughter? Our people have to keep making the equipment to replace the old stuff that we're sending over there. Yet, McGregor says, even if this $60 billion thing passes, the only thing that's going is cash because the old stuff is depleted and the new stuff won't be ready until next year. My question to you with your sources in Eastern Europe, will there be a Ukraine government under Vladimir Zelensky when the next president of the United States, whoever that might be, is inaugurated 11 months from now? Depends on who the president is, but there will still be a proxy war even under Donald Trump because the inertia of institutional bureaucracy towards this war, as well as towards ramping up tension with China along the Taiwan Strait and using Japan, putting new advanced missile systems on Japanese islands, pointing directly at China, compelling Japan to eliminate constitutional provisions which prevented Japanese militarization and rearmament, pacifist provisions in the

constitution. The U.S. is pushing that government, which it essentially has created, which the CIA has essentially created, pushing it to do this. So the institutional inertia is going to continue towards this new Cold War between Russia and China. And I don't think there's much Donald Trump can do to stop it. And I remember when Donald Trump was mocked when he was in a meeting with Mohammed bin Salman, and he pulled out these very crude, cartoonish charts that showed how much arms sales to Saudi Arabia were benefiting the U.S. military industrial sector. Well, Joe Biden, and he's the first Democratic president I can remember in my lifetime doing this,

has done the same thing, quoting Franklin Delano Roosevelt's on the arsenal of democracy to make the case that aid to Ukraine was fostering job creation in Pennsylvania, which is kind of like Joe Biden's de facto home state. Right. Joe. And we've also heard Tony Blinken declare after the bombing, the terrorist bombing of the Nord Stream pipeline, that this was a great opportunity for U.S. liquid natural gas suppliers. And now we've seen the cover-up into Nord Stream continue with the Swedish investigation being closed. And as it's closed, the Swedes are refusing to share information they've collected from the owners of the Nord Stream pipeline, for example, about the date and the size of the blasts on those pipelines. So it looks to me like

this was a U.S. operation that guaranteed profits for U.S. industry. And it continues in Ukraine and as well as Israel. Israel's main state-owned arms company is called Elbit Systems. Guess where they have one of their main plants for producing Hermes drones? Texas. In Texas, they always keep it in a swing district in Texas. I remember Kay Bailey Hutchinson, it was her district, and she would appear at AIPAC every year talking about how important it was to give aid to Israel and buy weapons from Israel because it created jobs in her district. And today, one of those Hermes drones slaughtered people in the Al Jalal neighborhood of Gaza City who were desperately trying to buy food and provisions at a makeshift food stall. The video is horrific.

Body parts are splattered all over the ground. And Biden is pushing hard to make sure that the streets continue to flow with blood and that we create jobs down in Texas at the old Elbit plant. I've been asking this question of our guests, Max. Has AIPAC corrupted the American Congress? I mean, where are the red lines? Why are there no red lines on this unprecedented slaughter we're seeing in Israel, where you have Chris Van Hollen, the senator from Maryland, openly stating that Israel's committed war crimes, and then he goes and votes for the aid package.

I think only three Democrats or two Democrats, Jeff Merkley and Bernie Sanders, voted against it. Elizabeth Warren said, we must not allow Israel to go into Rafah, Rafah being the southern city in the Gaza Strip, where 1.5 million people from Gaza, over 75% of the population are sheltering. Elizabeth Warren voted for the aid package. It's like, you must not go and commit a mass shooting at this parade, but here's the AK-40s, here's the Bushmaster rifle. That's what they're doing. Why are they doing it? Because of AIPAC. It's just a simple reason. It's what they're doing. Why are they doing it? Because of APAC. That's just a

simple reason. It's a very simple reason. And it's not just that APAC is guaranteeing votes on aid packages. I mean, they're working at every level to even engineer the personnel who get appointed to leadership positions. Hakeem Jeffries, for example. How did Hakeem Jeffries get in the position that he was in? When he was running in New York, he was running against someone named Charles Barron for his congressional seat. And Charles Barron was actually a great supporter of Palestinian liberation, someone who comes from the black liberation tradition in US politics and the civil rights tradition, who's actually beloved in New York because he had fought the developers and fought

gentrification. And to get Hakeem Jeffries elected, AIPAC got all of its local lawmakers to hold a rally for Hakeem Jeffries, declaring Charles Barron to be an anti-Semite, including the old mayor of New York, Ed Koch. And Barron was defeated with tons of money. And Akeem Jeffries goes all the way to the leadership position and plays this historic role as the first Black minority leader of the Democratic Party to be a complete stooge for apartheid Israel. So it doesn't matter who, which party runs the House. You have Hakeem Jeffries as the AIPAC acolyte, and you have Mike Johnson as the Christian nationalist, also an AIPAC acolyte. That's why AIPAC corrupted the Congress, not by, but by bribing it, by saying, you know,

do what we want or we'll primary you, we'll vote against you. And you do what we want. There's all the money in the world to get you reelected. And the difference is always rhetorical on Israel between the Democrats. The Democrats, they do these hand-wringing displays where they complain about Netanyahu being this horrible figure. And, oh, the slaughter of children is painful. One death is too many. That's what the State Department always says. But they ultimately do the same exact thing, whether it's Tony Blinken as Secretary of State, who's wringing his hands, he'll go meet with Mahmoud Abbas. He'll declare that UNRWA is an important, the UN aid agency taking care of Gaza's refugees is an important agency. But then at the end of the day, he'll defund the agency when Israel tells him to.

He'll give Israel all the weapons sales at once and circumvent Congress. And you look at his predecessor, Mike Pompeo, he was just in Israel, literally dancing with Jewish nationalist reservists who had just come back from the Gaza slaughter. So the difference is Pompeo dances, Blinken wrings their hands, but they both deliver the same amount of oil for Israel's apartheid machine. How awful of Pompeo. I don't know what he gains from that. Maybe he wants to run for president in 2028, and he thinks this will help him with the AIPAC crowds. The former director of the CIA, who boasted about lying, stealing, and killing, and the former Secretary of State of the United States under Donald Trump. Since you and I spoke last, things have really,

I think, gotten even worse. Just three little anecdotes. I know you're familiar with all of them. We have seen videos of a Palestinian male in his underwear strapped to a chair and being tortured by an IDF person while Israeli civilians were permitted to watch in video. We've seen videos of Palestinian ambulance drivers motioning for safety to the IDF who had just attacked three people. And as they get out of the ambulance to pick up the people who were attacked, they get assassinated. And we've heard this awful, awful human being, Itamar Ben-Gavir, you know who he is. He's the head of the Israeli domestic security forces. I guess he's the rough equivalent of Chris Wray, the head of the FBI here, who said that any women or children

who get too close to the Gaza-Israeli border should have a bullet in their heads, and I will direct the Israeli police to do so. How despicable can this get before there's enough American pressure on Joe Biden to draw, establish, and announce and enforce a red line? I've come to the conclusion that Israel could establish gas chambers in Gaza, bring in Zyklon B mobile extermination centers, and there would still be no red line. It's incredible. I'd never seen, and I was in Gaza in 2014 covering what I thought was an unprecedented slaughter, but this is unprecedented, not just in the context of Gaza or Israel-Palestine, but in the entire history of wars in my lifetime, certainly, and even possibly including Vietnam. I mean, the level of savagery and sadism that we've seen from Israeli soldiers in Gaza, along with the looting, the humiliation,

the torture, is just something I've never seen before. And what you have here is the unmasking of a democratic administration that came in in the shadow of Obama preaching diversity, equity, and inclusion, demonstrating that it has absolutely no red lines in the face of this vicious apartheid slaughter, which the ICJ, the International Court of Justice, has ruled is tantamount to genocide. How unstable or weak or how strong is Prime Minister Netanyahu with the Israeli people? Well, he's being kept afloat by Joe Biden. I mean, that's the irony here. As soon as there's a ceasefire, Netanyahu, who represents an existential threat to Joe Biden, Netanyahu goes to trial.

He becomes a national scapegoat for October 7th and Israel's politics become unstable. But what Netanyahu wants to do is keep this war going through November to destroy Joe Biden, because you can see Joe Biden's base is collapsing. And here's the crazy part of this that I think a lot of people who are protesting in the streets or watching this and are outraged who have voted for the Democrats in the past don't understand, is Joe Biden's top donor, his top individual donor, is the same top donor to Barack Obama and to Bill Clinton. His name is Haim Saban. He's a Hollywood billionaire mogul who sells trash film to the third world that can't get licensed in the US. He made like the Mighty Morphin Power Rangers was his big fortune. He produces nothing of value. He says, I'm a one issue guy and my issue is Israel. He helped set up a parallel lobby to APAC, which is even more extreme than APAC, called the Israel Action Committee, IAC. And his partner for setting that up was the top donor to Donald Trump, who funded Benjamin Netanyahu's entire career, Sheldon Adelson, whose late wife now continues his fortune, just did an odd event with RFK Jr.

But these people are running the show. Biden is accountable to donors like that or to Seth Klerman, another top donor who owns the Times of Israel and is also a single issue guy whose issue is Israel. Biden only cares at this point about the donor class. And so we're seeing, yes, Biden, he's weak in the face of Netanyahu, but Biden, he thinks he's showing strength by helping to show his top donors that he'll hold out in the face of this Gaza cost in order to keep the donations rolling in so he can defeat Trump. Behind it all, he's feeding at the trough of the same donor class that also funded Netanyahu and which will fund Trump.

So the rest of us are just kind of like collateral. We're just spectators here in all of this. Turkey, Jordan, Lebanon, Egypt, to resist the slaughter in Gaza. Prime Minister Erdogan and President el-Sisi met for two days. They had very strong language afterwards. I don't know if they're going to do anything. But el-Sisi is facing a crisis on his border if 1,300,000 people from Rafah decide to go south. Yes. You're referring to the president of Mexico, right? Right.

Okay. Well, we can section out these- Is that Mexico City or is it Cairo? Right. Okay. Well, we can section out these- Is that Mexico City or is it Cairo? Right. Turkey and Jordan, they're like the coalition of the talking, the empty talk. I'm sure that's a more clever name for them. Biden just met with King Abdullah. Abdullah gave a strong speech, laid out the numbers of those slaughtered in Gaza, demanded a ceasefire with Biden, kind of twiddling his thumbs behind him and staring off into space. But Jordan, more than Turkey, but like Turkey, is under too much Western pressure to be able to do anything of substance.

I'd say it's actually courageous that Jordan set up a field hospital in Gaza and has been air dropping aid, something that any other country could do. But that's about the most they can do. The US can bring their economy to the ground in a matter of hours. Their whole economy is basically dependent on Western aid. Turkey, the US has too many points of leverage there because of NATO. So Erdogan can talk all he wants, but there's very little he can or will do. Egypt, well, it's the same thing. One third of Egypt's economy is in control of the army. The army is totally dependent on the Camp David Agreement, which guarantees Egypt $3 billion of US military aid a year. So the US can tank Egypt's economy. However, it's an existential

threat for Egypt to allow hundreds of thousands of Palestinians into its borders. It's something that Sisi has vowed to actually go to war to prevent. And so right now, Sisi is holding the line on preventing Israel from bringing its troops into the Philadelphia corridor south of Rafah, which will allow it to kind of create a pincher effect around the refugees there and deepen the humanitarian crisis. But at the same time, there are NGOs like the Sinai Foundation, which are beginning to set up the infrastructure for welcoming refugees into the Sinai, which is the final solution for Netanyahu and his fascist coalition. The final solution is to push Gaza into Egypt.

And then you have Lebanon, which you mentioned Lebanon. Well, Lebanon's the only, one of the only countries actually doing something. Hezbollah is intervening right now to try to pressure Israel into a real ceasefire through military action in the north. It's attacking Kiryat Shemona, the Israeli city right now in retaliation because Israel slaughtered 10 civilians in southern Lebanon, including no shortage of children and infants. So most of the Arab world is basically co-opted and bought off. And Lebanon and Yemen are the only countries that enjoy any independence because of the movements that participate in the politics. Is the Israeli public turned off by monsters like Ben-Gavir when he says things like,

put a bullet in the head of women and children who come too close to the border fence? Well, yeah. I mean, there's a portion of the Israeli public that is disgusted by him. I mean, the funny thing about Ben-Gvir and Smotrich is they only control about four seats. They control a tiny slice of the Israeli public, which happens to be very influential, very well mobilized. But Netanyahu's coalition is so narrow that if he dismisses them, then his coalition collapses. So what the Biden administration is talking about doing, they're kind of leaking the possibility of doing this or floating it, is sanctioning Ben-Govir and Smotrick. Oh, big deal. remove, I mean, if they were sanctioned, it would begin to unravel Netanyahu's coalition, but they're not targeting the heart of the problem, which is the Israeli military itself.

If you sanction the Israeli military, this whole thing will come, a ceasefire will arrive yesterday. The Netherlands court ruled that Netherlands no longer has the legal authority or right under international legal conventions to replace spare parts for the F-35s that the U.S. has given Israel. And so if the U.S. stops sending spare parts on its own, that would be far more powerful than sanctioning these guys who represent the id of the entire Israeli government and the Israeli military. Like, they're talking about, oh, put a bullet in the head of every woman and child in Gaza. They're talking loud, but they're doing nothing. Meanwhile, you have reservists representing the heart of Israeli society who are doing just that in Gaza and are told there are no uninvolved in Gaza. That is

the official doctrine of the Israeli military. There are no uninvolved in Gaza. That is the official doctrine of the Israeli military. There are no uninvolved. So target the people who are doing it, the Israeli military. These interviews that we do, things just seem to be getting worse each week. Max, thank you. I know you're traveling. Thanks very much for your time. Deeply appreciated by the huge number of people watching us, not least of whom is me. Something else you wanted to add? Well, yeah.

Apologies for showing up late. Don't worry about it. I really thought that there would have been a ceasefire by now. I guess I was naive, but hope to see you next week. I think your heart is in the right place. I know your heart's in the right place, and that's why you thought it would happen. We'll see you next week, my friend.

Safe travels. Thanks a lot, Judge. Of course. Tomorrow at 3, another emotional gut-wrenching because he's so smart and so precise and so knowledgeable of what's going on. Interview. Tomorrow, 3 o'clock Eastern, Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, 4 o'clock Eastern. The boys, the Intel Roundtable, Ray McGovern and Larry Johnson. Judge Napolitano for judging freedom. We'll see you next time.