Judging Freedom - Max Blumenthal: The Media and Oct 7th Truth

Episode Date: May 23, 2024

Max Blumenthal: The Media and Oct 7th TruthSee 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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video i mean it's it's a real video, at least from what I can tell. But the way that it's being presented to the Western public, and especially to the Israeli public, is deliberately incorrect and is intended to reinforce this lie that Hamas carried out mass sexual violence on October 7th, that basically it invaded Israel to carry out a rape spree. And what the video shows is five female Israeli soldiers, all adult women, members of the Gaza division being attacked at their base, military targets who are being kidnapped, taken captive as prisoners of war to be exchanged for Palestinian prisoners. And the way they're being presented is as girls, just simply girls being rounded up.

And then there are several mistranslations and misinterpretations of Arabic words, like the word Sabaya, which means female prisoner of war, to claim that these Hamas commandos are going to use them as sex slaves, the same way ISIS did with Yazidi women. So this is just one of many, many lies about this video that's going around. We're also being told that, you know, these are just girls. They're just hostages. They're prisoners of war. And then beyond that, we have the sexual abuse allegation that we've been hearing about October 7th, which has been debunked again and again in the ICC indictment by ICC prosecutor Karim Khan against three leaders of Hamas. But there's no proof for that in the indictment at all. So we continue to see October 7th getting spun and spun and spun in order to justify 230 days of continuous genocide. Who made the video that purports to show the IDF female soldiers as young girls being victimized? It was made apparently by Hamas.

And the parents of these soldiers have publicized it because they want to put pressure on Netanyahu to actually cut a deal to get their daughters out. That just shows how it's dawning on the Israeli public, everyone pretty much outside of the Jewish nationalist camp, that there is no military means of rescuing the hostages or getting the POWs out. But there's another interesting aspect of this video. I don't know if you remember, but one of the few pieces of visual evidence after October 7th that the Israeli propaganda apparatus used to claim that these women were being sexually abused, who were being taken to Gaza, was there was a sort of disturbing

video and photograph of one of these five female soldiers with blood on the back of her pants. And they said that the blood emanated from her crotch. It was because she had been sexually assaulted. And we can actually see now in this new video that the blood that she got was not on her crotch. It was on the back of her pants. And it was because a firefight had ensued between Hamas commandos and Israeli soldiers. And it wasn't even her blood. So they just blew out of the water one of the major pieces of quote-unquote evidence they have for sexual abuse. Her name is Naama Levy. Does the Israeli public see the same views of Gaza that we do? They don't see... The slaughter, the destruction, the starvation, the horrible things that you and I could see

in two minutes. Does the Israeli public see that and know it? No. And I mean, the way that the war is being conveyed to them is either through the satisfaction they see of the destruction of Gaza as revenge for October 7th, or they simply see the heroism of their soldiers, but they never see the human suffering on their news. And this is just speaks, it speaks to a wider phenomenon in Israeli society. Since 2005, when Gaza was placed under siege, the West Bank was sort of sealed off through the construction of the apartheid wall, which doesn't run along any internationally recognized borders. And Palestinians in occupied territory largely disappeared from Israeli life. And you can see, concurrent with that siege separation policy, an escalation in racist attitudes among the

generation of Israeli youth who are raised during that period. You know, years before, Yitzhak Rabin, who is considered the icon of the liberal, enlightened public of Israel, who is supposedly a man of peace, he campaigned for prime minister on the promise of removing Gaza from Tel Aviv. And what he meant was there's all these Palestinian laborers who come out from Gaza on buses, work at construction sites in Tel Aviv, and he's going to get rid of all of them. And all you'll see are your fellow Jews in Israel. Israeli textbooks that children learn from, geography textbooks, when they learn about their own geography. I actually interviewed a professor from Hebrew University, Norit Peled Elhanan, who did the only comprehensive critical survey of early Israeli child pedagogy. It's on

all the way through high school. And she told me there are no photographs of Palestinians as normal people in any of these school textbooks. All they see is Palestinians as terrorists or as sort of anonymous farmers. And that's sort of what we're seeing with the Israeli coverage of Gaza. Let me just close a window here for sound. Sure. Okay, that didn't help. Quite all right. The ICC charges, I'm going to play Kareem Khan summarizing the charges against Prime Minister Netanyahu and Defense Minister Gallant. And then I'm going to ask you, what is the basis for the other charges against Hamas? Cut number nine. On the basis of evidence collected and examined

by my office, that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Minister of Defense Yoav Galant bear criminal responsibility for the following international crimes committed on the territory of the State of Palestine from at least the 8th of October 2023. The crimes include starvation of civilians as a method of warfare, willfully causing great suffering, serious injury to body or health or cruel treatment, willful killing or murder and intentionally directing attacks against a civilian population, as well as crimes against humanity of extermination and or murder, persecution, and allegations of crimes of committing other inhuman acts. I mean, what he just summarized, there is ample, ample irrefutable evidence for.

But why do you think he added the Hamas leaders to it? and why the negotiator, who's the one that travels back and forth between Doha and Cairo and whose role in this negotiation is vital? Well, they killed the last negotiator. The Israelis did. The Israelis killed the last negotiator who was based in Beirut. So Ismail Haniyeh is sort of the lead negotiator from Doha for Hamas. And the fact is, Haniyeh and the political functionaries of Hamas had no idea that Al-Aqsa flood was going to take place. This was something planned from within Gaza by a very small cell of political leadership, starting with Yahya Senwar, who's in a tunnel, and Mohamed Deif, who, I mean, there's only one photograph of Mohamed Deif. His last name, Deif, just means it's Arabic for guest, because he sleeps in a different house every night.

The Israelis have no idea where he is. And Haniyeh, Daif, and Senwar were indicted by the ICC. I highly doubt those two figures in Gaza, Yaya Senwar, for example, who spent most of his adult life in an Israeli prison. I highly doubt they care about their reputation before the Hague. So this is a very devastating indictment for Netanyahu and for Israel. Go ahead. I was going to ask you, doesn't this further isolate Israel? I mean, it arguably provoked three Western European countries to recognize Palestine as a valid, legitimate, freestanding state.

Yeah, I mean, and that's purely symbolic. It's not accompanied by any real action like sanctions on Israel. But what this does is, first of all, shores up the reputation of the ICC. They couldn't just indict Putin under this indictment that was completely phony for basically evacuating ethnically Russian children from the front lines of the Donbass to the Russian Federation, an indictment that was manufactured by the Americans, by the U.S. government as we exposed at the gray zone. They couldn't do that and not indict Netanyahu for such heinous war crimes. This is also about Western Europe asserting its own independence. We've seen even Germany validate the ICC warrant

for Netanyahu, Germany being the number two supplier of Israel's military genocide machine. So they are drawing separation between themselves and the U.S. So that's significant as well. And for Netanyahu, he's someone who depends entirely on his credibility in the eyes of the West. And now he has had to organize through his office a press tour. All last weekend, Netanyahu was working the U.S. shows, defending himself. And like a mafia don, mumbling threats, grumbling threats against Kareem Khan. He said Kareem Khan needs to worry about his status, not me. Meanwhile, AIPAC has activated all of its lackeys in Congress. Just

do a search right now on Twitter for the name of any member of Congress who's an AIPAC tool and the word equivalence, and you will find they're all using the same exact language provided to them by AIPAC, crafted by Netanyahu. There can be no equivalence between a democratic nation like Israel and Hamas, a terrorist group. But what kind of democratic nation holds millions of people under occupation, denying them any rights at all? So this is a very desperate situation for Israel. And the war that we're witnessing right now is far from over. Israel's credibility will continue to crater.

Here's Jake Sullivan being questioned by a reporter about whether or not the United States provided intel about Senwar. And it gets a little testy, but I'll be anxious to hear your take on this. Cut number one, Chris. Did you in your meetings provide any U.S. intelligence about Sinwar's whereabouts? So, I think at the root of this question is a story that is just completely wrong,

that somehow we were withholding information from the Israeli government relating to Sinwar or any other Hamas terrorist who was responsible for October 7th. The fact is that the United States has provided an intense range of assets and capabilities and expertise, which I got briefed on while I was in Israel, to help hunt down and deliver justice to Sinwar and everyone else who brought about October 7th. We have been doing that day in and day out for as long as this conflict has

been going on, and we will do it until the job is done. Probably true. Pathetic. I mean, utterly pathetic. This is the same mentality that Jake Sullivan and the humanitarian interventionist foreign policy establishment carried into Libya when they declared that they were going to carry out regime change and they destabilized an entire region. Assad, Bashar al-Assad, the president of Syria, has no right to govern his own country. And they sponsored a dirty war there. And they handed over large swaths of Syria to al-Qaeda and ISIS, which then Secretary of State John Kerry said they were watching advance as a means of trying to force Assad to the negotiating table. And they're doing the same thing in Gaza. They're destabilizing that entire society, causing mass starvation. They don't understand why the aid isn't getting in and why it can't be distributed. How are you going to get aid into a society where there is no government,

where no police or municipal authorities are allowed to function? You can't do it. So the US through its regime change delusions is spawning genocide, starvation, because it will, it refuses to allow any legitimacy to the one group in Gaza that has a major mass constituency. So it's never going to work out. And we can listen to not just me. I mean, you don't have to trust me, the anti-Zionist. Listen to Yoram Hamo, who was just resigned this month as deputy to Jake Sullivan's counterpart in Israel, Netanyahu's national security advisor, Saki Hanegbi, someone who's very close to Netanyahu. Hamo said, continuing the war in Gaza with its current approach will not achieve anything. Those are his exact words in a letter he made to the press. And he said

that destroying Hamas is, in his words, doubtful. And the issue of hostages, if they continue with the current approach, will be a multi-year problem. So he's predicting that this war could go on for years with no strategic gains by Israel. U.S. intelligence has said that Israel has only destroyed something like 30% of Hamas military personnel, which I think is a gigantic overestimate. And here Jake Sullivan is still fostering the same delusions about eliminating Hamas. We have a photo I want to show you. I'm sure you have seen it. This gets back to what we started discussing earlier.

Now, is that Israeli female soldiers being arrested by Hamas soldiers in a legitimate military operation? Is this what they say are girls who were assaulted sexually? Yeah, and you can see to the left is Nama Levy. And the back of her, you can see on her hands is blood, and the blood is spilling down the back of her pants. Now, there's another photo that's been used by the Associated Press and so many other media organizations of her being shoved into a van and taken back to Gaza. And you can see the blood on the back of her pants. And they, you know, the line that the Israelis pumped out through their willing dupes in Western media was that that blood was the result of being sexually violated.

And now we know from that video that it's false. They were abducted, they were taken at the Nahal'az military base. They were on base. Their job is spotters. As female soldiers, their job was to watch the frontier area between Gaza and what is Israel

and to call in any terrorist incursions in their view. And of course, they completely failed on that day. Then the men in their unit jumped through windows and ran away like little cowards and left them there to be abducted and taken back to Gaza. Now, they're not girls, they're adult women. Israel conscripts women into its military, just like men. If you're going tocripts women into its military just like men. If you're going to conscript women into your military and use them to hold millions of people in an open air prison, then don't come crying when those people strike back and when they bang on their prison walls. But that's what Israel's doing. It plays the victim and the sadistic victimizer at the same time. What has become to the liberal Israel, the pro-free speech, pro-LGBTQ rights, pro-independent judiciary that we in the United

States thought was emblematic of the Israeli public until the theocrats of the Netanyahu regime took over? Well, the liberal Israel is still there in many ways. I mean, Israel is a perfect portrait of liberal fascism. In December, a group of openly gay Israeli soldiers, they serve openly in the Israeli military as do trans soldiers. Vegan soldiers get PVC non-leather boots to accommodate their veganism. I'm not even joking. A group of openly gay soldiers after destroying a neighborhood in the northern Gaza city of Beit Hanun held a ad hoc gay pride parade on the beach, waving rainbow flags. So this is really how liberalism is being weaponized to cover fascism, that Israel's fighting to defend these

values that we hold so dear and cherish in our cosmopolitan cities, but the only way they can do it is by the mass elimination of this traditional society, of this Muslim, highly religious society. And so what we see with Israel is the paradox of liberalism in its terminal phase. Meanwhile, the contradiction is so extreme. The liberal contradiction is so extreme that so many Israelis are saying why do we even have to pretend to be democratic we just want to push the button now why do we have to pretend to negotiate for a Palestinian state and so they turn to the Jewish nationalist camp which promises an immediate end not only an end to the Palestinian problem but deliverance with the arrival of the Messiah and a Jewish promised land

with the ushering in of the third temple. What will become of these liberals in society? These gay kids are not liberals if they're engaged in the same type of slaughter in the name of gay rights. I don't even get the connection there. If they're engaged in the same type of slaughter in the name of gay rights. I don't even get the connection there. If they're engaged in the same type of slaughter that Ben-Gavir and Galant and Netanyahu have ordered them to perpetrate. I mean, stated differently, the idea of a liberal, open, speak your mind, live your life, say what you want, Israel, can't be the Israel of post-October 7th, can it? Well, it's certainly going to move towards Jewish nationalism. Netanyahu's kind of holding, papering over the contradictions by being secular, but also someone who's appealing to the

national right, which is dominant in Israel. But after him, you're going to have someone wearing a kippah, someone who speaks a more openly religious fascistic language that can appeal to Washington and Brussels in the same way. And, you know, if we go back to 1948, who was responsible for the Nakba? It was the Labor Party of David Ben-Gurion, the Labor party that set up Jews only Kibbutzim as their model of socialism, a kind of racist socialism. I don't know, you could call it a national socialism. They were responsible for every war crime leading up to 2009, almost every war crime, except for a brief period during the late 70s and early 80s under Begin and Ariel Sharon, later in the early 2000s, who is kind of following the labor model of hard separation with the Palestinians.

So it's really the left of the Zionist spectrum that's responsible for so many war crimes. And, you know, you have a giant gay pride parade in Tel Aviv, but those men who are dancing, throbbing in the sun in their tank tops or shirtless, those are soldiers or former soldiers who have the same eliminationist attitude as other Israeli soldiers. are you saying that whoever replaces Netanyahu, Benny Gantz, Naftali Bennett, Itamar Ben-Gabir, whoever it might be, would introduce a theocracy worse than what Netanyahu has introduced at the present? Well, to introduce a theocracy, you need to eliminate the power of the Supreme Court, which is what Netanyahu was trying to do. And he was catering to the religious nationalist elements that represent the incipient majority of Jewish Israelis. He's failed so far, but that day is coming. The issue really is PR. And when you have someone like Benny Gantz, who Washington favors, who's just as sadistic towards Palestinians as Netanyahu is, but who doesn't have the background in the dominantly couped party, he won't be able to form

a coalition. Netanyahu could barely form a coalition. The last coalition that Benny Gantz formed was with a member of the religious nationalist camp, Naftali Bennett. So there's no Israel without this kind of, you could almost call it a kind of Jewish fascism, a Jewish supremacism that seeks the total, not just the total elimination of Palestinians, but the deliverance of the Jewish people through the arrival of the Moshiach, the Messiah, through the destruction of the Al-Aqsa compound and its replacement with a third Jewish temple, the destruction of the third holiest site in Islam, something that would necessarily trigger a regional religious war.

Didn't Ben-Gavir himself state in the past 24 hours that the government of Israel owns the Al-Aqsa Mosque? This is inconceivable. It's not inconceivable that he said it. It's inconceivable that it could be true. Yeah. Ben-Gavir's got Netanyahu, as I said before, by the short and curlies. So not only did Ben-Gavir say that, he's pledging to go back to stage another incursion to the Al-Aqsa compound with fanatics like himself. He started doing this. Remember, October 7th, the operation was called Al-Aqsa Flood. It was a direct response to these provocations that Itamar Ben-Revir has been staging. Not only has he done that, he's sort of provoked Netanyahu into his first most openly religious display. Netanyahu laid tefillin. He wore tefillin that Jews put on when they pray at the Western Wall,

that ultra-Orthodox Jews. Is Netanyahu a religious Jew? He is not a religious, he is secular, as secular as I am, or, you know, any secular Jew in the United States has never involved himself in these kind of performative religious displays. But this is obviously a response to the power that Ben-Vir has over his coalition and that this Jewish nationalist element has in Israeli society. And it's because of Ben-Vir that Netanyahu cannot end this war. One reason why he can't end the war, because his coalition would collapse and then he'd go to trial.

So do you think he was being truthful when he was asked by a reporter last weekend, how long do you think the war will go? And he just flippantly said another 10 years. It could go another 10 years. I think Israel is in an endless war. It underestimated its perceived enemies among the Palestinians and in the axis of resistance who can go that long as well. It's desperately trying to cut off supply lines in the southern Philadelphia corridor between Egypt and Rafah.

But it's unclear if that will even make a difference. And as I mean, I quoted before, Yoram Hamo, the outgoing deputy national security advisor to Netanyahu, who said, current approach has failed and we're going to have to go several more years. So just imagine what that will do to Israel economically. It's already in terrible economic shape. Investors are pulling out in droves. Why would you want to invest in a war zone? The population of the South and North isn't going home. The population in Northern Israel was just subjected to a storm of rockets and mortars over the past several days, and they responded by assassinating some low-level Hezbollah operatives. But nothing is coming back together right now.

The only thing that seems to matter is Netanyahu's own political future. I want to play for you a very small but very telling clip of the valedictorian at Morehouse College, a young man of whom I've never heard, but he's very articulate, named D'Angelo Fletcher, who calls for, in his valedictory, I don't know if you've seen this, Max, he calls for an immediate and permanent ceasefire. Look at who's sitting next to him and watch that person's reaction. It is my stance as a Morehouse man, nay, as a human being,

to call for an immediate and permanent ceasefire in the Gaza Strip. He was either out of it or just being overly polite. It's absurd to see Joe Biden applauding to that. No, I think it might have been part of his strategy. Because if you watch Biden's speech, he did call for a cessation of hostilities in Gaza. But at the same time, he repeated the same tired, discredited propaganda about having seen video of atrocities that never took place, having seen photos of atrocities on October 7th that were reminiscent of lynchings before this black audience that never took place. Biden was creating the context for continuing the genocide in his speech while claiming that

he wanted a cessation of hostilities. It's all just about mollifying an important part of the base that he needs to get reelected, which is why he went there in the first place, because look at his numbers among Black men. They're lower than any Democratic sitting president that I can think of in my lifetime. Many of them are actually even going to Trump. Right. And so this is Obama levels of an Obama level of moral fraud that we're witnessing from Biden. Last question for you, Max. Why are Arab leaders in the region

not helping the Palestinians? Because they're not Arab leaders. They are neocolonial puppets whose countries could be brought to the ground because they depend so much, so heavily on Western and specifically USA. Look at King Abdullah in Jordan as a perfect example. He's half British. He's a blue eyed, half British king from the Hashemite dynasty, ruling over a bunch of warehouse Palestinians who are the majority.

His country's economy is completely dependent, entirely dependent on Western aid and NGO money. Egypt, Abdel Fattah el-Sisi came into power in a Western-backed coup, killed in prison the first democratically elected Egyptian leader in 5,000 years, Mohamed Morsi, who represented a constituency in the Muslim Brotherhood that was supportive of the Palestinian struggle. And, you know, on and on and on. And the Syrian government, Syria as the last independent Arab country, is so badly weakened by over a decade of dirty war and sanctions that the best it can do is to host Iranian military operatives and allow transfer of arms and other logistical needs to Hezbollah, but there's not much else they can do. So when you're in the Gaza Strip

and you talk to people there, the anger is actually more extreme at Arabs. They say, you know, the Israelis stabbed us in the front. The Israelis punched us in the front, but it's the Arabs who are stabbing us in the back. There's no one else. And, you know, you can ask the population of Pakistan, a nuclear armed country. It's not an Arab country, but it's a Muslim country. They say, why are we not sending a peacekeeping force to Gaza with our nuclear-armed, powerful military? So everybody feels sort of disenfranchised across the Muslim world right now, except for perhaps those in Yemen and in the axis of resistance.

Max Blumenthal, always a pleasure, my dear friend. Your knowledge is so so vast I've called it here and elsewhere encyclopedic it truly is thank you for your time my best to your family have a great holiday weekend thanks as always judge and sorry about

the construction site oh quite alright it's a pleasure to see your face and hear your voice thank you my friend appreciate it sure so tomorrow just trying to Pleasure to see your face and hear your voice. Thank you, my friend. Appreciate it. Sure. So tomorrow, just trying to check the schedule here. I hope we have Colonel Wilkerson at 3 p.m., but we do have end of the day, end of the week, almost end of the month, the boys,

Larry Johnson and Ray McGovern, the Intelligence Community Roundtable at 4 p.m. Judge Napolitano for judging freedom. Thank you.