Judging Freedom - Max Blumenthal: The Political Upheavals of 2024.

Episode Date: January 3, 2025

Max Blumenthal: The Political Upheavals of 2024.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 Friday, January 3rd, 2025. Happy New Year to you. Max Blumenthal joins us. Max, a pleasure, my dear friend. Sorry we kept you waiting. Thank you very much for being with us. Thank you for all you've done. Thank you for our personal friendship. Thank you for our professional collaboration in this venue and in others. Thank you for my friendship with your wife and with your great colleague, Aaron Maté. It's been a great 2024. I hope we can do even more of this in 2025. Thank you, Judge. It's a pleasure to be able to pick your brain. Your knowledge of these things is encyclopedic. Let me start off with what I've been asking many of our people in the past two days, particularly those that I haven't had a chance to question

in the past two weeks because of the holidays. Israel today, how is it economically? How is it politically? Is its euphoria over the fall of Assad to be short-lived? Well, Israel is, it depends on which Israel we're talking about here. Okay. The Israel of Netanyahu, which is, you know, certainly less than 30% of the population, but a hardcore base that supports what Netanyahu is doing, is euphoric about the political moment. And Netanyahu has been promising

this regional realignment, and that seems to be taking place. Now, greater Israel has expanded into Quneitra, Syria, where they've taken over six dams. They're taking Syria's water sources, which also encompass something like 40% of the water supply to Jordan. This is an enormous gain for a settler colonial expansionist entity like Israel. As Netanyahu just went through a prostate procedure where he had his prostate removed. A lot of his fanboys are praising his steely stoicism as he fights through this operation while continuing to persecute the assault on Gaza and all of Israel's enemies, ramping up the war on Yemen. Inside the ranks of the Israeli military,

the picture is a lot different. A lot of reservist units are extremely depleted. Guys just simply aren't showing up anymore. This has been reported by Israeli networks like Channel 13 and Channel 12. There is a spike in suicides within the Israeli military. There are thousands of injuries that are just being reported. We're talking about crippling and injuries. Israel is still losing soldiers on an almost daily basis in the Gaza Strip. Obviously, they are killing a lot more. There, Channel 12 in Israel just reported that Israel's failing to kill as many members of Hamas's al-Qassam brigades as those that are being recruited and are actively joining its ranks.

And at least 23,000 resistance fighters are currently operating in the Gaza Strip. The economic situation is also dire. Israel's credit ratings have not been upgraded. The foreign direct investment isn't returning, but it may in the future. So it's certainly a mixed bag, but Netanyahu has seemingly consolidated his legacy, and we haven't even reached its culmination. I think there's a plausible theory going around. You'll see it among pundits in more liberal Israeli publications like Haaretz, that Netanyahu now, because of this string of perceived victories, which could wind up being overextension and Pyrrhic victories, but because of that, he is reluctant to see the hostages and captives in the has the political latitude to attack Yemen, use it as a laboratory for what he wants to do in Iran, and then pivot to attacking Iran's nuclear sites. And Axios has just reported that Biden actually had an attack on Iranian nuclear sites put on his desk by none other than NSC director Jake Sullivan. So I think Israel is heading for a very maximalist position as long as Netanyahu is in power.

Do you think that President Trump will give Netanyahu whatever he wants, or do you think at some point he'll say enough is enough? Well, Trump doesn't want, my sense of trump which isn't exactly based on hanging out at mar-a-lago and having private conversations with you to mar-a-lago please bring me i don't think it'll happen go ahead yeah i you're more likely than i am to get there um based on second-hand, my understanding of the art of the deal, he doesn't want an open-ended war with Iran as soon as he enters the administration, where it's unclear how it will end up, where Iran is fighting for its very existence or the

survival of its revolutionary government in which the IRGC takes total power. He doesn't want that. Netanyahu actually throughout his own political career has avoided open-ended conflicts and getting involved in very big wars. However, the regional war picture is working out very well for Netanyahu. And he definitely wants Trump to do that. So it's a question of Trump being able to put his foot down against an omnipotent lobby that seems to have such control over him that, I mean, I just mentioned Mar-a-Lago. J.D. Vance and Donald Trump were just photographed together, seated at a table at Mar-a-Lago. I think it was New Year's Eve with who? Miriam Adelson, who is basically Netanyahu's top cutout in the US. Who might have been there to collect her debt of $100

million for what she donated to Trump. Your colleague, Kit Klarenberg, has an interesting piece about HTS as a tool of the British. And I think you wanted to talk about the UK-Syria project as well. What was the involvement of the UK in the demise of Assad? Well, Kit has a similar piece for us at The Gray Zone about UK involvement here. And the UK has played a seminal role in Syria. It's been as aggressive in Syria as it has been in Ukraine. Syria is its former property. It's what it considers its former colonial property through the Sykes-Picot Great Game. So Britain not only pumped weapons into Syria, lots of small arms during the dirty war against Assad, but it provided... Basically, there was an inflection point in the dirty war in 2015, where so much arms had flowed into the so-called rebels, including

tow missile systems, that they were actually doing serious damage to the armored columns of the Syrian Arab army and penetrating deep into the coastal heartland of where the Alawite base lives. And they were threatening genocide against the Alawites and they would then overrun Damascus. Basically what just happened almost happened in 2015, but Russia stepped in. And this was after the so-called rebels led by the Al-Qaeda aligned Jabhat Fatah al-Sham umbrella coalition took over the Idlib province in Northwestern Syria. So Idlib basically just became like this holding pen for all the rebels who were defeated in the rest of Syria. And throughout this eight

or nine year period, after the dirty war failed, they were preparing for the offensive that they launched in December with the help of the Turkish military, NATO. And what Kit documents is how when HTS, which is the rebranded version of Al-Qaeda's local chapter in Syria, led by Mohammed Jolani, took power in Idlib, Britain stepped in to provide them with basically a parallel governing infrastructure, including supporting the Syrian White Helmets, also supported by the US and Qatar, basically as their mash unit, but also as their propaganda unit to sell atrocity propaganda to the West, as well as the Free Syrian Police, which even the BBC have exposed as a parallel arm of Al-Qaeda, basically feeding men to and from Al-Qaeda's ranks under the guise

of a free police force that was funded through bags of cash delivered by British intelligence. And then the whole propaganda apparatus that sprouted up in Idlib, it was paid for by British intelligence through the foreign office. And what they did was they conferred upon HTS a sense of credibility, like they were a viable government that could replace the Assad government. And HTS in turn did not attack any of these supposed moderate forces sponsored by the UK and US because they knew that if they ever came into power in Damascus, the UK would follow as we saw them do and recognize them as the new de facto government, the Al-Qaeda Brooks Brothers unit. And it's happened. So if you consider it scandalous or dangerous that the former founder,

the founder of Al-Qaeda in Syria, who is the former deputy head of ISIS, has just taken power through violence in Damascus, not elections or any real people's rebellion. And he has just been meeting with foreign office officials, the top State Department official handling the Middle East, Barbara Leaf, and just today, Annalena Baerbock, the foreign secretary of Germany in a white pantsuit. If you think that's scandalous, this has been going on for years below the surface through a secret program, and Kate Klarenberg, I think, played a seminal role just now in exposing it. So the man who used to cut people's heads off and hands off, Al Jelani, here's what he looks and sounds like today. Chris, back to back, cuts number one and two.

Russia is an important country and is considered the second most powerful country in the world. And there are deep strategic interests between Syria and Russia. There are deep strategic interests between Syria and Russia. Syrian weapons are all Russian. Many of the power plants are Russian with Russian expertise, and there are great cultural ties between Syria and Russia. We do not want Russia to exit Syria, as some would like. Syria cannot continue without relations with a large regional country like Iran, but they must be based on diplomatic relations, respect for the sovereignty of the two countries,

non-interference in internal affairs, and only relations that are compatible with the interests of the two countries without interfering in the matters of sectarian hatreds. We hope that the new American administration will not follow in the same approach as the previous administration in continuing these sanctions and will lift them without entering into negotiations or bargaining. From central casting is training him and dressing him yeah he's getting good press in the uk too it looks like someone like qatar or turkey hired some

pr firms they're working with him he first took on the zelensky uh olive b shirt. Now he's wearing a three-piece suit. He's even put on a tie, which is something uncharacteristic of an Islamist leader. It's considered a Western affectation. This is part of the advice. He's making nice sounds toward Russia, which still occupies the Humeim air base and has a naval base in Tartus, but it's begun moving its planes toward Libya, possibly as part of a deal. What he said about Iran is clearly designed to relieve pressure. But what you can see internally from Jolani's goon squads is they're hunting down anyone they consider to be affiliated with Hezbollah as Israeli forces would and throwing them in torture centers. And they're waging a sectarian campaign of

intimidation and mass murder, increasingly mass murder on the Alawite coastal areas, consistent with their Wahhabi, jihadi, sectarian ideology. And Klarenberg reports that Mike Pompeo authorized indirect aid, indirect aid, but ultimately originating with the American taxpayer to these creeps, and that Americans gave them, I don't know what Americans did this, I guess CIA, a pep talk before the final push of Assad out of power. This was all, you know, this all began in 2018 when the U.S. through secret channels started rehabilitating Jolani as it prepared to make him the future ruler of Syria. And James Jeffries, who is Trump's point man on this project, was actually very close to Erdogan and Turkey and has been throughout his

career. But you can't put lipstick on a pig. I don't know. There's some other more kind of crude ways of putting it, but this is fundamentally an Al-Qaeda project, a Syrian Muslim Brotherhood project, which is not just sectarian, but is beginning to de-Arabize and de-nationalize Syria and sees it more as part of a broader Islamist nexus than as an actual country with people and citizens who can be pluralistic or even secular. Now we can just look at what Jolani is doing with his own military when he's just appointed as top commanders in his defense forces, a Uyghur from Xinjiang, China, an Albanian, and a Jordanian. And he's prepared to make the possibly 30% of his HTS military forces who are foreign fighters, citizens of Syria. Meanwhile, he's ended Syria's secular education system

and replaced it with an explicitly Ikhwani Islamist system and replaced words like homeland with Islam. So what he's doing is something that supports the Zionist project, which aims for a religious war between Jews and Muslims. Syria is no longer a country. It's simply a nebulous part of Islamic lands. Its minorities don't count anymore if they are not Muslim, and therefore they're not going to be able to fight for their country. And as the country's divided up, it's only those who are loyal to Jolani and his Wahhabi-ite vision who actually matter. This is the perfect scenario for the Greater Israel Project and for the United States, which seeks to also use-

Where does President Erdogan of Turkey fit in? when Turkey began stealing entire factories and shops from Syrian businessmen in Aleppo and taking them over the border into Turkey. But now Aleppo has basically been taken by Turkey. It's something that was always considered part of it by those with the Ottomanite perspective. And Turkey is playing such a major role in this that the head of the Turkish MIT, who is a figure very closely associated with Turkish nationalism, actually made kind of a victory walk alone past Damascus' Umayyad Mosque in central Damascus just a couple days after Yolani's men stormed in and basically showcased his role as the mastermind behind this whole operation. And of course, Turkey is a NATO

state that hosted the Incirlik Air Base, a US air base where most of the weapons flowed in to Syria, including to ISIS. So Erdogan is playing a central role here. Erdogan himself is said to be very sick. He himself is under the control of various forces. But the Turkish AKP, along with the Qataris, are the real managers of this project. And the second line is the US, Israel, which is the major beneficiary, and the UK and NATO. And look who they're propping up. Look at what they're doing as the US media freaks out over a supposed ISIS attack in the middle of New Orleans. It's the former deputy head of ISIS. I mean, it really raises questions about the purpose of the whole so-called war on terror. Right, right. Last thing I want to ask you about, because I know you're hot about this. CNN's Clarissa Ward and this fake prison release. What is this all about? Well, Clarissa Ward got caught in one of many hoax stories that came out of the Sednaya prison, which was no doubt

a horrific prison and which contained political prisoners, which was apparently a site of torture. But we were treated to so much propaganda in order to distract from the reality of the Al-Qaeda Brooks Brothers unit taking over Syria. And to win sympathy for them as supposed liberators, we were told that 100,000 Syrians were missing and many of them might be found in secret underground cells in the Sednaya prison. Then we were told that they had all been disappeared by being placed in vats of acid. That's why no one could find them. Then it was revealed that there were no underground chambers. We were told that there were these human crushing devices, which turned out to be cardboard bailers. We were told that children

and women were liberated from Sednaya prison, including little toddlers. Then we learned that actually the video that showed children and women were children and women being terrorized and intimidated by Jolani's men at a charity. And we were lied to. And then finally, you know, the icing on the cake was regime changed crazed CNN foreign correspondent, Clarissa Ward, who's basically a news actress. Is that, is that her Max? There she is supposedly participating in the liberation of the final prisoner from Sednaya, the last prisoner who turned out to have been a corrupt local Syrian government official under the Assad government, who is basically trying to win sympathy so he wouldn't be tortured by Jelani's men. And he crawls out from under a little blanket

as though he hadn't seen the light in three months. The whole thing was completely implausible, but Clarissa Ward played along with it. She should have known it was a hoax, but she wanted to win another Peabody Award. And she said it was the most significant experience she'd ever had as a journalist. And the whole thing turned out to be fake. And she has faced no repercussions as a CNN journalist. There's no accountability in our media at all for these people because they've played such an important role as the stenographers of the State Department, CIA, and Pentagon for so many years. Anyone who did that at the gray zone, I mean, as a small independent site,

I would have a hard time continuing to work with them. But that's not the purpose of CNN. Max, thank you for your time. And thank you for your extraordinary knowledge of all of these things. And thank you for accommodating us at this late hour. Much appreciated, my friend. I hope we can see you again next week. Absolutely. Looking forward to the next one, Judge. Thank you. Have a great weekend. You too. And coming up on Monday at 8 in the morning, Alistair Crook at 10 in the morning, Ray McGovern at 1130 in the morning, Larry Johnson, and maybe some surprises in the afternoon. Judge Napolitano for Judging Freedom. I'm out.