Judging Freedom - Max Blumenthal: The Zionist View of Human Life

Episode Date: October 23, 2024

Max Blumenthal: The Zionist View of Human LifeSee 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 Wednesday, October 23rd, 2024. My dear friend, Max Blumenthal of the Gray Zone joins us now. Max, a pleasure. Thank you for coming here. Max, what is the latest on your colleague, Jeremy Lafredo, who was arrested, abused, and detained by the IDF in Israel, and then released on the order of two judges? I just communicated with Jeremy. He's on his way to the Apple store in New York. So he's back. He needs a new phone because the Israelis have hacked into his phone. They've hacked into his laptop, changed the operating system. Who knows what they're attempting to do to him and violate his privacy and those of his colleagues, including myself.

And, you know, he was subjected to what I would call a violent, fairly violent fishing expedition for the past week or so or more. Jeremy, first of all, has done several reporting trips to Israel, Palestine for the gray zone, and his reporting is some of the most vital reporting that has been produced by any independent reporter, which is consistent with his whole record of reporting from across the U.S. was on his way into the occupied West Bank when he was picked up, not picked up, but actually arrested at a checkpoint along with several other reporters, independent reporters. They were abused, roughed up. Some were beaten. One had a gun drawn on him or two guns drawn on him. They were blindfolded, driven around roughly in a van. The rest were let go after 11 hours. Jeremy was held for three days in solitary confinement with very little food or water and then accused of supporting an enemy during wartime for his report for the gray zone, documenting where two missile strikes by Iran hit in Israel. And this was reporting that other reporters have done, including Israeli

reporters. We've seen Israeli publications publish satellite photos of where the missiles hit. So it wasn't as though what he was showing would have helped Iran recalibrate, but that's what he was accused of for just simply reporting on a vital news event and showing that Iran was targeting military and intelligence targets. Nothing he did violated the military censorship policy of Israel. That was the ruling of two judges, but the police held him in the country until October 20th to investigate him, to hack into his devices, called him in for two interrogations, very long interrogations, and finally informally deported him. The State Department was asked about this during a briefing.

They made no statement as to whether he was wrongfully detained or abused. This is the first U.S. reporter to be treated this way or arrested since October 7th, but they were clearly monitoring the situation because they knew he was on a plane home. So thankfully, Jeremy is safe back home and we can see the contempt that Israel has for critical reporting. I mean, we can also see it in the fact that they've murdered over 120 journalists in the besieged Gaza Strip. And this is, you know, what Jeremy's treatment was consistent with that. Were he Palestinian? Even if he had American citizenship, I would be really

concerned that his treatment would have been far, far worse. Consider what Israel did to the Palestinian American journalist, Shireen Abu Akleh, killed her with a bullet to the head by a sniper in the occupied West Bank. Do you think that Jeremy would have been freed without an independent judiciary, which of course we know before October 7th, Prime Minister Netanyahu attempted to recraft and from which he attempted to remove the independents? Well, it's really the Supreme Court in Israel that they were targeting. So it's unclear if his case would have gone to the Supreme Court or not. What they charged him with carried a maximum penalty of life in prison or death. Oh, good God. So I think that the judges were alarmed that an American reporter, I don't know what their thinking was,

would have been charged with that. But what happened fortunately for Jeremy was in his first hearing, a mainstream Israeli reporter came forward and testified that he had embedded Jeremy's entire video in one of his articles on Jeremy's arrest, and the military censor did not protest because it wasn't a violation. And that pretty much destroyed their whole case. But then another judge gave the police all this time to hold him in the country and continue to subject him to interrogations. He'll provide all the details himself, but what I gathered was that they actually believed he was some kind of Iranian spy. And we have no relationship with Iran on any level at the gray zone. So I wonder where they got that from. You know, one thing I've been thinking about is did they get that from a smear piece in the

Washington Post, which attempted with absolutely no evidence to connect us to Iran and Russia. I just don't know. But that was the sort of Damocles hanging over Jeremy's head for days is, will they actually accuse me of spying based on nothing? They went in his devices and obviously there was nothing there. What is the, switching gears off of Jeremy, significance in your view, either militarily or geopolitically, to the killing of Yahya Senwar? Well, I don't know if there's a military significance there. And it's so absurd the way the US media has been framing this along the same lines as the Biden administration, which is that this might provide an opportunity for peace, and that Senoir somehow was the obstacle. When it's obvious who the obstacle is, it's Netanyahu, whose house was just targeted in Caesarea by a Hezbollah drone, which actually directly struck his bedroom. Netanyahu wasn't there.

Netanyahu is the one who keeps moving the goalposts, adding new terms, refusing to negotiate, to keep the slaughter going, to preserve his own career and his own coalition. And Yahya Senwar, while the U.S. claims to have been assisting Israel in hunting down this terror mastermind, he wasn't killed in a targeted attack. He was killed by accident because he was actually out in the field fighting with his men while Netanyahu is constantly waddling into a luxury bunker. He was doing the opposite of what Israel was portraying him as,

some kind of coward hiding in tunnels with hostages. And this is consistent with Yahya Senwar's entire life, which he dedicated to resisting siege, occupation, and empire. And if you want to understand Senoir, well one thing you could do is try to read his novel that he smuggled out of prison, which contains a fairly tender but also harrowing recollection of life growing up extremely poor, dependent entirely on the UN for food and housing in a refugee camp in the Gaza Strip, which also shows the horrors his family was subjected to under Israeli occupation after 1967 in Gaza. But you could also look into how he negotiated his own way out of an Israeli prison where he had been sentenced to several consecutive life terms

for killing Israeli spies in Gaza. And it was through negotiation. It was through the art of diplomacy. This is not someone who believed in killing for its own sake. It's someone who actually wanted to liberate his people. And he did so through the capturing of Gilad Shalit, an Israeli soldier in 2006. And in 2011, Sinwar actually masterminded the release of 1,200 Palestinian prisoners in exchange for Shalit. That became the basis for October 7th. And between 2011 and 2023, October 7th, 2023, Israel killed many of those who negotiated that deal, assaulted Gaza many times, refused to negotiate. The US kept Gaza under siege, refused to recognize Hamas. And Sinwar was always trying to get out from under this dynamic. And he said, he determined the only way to do that is to take hostages and spur a deal.

But because Netanyahu has refused, Senwar was found out there fighting with his men. I think he understood from October 7th on that he had to submit to his fate. And he knew that he would probably die at a certain point if this deal wasn't made. When Israel, I'll use their phrase, decapitates leadership like Senwar or Nazarala, is this a substantial setback for Hamas or Hezbollah, or is it mainly just a 48-hour bragging rights for the IDF and the Netanyahu administration? Well, first of all, the way that Senwar was killed was a major boon to Hamas and consolidated Senwar as a global resistance hero. Whether you like him or not, that's the way most people in the world, the global majority is going to see him. Why? Because after a firefight with Israelis

and after his killing in which the Israelis couldn't face him directly, killed him with a sniper than a tank shell, one of the soldiers was so proud of his killing that he sent the picture to his fiancee, who then put it on her, I think her Instagram page, and then it went viral, pictures of his corpse. And then the Israeli army decided to release the footage of Sinwar's final moments, thinking this will show him alone in a pathetic state. It showed him slumped over in a chair missing part of his right arm with a kufiya wrapped over his face in battle dress and he flings a stick at the quadrocopter filming him. This was the ultimate show of defiance for Palestinians and

for anyone who believes in resisting the maniacal Goliath that has been crushing Palestinians with its jackboot for decades. And so the move on the part of the Israeli military to release that footage could not have been more self-destructive or foolish. Now, consider the whole history of what Israel's been doing since October 7th and before. They killed before Sinwar Saleh Arori, who was the main negotiator, and Ismail Haniyeh, who replaced Arori

as the main negotiator on all the deals that were to be carried out in Doha. They're constantly killing political leadership to make negotiation impossible and to render the only solution a military one. And before that, in 2003, remember, they killed Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, who founded Hamas. In his wheelchair, they killed him with a missile strike. They also killed Rantisi, who was the political leader of Hamas. And then they

killed Salah Shahada, who was the replacement, no, who was leading the military wing. They just keep killing and killing and killing. And where did it lead from 2003 to the present? Hamas continued to strengthen and fortify itself, increased its recruitment, increased its political power among a besieged, largely refugee base. And it's only going to increase from this point on. As even the spokesman of the Israeli military, Daniel Hagari, acknowledged Hamas is an idea and you can't wipe out an idea. Before we transition to another topic, I neglected to mention this when we were talking about Jeremy Lafredo, but I am inviting him to come on the show. I know he's your colleague and maybe you can help us reach him.

I would love for him to be able to tell his version of what, of what happened to him. I think our viewers would like to, would like to watch and hear that. Switching gears a little bit. How do you read the significance of the intelligence leaks this week? One showing CIA efforts to foment a coup in Bangladesh. Got very little publicity here. Honestly, I wouldn't have known about it if I hadn't read it on the Gray Zone. The other, which did get a lot of publicity, some of which has died down, revealing American intel's understanding of Israeli plans to attack Iran.

Well, yeah, really quickly on Bangladesh, where the main opposition party has just been banned in a real show of democracy by the new leadership. Muhammad Yunus, who has come in, is a close ally and acolyte of Hillary Clinton and the Clinton Global Initiative. He is basically a global loan shark who made almost a billion dollars selling microloans, which is an extremely predatory form of lending that somehow cast him as some kind of global hero. He replaced the elected leader of Bangladesh, who is said to be too close to India. She had refused to allow a military base. And we uncovered documents, Kit Klarenberg in particular uncovered documents from the

International Republican Institute, which is a wing of the regime change arm of the U.S. government, the National Endowment for Democracy, which itself was spun out of the CIA during the 1980s. And what they do is, I think most people watching this know, they pay opposition groups, they fund civil society organizations, media, even musicians like rappers, performers, in order to galvanize protest activity, generate color revolutions. And that is precisely what they did in Bangladesh to remove the elected leadership. And one of the things that really stuck out to us in these documents was how

the International Republican Institute, which is run purportedly by the Republican Party, saw the LGBTQIA community and minorities and rappers as key to destabilizing the government. And they actually used the term destabilize. And at one point, U.S. embassy personnel were taken to a literal drag show in Bangladesh that was sponsored by the International Republican Institute, which means by you, the U.S. taxpayer. And this was considered part of their destabilization activities.

So where are the congressional Republicans? Where is the Freedom Caucus on this? I mean, this is U.S. tax dollars literally. Where is the Christian Nationalist? That's the Speaker of the House of Representatives. Yeah, I mean, I don't know. Maybe Marjorie Taylor Greene hasn't heard about this, but we'd think there'd be like more outrage.

This is a pretty explosive piece, and it definitely reverberated throughout the region. We've been hearing back from our friends there. And on the Iran leaks, I mean, it's shocking to me, first of all, that there have been so few resignations from the State Department and the Pentagon when the U.S. is sponsoring this overtly genocidal operation. Yesterday, we saw images of a little girl with her head blown off, children in their diapers killed as Israel's openly ethnically cleansing the Jabalia camp in the north. But somebody leaked documents showing that the U.S. was spying on Israel and its plans to attack Iran. And that the U.S. had been closely monitoring Israeli preparations and drills for attacking Iran. And so that in itself is highly significant.

These documents are really all we have to stop this coming Israeli assault, which could quickly spiral out of control. And one of the things that stuck out to me in those documents was that the U.S. judged that Israel was not likely to use nuclear weapons at this time. Really? So they're not likely to use them. That means they have them. And the Pentagon has confirmed that these documents are authentic. Therefore, the Pentagon has affirmed that Israel secretly possesses nuclear weapons and that it tests them in violation of international law and U.S. law, which means that it violates several U.S. arms export regulations and that the U.S. must, according to U.S. law, cut off arms exports to Israel. But of course, they're not going to do it

because as a U.S. aid administrator told her employees, her staff, according to a Politico report last week, the Israel is just too close of an ally for us to suspend arms. But that's that's that's pretty significant right there. The U.S. had never had always wanted to help Israel maintain its nuclear ambiguity ambiguity. And now it's out in the open. I want to go back to Gaza for a minute by playing Secretary Blinken from earlier today. Chris, cut number 16. Israel has achieved most of its strategic objectives when it comes to Gaza, all with the idea of making sure that October 7th could never happen again. In the space of a year,

it's managed to dismantle Hamas's military capacity. It's destroyed a bunch of its arsenal. It's eliminated its senior leadership, including most recently Yahya Sinwar. This has covered the cost, great cost, to Palestinian civilians in Gaza. Now is the time to turn those successes into an enduring strategic success. And there are really two things left to do. Get the hostages home and bring the war to an end with an understanding of what will follow. What is he talking about? Israel has achieved its objectives in Gaza. Is he talking about destruction of infrastructure or destruction of an idea? He doesn't know. He doesn't understand

what Israel's strategic objectives are. And so he's misleading the public in order to create the sense that he's there. This is his 11th trip. He's basically the angel of death. And every time he goes, there are new massacres and he does nothing to stop them, even though it could all end with a phone call. And so he's pleading with Israel and he's also trying to speak over Netanyahu's head to the Israeli public. But that's not what Israelis want. There's definitely a large sector of the Israeli public, that sector that protested Netanyahu before October 7th and has been out there protesting for a ceasefire that agrees with Blinken that Israel's done enough in Gaza. But the rest of the Israelis and in particular the leadership,

the political leadership in Netanyahu's cabinet, actually want the ethnic cleansing of Gaza, the destruction of the Palestinian nation, the end of the Palestinian struggle, and the permanent pacification of Gaza as the cradle of resistance so that it can establish a bulwark for this project of a new Middle East, which will include the Gulf monarchies, Saudi Arabia, UAE. And this is a project that actually Blinken and his team, including the Lebanon negotiator, who's an Israeli citizen, Amos Hochstein, have been pushing. So Blinken is, again, just providing cover for Israel to continue what we see on the ground in Jabalia right now. I mean, the plan is just there for everyone to see. The plan is being devised in Tel Aviv. It's not being devised in Washington. Washington is just playing the role of Israel's lawyer. And the plan is the general's plan as laid out by the ideologue of this war. The person who behind the scenes has really been driving the genocidal agenda by

putting forward these hardline blueprints. His name is Giora Eiland. He's a former brigadier general in the Israeli military who's housed at a state-funded think tank, the Institute for National Security Studies. And he is calling for Jabalia to be emptied of its population because it's the northernmost point in the Gaza Strip. It's a refugee camp. It is a base of resistance. Israel has failed to pacify it with three major military campaigns. The resistance in Jabalia is still fighting, but Israel is killing an average of 40 people there per day over the last 18 days. They are bombarding civilians at random. They're driving them out, forcing them out deliberately. And then what they're going to do is set up a quote unquote buffer zone,

make it a military closed zone, then replace it with military bases, and then continue pushing the population south below this so-called Netsarim corridor, which extends below Gaza City. And then they're going to move settlers in. The Likud party, Netanyahu has hosted a major conference on settling the Gaza Strip with seven members of his party who currently serve in Knesset. This is all happening before our eyes. And what is Blinken doing behind the scenes? According to Axios, he's putting forward a plan for the UAE and Israel to effectively establish a dictatorship in the Gaza Strip. There are several other plans calling for concentration camps to be set up across the Gaza

Strip by mercenary, run by mercenary firms that have CIA officers on their board, in which any person in Gaza who does not submit their biometric data will be shot. It's all out there. The Prime Minister's office, Netanyahu, has uploaded plans for a UAE-run dictatorship in Gaza to its own website. So whatever Blinken says, whatever he's saying there is he's asking us to believe him and not our two lion eyes. You mentioned Amos Hochstein. I'd like your thoughts on comments he made two days ago. Chris, cut number seven. This is my sixth or maybe seventh visit to Lebanon in the past year.

And while we spent 11 months containing the conflict, we were not able to resolve it. In each of my visits, I cautioned that the situation was urgent and the status quo was not sustainable. We were either going to reach a solution or things were going to escalate out of control. I stood at this very podium, time after time, including as recently as August, and cautioned about the urgency. A resolution was possible, but it was rejected. And the situation has escalated out of control as we feared that it could. What are your thoughts?

Well, it's a clear statement of failure. This failure did not arrive through incompetence. It arrived through connivance and deception because Hochstein, his job was to play Israel's lawyer vis-a-vis Lebanon and Hezbollah. And one thing is clear. Hezbollah never allowed the situation to get out of control. It had a very clear objective, which was to put pressure on Israel in the north to agree to a ceasefire in Gaza. It had a clear political objective. It was attacking military targets. There was nowhere near the level of civilian casualties in the north of Israel under Hezbollah fire that we see in Gaza. And Hezbollah has continued to target military facilities and only attacked Netanyahu's residents after he killed their leader and Yahya Senwar.

So what was Hochstein doing all that time? Was he putting pressure on Israel for a ceasefire? No. We've seen several reports in the Washington Post and Politico citing sources in the State Department declaring that Huckstein decided that Israel escalating in Lebanon was a good idea because crippling Hezbollah would lead to a new Middle East, essentially channeling Condoleezza Rice when she endorsed Israel's disastrous 2006 war on Lebanon, when she said that this will represent the birth pangs of a new Middle East. And again, that new Middle East is a totalitarian dictatorship run through Tel Aviv by Gulf monarchies and the United States, which will be imposed on an Arab people that wants to be simply liberated from neocolonialism and empire.

And he's rubber stamped it when it could have all been ended a long time ago, months and months and months ago with a simple U.S. arms embargo on Israel. It would have just ended right then and there. There would have been a ceasefire in Gaza. But the U.S. accepts the Israeli logic that Hamas and Hezbollah are simply terrorists that cannot be dealt with politically when Hamas and Hezbollah are constantly putting terms on the table that should be politically acceptable to any American leadership. Why are they not acceptable to an American leadership? Because they're not acceptable

to an Israeli leadership because they would mandate the creation of a Palestinian state. Oh, and the Israeli leadership, as we know, in those negotiations was never serious. They kept changing the goalposts. I've asked you this before, and I think I know the answer. Is there a statistically measurable, meaning more than just a few people, anti-war left or anti-war right in Israel? Anti-war. There's definitely not an anti-war right. The anti-war left in Israel that I knew when I was reporting from there, I assume I'm persona non grata, by the way, because of what just happened with Jeremy Loffredo. But what I've been hearing about the quote-unquote anti-war left that I knew,

which was anti-Zionist and which was tiny, like less than a thousand people, is that it really no longer exists and that many of them have folded into the broader liberal Zionist or Zionist left, which is simply protesting Netanyahu and wants a ceasefire solely because they care about Jewish lives and the hostages who have been left to languish in Gaza, not because they care about the video, which Israelis rarely see, of children being shredded day after day in this Holocaust imposed on Gaza. So there's absolutely no internal resistance. And what really is striking to me about this war is, number one, there are just no shortage of Jewish Israelis willing to carry out genocide at the most intimate level, including by raping male Palestinian prisoners, according to policy in torture camps, but also by pushing the buttons, pushing buttons where you see a granular pixelated image of a family's home and you push a button to destroy it and kill everyone inside. There are no shortage of Israelis, including young Israeli women who are willing to do that and do so gleefully.

And number two, you have this incipient messianic religious nationalist camp, which is coming into power, which is enthralled with the idea of genocide. And just to consider one incident, really horrifying incident, which took place in Gaza over the past year, the killing of seven World Central Kitchen members, including Americans, who had supposedly coordinated with the Israeli military. They were killed in their car, which was marked in a drone strike. The commanding officer who led that drone strike was a messianic religious nationalist who believes in blowing up the Al-Aqsa compound. I mean, these are the people actually making decisions on the ground. And the United States is allowing those people, the Ben-Gavirs, to actually have nuclear weapons. I mean, it's one of the most dangerous scenarios that the world has ever lived through. The fact that these messianic

psychopaths have nuclear weapons, over 200 of them. Wow. Max, thank you very much. Please let Jeremy know. And Jeremy, if you're watching on your new Apple device, you're welcome here. Please let him know that we'd like to have him on. Thank you for your time and your insight, Max. Much appreciated. Yeah, we'll make that happen, but I get the exclusive. Yes, you do. Of course. All the best, my friend. Take care, Judge. Thank you. A busy day coming up. At one o'clock this afternoon, the anti-war firebrand running for his old seat in Congress in Ohio, Dennis Kucinich, will be here at 2.20 this afternoon. Not here, but on George Galloway's YouTube channel.

Yours truly will be a guest of the anti-war firebrand, George Galloway. Back here at 3 o'clock, Phil Giraldi. Back here at three o'clock, Phil Giraldi. Still here at four o'clock, Aaron Maté. Judge Napolitano for judging freedom. Thank you.