Judging Freedom - Max Blumenthal: Trump and Ethnic Cleansing.

Episode Date: February 13, 2025

Max Blumenthal: Trump and Ethnic Cleansing.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 13th, 2025. Max Blumenthal joins us. Max, always a pleasure, my dear friend. Thank you very much for joining us. I basically want to talk to you about Donald Trump and ethnic cleansing. There are a lot of rabbit holes that we might go down, but what is your understanding of the geopolitical response to his nonsensical suggestion that the United States would buy and own the Gaza Strip? Well, the geopolitical response pertains most immediately, when you look beyond Gaza, it pertains most immediately to the Western allies. If you can even call them allies, you might even call them vassals, in the region, Egypt, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia. And behind that, the UAE, whose stance has been

a little bit more mysterious. Donald Trump is seeking to intimidate and bully the monarchies of Jordan and the Egyptian de facto military junta into accepting massive numbers of Palestinian ethnically cleansed Holocaust survivors. The Wall Street Journal has reported that the Egyptian leadership of Abdel Fattah al-Thissi and King Abdullah in Jordan are taking Trump's plan very seriously. King Abdullah met with Donald Trump, and it was very hard to watch this display of Abdullah failing to challenge Trump at all as Trump basically humiliated him and insulted his dignity and told him that he was going to accept large

numbers of Palestinians. That's because Abdullah had basically orders not to challenge or confront Trump directly because of Trump's mercurial personality, his vengeful tendencies, and to lean on Egypt to present a counterproposal where Jordan and Egypt will stand together supposedly against this ethnic cleansing plan, which is clearly being directed from Tel Aviv, by the way. Then that leaves Saudi Arabia. Saudi Arabia, under Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman did nothing of any substance to challenge Israel or the United States during the 15 months of genocide. If anything, it was quietly assisting, just as Jordan did when Jordan shot down Iranian ballistic missiles, which were part of Iran's retaliation against Israel's attacks on its sovereignty. And now they're paying the price for being the poodle, for their silence.

The lambs are being taken to the slaughterhouse. Donald Trump is telling Saudi Arabia that he will impose this plan on them. Remember when Mohammed bin Salman's clique danced with Donald Trump's inner circle back in 2017? They danced with swords in Riyadh. That was a time when the Saudi monarchy, the Saudi regime thought that they could deal with Donald Trump as equals and that they could have at least a mutually beneficial transactional relationship. Now they see that Donald Trump sees them as inferiors, has no regard for their sovereignty, and will push the Palestinian problem onto them. And that is when Mohammed bin Salman released what's known in Saudi Arabia now as the Dawn Statement statement declaring that there will be absolutely no normalization

with Israel without a Palestinian state with a capital in East Jerusalem, something that is absolutely unpalatable to Israel and the forces that control Donald Trump. Prince Turki al-Faisal, the longtime intelligence chief of Saudi Arabia Arabia, major CIA ally, appeared on Christiane Amanpour's program on CNN with a Kufiya headdress, sending a very strong statement that you rarely see from the Saudi regime. And what we're hearing now from Riyadh are echoes of King Faisal Abdul-Altiz, who was likely assassinated for his strong stance on Palestine in 1975 by his nephew, who had been spending a long time in the United States before the assassination, who had organized an oil embargo, an OPEC oil embargo of the United States in order to extract concessions from the U.S. and Israel to return the Sinai Peninsula to Egypt.

And this is what the Saudis and the Arabs, the Sunni regimes, could have and should have done during the 15 months of genocide in Gaza if they had been united, but they failed to do anything. They assisted the U.S., and now they're learning the lesson from Donald Trump, that if you show weakness and you give an inch, Donald Trump will take a mile, and that's what he is proceeding to do, which means the only forces that are truly in the way here are the resistance axes. I'm sure you have followed the Saudi denunciations of Benjamin Netanyahu, the personal denunciations of Benjamin Netanyahu, as you point out very late, because he made a joke on television, the joke, what he thought was a joke, nobody's laughing in Riyadh, that there could be a Palestinian state within

Saudi Arabia. The Saudis have been bombarding him with harshly critical verbiage, not typical of them in public. Yeah, I mean, he's setting a stage for economic retaliation from the Saudis, which will hurt the American consumer, will hurt them at the pump. He's setting the stage for an even greater oil and energy crisis by not making a deal with Iran at a time when U.S. intelligence has just assessed that Israel intends to strike Iran within the first six months of 2025. This was reported in the Washington Post. And this attack cannot take place without U.S. assistance, either in-air refueling or guidance systems for bunker buster bombs that will strike Iranian nuclear facilities at Fordow and Natanz. Do you think that that's true or do you think it's a CIA propaganda out of their mouthpiece, the Washington Post?

Whether it's true or not, the NSC director, Mike Waltz, who as a member of Congress was an absolute stooge of the Israel lobby, called in January, effectively called on CBS's Face the Nation for a strike on Iran and warned Iran and said that Iran is likely to get hit by Israel and signaled his own support. And there are sources peripherally around the Trump administration who are sending the message that there's a major battle taking place between the restrainers, J.D. Vance, Tucker Carlson from outside the government, and Mike Waltz, who's made bigly in Donald Trump's words in favor of attacking Iran. Again, this will destroy the world economy. At a time when Donald Trump's words in favor of attacking Iran. Again, this will destroy the world economy at a time when Donald Trump's tariffs are already causing some economic disruption inside the U.S. and the threat of countries like China divesting from the debt that the U.S. holds. This is something that Saudi Arabia can also do,

which would raise interest rates inside the U.S. Sorry, which would raise inflation inside the U.S., which would thereby raise interest rates. And we can see what egg prices are. So, and I should also mention, there's a data for progress poll that shows that about 75 percent of Democrats, which is expected, are against Donald Trump's ethnic cleansing plan in Gaza. But about half of Republicans are as well at a time when Trump is worshipped by the Republican base in a way that no other Republican president of my lifetime has been, except maybe George Bush for a few weeks after 9-11.

This is just a continuation of Joe Biden's foreign policy. There's no substantial change whatsoever. This is a continuing, a continuation of the ethnic cleansing. Yep. Yep. Oh, and Max, but the Palestinians are very dangerous people. They're dangerous to the national security of the United States. Watch this stooge. I know you've seen him before. Cut number one. This population in Palestine is hostile. It's uneducated.

It's even more radicalized than they were at the beginning of this. I mean, now they have no homes at all. They're even more hateful of the Israelis. And their birth rate is explosive. The average Palestinian woman has five and a half babies. The average Israeli woman has only two and a half babies. So demographically, they're a threat, not to mention the national security threat. There is no way you can have these two peoples living side by side. That's about as low as I've as I've seen on this. Well, it sounds shocking, you know, as an American, even, you know, even American conservatives who favor mass deportations right now believe that everyone who's an American citizen should have equal protection under the law and should be able to have as many children as they

want. They at least say they believe in the Constitution. Israel presents itself as a democracy, but it's Jewish and democratic. How can it be Jewish and democratic without seeing the Palestinians as a demographic threat? And then what will it do to hold off that demographic threat? Well, this is the essence of the logic of Zionism. And it's what informed the two-state solution pushed not by the right-wing Zionists behind Trump, the Likudniks, the religious messianists, but by liberal Zionists, the camp that produced Tony Blinken and Barack Obama. They are the ones who conceived giving the Palestinians their own state in the

form of a series of cantons, placing them behind walls, and then walling off Gaza, because that's where the demographic threat will exist. They will be warehoused there as surplus humanity, and they can have eight to ten children, but it won't be on Israel's back because Israel doesn't have to provide for them or provide them with rights, then they can claim that they have a Jewish majority and elect Jewish members of Knesset, the parliament, and claim they're a democracy. But that farce is gone now, partly because Israel is so determined to take control of Gaza. So they want to push that population out. They're in a demographic war for ethno-religious supremacy over the land.

Help me to understand Zionism and the extremists. Suppose I, as an American and a Roman Catholic, owned a home in Gaza. What would my status be as far as the Israelis were concerned? As far as, excuse me, as far as the Zionists were concerned? If you were a Roman Catholic who owned a home in Gaza, if you were a Palestinian Catholic or a member of the Christian Orthodox faith? I mean, help me out here. All right. Well, any traditional Christian faith, and I live in Gaza, what would they do? Would they kill me? Would they destroy my home? I'm not a Palestinian, but I'm certainly not a Zionist. Well, there's the ethno-religious

issue, and then there's the political issue. And the Zionist movement and the Israeli state makes no distinction between Christians and Muslims who live within the Palestinian people because they're not Jewish, so they too present a demographic threat. There were demolitions of Christian churches throughout the Galilee in 1948 during the Nakba, the ethnic cleansing of Palestine during which 750,000 indigenous Palestinians were pushed out. Those in the Galilee meant most of them were pushed to Lebanon or were made kind of internal refugees, pushed out of their homes. Most in the south went to Gaza. What Gaza is today is a human warehouse of those refugees. 15 months enormously, not because of Hamas, but because Israel was attacking their main church

named for a Porphyrius, a local saint who settled the area in the eighth century. The Christian community in Bethlehem has been purged through deprivation, through the apartheid wall, which is built around Bethhlehem i know one family that owned a gift shop in bethlehem and the wall was built completely around their property would you want to live with a militarized wall around your property it wasn't because they were christian it was because they were not jewish and israel at the same time has sought to divide christians and muslims and appeal to Christians, Arab Christians. It worked with the Maronites, the right-wing phalange in Lebanon as kind of a death squad against local Palestinians.

And it appeals to Christians in the West on the basis of this phony idea that contemporary Israel is covenant land, that God made a covenant with the Jews and that the Jews need to settle this land in order to bring Christ back. That's sort of the basis of the Christian Zionist fanaticism that we see emanate from Pastor John Hagee's Cornerstone Church in San Antonio and Corsica. Right, right. John McCain's good buddies. It's a betrayal of the authentic Christianity that still exists today throughout Palestine. I mean, Nablus today in the northern West Bank is home to the original Samaritans. The Palestinian Christians are direct descendants of the apostles. So this really highlights the phoniness of American Christianity, that they would support this campaign of destruction of their heritage.

Let's go to the ceasefire. This week, President Trump apparently off the top of his head said, I want all the hostages released by noon on Monday, Saturday. I don't want them released in dribs and drabs, one and two and three and four and one. I think I'm fairly accurately paraphrasing him, even though it was his agent, his emissary that crafted that agreement for which he took credit before he was even inaugurated. Following up on that, Prime Minister Netanyahu said, I want the hostages released at noon. He didn't say all, he didn't say three, which is the only obligation that Hamas has under the agreement. A, is Trump trying to sabotage the agreement that his own guy, Steve Witkoff, crafted? B, is Netanyahu looking for an excuse to re-enter, for the IDF to re-enter Gaza? Well, Donald Trump has misunderstood Hamas. He's misunderstood Palestinian society in Gaza.

And he's also misunderstood the person who is, you know, the tail that's wagging him, Benjamin Netanyahu, in bellowing out this tough talk about all hell breaking loose. Israel, first of all, has violated the ceasefire in shocking ways, which haven't really reached the American public because of our pathetic stenographic media. They have barely reported that 92 people have been killed by Israel since the ceasefire deal and 822 wounded. They have scarcely reported that only something like 15 fuel trucks have been brought into Gaza when scores more have been promised, as well as aid trucks, caravans, tents. They've been not getting in. Israel has not been meeting its end of the bargain,

just as it violates the ceasefire deal in Lebanon, where it intends to keep troops in five places in southern Lebanon. Israel is the ultimate, you know, Israel is just, as all settler colonial authorities have been throughout history, abrogating any agreement with a force they consider to be weaker, who they seek to control. However, Hamas means business. Hamas is going to enforce this deal after 15 months of enduring so much destruction, and the population of Gaza has demonstrated that they're not going to leave, they're not going to bend or break after all they withstood, after the

Holocaust they withstood. And Hamas's leadership understands that. So they took this to the limit and they told Donald Trump through the negotiating line in Doha, Qatar, and the Israelis that no hostages will come out no matter what Donald Trump does. All hell already broke loose in Gaza. And then suddenly yesterday, as the Palestinian journalist Abu Bakr Abed reported, who's been kind of walking around Gaza taking these really compelling videos of the destruction, suddenly aid started to flow in. The tents started to arrive. Caravans started to come in. And Hamas announced that they would release on Saturday three Israeli captives. They've also produced proof of life for several other captives who were unknown, whose status was unknown. And one reason why this is taking place is there's enormous pressure in Jewish Israeli society, continuing pressure on Netanyahu to get these

hostages out. Major protests in Tel Aviv and elsewhere. And Netanyahu himself has apparently decided for now, I could be proven wrong. Things are moving so fast. I could be proven wrong in the next two hours, but it seems like this will go ahead and perhaps all hell will not break loose on Saturday, which means that Hamas has stood down the might of the U.S. and Israeli empires for now. Before we go, what is the state of the political stability of Benjamin Netanyahu and what is the state of his health? I don't know what the state of his health is because I haven't given him a prostate exam. I should have seen that coming, Max. Even though I haven't, I can tell you he's full of shit. Is he dying of prostate cancer?

We don't know. We know that Netanyahu had a major, he had his prostate removed. You don't do that. The explanation was that he had a urinary tract infection. And that's not what happens. And he seemed very weakened for quite some time. And he's being ground down by these constant interrogations that he has to give to the investigators on his various corruption trials. Where does he stand politically with Ben-Gavir gone? Well, you can kind of get a sense of where Netanyahu stands politically by the way that the opposition in Israel has received the Netanyahu-crafted Donald Trump ethnic cleansing plan, which is very positively. Benny Gantz, one of the key opponents of Benjamin Netanyahu, one of the only figures to have served as prime minister other than Netanyahu since 2009, is very positive about Donald Trump's plan. The whole opposition, even Meretz, which is Israel's version of the Green Party, their leadership has welcomed Donald Trump's plan. Again, across the spectrum,

across the Zionist spectrum, they see themselves in a demographic war with Palestinians, and ethnic cleansing just exists at the heart of Zionism. So this isn't surprising, but it's helped Benjamin Netanyahu stabilize his leadership. And I think that if Donald Trump proposed not ethnic cleansing, but just straight up an Auschwitz-like final solution with death camps for Palestinians, we'd see a similarly positive response across the spectrum in Israeli politics. That's how far gone they are. Benjamin Netanyahu knows how to benefit from that. And at the same time, he's keeping the Israeli public, he's heeding the call from a large section of the Israeli public that tends to oppose him in getting these three hostages out on Saturday, assuming they will come out. That doesn't mean that phase two will fully go through and that we won't see a return to war in Gaza, but it looks like for now we're going to continue

to see these exchanges. Max Blumenthal, thank you, my dear friend. I know you're away and on vacation. I deeply appreciate your time accommodating mine. My best to Anya and your baby. Thank you for joining us. We'll see you again next week. Thanks. And I'm never on vacation.

So anytime you need me. God bless you. God bless you, man. All the best. What a wonderful, unbridled and brilliant human being. Tomorrow, the boys, the Intelligence Community Roundtable, four o'clock Eastern.

Judge Napolitano for judging freedom. I'm out. Thank you.