Judging Freedom - Max Blumenthal: USAID Treachery.

Episode Date: February 5, 2025

Max Blumenthal: USAID Treachery.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 Wednesday, February 5th, 2025. Max Blumenthal joins us now. Max, a pleasure, my dear friend, no matter what we're talking about. Thank you for sharing your thoughts with our audience and allowing me to pick your brain. Before we even play these clips, of which we have many, your initial response to President Trump's statement yesterday that the United States will seize and own the Gaza Strip. Well, are you planning to play that clip? Sure. Sure. In fairness to the president, we'll play it. Chris, cut number four. The U.S. will take over the Gaza Strip, and we will do a job with it, too. We'll own it and be responsible for dismantling

all of the dangerous unexploded bombs and other weapons on the site, level the site, and get rid of the destroyed buildings, level it out, create an economic development that will supply unlimited numbers of jobs and housing for the people of the area. The reaction... The Press You were talking tonight

about the United States taking over a sovereign territory. What authority would allow you to do that? Are you talking about a permanent occupation there? Redevelopment? I do see a long-term ownership position, and I see it bringing great stability to that part of the Middle East

and maybe the entire Middle East. And everybody I've spoken to, this was not a decision made lightly. Everybody I've spoken to loves the idea of the United States owning that piece of land, developing and creating thousands of jobs with something that will be magnificent. And I don't want to be cute. I don't want to be a wise guy. But the Riviera of the Middle East, this could be something that could be so bad. This could be so magnificent. If we can get a beautiful area to resettle people permanently in nice homes and where they can be happy and not be shot, not be killed,

not be knifed to death like what's happening in Gaza. Why would they want to return? The place has been hell. The person next to you, the mass murderer and war criminal whose nose is three feet from yours, is principally responsible, along with your predecessor, for making it hell. I'll let you run with it, Max. Well, there are three areas here that I want to discuss. One is what inspired Trump to make these comments? And I believe that a series of plans have been put before him, which he had

trouble with interpreting. And he vomited his interpretation out in a very barbaric fashion. The second is what brought us to this point? And the third, I think, is my initial take, which confirms my thinking about Trump and the danger of Trump to the U.S. foreign policy establishment and to empire in general, which is that he always distills the essential and crudest and most violent logic of imperialism, and in this case, Zionism, in its rawest form, just because of the way his brain works or doesn't work. It's like just kind of chugging along, being powered by Hawk 2 Amin coins at this point. And he is declaring what Israel intends to do, which is what most Israelis want, is to ethnically cleanse the Gaza Strip, to remove its population, and to resettle them,

basically through force in Egypt and Jordan, by bribing those governments and intimidating them, which are already U.S. puppets, and then to begin the process of taking over Gaza. Donald Trump said he would take it over possibly with U.S. troops. He doesn't explain how he's going to take it over, but he is offering Netanyahu the full might and power of the U.S. military to carry out a foreign ethnic cleansing adventure. Now, this is something that most Jewish Israelis favor right now in record numbers, according to a poll by a very reputable polling firm in Israel, which was reported by the Jerusalem Post. Eighty percent of Jewish Israelis consider the full ethnic cleansing of the Gaza Strip to be either moral or practical or both.

And only 3% of Jewish Israelis consider it to be immoral. Americans, especially Donald Trump's base, the America firsters who want to make America great, might have some reservations about sending troops 7,000 miles overseas to send dispossessed refugees on a trail of tears for a strategically dubious mission, which will put a target on the forehead of Americans. But they're not the ones who determine the policy. And that's what's so obviously clear now and should be clear to everyone in MAGA is that this is about making Israel great again. And Netanyahu with a smug smile is sitting there approving of what Donald Trump is saying. And just a few days ago, we had Miriam Adelson, top benefactor of Benjamin Netanyahu and Donald Trump, seated in a better position for Trump's

inauguration than cabinet members and every member of Congress, because she basically bribed Donald Trump with $100 million to annex the West Bank and apparently put forward this plan before she gave up Luka Doncic as owner of the Dallas Mavericks. So this is so clarifying. This moment should be so clarifying to everyone who wants to understand how the sausage is made and what America First really means in the mind of Donald Trump. It's gotten so extreme that even Lindsey Graham, who represents the military industry, is a Zionist fanatic, but also is senator of a state which has a very large, disproportionately high number of enlisted US soldiers, has condemned Donald Trump's plan and conceded that most of his constituents would oppose it. So who's really in charge here?

You begin your analysis by saying what inspired Trump and how he vomited this out of his mouth. What did inspire him? To me, this is right off the desk of Pete Hegseth, he'd love nothing more than a sort of crusade in Gaza under his command. Well, since October 7th, but especially in 2024, after Gaza was substantially demolished, various interests in Israel representing different points on the Israeli political spectrum put forward the day after plan, the post-war plan. And apparently the destruction wasn't extreme enough for them to reach the point where they could actually make the plans fully public and begin marketing them. But there was one put

forward by the Institute for Zionist Studies, which is on the right wing of the Likud spectrum, which basically laid the basis for what Donald Trump said. It was a plan for the full ethnic cleansing of Gaza, pushing most of the population out to Egypt by force and settling it with Jews. You know, typical settler colonialism in line with the religious nationalist trend in Israeli politics. But Benjamin Netanyahu, in much more quiet fashion, put forward a plan called Project Niyam, named for Mohammed bin Salman, the Saudi crown prince's plan to develop the Red Sea area all the way up to the Israeli resort city of Eilat. And Netanyahu introduced a PowerPoint presentation through his minions, which would continue Project Neon through Gaza and all throughout greater Israel. And this also seemed to have inspired some of Donald Trump's comments. The plan calls for a four-stage

quote-unquote redevelopment or beautification of Gaza, starting with the destruction of Gaza. There's actually a slide showing the ruins of Gaza in this PowerPoint presentation. Then the population is separated according to those who support Hamas, who will be liquidated, and those who are just the rest of Gaza, who will then get humanitarian aid. The number three is rebuilding under the control or auspices of a kind of dictatorial strongman authority imposed by the United Arab Emirates following a normalization deal with Israel. So Israel's kind of working behind the good Arabs. And then stage number four, in 2035, Gaza will begin to produce electric car plants, factories, producing Teslas using, in the words of this PowerPoint presentation, relatively cheap Gazan labor to produce these cars for Gulf and U.S. companies.

And it's a win-win. It's presented as a win-win that can be used as a model for Yemen, Syria, and Lebanon, the next targets on the Israeli kill list to destroy the remaining members of the Axis of Resistance. And that plan, I mean, it's clear as day. I think Trump may have kind of misinterpreted it and tried to reframe it in crude, barbaric, what he considers America first language. And maybe it was a gaffe on Donald Trump's part, but the cat is out of the bag. The ethnic cleansing cat is out of the bag. This is the essential logic of Zionism. This is the continuation of the bag. The ethnic cleansing cat is out of the bag. This is the essential logic of Zionism. This is the continuation of the history of Israel through ethnic cleansing, control, domination, and expulsion. And Donald Trump has put it all on the table. There's no going back to the rules

based order, a two state solution, or any of the pretty talk of the Biden administration now. Hasn't Saudi Arabia condemned this in the past 18 hours? They have. I mean, what Trump said and the way that he framed the post-war plan has outraged Saudi leadership. Saudi Arabia just held a major MMA or UFC fight attempting to showcase the 2030 agenda of Mohammed bin Salman to transform Saudi Arabia into a more modern country that welcomes the world, that allows international people to drink alcohol in its luxury hotels and to have time on resorts on the Red Sea without war and without the sense of Wahhabism in the air. And this was to lay the basis for Project Neom, the project that I mentioned before, and influential MAGA figures were welcomed

to this UFC fight. And so coming on the heels of this showcase event by Saudi Arabia, Trump's comments have really been a setback for Saudi Arabia. And their foreign ministry has stated that they will not participate in any post-war program for Gaza that removes the population without a Palestinian state. And there have been leaks exposing Mohammed bin Salman for telling Trump that he personally wouldn't care about a Palestinian state or the Palestinians at all. All he wants to do is develop his country into a kind of globalist hub. But his constituents in the country, the Saudi people, do care deeply about the Palestinian plight. And looming in the background is the fear

of Muslim Brotherhood insurgency in his own country, as well as Shia insurgency in his country's southern region, which has been a constant thorn for Saudi's Sunni supremacist leadership. So MBS is worried about instability here. And I think all Arab leaders who have bowed before Western empire are deeply concerned now about what Donald Trump has just done, especially King Abdullah, who I believe is due for a visit to Washington, and quote unquote president, who's really just general, Abdel Fattah el-Sisi in Egypt, who is extremely concerned also about a Muslim Brotherhood insurgency in his country. Right.

Have the Trump people, I don't know that you could know the answer to this, given any thought as to where two million Palestinians would go? Well, Trump has been explicit that they would go to Egypt, to the Sinai Desert, and to Jordan. Jordan is essentially a colonially constructed human warehouse for Palestinian refugees. The vast majority of people in Jordan now are Palestinian refugees. And what happens to King Abel and General al-Sisi if they agree to this? Well, look at what happened in Amman, the Jordanian capital, throughout 2024. There were massive unprecedented protests, which we haven't seen in Jordan, maybe since Black September, when the PLO was forcibly, very brutally expelled by the Jordanian military. So you have a tiny minority of rulers who are in control, who feign concern for the Palestinians. King Abdullah goes on these

fake missions, dropping aid by air off over Gaza in his flight suit. Well, that's just not going to be good enough for people who have been forced out of their homes after a Holocaust and pushed onto his soil. Jordan is already strained because of the Syrian refugees that were basically dumped into its territory after the U.S. dirty war in Syria. One of the largest population centers in Jordan has been the Zaatari refugee camp on the border of Syria. So Jordan is just basically a repository for the violent waste by Western empire. And then you have Egypt, which has a population that largely is extremely supportive of the Palestinian struggle, but the upper crust of Egyptian society, those who supported the transition in power from Gamal Abdel Nasser to Anwar Sadat, who basically sold Egypt's sovereignty out for Camp David for normalization.

They despise Palestinians. The Egyptian military is very anti-Palestinian, their leadership, and they control one third of Egypt's economy. So they see the forced transfer of Palestinians onto their soil as a massive attack on Egyptian sovereignty, and they will do anything to resist it. They see Palestinians, particularly from Gaza, as in many ways, they see them the same way that Israelis see them as just simply terrorists and pests and a problem. So I don't think Donald Trump's going to have an easy time dislodging the population. The bottom line here is there's no legal basis for it. It is profoundly immoral. It is utterly unworkable.

And is Trump going to bring this about by force of arms while American Marines actually go there and yank people out of their homes with M-16s pointed in their faces? Well, it seems unfathomable, unfathomable. But there are already plans for American mercenaries and contractors to participate in some sort of disarmament activities in Gaza, monitoring the population as they move back to the north to prevent them from rearming the Al-Qassam brigades in the north of Gaza. American lives have been consistently held in the balance since the boneheaded Biden plan for an aid pier, which did include some plans for U.S. military participation. It floated out into the sea. It's always been there. But would the American public accept this? And if US Marines actually went into Gaza as a hostile force, would they not face barrel to barrel the Al-Qassam brigades and

all the various resistance factions, which know the territory better than anyone? Would they not be losing their lives? Would this not be a disaster? Would it not lead to Americans being targeted the same way that Israelis have as occupiers? Of course it would. And so Donald Trump is setting the stage for this. I don't know if he understands what he's doing, though. I think what he thinks he's doing is delivering on a bribe that he received from Miriam Adelson and countless other Israel-first Zionist billionaire donors. And if you look at this in the wider context of what Donald Trump has done since re-entering office. What has Donald Trump done on the international stage? He's threatened US allies. He's threatened Denmark, attempting to

wrest the control of Greenland from a NATO ally. He's threatened Panama over supposed Chinese control over the Panama Canal. He's threatening countries that are already basically subsidiaries of U.S. empire. And he's doing that because he knows that with U.S. allies or basically U.S. vassals, he has all the power to extract all the concessions he wants, something he cannot do with Russia over Ukraine because Russia basically has nothing to lose by confronting the U.S. Now put Israel in that context. Israel is the ultimate U.S. subsidiary. Without U.S. weapons, without U.S. 2,000-pound and 500-pound bombs, Israel folds tomorrow and its Jewish population is heading to Europe and to Ukraine on boats and flights.

And Donald Trump is not, just like the Biden administration, not using any of that leverage to get a real deal on Gaza that is good for American interests, American security, and good for humanity. And he has all the power in the world to do that, but he's bribed. It's so obvious that he's bribed and controlled, and it raises real questions about who is controlling the executive office of the United States of America. Certainly not Americans in this case. What will it take to get you into the White House press corps so that you can confront him with, A, your extraordinary knowledge of this, and B, your sharp questions to him? Well, I applied to be part of the kind of influencer clown show that has filled the White

House press briefings with all kinds of randos, haven't received any response, but we're working on it. I mean, we called the congressional press office today to ask about credentials there as a prerequisite for White House credentials. And whether it happens or not, maybe if I have to be throwing rocks from the outside of the building, throwing proverbial rocks, I'll still be able to get my questions and critiques in. And I think it's also up to the reporters in the room to actually learn from those of us who've been doing the work for the past few decades on this issue. And finally, it is outrageous for me to see that Democrats are finally indignant about genocide in Gaza after 15 months of the material destruction of Gaza by their own leadership. Trump didn't do this. This is about continuity in government, not about polarization. The Biden-Blinken gang

destroyed Gaza, turned it into what Donald Trump called a demolition site. And Donald Trump would not be able to spout this barbaric rhetoric had it not been for the support of Biden and Blinken for the genocide in Gaza. So don't start trying to lecture everyone now and wag your fingers because we didn't support Biden and Blinken and reward them for what they have done. This is about a much deeper system embedded in US government that it is about what C Wright Mills called a power elite and Biden, Blinken, Trump, Hegseth, these characters are just the mid-level players who are enacting their agenda. And that power elite is united by many things, transnational

capitalism being one of them, but also Zionism is part of the glue that holds it together. And we're seeing that enacted through Trump's rhetoric. This is a lesser subject matter, but it has intrigued me. Do you read anything into the absence of Secretary of State Marco Rubio from the Trump-Netanyahu meetings yesterday? Well, first of all, Marco Rubio's tweet defending Trump echoes the plan that I mentioned earlier, Project Neom or Gaza 2035, where Rubio refers to the beautification of Gaza. And it's supposed to be an international plan directed by Israel. So Rubio is sort of trying to right the ship here. But it looks to me like Marco Rubio is not a traditional Secretary

of State. He's a symbolic Secretary of State. They've removed him as Senator from Florida, so they can possibly run Laura Trump, who is the head of the RNC, and create more of a Trump dynasty. And they're setting the stage within Trump world for Richard Grinnell to replace Marco Rubio. It was Grinnell who went to Venezuela and met with Nicolas Maduro, the actual president, for the first time since the Obama administration. We've seen a US administration treat Maduro as the real president. And Rubio has been sidelined there. I think what Rubio has been granted is the authority to set his own agenda in certain parts of the Americas. But we've seen Rubio reverse himself on so many positions, including ukraine and some of the

things rubio has been saying in the past few days like we are entering a multi-polar world are really striking because i always associated him with the neoconservative unipolar he has to be miserable max and he should have known that he would be just a a play thing. I was going to talk to you about USAID and the treachery involved there, but this, of course, is more timely and profound. I appreciate very much all of your analysis on this, Max. I don't know where this is going to go. I don't know what remains of the resistance. I guess this is a great boon for Netanyahu back home, no? For Netanyahu and opposition leader Benny Gantz has praised Trump's comments. Again, this is something that is ethnically cleansing. Gaza is deeply popular in Jewish-Israeli society. Max, thank you very much for your time. All the best, my dear friend.

I can't wait till you're interrogating the President of the United States in that press room. I can't either, but it's going to be a long wait. Thanks a lot, Judge. Sure. Of course. Thank you. Talk to you again soon. Coming up at three o'clock today on all of this, Phil Giraldi. At four o'clock today on all of this Scott Ritter. And at five o'clock today, we will post the Donald Trump Benjamin Netanyahu press conference, which is only about 40 minutes, but it's fascinating.

You'll be able to watch it and comment on it with all of your colleague commentators. Judge Napolitano for judging freedom. Thank you.