Judging Freedom - Prof. Jeffrey Sachs: US Subservient to Israel

Episode Date: July 31, 2024

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Thank you. Hi, everyone. Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom. Today is Wednesday, July 31st, 2024. My dear friend, Professor Jeffrey Sachs joins us now. Professor Sachs, it's been a couple of weeks and we were at opposite ends of Italy at the same time, but it's a pleasure to be back on air with you and thank you very much for your time. A couple of weeks, but a lot of events in between, my God. pick the two worst weeks of the year to take off, the weeks with the most dramatic events in modern American history between the attempted assassination of Trump and the internet down for four or five days and President Biden leaving office, not leaving office, leaving the campaign. I don't know if he jumped or if he was pushed, but I'll ask you for your thoughts on that in a minute. A lot of granular issues to discuss, particularly with respect to the Israelis engaging in assassinations. But before we get there, does the United States have any credibility in the international diplomatic community?

Basically, no. It still has a lot of arm twisting. It owns a lot of politicians. It threatens a lot of politicians. It threatens a lot of countries. So the U.S. has power, but it is basically drained of respect and it does not have a moral standing. I've been now to Asia, many countries, and now in Europe, I've been speaking with the leaders in each stop. I think the situation in the U.S., in the world, the position of the U.S. is in a kind of dramatic freefall. You wouldn't get it from the mainstream media, which of course repeats the narrative of the U.S., but the way that leaders shake their head about what the U.S. is doing is really telling. Also, hearing how U.S. policies just throw other countries into disarray is quite stunning. Our foreign policy is bankrupt as far as I'm concerned. And there is fear, there is power, but there's very little respect.

Has this been the fault of Joe Biden and Tony Blinken, or has it been going on since 9-11, or has it been going on since 9-11, or has it been going on since before that? Well, my view is we've been in a kind of decline, starting roughly with Bill Clinton onward. So I see the last five presidents, Clinton, Bush, Obama, Trump, and now Biden, as continuing a path of decline of the United States in international respect, in international responsibility, in lawfulness, in making the world safer. We've become less and less safe. As we've discussed, I tend to use the doomsday clock as the most dramatic measurement of where we are in terms of risk of complete global disaster. Clinton inherited the doomsday clock hand at 17 minutes away from midnight, meaning by the standards of that clock that we were the safest that we had been for generations because the Cold War had ended.

But Clinton onward, every president has brought us closer to disaster. And Biden has been one of the worst presidents in modern American history. He just led us into more and more war and conflict. He doesn't understand how to resolve any crisis. And now, obviously, he's beyond his own physical capacity. And he's at the end of the political line as well. One of the events that occurred while you and I were away was the very, very bellicose and almost rapturously received speech of Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu in the Congress. To me, he was playing to an audience that he bought and paid for, but he condemned free speech. He offered no path to peace. He was about as bellicose as I have heard him in English. What do you think his goal

was? Was this for domestic Israeli political purposes, or was he trying to scare the Congress into declaring war on Iran? Well, I think you're right. The Israel lobby owns the Congress. We've heard descriptions now pretty vivid about how AIPAC puts a shadow on each member of Congress. Many are directly bought. The others are threatened. This is a genocidal regime in Israel now. It's a murder incorporated.

They do assassinations wherever. The most recent, of course, is the assassination of the Hamas political figure in Tehran, Iran, on the occasion of the inauguration of the new Iranian president. So Israel goes out of its way to say, we're thugs, we'll kill anyone, we'll destroy anyone, we'll bomb anyone. They go out of their way and the U.S. Congress stands up and applauds. It was one of the great shames of American politics in recent times to see this display of pitiful obeisance of the U.S. to the mass murderer standing at the podium and in the context of tens of thousands of innocent women and children being gone on with the continued murder and provocations of a wider war in the Middle East. So it's an unbelievable state of affairs of American politics right now. I found it repellent, Jeff, utterly repellent. One Republican, Thomas Massey, stayed away. About 100 Democrats stayed away. But the people that were applauding for him are supposedly our elected representatives, and they were not acting as our elected representatives. They were acting as lapdogs to the figurehead of the class of people that fund their campaigns.

Absolutely. When I said to Ambassador Charles Freeman yesterday, when's the last time the Congress applauded a mass murderer, one of the viewers wrote in and said, Judge, the people applauding are mass murderers. They're paying for the mass murderer. They're of like mind with this mass murderer. And that viewer was correct. I cannot recall anything like it before this.

I found it such a shame that it was basically unwatchable. The idea that Netanyahu was invited at all to speak is one thing. The fact that he got dozens of standing ovations is simply a sign of the collapse of American politics. It is an utter collapse of American politics. Congress is worse than useless. It is completely corrupted. It is not a deliberative body. It is a body on the pay. And the Israel lobby has bought tens, hundreds of billions of dollars of weaponry for Israel's mass murder through its campaign contributions, as well as through the stupidity and naivete of many of the Congress. We shouldn't underestimate how ignorant many of these so-called representatives are. But I think we saw it in as clear as can be. This is the collapse of American politics before our eyes.

Is there any question in your mind that Netanyahu wants a war with Hezbollah, wants a war with Iran, and expects the United States to back him up. That's the purpose. It's been clear as day for months. He does everything as provocatively as possible. Murdering a senior political official in Iran, no less, on the occasion of the Iranian president's inauguration, no less, days after China had mediated a political accord between the different factions of the Palestinians, you cannot be more begging for a major war than he is doing right now. And of course, that war is predicated on all those fools in the U.S. Congress standing up to run in front of each

other to say how many billions or trillions of dollars they'll vote for the Israelis to buy our weaponry so that they can fight this war and maybe bring us to Armageddon, because that seems to be what some of them want as well. Israel's a nuclear armed power, and God knows what kind of complete global catastrophe will result from all of this, the way that we are behaving. What's amazing to me, Judge, is that Israel commits an outright political assassination on Iranian territory, and the only words out of the mouth of our Secretary of Defense, Lloyd Austin, is, we will protect Israel if it's attacked. Not what is Israel doing? It shouldn't engage in political assassination. Not a word of truth. But just to say, okay, I am going

to stand there. The Pentagon will protect Israel as it commits its murders, as it expands the wars. This is American politics. Just to underscore how depraved Prime Minister Netanyahu's governing coalition is, last week the Knesset, the Israeli parliament, actually debated whether or not it should be made lawful for Israeli soldiers to rape female and male Palestinian prisoners, and whether Palestinian prisoners should summarily be executed in order to create more room in Israeli jails and other incarceration facilities. It's inconceivable to me that a country that calls itself a democracy could have such a debate and take it seriously. I don't think they actually voted on it, but this was the debate. One of the members of Netanyahu's party, the Likud, was asked, is it OK to rape somebody that is being held in detention?

The answer is yes, of course, if it's a terrorist. In other words, these are murderers and torturers. It's straight out. These words about democracy, we use them the same way in the United States. This is a pretty meaningless term right now. It's a term that is applied not because there is participation of citizenry or honesty of government or transparency of government. It's purely a game. And it has become a license for mass murder to say, we're a democracy. Then we can murder whoever we want that we don't like. That's whether it's the

United States or whether it's Israel. Of course, the two are completely complicit in this. But they don't even hide any of this anymore. Nothing's hidden. This is just a murder incorporated, period. Professor, talk to us a little bit about the Golan Heights, which only in the minds of Netanyahu and his colleagues, Donald Trump and Joe Biden, is part of Israel, but internationally is not. So 16 Druze, not Israelis, Druze were killed. The Israelis claimed they were killed by fellow Arabs and used that as an excuse to assassinate a Hezbollah leader. Everything is confused right now, like you're pointing out. But I think a starting point is something that almost went undiscussed in the United States last week. And that is that the International Court of Justice, which is the supreme body of international law, as if anyone in our political system cares about

international law, ruled that Israel is illegally occupying the conquered territories of the war in 1967, which is 57 years ago. And what the ICJ, the International Court of Justice, said is that this entire occupation, including parts of the Golan Heights, including the West Bank, and including Gaza, is a complete violation of international law. Everything else spins off of that because Israel is in this illegal occupation and the illegal settler movement, which is now the dominant political force of the state of Israel, is the underlying reason why there's no peace. It's impossible. What the Israeli government wants is to control all of these occupied territories illegally, to annex them into greater Israel, to rule over millions of Palestinian people who have political rights under international law reaffirmed repeatedly by the United Nations,

ignored completely by the United States and Israel. And the result of all of this is torture, mass incarcerations, mass violence, spreading war, and the United States saying, we'll always back these murderers no matter what they do. And that's the situation that we're in. Do you foresee a regional war with the United States involved? I mean, Netanyahu would be crazy to take Hezbollah on alone, wouldn't he? Well, he'd be crazy to take Hezbollah and Iran on, even with the United States behind it, because Israel will suffer terribly if they, quote, succeed in provoking this expanded war. This man is a mass murderer, Netanyahu. This man is leading a state which tortures, assassinates, and commits genocidal actions

in Gaza. This is not a rational actor, much less a moral one. Of course not. And he's leading Israel to disaster, and he is courting leading the United States to disaster. No one could look forward to this with equanimity, what he is hoping for. Switching gears, if we can, also since you and I spoke last, the slow methodical progress of the Russian military in Ukraine continues. Ukraine has not been top of the fold or even front page because of the domestic events here involving Donald Trump and Joe Biden. Nevertheless, Ukraine's battlefield losses are almost catastrophic at this point, are they not? They are probably around a thousand killed and maybe another 1,000 severely wounded per day on a moderately, unusually bad day.

In other words, 1,000 to 2,000 lost each day to deaths and wounded. Russia is taking territory every day. And Russia has said, well, we will continue this until there are negotiations. The United States, with its brain-dead foreign policy, its, I don't know, moribund or just incompetent or utter failure of a president, doesn't act at all. All we do is say, yes, fight on. Every day, another 1,000 to 2,000 Ukrainians lost, more territory lost. And we make up stories. Well, something's going to turn this around, whatever turning it around means. We don't have a foreign policy in the United States right now. We probably don't have a functioning president. But in any event, we don't have a foreign policy. And so Russia said, until you negotiate, we just continue

pursuing our war aims. If you want to sit down and negotiate, we're ready to sit down and negotiate. The United States answer is no negotiations. Very clever. You know, when I called for negotiations at the beginning of this special military operation, which would have left Ukraine, by the way, essentially with all of the Eastern Ukraine, because Russia wasn't even demanding at that point the territories, that was 500,000 Ukrainian lives ago. This is what our foreign policy has done. It has killed half a million Ukrainians for no reason except for Ukraine to lose more and more territory, to have our generals tell stupid fairy tales, which are just lies, to have our mainstream media hide the truth. And this goes on day by day. The United States and the West are planning to install more offensive weapons in Germany. And of course, they're going to be aimed eastward.

Here's what President Putin had to say about it on Sunday of this week, cut number one. The situation recalls the events of the Cold War era. If the U.S. implements such plans, we will consider ourselves free from the previously imposed one-sided moratorium on the deployment of medium and shorter range strike systems. We will take mirror measures for their deployment. We will take mirror measures for their deployment. What do you expect them to do? I think people really need to understand something that may be the single most important fact of our reality today. And that is that the United States has destroyed the nuclear arms control framework. It has done so willfully, it has done so repeatedly, and it has done so until today.

We had a framework for nuclear arms control. In 2002, the United States unilaterally abandoned the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty. This already created a profound destabilization. It is one of the reasons why the war in Ukraine broke out in 2014, because Russia viewed the United States as an increasing and potentially mortal threat, because the U.S. was no longer willing to abide by the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, and it began to place anti-ballistic missile systems, the Aegis missile systems, in Poland and Romania. And in December 2021, January 2022 to be precise, it refused to rule out placing missile systems in Ukraine. Now, in 2018, Donald Trump announced that the United States would leave the Intermediate Nuclear Force Treaty, second bulwark of basic nuclear arms control. And in 2019, the Trump administration followed through.

So we broke an agreement to not have intermediate range nuclear missiles. Now the United States has said it will place intermediate nuclear missiles, nuclear missile systems, presumably, according to what our experts are saying, in Germany. What are these people thinking? What is Jake Sullivan thinking? What is Blinken thinking? Is Biden thinking at all? What is Lloyd Austin thinking? What are these people thinking? Are they really aiming to get us all killed? Is NATO trying to provoke Putin? It's not NATO. This is the United States. Germany rolls over as if nothing happened. I spoke to a leading German politician a couple of days ago, one of the most important. He said, Schultz is a catastrophe. That was exactly the word that he used, catastrophe. And we don't know. I said, why? He said, well, they have something on him,

possibly. He didn't know. But we suborn these politicians. We control them. We occupy their countries with military bases. We have the CIA and the DND involved. We don't know what's happening exactly. But what are they doing with nuclear escalation now, with the collapse of a nuclear arms control framework that the United States has provoked? There is no accounting for this. It is absolutely reckless beyond any measure. It's the single most important development in the world in the last 20 years is that we abandoned, and I mean the U.S. led the abandonment of the nuclear arms control framework. Now it's in tatters. And we are in a hot war with Russia. We are in a cold war with China.

We have an expanding war in the Middle East. We have an incompetent president, and I don't know whether that's physical or just professional incompetence. It's a terrible situation. Last subject. By the way, I have to read what one of the viewers wrote, who's, I guess, somehow able to catch what I've been dreaming about, because it says, Jeff Sachs for Secretary of State. Don't punish me for being part of this rogue U.S. political system right now. Well, the system would have to be changed radically. What has China been doing diplomatically lately with Italy? Well, China is speaking words of

peace and cooperation in meeting after meeting, in region after region, China brought Iran and Saudi Arabia to a rapprochement. China brought the different factions of Palestine to national unity. China today is hosting the prime minister of Italy. You may recall that prime minister Maloney was called to the carpet in Washington last year for having normal relations with China. And Italy, as a response, announced that it would leave the partnership in the so-called Belt and Road program, the Belt and Road being the Silk Road program to link China, by the way, and Italy, which were linked 2,000 years ago along the Silk Road, to link now with modern infrastructure. And she left based on the White House demand and heard an earful from the Italian people and from the Italian business saying, what are you doing? You know, the Chinese like our

products. We have normal relations. Marco Polo made the way from Italy to China and back. That is our interconnection. That is our role. So she is doing. It's the normal way to behave, not the way that the American government behaves, which is that everyone's an enemy unless they bow down to the United States or to Israel, one of the two. Jeff, I'm not taking two weeks off anymore because I almost forgot how good you are and how helpful you have become and how clear is your understanding and ability to explain all these things. Thank you, my dear friend. Great to be with you. We'll see you again next week, I hope. Pleasure. Safe travels. We'll see you next week. All the best. Thank you. Bye-bye. Thank you. Boy, was he on fire. More fire coming later today at two o'clock this afternoon,

Eastern Colonel Douglas McGregor at three o'clock, Phil Giraldi. Judge Napolitano for Judging Freedom. Thank you.