Judging Freedom - Ralph Nader: Slaughter In Gaza

Episode Date: September 9, 2024

Ralph Nader: Slaughter In GazaSee 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 Monday, September 9th, 2024. Ralph Nader, yes, the Ralph Nader, the great Ralph Nader, joins us now by telephone. By way of introduction, Ralph, of course, needs no introduction. He has been a champion for peace and for the little guy for 60 or 65 years. Ralph and I first met more than 50 years ago. We are both alumni of Princeton University. Ralph was debating William F. Buckley Jr. on the Princeton campus, and I was chosen to moderate the debate. but it certainly exposed me to a different way of thinking and attracted me to your way of thinking, around to which I have finally and fully come.

Ralph, it's a pleasure, my dear friend. We've done many of these interviews, but it's always been you interviewing me. Now I am happy and thrilled to be able to interview you. Welcome, welcome, my dear old friend, to Judging Freedom. Well, welcome back to you. Thank you very much, Andrew. Sure. So this program has devoted itself in the past three years of its existence to exposing views that mainstream media is not interested in hearing, particularly on foreign affairs and especially on the war in Ukraine and the war in Gaza.

Most of our guests have been ex-military and ex-intelligence and academics who fiercely oppose both wars. You, of course, are probably the greatest fighter for peace in the United States of America today and the greatest fighter for peace in the United States of America in the past 60 years. You have done a great deal of research, I know, on the slaughter in Gaza. Let's take a step back. What is your view of Prime Minister Netanyahu, and what do you think he's really trying to accomplish? Well, he's using massive state terror weaponized by the U.S. government and Joe Biden unconditionally to slaughter a defenseless, trapped population, civilian population mostly, in Gaza, which is the size of Philadelphia geographically, 2.3 million people,

already destitute and embargoed for years by Israelis, bombed by Israelis periodically, hundreds and thousands of casualties. And then came October 7th, where, as pointed out in a letter by prominent Israelis to the Congress, Andrew, the collapse of the sophisticated multi-tiered border security apparatus, mysterious, still not officially investigated because Netanyahu is opposing it, opened up and Hamas decided it was their turn to attack. And that story has not been fully told, because Israel said there were 1,600 Hamas fighters killed in those few hours,

more than Hamas killed in the Israelis. But they used this, the Likud party, the right wing, probably the most extreme and vicious cabinet in the history of Israel, to launch a nonstop daily assault. And they attacked anyone standing in anything in place, buildings, markets, schools, mosques, refugee camps, apartments, homes, hospitals, 150 health clinics, ambulances, roads, water mains, electricity, on explicit orders of Netanyahu and his minister of defense, who said, note these genocidal words. On October 8th, he said, we're going in, no food, no water, no medicine, no electricity, no fuel.

These are human animals, and we're going to act accordingly. Those are the words of genocide. Why do you think that the world, with the exception of South Africa, seems loathe to condemn this as the genocide it obviously is, and was forced to stop it. It is obvious that Prime Minister Netanyahu does not want to negotiate for a ceasefire. He will never voluntarily do so. He knows if he does so, his government will collapse because the fanatics will leave it and he won't have a majority in the Knesset. But why won't any other government do anything to stop this, Ralph? Well, several governments have already joined South Africa, as you know, but your point is

well taken. It's because of the influence of the U.S. that can punish lesser countries in all kinds of ways to do it, and there are no holes barred. Israel can do whatever it wants. It's supported by, as you know, a very powerful domestic lobby, which adheres to the principle of Israel government can do no wrong ever. And they have huge influence on Congress. And that's the main reason. But the international effort is building as the evidence of the slaughter shows a huge undercount. This is a big untold story. The official undercount by the Gaza Health Ministry is about 41,000. This is deaths now, right, Ralph? This is deaths. Yeah,000. This is deaths now, right, Ralph? This is deaths. Yeah, deaths. And about 95,000 injuries.

That's an absurdly low level. You have over 140,000 precision bombs raining in on civilian infrastructure. You have artillery pouring out of the tanks. You have snipers. You have fires out of control because there are no fire trucks with water. You have disease spreading. You have 5,000 babies born a month into the rubble. You have thousands of bodies still recovered under the rubble.

You have mass movements of populations under treacherous Israeli orders to go to another safe area, and then they bomb the safe area, and then they push them out. Ninety-five percent are completely homeless, open to 100-degree heat or freezing in the winter. And now we're seeing contagious diseases spread. You have 55,000 diabetics with no insulin. How long do you live without insulin? You have 85,000 serious cancer patients before October 7th, no medicine. It just goes on and on. So I've written an article for our new newspaper, The Capital Citizen, which is very, very focused on what that in a minute, the empirical data

and the clinical record of hundreds of doctors who've been over there and seen it firsthand is over 300,000. Wow. Yeah, we're talking eight times the undercount is eight times less than it should be. It'll double by the end of the year. And there's corroboration by the head of the global health. All right, Ralph, that number, that number 300,000 is greater than the number that the Lancet came out with, which I think was about 186,000 a few months ago. How do you reach the 300,000 threshold? Or how do you count that? Yeah. Well, here's how it comes to bear.

The Lancet is now two months old, and they said the figure could be much higher. They're very cautious. So it's well over 200,000 now, just extrapolating the last eight weeks. Remember, there's starvation going on. There's disease. These are directly related to civilian being targeted. So I started out with a lot of projections by UN humanitarian basically saying that if the conditions persist, by the end of the year, there'll be a half a million fatalities. And, you know, they don't all die on December 31st, 2024. They die by the hour. But here's the historical record, which probably even you, as a scholar, are not aware of. Israel has always targeted civilians. In 1978, Israel's most prominent military analyst, Jeff Schiff, summed up remarks by Chief of Staff Mordechai Gur as follows,

quote, The Israeli army has always struck civilian populations, purposefully and consciously. The army has never distinguished civilians from military targets, but purposely attacked civilian targets, end quote. And then, former UN ambassador and foreign minister of Israel, Abba Eban, very well-regarded historic figure, by the way, who lectured at Princeton in the 1950s,

he wrote of Israel under then Prime Minister Menachem Begin that Israel, quote, is wantonly inflicting every possible measure of death and anguish on civilian populations in a mood reminiscent of regimes which neither Mr. Begin nor I would dare to mention by name, end quote. That's the historic record to defeat columnists like Charles Lane and Ruth Marcus in The Washington Post, who keep saying that Israel doesn't target civilian populations. Also, Biden says that. Well, that is totally, totally discredited. Anybody that says that. Totally. Social media pictures.

Correct. The videos. Correct. Okay, the second is the empirical record. And that's what, you know, they're bombing everything. What do you think? The Gazan population is made of asbestos and steel? They're bombing everything, all civilian infrastructure. As I mentioned, schools and refugee camps and ambulances and hospitals, and they've even destroyed the agricultural crops. They've bulldozed cemeteries. There's one Gaza undertaker, which is reported in the Capital Citizen. He does this pro bono with his little team and two open grave cemeteries. It's estimated he's buried 17,000 bodies, including 800 in one day. Why would the Palestinian health ministry undercount its own debt? They say 41,000. You say by the end of this year, if I have you correct, we're now in September, 300,000.

That's a radical difference in numbers. It'll be 600,000 by the end of this year. And that's the projection. It's based on these health experts a very important question you just asked why does Hamas under count one is they started

out just wanting to count verified names from hospitals and morgues well they're all destroyed virtually so they can't count and verify but they have another reason why they're all destroyed virtually, so they can't count and verify. But they have another reason why they're undercounting. They don't want to provoke their own people into condemning them even more for not protecting them and providing them any shelters. And Netanyahu wants an undercount for his reasons, so he can undercount the savagery and the genocide. So they both want

an undercount for different reasons. But there's no population that's already destitute with no infrastructure, nowhere to flee, nowhere to go, nowhere to have shelters, no food, medicine, electricity, water. The water is killing the babies because it's contaminated with deadly results and dysentery. And all the rest that we're reading and watching and think that 98% of the population of Gaza is still alive. I mean, this is absurd. Do you accept the rationale of many of the guests on this show who argue that Netanyahu will never agree to a ceasefire in order to keep his government together, that his goal, and I'm going to use a horrible phrase that Ben-Gavir uses, is to mow the lawn, that is to destroy all living persons in Gaza, and to expand the geographical area of Israel from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea. Do you agree with those who say that that is Netanyahu's goal in this war? That he wanted the war, that he looked for the war, and that he's

taking advantage of the war in order to achieve those goals? Of course. I mean, that's the historic mission of his predecessors. It's called Erzatz Israel, the Greater Israel, meaning the entire Palestinian mandate, the 28% left that is the West Bank and Gaza, which they now control, occupy,

colonize, seize land, etc. at will. Yeah, they want it all. And they don't make any bones about it. The ministry under Netanyahu and the guy in charge of the West Bank mayhem, they don't make any bones about it. They want to take it all. They call it Judea and Samaria, like the Bible is their real estate report. So there's nothing

controversial about this at all. And he was looking for an opening. And how come he hasn't had an official investigation of this collapse of the most elaborate border security apparatus in the history of the world, including human intelligence,

detection, all kinds of technological surveillance, alarms, suddenly collapsed on October 7th. Well, he had the Hamas plans a year before, and he didn't do anything about it. That's reported in the Israeli press in great detail. And of course, he knows that the minute the fighting stops, the Israelis will turn on him and he'll lose his job because he's despised by three out of four Israelis for, one, trying to weaken the courts,

which hundreds of thousands of Israelis marched before October 7th. He's under indictment by Israeli prosecutors for political corruption, and he exposed Israel to the October attack, and Israel is never going to forgive him about that. Ralph, in your view, did Prime Minister Netanyahu know that October 7th was coming and looked the other way? He had the plans. He had

spies and informants all over Gaza. They had such surveillance that a book was written on it by an Australian recently on how sophisticated. I mean, they know who lives in what buildings.

They know who's having dinner. They know who's going where there. Then they have military spotters, mostly women soldiers in the Israeli army on the border. And then they have all the technological detection. So there are people in Israel accusing him of just what you indicated, that he knew and he now is taking advantage of it because he's so deeply unpopular and the Israeli majority by far wants new elections. They don't want to wait until 2026. And to keep his job, he'll generate a wider regional war, drag the U.S. into it. Who knows where it will go? You know, the U.S.

government is a satellite of the Netanyahu regime. There are six federal laws that Biden is violating that condition the shipment of weapons to foreign countries. One of them is no weapon shipments where human rights are violated. Another is no weapon systems if the country doesn't belong to the nonproliferation treaty on nuclear bombs, which Israel does not belong. So federal statutes are being violated by Biden. Civil liberties in the U.S. are being crushed from universities to Congress. The budgets are being torn apart with Israeli weaponry being supported

in the many, many billions of dollars. The Congress has been reduced to 52 standing ovations for war criminal Netanyahu the other week. There's no president who's gotten more than 35 standing ovations. Who are these guys working for anyway? Most of them were Republicans, but there were quite a few Democrats jumping up and down in glee, watching this genocidal Prime Minister feed them what they want.

And look what it's doing. It's not just what's going on over there, Andrew. It's what the Israeli conflict, the Israeli colony, colonization, the Israeli regional empire is doing to our country's class and the Israeli lobby. I think you know him, Professor John Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago. When I asked him why Netanyahu got all these standing ovations, he said, well, the audience was bought and paid for. He bought the audience by the political.

Here's how bad it is. Here's how bad it is in the Capital Citizen. By the way, your viewers can get it by going to CapitalCitizen.com, print only, $5 donation or more, and they'll get it first class immediately by return mail.

It's a great newspaper. I get it all the time. Yeah. Well, in the current issue get it all the time. Yeah. Well, in the current issue, it has the pictures of 35 members of the Congressional Black Caucus who've taken significant money from AIPAC and its allies over the last 10 years. It amounts to a little over $11 million. So for $11 million, they silenced on the Israeli genocide 39 members of the Black Caucus. They also made him very weak on supporting their colleagues, Representative Cory Bush and Representative Jamal Bowman, who were under massive television ad bombardment by AIPAC.

You know, it's all well known. And they were defeated in the primary in Missouri and New York. And these guys in the Black Caucus didn't really go to bat for them. So it even penetrates that area of Congress, never mind the deranged GOP on this, saying that they wouldn't mind if the Israelis made the rubble bounce. That was Tom Cotton, Senator Tom Cotton. You know, the longest ovation that Prime Minister Netanyahu received, it was longer than a minute. Try clapping your hands for a minute, it's not easy to do, was when he condemned the First Amendment. He condemned the freedom of speech. He condemned the American demonstrators outside

the Capitol building, some of whom were friends of mine, and at least one of whom used to be the chief of staff to Colin Powell, now fiercely anti-war. So there you have a foreign leader condemning the central core of our Bill of Rights, the freedom of speech, and the Congress applauds him for over a minute. Well, on the other side, we have six prominent Israelis, including a former prime minister who wrote Congress before Netanyahu arrived, urging them to disinvite Netanyahu. And listen to this.

These are prominent Israelis. They're well-known celebrities from different backgrounds. Here's what they said. The man, meaning Netanyahu, I'm quoting, the man who will address Congress next month has failed to assume responsibility for the blunders that allowed the Hamas assault, initially blaming security chiefs, then quickly backtracking, and has yet to announce the establishment of a direly needed state commission of inquiry headed by a Supreme Court judge to look into the fiasco, end quote. In another part of this letter to Congress, they accused Netanyahu of destroying the state

of Israel. That's pretty strong language from inside. But it's supported by 17 human rights groups in Israel who, in an open notice in the New York Times on December 13th to Joe Biden, called on him to stop the human catastrophe in Gaza. That was the title. Ralph, we know. I won't even support these people. in Gaza. That was the title. Ralph, we know that Prime Minister Netanyahu and Defense Minister Gallant and the leaders of the IDF are engaged in genocide and are war criminals. Is Joe Biden a war criminal? Clinically, legally, empirically, yes. Yes. I mean, technically, as you know better than I, under our laws, he is now a co-belligerent

under international law. In other words, he is enabling, with massive weapon shiftments in violation of U.S. statutes, as I noted, to go to Israel. He's giving them diplomatic cover and veto in the Security Council in the U.N. And he's weighing in with other countries to support the Israeli genocide. You can't do much worse than that and not be considered a coup belligerent. Right. I want to change the subject a little bit because I want to know about your book. You, of course, once wrote one of the great bestsellers of all time called Unsafe at Any Speed, in which you catalog the excesses of the automobile industry. You have a new book out called Let's Start the Revolution, Tools for

Displacing the Corporate State and Building a Country that Works for the people. Tell us about the book, Ralph. Well, it's a very practical book for this year's election. It basically says to the readers or the voters, here's how you can try to get out more support for those candidates, regardless of their labels or party, who want to stand for the people, who are not subservient to giant corporations, the military-industrial complex, and the expanding authoritarian trends of our country against the First Amendment, the Fourth Amendment, the Seventh Amendment, right of trial by jury, and on. In that sense, it's a handbook for people who want to

be engaged other than just being told in 30 second ads vote for X or vote for Y or don't vote for X and don't vote for Y. It's a companion to our newspaper The Capitol Citizen which is designed to get

people themselves to be Capitol citizens. The greatest fulcrum for change for the better in this country, freedom, justice, the rest of it, is Congress. It is the first among equal branches of government. It's not equal. It's first among equal. And as your many books have pointed out, Judge Napolitano, the Congress

was given the exclusive war power right, the exclusive taxing right, the exclusive spending right, and the exclusive subpoenaing right of the other two branches under the information function that Madison and others so highly thought of. So I hope you'll get this, because if you're discouraged, demoralized, you say you don't want to vote, you're not turned on to politics. Remember, you don't turn on to politics. Look at history all over the world. People don't turn on the politics. Look at history all over the world. People don't turn on the politics. Politics turn on them in a very, very harmful manner. So let's start the revolution. Many long overdue changes for people's lives and livelihoods and their children that Western Europe, Japan, Taiwan, Canada have had for many years.

And one of them is cracking down on corporate crooks. That comes in at over 85% in the polls. A lot of left-right support on that. Law and order. And another one is living wage. The federal minimum wage is $7.25. That's 25 million people who make between that and 15 bucks. Living wage, federal minimum wage, $7.25. That's 25 million people who make between that and 15 bucks.

Can't live on that. And another one is change the tax system, which is a tax loophole system for the multinational companies and the super rich. And another one is open up access to Congress. Congress is becoming a cocoon under the heel of 1,500 corporations. You can't believe how they refuse to return phone calls, emails, serious letters. We even wrote a book on this, Andrew, called The Incommunicables. I've never seen it worse, and it's both Democrat and Republican. Ralph, you are a great man. You are as sharp and articulate as you were when we

first met back at Princeton in 1970. God bless you. Keep up your work. I hope you'll come back and visit with us again, Ralph, will you? Absolutely. And you keep up your work. The old principle, almost all assent in America historically comes from protecting dissent. Thank you, Ralph. God bless you. We'll see you again soon. All the best. All the best to you and your audience. Thank you. Coming up later. Wow, what a wonderful experience to be able to hear a man as steeped in history and devoted to the defense of the individual and to peace as the great Ralph Nader. Coming up at three o'clock Eastern, my good buddy, Charlie Gasparino. What happens when you go woke? Hint, you go broke. Judge Napolitano for Judging Freedom. I'm out.