Judging Freedom - Ryan Dawson: Israeli Slaughter and Ukraine Defeat

Episode Date: February 22, 2024

About:Ryan Dawson is a Historian from the College of William & Mary with over 20 years of political activism in a variety of mediums: blogging, radio, books, film, and television.Ryan Dawson has appeared multiple times on Russia Today, Press TV, Indus News, Sputnik, CNN Headline News, MSNBC, The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, Al Jazeera, anti-war radio, Eddie Bravo Radio, George Galloway, Pat Buchanan, and a variety of radio shows and podcasts.#UnitedNations, #PalestinianRights, #IsraelOccupation, #Coexistence, #InternationalLaw, #ChildrensRights, #PeacefulResolution, #HumanitarianAppeal, #DiplomaticEfforts, #legaljustice #russia #ukraine #USMilitaryHistory #Israel #Gaza #ceasefire #hostages #Ukraine #zelenskyy #Biden #china #IsraelPalestine #MiddleEastConflict #PeaceInTheMiddleEast #GazaUnderAttack #Ceasefire #Jerusalem #prayforpeace #hostages #Israel #Gaza #ceasefire #hostages #Ukraine #zelenskyy #Biden #china #IsraelPalestine #MiddleEastConflict #PeaceInTheMiddleEast #GazaUnderAttack #Ceasefire #Jerusalem #prayforpeace #hostagesSee 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 21st, 2024. Ryan Dawson joins us now, all the way from Japan. Don't let his age fool you. Don't let that young face fool you. Ryan is a historian and author and a political activist. Many of you may know of his work. Ryan, it's a pleasure. Welcome to the show. Thank you for joining us. Thanks for having me. I'm older than I look. Oh, okay. I want to talk to you, at least initially, about Israel and the slaughter that's going on in Gaza. And I know you have opined on this extensively. It appears to me as though no internal force within Israel is going to stop the slaughter and it will take an external force to do so.

What will that external force be? Surely not the Biden administration. It's not going to be the Biden administration. And unfortunately, there's nobody really domestically within Israel that is going to be able to replace Netanyahu and do anything differently. Majority of the population due to the in Israel, is sold on slaughtering Gaza, on ethnic cleansing. The whole reason they're in a concentration camp, to begin with, is from the Nakba and pushing people there. You have to understand these people had to break out of a prison, a wall. They were walled in, over two million people walled in with machine guns pointed at them. That's what they broke out of on October 7th. And it's akin to blaming

a slave revolt on the slaves rather than on slavery. Like, let's just remove the context of the occupation and ignore all that and act like it happened out of the blue. As far as external pressure, it's gonna take not just one party. It's gonna be a combination of different things. So you obviously have the physical resistance of Hamas and Hezbollah, and to a degree, the Houthis in Yemen. But it's going to take international pressure and actual consequences, not a bunch of finger waving, like the UN does. Israel's already been in violation of multiple UN resolutions.

It's not going to come from international court. They don't care. They'll just ignore those decisions. There have to be real economic consequences for Israel's behavior. The economic consequences are the direct result of Israel's behavior and may very well come from the following places. All of the young people formerly happily employed and economically prosperous that are now in the IDF. All the Palestinians that used to work in Israel, now none of them do. The Red Sea being used by various groups in Yemen,

not to kill Americans, but to prevent supplies from getting to Israel. I mean, that's got to have an economic effect on Israel, which Prime Minister Netanyahu and candidly the thugs in his war cabinet will feel the pressure from. In addition to all of that, you also have a lot of Israelis who have left. Because a lot of these people are from Europe or America or somewhere else in the first place. Some of them will claim God gave them someone else's house. They're not originally from there.

And so during the war, a lot of them leave and some of them aren't coming back. I don't see a lot of them from Ashkelon, especially, or other places adjacent to Gaza. They're not coming back to Israel. Those people are gone for good. And Israel is going to have a very hard time attracting tourists or people to come back and live in Israel. And it's important to the psychopaths in that government that they maintain a specific demographic majority for their group over everyone else. But they're leaving in droves. You know, when this first started and it became apparent that the argument that Israel can defend itself was nonsense, it was a pretext for

genocide and ethnic cleansing. A lot of Israelis and a lot of Americans, perhaps you and I among them, were hoping that Prime Minister Netanyahu would be removed from office. And once he's removed from office, he may lose his liberty or his life. But here's a clip from the person who will probably replace him, whose attitude on this is the same as Netanyahu. It's not the same on other Israel domestic issues, like the judiciary that he tried to bring under his thumb, but it's the same on this.

Here's Benny Gantz, who I once thought might be an appropriate person to replace Netanyahu. Listen to him, Ryan, what you're going to hear sounds like Netanyahu wrote it. The world must know, and Hamas leaders must know, if by Ramadan hostages are not home, ולעוד כמה יחסות תחלות תחלות תחלות תחלות תחלות תחלות תחלות תחלות תחלות תחלות תחלות תחלות תחלות תחלות תחלות תחלות תחלות תחלות תחלות תחלות תחלות תחלות תחלות תחלות תחלות תחלות תחלות תחלות תחלות תחלות תחלות תחלות תחלות תחלות תחלות תחלות תחלות תחלות תחלות תחלות תחלות תחלות תחלות תחלות תחלות תחלות תחלות תחלות תחלות תחלות תחלות תחלות תחלות תחלות תחלות תחלות תחלות תחלות תחלות תחלות תחלות תחלות תחלות תחלות תחלות תחלות תחלות תחלות תחלות תחלות תחלות תחלות תחלות תחלות תחלות תחלות תחלות תחלות תחלות תחלות תחלות תחלות תחלות תחלות תחלות תחלות תחלות תחלות תחלות תחלות תחלות תחלות תחלות תחלות תחלות תחלות תחלות תחלות תחלות תחלות תחלות תחלות תחלות תחלות תחלות תחלות תחלות תחלות תח casualties as much as possible. To minimize civilian casualties as much as possible. No one except the most naive or collaborators in his lies can believe that. They're attacking Rafa. They keep telling people, we'll just go to Khan Yunus. Oh, we'll just go to Rafa. And they bomb the places they tell them that will be safe. If bombing apartments is considered self-defense, I'd like to know what is offense. I'd also like to know, and you can put this to Jack Devine or any other Zionist shill,

is there anything, any action that Israel could take that would be considered a war crime? Exactly what would they have to do for us to consider it a war crime? Because they already have snipers shooting kids. They already blow up hospitals, mosques, churches, kindergartens, you name it. Cut the power off, collective famine, starvation, turning off the water, letting babies freeze to death in an incubator. What would they have to do for it to be a war crime? That's a great question, and I don't know how they would answer it. They'll give you their standard argument that the mosque fighters are hiding in hospitals and schools and mosques

and we have the right to destroy those buildings and everything else is collateral damage. It's not collateral damage at all, Ryan. We did a piece recently, which was brought to us by my dear friend, Scott Ritter, about a four-year-old girl in her family's car. Everybody else in the car is dead. A 15-year-old cousin puts her in touch with the Red Crescent and she's begging the Red Crescent to come and save her. And they say, we're coming, we're coming. The Red Crescent comes. The IDF motions the Red Crescent over. The two Red Crescent drivers get out of the ambulance. They're killed. The girl is killed. It's utterly reprehensible. It is a Holocaust-like event for which there is no legal or moral defense or justification. Did you get a chance to watch any of the presentations made to the International

Court of Justice? I did. And it is a Holocaust-like event. And the president of Brazil got in trouble for making that comparison. They called him a Holocaust denier, and he wasn't doing that at all. He was reaffirming. He says, yes, it is like that. You're like that. You're acting like Hitler. You're collectively killing civilians in a concentration camp.

And that girl, by the way, the reason her family was in their car was to try to go get food because they've cut it off to everyone. And I think she was six years old. Maybe she was four, but she was just pleading, crying, it's getting dark, help me in the tank. They shot her. They knew this is a civilian, this is a civilian car full of civilians. They just went in and murdered her anyway. And there's so many things like that. Yes, I have seen the International Court of Justice. I don't put a lot of stock into it. I agree with Doug McGregor on this, that the U.S. and Israel will just ignore them. Right. I thought the arguments made by South Africa and subsequently by the Palestinian

representatives were fabulous. Oh, they're excellent because the Israelis have no shame. They sit there and say the most ridiculous thing. They call them animals and so on. Herzog is no different than Netanyahu. And you can go down every minister and it's the craziest things you've ever heard. I can't believe this is, you know, in this century that people can talk like this. The head of the Israeli internal security, I guess the rough equivalent of the director of the FBI, this madman Ben-Gavir, actually said that Palestinian women and children who in Gaza get too close to the border to Israel should have bullets put in their heads. And I will direct the Israeli police to do so. As far as I know, no one has contradicted that direction.

Well, they did that in 2018 during the March for Peace. They would shoot, snipers would sit there and shoot kids, unarmed people, women, men, didn't matter. And the media, there was just no coverage of it. You are, we were kidding about your youthful face before we went on air, but you are a generation or two younger than I am, younger than most of the guests that I have on. What do young people feel about this, whether they're Republicans or Democrats, liberals, conservatives, progressives or libertarians, atheists or agnostics, white or black. What does the generation of 25 or 30 years old and younger think about this slaughter and Joe Biden's enabling of it?

I think that the age doesn't matter as much as whether or not people get their news from the internet which tends to be more from the younger generation and the older generation but it's not a clear delineation but I've seen it even in Korea and Japan they've been holding rallies for Palestine I never saw that in the past like in 2014 it may be a little thing with some foreigners but people not in the Middle East, not Muslim, not really tied to this directly, not Jewish, are starting to not just sit on the fence. They want to get involved because this is such a humanitarian crisis. And I'll tell you what the difference is. It's the X platform. It's the only sort of mainstream social media platform that

gives people access for the first time for a lot of people. People, these nine to fivers have never seen what Israel has been doing to Palestinians. Let's remember, they murdered 224 Palestinians last year before October 7th, pretty much in silence. Now they're seeing the video. They're seeing people pull bodies out of the rubble. They're seeing the devastation and they're able to see it because of Twitter or X. Right. I hope they're able to see it. You can't see it on YouTube. I hope they're able to see it because of judging freedom on YouTube as well. We have a huge

audience, as you know, an enormous audience. I'm deeply grateful. My own background, as you know, is as a lawyer, a judge, a professor of law, a constitutional scholar. I didn't think I'd be in the midst of foreign policy disputes, but judging freedom is almost exclusively foreign policy. And lately it's been on this and on Ukraine. Do young people understand that the problems in Ukraine began with the American orchestrated coup in 2014? I think a lot of them do. I think a lot of them, they don't know the details the way you and I know them, but they understand. But wasn't there a coup d'etat? Didn't they go to war at Donbass and murder 13,000 to 14,000 people in 2014 and 15?

They understand that they don't start the story in the middle, as Thomas Sowell likes to say. You can't just start with when Russia invades. Donbass is trying to declare independence. They, you know, Ukraine broke the Minsk Accords. They fired artillery at an elementary school. That was the way they decided to do that. And they are the younger generation is very mistrusting of mass media. They've been lied to so much about so many things. And they're even skeptical about YouTube and some platforms because even here you do. You're right. You can talk about it, but you can't show it. If you show certain clips, even though there's nothing wrong with them and they actually don't they don't violate the rules there's these unwritten rules and everyone knows you'll be demonetized or censored

or banned if you do that and they know that and so they come and they see these shows and they go to rumble and they go to twitter they go to telegram and they're getting access to better information but the censorship is really this really comes down to free speech if they weren't able to lie they we wouldn't have these wars we wouldn't have these sanctions we wouldn't have intentional starvation none of this would go on if you took away their ability to lie and that is how you fix it free speech solves all of these things when they went to iraq they had to lie about wmds when they went to syria when you pick something the lie predicates everything else one One of our guests, one of our regular guests is an American freelance journalist in Ukraine.

Right now he's in Donbass, Patrick Lancaster. I don't know if you've seen him. He's like you. He's fearless and courageous, but he lives in the war zone. He called us the other day and said, I'm in Donbass. I'm in my apartment. I just heard two horrific explosions. They had to be 2,000-pound bombs, explosions that big.

And then he went outside, cut number two, Chris, the one you just mentioned to me, and he saw this. And these are pieces of what is purportedly part of the HIMARS rocket. Now, we bring you this information from this intense attack here on the center of Dunyets because you deserve to see things from both sides of the line. Watch as much sources as you can to make your own educated decisions, because it's important not to be led like sheep by the Western mainstream media and the people that want to tell you what to believe.

Find out the information for yourself. Watch as much information as you can. All right, just to give you a little bit of an understanding on what the situation here is and how big this rocket is itself. This is one of the two craters of these United States-supplied HIMARS hitting this library in the very center of Dunn-Yetz. Okay. ... was a HIMARS, which is worse, because as you know, a 2,000-pound bomb is guided by gravity. HIMARS is a smart bomb. It's guided by the computer, which is aimed at the target.

The target was a library. And the rest of that clip points out to a pizza parlor across the street, and another one of these HIMARS hit a crosswalk at a busy intersection. These are Ukrainian military firing American artillery filled with American ammunition at parts of what they say are Ukraine, but what parts of under Russian law are Russia, killing civilians. Here we go again. Ryan. Ryan. Unbelievable. That crater was deep enough. It looked like John McCain was trying to escape. This is something that people of Donbass have been putting up with for many years.

They attacked a library, a pizza parlor, a sidewalk. I was a little sad. I had to pause there as I was thinking of Gonzalo Lira I mean this is another American they've essentially murdered him in prison or allowed him to die no news about it you know Patrick is really doing the work and you know I'd love for the press to be able to do that in Gaza too but the Israelis just shoot them but yes this is something you have to be reminded of this is why Russia went in the they there in. They attempted ethnic cleansing in Ukraine, too. They treated the Russians in the East as second-class citizens. They made laws against them. They've been attacking civilians. And I think this was done out of spite. And the Americans know when high-matters are fired and at what and when. They know. They give it the green light. they're trying to give them even more money they lost at vitka which was able to target the uh in the dana city and so this is just out of spite let's just fire and hit a library let's see we'll just kill some billions and the israelis do the same thing

if there's ever a war in lebanon they won't be able to beat hezbollah they're just going to try and murder as many civilians in beirut as possible that That's their own hostages. We'll hold your civilians hostage. And as Ukraine continues to lose this war, and they are, and get more desperate, they're going to start targeting civilians more. You mentioned John McCain. I knew him well. Of course, we didn't agree on very many things.

Sorry to hear that. Yeah. One of my colleagues, you may know him, he's got a great podcast, a great historian. Tom Woods says, no matter who you vote for for president, you end up with John McCain. And he's right. If you look at all the killings and all the wars and all the slaughter perpetrated by American presidents from as supposedly conservative as George W. Bush to as supposedly

liberal as Barack Obama and everybody in between. I want to go back to Israel for a minute and AIPAC. Who controls Washington? Who has a better grip on Washington, Joe Biden or Benjamin Netanyahu when it comes to Israel? Well, both Biden and Netanyahu really answered to what we call the donor class. And AIPAC is their conduit. It takes money from this donor class, which benefits from the foreign aid, which is always in the billions. So essentially, the U.S. is subsidizing its own subversion by sending all this money to Israel, part of its earmark to be spent on the MIC. The rest is funneled through this donor class to pick politicians on both sides of the pond. Now, in Israel, it's so bad. They're ideologically in line with this warped vision

of this is our land from mythology. But in the U.S., yes, Joe Biden always bends the knee to the Israelis. AIPAC had, there were congressmen, Congressman Brian Mass went to Capitol Hill in an IDF uniform. That's treason. Was he

a member of the IDF at one point? I think he was in their Civil Air Patrol or something like that. He went in there in a uniform. Can you imagine that? Somebody in a Chinese outfit. Right. Because it is Israeli and because of the vice grip they have on the Congress,

there's no complaints at all. I'm sure if one of the squad wore something emblematic of Palestine, they'd be reprimanded for it. In fact, one of them was reprimanded for saying on the floor of the house what Netanyahu says and Benny Gantz and Itamar Gavir say openly and publicly from the river to the sea. If you say from the river to the sea with a Palestinian flag in your hand on the campus of Columbia University, an Ivy League school not far from where I am now, would get kicked off campus. Isn't that something? Universities are supposed to be the bastions of free speech where you can kick around ideas and hash them out and figure out what you're going to believe. And it's the exact opposite. There isn't any place in America where you have less freedom of speech than a university. And it's not just Israel,

it's the safe spaces and woke culture for a series of things you're not allowed to talk about. And that's very troublesome. The fact that this whole cancel culture is a detriment to free speech, which is tantamount to controlling what you're allowed to think. You couldn't even wear a Palestinian pin or lapel, much less full regalia, let's call it. Ryan, it's a pleasure to chat with you. And I'm fascinated with your work and happy with your ideas. We'll do this again. And we'll start with outrageous examples of suppressing free speech. And we will post this and hopefully our huge audience will appreciate you as much as I have.

Thank you so much. Okay, all the best, safe travels. By the way, do you live in Japan? I did for 16 years. I live in Korea now. I'm over here getting my Korean visa actually. Okay, all right. Well, safe travels and we'll see you again soon.

All the best. Thank you so much. You're welcome. Judge Napolitano. That was fabulous. Judge Napolitano for judging freedom. I'm out.