Judging Freedom - Scott Ritter, "Why I no longer stand with Israel" - MUST LISTEN INTERVIEW!

Episode Date: October 18, 2023

Scott Ritter, _Why I no longer stand with Israel_ - MUST WATCH INTERVIEW!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 Tuesday, October 17th, 2023. In a minute, Scott Ritter on how did this mess in Israel and Hamas get started, and what do we do about it, if anything. But first this. There's an organization that still backs Obamacare, gun control, and extreme transgender policies that endanger our kids. They claim to be bipartisan. But last year, 95% of their donations went to the Democrats. AARP does not represent the values of conservative American seniors. Fortunately, there's a conservative alternative. AMAC. Thank you. and is fighting to restore America's election integrity. With more than 2 million members nationwide,

AMAC is proudly pro-family, pro-faith, and pro-freedom. I'm proud to endorse AMAC, and I encourage you to join today. Let's send AARP a strong message that they don't represent conservative American seniors. Join AMAC today at amac.us forward slash judge. That's amac.us forward slash j-u-d-g-e. Hi, Scott. Welcome to the show, my dear friend. No matter what we talk about, it's always a pleasure to speak with you. How to explain the Hamas savage attack on Israeli military and civilian populations 10 days ago? Well, I mean, first of all, we need to understand that we just can't start on October 7th. Correct. October 7th, something very bad happened if you were Israeli.

Your military let its guard down. Your nation came under attack and you suffered egregious casualties, unprecedented levels of casualties. But this isn't something that just happened overnight. It was part of a systemic failure. We need to, first of all, understand why Hamas attacked, because there's a lot of people out there saying, look, Israel was doing everything they could to appease Hamas, to appease the Palestinians in Gaza. They just approved 20,000 work permits so that 20,000 workers in Gaza could leave and work in the West Bank to earn money. That's 20,000 out of a

population of 2.1 million. So understand that it's not like a jobs program. It's a bribe, a small bribe. Israel had stopped active patrol because they built a wall around Gaza, this giant technologically advanced wall. Gaza was a prison, a concentration camp. And you have to understand that. And you have to go back to the birth of Israel to understand. In 1948, when the War of Independence began, the first act that the Israelis did in the Negev Desert, where Gaza is, is to attack every one of the 247 Arab villages and towns, slaughter the men, killing thousands, tens of thousands by some counts, and then taking the survivors and sending them to Gaza, where they became prisoners. This is

1948. Gaza has been a prison camp ever since then. And so there's a lot of animosity going down. The other thing you have to understand is within Gaza, Israel created or empowered the Hamas movement. I mean, it was there, but Israel helped bring it to light. Why? Because Israel needed to divide the Palestinian loyalties. Israel couldn't have the Palestinian people uniting around Yasser Arafat and the Palestinian Liberation Organization and the Fatah movement. That would become too powerful, and Israel would have to give them a state. What Israel did is support Hamas, the rise of Hamas, to split the Palestinians so that they would fight amongst themselves. A divided enemy is easier to control. So Israel created the Hamas

problem, and they were willing to accept the casualties that came about through terrorist actions from Hamas. But the fact is the Israeli military got overconfident. They forgot the lessons of 2014 where they got beat when they went into Gaza and got beat. They pulled back. They relied too much on technology and they fell asleep and Hamas took advantage of it. How to explain vulnerability at this very moment? Was the military on the other side of Israel defending the illegal settlements in the West Bank? Was the Mossad intentionally indifferent? I mean, at this moment in time, the military was nowhere near the Gaza-Israeli border, and the Mossad, the famed Mossad, ignored Egyptian warnings, didn't hear them, didn't get them, they didn't make them up the chain of command,

whatever it is. All this happened at once. How to explain that? It's hard to explain it because it's such an egregious failure. Look, Israel was embarked on a program of settlements in the West Bank, a very controversial program that was designed to push the Palestinians out of certain areas. And they expected a certain amount of backlash from the West Bank population. So they redeployed significant forces, primarily from the Southern Command, from the Gaza division. And they brought these forces in where you would normally have three to four brigades worth of troops around Gaza. You had one undermanned brigade remaining. Everything else was taken down to the West Bank where they were heavily involved in these police type operations. So you'd weaken the line, but Israel felt they could do that because they had an over-reliance

on technology, this new high technology wall with its sensors and remote guns and things of that nature, this artificial intelligence that they had taken in, you know, to collect so much data fed into supercomputers and the supercomputers would spit out assessments about, we think Hamas is going to do this, Hamas is going to do that. And then there was political, what we call conception on the part of the Israeli military and government that said, look, we're bribing Hamas. We're bribing the Palestinians with this jobs program. Things are going to get better. Hamas would never want to ruin this by attacking us. So even though we collect intelligence and you have Israelis, intelligence officers, the Scott Ritter equivalents who are reading it going, hey, boss, time out. I see stuff happening here that's of concern. They send the report up the chain and the chain looks at it and says,

now Hamas would never do that. We believe Hamas is buying into what we're selling them here. And so thank you very much, Scott. Go take a chill pill. We're going to ignore you. You had intelligence officers in Israel who were writing reports saying Hamas is getting ready to attack. You had Egypt telling the Israeli government, we think Hamas is up to something. But the Israeli government had bought into the notion that, no, we got this all under control, because if Israel acted on that, you would have to divert forces away from the West Bank, which means that the priority that Netanyahu had put into pushing these settlements wouldn't be done. So this is a political decision.

Politics, once again, trumped intelligence. Right before we came on air today, the reports are confirmed that the Israelis bombed the principal hospital in Gaza and killed 500 people. Now, how can the Israelis possibly justify that? Well, look, this isn't something new. Israel has a policy that's been in place since 2006. It was an unofficial policy prior to that. But after 2006, the war they fought with Hezbollah, where the Israeli military was beat, Israel came with a policy, and it's based on the principle of deterrence. It's called the Dahua policy. It's mowing the grass. And what it means is that Israel will respond with disproportional violence, not just against the fighters, but the civilians, that the whole idea is to break the support of the civilians for the fighters. So they will attack

them. They will inflict overwhelming casualties. It's a war crime. It's a literal war crime. But the United States has known about this. The world has known. Israel has published this. They bragged about it. But we just don't want to, you know, think about it. What happened in Gaza and what's been happening is part of this policy of dahewa, mowing the grass. And mowing the grass literally implies killing the children, culling them out, decimating them. These are war crimes committed with American military equipment and American ammunition. 100%. And again, normal, under normal circumstances, if a nation took American equipment and did this,

we would embargo them. We would sanction them. We would tell them that you can't do this. But here it's Israel. Again, see, hear, speak, no evil. We know what Israel's doing. We support what Israel's doing. This is why any talk of the United States of being sympathetic to the Palestinian population is a 100 percent lie.

We've never been sympathetic to the population. We've always been embracing the Israeli point of view and the Israeli strategic objectives, even if it includes a this policy of Dahua. Look, Israel published it. Google it. The papers are there. I'm not making it up. And when you read it, you're going to go, how could this be? Because we have been blind to the crimes committed by Israel against the Palestinians for over seven decades. speaking, was a rally outside the destroyed hospital in Gaza by several thousand Palestinians. What is the Israeli goal? Is it to turn northern Gaza into the Stone Age? When their troops enter, what are they going to be doing? Fighting guerrilla warfare?

Because if that's the case, are reservists adequately trained and equipped to fight guerrilla warfare against an enemy that doesn't wear uniforms? You know, there's two anecdotal stories that can be told here. One, early on in the battle of Stalingrad, the Germans came in and bombed the Red October plant, bombed it, pulverized it. And then the Red Army soldiers went in and dug into the ruins. And the Germans brought in their most elite sapper assault units and they attacked and they were slaughtered because it's impossible to launch an attack against an enemy dug into and already destroyed. Monte Casino, 1944. We blew up the casino. We blew up the villages, turned into rubble. The German 6th Airborne Division dug in. We came up and took four assaults and tens of thousands of casualties

before we could finally take that mountain. We only took it because the Germans withdrew from that. If the Israelis go into Gaza, what are they going to do? Judge, I'm going to be just dead up straight with you. They're going to die. They're going to die in numbers that the Israelis haven't seen before. And the Israeli military knows it. Why do you think they haven't gone in yet?

Because they know what's going to happen. Hamas is ready for them. Hamas is prepared for them. Hamas told Iran. Iran said, hey, look, if you guys are in trouble, we'll come in now. Hamas said, we got this, boss. We are ready for this. We don't need your help. We don't want your help. Hamas is luring the Israelis into a death trap in Gaza. And that's what's going to happen to the Israeli army when they go into Gaza. They're going to die. Do most Israelis blame Prime Minister Netanyahu for this, either for the vulnerability, the lack of taking intel seriously, or the conditions that caused it to come about? I think the overwhelming number of Israelis blame Benjamin Netanyahu for

this. First of all, before this war even started, they were already mad at him for what he had shredded, the rule of law. He had shredded the concept of separate but equal branches of government. They rewrote basic Israeli law to subordinate the judiciary to a politicized legislative, which was responsive to a politicized executive. And America would be the equivalent of the Supreme Court being told that the Congress gets to pick the Supreme Court justices. And if the Supreme Court justices make any decision that they don't agree with, they can be impeached and replaced. That wouldn't work. Well, that's happened in Israel to protect Benjamin Netanyahu. He is a corrupt individual under serious charges of corruption. So he is perverting the concept of basic separate but equal branches of government to benefit himself. And Israel is already fundamentally split. Now you throw on top of

that, he is Mr. Security. He's the guy that's been telling the Israelis from 1995 that he alone can take care of Israel. He knows the real threats. He knows all the problems. Trust me, I will save you. Well, Bibi, you were asleep at the wheel, and now you have thousands of dead Israelis because of you. All of Israel knows this. So he's in trouble right now. He's playing on this, which is going to make coming up with a peaceful outcome very difficult.

Because Benjamin Netanyahu knows this is the end of him as a politician. He is finished. He will not survive this. While this is going on, the president of the United States, we'll leave in a few hours, will soon be on his way to Israel. He taped a piece for 60 Minutes. They released some snippets. We'll play one or two of them for you now, in which he defends the ability of the United States to engage for Israel and to engage for Ukraine at the same time. So basically, Scott Pelley says to him, are you serious? Can the United States confront two wars at the same time?

Take a listen. Are the wars in Israel and Ukraine more than the United States can take on at the same time? We're the United States of America, for God's sake. The most powerful nation in the history, not in the world, in the history of the world. The history of the world. We can take care of both of these and still maintain our overall international defense. I guess he forgot about Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq, Scott. He forgot about a lot of things.

I mean, the fact of the matter is, and it pains me to say this, but we're not the most powerful nation. We're the United States of America, for God's sake. I know that, Mr. President. Unlike you, I wore the damn uniform. I know what it means to put my life on the line for my country. And you're going to sit there and lecture me? You're going to lecture the people that served in Iraq, served in Afghanistan, knows what it's like to be portrayed by the likes of

you? No way. Look, the fact of the matter is, if you took an American brigade right now, put it into Ukraine against the Russians, it would be destroyed within a matter of days. That's God's honest truth. Our military is not trained, equipped, organized. It doesn't have proper leadership. And to be honest, the physical fitness, the makeup of this military, it's gone woke. I don't want to get too much politics on that. We are not the same military that we used to be. And that's because of people like Biden. We're getting whooped in Ukraine, Mr. President. Maybe you haven't seen what's going on. We're not winning. We're not prevailing. They not only are beating the Ukrainians, which we've pumped up with over $130 billion worth of equipment, they're depleting NATO's

capability of fighting. And that was before Israel happened. And now the Israeli military just got their butts handed to them by a bunch of Hamas fighters. And Hamas is just foaming at the mouth for them to come into Gaza. Mr. President, what do you have to offer? Two aircraft carrier battle groups and one Marine amphibious ready group. 2,000 Marines. And I love the Marine Corps. We're pretty damn good, but we're not that good, Mr. President. What are you going to do with 2,000 Marines against 100,000 Hezbollah fanatics dug into the hill waiting for you to come?

What are they going to do? What are they going to do with What are they going to do with 2,000 Marines? And why are we sending them there other than for symbolic reasons? And where are they going? First of all, I mean, I think they're going to float in the Mediterranean. They're not going on the ground. They're not going to get engaged. What they need to do is make sure they stand off the coast sufficiently, because if you get too close to the coast, Hezbollah has some missiles that'll reach out, touch them and sink them. So you got to keep them there. What they're doing is playing a political game. Here's the reality of why Mr. Biden's going to Israel tomorrow.

We know that Israel can't win this war. We know this. Israel knows it. They ran two military exercises, one last year called Chariots of Fire, one this year called Firm Hand, where they tested this very scenario. What happens if Hamas, Hezbollah, the West Bank, and Iran and Syria all come at us at once? Can we defend ourselves? And the answer is no, we get whooped. We especially get whooped by Hezbollah, who has our number dialed in. Israel's mobilized 360,000 reservists. They've sent about 30,000 to 40,000 up towards the north. The rest went to Gaza. If Hezbollah comes in, let me just tell you what will happen. They will take northern Israel. Northern Israel will fall, up to and including possibility of the city of Haifa falling, being captured by Hezbollah, because the Israeli military is that bad right now.

The president knows this. He knows that if Israel goes into Gaza, Hezbollah will get involved. Iran may back them up and we don't have a solution. Look, Donald Trump ran into this. You remember when they shot down the Global Hawk drone in the Straits of Hormuz? And Trump was like, I'm going to bomb them. I'm going to bomb them. The military came up and said, excuse me, Mr. President, understand that if you bomb them, then they will retaliate by killing all of our Americans in the Middle East because they have the ability to do that. They will blow up all the oil fields in the Middle East. The world economy will collapse and it will take us 9, 12, 15 months to mobilize 900,000 troops to go there. And even then we may not win because it's a big country and they're

ready for us. Let's not do it. We can't beat Iran conventionally with nuclear weapons, different story. Hopefully we don't go down that route, but we can't beat them. Biden knows this. So what Biden's doing is coming to Israel and he's going to say, guys, we have to come up with a different solution. I know we don't want to talk about this because it means you're going to have to make some compromises, but we can't allow you to go into Gaza because if you go into Gaza and Iran comes in, we can't stop them. We're not going to do it with two carrier battle groups. We're not going to do it with 2,000 Marines. We don't have the forces to do this. So we need to end this conflict now. That's what the president's going to be saying to Israel. Last subject before we go,

what is happening in Ukraine? Because it's not on the front pages. It's not even on the back pages this week. Russians have won. It's a strategic victory for Russia right now. They're in the business of chewing up what remains of the Ukrainian military. The Ukrainians have exhausted their strategic reserves. They have no reserves coming in. Russia's engaged in at least three battles, meat grinder type operations. And the Ukrainians are just getting chewed up. And at the time and place of Russia's choosing, they will go on limited offenses and begin the process of pushing Ukraine back towards the Nipper River. And what happens to President Zelensky? He moves to Miami? It's his choice. He can either die, and he will die if he stays, or he can try and get out and go to Miami, go to someplace. I wouldn't go to Israel anymore, even though he bought that home.

I wouldn't go to Egypt. But yeah, Miami's probably a likely place for him to go and spend the rest of his life in retirement looking over his shoulders, because I will tell you that the Ukrainians will hate him for the rest of his lives. And he will be a hunted man because he is responsible for the deaths of over a half a million Ukrainian men. Scott Ritter, thank you very much. Thanks for your passion. Thanks for your intellect. Thanks for your extraordinary grasp of all these issues and your ability to explain them so succinctly so we can all understand it. I know the audience agrees with me as well. Thank you, my dear friend. Thank you. Okay. Judge Napolitano for judging freedom. We've had two very interesting days so far.

It's only the afternoon here on the East coast of the United States on Tuesday. We have three more days to come. Our usual guests will be with us. Keep watching. Keep subscribing. Thank you very much. We're up to 213,000 subscriptions. We will hit a quarter of a million by Christmas. And as always, more as we get it. Judge Napolitano for judging freedom. Thank you.