Scott Horton Show - Just the Interviews - 10/17/24 Max Blumenthal on the Exaggerated, Embellished and Outright Fake Atrocities Justifying Israel’s Genocide in Gaza

Episode Date: October 20, 2024

Scott interviewed Max Blumenthal on Antiwar Radio this week about his new documentary Atrocity Inc. Everything Israel is currently doing in Gaza is being justified by a series of atrocities that it cl...aims Hamas committed on October 7th. But Blumenthal and his colleagues at the Gray Zone have uncovered the fact that many of the most horrific and dramatic stories are either outright fabrications or were actually atrocities committed by the IDF that were later blamed on Hamas. Blumenthal and Scott discuss what he uncovered and documented in this new film. Discussed on the show: Atrocity Inc: How Israel Sells Its Destruction Of Gaza Max Blumenthal is a senior editor of the Grayzone Project and the author Goliath, Republican Gomorrah and The 51 Day War. Follow him on Twitter @MaxBlumenthal. This episode of the Scott Horton Show is sponsored by: Roberts and Robers Brokerage Incorporated; Tom Woods’ Liberty Classroom; Libertas Bella; ExpandDesigns.com/Scott. Get Scott’s interviews before anyone else! Subscribe to the Substack. Shop Libertarian Institute merch or donate to the show through Patreon, PayPal or Bitcoin: 1DZBZNJrxUhQhEzgDh7k8JXHXRjY Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Starting point is 00:00:00 For Pacifica Radio, October the 17th, 2024. I'm Scott Horton. This is Anti-War Radio. All right, y'all welcome the show. It is Anti-War Radio. I'm your host, Scott Horton. I'm editorial director of anti-war.com. And author of the book, Enough Already.
Starting point is 00:00:28 Time to end the war on. terrorism. You can find my full interview archive, more than 6,000 of them now, going back to 2003 at Scott Horton.org and at YouTube.com slash Scott Horton Show and, you know, Spotify and whatever, all your different podcatchers there. Just look for the Scott Horton show. And I'm here every Thursday from 23 to 3 on KPFK, 90.7 FM in L.A. And I'm happy to welcome back to the show, Max Blumenthal, from the Gray Zone. How are you doing, Max? good good to be back uh good to have you here and man you do such important work and one thing i like about it is you know you cover these very controversial topics but it's always solid stuff like
Starting point is 00:01:11 if i had to place a bet i'd bet everything i have that when you do a documentary like atrocity ink how israel sells its destruction of gaza that i just know i can bank on your facts that you are always so careful and so meticulous and fair-minded in your approach in the documentary you say hey look there's no denying what Hamas did here there is denying what they didn't do and there goes the rub and I just appreciate that it's nice to be able to recommend somebody to somebody and not have to add in a bunch of disclaimers it doesn't matter that we agree on everything or not I know I can rely on your journalism and that's a hell of a lot
Starting point is 00:01:54 and the documentary is Atrocity Inc. It's on YouTube right now. Atrocity Inc. How Israel sells its destruction of Gaza. And man, is this an eye-opening thing? I really recommend it to people to provide
Starting point is 00:02:10 real perspective on what's been going on over there for the last year, especially of course. The propaganda claims, the Belgian babies on bayonets. And I remember even thinking, Max, when the rumors came of all the initial atrocity supposedly
Starting point is 00:02:26 perpetrated by Hamas. And this always happens with all the wars. My initial instinct is to say, nah, come on, that's BS. But then I think, oh, wait, I don't know. I don't want to get out ahead of the story. I don't know it's a lie yet. And it could be true.
Starting point is 00:02:42 Hamas ain't nice, guys. I don't know. But then, boy, it turned out that the Israelis embellished the story of October the 7th as bad as any war propaganda. in the last hundred years, according to your documentary here. That's right.
Starting point is 00:02:59 We're over a year into what clearly appears to be a genocide. I mean, and even if you don't accept that definition, the level of human suffering in Gaza is unparalleled. It's unlike anything I've ever witnessed in my life. So how do we get here? I think that's part of what I'm answering in the film. None of this would have been possible, This level of violence wouldn't have been possible for them to justify it without manipulating Western public opinion through the deployment of atrocity porn that was fabricated through just a cascading series of hoaxes that took what happened on October 7th and exaggerated it to a sublime degree to convince not only convince Westerners,
Starting point is 00:03:52 that Israel, whatever it wanted to do, was absolutely necessary. And then it had to act with total ferocity to prevent this from ever happening again. Because this was as the script went, which was repeated by everyone from Biden to Kamala Harris to CNN hosts, Jake Tapper, Dana Bash, the worst killing of Jews on any day since the Holocaust. But as something that took place because Hamas wanted to simply kill Jews, and there was no historical context or political context. This didn't happen because Hamas represented a mass-based constituency inside an occupied and besieged enclave of refugees who had no way out and no path forward to ever end their death sentence to just being doomed in a kind of open-air prison, which I visited twice. And that is what I try to get to the heart of in this documentary.
Starting point is 00:04:56 And so I start just days after October 7th with the first lie about beheaded babies, 40 beheaded babies, which was featured on CNN. They claim to have confirmed it through Benjamin Netanyahu, as though one of the most mendacious political figures on the world stage can be trusted. Biden repeated it. There were several other fake atrocities cooked up by organizations like Zaka, which was a supposed rescue group that had access to the Kibbutzim that were attacked in southern Israel on October 7th.
Starting point is 00:05:31 This organization was raising millions of dollars off of the fake atrocities that concocted, and they were repeated by Secretary of State Tony Blinken to justify his opposition to a ceasefire as late as October 31. 23, when there should have been moved towards a ceasefire and a hostage deal already because Israel had destroyed northern Gaza, then we moved to the deception of the death toll, revealing how Israel actually killed many people. Actually, hold that thought for a second. I'm going to go back to Anthony Blinken there because it's Max Blumenthal, you guys, from the Grey Zone. And he's produced this great new documentary, Atrocity, Inc. And you show in there multiple clips of Anthony Blinken, who's got to. be the worst secretary of state since the last guy um i think he's the worst he he very well could be i mean he's right up there with yeah macnamara or connolyza rice or the worst you know colomalto the worst killers but he sat there and uh and told the congress he repeated to congress all of the most lurid stories here that were handed to him by the israeli government and
Starting point is 00:06:45 public relations machine correct Well, he was asked in a Senate hearing on October 31st, you know, do you think that we could move towards a ceasefire? You know, Gaza's being destroyed. U.S. aid is not getting in. Starvation is starting to happen. I mean, it's happening right away. According to Israel's plan. And he said a family was held by Hamas. The father's hand was cut off. The mother was mutilated. Then they killed the child and had breakfast or lunch in the living room. Well, listeners, don't worry. This is all made up, so you don't have to be upset. This was made up by someone named Yossi Landau from an organization called Zaka, which has raised millions of dollars off fabricated atrocity tales. And he's responsible for at least 10 of the major hoaxes. And so, you know, in my documentary, it's only 40 minutes long.
Starting point is 00:07:37 I mean, if the entire script had made it across the cutting floor, it would have been an hour and a half because, I tried to methodically explain how every lie was debunked and how there was data, forensic evidence that was already documented at the scene of all of these Kibbutzim, showing how everyone died and who died. And none of it matched up with anything Blinken, Biden, or any of these other figures said. And yet the lies still persist to this day. That's such an important point, that the professionals actually doing their job,
Starting point is 00:08:14 on the scene. They didn't lie. They categorized the deceased, the coroner, and his assistance and whoever, all these people. So that's how we know that the rest of this is an embellishment because it's right here in the real records what really happened, you're saying. Yeah, I mean, there are many people in Congress who wouldn't have cared if Israel had committed a Holocaust in Gaza without any justification. That's true. But they needed a script. And so this allowed them to justify it on the basis of atrocities and it needs to be prevented. I think, you know, listen, I mean, I don't know if you remember this, but there was a period, this had been 15 years ago or maybe more, where maybe just after Hamas was when John McCain,
Starting point is 00:09:04 I remember him, he's sitting out in the snow being interviewed at the World Economic Forum in Switzerland. And he says, we can talk to Hamas. They're not that bad, really. I mean, they're bad. But we could talk to him. And we're talking about McCain here, right? The horrible, the worst war hawk in the Republican Party in the U.S. Senate. But he was just that portrays a different understanding about Hamas. And in fact, I know that in, I'm going to say, what, 2013, I think, some al-Qaeda guys popped their heads up in Gaza. And Hamas immediately murdered them.
Starting point is 00:09:39 And so we did not do that. And they had always been denounced the Muslim brother. and Hamas have been denounced by al-Qaeda for playing the game of the West, negotiating, holding elections and trying to figure out a way to get along instead of just waging jihad and all of that. And so it's really an important distinction and an important part of their propaganda for Netanyahu to say, nope, see, all that's wrong. Hamas is al-Qaeda, is ISIS. And I've had people tell me, yeah, they throw gays off the roof. And I'm like, no, that was Benjamin Netanyahu. Yahoo's agents in Syria that was doing that, not Hamas. And Hamas actually sided with them, too,
Starting point is 00:10:21 but still, that was ISIS, not Hamas, you know? Hamas's political wing initially sided with them, their former leadership. The current leadership and their armed wing did not. And they didn't fight with them there. That's a side point. That's a side point. But, I mean, October 7th would have never happened if the United States, which actually imposed elections on Palestinians, national elections in 2005 and six had accepted the results and said, let's try to deal with the victor of these elections instead of allowing Israel to kidnap all of their legislators in the West Bank where they won and then placed the Gaza Strip under siege after a failed coup attempt led by Elliot Abrams to have the Palestinian Authority reassert
Starting point is 00:11:14 control in an area where they were not wanted because they were so corrupt and feckless. And instead, the U.S. supported a siege, declared Hamas, a terrorist group on par with al-Qaeda. Actually, not on par because the U.S. funded and trained al-Qaeda in Syria and Libya. John McCain even went and met with these characters. This would have never happened. October 7th, and this is not what my documentary deals. My documentary deals with really the role of corporate U.S. media in selling fabricated atrocities from beheaded babies to mass sexual assault on October 7th in order to manufacture consent for the genocide that's unfolding right before our eyes. But there's another documentary to be made, and there are several good books out there that, you know, there's a book called Containing Hamas and another book that's a collection, which I blurbed called Understanding Hamas by Helena Cobbin.
Starting point is 00:12:11 That really show that this is a political movement that's not any different from the African National Congress or Irish Republican Army that has political goals and it uses violence to achieve them when political means and diplomatic means are cut off because the West refuses to deal with them. And the West basically means the U.S. So October 7th was just an attempt to force a political negotiation so that Hamas could get. its people, its prisoners out, and to start to force an end to the siege policy. And Yaya Senwar, the man who was just apparently killed today by Israel in a massive strike in southern Gaza, who was the mastermind of October 7th and the entire, you know, with the objective of forcing this negotiation. He himself negotiated his own release out of prison through the Gilad Shalit prisoner swap in 2011. He'd been in prison for 25 years. And he's someone who
Starting point is 00:13:26 understands the society in Gaza and what it's like to be a refugee. He grew up in the poorest part of Gaza in the Shati refugee camp. And he also understood Israeli society. And he intimately, taught himself Hebrew at a fluent level in prison and became the key negotiator from prison for Hamas. When he was released, he duped the Israelis into believing that he wanted just accommodation, get some work permits, and get his people. I guess they never read the novel he smuggled out of prison. You know, and they were convinced that they could domesticate Hamas, and that, you know, if they sent some money from Qatar and to Gaza to just keep the lights on, that they would accept life under siege, and gradually the Palestinian struggle would
Starting point is 00:14:18 be diminished. Meanwhile, Sinwar was preparing a major operation, and there were a few things that went awry, like whatever happened at the music festival on Gaza's border, which in itself was a perverse display of colonial entitlement in which it appears over 200 people were killed. But as I show in the documentary, many of them were killed by Israeli Apache helicopters and drones as they were taken as captive back into Gaza. And people were just shot randomly on the ground trying to escape because the helicopter pilots couldn't distinguish between Palestinians and Israelis. and didn't. Hey, guys, I've had a lot of great webmasters over the years,
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Starting point is 00:15:39 Tom has done such a great job on putting together a classical curriculum for everyone from junior high schoolers on up through the postgraduate level, and it's all very reasonably priced. Just make sure you click through from the link in the right margin at Scott Horton.org. Tom Woods' Liberty Classroom. Real history, real economics, real economics, real estate. education. Well, I guess it was just a matter of time. I drank so much coffee I turned into some. Hey, guys, check out the Scott Horton Show special blend at Moondoseartisan coffee.com. It's a blend of organically grown Ethiopian and Sumatran coffee beans. Two very different
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Starting point is 00:17:34 So it's anti-war radio on KPFK. I'm Scott Horton talking with Max Blumenthal here. And this is where we get back to all the atrocity porn and was blamed on Hamas. Part of that was they had to explain the crime scene of just ultra-violence. and they had to blame it all on Hamas. And so you had entire houses blown up, bodies burned beyond recognition in various circumstances. And if Hamas did that all, then boy, that does look like some ISIS-type behavior max. But here's where we get back to what you were saying before about the Hannibal directive.
Starting point is 00:18:14 What is the Hannibal directive? Well, it used to be a secret Israeli military policy that allowed Israel to kill its own citizens if they were taken captive by the enemy to deny the political leverage. Didn't it start out that it was only for soldiers if a soldier like Gilad Shalik got kidnapped? Right. But then they just on the fly, they applied it to civilians too? Well, this was the first time that there had been a kind of mass kidnapping and many soldiers
Starting point is 00:18:44 were being taken captive from their bases. So they enacted a mass Hannibal and the order went out. no car should return to Gaza, blow up everything on its way to Gaza, kill everyone, and look at the methods Israel's using now in Gaza. They'll just blow up entire neighborhoods and apartment blocks filled with people, filled with children, to get one target, or they're just doing it randomly. We can't really tell the violence is so extreme. They're doing it in southern Lebanon as well. They just blew up an entire village, which did. dates back 2,000 years in southern Lebanon.
Starting point is 00:19:23 They were doing this on October 7th in the southern Israeli, so-called Gaza envelope, to their own citizens, including with tank shells. You had tanks operating inside Kibbutzim, like Kibbutzbury, blowing up homes. We know for a fact that at least one home was ordered to be shelled with at least 12 Jewish Israelis who were being held by a team of Hamas militants.
Starting point is 00:19:49 And they killed everyone inside, including 12-year-old twins, then blamed it all in Hamas. But you had tank shells going into many other homes, helicopter firing their cannons and rockets into homes, drones. And then, you know, you look at the homes in the state of them. They look like the homes in Gaza. And people inside were found with their body parts severed, shredded up. And then they would say, oh, Hamas just went in and shredded these people just for fun. When the reality was Hamas wanted to get as many people back to Gaza alive as possible and that they have done all they could to keep these captives and hostages alive so that they can use them as political collateral. Meanwhile, since October 7th in Gaza where
Starting point is 00:20:36 over 250 people had been taken captive and what was a very successful, probably the most successful Palestinian military operation in history, Israel has killed over 40 hostages. it continues to enact the Hannibal directive. Everyone who's come out of Gaza, who's Israeli, has said my biggest fear was getting killed in an Israeli air strike, and so many of them have.
Starting point is 00:21:01 Israel also killed three of its own citizens almost at point-blank range, execution style, when they ran out with a sign reading, rescue us, to a team of Israeli soldiers. Because the soldiers are basically told, kill everything that moves.
Starting point is 00:21:18 That's why the New York Times released an investigation this week showing the x-rays of children's skulls in Gaza with bullets wedged inside their skulls because snipers are shooting children, anyone who walks down the street. So this is what happened on October 7th. And this is what manufactured consent for what I consider to be the Holocaust of our time. Yeah. Max, you know, I think the only other side of the story is it just couldn't be. You're telling me that these are our friends. This is what we're paying for. Is a genocide based on pure lies in the most cynical make George Bush look like a hero type fashion? I mean, this is this is the worst scandal I've ever witnessed.
Starting point is 00:22:10 And it's almost undeniable at this point what's taking place. But now you even have Pentagon Chief, Lloyd Austin, and Tony Blinken, admitting that Israel is deliberately starving the population in Gaza, issuing a letter to Israel's defense secretary, Yoav Galant, declaring that if Israel continues obstructing U.S. humanitarian aid in Gaza, that they will cut off arms. Of course, they'll never cut off arms. And they say they'll do so in 30 days, and they waited until now, because in 30 days, it will be about a week. after election day so it's safe to do something but there's an acknowledgement there that is breaking u.s. law by refusing to allow u.s. aid into Gaza because its goal is not to end
Starting point is 00:23:01 Hamas it is to end the Palestinian question as it always has been since 1948 yeah and now this is the point of this documentary it's called atrocity ink everyone can watch it for free on YouTube and it's about American repetition, American media repetition of Israeli propaganda to justify all this. And it's so important because I know even as we're talking, people driving down the 405 are thinking, yeah, but what about all of that stuff? I heard, Max, like, for example, there's this lady Cheryl Sandberg and this guy, Jeffrey Gettelman, who put all this effort into exposing Hamas's mass rape campaign on October the 7th last year. What about that? Yeah, I mean, I go into that at length in this film and in the original script, I would have demolished these
Starting point is 00:23:57 propaganda pieces even more thoroughly, but we had to make this watchable, not send people down the rabbit hole that I was in for months, debunking these bogus documentaries and articles which were spinning out a propaganda construct that was conceived in Israel, in Tel Aviv, after all of the other hoaxes had been exposed, and after the first exchange of hostages and prisoners in early December, which is that Hamas carried out mass sexual violence on October 7th. I just knew this was false because I know the mentality of the Hamas fighter and the organization. And if someone had been caught doing that and violating religious and cultural custom in Gaza,
Starting point is 00:24:53 they actually would have been executed by Hamas leadership. It also would have violated the mission. And it would have been actually sort of physically impossible under Israeli fire. So I immediately called out this lie, but then I set out to debunk all the sources in the major New York Times. Times front page article, it then started to collapse when members of the families, bereaved family members of people who are killed on October 7th, started claiming the New York Times had lied about their own family members being raped. So Cheryl Sandberg, billionaire, neoliberal, tech oligarch friend of Hillary Clinton comes forward with a documentary. Taking a
Starting point is 00:25:43 the New York Times and all of these articles, which were the result of the Israeli propaganda construct claiming mass rape took place on October 7th. She sort of dramatized it through interviews with sources who had already been debunked. And she violated the Geneva Conventions by featuring testimony by Palestinian prisoners in Israeli torture camps whose testimony had been coerced, obviously through torture, through threats against their families who claimed that they raped women on October 7th. And, you know, separately at the Gray Zone, we investigated these testimonies and tried to match them against physical evidence, video evidence, forensic evidence of what took place on October 7th because there is meticulous documentation.
Starting point is 00:26:33 And we could not match any of these confessions with any real events that took place. So obviously, they were the product of torture. I mean, what Israel's shin bet will do is they'll tell these Palestinian guys, like, here's your family's home, here are the coordinates. We're going to kill your entire family unless you start talking. And it's a credible threat, too. They kill families all day. All day.
Starting point is 00:26:56 If you belong to Hamas or if someone in your family had been involved in resistance activities, you will be eliminated because they believe that the family itself poses. a threat because they can have children who will then resist them and that they need to send a message to a population at large that you will be killed if you do anything so Cheryl Sandberg violated I think one of the most important red lines in journalism which is you don't use coerced testimony uh you know testimony of course through torture at least without verifying it um so we feature that as well and I think what atrocity is Ink does is it provides people with a vehicle, not just for understanding how this massive
Starting point is 00:27:46 propaganda apparatus manufactured consent for the worst genocide we've witnessed in recent years or in my lifetime, but also gives you an educational tool to share with others. You can show it in your school. You can show it in your community, have a small meeting with friends and people who are on the fence and start a discussion about it. It's only 40 minutes long. And I think, you know, we did it in a pretty compelling fashion. Yeah. Hey, I sent it out to some conservative-leaning friends of mine and just said, hey, blow your mind.
Starting point is 00:28:28 Check this out. Because I know that they don't know. But you do such a great job of presenting your evidence in this documentary. it is incredible and it is it should be viral it's the kind of thing that people can know that they can stand on to show their friends and their family that listen you don't have to believe these lies there's no reason any of us should have to be bound to support evil based on deception forget it break free of that it's as simple as that yeah here's such a great tool to show your friends and families so thank you so much for your effort here and and all your great work at the gray zone and your time on the show, Max. Thanks a lot, Scott, and congratulations on the new book. I appreciate it.
Starting point is 00:29:12 Soon. Soon. All right, you guys, that's the great, Max Blumenthal. Speaking of books, he wrote Goliath, the 51 Day War, and the management of savagery, which are all fantastic. And again, this documentary is called Atrocity, Inc. How Israel Sells It's Destruction of Gaza. And that's it for Anti-War Radio for this week.
Starting point is 00:29:33 I'm Scott Horton. I'm here every Thursday from... 230 to 3 on KPFK, 90.7 FM in L.A. See you next week.

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