Scott Horton Show - Just the Interviews - 1/11/24 Kyle Anzalone on the Wars in Gaza and Ukraine

Episode Date: January 13, 2024

Kyle Anzalone was on Antiwar Radio this week to discuss developments in the Middle East and Eastern Europe. They discuss the war crimes case against Israel, the humanitarian crisis in Gaza, the risk of a wider war in the Middle East, the status of the war in Ukraine and more. Discussed on the show: “Blinken Warns of Expanding War in the Middle East, But Restates Full Support for Israel” (Libertarian Institute) “Media amplified US, Israeli narrative on Palestinian deaths” (Responsible Statecraft) “Inside Israel’s torture camp for Gaza detainees” (+972 Magazine) “Israel Choking Aid Deliveries into Gaza” (Libertarian Institute) “An American Appeals to Taiwan: Don’t Vote To Be Ukraine 2.0” (Antiwar.com) “RFK Jr.’s ‘unconditional’ support for Israel is costing his campaign for president” (Orange County Register) Kyle Anzalone is news editor of the Libertarian Institute, opinion editor of Antiwar.com and co-host of Conflicts of Interest with Will Porter and Connor Freeman. Follow him on Twitter @KyleAnzalone_ This episode of the Scott Horton Show is sponsored by: Moon Does Artisan Coffee; 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

For Pacifica Radio, January 11th, 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 at anti-war.com, and I'm the author of the book, Enough Already. to end the war on terrorism. You can find my full interview archive just short of 6,000 of them now going back to 2003. In fact,

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All right, welcoming back to the show. the Institute's news editor and anti-war.com's opinion editor and the host of the great podcast Conflicts of Interest and my good friend Kyle Anzalone. How are you doing, Kyle? Happy to be back on the show today, Scott. Great, man. Happy to have you here.

And we got so much important news to talk about. First, let's do Israel-Palestine. Talk to me about the South African case in the ICC. there in the Hague and and then also you've got a couple new stories here about Antony Blinken. I don't know why he even shows up in the morning. But anyway, first of all, what's going on at the Hague? Yeah. So it's the ICJ that they're holding it at.

And I'm not sure as probably as the time we're recording Scott. They're still ongoing. The South Africans were presenting their case this morning. And of course, you know, one of the very notable things about this. South African cases, it was joined by a member of the Israeli Knessy, Israeli lawmaker. And now, of course, you know, the rest of the Knessa is trying to dispel this guy for doing so. But he is out there and I think rightfully so calling himself a true patriot and saying what, you know, what things call for right now is to call for restraint, not more violence.

And to say that we can not commit these war crimes that we are committing in Gaza. And so, you know, he's facing a lot of heat from. its fellow lawmakers. And then, of course, the U.S. has denounced it as well. John Kirby, the White House National Security Council spokesperson called it awful. Anthony Blinken, our secretary of state, while he was in Israel, denounced the South African indictment of Israel with their charges. And then also went on to say that it was counterproductive for the Palestinians. He said it's going to make it harder to get aid into the Palestinians, which, you know, is just completely absurd in 1984-level propaganda that our secretary of state is trying to spit out. So one of the

articles I wrote for the Institute yesterday, Scott, was going over some of the requests blink and made of Israel while he was in the country during his Mideast trip. And a couple of things that he asked Israel to do was allow the Palestinians to return to North Gaza, release Tats money. so Israel collects Tats money on behalf of the Palestinian Authority, and since October 7th, they withheld that. Biden has actually pushed Netanyahu in the past to agree to this proposal that was first made by Netanyahu to allow the Norwegians to have access to that money. And I guess then they will play like a role of purchasing things on behalf of the Palestinian Authority or allowing the Palestinian Authority to have access to that money in certain circumstances.

and then they also called for Israel to just scale down operations in the Gaza Strip. And we had Smaltrich, the Israeli finance minister, post on ETS after Blinken's visit, that, you know, Blinkin's real nice and we really appreciate our allies in the U.S., but we are not going to release that money. And so this seems to be a top agenda item for President Biden releasing the Palestinian Tats money. I think it's really important to what Biden sees as his long-term plan for Israel, which includes the Palestinian Authority, eventually governing the Gaza Strip after the Israelis and their military campaign and eventual military occupation, which, of course, can't happen if the Palestinian Authority is bankrupted by Israel and collapse as well before then. So he's really trying to get Israel to release this money and apparently hung up on Netanyahu and said fits this and ended the phone call with him. last month over this issue. And it seems the Israelis still aren't going to fit it. On the ethnic

cleansing, Smoltrich also tweeted that, you know, they have no plans to allow the Palestinians to return back to Gaza and are working on plans for them to voluntarily migrate in, as Prime Minister Netanyahu called it, for other countries to absorb the Palestinians. And actually, while Blinking was in Israel, the Israeli defense minister Galant said that Israel would be escalating their military operations in the southern half of the Gaza Strip. So, you know, everything the U.S. is asking for, Israel is saying absolutely not. And Blinken just tates it. You know, they're putting this on Twitter, Scott.

You know, these posts just absolutely ignoring it. And the White House has absolutely no plans. And, you know, the New York Times keeps reporting it, no plans to condition any aid to Israel. It's anti-war radio. I'm Scott Horton talking with Kyle Anzalone from antiwar.com. and so I think it's important to note here as you do in your piece that Bezal Smatrich again he is the finance minister in Netanyahu's ruling coalition there that he has to lie or you know what embellish like crazy just I guess even in his own mind to justify what they're doing by calling the people of the Gaza Strip Nazis but they're not Nazis that's just name calling right it's not anything are they national socialists are they hitlerians at all is that their economic or national policy or anything is even exterminating jews like in the holocaust their

policy hamas's policy no it's completely crazy and then this is you know a government minister saying this is our policy our policy is based on you know that's like saying saddam hussein did 9-11 or something crazy like that. It's just not true. Right. In a way, Scott, it's even worse because this is Palestinian Authority money. And he's kind of presenting it as it would all go right toward to Hamas, which, you know, of course, is a completely different group in a rival political faction among the Palestinians from the Palestinian Authority. So, you know, it's just very misleading. That's what they did in 2006 when W. Bush forced them to hold an election and Hamas won a plurality and had to form a coalition government,

the first thing they did was punish the PA and deprive them of all their tax money and essentially weaken their position in comparison to Hamas. And then they tried to sponsor a coup by that same weakened Palestinian authority, which, of course, failed and led to Hamas taking over the Gaza Strip

under Israeli overlordship and siege, of course, in context here. But, yeah, now, talk about the um if you could call anzalone from the institute and antiwar dot com tell us about the humanitarian crisis in gaza now as far as uh numbers of people killed and wounded and also these reports about hunger and and even starvation disease and you know the all the if you can imagine the refugees of the refugees of the refugees from north gaza now what living in tent cities down there near Rafa or what is going on down there?

Yes, Scott, so this is really awful and I'll try to run through all the statistics that that kind of have handy here. The number of dead by the official count is over 23,000, although all long it's been reported that that's the official number and there are quite a few other people that have been killed that are not counted there. There's at least another 8,000 people missing and among the dead nearly $10,000 now are children and 6,700 are women. So a pretty strong percentage are definitely civilians.

And what you're saying there is you're referring to people who are still lost under the rubble or will never be found right because these roads are just bulldozing the rubble as they go. And so these are just people who are will never be seen again or get a burial. Right. Many of them bury alive. Right. Maybe years down the line, you know, people will recover skeletal remains or something like that.

But certainly no kind of identified burial and probably won't ever. be counted. You know, years after the Battle of Mosul, in Iraq where they're far more construction equipment of funding to find people, they're still finding, you know, not still, but three, four years after that conflict, they were finding bodies under the rubble there. So you can only

imagine for Gaza, there's just a lot of people who are never going to be counted. And I guess eventually missing will become dead and never found. Yeah, they'll just be MIA and presume KIA. Right. Right. And by the way, so this is in Roy,

and I'm sure other places you may be able to expand on this, but I've seen it reported multiple times in the Western press that Israeli authorities ratify these numbers and say that, yes, it is true. And then according to Reuters, but they insist that one third of them are combatants, which is a nice way of saying that the super majority of people they've killed

have been innocent civilians, and that's accepting their proportions there. But they agree with the totals. So for everybody who's heard over and over that, oh, those are just Hamas's numbers, Hamas's numbers. Well, no, they're not. Right. And even a State Department official, Barbara Leaves, said that the numbers were likely

in undercount. And you and officials have said the same thing all wants. And, you know, there is a track record of the Palestinians. I think there's a good article by Matthew Petty and Responsible Statecraft on this. how for years and years, the Western press just reported the numbers put out by the Ghazan health ministry because they were always shown to be accurate. And it's just now in this conflict that suddenly they're constantly denounced as, oh, these are just the Hamas statistics.

It's just propaganda to try to put you and me on our back foot where we've got to defend against all this stuff. You know, Rock War II is the benchmark for all this, right? If you were arguing against Iraq War II, you had to explain what it was really about. At the same time, you had to debunk all of the lies. about what it wasn't about. So even though it's not about weapons, I still got to talk to you

about mustard gas and aluminum tubes and African uranium and all of the rest. You got all of the smokescreen that you want to just dismiss the smokescreen, but you really have to go through and confront those one at a time as well.

These numbers are credible. The Israelis admit it and we're talking tens of thousands of innocent people blown apart and buried alive here in this thing. And with 100% Americans support for every bit of it. And I read a quote from an Israeli general saying, we could not do this without America. It's their planes, their bombs, their everything without them, it'd be over.

Yeah. And Scott, there's also a new article out in Plus 972 magazine, which is, of course, a Tel Aviv based outlet where they go over the torture situation in the Gaza Strip where, you know, Israeli forces go into a neighborhood. They round up all the men and they strip them down to their underwear. They blindfold them, put a bag over their head, handcuffed them, place them all very close together in a truck and haul them away somewhere. Nobody has any idea where they're going. The Israelis aren't reporting it. You know, people who have since been released from these camps report that, you know, they're deprived of food, medication, water. And so, you know, anybody in their 50s, let's say that has a heart condition is just dropping dead. They're, you know, torturing people,

cigarette butts, you know, putting them out, beating them in various. kinds of ways. They're chaining them to fences for long hours of the day, not giving them food and water, making them soil themselves. So it's a really horrific situation. And of course, I'm sure all the Palestinians that are dying, dropping dead in these prisons, are probably just being buried in a mass grave somewhere and not really count it. Man. And then so tell us about this article, Israel choking aid deliveries into Gaza that you wrote here at the Institute. Yeah. So we had a U.S. sender Van Hollen from Maryland, a Democrat, who was on CBS's Face the Nation, I believe, and he said that the Israeli inspection process has been described to him by international

aid organizations as the most restrictive that they've ever seen. And he actually described that a part of the process means that if they search a truck and they find one item that they declared to be, you know, something on the banned list, then they'll send the whole truck back and not allow it to go through rather than just taking that item off. And so that's causing a lot of delays. And then, of course, we've even had the French government complaining about how, you know, the aid that they're trying to provide to Gaza can't get in because of the Israeli bottle nets. You know, the inspections are going very slow.

A lot of the inspections have to be done in Israel, but then the aid has to travel through Egypt into Rafa, the Rafa crossing, and then into Gaza. And, of course, all the aid that's getting into Gaza is only going to the south, the 100,000 people or so. And they really have no idea how many people remain in North Gaza. But there's at least 100,000 there are getting essentially no aid deliveries. And there's been reports. And again, this is U.S. mainstream press that the people in northern Gaza have taken down to hunting stray dogs and cats in order to try to feed themselves. Jesus Christ.

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and a host of conflicts of interest. Now, what about the threat of this thing spreading? We've got the Houthis who are kind of the latest and newest and most aggressive part of the loose

Shiite alliance in the region, but we've got tit for tat still with Hezbollah and southern Lebanon and we've got stried strikes back and forth in Syria and Iraq. And man, if I read this right, Kyle, you got Biden's own people complaining to the Huffington Post that he's kind of off on a rail and they don't know what he's going to do and they're really worried.

People inside the White House are really worried that Biden is going to allow Israel to expand this into a regional war against the Shiites. Yeah, and it seems, of course, if Israel would choose to expand the war, it would be again, says Bala. That's where most of their strides have been. And yeah, the Huffington Post report that there is members of the White House that feel like they are constantly trying to pull back from the ledge here. But they say that the problem is, is that this is a firm policy of Joe Biden. And even the New York Times reported that this has been the thing that Joe Biden has been most personally involved with during his time in the White House. And so the official speaking

to the Huffington Post says, well, if it's the commander in chief, Eventually, you have to go along with the policy, which we know that administration officials didn't feel that way during the Trump presidency, but now that's pushing for more war. Suddenly, they can't do anything to resist the president. Of course, resigning would be another thing that you could do and publicly come out and say, what a disgrace Joe Biden is for doing this. That would be really important, but we're not seeing very much of that. So, yeah, that's really important. It does seem like there's been significant escalations. Israel has killed a Hamas official in Beirut.

I think it was the first Israeli strike in Beirut since 2006. And then they've also killed some senior Hamas commander, Hezbollah commanders that has, you know, ramped up tensions. And Hezbollah has carried out some pretty significant attacks on northern Israel at this point. A lot of the Israeli towns up there have been completely evacuated. An air base that was fairly important to the Israeli operations in northern Israel was at least significantly damaged. Jason did's report this at anti-war.com was at least significantly damaged by

Hasbala attack. All right. And then, so talk about the Iraqi reaction to the strikes there. Yeah, so the U.S. has carried out assassinations in Baddad. And Biden ordered this around the anniversary of the Soleimani assassination in Baddad under Trump in 2020. And so I think that inflamed tensions a little bit more among the people of Iraq. And so the Iraqi government is asking the U.S. to leave again. The U.S. is saying that they're not going to leave. And I don't think there's much the Iraqi government could do if the U.S. says, no, we're going to stay. And so at this point, it doesn't seem like we're going to see an end to the U.S. forces in Iraq, but the Iraqi officials are going to be complaining about for some time. Yeah. Well, and, you know, there was this bombing in Iran as

well at the tomb or I guess on the road to the tomb of Soleimani and you know people were kind of jumping to the conclusion that America or Israel must be behind it which America and Israel both did back Jondala there about a decade ago and you know even Dan Rather covered that for some crazy reason I think he was spinning for Jondala actually but there's a lot of good reporting about that but anyway there's no specific reason to believe that. believe that that's true here. I would take another lesson. If everyone would just hold their horses a second, look who's attacking Iran. I mean, if the, if they claim is credible. I don't know if the claim that it was ISIS was credible, but that's what they said. But it's at least a plausible

answer. And it goes to show that Israel's interests fighting against the Shiites is 180 degrees from America's interests. When the people who slaughter Americans and Europeans, by the thousands are from the Sunni side, the bin Ladenites, whether ISIS or Al-Qaeda or their different break-off groups. And, of course, in the past decades, and of course, especially during Obama times, even have us fighting on Al-Qaeda side against the Shiites. And so it just goes to show when the neo-conservatives talk about American and Israeli interests, they pretend that it's all one and the same thing.

Like Michael Liddine used to say, Tehran is the Terror Masters. Well, they're not behind bin Laden, so ain't that completely irrelevant? What, they back as Bala? What the hell does that mean? Who cares about that? Southern Lebanon isn't on America's northern border, is it? Right. And I think there's a couple other important points there, too, Sky, and another important lesson here.

And that is, you know, Iran is always portrayed as this bloodthirsty, irrational country that just wants to kill Jews. But here, about two days after the former prime minister of Israel, claimed credit for an attack in Iran and also said that the Israel should carry out more attacks in Iran. You had this massive explosion at the graveside or at, you know, a shrine for, you know, one of the most heroic figures in recent Iranian history. And rather than using that and exploiting that to attack Israel, the Iranian government has, you know, been relatively reserved. They're saying that they're going to carry out a response, you know, and they're certainly going to do something in response here. And I think they've said that there's some ISIS person

that they're looking at here. So, you know, just the way everybody portrays Iran clearly isn't correct as the way the Iranians are reacting here because they really could, you know, use this to portray as, oh, this was definitely the U.S. and its allies in Israel. Yeah. All right, it's anti-war radio. I'm Scott Horton, talking with the great Kyle Anzlone from anti-war.com about all hell breaking loose. And of course, for the last few months, all attention has been diverted to Israel, Palestine, away from what's truly the most dangerous thing of the world. I mean, even if it turned into a regional war, even if you had new Sunni and Shiite alliances against American Israel and a full-scale regional war over there, that's still really nothing compared to the risk of

getting into a tangle with the Russians who are sitting on a pile of 7,000 H-bombs. who could annihilate our entire civilization in an afternoon permanently. So what's the latest out of Ukraine? Kyle, I'm very interested to know. Well, Ukraine is in need of weapons and there's not a lot of what they need forthcoming. When it comes to the F-6 teams, we got news that the first shipment is supposed to be three F-6 teams coming from the Dutch has been delayed by another six months. I think they were hoping to get them right around.

this time, and they're now saying quarter two. So I'm guessing sometime in June is when they're looking at shipping those F-Sitz-teens to Ukraine. And Ukrainian officials have said that there's like three groups of pilots going through training. The first one, again, expected to be ready in quarter two. The group of pilots in the U.S., I believe, are supposed to be ready at the end of this year. And then there's a group in the U.K. that may not be ready until 2025. And so, you know, the F-S. teams are still a way off for Ukraine. And in the meantime, they are really struggling on the ground. Russia is outfiring Ukraine in artillery three to one at least is what the Wall Street Journal reports. That's on the front lines. And the Ukrainian forces have resorted to using more drones,

like small drones, the size of dinner plates are so they're strapping grenades or any kind of munitions and explosives they could find on these things. And while they are effective against infantry targets or maybe soldiers on motorbites or traveling in cars. They're really ineffective against any kind of armor or any kind of building, you know, with a concrete exterior. And so Russia, I guess, is developing some capabilities to take out the drones. They report that a small number of them do get taken out with like electronic warfare interference and things like that. But it's reflective of an overall shortage that Ukraine has of two major components. One is artillery and one is air defenses, and Zelensky was just in Lithuania, and he said our warehouses are

empty and was particularly appealing for air defenses. Now, Ukraine has a couple problems here, Scott. One is that the U.S. is out of aid, so the White House needs reauthorization, you know, for more funding to arm Ukraine. And that is at least held up in Congress for now because of Republican demands on immigration policy. So I assume that's eventually going to be worked out and there will be money for more aid. However, another issue here is just the amount of arms in the Western stoppiles. We know that the needs of Israel are diverting 155 millimeter artillery rounds. A really core need of Ukraine is being shipped to Israel to carry out their operations in Gaza and the Ukrainians are left without and then also air defenses. The U.S. has resorted to pushing Tokyo to actually

alter their constitution to allow them to ship Patriot missiles to the U.S., and this is a whole scheme to free up more Patriot missiles that the U.S. could then send to Ukraine, and those are air defense systems. So in the U.K. says their stoppiles are empty as well. Hey, I'll have you know, Kyle Anzalone, that there will never be any blowback from America remilitarizing Japan. Mark my words. No, comeuppance. It'll be just fine. Well, and you know, Scott, another point on this, of course, is the way the U.S. has remilitarized Japan has also been aimed at bringing South Korea and Japan into trilateral paths together. And that has really inflamed tensions on the Korean Peninsula. Biden's done a lot of other things to inflame tensions

there. But for the North Koreans, one of the biggest issue is what they see as the U.S. trying to create an Asian NATO, this trilateral pat between the U.S., South Korea, and Japan. And while I think most people in the U.S. probably think that they would utilize this alliance to defend Taiwan from China, the North Koreans see it as a real threat. And, you know, it wasn't so long ago for the North Koreans that they were living under Imperial Japan and really, really miserable and awful conditions. Yeah. Well, you know, I think it is important to go back to the Huffington Post story about

Biden calling the shots on Gaza, there's so much speculation about who's really in charge. And I think really that's the scary answer here, is Joe Biden is. And he's the same Joe Biden he's always been, you know, and only now he's just too old to think straight at all. And he's risking conflict in Korea over Taiwan, threatening regional war in the Middle East. and while we're in the middle of a proxy war with Russia? And now, what about the talk recently that, geez, we kind of know the Ukrainians lost now and we're sort of admitting it now after two years. And so maybe we should begin to find a way to wind things down that had a piece in the New York Times.

Aha, Putin is licked. He's willing to accept Ukraine's surrender, possibly. What do you think? Yeah, maybe that will be the only way that the West is able to portray this as a victory. They'll take their ultimate fantasies of Putin really wanted to conquer Poland, but had to stop halfway across Ukraine. And that's our real victory here. Yeah, exactly. We only gave him four provinces.

But like I was saying before, Scott, I think the Western war aims in Ukraine are hitting real logistical problems here. And it's not just ammunition and money. It's also manpower. One of the Ukrainian platoons interviewed by the Wall Street Journal said they had half the number of troops that they should have in their platoon. And this seems to be pretty consistent. And the Ukrainian, I believe, interior minister recently said there's been 500,000 casualties. And he was talking about casualties severe enough to take people off the battlefield. So not just minor injuries, significant injuries and deaths there.

What an absolute catastrophe. You know, I saw a tweet this morning. Somebody said, hey, Taiwan, heads up. This is what we have in mind for you. Do not trust the United States of America. And it just showed, I think it was Bakhmut. in absolute ruins. Can you imagine America saying, hey, go ahead.

We've got your back and getting into a war. You know how this ends up. We ran an article on that by John Walsh this week at anti-war.com because Taiwan has elections coming up, I believe, this weekend. Right. And how much time we got? No, none. Next time.

Thank you very much for your time. Everybody, that's Kyle Anzalone. He's news editor at the Institute. opinion editor at anti-war.com and check out his great podcast, Conflicts of Interest, three times a week. Really appreciate you, Kyle. Thank you, Scott. All right, y'all, and that's anti-war radio for today. I'm your host, Scott Horton. Again, find the full interview archive and sign up for the podcast feed and everything at Scott Horton.org or at YouTube.com slash Scott Horton's show. Follow me on Twitter at Scott Horton's show. And check me out this Sunday in the Orange

County Register. I've got an article in there called RFK Jr.'s unconditional support for Israel is costing his campaign for president. I think you'll like it. And I'll be back here next Thursday, as always, from 2.30 to 3 on KPFK, 90.7 FM in L.A. See you next week.