Scott Horton Show - Just the Interviews - 11/2/23 Connor Freeman: The Palestinians are Getting Slaughtered

Episode Date: November 4, 2023

Connor Freeman joined Scott on Antiwar Radio this week to discuss the violence in Gaza, the West Bank and northern Israel. Freeman gives an overview of what’s happening and the two analyze the reactions from political and media figures on all sides.  Discussed on the show: “Netanyahu’s Support for Hamas Backfired” (Antiwar.com) “It’s All About Provoking Your Reaction” (Antiwar.com) Connor Freeman is the Assistant Editor of the Libertarian Institute, primarily covering foreign policy. He is a co-host on Conflicts of Interest. His writing has been featured in media outlets such as Antiwar.com and Counterpunch, as well as the Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity. You can follow him on Twitter @FreemansMind96 This episode of the Scott Horton Show is sponsored by: Tom Woods’ Liberty Classroom; 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: 1DZBZNJrxUhQhEzgDh7k8JXHXRj Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

For Pacifica Radio, November 2nd, 2023, 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 the editorial director of Anti-War.com, and I'm the author of the book, Enough already. Time to end the war on terrorism. You can find my full interview archive, almost 6,000 of them now, going back to 2003 at Scott Horton.org and at YouTube.com slash Scott Horton's show. And you can follow me on Twitter, if you dare, at Scott Horton's show. All right, introducing

Connor Freeman. He's my right-hand man and assistant news editor at the Institute and also assistant news editor at anti-war.com as well. And he's co-author with me of a new piece that, well, we put out around this time last week, I guess. Netanyahu's support for Hamas backfired. And you can find that at the Institute and at anti-war.com in the right-hand margin under my name there. Welcome back to the show. Connor, how you doing? I'm doing great, Scott.

How are you? Thank you for having me on. Absolutely. Happy to have you here. So we have a lot to talk about. Let's start with the news. Can you give us rough numbers and statistics and parameters of the conflict in the Gaza Strip as it stands right now? Currently, it looks like the latest numbers that I've seen are 8,850.

I've actually seen that it's getting closer to 9,000 even just today killed in Gaza, civilians. You're talking about thousands, well over 3,600 children. and thousands of women, and 22,219 wounded, at least. And then in the West Bank, the settlers and Israeli troops have killed almost 130 people. It's at 128 now, and you've got nearly 2,000 wounded. And really, that's unfortunately, the West Bank, I think, gets the least attention because all the bombing and complete chopping women and children to bits with American paid for explosives and bombs, that's all going on in Gaza.

But in the West Bank, because people aren't paying attention, the settlers are just absolutely running wild, killing Palestinians every day. And so are the Israeli occupation forces. And that needs to get more attention. But currently, I mean, we've seen atrocities just here in the last couple of days. They bombed, the Israelis bombed the most crowded refugee camp in Gaza twice on Tuesday. and Wednesday, and the death toll there, according to authorities in Gaza, is reaching close to 200.

They leveled an entire neighborhood called Block 6, claiming that they were targeting a Hamas, I believe it was the anti-tank missile unit commander, although none of that is confirmed that they killed this guy, as if that would ever justify murdering nearly 200 civilians or any civilians for that matter. But as Gideon Levy was talking about in Horat's last night, actually, people were digging their children out of the rubble with their bare hands after this bombing. I mean, the crater is just absolutely massive, but you've got IDF spokesmen on CNN saying, well, these people aren't even refugees and just walking all over their grades. And so it's absolutely despicable, but I know that we saw, you and I saw footage this morning of another school that was bombed.

And continuously, just civilian infrastructure is being bombed. You're talking about mosques. We've seen a church bombed. We've seen UN shelters and schools and hospitals bombed. I know the only cancer hospital is out of service now. The Turkish-Palestinian friendship hospital is out of service now due to Israeli strikes. So this is absolutely, I mean, it meets the definition of genocide and whether or not people want to use that term. is up to them. But according to the UN definition, that's what we're looking at here. And so we're

getting very close to 10,000 civilians dead at this point here, probably before the end of the week at the rate that Israel is bombing. It's anti-war radio. I'm Scott Horton. I'm talking with Connor Freeman from anti-war.com about the conflict such as it is in Gaza. A war is when two armies are fighting, Bill Hicks said. And listen, I mentioned this. not exactly as a disclaimer but i guess in a sense just to make sure that people don't misunderstand because in this day and age people are so quick to assume the motives of people who they disagree with as being dishonest and secret code for some other kind of thing here no one on this station no real critic of israel that anyone takes seriously is actually

anti-Semitic at all. And the Zionist movement and Judaism are entirely separate and different things. There are many Jews who are not Zionists and there are many Zionists who are not Jews. And, you know, what you will not hear is anyone actually say anything hateful about Israelis or Jews. But if anyone is on Twitter, then you're experienced with being told, oh, you think this and you think that in place of things that you actually said. And in fact, what we're talking about here is just the reality of the power differential between the nation's state of Israel backed and financed by the U.S. superpower versus essentially prisoners in a concentration camp. And what people a lot of times don't understand is that the Palestinians were already beaten way back almost 60 years ago now, licked, conquered, annexed, even though they don't call it that. And so they're under military occupation, even though they try to.

ought to call it that, but that's exactly what it is. They don't have their own country. They're locked in. This is a canned hunt, not a fight between sovereigns, never mind equal ones. And so that's what's so important for people to understand. And you know, I want to play this clip, Connor, of Wolf Blitzer speaking with an Israeli general and spokesman for the IDF on CNN yesterday. And people may or may not know that Wolf Blitzer actually got his start in the media as a spokesman for the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. And there's famously, or somewhat famously, an old clip of someone asking him, yeah, but did the Palestinians have a right to exist? And he goes, the Israelis have a right to exist. And they go, yeah, but what about the Palestinians? And he

goes, the Israelis have a right to exist. Well, here's Wolf Blitzer, just absolutely astounded about this strike on the refugee camp as he's speaking to the Israeli Defense Forces spokesman here yesterday, Connor. But even if that Hamas commander was there amidst all those Palestinian refugees who are in that Jabalya refugee camp, Israel still went ahead and dropped a bomb there attempting to kill this Hamas commander, knowing that a lot of innocent civilians, men, women, and children presumably would be killed. Is that what I'm hearing? That's not what you're hearing. We, again, we're focused on this commander, again, you'll get

more data who this man was. It killed many, many Israelis. We're doing everything we can. It's a very complicated battle space. There could be infrastructure there. There could be tunnels there. We're still looking into it and we'll give you more data as there are moves ahead. But you know that there are a lot of refugees, a lot of innocent civilians. men, women, and children in that refugee camp as well, right? This is the tragedy of War Wolf. I mean, we, as you know, we've been saying for days, move south. Civilians are not involved with Hamas.

Please move south. Yeah, I'm just trying to get a little bit more information. You knew there were civilians there. You knew there were refugees, all sorts of refugees, but you decided to still drop a bomb on that refugee camp attempting to kill the Samas commander. By the way, was he killed? I can't confirm yet

there will be more updated he yes we know that he was killed so there you have it blitzer himself like yeah but I think that may be the first time I've ever seen him do a triple or quadruple follow-up with a government spokesman

justifying violence where he's like huh but wait you're saying you're not really sure about tunnels or whether the guy was there but you were sure that there are men women and children down there though and that he's a very measured tone but that is as exasperated as Wolf Blitzer can get, I'm pretty sure, you know?

Yeah, and I don't think he was, I mean, if I had to guess, I don't think Wolf was having trouble hearing him over the connection. I think he was really left speechless and maybe somebody in his ear was telling him we should move on from this. I mean, that clip went viral very quickly and it just shows you the callousness of the Israeli military and the regime carrying out this. Like you said, it's not really, it's not a war. I mean, the, the Palestinians are outgunned by a thousand times, including Hamas. They have no army. They have no air force. They have no Navy. They have no air defenses. This is not, these are not wars. These are canned hunts. And there have been at least three or four of them, as well as the Great March of Return,

which these were peaceful protests where people were going up to the border defense protesting that, hey, we don't want to be in this concentration camp anymore. We want a right of return. We're still refugees and we haven't gone anywhere. Well, the Israelis started sniping. them. I mean, killed nearly 200 of them. And they were laughing about shooting journalists and amputees and medics and children. And you're talking about these wars so called on Gaza, whether it's Operation Castlet, Operation Protective Edge, thousands of people were killed in these. But by 2015, you had 100,000 people internally displaced just in the war, the wars, in quote, unquote, from 2008 to 2009, 2012, and then 2014, with the 51, with the 51.

day war. And in each one of these, you're talking about thousands, tens of thousands of homes and housing units and just destroyed or so severely damaged that people are displaced. Well, at this point, in Gaza, more than half the population is displaced. And for that guy to, for that is IDF spokesman to go, well, we told them to move south as if it's like tough luck suckers. Now your, now your kids are dead. When they did try to flee south, their convoy. boys were bombed by the Israelis. They're still bombing the South. Well, you know, the New York Times Connor has a story about how the White House is now preaching caution to the Israelis. And they paraphrase American officials in there saying that the Israelis were telling them, hey, come on, look what you did

to Tokyo and Dresden. And for that matter, Hiroshima and Nagasaki during World War II. And I think this is part of what started bugging out, the Biden administration, who, you know, he is, of course, always been very pro-Israel. But anyone who's not part of the Israeli defense establishment right now can look at that kind of comparison and analogy. And there's only one conclusion is that it's completely crazy. Only Lindsey Graham thinks that that is reasonable. All other people understand. that the Third Reich was the most powerful military on the planet, the most powerful state on the planet.

The Gaza Strip is much more like the Warsaw ghetto, full of helpless refugees, desperate for their survival. To compare them somehow to the imperial Japanese, not that it was okay for America to firebomb and nuke Japan after they were already beaten too and surrounded too. But now that's the baseline. If Truman can use nuclear weapons, then anyone can do anything, or at least the Israelis

can do anything, even to prisoners in a camp. Not anything like a sovereign state at all. Yeah, and Lindsey Graham said on Fox News that if Gaza does not look like Tokyo after the end of World War II or Berlin after the end of World War II, then Israel made a mistake. It has to look like that. And he says there's no limit on how many civilians can be killed. There's none. And I mean, it's just, I think it really needs to be emphasized that Muhammad Adda, who

was the pilot hijacker on Flight 11 on 9-11 that flew into the North Tower, did it because Israel bombed a UN shelter in what's called the first Kana massacre in their war against southern Lebanon, their occupation of southern Lebanon, which again was unconditionally backed by the U.S., killing over 100 women and children. Okay, so that's happening on a nearly daily basis now. They're bombing UN shelters left and right. And we've already seen thousands of, there's the civilian casualties, deaths of women and children, particularly children, are piling up.

We're very close to 4,000 here. And our government is preparing to reward Tel Aviv with $14 billion on top of the 4,000, well, the 3.8 billion that we give them every year to carry out atrocities against the Palestinians. And so this is what motivates hatred toward America. So Lindsey Graham is in effect saying he's also willing to sacrifice, not just Palestinian women and children, which to him mean, their lives mean absolutely nothing. But, you know, even his own voters, he's putting in the line of fire now or, you know, the troops he claims to support so much who are under rocket and drone attack when they're

illegally occupying Syria, a policy which he insisted on, even when Trump tried to pull, Donald Trump attempted to pull the troops out of Syria, but they insist on keeping the American troops in harm's way, illegally occupying a third of Syria and stealing their oil and stealing their wheat, keeping out of the hands of the population of the country and this war-torn country, which we already, the American regime and the CIA and their allies, including Israel, already destroyed, taking the side of the guys who brought the towers down. So this is a completely corrupt and illegitimate regime in Tel Aviv and in Washington, and the American people shouldn't absolutely not stand for this.

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Well, it's Anti-War Radio. I'm Scott Horton. I'm talking with Connor Freeman. And, of course, we're discussing Israel's war on the Gaza Strip. So listen, we're about to get to the article that we wrote together here about Israel playing with fire. But my article before that at anti-war.com, just go to anti-war.com slash Scott. It'll forward you on there. It was called, it's all about provoking your reaction.

And this is a very important principle for people to understand about terrorism. Is that what we're talking about is asymmetric war, a small group of mostly helpless bandits fighting against an all-powerful state. And just like with al-Qaeda attacking the United States, they were trying to get George Bush to basically do their dirty work and drive our nation into the ground by overextending the empire, which is, of course, exactly what he and. his successors have done. And then in the same manner, Hamas was trying to provoke a reaction here by slaughtering these innocent people and, you know, catching the IDF literally and figuratively with their pants down on a Saturday morning and getting away with what they did, a horrible atrocity that they committed against civilians, was meant quite clearly to provoke the bombing campaign that we're witnessing now. And they're no fools. They knew that this was going to happen.

They don't care. They're hiding under the tunnels down there. As, you know, Israeli officials admit from time to time that the people they're bombing on the surface aren't Hamas. Hamas are hiding and safe and don't care about those poor people at all. But they're willing to get them killed, even at the risk of the loss of their own power, such as it is in the Gaza Strip, in order to force the issue in order to force a major change in at least the discussion and possibly who's shooting who on the ground throughout the Middle East. And so by provoking Israel into launching this massive bombing and now ground campaign, they are raising the question of what is Nasrallah, the leader of Hezbollah and southern Lebanon, Iran's 51st state sort of. What's he going to do? And for that matter,

the Shiite militias that George W. Bush put in power in Iraq during Iraq War II. Now, the Palestinians are Sunnis, but still, they've cooperated with Iran all along. And because the Sunni kings are all loyal sock puppets of the empire, that's a big opening politically for the Shiites to side with the Palestinians and stick up for the Palestinians, which then, of course, puts all the Sunni satraps of the Gulf from Kuwait to Oman, all of them on the spot of what position are they going to take on this? You already see the Yemeni Houthis firing off a couple rockets, at least allegedly, I guess believably, trying to, you know, get a couple licks in of the war for their own part. And so I guess my question for you after that big soliloquy here

is where stands the regional reaction now? I saw that Nasrallah is due to give a speech today. I know you don't know what he's going to say, but I wonder, you know, what kind of temperature you're taking in Lebanon, in Syria, in Iraq, in Iran, in, for that matter, the Gulf states and all the different factions and as you mentioned previously, too, in the West Bank, and what's happening there and the various reverberations and repercussions from this original, I shouldn't say original, this if you want to, this massive retaliation. against innocent civilians who did not deserve it on October the 7th by Hamas. Well, I think just as much as it's true that Hamas carried out their unprecedented attack, Israel and southern Israel attacking these military bases and briefly seizing these kibbutzim in the south, as much as they were provoking the Israelis to carry out this attack in Gaza and mass murder and pile up bodies and force all these different parties to choose a side, firmly choose aside. Israel is doing that just as much now just by falling into their trap, but really doubling and tripling and quadrupling down as Lindsay Graham is demanding that they do.

And so, you know, I mean, as far as Hezbollah goes, Nasrallah's speech is, like you said, is tomorrow. Blinken will be visiting Israel at the same time. Now, according to Mondo Weiss, Hezbollah says that they've carried out 105 attacks on Israel since the seventh. And they've claimed 120 Israeli military casualties killed and injured, and they've destroyed nine military. vehicles. And in that same time, they're saying that 48 of their fighters have been killed. So there may be a higher threshold than we suspect four clashes at the north before Israel launches a whole other front or before Hezbollah really invades Israel and things get that hot. But I think that that could always be triggered, of course, by the ground invasion being kicked

off into Gaza because we know that the atrocities are just going to ramp up exponentially as soon as that as soon as Israel makes its invasion in earnest. Currently, it looks like they're implementing a plan or possibly implementing a plan that was leaked that was included in an intelligence ministry, an Israeli intelligence ministry document that was leaked that discusses a plan to ethnically cleanse the 2.3 million Palestinians from Gaza so that the Israelis can take it and make it and make it basically a part of the sovereign state of Israel. And listen, that's real, everyone and you can read about it at news dot antiwar.com and I'll clarify because I think it is important that this document was released by something called the Ministry of Intelligence that basically

is sort of an in-house think tank that writes up studies. It's not part of Mossad and it's not necessarily you know Netanyahu's war cabinet is issuing this edict that this is exactly where they're at but it's still important and worrying it would be something like you know one of the CIA's sub-think tanks coming up with a study like this in the middle of a war. Right. And it's headed by a member of Netanyahu's Lakud party. And you've got Lakudnik members of the Knesset and then people in the right wing in the media and Israel calling for a Nakhpa 2.0 and something similar to this. And so they've told the Palestinians to evacuate the north of Gaza and they're pummeling it with airstrikes as we discussed. As far as the regional fight goes,

I think that the Americans are making a huge mistake by continuing to say, we have special operations forces on the ground doing God knows what, but it's been admitted by an assistant secretary of defense of special forces that they are, among other things, helping to locate hostages, including American hostages in Gaza. But the U.S. is also sent to aircraft carrier strike groups to the region, I believe at least 2,000 Marines and augmented our fighter jet squadrons across the U.S. the region. And there's a lot of targets that, as you say, Iran and particularly Iran with their missile capabilities can hit, whether you're talking about the Centcomhead, the Fifth Fleet in Bahrain or the Air Force Centcom headquarters in Qatar. There's a lot of American casualties that we could take here very soon if this escalates. The Houthis, I mean, who have been subjected to the absolute worst violence of the empire in this. century or arguably so of the American Empire. I have to say that even if, like you say,

it's not really having any kind of effect. They're, you know, a missile here, a couple drones there that get intercepted by Israel's air defense system, their arrow air defense system or their fighter jets. It still says a hell of a lot, you know, because quite frankly, we're constantly told in the media that these Arabs, they just, they'll die and they don't, they worship death and all of this, but for these people to stand up after what Yemen's been through being under siege for so many years and having all their civilian infrastructure obliterated and their children and infants poisoned to death by the hundreds of thousands, it's, you know, it shows you how much this means to people in the region. And you have American troops coming under attack

seemingly every day, a rocket and drone attack in Iraq and Syria. I mean, for all we know, Nasrallah could be calling for some kind of mobilization of the axis of resistance, but Jordan has recalled its ambassador. I know that we've had Chile and Colombia and Bolivia have followed suit. Bolivia has cut all diplomatic ties with Israel, and I think that you're going to see more of that in the Middle East itself. In fact, I saw in the newswire at Al Jazeera today that there was, the Israel was clarifying that Bahrain has not recalled its ambassador. And just the fact that that's happening is important. And I should stress that, importantly, the Netanyahu doctrine was failing before October 7th. There was an important piece in Bloomberg earlier this year.

I wrote up about it at the Libertarian Institute. People can look it up. It's cited in our article that the massacres being carried out, particularly in the West Bank, by Israeli forces and the rhetoric, especially of people like Bezalel Smatrich, who's the finance minister under Netanyahu's coalition, which is full of these Jewish supremacists and extremist settlers, and Ibn Ghavir, for instance, the national security minister. The massacres carried out in Jeannie in particular had cut popularity in Bahrain and the UAE for the Abraham Accords and for this normalization of the Israeli apartheid state by double digits. In fact, those numbers, I mean, they're not just coming.

from some polling agency. It was coming from Winnett, the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, which is essentially the Israel lobby's own foreign policy think tank in the U.S. And so they were concerned about this. So you're talking about, I believe it was roughly 20% of a decrease in popularity as a result of Netanyahu coming back to power and these attacks being carried out. And for instance, in Janine, it was in July. The Biden administration fully backed it. You had Israeli security forces invading and bombing a refugee camp in the West Bank, the Janine refugee camp, killing a dozen people, including five children. The Israeli bulldozers tore up, the electricity and the water networks, the camps, roads.

And you had a thousand troops participating in this raid, along with Apache helicopters, 150 armored vehicles and drones. And so they thought Netanyahu and Smatrich were so arrogant. We know that, you know, a couple weeks ago, Netanyahu gave a speech a few weeks ago now to the UN General Assembly, where he held up a map of, quote, the new Middle East, where Palestine from the river to the sea was completely erased. So when we hear, of course, in the media now, oh, when you say from the river to the sea, Palestine, that's a calling for a genocide of the Jews.

No, that's not true. But Netanyahu's policy of normalizing with these Arab dictatorship satellites of the Americans and having them throw the Palestinians under the bus in exchange for American tax money and advanced U.S. weapons systems and other favors, that was designed to erase Palestinians and keep them in this permanent occupation or just opening up the opportunity for them to ethnically cleanse, continue ethnically cleansing the Palestinians from the West Bank, for instance, by the settlement, the expansion of settlements, which Netanyahu's government was also setting records for, for settlement construction this year. And the Israelis have picked this fight this

entire year. They've launched drone strikes in Iran. They've already carried out over 30 air strikes in Syria, which happened on a nearly weekly basis, and that was before October 7th. But since then, they've bombed the, for instance, the Aleppo International Airport four times. And they've also bombed the Damascus International Airport since this current phase of the war. Well, this war on Gaza has begun. So, and then you talk about Lebanon, Lebanon was bombed earlier this year. There was another bombing campaign in Gaza in May. And all of these factors, David Barnia in September declaring, we're going to

launch an assassination campaign in Iran in the heart of Tehran. The, you know, this is the Americans and Biden's administration, according to Trita Parsi, has been far more, far more deferential to Israel when it comes to Iran. And they have been picking this fight. So whatever happens next, it'll all be on Biden and Netanyahu. And the Palestinians have shown that this is just this policy of throwing the Palestinians under the bus and making these deals with the American stage managing all of it. that that is completely out the window now. And I think it's going to be completely untenable

in the future for Jordan and Egypt and Saudi and the UAE and Bahrain to maintain this status quo. And Netanyahu is digging his own grave, really politically. His own people want him, you know, put on trial. He was already facing a corruption trial, but now he's going to be held accountable for ignoring the warnings he received, especially from the Egyptians about this incoming attack on the well we'll see about that yeah right but the longer he keeps the war going the more he can avoid that but yeah well that's true he sure has an interest in prolonging it if only to stay in office since there's so much talk about him possibly being held accountable at least forced from office when it's over but i'm sorry we're all out of time but this has been connor freeman

here on anti-war radio and he and i have a piece or two well one together here at anti-war It's called Netanyahu's support for Hamas backfired, and it explains that Netanyahu doctrine and the whole destructive nature of the Lakud regime, how self-destructive it is for the people of that country. And then before that, I got one. It's called, it's all about provoking your reaction. So wise up. And those are at antiwar.com slash Scott. And you can find Connor in the news section at news. anti-war.com as well as see him co-host conflicts of interest with the great Kyle Anzalone as well.

All right, and that's it for the show today. Thanks very much for coming on, Connor. I appreciate you. Thank you, Scott. And thanks you all for listening. I'm Scott Horton. I'm here every Thursday from 2.30 to 3 on KPFK, 90.7 FM in L.A. See you next week.

Thank you.