Scott Horton Show - Just the Interviews - 1/23/25 Max Blumenthal on the Biden Administration’s Fictional Ceasefire Narrative

Episode Date: January 24, 2025

Max Blumenthal joins Scott to talk about his recent viral interaction with Biden Secretary of State Anthony Blinken. Blumenthal talks about using the Secretary’s final press conference as an opportunity to tell him what he really needed to hear, explains the blatant falsehoods in the official narrative about the effort to reach a ceasefire and talks with Scott about where he sees things in Palestine going from here. Discussed on the show: The clip of Blumenthal in the briefing room 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

All right, y'all, welcome to the Scott Horton Show. I'm the director of the Libertarian Institute, editorial director of anti-war.com, author of the book, Fool's Aaron, Time to End the War in Afghanistan, and The Brand New, Enough Already, Time to End the War on Terrorism. And I've recorded more than 5,500 interviews since 2004. almost all on foreign policy and all available for you at scothorton dot for you can sign up the podcast feed there and the full interview archive is also available at youtube dot com slash scott horton's show all right introducing the great max blumenthal he is the author of a bunch of extremely important books including the management of savagery the 51 day war and goliath and he is the editor in chief

of the Gray Zone, the great journalistic enterprise over there, which includes such excellent journalists as Kit Clarenberg and Jeremy LaFredo and other very important journalists of our time here. Welcome back to the show. How are you doing, Max? Good, good. Congratulations on the new book. Thank you very much. Appreciate that. Sorry, it's so long. I hope you like it. You're in it. It's like an encyclopedia. on everything that led up to this disaster that we're going to be living with for the next decade in Ukraine, Russia.

Yeah. If you're listening to this, you haven't gotten provoked, get provoked. That's right. All right, Max. So before it's too stale, as we enter the new second Trump era here,

I want to talk about this clip of your parting fair farewell to the Secretary of State, Anthony Blinken, along with Sam Hussaini, the great journalist in Washington as well. Many people have heard this clip, but not everyone, and I like for him, too. So this is you and Sam Hussaini at Anthony Blinkin's last briefing at the State Department, the outgoing Secretary of State under the previous Biden administration. 300 reporters in Gaza were on the receiving end of your bombs. Why did you keep the bombs flowing when we had a deal in May? We all knew we had a deal. Everyone in this room knows we had a deal, Tony, and you kept the bombs flowing.

Why did you sacrifice to rules-based order on the mantle of your commitment to Zionism? Why did you allow my friends to be massacred? Why did you allow my friends' homes in Gaza to be destroyed when we had a deal in May? You helped destroy our religion Judaism by associating it with fascism. You wave the white flag before Netanyahu. You wave the white flag. before israeli fashion your father-in-law was an israel lobbyist your grandfather was an israel lobbyist are you compromised by israel why did you allow the holocaust of our time to happen

how does it feel to have your legacy be genocide you too matt you smirk through the whole thing every day you smirk through a genocide all right now uh the great sam husain he was accosted by security and dragged out of there and uh i'll spare everyone the audio but everyone should go and bear witness to the video and take a good look at it if you can online and see the way that he was dragged out of there pretty iconic but you had some very strong words for the former secretary there max what do you have to say to explain here well that was one of the few times i could actually say that something i did was for humanity and that was the reaction i got like i really felt like I heard, I heard congratulations, one form or another from representatives of humanity,

including the president of Columbia, Gustavo Petro, reached out to me to thank me for that. Lincoln was singularly identified with the Biden administration's Gaza policy. He was one of the most responsible, culpable figures for the 15-month-long genocide that took place in Gaza. It's just confirmed by one State Department staffer after another who was on the inside, inside the room where the sausage was made that Lincoln sided with Israel at every turn and obstructed the ceasefire that we were falsely told Biden and Kamala were working tirelessly to achieve. And when I did that, people around the world understood that this criminal figure was being held accountable in a way that he had not and might not ever

be held accountable again. And they cheered it on. And I felt a certain responsibility to do that because I had access to the press briefing room because I'd been going to these briefings for 15 months. And the rest of the press corps, other than Sam Hussaini, was not going to deliver the treatment that Tony Blinken deserved, let alone ask questions that would even make. him uncomfortable and if you watch what I did just scroll back a minute into the briefing you'll see that Tony Blinken was talking about how the press corps were his friends and they forged these wonderful friendships even as they had robust exchanges in the briefing room so that's what really I was I was waiting for the

right point to intervene and that was the point where I just could not hold back any more. And it happened right away. And finally, the reason that Sam Hussein and I did not respect the process, as Tony Blinken demanded, was because we were blacklisted by his press secretary, Matt Miller, who I called out at the end as he was escorting me out. And it was Matt Miller who signaled or ordered the police to remove Sam Hussaini after he simply tried to. to ask a question out of turn because he was not going to be called on. So we would have respected the process if we had been called on, but they don't want to allow real dissent in that room. They want the facade of democracy with total narrative control.

Yeah. I was reminded of George W. Bush's press conference, right, his very last one before the launch of a rock war two where one of the reporters asked him a question out of turn and he went hey stop this is a scripted he didn't really finish his statement but made it very clear that they had maybe even rehearsed it who's allowed to ask which question and which order and everything yeah it's amazing um and you know it's always funny to me when they're so ham handed in their hypocrisy right where you know they claim to be the champions of free speech but they're not man enough to just take some tough questions from a reporter um and they're not you would think that they would see the mileage in acting like they're brave enough to take on all comers but no way they would

much rather hide they feel like they're better off not having to face these questions at all Yeah, I mean, the State Department has what they call the bullpen, and that's the first two rows for the press that are the legacy press, mostly. Saeed Araqad being an exception, an exception, because he's from a Palestinian newspaper in Jerusalem called Al-Quds. But everyone in the bullpen has to behave, and they are guaranteed to be called on, and the press secretary will work through all of them. and then if he doesn't want to call on anyone who's outside the bullpen, then he'll just keep working back to them, and he uses them to box us out. And Blinken was doing the same thing.

You watch the White House press briefings. They get all the questions in advance. Biden is told who to call on in advance, and it's a complete Potemkin village theater that is designed to, I mean, there have been briefings, where Biden got some unlikely questions from conservative reporters. But none of them were going to ask what I was asking, Blinken. And the substantive issues with Blinken are just completely off limits to the press in Washington.

And they do concern his family, his commitment to Zionism as a Jew. You're just not allowed to talk about that and how that compromised him. And that was at the heart of my questioning. And my questioning also came from my experience as a Jew growing up in Washington and rejecting Zionism and seeing how a figure like Tony Blinken so closely identified Judaism with the Holocaust that in my view of Israel committed and did so much damage to us and everything that I was taught to believe in and exposed the hypocrisy for the world. So I, you know, this was personal for me. It transcended journalism or even activism. And it had to be done for me also to get closure on the last 15 months where I think I played a role in exposing a lot of the lies and deceptions that Tony Blinken deployed in order to obstruct the ceasefire when one was.

actually on the table a deal was on the table in October 2023 and that's something that you said to Blinken in your confrontation there that we had a deal in May and everybody knows that but now you're saying no we had ceasefires on the table even in October 23 can you please take us through the history of that because as you said the official story coming out of the White House was they were working tirelessly to achieve this ceasefire that somehow they were just unable able to achieve, I guess, because of the intransigence of the terrorists on the other side, right? Yeah. On October 12th, Sam Hussein and I actually confronted the press secretary for the first time about the atrocities Israel was committing just five days in the Gaza Strip and the calls by Israeli leadership for genocide, just straight up.

Genocidal intent being expressed at the highest level that's in Yahoo! referring to Palestinians as Amalek, his ally in the Knesset, calling for Nakba 2.0, and so on. And Matt Miller just chewed us out. But it was clear to me, and also from my understanding of previous agreements with Hamas, between Hamas and Israel, that Hamas had constructed the operation of October 7 in order to get as much human collateral as possible because they were prevented from having any diplomatic leverage otherwise in order to get Palestinian prisoners and hostages, including like children, child prisoners and women prisoners, out of prison, but also to relax the siege and to begin to consolidate themselves because, you know, unlike the rebranded al-Qaeda forces that have overtaken Syria, the West refused to recognize them. So they did not carry out the acts of the I mean there were atrocities on October 7th but I understood they weren't beheading babies there was no mass rape and instructions to sexually assault women and that's all been discredited by now but Blinken his state department the media was conveying these to prevent a deal from taking place and give Israel latitude to destroy large swaths of the Gaza Strip Hamas actually told the Israelis that if you

we will release a large number of hostages if you simply do not do a ground invasion. They told them that in October. They wanted to take it from there. That was obviously off the table. Blinkin on October 31st in the Senate rejected calls for a ceasefire said Israel needs to, in so many words, be able to destroy more because they're dealing not just with terrorists, but with people who have mutilated entire families and then had lunch in their living in their, their dining room, which was a complete hoax that was soon exposed as such. Then we saw various ceasefire resolutions at the United Nations vetoed by the United States. We saw the U.S. rearm Israel after the brief humanitarian pause that allowed an exchange of captives,

which showed that Hamas was operating in good faith. had been taking good care of the hostages in order to get as many of their people back. The U.S. sent a massive shipment of over 20 billion and justified it on the basis of Israel needing to also go to war with Hezbollah. And in May, the International Court of Justice introduced its ruling, calling not just for Israel to cease genocide, but to also not invade Rafa, which is where, most displaced Palestinians had been living in tents. And that's when the Biden administration introduced its ceasefire proposal, and that resulted in the Algerian resolution at the UN being tabled. That resolution was to enforce the ICJ decision.

And at the same time, Hamas accepted the U.S. ceasefire proposal, which was clearly introduced to everyone to subvert international law in the ICJ decision, but Hamas accepted it. And that's why I said we had a deal on the table. But it was Netanyahu with his fanatical religious nationalist and messianist security minister, Idemar Ben-Govir and finance minister, Bezal Smoltrick, and other fanatics who kept introducing new conditions that prevented that deal from taking place around this time they assassinated in his office in Beirut. the chief Palestinian negotiator outside of Gaza, Salah O'Roury.

Then they attacked the Iranian consulate in Syria, and they began provoking Iran, Syria, and Hezbollah into what they wanted, into the regional war that Netanyahu wanted. And as that developed, the U.S. continued vetoing UN resolutions until by September, the Israeli military was able to escalate in Lebanon after a very suspect bombing in the occupied Syrian town of Majd al-Shams, which Israel occupies, in which 12 Syrian youth were killed. Local Druze officials said that they had, they didn't believe that Hezbollah was responsible. Israel blamed Hezbollah, and that's when it began attacking Beirut directly. It eventually killed Hassan Nasrallah. It was killing IRGC officials. It killed the head of

the jihad council, the military council of Hezbollah, Fuad Shooker. And the Biden administration loved this. They loved what they were seeing because they have wanted to oust Hezbollah from just completely, they wanted to waste Hezbollah and remove the president. the interim president of Lebanon and replaced them with a more complicit figure. They also wanted to remove the government in Syria, and an operation was brewing there from forces that the West and NATO through Turkey were quietly backing in HTS. And they also had restarted a war in Yemen, and they wanted to destroy the Houthi leadership, which was waging a fairly effective blockade in the Red Sea.

So for all these reasons, the U.S. was obstructing a ceasefire while telling their Democratic base because Kamala had taken the baton from Biden and was running for president, that she was working tirelessly for a ceasefire. But if you actually even just read public media reports in places like, even like Politico, it was clear that the people who were running Biden's policy, Blinken, Brett McGurk at the NSC, Jake Sullivan, and their Lebanon envoy, Amos Hoxstein, who was actually an Israeli, dual American-Israeli citizen, were delighted with the destruction that Israel was reeking all across the region and actually pleasantly surprised. They love the pager attack in Lebanon. And so they were postponing the ceasefire that was already there. And that meant that they were sacrificing tens of thousands of lives in the Gaza Strip to be able to reshape the region, according to Netanyahu's designs.

Finally, they killed Yahyazenwar. Israel killed Yajanwar, sort of by accident. They found him fighting in the field alongside his men. Unlike Netanyahu. who was hiding in a luxury bunker during that time because Hezbollah had actually scored a direct hit with a drone on his home in Tessaria. Senor was killed, and at that point, the Biden administration decided, well, you know, we've achieved so many goals here.

Like, Israel has decapitated the leadership of all these organizations. Might as well do a deal. But as Blinken himself admitted in his own press conference, and he had also said this, at the Atlantic Council, where he's interrupted twice. And I said this at the time. Killing Sinwar makes a deal very difficult because everything has to go through him.

He has to approve it, and he was no longer alive. So it took them months more to actually get everyone on board. And the Israelis, of course, were obstructing and obstructing Natinia, who had to reconstruct his coalition. And so it took so long between that time. and the election took place. They lost because of their Gaza policy and alienated so much of their base.

They lost Michigan. And by the time they finally could get a ceasefire together because of all the destruction and killing and assassination they were doing, Donald Trump was there to get the credit and Netanyahu was more than happy to give him the credit because, A, Netanyahu likes Trump better. They share a donor in Biry of Adel

And Trump was going to give Netanyahu the West Bank, where Israel is currently besieging the city of Janine, as in as sort of an exchange or a tradeoff for the Gaza ceasefire. And so that's the way I saw it working out. So the real reason that it took so long to get a ceasefire when it was always there and when Hamas was willing to accept such a what would be like a lousy deal after their operation and all they suffer. is because of the cynical, geopolitical gambit that the Biden administration was waging with Netanyahu ushering in what Condoleezza Rice called back in 2006, the birth pangs of the New Middle East. Yeah. Their goal, by the way, their goal, by the way, was to get back to the Abraham Accords,

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Now, we're somewhat short on time, but I want to get back to what you said there about the tradeoff about the renewed action in the West Bank as there's a ceasefire in the Gaza Strait. it's been, you know, popular hearsay going around and including in Israeli newspapers and so forth that Miriam Adelson had, the widow of Sheldon Adelson, had a direct quid pro quo. Here's $100 million. I want you to allow the Israeli government to officially annex the West Bank, as though they hadn't annexed it back in 1967 anyway. But to go ahead and recognize that. And then I guess the question is whether in to do so, how far they are willing to go as, you know, compared to on a scale of one to what just happened in Gaza in order to take even more of that territory, possibly even including emptying the cities and trying to force the Palestinian people into Jordan or what?

Well, there's the West Bank is divided, but was on this is all the result of obviously. by the way. I mean, Oslo made this all possible. The fake peace process. It divided the West Bank into areas A, B, and C. Area A are the populated cities that are mostly controlled by the Palestinian Authority. Area B is mixed control between the Israeli military and Palestinian Authority. And area C is Israeli military control. Those are the more rural areas, the farming areas, the areas where they want the water. where the more fanatical settlements are. And what the goal of the Israeli military is here is to push everyone into Area A, the most Palestinian population possible, and the least possible land, and then take all of the arable land, all of the land where there are water wells, which they've already basically taken in the Jordan Valley, and all the areas that are religiously significant,

which is particularly around Hebron and the South Hebron, on hills, where they're the most fanatical settlers, and then north of Nabilis, and just take them. And that's what they've been doing since October 7th through sheer terrorism. They gave the settlers uniforms. They gave them M4 colt rifles from the U.S. and basically said, you are deputized to go out and just shoot Palestinians, terrorize them as much as possible. And now Donald Trump has pardoned some of the most violent settlers. I wouldn't say pardon, but stepping back, the Biden administration sanctioned a small handful of extremely violent settlers who were known for killing price tag attacks, burning

homes as a token gesture to international law and in place of actually sanctioning. the entire Israeli military, which was carrying out state terror on an unprecedented level in Gaza. Donald Trump has removed those sanctions as one of his first moves in his administration, and that basically gives the white flag of surrender or like, I don't know, whatever the checkered flag at the start of the races is to the religious nationalist settlement movement in the West Bank to basically wage war on Palestinians. And then you have a situation also in the Northern West Bank in Tulkarim, Janine, and a few of the refugee camps in that area where the Palestinian authorities lost control.

And they've lost control to an array of resistance forces, not just Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad, but just pretty much everyone who wants to take up the gun against the occupation. The guns are coming in through Jordan, like never before. There are new smuggling networks that have opened up. They're also developing new IED munitions that have had a powerful effect on Israeli armor. And Israel's worried. They're worried they're going to start actually being able to get developed like tandem, anti-tank. rocket systems and start to look like Hamas does in the Gaza Strip and now they have laid siege to

these cities and they're waging a brutal operation that we haven't seen in Janine since the second Intifada but this time they're complementing it with air power and the gazification of the northern west bank is underway kind of what a nightmare um yeah this was the trade off for getting rid of the last guy and replace him with the other last guy. It's, it is a break from the Washington consensus on some things, but on this one, certainly for the very worst. I mean, I don't know. I guess I don't have time to ask you if you have a little bit better prognosis for the

future of the situation in Eastern Europe now, but this has always been. I guess the most obvious potential danger and fear of Donald Trump's foreign policy. It's not really realistic. He'd go to war with Iran. But what else could he do for Benjamin Netanyahu? And this makes sense that this would be it. But then see, here's the problem, Max, obviously, right? Is that if they really complete this annexation, including, for example, the cleansing of eastern Jerusalem,

then that almost certainly equates also then to the destruction of the Alaksa mosque and the rebuilding of the temple and the onset of World War 4 or 5 or whatever number we're on now in the Middle East, right? That's where this is going. I mean, this is, although the leading politician or political figure and operator of the temple movement, which aims for a kind of messianic apocalypse that begins with the destruction of the Alaksa Mosque. Idemar Ben-Fir has left the government.

This moment and the dynamics of the moment after the ceasefire really fuel his movement. And so we're moving away from, I think the war is becoming more internalized, Israelisraeli society, Jewish-Israeli society is a pressure cooker. We're seeing the removal of the chief of staff of the Israeli military. He will be replaced with a more fanatically religious nationalist figure, as well as the head of the Southern Command in Gaza. So the religious nationalists, the temple movement fanatics are going to work to complete their march through the institutions. And Israel's military will be focused on the West Bank, which always has a messianic quality to it because of the Jewish holy sites that are there

and the desire to just oust the Palestinian population from living anywhere near them. And then I'm sorry, in just a couple of moments here at the end, what about the future of the Gaza Strip now? I saw aid trucks are headed in there. I know there's a clip of Netanyahu saying, well, Donald Trump told me I can go right back to war as soon as the last sausages are released,

But do you predict that that's the way things are going there, or they're going to have a chance to rebuild? Well, Israel's, I think the religious nationalist movement has lost or has stalled on its agenda in the Gaza Strip. What it wanted was it wanted the annexation of the North, which they were getting. Their commanders were in charge of the operation that saw the starvation siege of northern Gaza, which culminated with the destruction of the Kamala-Adwan Hospital, medical facility there. They took a lot of bodies. A lot of them died. A lot of them were injured, and they wanted something for their sacrifice. And so what they wanted was the ability to build new settlements in Gaza. They actually thought they were going to get this if the war

continued. They're really upset with Donald Trump right now. They're upset with Netanyahu. As I mentioned, Ben Fear left the coalition. So they still have that on the agenda. What Netanyahu and the entire military intelligence apparatus wants is a permanent Israeli military presence in two areas in Gaza. One, the Nezorim corridor, which cuts off the north from the rest of Gaza and then primarily the Philadelphia corridor between Egyptian Sinai and Southern and Rafa, because they believe that if they're there, it will prevent Hamas's al-Kasan brigades and other. resistance factions from being able to be armed. As we saw, after the announcement of the ceasefire, Hamas was able to send members of its Nukhba force, its most elite forces, into the streets for a sort of show of force and survival that there was no eradication of Hamas. Israel failed on its major goal of eliminating Hamas. And so they are desperate to prevent them from re-arming.

and I think that could lead to the breakdown of the ceasefire in phases two and three, which call for a removal of Israeli forces from those areas. And we've heard from the Trump administration, NSC director Mike Waltz, that they will allow Netanyahu to send the troops back in. So we will see, I mean, the other factor that I didn't mention is that Jewish Israeli society is exhausted. And the reservist forces rely on, you know, men who are of just any man, male of fighting age. And they are economically exhausted and they want to be with their families and they want to go back to their businesses. And many of them are half crazy or completely crazy, just deeply traumatized from participating in the Gaza operations.

So how long can Israel keep at this for? And with that, we're all out of time. I'm sorry, but thank you so much for your time again on the show, Max. It's always great to talk to you. Thanks a lot, Scott. All right, you guys, that is the great Max Blumenthal. He is the editor-in-chief over there at the gray zone.com, and he's got a whole crew of great journalists over there as well.

His latest book is called The Management of Savagery. The Scott Horton Show, Anti-War Radio, can be heard on KPFK, 90.7 FM in L.A. APSRadio.com. anti-war.com, scothorton.org, and libertarian institute.org.