Scott Horton Show - Just the Interviews - 2/8/24 Kyle Anzalone on Gaza, the West Bank, Yemen, Iraq and Syria

Episode Date: February 10, 2024

Kyle Anzalone joined Scott on Antiwar Radio this week to discuss developments in the Middle East. They start with the humanitarian situation and mass violence in Gaza and the West Bank. They then talk about the escalating violence in the broader region. Discussed on the show: “Israel Has Failed to Provide Evidence to Prove UNRWA Hamas Ties” (Libertarian Institute) “Israel Destroys Belgian Aid Agency Office in Gaza” (Libertarian Institute) “Amnesty Documents ‘Shocking Spike in Illegal Force’ Against Palestinians in West Bank” (Libertarian Institute) “Biden Makes Americans Targets in the Middle East, Then Campaigns on Their Deaths” (The American Conservative) 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, February the 8th, 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 am the editorial director of Anti-War.com, and I'm the author of enough already, 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 all your favorite podcatchers and video websites and so forth. And you can follow me on Twitter, if you dare, at Scott Horton Show.

All right, introducing this week's guest, it's great Kyle Anselone. He is the host of a great podcast called Conflicts of Interest. He's also the news editor at the Institute and the Opiniscuit. opinion editor at anti-war.com. Welcome back to the show. Kyle, how you doing? Doing great, Scott. Thanks for having me back on. Happy to have you here. And man, you wrote so much stuff this week for the Institute.

And it's because there's so much bad news going on. I think we've got to start in Gaza. But even that said, I almost don't know where to begin. How about Kyle has there been any effect on U.S. policy? from the ruling of the International Court for Justice that there's a plausible case that there's a genocide taking place here and their insistence on all these measures that Israel is supposed to take in order to prevent such a genocide from taking place. Unfortunately not, Scott.

And almost as the Secretary of State, Anthony Blinken, said before South Africa actually filed and the court ruled on the genocide convention, he warned that this would actually work out worse for the Palestinians if it's happened. And that's been the case because it seems in retaliation, Israel made this allegation that 12 Palestinians took part in the October 7th Hamas attack on Israel. And they're using that in the U.S. and several other countries as an excuse to pull aid from the U.N. aid agency for the Palestinians. That's UNR. The U.N. release. and warts program. So at this point, it's, you know, really desperate for the Palestinians. The agency says they have about until the end of the month left in funding. But once that

funding runs out, even the Israeli military is worried that the famine there will get so bad that they're going to have to stop their military operations. Elaborate about that story. Where do we get that from? And this is from the officers leading the fight itself? Yeah, this was a statement made from the Israeli military to the Times of Israel. And I think it was somewhat in response to a Wall Street Journal article that ran that said the long-term plan for UNRWA, for the Israelis, was to have significant reforms for the agency or to just eliminate it and replace it with something else. I think the Israelis are probably not planning to have to deliver aid to Palestinians after a few months here in Gaza because, you know, they're planning to end and they cleanse them from the street. Yeah. Well, and yeah, in the meantime, you got to keep people healthy enough to bomb. If they're all just laying down and dying a starvation, that looks bad or worse, I guess. Right. And we've seen the humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza really had exploded over the past a couple of weeds here. Scott, doctors are now reporting that especially among children, hepatitis A is circulating. A part of this is because there's,

no diapers or if there are diapers in Gaza, they're just too expensive. And so the sanitary conditions are really bad. There's no food for infants. Of course, mothers aren't producing breast melt because they don't have enough nutrients themselves to do so. And the situation is that children just don't have food. And so parents are trying to feed them solid food, which you can't do for children under six months. And so this is a really desperate situation. And this is the area we're talking about now, Scott, is Rafa, the area of southern Gaza that's closest to the Egyptian border where aid is actually getting in. The U.N. agency for Gaza recently said that nobody has delivered aid to the northern half of the Gaza Strip in over two weeds, where there are believed to be 300,000 Palestinians still living. And CNN has reported that people there are boiling grass and trying to eat that to defend off starvation.

That's insane. And that's the thing of it, right? It's an unbelievable level of cruelty, but in the most literal sense. Like, nah, really? They're just laying down and dying. They're eating grass. They've got nothing. Their children are being killed. 30,000 people already killed. And even the Israelis say two-thirds, a super majority are women and children. And they, of course, count all so-called fighting age males as fighters are terrorists. which is a lie, of course. But it's pretty incredible what is going on here. And then Americans have to choose whether they want to know enough about this to be outraged or they're just going to have to turn away. Are they going to somehow justify starving little kids to death? Well, Biden and the White House are spinning propaganda here for the Israelis. You know, Israel made this claim that 12 members of UNRUD participate in the Hamas attack. And they haven't provided any actual evidence for that, but the White House is buying it enough to actually have suspended aid to the organization.

And this prompted Germany and a lot of other top donors to Unra to suspend their aid as well. Notably, one country that didn't, Scott, was Belgium and Israel just happened to bomb and destroy their aid agency building in Gaza after they decided not to. So it seems like there's maybe repercussions for anybody who doesn't fall in line here. But we've seen from the UK Channel 4 News, the Daily Beast, and CBS. news, all who reviewed the documents that Israel publicly released said there's no evidence in here to bet their claims, but still the White House stripped that aid.

And not only that, Scott, but the massive spending bill for the defense supplemental aid that they're trying to push through now, I think it's like $98 billion because they stripped out the border stuff includes a provision in there that strips all aid in the future from going to UNRWA. So they're actually looking to make this suspend. permanent with that legislation. And even worse. So wait a minute.

I want to make sure that I understand you right, that you're saying, like you have here from, I guess, a couple days ago, Israel's withholding this intelligence dossier. So they're just saying you have to trust us. But then after that, now you're saying, well, they did release what they call evidence to some news organizations who then had to report that, yeah, well, there's no evidence in there. So Israel is saying that this is a summary. of their intelligence dossier, which they're refusing to release to anyone. And it appears at this time that that includes the United States and the U.N.

And now they said at the beginning that this information came in major part, I think, was the phrase, from interrogations, which we know very well may include torture. We don't know for sure, but it's a reasonable assumption that they, at the very least, twisted a guy's arm behind his back until he said what they wanted. Yeah, that was the initial claim. Now, since they've claimed that they have either cell phone data or other kinds of location information to know that these people were outside of Gaza on October 7th, but they haven't actually provided any of that evidence. They just say they have it somewhere, and they're not sharing that with the media outlets. And this came out right at the time of the, you know, maybe the day that it was coming out of the ICJ ruling.

Yeah, it came out the day of the ICJ ruling. Yeah. So, and as people have been documenting on Twitter in depth going back and finding, and I'm sure you've written this up, maybe you even just mentioned, that Israel's wanted to destroy this organization for a very long time, for the simple reason that it recognizes the Palestinians as refugees from what's now called Israel, but is formerly their private property where they and their, you know, grandparents and parents had lived before. And so this served a dual purpose of being a big public relations stunt to change the subject from the ICJ ruling, but then also giving them an excuse to help to destroy this agency that they've hated for so long. Right. And just to expand a little bit there, Scott, the reason the refugee status is important is that the right to return to Israel, which is what Israel doesn't want. Once they had spelled the Palestinians, they want them gone. And so, you know, I imagine, I haven't seen this yet. I've been looking in all the details of the Israeli officials discussing it, what kind of reforms they want for UNRWA,

but I would assume it would have, you know, remove that refugee status from the Palestinians. Let me ask you about the American policy here. They say that they keep expressing concerns or something, but is there any indication of America, even urging restraint, much less threatening restraint on our part if the Israelis don't stop with the worst here? Or is it really just the case that Biden has given Netanyahu a blank check? Just do your worst, pal, and I'll have my guys complain to the Washington Post a little bit every once in a while, but don't worry about that. Yeah, unfortunately, Scott, it's the latter. Whenever any of these department spokespersons, whether it's the State Department, the Pentagon or something like that, they are confronted with clear

evidence of Israeli war crimes being committed in Gaza. We have to look into that more. Maybe there was a Hamas tunnel underneath. And even if that never comes true, the U.S. just isn't going to condemn Israel or anything they're doing here. And in part because it's very clear the White House policy will not change from unconditional aid to Israel. And so we are just going to participate in this genocide as it continues to drag on month after month. And Congress wants to get us even more involved by authorizing the house pushed a $17.6 billion aid package just for Israel this week. Fortunately, it got rejected, but yeah. Yeah, and I heard you say on conflicts of interest that they already concede, maybe boast, that they've transferred 25,000 tons of weapons,

mostly bombs to Israel during this time to use in the war. Yeah, thousands and thousands of bombs and artillery shells and taint shells and yeah you're right sky it's a boast it's not an omission a zab battalion eats your heart out pal well before we talk about the regional war what's what all's going on in syria and the rest tell us a little bit about the west bank because of course the israelis say that well hamas hamas hamas hamas hamas but in the west bank there's no Hamas. And yet, I keep reading reports that people are being killed and there are violence clashes as the American media calls them and so forth. So can you describe to me what the hell's going on over there? Amnesty International released a report earlier this week, Scott, that looked at

several cases of Israeli military operations in the West Bank in October and November of 2023. And what they found was basically Israel just had turned up the dial. So in the past, you know, This is all things the Israeli military has done killed children for throwing stones, blocked ambulances from reaching wounded Palestinians, or just conducting raids on West Bank homes and then killing innocent Palestinians in their beds or things like that. But this has been accelerated since October 7th. We're looking at now almost 400 dead Palestinians in the West Bank, and that includes 100 children, Scott.

So that number we just unfortunately hit this past week, 100 dead children in the West Bank. Some of this violence has been done at the hands of Israeli settlers, and the White House has issued some sanctions on individual settlers. I think 12 or so received a ban from entering the U.S. and four were actually placed on a U.S. blacklist, but other than that, there's been no repercussions towards Tel Aviv for these actions. And, of course, the settlers who are committing this level of violence are doing so

because they want to ethnically cleanse the Palestinians from the West Bank to turn the West Bank into part of Israel. So they have no intention of leaving and coming to the United States. Banning them from entering doesn't do anything. They're concerned about what they view is their homeland, not what was happening in the United States. So these are relatively meaningless gestures that the U.S. is making against the Palestinians. But it seems particularly cruel, Scott. And this has been documented by, you know, Jewish reporters, from Heretz, who say that as they try to travel around the West Bank, it takes hours to go miles

because there's checkpoints everywhere. And you have young, you know, teenage, early 20-year-old Israeli military soldiers at all these checkpoints. And they just don't care. You know, they'll stand there and talk to each other while they ignore you or record videos for TikTok and things like that. And it's just an insult to every Palestinian every day as they tried to do anything in their daily life in the West Bank right now.

Yeah. And now are there actual new settlements going up? I know we talk with Michael Tracy about them cleansing old ones. Yep, some Bedouins obviously used to live here and got run right the hell out. Are they establishing new settlements on new hilltops and this kind of thing? Not that I've read about yet. I know there's a lot of violence being directed at the Palestinians. And so I'm not sure if they maybe have the resources to go ahead and start putting up new settlements and things like that. But I've right over 10,000 Palestinians have not. fled the West Bank because of the threats of their lives. Oh, man. And that's internally displaced in the West Bank, or they had to go sit in a refugee camp in Syria or Jordan or something? You know, I haven't read for sure. I know some have, are displaced in the West Bank, but maybe some also fled over the border to Jordan as well.

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wouldn't even get to keep it. It would go under the king of Jordan again like it was before 67 and anything to prevent Palestinian sovereignty there. So that sounds to me like something they're likely to do. I don't know if they can start a war big and horrible enough to get away with cleansing another 3 million Palestinians out of their homes on the West Bank, the way they're doing to the 2 million in Gaza now. But hell, maybe, Kyle, you know, I don't know. If they just are bombing Ramallah, where are people going to go? They're going to. They're going to have to run somewhere or die. So I don't know. It's not like they have guns. Right. And, you know, if the Palestinians and the West Bank are looking at what's happening in Gaza and they see the

international community just allow Israel to, you know, kill and murder hundreds of thousands, either through starvation or through their direct warfare, Palestinians, then they might decide that they have to leave or else Israel is just going to do it to them in the West Bank once they start the military operations. So we, you know, we could see. And we have seen psychological warfare from the Israelis. This was recently reported on by Heretz that the Israeli Psiops unit was running a telegram channel that was promoting Israeli war crimes being committed in the West Bank. Brutal torture and awful humiliations of the Palestinian people were being chaired in this telegram channel. And it was now reported on by Heretz that was done by the military.

Man. you know the scale of violence under the american terror wars of the last 20 years has just been incalculable but the degree of cruelty being inflicted by the Israelis on the Palestinians here seems to be a whole other level of like maybe not even medieval but maybe ancient level warfare of just outright kill them all without mercy and i have seen you know know, repeatedly, not just from Netanyahu, but from, you know, members of the military over there. That's right. It's, you know, in these TikTok videos. That's right. We're fighting Amalek. In fact, Dan Cohen had this activist whose son is captive by Hamas right now, saying they're all

Amalek killed the men, the women, the children, and I think he specifies the infants and the toddlers. got to kill all of them because of the Old Testament says that that's what you're supposed to do. And that's what Joe Biden has signed up the United States for, is this is not the Geneva Conventions. This is not even the way W. Bush wages war. This is this whole other level of barbarity. It's just crazy in 2024 on Twitter in front of everybody. Yeah. And it's going to get even worse. Scott Netanyahu said there's going to be no ceasefire, no hostage, it's staged deal.

and that the Israelis are going to go on to total victory. If there is any confusion about what that meant today, he said that that meant the Israeli troops are moving on to Raffinets, where there were about a pre-war population of 250,000 Palestinians. Now between 1.5 and 1.7 million Palestinians are sheltering in the city. There's already widespread starvation. There's completely inadequate facilities for that many people. We're talking medical.

waste. So nobody has clean water. The situation is just absolutely awful and horrific already. And now Israel's prepared to launch a bombing campaign on that city. The Palestinians and even U.S. mainstream media outlets when they talk about Israel saying they're going on to Rafa are saying they don't know where the Palestinians are going to go. And so it's very concerning, Scott, that why Israel rounded them all up there was maybe just to slaughter them all in one place. All right. It's anti-war radio. I'm sorry. Scott Horton, talking with the great Kyle Anzalone from anti-war.com. Now, let's zoom out on the map a little bit here, Kyle.

And actually, let me tell you first. I talked with Nasser Arabi, my reporter friend from Sana'a. And he said, so far, they've only bombed empty warehouses and not killed, I think, anyone. And, of course, it's been completely ineffectual. The Houthis have been able to hit back against the Americans, sometimes even within the same hour as their strikes. Them and the Brit strikes there. so that's the state of that but there's a lot of politics involved too and anyway also we have Israel versus Hezbollah on their northern front we've got all kinds of complications in Syria and Iraq

but I wonder if you can give us a rundown on the already spreading regional war against the Shiites and the threat of expansion to real war with Iran if you perceive one sir Yeah, at this point, Scott, the U.S. is bombing Yemen at least once every day, maybe twice some days. Sankham is reporting that they're hitting either Houthis trying to set up anti-ship missiles or warehouses where those missiles came from. Even according to Pentagon reports, they say they've degraded like 20 to 30 percent of the Israeli military or Houthi military capability. So it seems unlikely, you know, at this point that the U.S. is making much progress in the U. that Nasser Arabi is probably right in what he told you, because Sankham, I'm sure their estimates are overly optimistic.

And the Houthis have, you know, conducted more and more attacks on either U.S. and British ships, Israeli ships or targeting U.S. and U.K. warships in the Red Sea. So that seems to be escalating quite significantly. But even more concerning, Scott, of course, is what's happening in Iraq now, where the U.S. just assassinated commander of a key Shia militia in Iraq in Badd along with three other people, and I'm sure this is going to have major, major consequences. Immediately after protests started at the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad, fortunately, the security forces there shut that down pretty quickly, but I can only imagine that the temperature is very hot if we're seeing protests at the U.S. embassy.

Yeah, and these are the forces that Bush and Obama fought for are the ones that we're bombing now, which puts America back on the side of the bin Ladenites. as it was in the Carter through Clinton years, and again in the Obama years, Kyle, for everyone keeping track out there. But so now the three American National Guard soldiers were killed in Jordan last week, just on the other side of the line from Iraq and Syria at that funny border where they all come together there, where the American Al-Tomf base is. But now, straight me out because I see some headlines, but never much detail in the accusations, Kyle, about Shiite militias operating in Syria. Seems like, nah, that's not really right, that the different forces in Syria don't really include a bunch of independent Shiite militias, as far as I'm really aware.

These really are Iraqi militias who are reaching out and touching Americans on the other side of this line, but just barely on the other side of the line from their country. Is that your same understanding, or is there a separate sort of front brewing in Syria right now as well? Well, the Shia militias of Iraq, this umbrella group that's calling itself the Islamic resistance in Iraq, does operate some in Syria. But, you know, I think you make a good point there, Scott, because these groups are typically operating on the area of Syria that the U.S. occupies along with the Syrian Kurds, where this area, Tower 22, on the Jordanian side. side of the border was supporting the Al-Tanof base in southern Syria. And around this area is more where ISIS operates versus the Shia militias. Now, you know, the Shia militias do work with Assad, Scott. So it's possible that there are Shia militias out in this area that are there, you know, ostensibly, you know, working with the Assad government to attack ISIS or something like that,

because ISIS attacks do cut or are carried out against pro-Assad forces in this area. But it's also possible that ISIS, you know, pulled off this attack as well, although the U.S. says they know for sure and they don't have any evidence to present to us. And now, so you talked about the riot at the embassy, or at least the big protest at the embassy. I guess the question is how high Mutttaud al-Sada turns that dial, you know, if he wants people to protest at this decibel or that one, I think he can specify. But there's also, I think, a real threat that should be mentioned to American forces. Forces stationed, wherever they are in Iraq, especially in Kurdistan, they're thought to be, what, completely untouchable there. But if America keeps bombing these militias that essentially are no different than the Iraqi army, they're completely embedded with the Iraqi army, they're friends and cousins of guys sitting in parliament right now, you know, they're literally part of the government America built there over the last 20 years that we're bombing. that could lead to uncontrollable outcomes.

And I'm not saying I'm really predicting it. I think, Kyle, that maybe Biden will get away with it. A little bit of reprisal strikes here and there and that it won't escalate beyond what it is now to something like we were really considered to be a raging regional war and including Iran and ground forces and things. Seems like probably not. But it does seem like they're taking an awful risk with this.

Well, yeah, I think the Biden administration's thinking on this, Scott, is that they're able to do these tip-for-tat strides and slowly escalate the situation, you know, with the Shia militias in Iraq and Syria and also with the Houthis in Yemen. But at the end of the day, before they reach like a tipping point and where they would have to declare war in any of these situations, Israel is going to end its operations in Gaza, which is going to relieve the problem. pressure on the Middle East. I'm not so sure that that would be a good bet to make that you're betting on Netanyahu's restraint and that the Israelis are either going to get this done quickly in Gaza or that they're going to stop at some point in time. Neither of those outcomes seem very likely at this point. And so I think Biden is putting himself in a really bad position. And Dub Bondow has a great piece out today, Scott, at the American Conservative, where he explains that Biden is essentially just using these troops in the Middle East's political props now all the way

from when he sends them out there to wave the red, white, and blue and to declare, you know, we're going to take the Syrian oil and our occupation of Iraq and all that to when their caskets come back to the U.S. and he uses them as a photo op as, you know, they get driven by. Now, I think maybe the good news here, Scott, is this isn't 2002 America anymore where, you know, seeing the fled draped over the coffins of young Americans make Americans instinctively want more war in the Middle East. I think, you know, we're getting to the point where we start to blame our political leaders for having them there in the first place. There's a really important poll done by defense priorities where they had UGov survey Americans. And before the attack that

killed those three soldiers, Scott, only 30% of Americans knew there were U.S. troops in Syria. Yeah. And hopefully they were, you know, surprised. to find out that so few troops were put in such a far-way outpost with so little force protection for their own lives out there and guardsmen too and including a woman who were they doing out there i thought they were for in case there's a flood they're going to help sandbag the river or the creek you know instead they're dying in jordan anyway we're all out of time but that is the great Kyle Anzalone, he is, again, the news editor at the Institute Opinion Editor at anti-war.com and the host of the great podcast, Conflicts of Interest, which you can find on all your favorite podcatchers out there.

Thank you very much for your time again on the show, Kyle. Thank you, Scott. All right, Sean, that's been Anti-War Radio for today. I'm your host, Scott Horton. Find the full interview archive at Scott Horton.org. Follow me on Twitter at Scott Horton's show, and I'm here every Thursday from 2.30 to 3. on KPFK, 90.7 FM in L.A. See you next week.