Scott Horton Show - Just the Interviews - 3/14/24 Connor Freeman on Israel’s Atrocities in Gaza

Episode Date: March 16, 2024

Scott was joined by Connor Freeman to discuss what Israel is doing to the Palestinians. They start with a quick discussion of the violence in the West Bank before reviewing the scale of destruction th...at the IDF is raining down on the people of Gaza. They also talk about U.S. complicity, the war’s effect on the 2024 presidential election and the likelihood the war will soon spread to Lebanon. Discussed on the show: “Biden’s Unpopular Wars Reap Mass Death and Nuclear Brinkmanship” (Libertarian Institute) “When Israel Becomes Like Hamas” (Haaretz) “Israeli rabbi says women, children should be killed in Gaza” (The New Arab) 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: 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

Transcript
Discussion (0)
Starting point is 00:00:00 For Pacifica Radio, March the 14th, 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 the editorial director of anti-war.com and author of the book, InNUK. 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 YouTube.com slash Scott Horton Show and all the other video sites slash Scott Horton Show. And you can't follow me on Twitter because I quit while I'm writing my history book. But if you want to anyway, it's at Scott Horton
Starting point is 00:00:51 Show. All right. Introducing Connor Freeman, he is assistant editor at the institute and at anti-war.com. He's got a great new piece from the Institute from this last week. Biden's unpopular wars reap mass death and nuclear brinksmanship. Welcome back to the show, Connor. How you doing? I'm doing great, Scott. Thanks for having me back on. Great to have you on the show here. So let's start with the American-backed ethnic cleansing and genocidal campaign against the helpless Palestinians. Joe Biden and Benjamin Netanyahu's canned hunt. How many innocent people have they murdered so far Connor? It's over 31,000 at this point and well over 12,000 children. Let me get the latest numbers. 31,272 people killed, including 12,300 children, 8,400
Starting point is 00:01:42 women, 73, more than 73,000 injured, including nearly 9,000 children and about 6,000 women. And then you got 8,000 missing that we know of, presumably dead or buried under rubble. And, you know, these have to be massive undercounts because the health care system has been all but eradicated. And so it's very difficult to keep track of these numbers for the Gaza Health Ministry at this point. And then in the West Bank. And there are no separate numbers, are there for Hamas fighters versus just males? They want us to believe that all men that they kill somehow deserve it. But most of them are innocent civilians as well.
Starting point is 00:02:21 Right. Yeah. And the thousands of people that are being rounded up in Gaza and the West Bank. and we're getting all kinds of reports, especially in Israeli media, about the just barbaric torture people are being subjected to. And speaking of the West Bank, the death toll is up to 432, including 115 children. A UNICEF put out a report earlier this year about how last year was the deadliest year on record for children in the West Bank. And it's only going to get worse from here on out because the settlers and the IDF for absolutely running ramp. killing people left and right and the raids and have just increased exponentially we see
Starting point is 00:03:02 air strikes as like a regular occurrence drone strikes and helicopter attacks and the excuse endlessly pleaded and repeated by the mindless drones of the United States of America that no-uh because they're fighting Hamas is absolutely dead and null and void in the West Bank where Hamas has no presence or power whatsoever absolutely you imagine being dumb enough to just sit around repeating that. Oh, gee, I don't know how I explained 432 dead innocent civilians in the West Bank and the most massive expansion in settlements in years. You must have something to do with Hamas. Give me another talking point. How do I justify this? Yeah, you know, there's got to be a great talking point for why home demolitions have escalated to nearly 100 so far this year in
Starting point is 00:03:50 East Jerusalem. In fact, they recently demolished a peace activist house and they're going to charge him something like $20,000 or $30,000 to pay for it. You know, you have to pay for your own home to be demolished and your children and grandchildren to be made homeless and also pay the salaries of the cops who were sent to carry out the eviction because you're not Jewish. So you don't have a right to, you know, have a home or build a home. Yeah, I think Americans a lot of times mistakenly project Western values and, you know, Geneva conventions and things like that onto Israel and assume that they must be doing what they're doing for some good reason. But the Israeli regime's degeneracy and morality is about equivalent to southern state governments during
Starting point is 00:04:37 slavery in the 1850s. It's a society that in no way reflects the values of the West. Yeah, not at all. We have, you know, and of course they're announcing more and more expansions of the settlements and all we have from Anthony Blinken, who, as he says, inherited his Zionism is that, you know, we're disappointed. So we get these kinds of token, mealy mouth, can't even call them condemnations in the midst of this live stream mass killing spree that the Israelis are killing out, where they have telegram channels that feature snuff films killing women and children in Gaza. And, you know, we have Joe Biden, his heartbreaks really for the genocide that he's enabled. and underwriting, as he said, in his State of the Union speech.
Starting point is 00:05:26 It is really amazing. To your point about the numbers, we really don't have numbers on how many of these people being killed are Hamas fighters. The Israeli figures are a joke. I mean, they completely just pull them out of thin air. I mean, there was one week, maybe a couple of months ago, where they said you had two Israeli officials speaking to two different media outlets in the same week where they gave, like one would say, oh, we've killed 5,000 Hamas fighters.
Starting point is 00:05:53 The other one goes, we've killed 7,000 Hamas fighters. And they just, you know, they ramp it up. As you say, they pretend that they think that every fighting age male that they kill is a Hamas fighter. But, you know, they openly admit that, and that's still less than a third of the people that they've killed. Yeah. And they're rounding up, you know, they read the new scandal. I wish it was, it should be the biggest story in the news right now. But it's, they tortured, uh, unrem workers, uh, the UN, the Palestinian, uh, the Palestinian,
Starting point is 00:06:23 aid agency into, you know, trying to coax out of them false testimony that members of UNRWA participated in the October 7th Hamas attack and that they were Hamas fighters. And so now we have an UNRWA report. It was reported in Reuters where they're talking about people being just severely beaten and waterboarded and having their families threatened in order to make these false claims trying to pin this on UNRWA. Because this is, again, part of strangling the Palestinian population, denying them their right to self-determination, let alone human rights, equal rights with Israeli citizens or their own state.
Starting point is 00:07:08 And, of course, the United States is going along with it. The European Union and Canada will be restoring their funding to UNRWA in light of these investigations and revelations, because even the U.S. intelligence community, is saying, it was in the Wall Street Journal, that, well, we have low confidence in these claims, which is intelligence speak for they're just complete nonsense. There's not a shred of evidence. It's just an assertion. And when this dossier that the Israelis had compiled claiming to demonstrate the connections
Starting point is 00:07:36 between UNRWA and the October 7th attack, we had major media organizations that are always willing to go along with American propaganda. And they're saying that, no, there's no evidence here. There's no evidence here in this dossier. proves anything that could pin blame for the attack on any members of UNRWA. But, of course, the Americans are willing to go along. Just like, you know, even this report of the UNRWA members being tortured, you know, we have a refusal from the State Department spokesman to condemn these reports and medical
Starting point is 00:08:09 staff recently as well. At the Nasser Hospital in Gaza, we have this report from the BBC and video that's coming out of these medics being stripped down to their underwear and made to kneel down. They said squat down and kneel with their hands behind their head, pulling their neck down for hours on end and says if they, if anybody moved at all, one of the doctors said that they would be hit. If you try to move your head in these horribly compromising positions, you immediately get beaten. And there was all kinds of reports of torture. And the BBC goes, we corroborated this independently, all the key claims.
Starting point is 00:08:43 And so there's just, and as I say, there's in a 972 mag, which is the Tel Aviv based outlet, as well as Haaretz. We have just horrible reports about people being raped, burned with cigarettes, electrocuted, having people spit in their mouths. They're not allowed to go to the bathrooms. They have to defecate on themselves, being tied to fences and just severely beaten and humiliated. Their testicles crushed to the point where their genitals turn blue and there's blood and their urine. It's just what the Israelis are doing is just absolutely unacceptable. And there's just, know the American government refuses to just be honest about this. I mean, even when we see things like where they say, well, listen, if Israel moves in and invades Rafa, which they're threatening
Starting point is 00:09:31 to carry out a blitzkrieg against Rafa this month. They were originally going to start it once the month of Ramadan began, and that was three days ago. So we're all just waiting on pins and needles for the full escalation into Rafa to begin. It's been pummeled with heavy airstrikes for weeks but it's still um you know the the invasion itself hasn't has yet to take place but this you know biden says there's a well there's a red line on raffa he said to ms in this interview with ms mbc and then he goes well actually there's no red line i would never stop supporting israel israel is defensive israel is critical and there would there's no red line where i would cut off weapons and not be providing them ammunition for the iron dome and and providing them this kind of defense and so there's just he he there's we have
Starting point is 00:10:19 all this leverage, we've given them over $300 billion since 1948, adjusted for inflation. That's more foreign aid the U.S. is provided to Israel than any other country. And we've approved there's this recent piece in the Washington Post that we've approved. The United States has approved over 100 weapons sales to Israel just since October 7th. And what they're doing is that's, you know, we only knew about the two. one was for tank ammunition, the other was for components to make 155 millimeter artillery shells. And those made the news because Blinken had to bypass Congress to get those pushed through. But what they're doing is they're doing a myriad of sales that are just low enough in value so that they
Starting point is 00:11:02 don't have to notify Congress. But, I mean, just think about that. A hundred plus foreign military sales underwriting this genocide of well over 12,000 children, 30,000 people. leveling Gaza, an open-air concentration camp worse than Dresden. I mean, the Guardian was reporting on this satellite data analysis study that was conducted back in January that showed that somewhere over 60 percent, between 50 and over 60 percent of buildings have just been destroyed or damaged in the entirety of Gaza. And we have them bombing orchards and greenhouses and fields and hospitals and UN shelters
Starting point is 00:11:40 and universities and hospitals and homes and apartments. just every kind of civilian infrastructure you can think of, they are bombing. And they're massacring Palestinians when they go to try and get the little trickles of aid that come through. They fire on aid convoys. We have Israeli citizens setting up bouncy castles and like cotton candy stands over by the border crossings, protesting any aid getting in because they support starving the Palestinians to death. is a, as Gideon Levy talks about, this is the unanimous war in Israel. The entire population supports what's going on. And he says he's never seen anything like that in the history of
Starting point is 00:12:24 Israel. He's a very sharp critic of the occupation, Israeli writer for Haaretz. And, you know, he's just devastated. I mean, he wrote this recent piece that was up at antirewar.com this week about how there's a report in Haaret's from another writer about how 27 more Palestinian detainees of these Israeli torture dungeons have died. And so, and he's just saying, You know, if all these worst projections onto Hamas of what they've done or what Hamas, the atrocities were actually carried on on October 7th, he's saying that Israel is just the same, if not worse, and that this is just a watershed moment for Israeli society. It's anti-war radio on Pacifica, and they're far worse than Hamas, the lowest degenerate criminals on the face of the planet, Benjamin Netanyahu and his war cabinet and the men who implement their orders. We had a piece on anti-war.com from, I think, Middle East Eye the other day, where a rabbi instructing, graduating IDF officers told them not that they can, but that they must kill babies, women, elderly, because they're all just terrorists. And then, I think hilariously, in a way, cites the Old Testament as though it's purely universally applicable to any enemy of any.
Starting point is 00:13:43 Israeli Jews at any time. It says in the Bible, you're supposed to, you must kill their children too. Now, that makes these people worse human beings even than the communist dictatorship in China or even the democratic dictatorship in Washington, D.C., although they share absolute responsibility for everything going on here. I would encourage the audience to remember that it was Israelis who came to train the Americans on how to torture the poor Iraqis in Abu Ghraib Prison, the Palestinian chair that wasn't named after things that Palestinians do to people. It's a chair made to be a permanent stress position that the Israelis, of course, had pioneered against their slave subjects that they own in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. And of course, it was Israel
Starting point is 00:14:39 that lied us into Iraq War II in the first place as well. People don't resent that country nearly enough. Hold on just one sec. We've got to make some money here. Man, Starbucks support for Israel's ethnic cleansing campaign is almost disgusting as their coffee. Don't you just hate them? You, me, and a lot of other people, too. It's time to boycott and divest from those genocidal blood-drinking traitors at Starbucks. But you're still going to need your caffeine in the morning.
Starting point is 00:15:04 Well, you guys are going to love Moondos coffee. It's so good. And the price is right. Check out a massive variety of awesome tasting coffees at Moondosartisancoffee.com. You'll be glad you did. That's Moondoseartisan coffee.com. Hey guys, I had some wasps in my house. So I shot them to death with my trusty bug assault 3.0 model with the improved salt reservoir and bar safety.
Starting point is 00:15:30 I don't have a deal with them, but the show does earn a kickback every time you get a bug of salt or anything else you buy from Amazon.com. by way of the link in the right-hand margin on the front page at scott horton dot org so keep that in mind and don't worry about the mess your wife will clean it up well folks sad to say they lied us into war all of them world war one world war two korea vietnam iraq war one syria afghanistan iraq war two libya syria yemen all of them but now you can get the e-book all the war lies by me for free. Just sign up the email list at the bottom of the page at Scott Horton.org or go to Scotthorton.org slash subscribe. Get all the war lies by me for free. And then you'll never have to believe them again. It's anti-war radio on Pacifica in L.A. and we're talking about
Starting point is 00:16:25 Benjamin Netanyahu deliberately murdering children for fun and for some sort of profit. Eventually they plan on stealing all of this land. from these people once they're done killing them all, and including by starving them to death. Now, when America and Saudi and UAE all ganged up on the Yemenis under Barack Obama and through the Donald Trump years up till in the first year of Joe Biden in that war, when they were deliberately inflicting famine on the people of Yemen, we call that genocide. There's no other name for it. So you could say, well, there's an ethnic cleansing campaign here.
Starting point is 00:17:09 Some people are killing a lot of people there. The Azerbaijani's force-marched all of the Armenians out of Nagorno-Karabakh. But deliberately inflicting a famine on a civilian population, I don't care what the international courts say. That's genocide. And America's center-left liberal Democrats are responsible for it, just as much as Benjamin Netanyahu and his criminal. liqueod regime over there. And so it's fun in a way, in a horrible and ironic way, to see the cognitive dissonance among American liberal Democrats who somehow have to justify this while the entire left half of the left is absolutely beside themselves about it. They keep chanting
Starting point is 00:17:55 four more years, but I don't think Biden's going to get them. No, definitely not. In fact, they're taking extensive measures, as NBC News reported, extraordinary measures during Biden's, if you can even call it, his re-election campaign, you know, they're going, they're trying to make their events smaller withholding their precise locations from the media and the public until he arrives and avoiding college campuses. This is all just to avoid anti-war protesters. I imagine that. The sitting president of the United States of America has to keep his campaign locations secret up until the moment and he shows up. And yeah, and we had in this recent Michigan Democratic primary, more than 100,000 people vote uncommitted and demonstrating that he's going to have Al to pay here at this election, this coming election.
Starting point is 00:18:43 Because people refuse, they don't, I mean, they're not going to vote for Trump, but they sure ain't going to vote for Biden. They're not going to be complicit in genocide. And we have demonstrators camped out daily in front of Blank, Anthony Blankin, Secretary of State's residents yelling, blinking, blinkin, we see you and all the war crimes that you do. You know, and I think, again, you know, one of the points in my piece is that there's a recent data for progress poll that came out that shows that two-thirds of the American population oppose this war and want to ceasefire. And it's pretty interesting. The breakdown, it's 77% of Democrats, 69, which I think has got to be a low count, but,
Starting point is 00:19:20 well, maybe not, but 69% of independence. And then a staggering 56% of Republicans opposed this war and wanted to. ceasefire. And I think that's just amazing and very encouraging. And that's despite all of the chattering classes on the American right who are all virtually all Zionists at this point, just trying their best to convince the young Republicans and conservatives in the country that your enemy is Hamas. They're just like Black Lives Matter and the woke college campus loons. And you know, you've got to be against these protesters and Israel has a right to defend itself. And, you know, these are God's chosen people and we're fighting Hamas and whatever.
Starting point is 00:20:07 And it's just, it's not working. It's not working. I mean, this is one of the reasons why they're trying to ban TikTok, of course, is because just the plethora of footage coming out, these graphic videos of women, children, babies, old men, young men, dying and ripped apart by American bomb. dropped by American planes by the Israeli apartheid army, and there's nothing that can wipe that from the memory of the American people, even if they ban TikTok. I mean, give me a break. And that's going to hurt his chance, his electoral chances too. I mean, he's losing to Trump
Starting point is 00:20:43 in polls that are coming out to, among young people, among black people, among Hispanics, you know, half a solid 50% at least of people who voted for Biden in 2020. believe he is committing, he's complicit in genocide. And there's just, you know, I don't know how they plan to handle this. What they're trying to do is we have all these reports that everybody laughs at in, you know, there were two new ones in the New York Times and in Axios. Caitlin Johnstone has a terrific write-up on this. And it's something like, you know, liberals try to distance Biden from Israel and try to distance Netanyahu from the Israeli state. And it's all about how there was this recent report in the Times where they go, Biden is.
Starting point is 00:21:26 in the middle of this Middle East war. On the one hand, he's dropping, you know, aid pallets trying to feed people in Gaza, and he's also providing the bombs to Israel to kill these people in Gaza. What a conundrum, but he's, you know, it's this, he's trying to strike a balance and like, and then it's always, he's frustrated. He's frustrated with Netanyahu and the Biden administration and these top State Department officials. They're frustrated with Israel's intransigence and refusal to, you know, to tone it down or abide by some of these America, you can't even call them demands. I mean, because there's a report in political, I mean, it's every time they even hint that there
Starting point is 00:22:08 could be some kind of point where the Biden administration might leverage its aid with Israel, its military aid with Israel, just you get another report where it's U.S. officials, like the one in Politico last month, where they said that even if Israel invades Rapa, where about 75% of the population, have been forcibly displaced to, even if Israel invades Rafa cuts off the last crossing where, you know, the very limited amount of aid is getting through at this point. You know, before the war started, Gaza was seeing 500 aid trucks delivering food and basic necessities under the Israeli blockade every day. And now it's well below 100 per day. The number I saw that the UN put out, I believe, was somewhere in the 30s, you know.
Starting point is 00:22:53 And so they're saying, you know, even if he invades Rafa and starts killing civilians and does everything that the White House ostensibly is against, there will be no, there's no reprimand in place. There will be no consequences. There will be no leveraging of aid and support and diplomatic backing and cover at the UN Security Council. We've vetoed five different Security Council resolutions calling for a ceasefire and condemning Israel's massacre, what's now called the flower massacre outside of Gaza's. city at the end of last month, where the Israelis opened fire on starving Palestinians trying to get this little trickle of aid that have been brought in. They killed over 100 Palestinians and injured mostly with bullet wounds, something like 700 more.
Starting point is 00:23:43 It's absolutely unconscionable. In fact, there's a great quote in this piece up at Mondo Weiss where they interview some U.N. experts on the famine because the famine review committee is, going to put out their new report here at the end of the month, I believe. And there's a report from Michael Fikiri, he's the U.N. Special Rappontour on the right for food. And he talks about how they are just absolutely starving these. He goes, there's just no denying humanitarian, it's not just denying humanitarian aid. It's not just shooting. It's civilians trying to get humanitarian aid. It's not just bombarding convoys of humanitarian trucks, even though those
Starting point is 00:24:20 humanitarian trucks are coordinating with them. They're destroying the food. system. They've destroyed over 80% of the fishing fleets and fishing nets of small-scale fissures in Gaza. They're destroying agricultural land. They're destroying fields, greenhouses, orchards. They're using white phosphorus, which poisons the land. So it makes it almost impossible to farm on the land in the near future. You know, that warning from the UN back in December, it was back in December that they said a quarter of the population is on the brink of famine, 576,000 people. And then in the last month, the last couple of months, they've been saying that these people aren't just on the brink of famine, they're in famine conditions already. And so this next report is going to be absolutely devastating.
Starting point is 00:25:07 There's just no way we can measure. It's unfathomable what the excess death rate is going to look like by the time this is over, how many people they're going to kill, just with the siege and the starvation campaign. It's anti-war radio. I'm Scott Horton talking with Connor Freeman from the Institute and Anti-War.com about Israel. genocide against the helpless Palestinians of the Gaza Strip. And we're almost out of time here, but you brought up the humanitarian aid that they're bringing in. And of course, it's a great PR stunt, I guess, for the Americans to do air drops of aid.
Starting point is 00:25:44 But you talked about the number of trucks that were going in to supply the population in the economy of Gaza before the war. and the comparison then to the amount of aid that's actually getting in now and it does go back to the Democrats I guess desperation for some kind of PR stunt to try to confuse the issue even as they announced there are no red lines
Starting point is 00:26:08 and but so it does bring up the question of the Republicans and Donald Trump if it's possible for Donald Trump to have been a worse Zionist than even George W. Bush or Harry Truman He was. He did nothing but serve Benjamin Netanyahu and Sheldon Adelson for four years straight. And so I wonder, since Biden is absolutely implicated in this genocide, what does his one and only opponent for the presidency have to say about this right now? Connor?
Starting point is 00:26:42 So earlier this month, Trump was being interviewed on Fox and Friends by Brian Kilmead, who's an ardent supporter of Israel and virtually all of America's wars. And the way he framed it to Trump, who was calling into the show was, you know, Biden's getting a lot of protesters who are breathing down his neck about his support for Israel. And I have no idea what he's referring to. He goes, but now Biden is turning on Israel. And Mr. Trump, you're firmly in Israel's camp. So do you have any qualms whatsoever with Israel's conduct? If it's taking the war to Gaza, I think is how he put it.
Starting point is 00:27:16 And not Hamas to Gaza. And Trump said, so he asked, are you on? board with this and Trump virtually gave another green light to the genocides. You've got to finish the problem. You had a horrible invasion that took place that would have never happened if I was president, by the way. Look, I hate seeing what's happening. Again, it would never have happened on my watch. This attack on Israel and likewise Israel's counterattack, which is what it is, would never have happened if I was president. So this is just, you know, Trump's usual rhetoric. In many ways, I mean, his supporters will often claim that, well, you didn't start any new wars, but the war, really, the wars in Ukraine
Starting point is 00:27:55 and this war on Gaza and the broader regional war that's coming down the pipe in the Middle East is a result of Trump's policies. And so these are the wars, the new wars that he did byline as much as Biden, really. And so, of course, he's, you know, this is the guy who moved the embassy to Jerusalem. This is the guy who recognize, what does he always say every time he sees any Israelis on the golf course. I gave you the Golan Heights. I gave you the Golan Heights. He recognized Israel's illegal annexation and theft of the Golan Heights in Syria.
Starting point is 00:28:29 They, you know, Mike Pompeo, they only recently rescinded this, but Mike Pompeo declared that the settlements, the illegal settlements, the settlements in the West Bank, these Jewish only colonies were about 700,000 settlers, as they're called, live. You know, Mike Pompeo declared that these are not in violation of international law, you know, just completely desecrating, you know, drag. America's name through the mud on behalf of Sheldon Aedelson and Benjamin Netanyahu, ripping up the Iran deal, bombing Damascus, all these horrible policies. And of course, he oversaw the mass, the massacres during the Great March of Return in 2018 and 2019, where like Falkwork, every Friday
Starting point is 00:29:07 could watch Israeli snipers kill women, children, medics, journalists, amputees, just for protesting that they don't want to be locked up and blockaded in a concentration camp anymore. That's Palestinian lives don't matter as far as Donald Trump is concerned. And he's as pro-Israel, if not more pro-Israel, than Israel's man in Washington, or as he's known now, Genocide Joe. That's incredible. All right, now we're just out of time here, but very quickly, if you can, squeeze in here the very real danger of this war spreading now to a full-scale conflict with Hezbollah and southern Lebanon. Well, so there's just been more and more air strikes and rocket attack. The Israelis carry out air strikes is even, they've used,
Starting point is 00:29:49 even attacked Beirut so far since the 7th. So it's going pretty far north and been attacking the south as well. And then you have the Hezbollah will fire. Recently, they fired something like a hundred rockets into northern Israel in response to one of these air strikes. And so Yoav Galant, the defense minister, has said that even if there is a ceasefire, a temporary ceasefire agreement in Gaza, they're going to use that as an opportunity to escalate drastically against Hezbollah, southern Lebanon. And I don't see much possibility of a diplomatic settlement yet. Hezbollah doesn't think there's going to be a major war. At least their top leaders are saying that they don't think that that's going to be the case yet. But the Israelis seem dead set on it. And we have
Starting point is 00:30:34 numerous reports that have come out where U.S. officials are saying very candidly that the entire Israeli war cabinet is hell bent on war with Hezbollah and war against Lebanon. And if that happens, we, you know, we've already seen reports that the Iranians, supposedly they've given Hezbollah green light to escalate if Israel invades Rafa and really escalates there. And that's it. We're out of time over time, but really appreciate your time on the show again, Connor. Thank you very much. Thank you, Scott. All right, you guys, that is Connor Freeman from the Institute and anti-war.com. Check out his recent piece. Biden's unpopular wars reap mass death and nuclear brinksmanship. And that's it for anti-war radio for today. Thanks very much for listening.
Starting point is 00:31:19 I'm your host, Scott Horton. I'm here every Thursday from 2.30 to 3 on KPFK, 90.7 FM in L.A. See you next week.

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