Scott Horton Show - Just the Interviews - 5/22/24 Max Blumenthal on the Significance of This Student Protest Movement

Episode Date: May 24, 2024

Max Blumenthal of The Grayzone was on Antiwar Radio this week to discuss the nationwide student movement protesting American support for Israel’s ongoing slaughter in Gaza. He and Scott discuss the history of American student opposition to Israel before getting into the details of what we’re seeing today. Blumenthal argues that the war machine could suffer a serious hit if the divestment demands of these students are met. Discussed on the show: “‘Israeli soldier’ from notorious unit confesses to US citizen’s killing” (The Grayzone) 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

For Pacifica Radio, May 22nd, 2024, I'm Scott Horton. This is Anti-War Radio. All right, y'all welcome the show. It is Anti-War Radio. I'm your host, Scott Horton. I'm editorial director of anti-war.com. of the book 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 YouTube.com slash Scott Horton Show. All right, our guest today is the great Max Blumenthal from the gray zone.com. And of course, he's the author of the book's Goliath and the 51-day

war. And of course, management of savagery, which is the Max Blumenthal version of Enough already and I think you'll like them both. Welcome back to the show Max. How are you doing? Good. Good to be back. Did I mention you're the editor-in-chief of the gray zone dot com. The great website full of great journalists doing great

work all the time. We're going to talk about your latest there in a little bit. But first of all I was hoping you can help me out because here on the show for the past many weeks, basically we just cover the war in Gaza and I interview my guys from anti-war.com, especially

And we just talk about that. And I really have been neglecting the story of the war at home as it has developed, especially with the campus protests, but also all the counter reaction to that and the censorship and all of everything that's going on. And I'm up to my eyebrows in my book I'm writing about a whole different subject right now. And so I've really just been negligent on the issue. And yet I heard a recent interview of yours where you, of course, are keeping score like no one else about how all these things. are playing out and what it all means. So I was wondering if we could start with that. And you could tell us a little bit about, does it all start at Columbia or where do you want to go? Well, I mean, I think it began with the announcement of a campaign of boycott divestment

and sanctions against Israel. I've been participating in this movement for well over a decade. Yeah. For about a decade. And that's really when it first started gaining steam. There was a new generation on campus. They were heavily, heavily influenced by, you know, my generation, I'm 46, Generation X, sort of at the end of Gen X. We went through the second Intifada, 9-11, the Iraq War, all at the same time. Then the 2006 assault on southern Lebanon, then 2008, 2009.

first major Israeli assault on Gaza, Operation Kass led, which was shocking to witness at the time, but pales in comparison to what we're witnessing now, where Israel's just destroyed the entire, almost the entire Gaza Strip. But this new generation kind of gained its steam, its momentum after Operation Protective Edge in 2014 when we started to see that Israel was primed for genocide and it destroyed the border regions of Gaza completely. I cover. that war and came back and participated sort of as a journalist and advocacy journalist speaking at divestment drives about what I saw. University of Michigan, I spoke there. It was massive. I could tell something was happening on campus. And I got to witness how the student government

voted and how pro-Israel forces were being indoctrinated and mobilized. And they had these adults kind of coaching them. The Palestine Solidarity Movement was just fully grassroots, and I was the closest thing to an adult in the room, and I was sort of following their lead. Several members of the student government who voted down divestment had been taken by APAC on trips and were promised internships and jobs after they graduated. So you could really see how threatening this was for the Israel lobby. Flash forward to 2024, this is now a nationwide phenomenon, not just on campuses, but, you know, these campus rebellions have really shaken Israel to its core. The U.S. special relationship is not only threatened by this, but U.S. Empire itself.

Two weeks ago in Washington, D.C., there was a conference called the Strategic Competitiveness Project, run by Eric Schmidt, the former CEO of Google. He's now in charge of the Pentagon's third offset, which aims to compete with China on AI. weapons and Schmidt convened this conference of spooks and military honchos in DC, mostly focused on tech and the role that tech plays in competing with Russia and China, especially China. But of course, Israel, Palestine, and Gaza took center stage in one of the main panels featuring Mark Millie, Aaron Ross Sorkin, the bootlicking stenographer for power from the New York Times, Wall Street reporter, and Alex Karp, CEO of Palantir, which was co-founded by Peter Thiel of the PayPal Mafia, is one of the major private spying firms in the world and helps provide Ukraine

with targeting. They have a contract with the Ukrainian military. Alex Karp just freaked out on stage about what was happening on campuses and said, if this continues and we lose the intellectual battle with these forces, we will not. no longer be able to send armies to war in the West. And I think he was right in a way because what these students are doing is they're not just targeting investments in Israel. They're targeting the whole military industry in which these campuses are so heavily invested. I mean, you look at Columbia University. They refuse to provide any transparency on their investments.

They're definitely invested in the arms industry, in the big five. But they have on their board, Che Johnson, who is former head of Obama's Department of Homeland Security, someone who's been liaising between the campus administration and all the law enforcement agencies that were used to basically militarily repressed to students. And while he sits on the board of trustees at Columbia, he simultaneously is on the board of Lockheed Martin. So the idea is that if the students successfully divest, that starts to threaten. a major source of income, not only for the contractors like Alex Karp, who feed off the corporate welfare that our tax dollars pay for, but also the big five, the blue chip companies of the

military industry that supply the weapons. And then the military itself, which isn't a real military. It's not defending a republic. It's not, you know, a standing army that's, you know, here to defend our shores. It's essentially an unprecedented empire, as everyone who listens to this show knows, of an archipelago of bases. So these students are really hitting at the core of American empire and the people who profit from it and who are directing wars, proxy wars, and all the hybrid warfare that comes with it are freaking out. And that's a beautiful thing. Yeah, absolutely. So that really is huge as you're saying this guy in his fear is sort of blurting out that the people really do have the power and what he's worried about here is the precedent being set and you know

I saw some wiseacre on I guess the Twitter there saying oh yeah nice protest everybody I guess the city of Austin is now going to pull its troops out of Gaza I guess you really accomplish something when obviously that's just as I mean he's joking around but in a way he's what he's trying to say is that they have no point but they do have a point they want the city of austin to make sure that none of its investments or holdings are involved in any way in what's going on over there and that alone is a huge precedent if they can force the city government to go along with that and then you make such an important point max about divestment when it comes to these universities doesn't just mean sell your stocks in lockheed but we're talking about massive research projects subsidized by the public at these universities in order to benefit the military industrial complex in a real genius sort of a way from lasers and microchips and everything in between, right? And so if they can really force that issue that the students are no longer going to let the universities go along with the Pentagon

on these programs, that really hits them where it hurts for sure. Absolutely. I mean, I think at Columbia University, the students found at least $7 million alone in research sponsored by the Pentagon. And that's a lot of bang for the Pentagon's buck. These are the places where the Pentagon aims to outpace China in the great strategic competition that Eric Schmidt is in charge of leading, particularly when it comes to AI. So it's a lot more threatening than I think. but even the anti-Vietnam War movement was doing, leading, for example, sit-ins at MIT, which was a major center of research on the Vietnam War. Actually, there was a professor there, Noam Chomsky, who was getting paid through a Pentagon project to assist with surveillance devices that they were using in Vietnam. And he later, when he learned what he was doing, he later became a part of the anti-Vietnam War movement. But this is, I mean, these were sort of isolated. First of all, the protests were

isolated, much more isolated during the anti-Vietnam War protest movement era. But the research was much more isolated. You know how research going on across the country, and it's not just really advanced AI research. It's also police training being conducted by Israelis through, for example, Georgia State University. And, you know, the cop city, the movement that's mobilized against cop city outside Atlanta has been heavily involved in challenging these so-called police exchanges where Israeli state security and police come in and actually train U.S. police as if there's anything we can learn from them. But Georgia State is a major base of training. We're talking about thousands of cops who've been trained by Israel, including cops on campuses, university police.

And you know, interesting, Max, how it's the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs are now of America, the same guys who lied us into war. The Jinsa crowd is what Colin Powell called them, who lied us into war with Iraq. They're the guys who are most responsible for this Israeli occupation forces training American cops. all these years. You have, you know, JNSA not only training American cops, they take American former generals. We're talking about hundreds and hundreds of former military officers all the way to the general level to Israel for propaganda trips. And one of those former generals, sorry, he was, I believe, a colonel, and I'm forgetting

his name, but, you know, not a very significant figure who went on one of these JNSA trips, was obviously moved enough to write op-eds defending the special relationship with Israel afterwards. His mercenary firm is being put up for the contract to help maintain this so-called aid pier off the coast of Gaza. So it's essentially Israel maintaining a U.S. aid peer with American faces. All right. So now on the Columbia thing, I guess what I had in mind there at the beginning was that it seemed like these kids had a pretty small little encampment there and they called out ruthless forces to smash them on the Ferguson style which caused of course a massive reaction and just grew the protest movement by leaps and bounds but of course all of that

and I know the whole thing's going on across the country at UT and UCLA and a lot of other places as well but of course we're also up against the end of the school year so where does that leave the leftist, definitely student-led, anti-war protest movement? Where do they go now? Well, these are faculty-supported movements. At Columbia, we saw a massive show of support by Columbia University faculty for the students and against minutiafique, this completely callow president, who called for immediately sent in the NYPD in an unprecedented move onto campus to attack.

the students to arrest them, to ban them from their own dorms, which they, which they paid for. And a very similar thing took place at UMass, where I spoke. Just, I got there just hours after a military-style repression of a completely peaceful encampment in which students were brutalized, then held for, in zip ties for six hours, not allowed to go to the bathroom, female, students weren't allowed to change their tampons. the chancellor of UMass and Mnush Shafik have now faced an overwhelming vote of no confidence. We're talking about over 80% of faculty voting, no confidence in university leadership. So that's part of the fallout.

The students obviously see what the American university is. And it's essentially a hedge fund for corporate elites with them as they, basically paying into it without having any voice in how that money is spent. And so I think we're going to see this continue into the next year. It might not be as sexy if there's a ceasefire. Columbia had a major divestment drive that started in 2018. And in 2022, the student succeeded in getting a successful vote from the student council for divestment from these military companies involved with Israel, and the school refused to obey that. So they just rejected the student's voice. The students are paying like 80,000 a year to be there. So that's really what

actually drove this encampment was that their wishes, their democratic will was not being respected on campus. So we're going to continue to see those drives. They're going to get more attention than before. They're going to be more successful than before. And what we're going to see now that the semester is over, as we've witnessed protests at commencement ceremonies. Jen Saki, former White House press secretary here at George Washington University, was interrupted throughout her entire speech. This is someone who had a contract through Tony Blinkin's consulting firm West Execut Advisors to consult for a spy tech firm based in Israel. Between the time she was MSNBC's top Biden propagandist and one of the

while she was serving in the Obama administration. So we've seen those protests at the commencement ceremonies. I think these students have a plan that goes well beyond campus. I know this from talking to them. They're keeping their plan very close to their chest. But I think it involves Chicago, the Democratic National Convention. And just in talking to some of the activists who were involved in planning the protest there, they really believe this protest is existential. Either their voice gets heard at the Democratic

Convention and Biden feels their wrath or the policy continues. The policy of genocide continues unabated and Israel maintains its impunity from the Biden administration. You know, there was some talk about, oh, let's go to the Republican National Committee, the Republican National Convention, you know, protests there. I'm sure there will be protests there. I'm sure there will be protests there. but the RNC doesn't take this constituency, the activist left, the anti-war left for granted. They don't say every year, we're going to throw out a bunch of culture war issues like abortion and gay rights and the right to vote and expect that they'll overlook the fact that we are supplying weapons to enable an apartheid state to conduct an industrial-level slaughter of children.

And what the activist left, the any war left is now saying is we're just not that model of politics is over. And if we force them to lose to suffer the consequences, then they'll have to listen to us on the day after. And we'll see that model tested. And I think the students who mobilized on campuses across the country are going to have to converge in one place to really have their voices. heard on the national level. Yeah. Hey, guys, I've had a lot of great webmasters over the years, but the team at Expanddesigns.com

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That's expanddesigns.com. Man, I wish I was in school so I could drop out and sign up for Tom Woods' Liberty Classroom instead. Thomas done such a great job on putting together a classical curriculum for everyone from junior high schoolers on up through the postgraduate level. And it's all very reasonably priced. Just make sure you click through from the link in the right margin at Scott Horton.org. Tom Woods' Liberty Classroom. Real history, real economics, real education. People say to me, Scott, how do you get so much work done all the time?

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and help support this show if you just go to moondose artisan coffee dot com slash horton find the link and the q r code in the margin at scott horton dot org that's moondos artisan coffee dot com slash horton all right it's uh anti war radio i'm scott horton talking with the great max blumenthal here and um you know on that left liberal divide it's not even necessarily the left liberal divide because the polls say that 70% of democratic voters want to end this war right now so you can call that the left if want but i think that includes people you know who are really just plain old liberals or progressives who you know really aren't further to the left than that at all who are just absolutely discussed with this so that makes it seem at least like a real like ruler versus ruled sort of divide there

the voters versus the party elite but i wonder is there anyone in the party elite who's getting this through their thick skull that they better fix this on the democratic side or it really is just the people versus the power here. No, absolutely not. I mean, we can see that in the way that the Biden administration has reacted to the ICC warrant for Netanyahu, where they not only celebrated the kind of ridiculous ICC warrant for Vladimir Putin for evacuating ethnically Russian children from the front lines of the war.

They engineered that warrant. The State Department, as we exposed at the gray zone, this. State Department funded the research that went into the warrant for Putin. And now they're denouncing the ICC. They are denouncing the UN. Anthony Blinken reportedly threatened to defund the UN and to defund the World Food Program and starve people if the UN recognized a Palestinian state. So that shows you the level that they're invested in providing Israel with total impunity. Biden just forked over $700 million in tank munitions, as well as 500 million for tactical vehicles for Israel to continue its genocide. He's not exercising any leverage. He continues to protect Israel at the highest level. Why?

Because it's all about the Benjamins. At least one third of Biden's top donors have expressed pro-Israel views, as Eli Clifton reported at Responsible Statecraft. But if you zoom in, the more you zoom in on those donors, they're providing a disproportionate. amount of Biden's funding. And Biden is raising a record hall despite being possibly clinically brain dead. He's slurring his speech like never before. He gets a special award if he can get through speech reading the teleprompters at a, you know, high school level. So yet he's raking in something like $40, $50 million a month. That's all the Democrats care about. They don't care about humanity. They don't care about the slaughtering of children, the destruction of families.

They don't care. They're in their own bubble. They had actually hoped, I mean, if you actually listen, go back to like December, January, follow the language of the Democratic consultant class. They were all talking about this going away and the activist base and the, they're sort of progressive constituents, just forgetting about it and focusing on. on what really matters, like abortion, hasn't gone away. In fact, the intensity of feeling has deepened among the progressive base. And the State Department of Tony Blinken at that time

was talking about the day after. The day after Israel wins and just mops up Hamas, we're going to put in some Palestinian authority and then we're going to flood the zone with aid and blah, blah, blah, blah. All the regime changed delusions came back to the fore. And now they're not using that language. anymore. They're in a state of panic. They have no plan. Netanyahu has no plan. He's bogged down in Gaza,

the Israeli military is taking losses all across Gaza Strip. I mean, we're talking about the Jabalya refugee camp all the way in the north, which they said was an operational hold when they withdrew their soldiers in early January. They're back there taking losses. They cannot win. They cannot achieve their objectives. A major hostage video just appeared today of three female soldiers, Siege masters who were involved as spotters in the siege of Gaza, who were captured on the Nahala's base by Qasam teams of Hamas on October 7th. And those videos have hit Israel like a shockwave, like a political earthquake. And by the way, after being abandoned by their fellow soldiers who climbed out the window and left them behind, which I read in Israeli media, Max. Exactly. They couldn't, I guess they couldn't get out the window in time.

unbelievable but they they they're these women's job was to actually spot quote unquote terrorists before they crossed the border fence and they failed completely they all got captured and they're prisoners of war now they're not hostages let's not call them hostages they're prisoners of war completely fair game uh you know civilians who are living in the kibbutzim those are hostages but these are soldiers in a war And Israel has no means of rescuing them other than negotiating and calling for a ceasefire. And the Democratic Party, you know, the party of Joe Biden is doing nothing to force that. So it is really a disastrous political situation that Biden has engineered for himself.

But all he's done is follow the model of every Democratic presidential candidate since, I don't know, could we say 1980 uh 1984 ever since they just started kowtowing to the israel lobby yeah 48 48 maybe i mean there was sort of a clash between teddy kennedy who was in the pocket of the israel lobby and jimmy carter at the what was it the 1980 convention because carter had done camp david which was obviously to israel's interest but the point is there's no daylight there has been no daylight between any democratic presidential candidate and israel since around that time and that's finally because of a new generation at the progressive base of the democratic party which is more politically conscious rejects legacy media many of them actually know

Palestinians more of them are Muslim than ever before they're really finding their voice now. And at the same time, they're not finding an alternative. There isn't really momentum behind an independent candidate that I can detect right now. So this could go in any direction. But right now, it's remaining sort of uncommitted to Biden and more and more people, including like Farid Zakaria, who has typically been a voice of the Democrats and their state department are predicting that Biden will lose. What about Jill Stone? she's the Green Party candidate, right? She is.

She's going to be on the ballot in like 20 to 30 states. And she's reliably good on this, isn't she? She's taking a good line on it, but, you know, I'm just not seeing a convergence behind her of the forces that are really leading the, I can't put my finger on it, but I'm not seeing the kind of broad convergence behind her that we need to see in order to... Well, that's up to her. to create it. Yeah. No, that's true. Yeah. All right. Well, listen, we're almost out of time here, Max,

but can you just give us a minute or two here on this latest piece? Israeli soldier from notorious unit confesses to U.S. citizens killing? Is, do I really have this right? This is an American Israeli killing, or an American Palestinian? This is far from the first time this has happened. It's confirmed that his unit, uh, Netsa Yehuda, which is, uh, uh, a battalion under the notoriously bloody Kfeer Brigade, but this is a battalion of religious nationalist and ultra-Orthodox soldiers that has a terrible reputation for torture, killing, sexual abuse. They operate in the Ramallah District of the West Bank.

Three of their soldiers were just killed, actually, in northern Gaza, just reported today. But the State Department, the Tony Blinken State Department, announced plans to sanction this unit and said they were unremediated. and then they pulled back for no reason and we don't know why and they said we're still examining this and engaged in talks with Israel they're providing us with more information it's like how whenever there's a massive crime committed by Israel they say we want them to carry out an investigation in our in other words the killer investigates themselves so in January 2022 a group of

Netza Yehuda soldiers pulled a 78-year-old man out of his car near his house early in the morning, took him to a like a warehouse, 100 meters away, bound him, gagged him, blindfolded him, and just left him there to torture him on a very cold and damp morning. And he had a heart attack and died. And at the gray zone, we located audio. Actually, it was, yeah, we located audio. and spoke to the person who recorded the audio, who was on a Discord chat engaged in a series of arguments

with a self-identified American who went to fight in Israel as a lone soldier and who was actually part of this unit and provided intimate details about the killing of this 78-year-old man who happened to be an American citizen named Omar Assad and bragged about the killing and said we wanted to do it just to like mess with this geyser because he was talking back to us and we didn't mean to kill him but screw this guy we'll kill a hundred thousand we'll kill a million if it means saving one of our own lives you know the genocidal mentality that we now see on display

in gaza so we thought this audio was significant especially because the biden administration has never as refuses to act on this unit and here you have someone saying you know we're genocidal. He said, my whole unit, we're all racist. We're all homophobes. We hate everyone who's not like us. I mean, he's just spilling the beans about this unit, and the U.S. refuses to do anything to act. So, you know, we have provided a platform for that recording. We're seeking more information about that soldier's identity. We have his gun number, information about his background and family, but we haven't gotten his name, but he's an American. And this really is a perfect portrait of the war that Palestinians are fighting. They're fighting foreign soldiers

on their own soil, defending their farms, their land, and their cities against a foreign army backed by the United States that in many cases just consists of Americans. What would you call that? Are they terrorists for doing that? It doesn't sound like these Americans are escaping the Holocaust or anything like that, you know? No, they're reenacting it. All right. We're all out of time, but that is Max Blumenthal. He's the editor-in-chief over at the Grey Zone.

His latest piece is with Christopher Weaver. Israeli soldier from notorious unit confesses to U.S. citizens' killing. Thanks so much for your time again, Max. Thanks a lot, Scott. That's it for anti-war radio for today. I'm Scott Horton. Find the full interview archive at Scott Horton.org. And I'm here every Thursday from 230.

to 3 on KPFK 90.7 FM in L.A. See you next week.