Scott Horton Show - Just the Interviews - 6/20/22 Ramzy Baroud on Israel, Palestine and Mali

Episode Date: June 27, 2022

Scott is joined by journalist and author Ramzy Baroud to discuss the deterioration of Israeli Politics and the war in Mali. Israel will hold its fifth election in four years after yet another failure to form a government. Baroud gives some background on Israel’s issues and explains why they show that the ideals of its founders have collapsed. Scott and Baroud also discuss the war in Mali, examining how a seemingly simple intervention by NATO into Libya brought about deadly unanticipated consequences.  Discussed on the show: Our Vision for Liberation by Ramzy Baroud “The Geopolitical War Over Mali: West Africa Is Up for Grabs” (Antiwar.com) Ramzy Baroud is a US-Arab journalist and is the editor-in-chief of the Palestine Chronicle. He is the author of My Father Was A Freedom Fighter: The Untold Story of Gaza and The Last Earth: A Palestinian Story. His new book is These Chains Will Be Broken: Palestinian Stories of Struggle and Defiance in Israeli Prisons. Follow Ramzy on Twitter @RamzyBaroud and read his work at RamzyBaroud.net. This episode of the Scott Horton Show is sponsored by: The War State and Why The Vietnam War?, by Mike Swanson; Tom Woods’ Liberty Classroom; ExpandDesigns.com/Scott; EasyShip; Free Range Feeder; Thc Hemp Spot; Green Mill Supercritical; Bug-A-Salt and Listen and Think Audio. Shop Libertarian Institute merch or donate to the show through Patreon, PayPal or Bitcoin: 1DZBZNJrxUhQhEzgDh7k8JXHXRjYu5tZiG. 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.com slash scott horton's show all right you guys on the line i've got ramsie barood he's a regular contributor to antiwar dot com and uh he's a journalist and editor of the palestine chronicle that's palestine chronicle.com He's the author of six books, and he's got a brand new one with Elon Pape called Our Vision for Liberation. Engaged Palestinian leaders and intellectuals speak out.

And so, first of all, welcome back to the show. And second of all, this is already out. Oh, it just hit in last month, a month ago, May 15th, it says here. Great. Welcome back. How are you doing? I am doing well, Scott. Thank you for having me again.

Happy to have you here. And congratulations on this. great new book. And on this great co-author, I know Elon, I'm probably saying his name wrong. Pappé is really a legend in terms of the scholarship that he's done on

the Israel-Palestine conflict from I guess an Israeli but non-Zionist point of view. Is that fair to say? That's very fair to say. Yes, it's a great honor to have had the chance to work with Ilan, who was my supervisor at the university for my PhD.

So I'm doing a book with your teacher. is not, it's quite an intimidating feat, but it went very well, and we are very happy with the product. Okay, great. Yeah, I was going to say, that could either be a nightmare or a dream come through or maybe something in the middle there. All right.

Well, listen, that's just great. And, of course, everybody check out Ramsey's whole, you know, page there. Click on his author name at Amazon.com and check out that whole collection and something else. Man, I got so many different things to talk to you about. But let's start with what I want. wanted to end the last interview with, but I just couldn't stop Connor Freeman. Man, he was on a role talking about Israel intervening in America's Iran policy, something you might have heard of.

And I was going to say at the end, hey, Connor, did you hear the government of Israel just fell? Jerusalem Post update in my email box says so. And so, I mean, he can't really take the Jerusalem Post's word for much, but that seemed like a credible one. So, Nafali Bennett is doomed, And that means, oh, what's his name, his Padna, who was going to trade off and become prime minister. That whole deal is off. I wonder if you're wondering, and the same thing I'm wondering, which is whether we're going to have Benjamin Netanyahu back in charge over there again now. You know, this is very much a possibility. I mean, this is what Netanya has been fishing for, you know, since the government, this very strange, odd coalition was formed.

He knew that the fault lines are way too many for it to survive. And if anybody knows anything about surviving in Israeli politics, it's Benjamin Netanyahu. And he has done his fair share to contribute to the collapse of the government. As you know, I've written extensively about this issue for anti-war before and where we predicted that this government is not going to last for long. And it was really unified around a single principle, pushing Netanyahu out of politics. They have succeeded, but temporarily. And now they have to face Israeli voters next October for the fifth elections within less than four years. Well, I don't know how Lakud is doing right now.

I mean, there's a lot of factors at play in terms of Israeli domestic politics that are just completely beyond my scope. but I know that there's nobody with his charismatic leadership skills, such as they are, in terms of, you know, Israeli politics, you know, Ehud Barak or Nafthali Bennett or, oh, what's his name, the bouncer from Yisrael Betanu. These guys are Lieberman. Yeah, yeah, exactly, Lieberman. These guys can't hold a candle to him in terms of political skill and his ability to claim. influence in America and all those other things, you know? They can't, Scott, but there's something bigger than all of them combined, and that is the Israeli voter, Israeli political constituencies throughout the country, has veered sharply

towards the right and for many years. So, in other words, these guys would have to appease this constituency, and Naftali Bennett's biggest problem was the fact that. that he brought this kind of mishmash of a coalition, including far right and left and Arab party and others. And for the Israeli voters, that is the majority, the vast majority of which actually now define themselves as right, you know, couldn't identify with it. So, you know, the seats of the collapse of the government were placed there from the first

day that the government was announced. I think this is something beyond all of them. They have to cater to an existing political mood in the country that hasn't really changed for years and years. It's quite solid. Yes, we can argue that Netanyahu played a big role in shaping that right-wing constituency. But in my opinion, the country was moving in that direction regardless. Yeah. Well, I mean, isn't that something the idea that Netanyahu is going to end up joining the labor party or something or breaking off his own Kadima because Lakud gets to right wing for him something nuts like that? I guess anything's possible or he'll just ride the wave and get worse, huh? That's right. But also there's another factor to all

of this and that is Israel is now an unstable country in really not just politically but militarily as well. I mean, if the early Zionist leaders look or are aware of what is actually happening in their country right now, they would be absolutely shocked. Israel is a country that

operates on a worn-out ideology. That is Zionism. It is something that the very definition of that ideology has changed tremendously from its early days until today. It's a country that has no plan.

If there's anything that unify Israelis right now is just their fear of demographics, you can't run a country based on trying to ensure that your enemy's birth rate is low. I mean, this is not a way to run a country. So the very idea of Israel, as articulated by the early Zionists, have collapsed. And this is why Israel is in a very, very deep trouble. Bennett, Lieberman, Netanyahu, Lepid, it doesn't matter. Nobody can possibly fix something that is broken to a thousand peace. And that's Israel's problem.

Regardless of what's going to happen in October, the instability is going to continue. Yeah. Now, I know we've discussed this before, nobody really knows how the counterfactual would play out or anything like that. But at least on the face of it, from their point of view, the solution is obvious. is let the Palestinians go. Let the Palestinians have 22% what's left of historic Palestine,

the West Bank and the Gaza Strip in East Jerusalem, and then you don't have that problem to do with anymore. The only reason that they have a demographic problem is because they kidnap six million people. They kidnap six million people and refuse to accept the fact that even from a demographic point of view, the Palestinians are now arguably, and many agree, are already larger, you know, have larger

numbers than the Israeli Jews. So you have this issue now. Your premise is that in order for us to survive as a Jewish state, we always have to be higher in numbers. Well, you've lost that bet. Even in Jerusalem, which has been kind of the microcosm of this demographic war that is really a kind of a one-sided war launched by Israel, you know, they came up about 20 years ago with this plan of, you know, Greater Jerusalem. I don't know, it was called something like Greater Jerusalem 2000s or something to that effect. And the plan was they want to maintain 70% 30% majority over Palestinians.

And they played all, every kind of trick in the book. They expanded the borders of Jerusalem. They called it Greater Jerusalem. They excluded Palestinian neighborhoods, like Shofat, for example, which is very highly populated. They excluded it from the new boundaries. They brought settlements and settlers into Jewish settlers into the new boundaries. And then they began this process of what Pape refers to as incremental genocide, pushing Palestinians out slowly, ethnically cleansing them slowly, destroying their homes slowly,

with the hope that at 1.20, there will be a sustainable Jewish majority. Well, guess what? They failed at that. And this is where they put all of their resources, all of their know-how, all of their social engineering to achieve that goal. And now they failed. And this is why what's happening in Sheikh Jarrah and Silwan and other neighborhoods in East Jerusalem. By the way, this is part of the story that's kind of quite missing. We talk so much about Sheikh Jarrah and the ethnic cleansing and all of that, but what we haven't really spoken about is that how all of these factors in the initial plan of two decades ago of trying to create this sustainable Jewish majority in East Jerusalem.

And this is why they are so angry and there is why there's so much violence in East Jerusalem. They are trying to get to that percentage and they failed. Well, if they failed in East Jerusalem, we'll imagine in historic Palestine, they can't possibly succeed. So if the demographic war has been lost and it really is lost, what remains of the original definition of the Jewish state as defined by the early Zionists? So now they have to deal with this issue, the fact that from an ideological point of view, they have failed. The annexation, even the annexation project has failed, at least in the formal sense. Yes, they are trying to find a roundabout sort of way to annex Palestinian areas in area C, in the West Bank, without calling it official annexation.

But no matter how much you try to, you know, play around with numbers and borders and boundaries, and you are still dealing with the bigger problem is that between the Jordan River, and the sea at this point, either you have 50-50 Palestinians, Christians and Muslims, versus Israeli Jews, or you have a majority Palestinian population. How do you deal with that? How do you deal with that? The issue of ethnic cleansing, so-called ethnic cleansing in the old paradigm of pushing a million people out the same way they have done in 1947, 48, it cannot be done.

The Jordanians wouldn't allow it. the Egyptians wouldn't allow, the Lebanese wouldn't allow, and the Palestinians themselves wouldn't allow it. The Palestinians are not going anywhere. Look at Gaza, for example. Gaza is an area that is experimenting or is living under, you know, in the world's largest open-air prison, it's often called. And there are two millions of them living in an extremely poor and overcrowded area.

Once upon a time, they actually broke the fence with Egypt, a good number of years ago, I think about 10 years ago, they actually broke the fence and they rushed out in their hundreds of thousands into the Sinai Desert. But what they ended up doing, a lot of people thought, okay, this is another Nakba. Palestinians are fleeing out of a war zone.

But almost every single one of them actually came back. They bought food and they came back to Gaza. They didn't leave. The only ones who stayed out about 200 students who are studying in Egypt they are the only ones who stayed out of Gaza every single one of them so this idea of Palestinians running away

fleeing under pressure and their war that's not going to happen so with ethnic cleansing no longer being part of this equation and it's no longer an option how can Israel deal with the numbers and if they can't deal with the numbers the idea of the Jewish state has already collapsed

yeah now so listen you know the fears expressed on the other side are that Yeah, but if you give these people freedom, then they'll push all the Jews into the sea where they will all drown and die, and it'll be like the Holocaust again. Your article ends with, yeah, and then once the Palestinians are free, then we can all live together and be friends, which, okay, so that's speaking for yourself, but is that really what the Palestinians would do if they were allowed, say, full citizenship in a new single state and all these. green lines and so-called borders and gigantic concrete walls were taken down? Okay, I'm going to be a little bit more blunt than usual with you here, Scott, and say, it doesn't matter to us. It's not our responsibility. It's never the responsibility of the

colonized, of the oppressed, of the slave to guarantee the security and the will-being of his oppressor. Actually, that's not my statement. That's Hanan Ashrawi, the great Palestinian intellectual and leader in the West Bank. She said, we are the only nation on earth where the occupied people are pressed to guarantee the safety and the security of their occupier. But that said, we have seen the scenario play out many times in the past. We have seen it in Africa. We have seen it in South America and in Asia, just because black people became equals in South Africa, it doesn't mean that they went in this, you know, onslaught of white people in, you know, in Pretoria and Johannesburg and Cape Town. That didn't happen. And I don't see why

Palestinians who, in their history, the history of the Lavant, the history of that region, have presented one of the greatest examples of co-existence only to be compared to Al-Andalusia in the Iperian Peninsula back in the day. I don't see why would they be the ones who is going to break that model. And here's a little bit of a personal experience. I was living in Gaza in a refugee camp when the Oslo Peace Accords was declared. Now, we know now that that was a complete sham, and my father being the good socialist, he was kind of so into the, read the document, and he said, this is going to be very, very bad for Palestinians, but the vast majority of Palestinians were so happy and so desperate for a moment, for a respite, for a movement to peace, and they trusted their leadership. They trusted Yasser Arafat. So what happened is the people of my refugee camp, in their tens of thousands in 1993, rushed to the streets carrying, you know, olive branches. And where did they head?

They hid it to the Israeli military camp that has terrorized our refugee camp for decades, where all the snipers who called all the children the refugee camp come from that military camp. The Israeli snipers did not know why these thousands of Palestinian Arabs coming, you know, you know, in this mass rally towards them. They thought that they are going to throw rocks and empty bottles and that sort of thing. But what actually happened is that the protesters start carrying soldiers and on their shoulders and chanting for peace. Actually, I wasn't very proud of that moment. But it just comes to show you the immediate willingness of Palestinians to embrace a just peace

of any kind. And of course, when it turned out that that just peace was complete, Sharad, the clash has started all over again. But there is this immediate willingness of Palestinians that they want to see a situation in which they're not being slaughtered like sheep, where their kids can live a normal life, where they can travel, where they can have access to food and health care and basic human rights, where they can have political representation. There is so much desperate need for hope that any attempt at actually bringing a just peace

to the Palestinians, you are going to find vast majority of Palestinians embracing it, and we have seen that in the case of Oslo. The honeymoon was over in a year or so, but Palestinians have indeed shown their willingness to interact and to engage with any possibility

of real peace. And I think once we reach that point that Palestinians, once more reached that conclusion, I think there will, and of course this is a one-state solution is not going to happen overnight. There will be a transition. And there will be intellectual dialogues and there will be conferences and there will be rallies and there will be cultural exchanges and that sort of thing.

And I think a process of that nature would give us a lot more hope that Palestinians and Israelis can possibly make that option irreality as opposed to this continued state of ethnic cleansing, war, killing, shootings and assassinations. Hang on just one second. Hey, y'all, the audiobook of my book, Enough Already, Time to End the War on Terrorism, is finally done. Yes, of course, read by me. It's available at Audible, Amazon, Apple Books,

and soon on Google Play and whatever other options there are out there. It's my history of America's War on Terrorism from 1979 through today. Give it a listen and see if you agree. It's time to just come home. Enough already. Time to End the War on Terrorism, the Audio Book.

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Hey guys, Scott Horton here for Listen and Think Libertarian audiobooks. As you may know, the audiobook of my new book, enough already. Time to end the war on terrorism is finally out. It's co-produced by our longtime friends at Listen and Think Libertarian Audio Books. For many years now, Derek Sheriff over there at Listen and Think has offered lifetime subscriptions to anyone who donates $100,000, or more to the Scott Horton show at Scott Horton.org slash donate or to the Libertarian Institute at Libertarian Institute.org slash donate. And they've got a bunch of great titles, including

Inside Syria by the late great Reese Erlich. That's listen and think.com. Yeah, well, so to zoom in a little bit here, Ramsey, I just know that I'm way behind on this news, but there's been all kind of controversy going on for months at the Al-Oxham Mosque. in Jerusalem about who's allowed to pray where and Israeli militants threatening to destroy things and civilians being beaten and God knows what. And so I was just wondering if you can provide some perspective here about what's going on there. Absolutely. But if I may take our listeners just a little bit back to what we were speaking about earlier

of why what is happening in Jerusalem is a microcosm of. the larger conflict and the larger war and this is why the Israelis are extremely angry and this is why the Israeli right wing and ultra-nationalists are constantly raiding Al-Aqsa mosque. What they are

trying to achieve here, they know that the mosque, that the fight is not about the mosque itself. And I think a lot of people, even particularly Muslims actually, like not Palestinians, but Muslims from Pakistan and Tunisia and other parts of the world, the

actually think that the fight over the mosque itself because of the religious significance and centrality of the mosque in Muslim theology and Islam as a religion. But for Palestinians, the mosque is as important as the churches of East Jerusalem. There are symbols of Palestinian culture, tradition, religion, but also politics. There are symbols of Palestinian existence and history in that part of the country. The Israelis know that very well, and this is why the constant attempt at pushing the Palestinians out, raiding al-Aqsa, and trying to create what Palestinians call a physical and temporal division of the mosque. What they mean by that is, if we go back to 1994, when an Israeli-Jewish-American,

militant, extremist, Baruch Gouldestein, raided the Ibrahimi Mosque in Hebron al-Khalil and killed 29 Palestinian worshippers, and he was eventually killed by the people in the mosque after he killed all these people. The government, the Israeli government, came in and they said, okay, you know what? since it's a disputed mosque, let's divide the mosque between Jews and Arabs, and they basically took half of the mosque, gave it to the tiny, very small Jewish settler community living there and lift the Palestinians with the other half. And they placed an Israeli military checkpoint around the mosque. So Palestinian worshiped.

Isn't that what happened when Dillon Roof massured all the black people in the basement of that church was the Nazis got half the church as a compromise? Isn't that very interesting how, you know, this kind of similar scenarios play out? Because this is precisely what happened. And the Palestinians said, but wait a minute, we were the victims. You killed 29 of us. The Israeli army came and killed another 25, by the way. And not only that, whenever there is a Jewish holiday, the Palestinians are told you can't go to the mosque.

Whenever there are clashes in the area, the Muslims, the Palestinian Muslims told you can't go to the mosque and so forth. Now Palestinians believe that there is an Israeli. attempt at recreating that scenario by allowing the settlers into the Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem, creating these, you know, clashes, provocations, really, and coming at the end and saying,

listen, well, since you guys cannot get along, even though it's the Israeli army that's actually engineering the whole mess, since you guys cannot get along, let's divide the mask physically and in terms of allocating times. The Jews can pray during this time,

the Muslims can pray this time. during this time. But there is something more dangerous than that. They understand the centrality of the mosque to the Muslims of East Jerusalem. Every Palestinian Muslim in East Jerusalem goes to that mosque the same way that every Christian in East Jerusalem have their own houses of worship. If you take control over these houses of worship, what you do here? You create a scenario in which you are pushing people out of the area, out of their neighborhoods. You are basically disrupting the cultural and traditional and historical flow of those communities with the hope of reducing the numbers of Palestinians where you can maintain that absolute majority that you have been seeking throughout the years. So this is why Palestinians are very, you know, not just in Israel, but throughout historic Palestine, are very, very much involved in this fight because they know if they lose the mosque and they lose East Jerusalem, then Israel is going to do

the exact same scenario repeated to smaller communities here and there until they get exactly what they want. So the fight for the mosque is a fight for East Jerusalem, and the fight for East Jerusalem is a fight for all of Palestine. And this is why Palestinian resistance in Gaza and elsewhere are getting involved. They're saying that we understand the complexity of this situation. This is not about East Jerusalem. This is also about Gaza.

The same way that Gaza is also about the West Bank. So you see this unity that is happening now among Palestinians, the kind of unity that we haven't really had in such a long, long time. We've been talking about unity among factions, Hamas, Fatah, national unity agreements, whose fault is it and that sort of thing. Well, it seems that the Palestinian people have transcended that kind of discussions and they are pushing for a different type of unity that is actually unifying

Palestinian communities throughout historic Palestine. Oh, man. All right, now listen, can I keep you another couple minutes here? I want to ask you about Mali. Absolutely, go for it. So you wrote this great piece for anti-war.com. The geopolitical war over Mali,

West Africa is up for grabs. And, of course, as you correctly note here, our story begins with Hill. Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama's aggressive attack on Libya in 2011. Take it from there, Ramsey. Well, you know, this is the thing about U.S. foreign policy is that they always think of the immediate. I remember Hillary Clinton's, you know, lovely chuckle when she arrived to Libya during the war, and she declared that we came, we saw he died, referring to the way that Muammar Gaddafi was.

murdered in a most heinous way, actually, that I can't even articulate to your listener. There was something awful in the way he was murdered. And there was supposed to be another victory for American democracy. Of course, they dumped a massive amount of weapons in that poor country, eventually turning it into a pariah state, a state with no central government, a state with no central army, no actual institution divided the country between east and west, although in reality the vast majority of the south of Libya was completely just up for grabs controlled by bandits, by tribes, by all sorts of militias.

They basically destroyed Libya. They claimed the victory for their voters, and they moved on. But what actually happened in Libya is that a large number of Libyans were ethnically cleansed out of that country. I was actually told recently that the term ethnically cleansed is not the right term to use in this situation. It's offensive. So that's why I say so-called ethnically cleansed out of that country, including the Tawarik and many people in the tribal south that were close to the central government in Libya. They were punished because of that closeness. Many of them escaped and many of them ended up in Mali, in northern Mali, in the so-called Azawad region in Mali.

And much of these weapons actually found its way to Mali. Chad as well and other countries, but particularly Mali. So within months, there was a rebellion in Northern Mali. Now, it's very important that we remember that Mali has been a largely unstable country, has been a country under the strong influence of the French and other European countries, but particularly the French. And Northern Mali, in particular, has been really neglected. There is really very little infrastructure in that country that is.

worth speaking of a lot of discrimination, a lot of neglect. So when the Tawarik came with their weapons, naturally they managed to appeal to a large number of communities in the north, and they managed to take over much of the country in the matter of weeks that created the kind of destabilization, that allowed France to kind of make its move and kind of really come to colonize Mali all over again. time in the name of we are trying to restore democracy, we are trying to restore order. But of course, there was a very heavy colonial agenda at work in Mali. Well, since then, Mali has been extremely unstable.

French soldiers have been affiliated with all sorts of massacres and mass graves, and the people who invited them to Mali in the South are the very people who now wanted them out. Well, who came to the rescue, Russia. Russia began providing military assistance and helicopters and anti-terrorism equipment and that sort of thing. And the Malians are actually quite happy with it because the Russians don't have a colonial agenda the same way that the French have colonial agenda and they are not really necessarily affiliated with any kind of mass killings. So the honeymoon between the Malian government and the French government was over very quickly and Russia moves in. Russia has been moving in for quite some times in East Africa, not just in Mali, but what made the picture very, very complicated is that France has decided that it's time for us to leave Mali and perhaps eventually East Africa just before the Ukraine war started. And that's just before the geopolitical war between Russia and NATO countries reached its zenith as it is today.

So the U.S. is now involved. France is involved. They are trying to push back. They are trying to reclaim Mali once more. But I think it's a case of too little too late, especially as we see other countries, like, for example, the Central African Republic and other countries that are actually moving the same direction. as Mali has done. So this is creating another basically battleground for the geopolitical war. And Africa is now kind of at the heart of this new dimension of the war that has opened up as of late.

And of course, you know, pitting the U.S. versus Russia, there's a Chuck Norris movie in here just, you know, waiting to go. it's the perfect kind of thing. And that's why the grunts, Gareth Porter, instructed me. It was regular GIs, enlisted men, conscripted men on the ground in Vietnam, who invented the term self-licking ice cream cone.

And that's exactly what we have here. Just another place where we can compete because of the crisis that we created a little while ago. In the land of Timbuktu, which I think most Americans, if they ever heard of, thought was an imaginary place from a Disney movie or something. That's how remote that is. It's really important to note that the Malian kingdom

was one of the greatest, not only African kingdoms, but was one of the greatest kingdoms of if it's time anywhere, anywhere in the world, a land of wealth and architecture and beauty. And that's really most of the fighting has been happening in that area, which the historical sites have been largely demolished or damaged by all of this. Yeah, in fact, there's this heroic effort that was made by locals in Timbuktu to basically take all the scrolls from the library and pass them out to trusted members of the community to hide in their houses, which worked.

And they saved all these ancient scrolls and all of these things before the bin Ladenites. who, for some reason, have a bunch of brand new white Toyota Helix pickup trucks with machine guns on the back. Thanks, Prince, whoever, in Saudi Arabia for that, before they could get there. They successfully hit all these scrolls and saved all this ancient literature and whatever else. But, yeah, and they did talk about, you know, graves were desecrated and this kind of thing. So, you know, the bin Ladenites. They don't like graves. That's, you know, hedonistic to have a grave, I guess.

But, yeah, I mean, I'm so glad that you wrote this piece for us. I was so glad to see it because I know, in fact, someone was just tweeting at me the other day that, oh, I was thumbing through your table of contents here, and I see you have a chapter about Molly. All right. And this person was excited just to know, I guess she knew a thing. to about it already and so she was just excited that anybody else cared at all enough that wow you even have a chapter about it in a terror war thing here um so that's in other words that just goes to show how little this is discussed how little attention is given to it even though it's all the fall of

the american empire of course and you know by the way i'm not sure if this is one of the things you listed or not but um you know Gaddafi's government there used to have tight southern border controls, and with the disillusion of that regime, it meant there's this massive influx of sub-Saharan Africans trying to get to Italy, but of course there's a sea in the way. And I don't know exactly what the count is, but in 2015 and 16, I think it was the worst of it. I think it was on the order of, you know, something like 10,000 people drown out there trying to make it to Italy. this kind of thing is another part of the chaos that innocent civilians caught up in this thing

that's right and the interesting part is that the Italian government well initially quite hesitant but eventually joined the NATO war against Libya destabilizing the very country that has been you know kind of monitoring that massive border

I think about 2,000 to 3,000 kilometers really than And, you know, it's a huge border that Libya has with the Mediterranean Sea, and that's where most of the migration used to happen from there. And of course, I mean, you can't blame people. I mean, first of all, I think that instability and, you know, political instability of countries quite beneficial to the U.S. I mean, you know, we know about, you know, the shock doctrine of Naomi Clayne and her argument

of how we intentionally destabilized countries in order for us to kind of move in and take advantage of that instability and create new alliances and reshape the countries in any way that is, you know, that is good to fit our own foreign policy. So that was quite beneficial to the U.S.,

but it wasn't beneficial at all to the very countries that kind of, you know, went along with the NATO war. And Italy, you know, there's so much racism, in Italy, a lot of racism in Italy that has emerged as a result of this following the 2011 war, but you kind of like tell people and intellectuals there, it's like, yes, I understand that

you are frustrated with all these people coming to your country and you're already struggling, your economy is already struggling, but remember, it was you that actually went and dropped bombs on Libya and destroyed the central government and destroyed the very army and destroyed the very Navy that was actually policing that region, and now you are complaining that all these immigrants are coming in and, you know, ruining our way of life or whatever it is that they have a problem with. But it just comes to show you that NATO, you know, they try to make it appear as if they really do have their act together, but they really don't, whether in Iraq, in Afghanistan,

in Libya, in Mali, in Ukraine, it always backfires and backfires. fires quite badly yeah great so all right everybody find ramsie at palestine chronicle that is palestine chronicle dot com and at antiwar dot com slash ramsie dash barood we need to fix that should just be slash ramsie so it's easy to say on the radio and uh but anyway you can find them right there in the right hand column at antiwar dot com and check out his brand new book just out our vision for liberation engaged Palestinian leaders and intellectuals speak out really appreciate it thank you very much scott take care the scott horton show anti-war radio can be heard on kpfk 90.7 fm in l a psradyo dot com antiwar dot com scott horton dot org and libertarian institute dot org