Scott Horton Show - Just the Interviews - 7/11/24 Kyle Anzalone on Biden, Netanyahu and the Suffering They Are Causing in Gaza

Episode Date: July 12, 2024

Kyle Anzalone was back on Antiwar Radio this week to discuss Gaza. He and Scott talk about the amount of attention Gaza is getting in the US, especially as everyone debates Biden’s well-being. They also talk about the Israeli who is practically in charge of Biden’s Middle East policy, Netanyahu’s concern about getting arrested in Europe, the danger of terrorism in the US, the growing hunger in Gaza and more. Discussed on the show: “Insanity: Biden's Mideast Guy Is Israeli” (Substack) “Tel Aviv’s Man in Washington” (Antiwar.com) “Netanyahu Avoids Europe Stopover En Route to US, Over ICC Arrest Concerns” (Libertarian Institute) “War on Gaza Causing Surge in Terrorism Recruiting, Says US Intel Official” (Libertarian Institute) Kyle Anzalone is news editor of the Libertarian Institute, opinion editor of Antiwar.com and co-host of Conflicts of Interest with Will Porter and Connor Freeman. Follow him on Twitter @KyleAnzalone_ This episode of the Scott Horton Show is sponsored by: 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, July 11th, 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. and I'm the author 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 scothorton.org and at YouTube.com slash Scott Horton Show and all your favorite podcatchers and video websites slash Scott Horton Show and so forth. And of course, I'm here every Thursday from 233 on KPFK. All right, so our guest today is the great Kyle Anzalone. from the Institute and Anti-War.com. Welcome back to the show. Kyle. How you doing?

Doing great, Scott. Thanks for having me back on. Very happy to have you here. Do I ever tell you how much I love listening to your podcast, conflicts of interest? It's so good. I'm jealous. All of my guys are kind of leaving me in the dust here, but you give me reason to try hard. So, which just means having you on the show to tell me all the horrible stuff that you've been learning lately. And of course, especially focusing on Israel-Palestine. And let's start with this. I kind of get the idea, Kyle, that people stop paying attention to the Israel-Palestine thing. All the college students are out for the summer, and I guess the tempo of the bombing has somewhat been curtailed. I don't want to overstate that, but, or maybe it's just summertime blues or what, I don't know, but it seems like it's kind of fading from people's consciousness.

So we got to do our part to make sure to keep people paying attention because the war is absolutely not over, which itself is just remarkable when you look at the size of the Gaza Strip and the alleged might of the IDF to carry out a war in nine months' time here. But anyway, what's your take on that? Do you think that attention has begun to wane or that's just me? No, I think maybe you are somewhat correct, Scott. But I think the college students not being there probably has a little bit of an impact on how much this is a story in the American news cycle day after day because the college students, you know, they have crat downs by police and things like that, which really draws in the media attention. And, of course, the bigger story is the war in Gaza. And so they have to provide some coverage to that too. Now, I imagine that's going to step up in the coming weeks, especially as we have the DNC convention coming up in Chicago.

it seems that there's a lot of activists within the left wing of American politics, more generally, right? I'm not trying to label, give anybody a label, just anybody who might be involved with the DNC or as a progressive, a leftist, something like that, seem to be wanting to show up in Chicago and do a big protest there. And so I think that will probably get it more in the spotlight. But I think the other issue is, Scott, is after Biden's debate debacle, a lot of the coverage in the United States is now around is he even going to be the Democratic nominee, which is really unfortunate because the discussion should be, is he competent enough to really assess if Israel using American weapons for war crimes in Gaza? Because if that was the discussion, then I think we realized that our president isn't

competent enough to decide that, and we should all look for ourselves and see that what's going on in Gaza is absolutely horrific. And I'm not quite so sure the pace of the bombing has slowed down, And Scott, one thing that happened is Israel reduced Rafa to rubble. And so I think that really reduced the access that Palestinians within Gaza had to the outside world through sharing videos and stuff like that. Yeah. Well, and I know, I mean, it was a deliberate campaign. It was explicitly documented, very well documented in the Israeli press that they were murdering journalists and their families. And but specifically targeting journalists in order to prevent the dissemination of.

All that video footage coming out of there. So, yeah, no surprise. And, you know, you're right. And it's, it almost seems like a trivial issue compared to what we're talking about here. But, of course, it is a huge part of it that Biden's not just old, right? He has dementia. He's out of his mind. And he has been this whole time as anyone who's not married to the Democratic Party could tell you.

And so the same media that's been lying to us this whole time. pretending that that's not so are the same ones who are as you say now saying well the only issue is can he finish out another four years this and that no one on tv news is saying man maybe we really need to reassess the shots that this guy has been calling this whole time like when he swears and we all know it's not true that Putin told the world that he was coming for Poland next once he was done in Ukraine, which is not true. And Biden apparently has based his whole policy on that. Or as you're saying, this policy that, yes, of course, Israel can have a blank check to bomb whoever they want and we'll do everything in the world to protect them diplomatically

and the rest. Maybe you've got to be demented to go along with that. Did anybody on TV ever think of that? Right. Well, and Biden said publicly that he saw images of beheaded babies. of Israeli beheaded babies from October 7th, and we know that that did not occur, and he made that up his own wise house has had to admit that. He's also repeated a lot of other the most elaborate Israeli falsehoods, and not to say that atrocities were not committed on October 7th by Hamas, but the larger point here, Scott, is that the president is going off of, and he believes the very worst of the Israeli atrocity propaganda from October 7th, and it's largely been proven untrue.

yeah and look part of his dementia clearly and this applies to others as well sometimes is he gets all angry and starts poking people in the chest and whatever he don't want to hear it about anything so the same people who are afraid to tell him that mr president you have to stay up till 630 tonight because there's something important happening or whatever are the same people who are afraid to tell him probably that mr present that line of yours about how putin vowed to conquer the rest of europe as soon as possible like you should you do know that that's not true right like of course you can tell whatever lie you want but you know that that's really not right right because he didn't say that and we've re-read the speech numerous times and including our russia speakers and he didn't say that you know uh who ever told him that did anybody tell him that can solvin or blinkin tell him that or would they even want to seems kind of important when you're talking about you know conflict with russia based on total inanities as the, you know, basis of the policy here. And then, of course, the absolute ultraviolence going on in Palestine.

And who knows, if Joe Biden was in his right mind, it might be worse, right? He might send in the Marines or something. I don't know. You know, real Joe Biden was a real bad guy before he lost his mind. So it's kind of no telling. Right. You know, in all these points aren't to absolve Joe Biden of anything. He is a lifelong Zionist, and that is something he's probably touted in his career.

And so there's no reason to think that Joe Biden wouldn't have done this if he wasn't the president. However, it does explain how convoluted the policy has seemed at times. Like through the first seven months of this conflict, the Biden administration was trying to end the war by getting a massive deal with Saudi Arabia and Israel to normalize ties as Israel is committing this onslaught in Gaza. something that was very obvious Saudi Arabia would never go along with as long as as Israel was waging this war. And then at the beginning of June, the Biden administration was saying that we're going to de-escalate the situation in Lebanon by getting a ceasefire deal in Gaza. And when it became clear that wasn't happening.

A week later, the White House is saying that, well, any deal to de-escalate in Lebanon has to be separate from a deal in Gaza. And it's just completely convoluted. And there's no basis for diplomacy whatsoever. And I'm sure part of what the United States is doing is why this war is dragging out and lagging on just so long. Yeah, it's a funny thing. Yeah, it's certainly not to absolve him. And of course, he has his moments of lucidity.

He knows what he's doing. It certainly doesn't absolve him of responsibility at all. But it does make sense then why he would do and say things that don't make sense all the time and be completely inconsistent and base his policies on. things that nobody ever said and God knows what because he is nuts Joe Biden, you know, you had horrible Joe Biden and then you turned him nuts. No, he's horrible and that's, it's not good. And just to add to that, Scott, we don't have sanity behind the scene and adults in the room that are actually effectively governing while Joe Biden is just up there bumbling and mumbling on. We have Annie Blinken, Jade Sullivan, and the rest of them that just seem to

marching orders and carry on with the same convoluted policy that the White House has put out. It was about two months ago now. The White House said that Israel had agreed to a ceasefire proposal in Gaza, and immediately Netanyahu said that Israel did not agree to that and that Israel is not going to end the war in Gaza permanently. And yet, from the top down in the White House, they're all repeating that Israel has agreed to a ceasefire that Israel has explicitly not agreed to. And so not only is the president demented, but the entire White House is just willing to walk along with it.

Yeah. And then by the way, did you see this thing? I think I sent you this from M.J. Rosenberg, who is a progressive and famously used to work for APEC and has a grudge and is, you know, a great anti-Israel lobby guy. And he's got a great substack. And didn't I send you this thing about how Joe Biden's Israeli advisor is an Israeli. advisor. And that's who is telling Biden what's going on. His name is Amos Hotchstein. And he's apparently coming in and telling Joe Biden about what his Israel policy should be. Right. So since October 7th, it seems that behind the scenes, the two people who have the most influence on Joe Biden's

Middle East policy are Brett McGurk and Amos Hochstein. And I would say three or four months ago, James Cardin wrote a really important article for us at anti-war.com, if you go back in his archives to probably January, you could find it there, where he details how Amos is just neck deep in the Israeli government. It's not just somebody who happened to have been born in Israel and then grew up in the United States and is effectively American. This is somebody who you would definitely question where his loyalties and interests lie. And so, yeah, this is very problematic. And then And months and months later, the Washington Post finally catches up with anti-war.com, of course, and we get this article detailing it.

And, you know, Scott, this doesn't seem to be a situation where Biden is leveraging this guy's Israeli passed in order to force a deal on Netanyahu, right? Like, we have Amos Hodgestein, who we clearly know is an anti-Semitic. He's not pro-Palestinian. And so if he's the one driving this agreement, it gives Joe Biden some right wing or Israeli cover. to really try to force Netanyahu into a corner. That's not what's happening here. What the Americans are saying to Hezbollah is they're not going to force Israel to do anything. Hasbala has to completely back up and withdraw from the border with Israel and essentially mid and concede defeat, even as the war in Gaza is dragging on. It's something that the Hezbollah leadership has made very clear they're

not willing to do. And so his policies that he is putting forward are either deliberately unattainable in order to just let Netanyahu drive this on as long as possible, or he's just so steeped in Israeli propaganda that he's incapable of negotiating a deal with a side and Israel. Hang on just one second for me here. You guys, I'm so proud to announce the publication of the Libertarian Institute's 14th book. It's Israel, winner of the 2003 Iraq Oil War, undue influence, deceptions, and the neocon energy agenda.

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Look up Roberts and Roberts at rrbi.co. That's rrbi.com. It's anti-war radio. I'm Scott Horton. I'm talking with Kyle Anzalone from anti-war.com. And, you know, it's misleading. Not your fault. It is what it is and it's how we talk. But it is. is misleading to even call what's happening in Gaza war at all, which, I mean, on one hand, the Hamas guys are resisting where the Israelis are within range of their pot shot weapons. I mean, there is a fight going on, but we're talking about a sovereign nation state fighting an Indian reservation, right? This is not a war between nations. And people say, why are you singling out Israel? Well, this is a pretty unique circumstance what they're doing. It's essentially a canned hunt. It'd be like if you

walled off an American county and then went to war against it. That's what it is. And so you can call it that, but as Bill Hicks said, a war is when two armies are fighting. This is more of a horrific slaughter. Ethnic cleansing campaign. Some call it a genocide. As we've discussed on the show, you know, they have killed and destroyed a dressed and worth of people there over months, not over two nights, you know, in one big firestorm, but still in the Wall Street Journal even compares it to Dresden and Hamburg. And this is not funny and it's not a marginal thing. It's a huge deal. And it's a huge deal in American politics. It should be. I mean, the polls, wouldn't it right, Kyle, that the polls had something between 70 and 80 percent of Democrats wanted to ceasefire

yesterday, right? Yep. 40 percent of Democrats said Biden is giving Israel too much support. So the Democrat support for Israel has definitely been waning on this. And Scott, even Israeli officials have effectively compared this to Dresden. That's what Netanyahu has said, well, look what you did in Dresden to give him the clearance to do he's doing in Gaza. Unbelievable. I know. Yeah, they go, well, you can burn all of Tokyo to the ground. I mean, hey, they got a point about that.

Zora Neal Hurston called Truman the butcher of Asia. Who could dispute that? But now that's the benchmark. whatever America did in World War II was the benchmark but wait a minute after that was the Geneva Conventions and look speaking of all of that

I noted it's on antiwar dot com today about how Netanyahu coming to the United States has to skip refueling in Europe he's afraid that he's going to get arrested and I've never been a supporter of the ICC until I don't know this morning but now I'm considering it

I at least think it's good for a yuck and then so, but why would they do that? He's been indicted by the ICC as a war criminal and that might sound crazy to people who don't know what's going on. But then again, I was looking at the internet yesterday. I'm sure you saw, it's unbelievable footage. These guys are playing soccer in a parking lot. And Netanyahu bombed them and blew them to pieces.

And it's all right there in high-definition 4G video. Mm-hmm. so hence the indictment you know right so just a little clarity about that I believe the prosecutor at the ICC the chief prosecutor Kareem Khan has requested the court issued the indictment arrest warrant for Netanyahu I don't believe the court has actually issued that arrest warrant but it's sitting out there is enough to effectively make it so and Netanyahu is treating it as if that arrest warrant already exists because I guess they could unveil it as his plane is

in the air or something like that and arrest him when he touches down on Italy or Spain or however he is flying to the U.S. And by the way, that article was by our friend Connor Freeman at the Institute and yeah, Netanyahu is so afraid of this arrest war that he has to

just completely fly skipped over Europe to fly to the United States for his big speech in D.C. Which just goes to show how horrific the Democrats, the Republicans, and Congress are. They're planning to give Netanyahu dozens of standing ovations as he addresses Congress. And at the same time, the rest of the world is absolutely disgusted at what's going on. You mentioned that soccer game. I believe this was an area of Khan Yunus, which is the region of Gaza that a lot of the Palestinians, there's about

1.3 million Palestinians sheltering in Rafah before Israel ordered the evacuation of that city and then destroyed it. And a lot of those people returned to Con Unis, which itself had been 80% destroyed by the previous military operations there. But about two weeks ago, they ordered all the Palestinians out of Con Unis once again. And so, Scott, it seems they really want to force the entire Palestinian population out of what were the existing population centers, where there is some existing infrastructure that hasn't been destroyed, and forced them all into these 10 cities. And they also ordered the evacuation of Gaza City once again, which is where a good number, the majority of the people who are still in the northern half of the Gaza Strip are living.

No idea where they're supposed to go. They're probably going to be forced into tents. And a lot of the residents of the city are saying, at this point, they're not going to flee anymore. They would rather die in their homes than be forced out into the middle of the desert. Now, with the bombing of that school, 31 people were killed. And as you can see from the video, there are just young boys playing in a soccer game

at the time the strike occurred. And I mean, this is just one of the most horrific things you could imagine. Like if this was Saturday morning in America and somebody went and set off a bomb at a child soccer game, I mean, we would all be horrified. And that's exactly what's going on in Gaza. But this isn't just one time. It's almost a daily occurrence that Israel is bombing some sort of civilian targets.

This was occurring in a U.S. and run a school that is now serving as a shelter in Gaza. And so, you know, these have been struck several times over the past couple weeks. Man, it's just sick. And look, you know, I don't know. Maybe it's too much to ask people to care about people who live so far away, even though it's our government paying for all of it, providing all the weapons and the diplomatic support and every bit of it.

Seems like that would matter enough. But how about this is what got the towers knocked down? It was Shimon Perez's invasion of Lebanon including the Kana massacre where they killed a bunch of civilians in a school, 106 women and children in a U.N. shelter there

in 1996, that motivated the hijackers to go and join al-Qaeda. The same guys who ended up, Kamikazean, hijacked planes into those towers. That was what made them so angry that they chose to do it. And as Ron Paul Warren,

You think we can just go around the world bombing people without consequence, and we do that at our own peril. You're putting the people this country in danger. Here's something that demented old Joe Biden can't seem to understand, and yet this was a headline in the New York Times last week, wasn't it, Kyle, that the American intelligence agencies are rightly worried about terrorist blowback from America helping the Israelis murder the Palestinians against. Yeah, so this is a statement from Brett Holmgren, who has headed the State Department's intelligence agency since 2001. This is a real deep state cretan. He has worked with the CIA previously, the National Security Council previously. He worked at Capital One during the Trump administration when he was out of government. During that time, Barack Obama officiated the guy's wedding.

So this is, you know, a true deep state creature. And he is admitting that Israel's actions in Gaza are driving recruitment into international jihadist organization. So I'm guessing this is like al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula or some of the groups in North Africa or in Iraq, Syria. And, you know, there could be a real risk to American soldiers from maybe terrorist attacks against them in the Middle East, even Saudi Arabia, something like that. But also could inspire lone wolf terrorist attacks, which is something that we saw

the West was very vulnerable to during the rise of the Islamic State, where they were able to recruit people online who were already in the U.S. and other countries. And with all the migration that's been happening recently, you know, wouldn't be surprised that they find ample recruits in different countries to go ahead and carry out these attacks. So, yeah, there's a real risk to American security here, Scott. It's not, as Biden likes to say, Israel is so vital to American security that if it didn't exist we would have to create it yeah it's absolutely the opposite of that these guys could get in you know there were um a bunch of tajeks who were arrested who had snuck across the border like that's not mexican migrant laborers and they might be perfectly innocent tajeks

but i don't know that you know they very well could be extremely dangerous and um and our government is continually giving them on one hand aid and support in some places and on the other hand motivating their violence against the people of this country too. So it is really a dangerous situation. Right. And Scott, can I have one more man to talk about Holmgren? Yeah, man. So this guy is getting a promotion to the National Counterterrorism Council. And that's why I believe the Washington Post did this interview with him. And they also interviewed Victoria Newland about him who said some really nice words about how smart he is. But what she was touting and the reason he's getting this promotion, Scott, is because the State Department

Intelligence Agency was one, the only intelligence agencies in the U.S. to predict that Russia was going to invade Ukraine before February of 2022. And so they're saying that, you know, oh, this guy is just so smart, he's so oppression and things like that. But if you actually look at what this means, it means the State Department knew that Russia was going to invade Ukraine before it invaded and they still refused to negotiate with the Russians. And so rather than showing that this is some great guy, I think it really shows how ineffectual he is and how much he must love conflict, where rather than taking the information that he had and passing it to the Ukrainian saying, you guys better prepare for war, he should have took that information past it to blinking

and if he had to go over his head to the president and say, Mr. President, we are actually talking about Russia invading Ukraine here. We have to do something to prevent this. He didn't do that. He just allowed it to happen. Yeah. Or he did that and they said, yeah, that's what we want. We're going to weaken Russia by giving them a bunch of territory and giving them an excuse to build up a massive new military.

They're Democrats. I don't know what they're doing, you know. And that was clearly the strategy even before the war. But you're right that all these little, you know, State Department weanies and the rest of them who went along with this, they bear their share of the responsibility for this war for certain. And it's been an absolute catastrophe for those poor people, too. And so speaking of which, too, I want to make sure that we keep up with this about hunger in Gaza. Because I know they're under a blockade, and I know that the aid efforts have been.

for not. The pier, you know, fell apart. The airdrops are a PR stunt. The border crossings are closed. But there's millions of people there with no ability to really create an economy of their own in this situation. So people laying down and dine, as you would think they might be? Or how bad is it getting? And is anyone doing anything about it? Yeah. There is definitely been at least 34 people who have succumbed to deprivation, almost all of them young children since this war broke out. And those are the documented people who died in a hospital bed where there were people who were able to communicate with the Gaza authorities to report that this person died from this reason. International agencies are saying about a million

Palestinians are on the brink of famine. And of course, once famine is declared, Scott, that that doesn't mean that, oh, now people don't have food to eat. A state of famine means that two per every 10,000 people are dying. And so if you're talking about a million people, you're talking about hundreds of people dying every single day to actually be in a state of famine. And so the population in Gaza is certainly on its way there, if it's not already there. It's just unclear because there's so little reporting going on. Yeah.

Eight organizations are saying there are really no effective. aid, convoys getting into Gaza at this point, a big part of that is because Israel keeps displacing the population. And so, say, you set up some truts to arrive at a food warehouse and conunis where you're going to prepare meals and feed the hundreds of thousands of people in that city, and then Israel declares a restarting military operations there. It completely scuttles the entire effort to bring food to those people. And now that population is dispersed among other areas of Gaza, and they have to, you know, kind of establish themselves once again. Eight agencies had to find them before they could start to even plan the logistics of getting the trots

to where they need to go to feed the hungry and starving people at Gaza. And so that's a major part of the problem is just the intensity, how widespread the Israeli operations are in Gaza at this point, and how dispersed the people are, makes it very difficult to get food to them. As you mentioned, the pier has completely fallen apart. I think there's a little bit of aid left in Cyprus and on the floating pier that's out in the middle of the Mediterranean Sea. And so they're going to bring that aid into Gaza where it's going to sit in the Nazarene corridor that's controlled by Israel until probably it spires maybe eventually one of these UN organizations will disperse it. But for the most part, all the aid that's gotten into Gaza through the pier has not gotten to the people.

Some of it's been looted. some of it's been a tad but most of it is just sat in the warehouses yeah i mean i've been reading articles for months about people eating grass and leaves off of trees and trying to make some kind of soup out of the mud and and this kind of just absolute desperation like you know ethiopia in the 80s or something so and that's been quite a while ago so you know we definitely need to keep track of that as best as we possibly can i know as you said information coming out of there is limited, but it's certainly a horrible and desperate situation. And I'm sorry, we're all out of time.

But thank you so much for your time on the show. As always, Kyle, you're great. Thank you, Scott. All right, you guys. That is Kyle Anzalone. He's at the Institute at Anti-War.com, and he hosts the incredible podcast, Conflicts of Interest. And that's it for the show today. I'm Scott Horton.

I'm here every Thursday from 2.30 to 3 on KPFK, 90.7 FM in L.A. See you next week. Thank you.