Scott Horton Show - Just the Interviews - 7/25/24 Daniel Davis on Netanyahu’s Infuriating Speech

Episode Date: July 28, 2024

Daniel Davis returns to the show to talk about Netanyahu’s address to Congress. He and Scott pick over some of the most egregious absurdities, exaggerations and outright lies in the speech. Discussed on the show: Netanyahu’s address to Congress Daniel Davis did multiple tours in Iraq and Afghanistan during his time in the army. He is a Senior Fellow at Defense Priorities and is the author of the reports “Dereliction of Duty II: Senior Military Leaders’ Loss of Integrity Wounds Afghan War Effort” and “Go Big or Go Deep: An Analysis of Strategy Options on Afghanistan.” Find him on Twitter @DanielLDavis1and subscribe to his YouTube Channel. 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

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 next up i've got on the line the great daniel l davis retired lieutenant colonel from the u.s army host of danny davis deep dive on the youtube's there and of course he wrote the book the 11th hour in 2020, America. Happy April Glaspby Day, Danny.

How are you? I'm doing really good, Scott. Good to be back on your show. Oh, very happy to have you here. Of course, it was 34 years ago today that April Glassby told Saddam Hussein, go ahead and take the Northern Oil Field, see if we give a damn.

George Bush and James Baker told me to tell you, go right ahead, pal. Remember that? Yeah, I remember. Okay, I'm roughly paraphrasing, but let me ask you. When you and your buddies were fighting in that war, Danny, did you guys know that America had so cruelly baited Saddam into the stupid invasion of Kuwait? You know, we really didn't. They didn't give us that kind of information.

They just gave us deployment orders and execute move time now. That's about the extent of what we got. Yeah. I mean, I remember, because this is all pre-internet era and whatever, we're all like at the mercy of day. rather. And the only real breakthrough, I mean, unless you read Seymour Hersch or whatever, but most Americans have no access to that kind of thing, right? So all we got was Ross Perrault said in the debates. And yeah, James Baker told Saddam Hussein to go ahead and take back the northern oil fields, ain't that right? And Bush got all mad. That's the country's honor. How dare you say that?

And Perrault says, oh yeah, well, then why don't you release the State Department cables? and it wasn't until Chelsea Manning in the year 2010 liberated those documents and gave them to Julian Assange who posts him online that we finally got the State Department's version of the memo and there it says

look George Bush isn't looking for a war wink wink nudge and Glasby herself later told the New York Times well we didn't think he was going to take the whole country so there you go guilty as accused right there yep and I'm sure

everybody, you know, recognized it and people were held accountable and changes. Oh, wait a minute. I'm sorry. Yeah, that's what your book's about, how everything is cool now. The 11th hour means we can all go to bed. It's fine. Yep, yep. And as soon as you point out the truth of things and people recognize it and all those people who lied so, you know, vehemently to your face were all held a kid. Okay. I'm sorry. I must have already gone asleep and it must have been fantasizing. But yeah, it's really frustrating. frustrating because so much of this information is out there. So many the facts are known and people just keep on doing them because they don't get held accountable for them and they actually get rewarded many of the times, even when the information has come out, David Petraeus being the chief among those. Boy, got that right. The great American fraud, David Petraeus, him and Benjamin Netanyahu. Yikes.

You know, it's kind of amazing. the kind of just guff that he gets away with was this what fourth or fifth time he came to speak to the U.S. Congress? Yeah, I can't remember how many it's been. And he's just bluffing. He actually used the line.

I mean, why even say it like this? Why not just lie? He said, hey, for all we know, Iran is backing all of the anti-Israel protests on American campuses. And so, and then like in the next breath. So, boy, you guys sure are Iran's useful idiots since you're being backed by Iran.

When he was the one who just made that up a sentence ago, the hell is he talking about? Yeah, and I actually had Ambassador Chance Freeman on my show today, and we discussed that very issue. And he said how ironic that he is, number one, how insulting that he's bashing American citizens of being useful idiots for Iran as opposed to what they were actually doing, which is just protesting against the genocide that was being carried out against the hapless Palestinian people who were trapped in the Gaza Strip and can't escape. Instead of doing that, he calls them useful idiots, which he said was really rich given that basically all the members of Congress who stood up and made. made this boisterous applause were the real useful idiots because they're giving cover to Netanyahu in his public address capabilities to try and continue to press the issue on forward, you know, and to cover over the lie that it's not that you just pointed out he said. So it was it was really embarrassing and insulting to me.

Yeah. And, you know, the Congress, they're just so craving. It's just crazy. I don't know. So what did you think? Oh, I was going to say. There's one thing that I agreed with Netanyahu about that he said that what it comes down to here is a battle between barbarianism and civilization. But everybody knows who's blowing up all the little kids over there, and it ain't the Palestinians.

See Israelis every single day, bombing tents with 2,000-pound bombs, bombing hospitals. Yeah. And, you know, I just, I mean, you want to stick with the theme of. saying things that are not true, I just again found it offensive that one of the specific things that Netanyahu was just pounding the lectern about, was about how, you know, how evil it is for the Palestinians and Hamas in particular to say, hey, we want to rule from the river to the sea because that implies that you want to get rid of all the Israelis and how terrible that is. And then as I showed also on my show today, on January 18th of this year,

Benjamin Netanyahu stood up and said, we will control from the river to the sea and get rid of everybody in between there who's not Jewish. So you had him himself boisterously saying on Israeli television, he wants to dominate from the river to the sea, and then comes to our lectern in our Congress and accuses the other side of wanting to do what he himself wants to do. That just infuriates me well and really he's completely putting words in their mouth too because and you could say they're not being honest if you want it to but the palestinians always say that they never said anything about pushing all the jews into the sea they're just talking about being free too right and um in fact i'd have to go back i don't remember the guy's name anymore

but i'm sure people can find this it was actually an israeli massou undercover operative who coined the phrase push the Jews into the sea in the first place like no Arab ever even to be fair there there definitely are some of the Hamas leaders I've seen them myself where they expressly when even when pressed on it say yes we want to get rid of all the Jews we want to get rid of all and fair enough I mean that's that's something you can push back against because that's what somebody wants to do to your people they have no power to do it Israel has the power to try and do what they're saying here, and that's what really matters the most. And to your point also, it's simultaneously true that the Palestinian people, the vast

majority of them, just want to be able to live in freedom. They don't want to force other people out because I think they know that's unrealistic. Yeah. And, you know, what, Hamas rewrote their charter, which they always leave out, and took out the Lacudnik stuff about expelling all of their enemies, and they have said numerous times that they would recognize Israel as part of a final status deal on 67 borders. They're not going to, and then of course the Israelis say, no, you have to recognize Israel first. Oh, and you have to recognize Israel as a Jewish state. In other words, at the expense of the one-fifth of the Israeli population that are not, never mind the occupied territories, but I'm talking about citizens who are not Jewish, who are Muslim and Christian,

Palestinians. And so they're always moving the goalposts. And of course, as we've discussed on the show numerous times, the entire goal of the Lakud since the 1980s has been to prop up Hamas just so that they can say, we have no partner for peace. You don't expect us to do with those terrorists, do you? One of the biggest successes from his perspective, exactly. Yeah. And their entire foreign policy is based on being liars. And you know, Scott, I just don't understand, well, maybe I can't say that tongue in cheek. I guess I do understand why that's being suppressed here. But it's open information.

It's not a secret. It's not what someone, you know, whispered in the holes of Congress or something. Netanyahu has been clearly wanting to support Hamas over many, many years. He was given the money funneling through Qatar. It was an open information, not a secret. And he even said many times in public forums that he wants to help. to stay in power so that they're a foil against the Palestinian Authority, which is also being corrupt and keeping them at each other's throats, be just enough so that he could then

say, you know, with a straight face to the global public, how could I do business with these people? They want us, they want our destruction and whatever. And so people go, oh, okay. And so now then we have what we have, that he himself tried to support. And then he wants to now ignore that part. Yeah. Well, what did you make of his declaration that, well, he didn't say this part out loud, but he sure was making a fool out of Joe Biden and Anthony Blinken saying there's not going to be any deal here. We're going to achieve total victory. We're going to completely destroy Hamas. They're going to never have power. They're going to never exist to threaten

Israel ever again to have power in the Gaza Strip or anywhere else. And we're not. not going to stop until we're done yeah i mean that's he's never said anything but that he has been incredibly consistent from the beginning no matter what every american uh official uh since october 7th has been saying to include multiple times joe biden himself and every time that happens there's never any consequence we just roll over so yeah i mean you you see that he is truly netting yahoo is running American foreign policy regarding the Middle East right now. I mean, you can't come to any other conclusion. It's humiliating that we literally don't have any say in what's going on. And yet we just keep getting slapped in the face and saying, how many more bombs shall I give you today,

Mr. Netanyahu? That's the bottom line. That's why this is so just aside from the most infuriating part about the Palestinian people dying, that is number one and always in the front of my mind here. and just egregious failure of humanity. But right behind that, as an American, I'm like, why have we just jettisoned our foreign policy and the power over our own ammunition supplies and everything else we do to this man who infuriates us and basically slaps us in the face

and just ignores everything we say? That's the part I don't get while we're so subservient. Well, it's the money. You know, it's politics. And on the Republican side, with Donald Trump coming, you have all the evangelical votes, which he knows good and well, he needs those votes. And, you know, their ministers say that America must serve the foreign state of Israel and no uncertain terms. Here's good thing, Scott. I've got to jump in, though.

I'm an evangelical. I consider myself a Bible-believing Christian. And as a Bible-believing Christian, someone who knows what the Bible actually says, by the way, I spend time every day. So I'm very intimately familiar with it. is nothing in there where it says that we have to be subservient to the political leadership of the country of Israel at all. It says we have subservience to Jesus Christ, who has a very different set of standards that we're supposed to follow. But this idea that we just give whatever Israel wants and that we're cursed if we don't do whatever the political leadership

wants, especially when it's in direct contradiction to the teachings of the Bible, both old in the New Testament, then I just, I keep using that word, it infuriates me that my own co-religionists don't know what their own Bible says. I know, and you know, I guess I brought this up. It came up earlier. Oh, I was quoting Ron Paul from the old Ricky Ware show. There's this old radio host from San Antonio. I used to love to listen to. I'm sure he's dead by now, but his name was Ricky Ware, and he was just the sweetest old guy on 5.50 a.m. down there, and he was a member of John Hagee's Cornerstone Church. And whenever anyone mentioned anything about Israel, he would just go, well, I mean, the Bible

says you have to bless Israel or else God won't bless you. I mean, that's just it. And that was just the end of the conversation. It was always the end of the conversation. And it hadn't, you know, there was no room in there to reflect. They're like, well, look, these are two and three thousand-year-old stories, and they're very important to you, fine, but they're about back then. doesn't say that about, like you're saying here, about America being subservient to whatever the whim of the Likud is today. And by the way, God, can I just point out there also that the same Bible shows about how God is furious when the Israeli leaders violate his laws and how He, God himself, punishes Israel,

and that was not just with kicking him out of the land a couple of times, but also with significant military defeats when they don't follow the precepts of the Bible. Got to put that part in there, too, when you want to talk about how God feels about the Israeli people. Yeah, it raises the question about whether God would prefer America stay out of it because he's got his own thing going on here. He can handle it. He does not need any help from Washington, D.C. That's a good point. Yeah. Hey, guys, I've had a lot of great webmasters over the years, but the team at Expanddesigns.com have by far been the most competent and reliable. Harley Abbott and his team have made great sites for the show and the

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slash Horton. Find the link and the QR code in the margin at Scott Horton.org. That's Moondos artisan coffee.com slash Horton. All right. So, but politically, it's a hell of a lot. And Miriam Adelson writes humongous checks, and she ain't the only one. There are these massive donations. We saw this on the Democratic side, where it wasn't Pelosi and Schumer, right?

It was the donors. The donors have decided Biden must drop out. Well, who are these guys? Well, they're extremely wealthy Zionists. That's who they are. And that's what they're about. That's, you know, as Heim Sabin, as Edelson, Sheldon, Edelson said before he died, my issue, I've one issue, and that's Israel, period.

And that's what it's all about. And so, you know, Donald Trump had gone to A-PAC in 2016, said, I don't need your money. I'm filthy, stinking rich. How do you like that? And he got a bunch of trouble for saying that, because you're not supposed to say that the entire purpose of him going there, obviously, was for the money. But then someone must have told him, yeah, but Mr. Trump, we got midterms coming up, right?

Like, we got a whole Republican Party nationwide that needs support. And you can't just tell APEC to piss off. They write checks. They spend, this is Wall Street Journal, $500 million a year. A PAC, they don't spend. They organize for their preferred donors. It's an unbelievable amount of money, and they're just completely dependent on it. There's nothing that they can do about it, and I expect for Donald Trump to be worse now than before.

The Democratic primary in New York a couple of months back where they targeted the guy that they didn't want to be in there because he was not sufficiently pro-Israel. They spent $15 million on his opponent to try to get him out there, and he wasn't even a good candidate by himself. And yet it still took, they still spent that much money in a primary just to get the guy out there as a message to everybody else. And I think that message was clearly received. Yep. And I saw where Glenn Greenwald, you know, snarkily congratulated APEC because as they were bragging with an open face, they're not ashamed about it all. They're totally proud of the fact. They're bragging that every primary, were they back somebody that they had won this year.

and I think they must have been omitting the Massey race, but in all the rest of them, and they're just perfectly happy to gloat, that any congressman that messes with Israel, A-PAC will destroy them. And the only reason they can't get rid of Massey, people might not know his origin story, but he's a real-ass grassroots candidate

who got his political start just complaining at a city council meeting or something like that, and people were like, man, you're really good. And he ended up becoming a congressman in almost like a Mr. Smith goes to Washington kind of a way. So he has like a real like down home community

support network that put him in there in the first place. He wasn't AstroTurf. He was a real from the community guy in the first place. So he was able to withstand it. But they spent a ton of money taking him on. And as you say, I think you're talking about Bowman there, Jamal Bowman.

They took out a bunch more too. They all just absolutely declare vendetta. And they're not even ashamed. whatsoever to admit they boast about it as you say to send a message don't even mess with us you sign on to apac legislation or you're going to have a problem and you know and i guess it'll continue on as long as they get that kind of result until and this is where i think we're probably getting into that territory now when when things just finally collapse on top of them because of these insane views that they have and the insane policies that now large portions of the world

are turning against, not because they're Jews at all. In fact, many of the protests, the biggest protest in Washington here in the last few days have been by Jews. So you can't say that they're useful idiots for Iran when it's the Jewish race itself that is revolting against this kind of thing. And I think the more when Americans see that, and the more when they see, you know, Netanyahu's disastrous, murderous war will never bring the peace that he promised, only more death and bloodshed and violence to the Jewish people.

Then I think finally there may be a turn of events, but it's going to cost so much blood before we get to that point. And that's just, it's just egregious to me. Yeah, the whole thing is terrible. Although, I mean, part of it is that it's just so ridiculous. Like any idiot, like even if you were a committed Zionist and you were really a Netanyahu fan. And then you listen to him say to Congress, yeah, people being allowed to protest against Israel is causing. anti-Semitism. Like, come on, this

guy kills people all day, every day with high explosives, tears them apart, including little kids, and everybody can see it on their social media. And if there's, if there's an increase in

anti-Semitism, what's really going on there mostly is he's deliberately overly defining anti-Semitism to mean any criticism of Israel at all. But if there's any actual anti-Semitism being increased, he's the one

increasing it. Personally, he's the one responsible. And then he blames free speech by Americans being able to complain about his crimes for causing hatred of Jews. I mean, the entire like whatever

people consider the Jewish establishment of organized Jewish groups and powerful synagogues and whatever, they should all just absolutely be ridiculing him and laughing him off of the damn stage for that. He looks like such a clown trying to claim that when he's standing up there with blood dripping off his hands. Give me a break. Right, right, right. That's what I was going to say when he was, that's, again, one of those moments where he was literally pounding the lectern and got

raucous applause after people leapt out of their seats to applaud him, talk about how damaging and bad anti-Semitism is. And ironically, kind of like you, this is one point I partially agree with him on. Anti-Semitism is a bad thing because we've seen it throughout centuries of time, especially many times for literally no good reason at all. People were just attacked and murdered and everything else because they were Jews. Now then you've got this guy, Netanyahu, who is the prime cheerleader for the causation of anti-Semitism. He wants to say that's for no reason, but yet, as you just pointed out, it's self-evidently

and painfully, bloodily, painfully, obvious that his policies is exactly what's driving some legitimate anti-Semitism around, which needs to stop, but it's not going to stop until he stops his murderous actions. So that's what needs to be the message here. You want to stop anti-Semitism? Get rid of the policies of Netanyahu. And I specify that as opposed to just getting him out of violence. office because there's a lot of people in Israel right now who are leading those same kind of

policies. That's why he's in power. And so Israel has to deal with that on their own. That's an internal issue. But if you want to stop anti-Semitism, you damn well better change your policies. Yeah. All right. So now what's all this crap about Iran? Are we in danger from Iran in the Shiite crescent in the region there, Danny? You know, from a military perspective, they are a nuisance. They exist. And they do have some power. They that's probably some of these groups are the ones that ended up killing the Americans, I think in February this year in Jordan that were just across the Syrian border in response to some of the things going on with the Hamas Israeli war.

So they do have some nuisance, and of course that includes the Houthis who are now firing missiles, you know, at shipping in the Red Sea, which is just a big pain for us, which will never be solved. but that's something we have committed ourselves to just expending a bunch of missiles that achieve no value. But that's about the extent of it. They can be a nuisance, but there is no fear that they're going to do anything to Israel, that they're going to do anything to us. I mean, you see the best that they can do is to be nuisance missiles in the Red Sea.

They have hit some of our troops in the Middle East, but they've tried a bunch and rarely succeed. They have no possibility of doing anything to the state of Israel. So then why do you want to make them out to be this big threat? Now, I will say, though, that's the question itself. But if you're talking about specifically Iran, if they're pushed into it, i.e. if anyone ever takes war to them, they do have the ability to shut down the strait of Hormuz, which would be catastrophic for the global economy. And they have a pretty decent, you know, naval capacity with some of these speedboats to cause shipping problems in a large area that can mine the thing. and they have a pretty substantial ballistic missile capacity and drone capacity.

So if pushed into war, they can cause a great deal of damage. But if not pushed into a war, they will never use it. They want it to be a deterrent. So they're not going to launch a war that they could not win, but they will not hold their powder dry if they're attacked. So as long as we don't attack them, we have nothing to worry about security-wise in the Middle East from Iran. You know, this is the point, too, is that we, like, have no other reasons to really be a concern with them, right? The Americans can resent the fact that they wish they hadn't given Baghdad to Iran's best friends, but whose fault is that? Right.

But it's a damn lie, whether they know it or not, I think most of them do know it. It's a damn lie that Iran killed 600 Americans in Iraq War II. It was Iraqis who made those EFPs, Iraqi Shiites. And no, Iraqi Shiites are not Iranians. They're Iraqis. And there's zero evidence that Iran supplied a single one of those bombs ever. And so that's a lie. And so what are they got?

They're mad that the Iranians overthrew America's sock puppet dictator over them back in 1979. Who cares? I don't personally know the intelligence on that. But let's say for a moment that it was true, that they did, to whatever percentage. What difference is that than what we are doing on an hourly basis in the Russia-Ukraine war, given the Ukraine side everything in the world to attack and destroy Russia? So we want to now accuse Iran of doing a similar thing in the Iran-Iraq War that we are now doing, like, times 100. It's just it just- Or in Iraq War, too, but yeah.

Yeah, I'm sorry. I'm sorry. Yeah, that's what I was talking about. The post-2003 debacle, you know, we can't condemn one person for doing it and then us do it on steroids and have any kind of credibility. Although, by the way, and this is in the book, and in fact, it's on my substack. People can read this for free is the section of my book on this. It's called Soda Straws and EFPs. And that's a Robert Gates quote about, so you're looking at the war through a soda straw. well look at what is actually going on here all it was is a giant propaganda campaign by dick cheney and his men and david petraeus the great american fraud to claim that every time a shite killed an american in the war that it was iran that was responsible for it that and it was just a lie and i showed where there's uh what like 10 different important news pieces that demonstrate that all of those ephps were being made in iraq by Iraqis and with Iraqi components and there was just an entire fraud perpetrated by guess who

it was Michael Gordon who was the co-author with Judith Miller on all the WMD stories that lied us into war in the first place acting in service of Dick Cheney again in 2007 yeah what a shock the whole thing was fake

and so you know we had no real America has no real excuse for this grudge against Iran, other than they declared independence from our government 45 years ago. Yeah, yeah. I mean, it all goes back to the 1979 revolution and whatever, all our hostages that were there for 44 days, et cetera. That hatred was spawned in and it never went away.

It was never reexamined. No one has any interest in the United States to ever reconcile that issue or, or even put it on a back burner, there's just too many people that just love to hate Iran. And they'll never be satisfied until the state of Iran is destroyed, or at least that's what they think. But there's no desire at all for even putting this, you know, on the back burner. Like I said, and I think that that would be probably the best we could get right now. But there's just too many like John Bolton, of course, they're just lusting for war with Iran and they'll do anything they can to get it. Yeah. Well, and that was why the Israelis opposed the

JCPOA is because they were complying and it took the issue of conflict over their nuclear program off the table. And Iran would rather have conflict on the table and even the actual greater risk of Iran obtaining a nuclear weapon. They prefer that as long as they can get confrontation to the possibility of an opening in America really being able to get along with Iran again like it was back in the old days. Yeah, that's a fact. Yeah, we would rather have continued confrontation than to have the issue solved

and it's just very, very disheartening to me. Yeah. By we, you mean they. Yeah. All right, I'm late. I've got to go. Thank you so much for coming back on the show, Danny. And sorry that it's such a sad occasion that the leader of the American conservative movement, the Prime Minister of Israel, came to town to dictate to us the way things got to be.

but good to talk to you as always. Always a pleasure, Scott. Talk to you next time. The Scott Horton Show, Antivore War Radio, can be heard on KPFK, 90.7 FM in L.A. APSRadio.com, antiwar.com, Scotthorton.org, and Libertarian Institute.org.