Scott Horton Show - Just the Interviews - 9/12/24 Connor Freeman on the Horror in Gaza and the West Bank

Episode Date: September 14, 2024

Scott brought Connor Freeman onto Antiwar Radio this week to talk about Gaza. Freeman runs through the latest developments in the ongoing slaughter of Palestinians that us Americans are forced to fund. They also discuss the recent Israeli moves in the West Bank. Discussed on the show: “Nineteen Palestinians Reported Killed in Israeli Strikes on al-Mawasi Camp in Gaza” (Antiwar.com) “Ben Gvir Says He Wants To Build a Synagogue at al-Aqsa Mosque” (Antiwar.com) “Washington’s Reaction to IDF Killing of Aysenur Eygi is Disgraceful and Hypocritical” (Antiwar.com) “Two Girls Reported Killed in US Strike Near School in Yemen” (Antiwar.com) “Is Israel intentionally attacking aid workers?” (Responsible Statecraft) “On the Road to Annexation, Israel Is Turning the West Bank Into Gaza” (Haaretz) Jim Bovard is a columnist and the author of Last Rights: The Death of American Liberty. Find all of his books and read his work on his website and follow him on Twitter @JimBovard. 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, September the 12th, 2004, I'm Scott Horton. This is Anti-War Radio. All right, y'all welcome the show. It is Anti-War Radio. I'm your host, Scott Horton. I'm the editorial director of Anti-War.com. and 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 Scott Horton.org and at YouTube.com slash Scott Horton show, and I am here every Thursday from 23 to 3 on KPFK 90.7FM in L.A. And introducing this week's guest, Connor Freeman, assistant editor at the Institute and anti-war.com. Welcome back to the show. Connor, how are you doing? I'm doing great, Scott. Thank you for having me back on. I really appreciate you joining us here today. So let's get the update on who all Benjamin Netanyahu has murdered in cold blood in the last week.

So the number of people who have been murdered, who have been maimed, or missing and presumed under the rubble has now reached about 145,000. The death toll itself has surpassed 41,000 at this point. And that includes 16,700 children who have been killed and 11,300 women have been murdered in this war so far in the besieged Gaza Strip. Over the last 24-hour period, Israel killed 64 Palestinians, including bombing a breadline in Gaza City, where they killed three people and injured seven others. They also bombed a U.N. shelter that used to be a school in the Nusriat area, killing about nine. 19 people, including six UN workers and the deadliest attack on UNRIS staff so far in the war. That one school has been hit five times since the war began, and it houses 12,000 internally displaced Palestinians who are mostly women and children.

18 other people were wounded, and also there was a home in Con Unis in the South that was bombed where six women and six children, excuse me, six brothers and sisters of a family were killed. ranging an age from less than two years old to 21. Yeah, it's just incredible. And, you know, especially when it's the market masker and the breadline masker and stuff, these are like direct analogs to some of the false flag attacks that were used to justify American intervention against the Serbs in Bosnia. And here you got the Israelis doing this kind of thing to the Palestinians all day long

and America's on their side. And if just the New York Times is reporting on September 10th that, They just bombed the Al-Mawesi tent camp and with 2,000-pound bombs again. The craters are 50 feet wide and people are pulling dead Palestinians out of the ground with their hands. And so far, at least 19 people have been killed with dozens of others injured, at least 60. So this is the safe zone. Yeah, this is one of the safe zones, absolutely. And they continue to do this.

And I was just reading a piece about how many schools have been bombed in Gaza. and how many schools and universities have been destroyed. In a six-week period, starting in the beginning of August, Israel bombed 16 different schools and killed 217 Palestinians and injuring hundreds more. And the data on this is shocking. So 85% of schools have been thoroughly destroyed, according to the UN, and 90% of Gaza schools have been severely damaged by Israel in the war. and every university at this point has either been significantly damaged, if not completely ruined.

It's sort of similar to what Israel's method is, and CNN did a report on this earlier in the year, where they looked at, you know, I think it was 16 different cemeteries that the IDF had bulldozed and torn to bits because they claimed, oh, there's a Hamas, you know, command and control center under here, and without providing evidence always. And then CNN went and verified that there was no evidence of that. But destroying the universities, destroying the cultural sites, you know, bombing churches, bombing mosques, they are eviscerating the history of the Palestinian people as they exterminate them in real time. I mean, it's just absolutely shocking. And we see the Israelis getting more and more out of control. You know, Itmar Ben-Gavir, the national security minister,

recently vowed to build a synagogue in the Al-Axa compound in East Jerusalem, which houses the Al-Aksa Mosque, which is the third holiest site in all of Islam. So, I mean, they are deliberately provoking, you know, a very serious religious war here. They've just recently opened up this whole new front on the West Bank. The death toll there, Scott, is now up to 700. And they, according to the U.N., the, I mean, the airstrikes, it's just unbelievable. I mean, they, I remember being shocked when they were carrying out airstrikes in Janine last July before October 7th. But just since October 7th, there have been 157 air strikes in the West Bank. And they've killed dozens and dozens of people, including many children. The figures on what's going on there

are incredible. And in this recent raid on Janine, they tore up with bulldozers and armored vehicles and drones and helicopters and hundreds of soldiers and intelligence officers and police. They went in and tore up 70% of the water works, the sewage systems, and the electricity, and the roads. I mean, it's just this massive attack on infrastructure, and they internally displaced during this 10-day assault, about 1,000 families, most of whom have returned home at this point, some about more than 200 are still internally displaced. And, you know, because just like they did in Janine, they've also done in some of these other cancer. They're destroying homes. I mean, I think in Nersham's and Tolkrum, the refugee camps there,

because this assault in this new campaign, which is the largest attack on the West Bank since the Second Intifada. They're focusing on the north. And since October 7th, we've seen 57 Israeli air strikes carried out in the West Bank, which have killed 156 Palestinians and injured 57 others. And more than two dozen children were killed in these kinds of air strikes. in more than 26 children have been killed in these airstrikes alone. And that's to say nothing about the fact that they are tearing up infrastructure at a just a large, massive rate in Janine and in Tulkram and in Nersham's, sending in bulldozers, uprooting electricity poles, you know, attacking the power lines, destroying the sewage systems

and the waterworks. They destroyed 70% of the infrastructure in Janine and internally displaced about a thousand families, more than about, well, somewhere between 47 and 50 people have been killed in this campaign so far. And Israeli military officials are telling outlets in the country that the West Bank is now the second most critical front in this war and that Janine is just the beginning. And this new campaign only started on August 28th. And we have the settlement minister demanding that Netanyahu and his coalition declare a state of war on the West Bank. And even Israel cats, Israel's foreign minister was saying similar

things, that this is a full-fledged war in the West Bank. And obviously, itmar Gavir is just licking his chops. I mean, this is a way to, you know, this is what he's talking about. We're going to have to kill thousands of people, and we're going to have to demolish so many of their structures and buildings because the land of Israel, which, you know, he's talking about when he says Judean Samaria, the West Bank, Gaza, all of this belongs to the Israelis. And It is for Jews only, and we are going to ethnically cleanse the Palestinian, Muslims, and Christians. And that's just what they're doing.

Bezalel Smotrich, the finance minister, who's also the occupation governor of the West Bank because of this position he holds in the defense ministry, has, there's this new piece in the Washington Post about how they are just redrawing the map on the West Bank by demolishing villages, demolishing towns, expanding settlements at record rates, and ethnically cleansing, Palestinian. And they have approved land seizures of about 6,000 acres. And this comes on top of, you know, the news that they were expanding settlements to a degree not seen since, well, in more than 30 years. And so really, if you look at the internal divisions, you know, even the head of Shinbet

is saying that, you know, people like Ben Gavir, risk delegitimizing Israel completely on the world stage, including with Israel's strongest allies. But this is their moment to ethnically cleanse the West Bank. And so now we're seeing the war shift over there as Israel, you know, is facing, whereas Netanyahu is facing pressure from the Israeli people because on August 29th, there was a story of the six hostages who were discovered in tunnels under Rafa, who had been executed by Hamas. And this, we, as a result, there were hundreds of thousands of people in the streets protesting, demanding a hostage release deal, a ceasefire deal, you know, not out of concern for the poor Palestinians

being massacred and wiped off the face of the earth, but because they want to get their hostages back. And they know, I mean, it's just completely out in the open in Israeli media that Netanyahu is the reason why there hasn't been a ceasefire deal. There hasn't been a deal to release the hostages on both sides. The Palestinian hostages, I mean, they've rounded up more than 10,000 Palestinians just since October 7th, including with administrative detention, where they're just never going to see a trial and they're not charged with any crimes. But so Netanyahu's new tactic to avoid this kind of pressure is to launch this war in the West Bank,

create this whole new front. And also, he's saying that he has to maintain the... the Israeli military's permanent control, or at least indefinite control, over the Philadelphia corridor, which is the border Gaza shares with Egypt, which is a complete non-starter for Hamas in these talks. And so the reason he's saying so is they're smuggling weapons through the Philadelphia corridor, are underneath it in tunnels, and this is why we have to stay there. But even this former head of Shin Bet, who ran, which is the functional equivalent of the FBI, for Israel. His name is Naghav Argamon says there's no connection between the weaponry found in

Gaza and the Philadelphia corridor. When Netanyahu speaks of remaining on the Philadelphia corridor, he knows very well that no smuggling takes place over the Philadelphia corridor, so we are now relegated to living with this imaginary figment. And the IDF is saying that they do not need to control the Philadelphia corridor. It is not an issue that they would say. that we can't have a ceasefire agreement if we can't control this. It's not necessary from a military perspective. And so now what he's pivoted to is there are these fake stories circulating beginning in the UK with the Jewish Chronicle, where they have this, they claim that there was a basically that they had interrogated a senior Hamas official and discovered documents

that show that the plan is they're going to take the hostages, smuggle them out of Gaza with the tunnels under the Philadelphia corridor. And once they get to Egypt, they're going to take the hostages and take them to Iran. And so he's saying, we'll never get them back. So Sarah Netanyahu, Bibby's wife, she's meeting with family members of the hostages and saying that, you know, we have to maintain, I'm sorry, we can't have a deal, but we have to maintain our control over the Philadelphia corridor, because otherwise the hostages will go to Iran.

But so subsequently to that, there's been multiple reports in Israeli media beginning with this story from Channel 12 News, where the military establishment is coming out and saying none of that's true. There's no supposed intelligence, whether in a written document or some sort of interrogation. And then after that, two days later, there was a story in Wynet where multiple sources from Israel's intelligence community as well as their prisoners. and missing persons division said, that's a wild fabrication. It's 100% lies.

And the IDF spokesman came out and said the story is baseless. So, and this came, you know, Netanyahu gave this speech on September 4th, following the discovery of those hostages and those protests, where he gives this speech about why he's sticking to his guns on maintaining the, these indefinite military presence in Gaza with the Netrazine corridor, which bisects the northern part of the strip from, the rest of the enclave as well as the Philadelphia Corridor. And that's what he was saying was that, you know, they are going to smuggle hostages out of the country if we don't do this.

And then all of a sudden, these stories come up that completely match his propaganda. So now there's a growing consensus in Israel that these are totally fabricated stories from Netanyahu and his men. So they're getting more and more desperate. Even Yoav Ghulant, his defense minister, is saying, no, we should have a six-week ceasefire so we can get the hostages back and then we can go back into Gaza and eliminate Hamas and kill as many people as we want. So the voice of reasons spoken. Yeah. 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.

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I'm talking with Connor Freeman from anti-war.com. Tell me more about this American killed in the West Bank. So this was a 26-year-old Turkish-American woman named Ansor Iggi, who would, was shot in the head by the IDF with a sniper rifle. She was protesting with the international solidarity movement against settlement expansion in this village outside of Nablis. And, you know, the Israelis now admitted that, okay, it's highly likely that one of our snipers killed her, but it was unintentional and accidental. But it was a straight headshot. We are deeply offended by the suggestion that this was in any way intentional.

And so they shot her in the head. Now, they claimed that they were aiming for the instigator of a riot, basically. And the eyewitnesses there as well as the other members of the International Solidarity Movement who were there with Iggy have said that, no, there was no key instigator of a riot. We were being totally peaceful. There were no combatants in the area. and her family is livid because, you know, there is yet to be a demand from the United States, from Biden, from Kamala Harris, or from the State Department, that they, you know, want to see

whoever killed their daughter, their sister, you know, brought to justice. There's not going to be an independent investigation. The State Department already said, you know, we're not going to investigate the usual story, which is that Israel can kill Americans, investigate themselves, declare it was an accident, and then we can all go back to business as usual. And Joe Biden is already reiterating the Israeli propaganda. He says, apparently it was an accident, ricocheted off the ground, and she got hit by accident. I'm working on that now.

But they say, you know, this cannot be misconstrued as anything. Her family said this is a deliberate, targeted, precise attack by the military against an unarmed citizen. And Blinken actually issued Anthony Blinken, the Secretary of State, who has been arguably the worst diplomat. in the history of the United States and certainly has completely disgraced our nation with his role in parroting Israeli propaganda and lying about these hostage and ceasefire negotiations that the Qataris and the Egyptians are, you know, saying Netanyahu is the problem and they're

even preparing to potentially issue a joint statement just declaring that. And but so he says, no one should be shot and killed for attending a protest. Israel needs to make some fundamental changes to the way they operate in the West Bank, including changes to their rules of engagement. Well, the whole occupation is illegal, and they've killed 700 people now, and they're taking more land than they have in decades. I mean, it's ridiculous. They just killed another American, and the response from Washington has just been disgraceful. In fact, there's a great piece up at anti-war.com right now by Abdelamene, Abdel Ramon, and it's

his first original for us, and it's called Washington's disgraceful reaction of the IDF killing on Suriigi. And it is, I mean, we, it's just another slap in the face to the American people. You know, they've already killed multiple American citizens throughout this war. And, you know, Israel at most gets a very light tap on the wrist. And when Hirsch Goldberg, Poland, the American citizen who went to Israel to join the IDF to be a part of Israel's apartheid army was killed in Gaza, Tony Blinken came out and said, we lost an American hero today. And it's just the Democrats and their position on this is so insulting and just they are covered in blood and yet they try to say things like what Kamala Harris says, you know, far too many

people are being killed in Gaza, as if there's some number that we have since surpassed that would have been acceptable. Yeah. It's just horrible. Well, looking at anti-war.com from yesterday, Wednesday, Connor, there's a headline at the bottom. Two girls reported killed in U.S. strike in Yemen, and that might sound like a low number,

but that's a war that we finally stopped where America had been backing Saudi Arabia and UAE in a horrible bombing campaign against Ansar ala, the Houthi regime there. from 2015 on and it finally came to an end at the beginning of Biden's second year in 2022 there just as the Ukraine war was kicking off and now America is directly bombing Yemen because of Israel and this is such an important point to make everyone concerned about this issue needs to focus on the fact that support for Israel is a threat to the United States of America. It is a danger.

It is against America's national interests. And the prime example of that, of course, is 23 years ago when some Saudis and Egyptians crashed planes into American buildings, killing 3,000 people, as revenge for what Israel was doing in Palestine and Lebanon, and for America's dual containment policy in Saudi Arabia, which included carpet bombing and blockading Iraq for eight years, at Israeli behest.

A dual containment policy was invented by Martin Indyck, who had been an advisor to Yitzhak Shamir from the Lakud Party before he came to tell Bill Clinton what to do. And that's where dual containment came from. And this is what got the towers knocked down and kicked off an entire generation of war. war in many ways leading to the situation that we're in right now. And so people need to take that very seriously. Of course, it's not a justification, but it is a justification to the people

who do it, to the terrorists, for wanting to target us. And this is a country just absolutely lousy with soft targets. And our government is bad enough, but Americans should not have to pay for the sins of foreign governments that our government backs in this way and their absolute merciless cruelty to this captive population that they have here in the Gaza Strip concentration camp and it's just insane that we allow this to continue and that it's just shy of a year now that this has been going on in a row. It's just unbelievable. It's like if the state of Texas went to war against one county for a year, it's just beyond comprehension. Yeah, and we're on the eve of the one-year anniversary of the war on Gaza and the October 7th attacks.

One of the key motivators for the al-Qaeda attacks against America on 9-11 was the bombing of a UN shelter in what's called the first kind of massacre in southern Lebanon. They killed over 100 women and children sheltering there. And what we see, and there's this new report at Responsible Statecraft called Israel intentionally attacking aid workers. And we find that more than 75% of all aid workers, not just from the U.M, but from any kind of humanitarian aid organization, have been killed by Israel, either in Gaza or the West Bank, since October 7th. That 378 aid workers have been killed worldwide. 284 of them were killed in Gaza, the West Bank. And they go through a list of 14 different instances where these groups and in some cases, even Washington, provided information on their location, the routes that they were taking, what kind of eight operations they were carrying out to make sure that there's no chance that they could be bombed or massacred during their efforts to try and get some relief to these poor Palestinians who are being just murdered and starved to death, more than a million people. in, you know, close to famine conditions, and they go through. And it's just every time they tell them where they're going to be, what they're doing, and Israel comes along and murders them,

including the IDF tank shelling of the Covenant of the Sisters of Mother Teresa, which is part of a Catholic Church compound in Gaza. And they displaced 54 disabled people who were sheltering there. And then later in the day, the Israeli and Dave DeCamp wrote this up in anti-war.com at the time, there was an Israeli sniper who killed two Christian women sheltering at the church, shooting one as she tried to carry the other to safety. It's just absolutely barbaric, and the Pope came out and condemned it as terrorism. I mean, Israel is just completely out of control, I mean, bombing every kind of infrastructure you can think of. I mean, and also there's this great editorial in Harats that we ran at anti-war.com earlier this week called Israel is turning the

West Bank into Gaza. And they're bringing back all those same kind of tactics, laying siege to hospitals and starving people to death and locking them, basically preventing them from leaving their homes and cutting off their water and electricity, destroying, setting homes on fire, demolishing homes, and attacking all of the infrastructure that can sustain life. And you have people who go days and days and days without food and water. They have, you know, no internet connection, no way to communicate with their family members. And, you know, there was this horrible story of as Israel is carrying out this raid in Janine, a 16-year-old girl opens up a curtain to look out a window to see what's going on. And an Israeli sniper just shoots her right in the head and kills her.

This is the most noble army or the most moral army in the world that the American taxpayer has given, let's see, about $20 billion to this year alone because we've been forced to by the bipartisan consensus here. And there's not a single inkling of any kind of a shift coming in this policy for the foreseeable future, as we saw in the debate earlier this week between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump. There's just no empathy for the Palestinians, and as you say, this puts us completely in the crosshairs of blowback terrorism, which is sure to be worse than anything we've seen because what we are actively doing now, the same way in Ukraine, where it's the U.S. and NATO at war with Russia, and Putin's making comments like that as Tony Blinking gets ready to announce that we're going to allow long-range missile strikes deep inside the Russian mainland, we are ethnically cleansing and exterminating the Palestinian people. That's what's happening. It's Israel is doing it, but everybody in the world knows. In fact, there was this story in Hartz recently where a senior Air Force officer said, we are so dependent on American aid that if they were to cut that off, we could not sustain operations in Gaza beyond a few months. We've shipped over 50,000 tons of weapons to them, including 14,000, 2,000 pound bombs. And all this rhetoric,

from the Republicans. I can't believe they held up that one shipment. This is a, you know, we're betraying our greatest ally and all this nonsense. They're still bombing tent camps of internally displaced people who have been displaced, some of them, you know, more than a dozen times before they get killed. And these are elderly people, some of whom were ethnically, were ethnically cleansed from Israel, excuse me, from Palestine in the Nakba of 1947 and 1948. And now they're being, you know, pushed around Gaza from one end of the strip to the other, just trying to avoid being burned alive with American taxpayer paid for explosives. And then eventually they'll just be killed along with their family members at some point because there's no point where the American

government will say to Israel, okay, we're going to cut off the weapons. You can't keep doing this anymore. It's a national security risk for Americans, and this is a violation of so many U.S. laws that prohibit us from, you know, providing military aid to the two states that are openly engaging in crimes against humanity, including starvation and extermination and things like this for which Benjamin Netanyahu will hopefully someday be put on trial for. I mean, that is what the warrants that Karim Khan, the chief prosecutor of the ICC, is seeking actually say. And they haven't been approved yet. And, you know, Israel is pressuring and they don't even have to apply that much, but our Congress, and we've already, the House has already voted that they

were going to sanction jurists at the ICC if they go through with this and level other kinds of retaliation against the world court. But this, I mean, this is open genocide being committed and the American fingerprints are all over it. And it's women and children every single day, just being killed with, as I said, 2,000-pound bombs and starve to death. All right, you guys, that's Connor Freeman, anti-war.com. Thank you, sir. Thank you, Scott. Aren't you guys, and that's anti-war radio for this week.

I'm Scott Horton. I'm editorial director there at anti-war.com, and you can find my full interview archive, more than 6,000 of them at Scott Horton.org. And I'll be back here next Thursday from 2.30 to 3 on KPFK, 90.7 FM in L.A. See you next week. I'm going to be able to be.