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May 13, 2021 - Jimmy Dore Show
01:04:09
20210513_TJDS_20210512_Podcast
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Get ready for an outstanding entertainment program.
The Jimmy Dore Show.
Hey, this is Jimmy Dore.
Who's this?
What's up, Tibby Dore?
This is Vince Vard.
Oh, Double V. Actually, it's Triple V now.
What?
The extra V is for vivaciousness.
Oh, really?
What's got you all worked up, Vince?
Jimmy, I'm calling to defend Israel's right to defend itself.
I'm a defender of defense.
Jesus.
I see.
Defend themselves from what exactly?
The attacks.
The attacks from these Palestinians.
They're firing rockets, Jimmy.
Thousands of rockets.
And how many Israelis have these rockets killed?
Do you know?
I don't know.
Hundreds?
Seven.
Well, okay, that's a lot, too.
Every single human life is precious.
Okay, now, how many Palestinians have been killed so far?
I don't know.
Who gives a shit?
Yeah, yeah.
Okay, Vince, 65, including 16 children and five women.
Children, Vince.
Well, I mean, they got some Hamas guys too, though, right?
Yes, Vince.
Israel's wildly disproportionate reaction in which they have collapsed entire apartment buildings to rubble, which they won't be able to rebuild because Gaza is denied construction materials, did manage to get a few Hamas guys.
They did.
Mission accomplished.
Yeah, I agree.
Hamas started this shit.
That's what they get.
You start shit with me.
I'm going to come at you hard.
Just like my boy Israel.
Did they, though?
Israel puts unbelievable pressure on the Palestinian population, seizing more land, harassing them during religious festivals until they snap like any group of humans would.
Then Israel says, oh, look, we're under attack.
It's always bullshit, Vince.
That's Israeli.
That's their land.
According to whom?
The Israelis.
Yeah.
It's in the Bible, you idiot.
Don't you read the Bible?
Are you religious, Vince?
No, not at all.
But obviously, I'm trapped into citing Iron Age religious writings in order to justify my otherwise unjustifiable claim that Jews inherently own all that entire region.
Don't you see that?
Yeah, and I also see they are using the spooky book to justify colonizing and ethnically cleansing all of the land between the sea and the river.
What's wrong with being colonists?
This is America.
We started out as hardy colonists and look at us.
We kicked fucking ass.
Yeah, and that colonization required the ethnic cleansing of Native Americans.
Okay, yeah, but the ones who were left are like revered.
God.
They are treated horribly, Vince.
Okay, maybe, but they have a great reputation.
Everyone thinks they're wise and shit.
Like in movies, anytime there's an old Native American, he's always like, ah, the great sky buffalo says this and that, and everyone's nodding along.
They're like, this is deep shit, man.
That's cold comfort for losing your continent.
Well, I don't know what to tell you, okay?
That's Israel's ancient sacred land.
They're really, they're really the Native Americans of the Middle East, actually.
And the Palestinians aren't even a real people.
They're invented.
What does that even mean?
I don't know, but Ben Shapiro keeps saying it, and he's smart, very smart.
Do you realize that saying a group of human beings aren't a real people is step one in a genocide playbook?
Excuse me, are you accusing me of supporting genocide?
Yes, you idiot.
Well then.
Well, I never.
I've always said that nothing betrays the lack of a cogent argument like the use of foul language.
Your lack of civility reveals your true self, good sir.
Ah, yes.
Good old civility.
It has brought us so much.
You do realize every argument and tactic you've made is just repeating the talking points of idiots, right?
You know what?
Agree to disagree.
Agree to disagree.
Exactly.
That's another one right there.
Agree to disagree.
No, Vince, I don't agree to disagree about genocide.
Okay, I'm hanging up before you refuse to agree to agree to disagree.
Establishment media sets on its fighting.
So good luck.
Bullshit we can't afford.
Why is fomenting this?
Watch and see as the jet golf.
The median speeds and jumps the medium.
And hits them head on.
It's the Chimitor Show.
*music*
Joining us now is the editor for the investigative journalism website, The Gray Zone.
He's the author of two books on Israel and Palestine, Goliath and the 51-Day War, as well as the full-length documentary, Killing Gaza.
Please welcome world-famous journalist Max Blumenthal.
Let me just remind people what's going on.
So Benjamin Netanyahu's corruption trial resumes today, right?
Netanyahu's, so his corruption trial, Israeli prosecutor told a court on Monday that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had helped businesses couple to clinch deals worth hundreds of millions of dollars in exchange for favorable press coverage.
So that's kind of amazing.
So that's happening.
So he's getting, so that trial is starting again.
And uh-oh, we have a bit of a distraction.
So now Israel airstrikes in Gaza killed at least 24 Palestinians, including nine children.
Our children are getting killed, says a man who has lost his nephew.
Israel launched 130 airstrikes, wounding 125 people.
At least six Israelis were injured by Hamas rockets.
So let me play this, and then we'll get Max to come in.
So here we are.
Here's the official.
You want to see the official Biden administration response to this?
Here we are.
Thank you, Matt.
I want to ask you about Jerusalem, but talk about what you said about the principle of self-defense.
Does that in any way apply to the Palestinian?
Do they have a right to self-defense?
Do Palestinians have a right to self-defense?
Broadly speaking, Saeed, we believe in the concept of self-defense.
believe it applies to any state.
I don't think that – I certainly wouldn't want my words to be construed as – I want to ask you, Julia, I don't want to harp on this either, but the Israelis killed 13 people just now, including maybe five or six children.
Do you condemn them?
Do you condemn the killing of children?
Said, I'm asking, do you condemn the killing of Palestinian children?
Obviously, and these reports are just emerging, and I understand.
I was just speaking to the team.
I understand we don't have independent confirmation of facts on the ground yet, so I'm very hesitant to get into reports that are just emerging.
Obviously.
Listen, I'm going to wait till the reports come out and say something vague, and then I'm going to make an even vaguer statement on that.
And by the way, whatever somebody says, broadly speaking, that's code for they're not really going to answer your question, just so you know.
And I don't know if I've never seen a guy wish, seem to be wishing more for the invisible cloak from Harry Potter.
That's what it looks like.
But here we go.
Deaths of civilians, be they Israeli or Palestinians, are something we would take very seriously.
Okay.
You're going to know as soon as I read what your answer was, that there's a big problem with it.
You said, well, not a problem.
It just doesn't answer the question.
We believe that it, meaning the right to self-defense, applies to any state.
Well, you see the problem, right?
Yes.
Do you regard Palestine as a state?
I wasn't referring to you.
I joined in the context of the ICC and the U.N. So are you saying that you do not, if it applies to any state, are you saying the Palestinians don't have a right to self-defense?
I was making a broader point not attached to Israel or Palestinians in that case.
So they do have a right to self-defense.
Matt, I'm not in a position to debate the legalities from up here.
Our message is one of de-escalation.
Jesus Christ.
Obviously, I'm just an imperialist shill, obviously.
So, Matt, let me bring you in.
Let me have you.
What do you make of what's happening right now?
What do you make of the fact that he can't even denounce killing children and the fact that Netanyahu's trial is starting again?
Well, let me try to knock out the response of Ned Price first.
He's such a Ned.
I mean, it's like when you're named Jeeves and then you become a butler, you know, Victor, and then Victor, and then you're a nightclub bouncer.
It's like you kind of just grow into your name.
Max, I'm like some wacky media guy.
Anyway, so he's a ned.
He really can't provide a clear answer.
He's like in the perfect position in the Biden administration to waffle on the central human rights and international legal issue of our time.
And you have Tony Blanken, someone who said that he's inherited his support for Israel's strength, who said that at a meeting of the Israel lobby's main arm, AIPAC, a few years ago, as Secretary of State, wagging his finger at countries from Iran to Russia to China about the rules-based international order.
And he uses this term in order to subvert international law.
What that term really means, the rules-based order, is that the United States and its special little allies like Israel or Saudi Arabia, which is responsible with U.S. help for the worst humanitarian crisis in the world in Yemen, exist in a state of legal exception outside of international law.
And so what Ned Price is saying in response to these questions is that he can't address them legally, even though international law is very clear that occupied populations like the Palestinian population do have a right to resist with weapons.
They do have a right to defend themselves.
And it's also very clear that the occupier has no right to move its civilian population into occupied territory.
That's not only illegal under UN Resolution 242.
It is completely illegal under the Geneva Conventions.
And that is what Israel has been proceeding to do.
That is what really lit the fire for this escalation of this long-standing crisis.
And then, yes, you do have Benjamin Netanyahu, the ultimate political opportunist, longest-serving Israeli prime minister, regarded by his supporters as kind of the king of Israel, trying to hold on to the prime minister's office.
And what he's done so far to hold on is he's constructed this coalition government that's completely right-wing.
Usually there'll be, or usually there'll be like, you know, a mix of ultra-Orthodox parties and some centrist party.
Netanyahu has brought in literal fascists who believe that all Palestinians should be ethnically cleansed.
One figure he's brought into the Knesset through his coalition government is Itamar Ben-Gavir, who represents anyone, any Jewish settler in the West Bank who commits a hate crime against a Palestinian or an act of terror, because that's what he himself did as a youth.
So we've seen these sort of this campaign of ethnic cleansing in Jerusalem intensify around the neighborhood of Sheikh Jara.
I can get into detail about that.
But this kind of lit the fire for the escalation between Israel and the Gaza Strip.
Why?
Because the Gaza Strip is basically an open-air prison controlled by some of the only factions within the Palestinian polity that still have the ability to resist and the willingness to resist Israel with weapons.
And Israel is now bombing civilian residential towers.
They brought down a 12-story tower.
Well, that's the same thing.
Let me show that.
Let me show.
So here is here is Hanadi's tower bombing in Gaza.
We'll show you.
God bless you.
No, that's not terrorism.
That's not terrorism at all.
Imagine if Palestinians did that to an Israeli building.
Right, exactly.
I mean, so what you tweeted out was Israel destroyed this residential building with no military significance, just as it blew up several apartment towers in middle-class areas of Gaza in 2014.
The purpose of this terror attack was to guarantee escalation and demonstrate total impunity.
That's a very good point.
And just so you know, the U.S. gives Israel $10 million a day worth of military aid just so it can do things just like that.
And if you now, here's the thing, Max.
Is this real?
So this was tweeted out, and I saw the video.
I can't play it because it has copywritten music underneath it.
But this was tweeted out.
It says, hard to capture how deeply horrifying this video is.
Thousands of Israeli Jews singing about revenge, chanting Yimak Sharam, and may their names be erased, dancing as fire burns on the Temple Mount.
This is genocidal animus towards Palestinians, emboldened and unfiltered.
There's a video of them.
So can you, are you familiar with this?
Yeah, I'm very familiar with it.
And I've witnessed events like that during my time covering Palestine.
It's, you know, I've written about it in my book, Goliath.
And basically what's happening there, I mean, this is the annual Death to Arabs march.
That's what it's essentially is.
It's really the Jerusalem Day march.
And settler nationalist youth, religious nationalist youth rampage through Jerusalem's old city.
Palestinians who are living in the Arab quarter, which is under constant assault, basically have to bar themselves in their homes.
And anyone who's out often gets assaulted.
They chant death to Arabs, rampaging down the street.
And what they're celebrating is the Israeli occupation of Palestine, Israel's victory in the 67 war and its seizure of East Jerusalem and the old city.
Their goal is to ethnically cleanse Palestinians of East Jerusalem, just completely remove them, take Jerusalem for themselves, but particularly that area and the fire that you see there is in the Al-Aqsa compound.
That's Inside the third holiest site in Islam.
And that site is a target of this religious fascist movement, which wants to replace the al-Aqsa compound with the third temple and usher in this kind of apocalyptic moment, this rapturous moment that will bring about the Messiah, the Moshiach.
So this is not just a celebration or a rally.
It is a full-scale campaign to purge Jerusalem of Palestinians.
And not far from there is the Sheikh Jara neighborhood, where we saw for weeks intense protests against the removal of something like a dozen families.
And this has been going on for decades.
I've been a witness to it.
I was a witness to and participant in some of the major protests going back as far as 2010 against these evictions.
And what they're doing is they're saying these Palestinians who've been there since before the state of Israel was even established or who were moved there because they were forced from their homes when the state of Israel was established have no right to be in their homes.
And then the Israeli police just come in, take their belongings out, and minutes later move a settler family into their home, just like that.
And this has been happening again and again.
So these protests were simply about against ethnic cleansing.
And you see this population in Jerusalem, 350,000 Palestinians living under occupation in East Jerusalem, governed by an occupation authority who claims that its judicial system is legitimate, moving them out of their homes, moving them off their property, and literally terrorizing them.
And they're left totally defenseless.
They don't have an army.
And the U.S. rejects their right of self-defense.
So the only resistance factions that are able to defend them are in the Gaza Strip.
They fired rockets to Jerusalem.
And this was taken by them as responsibility to self-protect.
People in Jerusalem, Palestinians in Jerusalem, cheered because they said somebody is sending a message to our occupier that they can't just do this to us with impunity, which they've been doing to us since 1948.
I don't know why this isn't better understood in the United States and why our hypocritical State Department, which is filled with these humanitarian interventionists who constantly invoke R2P, the responsibility to protect against any government or state, particularly in the Middle East, that doesn't align itself with the U.S. and refuses to normalize with Israel, like Syria, for example, or Libya.
They won't allow Palestinians to even defend themselves.
And Israel, when it responds to Palestinians, it's not responding to targets with military value.
It's doing precisely what it has always done to Palestinians, which is to target and terrorize the civilian population with this delusional belief that they will somehow eventually capitulate and the Palestinian question, as they call it, the Palestinian nation will somehow cease to exist and there will no longer be a Palestinian struggle because they will buckle.
Israelis always, if you talk to Jewish Israelis who support Netanyahu or who support the center-left parties, they often will say Palestinians and the Arabs only respect strength.
And they thought that this was over when they began to normalize with the collaborationist, phony Arab monarchies of the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia and Bahrain, these colonial cutouts.
They thought, oh, we're friends with the Arabs.
The Palestinians will just go away.
And now Palestinians are here to say that they're still resisting.
And they're not just resisting in Gaza or Jerusalem.
They're resisting inside what is known as Israel.
They're resisting in cities in the core of Israel where Palestinians who are technically citizens of the state of Israel are having their rights stripped away or being forced to issue loyalty oaths or even having their homes in cities like Lod demolished because often Arab construction is simply not allowed.
They can't get permits to renovate or expand their homes.
And then effectively, Jewish settler populations are not technically settlers are brought in all around them.
I mean, I've seen this, witnessed it, documented it, and I knew it was only a matter of time before this kind of crisis finally developed into kind of like a nationwide Palestinian uprising akin to, it's not an intifada yet, but akin to an intifada.
So I thought this interesting tweet.
It says it's interesting to see Israel supporters in the West make increasingly implausible and tortured justifications for this stuff, while Israelis on the ground are just openly calling for genocide.
Which is why.
Go ahead.
Yeah, I mean, there's video of a deputy.
There are several deputy mayors of Jerusalem.
One of them is affiliated with this fascist group that I mentioned that's in a coalition with Netanyahu.
It's called Otzma Yehudit, or Jewish Power.
And their hero is Meyer Kahana, the assassinated rabbi and fanatic who called from the Israeli Knesset for the total expulsion and ethnic cleansing of all Palestinians.
The deputy mayor of Jerusalem, this deputy mayor, he's been seen in Sheikh Jara openly calling for people to be thrown out of their homes, celebrating police violence against Palestinians.
His name is Ari King.
And how did he get to be deputy mayor?
How did he become popular?
He became popular by basically organizing mobs and campaigns to physically remove Palestinians from their homes so that Jewish settlers could move in in Jerusalem.
I remember when I was actually living in Jerusalem, working on my book, Goliath, back in like 2011, 2010, Ari King had put out ads in local right-wing media looking for strong women because he wanted women to help physically remove Palestinian women from their homes.
And this literal fascist is out in the streets inciting genocide against Palestinians.
We've even seen mainstream Israeli media figures, a guy from Yediot Aranot, which is one of the major newspapers in Israel, say we should delete an entire city in the Gaza Strip after a rocket, a homemade rocket flew out of the Gaza Strip.
This is very common, this genocidal rhetoric, but we have to understand that there is an actual campaign, an official campaign behind it.
And it began even before 1948, but it really began in force in 1948, which is what Palestinians call the Nakba, the catastrophe.
Because in order for Israel to exist as a Jewish state, there has to be a majority of Jewish citizens, a minority of Palestinian non-Jews in a region where most people are Muslim or Christian.
Maximum Jewish population on maximum land, minimum Palestinian population on minimum land.
That's what the Gaza Strip is.
The Gaza Strip, 2 million people crammed into one of the most densely populated places on earth, surrounded by walls, unable to even control their own airspace, surrounded by the Israeli Navy to their west in the Mediterranean, surrounded by cameras, the most heavily surveilled area on earth.
These people are refugees.
They are from what is today Israel.
They were forced off their land by force.
Some of them were literally pushed into the sea in what is now Tel Aviv, the Aman Shia neighborhood.
An entire neighborhood was basically bulldozed after its population was pushed into boats.
They sailed to Lebanon to Gaza and they're there and they are not allowed to return.
They cannot go to Jerusalem.
They cannot go to the now Tel Aviv municipality simply for one reason.
They're not Jewish.
This is the essence of Zionism.
And anyone who is a Zionist believes in this ethno-supremacist, exclusionary philosophy, which is no less contemptible than the white nationalism that gets condemned by the Democratic Party who freaks out about Tucker Carlson's replacement theory, but has nothing to say when Israel is doing precisely the same thing officially in broad daylight.
So it's in some ways, it is a genocidal philosophy.
And it necessitates, or it creates the framework for this endless crisis, which turns into violence because Palestinians are not just going to go away into some dark night.
They're not just going to disappear.
Now, I want to remind people what Israel did to Gaza in 2014, because that was the dividing point for Dave Brubin and I when we were at the Young Turks.
This is what they did.
This is what the Israeli military did to Gaza.
And the person asked, when will the world stand up to this nuclear apartheid colonizer?
So, I mean, what they were doing was literally bombing schools.
And they knew they were.
Like, there were people being interviewed.
They were calling the UN, calling the Israeli military, telling them there's children in this building.
Please don't bomb it.
It's a school.
And they did it anyway.
And there were people who defended that.
And that was our dividing point.
So I just want to point out that the United States, by the way, so they give so much aid to Israel, but it's also decoupled from human rights.
So you can't use that as a reason to be against it.
But anyway, U.S. spending bill five gifts to Israel, an enormous U.S. spending bill that accompanied the COVID-19 relief package contains many financial and political perks for the Israeli government.
So they couldn't give the people of the United States real relief.
They gave them a one-time $1,400 payment, which is not what the rest of the world did.
And they can't even give us health care.
But guess who does have Medicare for all?
Israel.
And guess who does have co-relief?
We're giving it to Israel.
Watch this.
Israel's prime minister Netanyahu, we will continue to attack on Gaza with full force.
Defense Minister Gantz, this is only the beginning.
Breaking, President Biden sent a letter to Palestinian President Abbas amid U.S. efforts to de-escalate the crisis in Gaza and Jerusalem.
And he has, he has he asked Netanyahu to de-escalate, given, you know, him being the main instigator here.
So, Max, could you talk a little bit about so here's another one?
The U.S. has no right to criticize other countries while funding these extremists.
So, talk about the funding that the United States gives to Israel and what that means.
Well, the aid package, the annual $3 billion aid package that the U.S. provides to Israel increased to record levels under Barack Obama, just as Israel during the term of Obama committed the most disproportionate violence against civilians in the Gaza Strip ever.
And somehow it's starting again now that a Democrat's back in office, which is interesting.
Obama's vice president, Biden, who said that if Israel didn't exist, we would have to create it, who has personally declared himself a Zionist.
So it's now $3.8 billion a year, and the money gets channeled back to Texas and Colorado and to Connecticut, anywhere where there are weapons factories, arms manufacturers that make the weapons that Israel uses to incinerate entire multifamily apartment blocks in the Gaza Strip.
I walked through that rubble that you just showed on screen in 2014, Jimmy.
Everyone watching this can watch Maya and Dan Cohen's documentary, Killing Gaza, where we documented the effect of that assault on the Gaza Strip in 2014, which lasted 51 days.
Obama, at every juncture, provided the opportunity for Israel to extend that war and rearmed Israel in the middle of that war.
And prior to the war, because Obama was seeking to mollify Israel to get the Iran deal done, he authorized the shipment of 5,000-pound bunker buster bombs to Israel.
Bunker busters.
I mean, what do you need that for?
They proceeded to use them, along with the regular 2,000-pound guided weapons from USF-15s to blow up four major apartment buildings in the middle of this or three major apartment buildings in the middle of a middle-class area in Gaza City at the end of the war.
My colleague Dan Cohen documented the destruction of the Italian tower.
These aren't military compounds.
These are just giant towers filled with families who are doctors, lawyers.
And, you know, they get a knock before Israel blows up the buildings with these advanced American missiles and planes.
The knock comes in the form of a drone firing a flare into the building, which often kills people.
Then people get calls or text messages.
We are going to blow up your home.
And they get like a few minutes, 20 minutes to gather everything they can before their whole life is destroyed.
And you look at these buildings.
They're 20 stories high, 30 stories high.
I mean, these are hundreds and hundreds of people, people who have struggled their whole lives to have those apartments, and it's all gone.
And I arrived a few days after the Zafir Tower in the Al-Rimal district of Gaza City, very well-to-do middle-class district was destroyed.
And people were just sleeping in tents next to it.
They had been, the Nakba had returned, and it was 1948 all over again.
Palestinians are constantly living out the Nakba of 1948 through these military assaults, these home removals.
And so it's beyond apartheid.
It is naked, ethnic cleansing, and then the human warehousing of a population that Israel and its patron in the United States have deemed surplus humanity under the rules-based international order.
They don't fit into humanity because for Israel to really treat them as true citizens with human rights, they have to be Jewish, and they're not.
So the logic of Zionism mandates these campaigns, along with the siege of Gaza.
The siege of Gaza is not only enforced with United States weapons to support the Israeli military, but dolphin-class submarines and cruiser boats that are supplied by the government of Germany.
Why does the government of Germany give Israel these attack boats?
The Dolphin submarines, by the way, are retrofitted to fire nuclear weapons if Israel wants to attack Iran.
Why?
Why are they giving them those boats?
As reparations for the Holocaust.
So as reparations for a war in which a state declared that it determined what the rules-based international order was, that it could invade whoever it wanted, that it existed in a state of legal exception, and that it would embody an ethno-supremacist ideology as it proceeded to ethnically cleanse neighboring populations and internally colonize its area as reparations for doing that to Jews in Europe.
It is providing them with the means to warehouse surplus humanity in what amounts to a gigantic concentration camp in the Gaza Strip.
And my friend Ali Abunima on German state TV, Deutsche Vela today, asked, when will German elites and the German people stop making Palestinians pay for the crimes that Germany committed against Jews in Europe?
And that's a question we need to ask today, because it's not just the United States doing this.
It's also the EU and NATO.
I was talking with someone who supports Israel in this position, and they often say, well, it depends on where you come in in the story.
You know, the Palestinians didn't want peace.
The leaders of the Palestinians didn't want peace.
And I'm like, you know, there's a when you're the occupier, when you have much greater force, power, and you have complete control of the situation, you have greater moral responsibility than the people you're occupying.
You have the responsibility to make sure they're taken care of.
And so anyway, so I'm having this argument with them.
And somehow Putin comes up.
He's like, oh, that Putin's a thug.
I just can't.
So as someone who was in Gaza in 2014, what do you say to someone who, with a straight face, will say Putin is somehow worse than someone else?
Well, I mean, the issue is, you know, who wants peace?
Palestinians in 1988, the Palestine Liberation Organization recognized Israel's right to exist.
What they wouldn't do and which the U.S. constantly demands they do, whether it's a Democrat or Republican administration, Barack Obama demanded they do this, is recognize Israel as a Jewish state.
So I would ask Obama, do you recognize the United States as a white Christian nation?
Would Jewish Americans like myself recognize the U.S. as a white state or a Christian nation?
Hell no.
That's not how democracy works.
But the U.S. makes that onerous anti-democratic demand of Palestinians and they can't accept it.
Palestinians then, under their leadership, what became the Palestinian Authority, which is now this kind of collaborationist force, they accepted the Oslo Accords.
You know, Arafat shaking hands with Yitzhak Rabin, who had ethnically cleansed Palestinians in 1948, the bone crusher of the first Intifada.
He implemented the bone-breaking policy against youth who threw rocks and got hailed as this great peacemaker.
Arafat shook his hand on the White House lawn and they signed this peace accord.
And what did Palestinians get?
Something like 200,000 settlers in the next five or six years.
What did they get in October 2000 when they began protesting without arms, without suicide bombing against this constant infringement on their freedom against the growth of the occupation, hundreds of thousands of settlers being moved into their midst?
They got 1 million bullets fired by the Israeli army, according to the Israeli Defense Ministry in October 2000 to push the Palestinians to violence.
And every time that Palestinians try to appeal to the sensibilities of Western liberals, like Thomas Friedman, who called for Palestinians to stage a march to the walls that hold them into their ghettos in the New York Times, every time they do that, Western liberals and the Democrats that represent them turned a blind eye.
They turned their backs.
Palestinians had the great march of return in the Gaza Strip 2019, 2018.
Waves of young people walked towards this militarized frontier, which I've passed through myself, and you have, you have, you're totally defenseless there.
And they just got shot.
They got their legs shot out.
They got shot in the face.
They got tear gassed.
And nobody in Washington said or did shit.
So every time they try, I've seen it in the West Bank, the popular struggle of farmers against the separation wall being built through their land.
They would stage these unarmed protests where at most they would throw rocks at soldiers.
They'd get shot and killed.
And nothing would change, no matter which administration was in power.
And there was no like squad in Congress that can do anything about this.
So what who wants peace?
And what is the benefit for Palestinians if they just embrace some kind of pacifist campaign?
What do they get?
They get nothing.
So Palestinians in 2007, this is Palestinian civil society, not just inside Palestine, but in the refugee camps in Lebanon, Syria, where people can't even be on their land and across the West.
They recognized that they had no deterrence.
They had no way of stopping these walls being built, the siege of Gaza.
And they needed something to deter Israel.
So they came up with the Boycott Divestment and Sanctions Campaign, BDS, which calls on everyone, me and you, especially me and you, people like us in the West, to boycott Israeli goods, to organize divestment campaigns like the campaigns on college campuses, which urge university administrators to divest their holdings in businesses that do that that are active or participate in the Israeli occupation, all according to international law.
And they call on legislators to sanction Israel, to, for example, not give them the spare parts for the F-15s that are now bombing families' apartment buildings in the Gaza Strip.
This is what we can do.
This is what our legislators need to call for.
Rashida Tlaib has endorsed BDS.
AOC, not so much.
She's not going there.
Now, why?
Now, also, now, I've heard Chomsky is not a supporter of BDS.
I haven't looked into this.
Do you know what his rationale is for not being forced?
Is that true, by the way?
Do you know?
And do you know what his rationale is?
Yeah, I mean, he wrote a piece in the nation several years ago, kind of, I would say, undercutting an argument for BDS without offering any other alternative for putting a price tag on Israel's relentless abuse of Palestinians or deterring the violence.
And he just kind of offered arguments for why it wouldn't work.
And it's definitely, I wouldn't call it a Hail Mary, but it's, you know, you're swimming uphill when you're doing BDS in the West.
We don't really live in democracies where the people are going to have a say on what our Congress does vis-a-vis Israel-Palestine AIPAC kind of decides, but it helps offset the violence.
It's a great teaching tool, and it has definitely, it has definitely shaken the Israeli apartheid establishment to the core.
It certainly scares me why Chomsky would do that.
I think he favors a two-state solution.
It was very unhelpful.
And I just don't know why he did that, but he did do so.
He's done a lot of inexplicable shit lately, especially come out with absolutely an ahistorical view of having a vote for Medicare for all on the floor.
He thinks that somehow that would set back.
There's no historical precedent that he could point to that would confirm what he's saying, that actually fighting and having a vote on something popular sets it back.
There's no historical precedent for that.
He just pulled it out of his ass.
Just like the psych, I asked the same question.
So if you're against BDS, what are you for?
What are people, what mechanism do people have to hold Israel and our government account?
What can we do?
They never have an answer for that.
So until Bernie Sanders condemns BDS and he's done it on Twitter and I said, okay, Bernie, name one thing that you will do to hold Israel accountable and prevent, you know, and what can we do?
Name one thing.
What recourse do we have except BDS?
I don't see what's so bad about it.
He's never answered that question.
Of course.
And it worked.
I'm old enough to remember when we did that to South Africa and it worked.
And I mean, it clearly worked there.
Another really depressing trend is that the states that have traditionally defended Palestine or refused to normalize with Israel, whether it's Venezuela and South America or Syria, which is really the core Arab state that refuses to normalize, which These states have come under unprecedented imperial attack over the past 10 years.
And you have organizations like Human Rights Watch, this billionaire-backed human rights group, which is willing to say that Israel's guilty of the crime of apartheid, but they put the bulk of their energy into serving as a force multiplier for the State Department in supporting regime change in Venezuela, in Syria,
and cooking up phony human rights reports to demonize these countries and to split and to undercut the anti-imperialist current, which is so important to defending Palestine because Palestine will never be free from this kind of Israeli state terror as long as an American empire exists.
It's not going to change overnight here through Congress.
It's going to be, there's going to need to be a shift in the international order where the U.S. is no longer able to dictate what's taking place in the Middle East.
And it's just so depressing when these human rights NGOs spend the bulk of their energy trying to retrench American control over the region.
And then for a second, they pull back and say, oh, well, by the way, Israel is an apartheid state, in case it wasn't obvious 30 years ago.
Hey, you know, we no longer have an Amazon link because we're not doing that.
We're not playing that game.
But here's another great way you can help support the show: you become a premium member.
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Hey, David Axelrod's on the phone.
Hello.
This is David Axelrod, author, believer, host of the Axe Files political podcast, director and professor of politics at the University of Chicago.
That's in Illinois.
Senior political commentator at CNN.
Head body language correspondent at MSNBC.
And senior collapsing balcony expert on Inside Edition.
Collapsing balcony expert on Inside Edition.
Jimmy, I not only teach an extracurricular program designed to spark passion for politics and public service, I also instruct people on the dangers of balcony parties.
I ask the hard questions: Is your balcony a danger zone?
Are you putting yourself at risk by partying too hardy?
Could your next balcony party literally become a prelude to death?
We don't have a balcony.
Well, to hell with you, then.
Jimmy, you'll never guess whom I interviewed on David Axelrod's The Axe Files this week.
President Joe Biden's press secretary.
What did what did your interview reveal?
The P in her last name is silent.
So if you wanted to use her name in a phrase containing words beginning with the hard P sound like politics, patriotism, and passion, you'd be completely shit out of luck.
So what did you do?
I had to resort to the lowest common denominator and talk about the issues.
For instance, I found out what's happening at the border is not a crisis, but a cyclical challenge.
Yeah.
Want to learn more?
Hear the pod.
Stew it up.
It's a good pod.
I like to exercise while potting.
I have a pod bod.
What else did Jen Saki say?
You mean Jen Saki with a silent pee?
Yes.
At POTUS, I mean, Biden hates acronyms.
He's a storyteller, always looking to tell the story in an accessible way without all the complicated jargon that can interfere with one's journey.
What exactly does that mean?
It means he really can't remember shit.
It literally takes him all day to figure out what RD means.
It's very recentering for the president of the United States to think that the average American living in the U.S., I mean, the United States, doesn't know what RD means.
I mean, seriously, what does RD mean, Jimmy?
Research and development.
Wow.
Right now I'm doing that way over my head gesture with my hand, Jimmy.
What is this research you speak of?
And what does development mean?
Am I even pronouncing that correct, you big egghead?
I do admit I can get a bit esoteric at times.
We're not in the Trump administration any longer.
So you can stop with the big words.
Democrats no longer have to use multi-syllabics like hydroxychloroquine and that get everybody all confused.
It's truly a return to normalcy.
All part of building back better with passion.
So David, what's coming up next on the hacks on tap?
The pressure mounts on Liz Cheney.
Will she survive if the GOP?
Let me start over.
Will she survive if the grand old party caucuses to hold a secret ballot on her fate?
Find out on the next Hacks on Tap with the electrifying, smartly dressed Robert Gibbs and the always mesmerizing Karl Rose.
We'll talk caucus and then some.
This is David Axelrod signing off saying, you only go around once in this life, so grab for all the gusto you can get.
Ch-ch-ch-ch-ch.
Ch-ch-ch-ch.
I'm here with world-famous protest song singer and journalist Max Blumenthal, author of Goliath and the 51-day war, as well as the full-length documentary, Killing Gaza.
Where can people see Killing Gaza?
I think we have a site, killingGaza.com.
You can rent it on YouTube and Vimeo, unless they like block it from existence.
But you can rent it for three bucks, buy it for $5.
Also on YouTube.
Yeah.
Okay.
YouTube and Vimeo.
So that's great.
Everybody should do that.
Yeah, if you really want to see what life under siege in the Gaza Strip is like, we did our best to kind of convey it without really inserting ourselves much.
Yeah, it's a little jaw-dropping.
It's a little anyway.
Richard Hall tweets out: you really have to trawl and dig to find coverage of Israel-Palestine in the U.S. media that doesn't dehumanize Palestinians in a dozen different ways before you get past the subhead.
So here's just an example: Palestinian health officials in Gaza Strip say 20 people, including nine children, have been killed in fighting with Israel.
So, of course, how are the children fighting?
I think those kids were in bed.
Yeah.
So, as they're blowing up their apartments.
And so, here's video: Palestinians, Israeli police clash at Jerusalem's El, how do you, how do you pronounce that?
Al-Aqsa.
Al-Aqsa Compound.
Okay, so here's the video.
Okay, so here's the video.
So, now Compound, it's called a mosque, aka a church.
So, that's one person's take.
And let me just show you what the New York Times has been doing.
So, the New York Times has been rewording its stuff.
And this is so they posted an article.
It says, after raid on Aksa Mosque, rockets from Gaza and Israel Israeli airstrikes, Gaza officials say 20 people were killed in the airstrikes.
The escalation followed clashes between the Israeli police and Palestinian protesters at the El Aska Mosque in Jerusalem.
And so, someone named Editing the Gray Lady has been following the New York Times.
So, this is they're changing the words.
So, this is how it was originally.
The police entered the compound and Gaza militants fired rubber-tipped bullets.
Anger was already building in response to rockets towards Jerusalem and the looming expulsion of several Israeli police fought with Palestinian families from their homes, protesters in the city, and escalate.
So, do you see the stuff they're cutting out?
So, they're cutting this stuff out, and now they're going back to Gaza militants fired rockets toward Jerusalem, and the Israeli police fought with Palestinians, protesters.
So, do you see what they're doing?
So, that's and so this person says every day it's more and more painful that this isn't this account isn't satire.
So, that's really happening.
This isn't satirical.
That's really happening.
And predictable, horrific edits, yet still shocking and disgusting.
That's a feat.
So, were you aware of that?
The New York Times is doing that, Max.
And is that so shocking to you?
Yeah, I remember in 2014, there was the beach massacre.
It was one of the first massacres that the assault on Gaza.
And basically, a bunch of young men were on the beach in the Gaza Strip and they had set up a screen and some chairs to watch the World Cup.
And an Israeli missile struck and killed them.
And I think like 12 were killed, lots of injured.
And the New York Times headline was something like, an Israeli missile finds a beachfront World Cup watch party.
Like it finds it found them.
Like it got lost on, it was like on a birthright Israel trip and it got lost and just found them.
Like, where are I?
Can you guys help me get back to my hotel?
So, I mean, there's a long tradition at the New York Times, and everything in mainstream U.S. media refers to stone-throwing Palestinians and a nuclear-armed versus a nuclear-armed military rampaging through their holiest religious compound with sound bombs and tear gas as clashes.
They don't really have another way of describing it.
They're so afraid.
I mean, there are two factors here that I see.
Number one, there's a very powerful Israel media lobby that torments, that seeks to torment any journalist that takes on the issue of Palestine and promotes in advances even a remotely fair and balanced narrative on Israel-Palestine, like groups like Camera, for example.
And that frightens a lot of mainstream people who want to advance in their careers.
But then you just have this culture of this pro-Israel culture, particularly in the New York Times, where this might, I don't know, shock some of your viewers to know, but the New York Times Jerusalem Bureau actually, the bureau chief, traditionally lives in a home that was seized from a very notable Palestinian family in the neighborhood of Katamon in Jerusalem.
They were ethnically cleansed in 1948.
It's the home of Hassan Karmi, who was a BBC Arabic broadcaster before he was forced from his home.
That house was purchased by Thomas Friedman in the 1980s.
The family is unable to return because Israel passed a law in 1950 called the Absentee Property Act, which mandates that any Palestinian who left their home in 1948 cannot return and the state gets to take the home.
And who do they give it to?
You know who?
People who can be Israeli citizens, Jewish people, including Jewish Americans.
And who's worked out of the Jerusalem Bureau besides Thomas Friedman, who worked out of there in the late 80s?
Ethan Bronner, he was the bureau chief for a long time.
And he had a son who, while he was bureau chief, went into the Israeli army into a combat division.
And his assistant editor, Isabel Kirshner, also had a son in the Israeli army.
And one of their fact checkers had a child in the Israeli army.
So can you imagine like if the New York Times, first of all, they're working out of an ethnically cleansed Palestinian home in Jerusalem and then they have children in the Israeli army.
And this is considered totally acceptable within the culture of the New York Times.
Can you imagine if one of them had a child, if there was a Palestinian, one of their assistants who had a child in a Palestinian armed faction, the scandal that that would cause and how they would be forced to resign.
So there's a long-standing double standard at the New York Times.
They're always approaching this crisis from the Israeli perspective.
And in some, in many cases, they are Israelis themselves who are writing the articles.
Yeah, I mean, and then you have like just, look at who's allowed to write the op-eds at the New York Times.
I mean, just the none of them.
Why is there never like an Arab Muslim op-ed writer, like a regular columnist at the New York Times?
It's like people like Nicholas Christoph, who said, he explicitly said Palestinians should not be, we cannot support Palestinians throwing stones.
He explicitly said that after attending a Palestinian protest.
But here's a guy who supports every war the U.S. wants to wage to supposedly save a civilian population, who said that Libyans are greeting the U.S. with love after they destroyed their country, who called for U.S. airstrikes on Syria.
He loves all those wars, but Palestinians aren't allowed to throw a single stone.
That's the culture of the New York Times.
It's the culture of the Washington Post.
It's the culture of the LA Times.
And there's just no exception within U.S. mainstream media.
So look at this tweet.
If you want to understand the CNN Middle East coverage, just know that Wolf Blitzer got his start as an intern at AIPAC and Anderson Cooper worked at the CIA.
And if you want to see Jake Tapper's coverage, it's beyond bizarre how, I mean, I understand you're going to do propaganda for Israel, but oh my God, could you at least try to hide it a little?
But they don't.
It's just unbelievably criminal what they're doing.
Have you ever seen Wolf Blitzer's debate with Norman Finkelstein?
No, I haven't.
When Wolf Blitzer was a researcher for APAC, he debated Finkelstein in a public form.
And I mean, he gets ripped to shreds.
Finkelstein completely curb stomps him.
But Blitzer's arguments about why Israel should be able to do whatever he wants are, I mean, he makes Netanyahu look like a genius, like a sophisticated genius.
So that's, yeah, that's CNN's guy.
He's just always on in the daytime.
And then you have Jake Tapper, someone who just personally is very attached to Zionism and Israel.
And he loves to attack women of color who are not.
He's always, he's just obsessively attacking Ilhan Omar, Linda Sarsour, whoever, and calling them anti-Semites on Twitter.
He just can't control himself.
It's almost like this strange fetish, this fetishistic obsession.
Palestinians are Semites, correct?
You could say that.
I mean, what do you mean you could?
Could you or couldn't you?
I mean, I'm dumb.
I don't know.
They are a Semitic people.
Palestinians in Bethlehem are also direct descendants of the apostles.
I mean, they have a direct lineage to the original Christians of that area.
And yet the Christians who support Israel, Christian Zionists, don't even regard them as Christians.
So there are all these contradictions in how we see Palestinians.
Okay.
And Anthony Bourdain was given an award just for kind of acknowledging the plight of the Palestinians.
Do you remember that?
Yeah.
Yeah.
It was like he went there and acknowledged that they're like human beings who like wear pants and he got lauded.
I mean, that's how low the bar is.
And he even kind of says so.
Here, I'll play it for you.
Here's what he said.
I'm very, very honored for this award, the Impact Voices of Courage and Conscience media award.
There was, however, very little courage, and one would hope an ordinary amount of conscience at work in producing our Israel-Palestine episode of Parts Unknown.
Very little courage and just an ordinary amount of conscience.
That's what he called it.
And he got it a big award for it.
So he knew he wasn't taking credit for doing anything big or dealing.
He was just like, I just happen to show up and have like be a normal person, and this is outrageous.
So there's Anthony Bourdain being a solid dude.
Anything else you want to say, Max, about what's happening or the media coverage or anything?
Well, I think we're looking at the beginning of a long, longer horror.
And, you know, I think it's important to keep the focus on our media, but to also not feel so disempowered.
And that's what BDS boycott investment in sanctions allows us to do.
And there will be, there was a very large protest outside the White House today.
It wasn't really outside the White House because it's like completely fortified.
They just won't get rid of those fences.
And Biden's in there staring at a blank wall.
Lincoln's authorizing more weapons shipments.
And they're just letting this happen.
This is happening because the United States allows it to happen.
BDS is the one thing that we can do here in the U.S. and elsewhere in the West to actually try to get in the way.
So we should be demanding that if you have a progressive representative, we should be demanding that they endorse BDS and put the stamp of legitimacy on this call from Palestinian civil society.
And that means AOC.
That means Jamal Bowman.
That means Corey Bush.
These members of the squad have not endorsed BDS.
It also means your local city council members.
But it's something we can do.
BDS is, I know BDS bothers them because there's a big pushback against it, right?
I mean, Abby Martin and other people have had their rights taken away because they won't sign a loyalty pledge basically to Israel.
Well, yeah, it helps expose the farce of free speech in the West and in the U.S. as well.
Yeah, Abby filing a lawsuit against the state of Georgia for trying to force her to sign an oath before speaking at a Georgia state university that she would not advance BDS.
She had to basically sign a speech oath to be muzzled.
Roger Waters, there was an attempt to prevent him from performing in Long Island because he had supported BDS.
I believe that was supported by Andrew Cuomo.
Cuomo has advanced bills that would basically ban businesses from refusing to do business with the state of Israel or its occupation.
These are attacks on direct attacks on the First Amendment, and they're passing in state after state, legislature after legislature, while the U.S. goes around, Lincoln goes around advancing the rules-based international order and claiming the U.S. is some bastion of freedom.
So it's not just the hypocrisy on Assange.
It's that at home, private citizens are having their speech muzzled simply because they are disgusted by seeing Palestinians be ethnically cleansed and bombed into smithereens in an open-air prison.
So BDS, BDS, almost a BDSM.
BDSM is hurting them.
I bet that does hurt.
BDSM also hurts.
BDSM also hurts.
It can hurt everyone if you don't do it properly.
Is there any safe word?
Now, when you do BDS, is there a safe word?
Hey, I am done boycotting.
Stop the boycotting.
The safe word is liberation.
You know, when Palestinians are finally free, there's no more BDS.
And what BDS does is it removes the sense of normalcy that Israelis in Tel Aviv have, that they think that they can just continue to go into army service and continue to vote for these murderous politicians and continue to support the apartheid structure of the state and then exist in a city that's facing Europe,
that feels very much like a part of Europe, and they get to go have concerts with top pop stars and pretend that they exist outside of the occupation.
That's really 15 or 20 minutes away, that Palestinians can never escape.
That's the point of it.
So if some major pop star wants to perform in Tel Aviv, they're going to hear from BDS advocates.
And in many cases, they do not show up.
And people in Tel Aviv have to grapple with the fact.
This is what white Afrikaners in South Africa also had to grapple with when their Springboks rugby team was unable to find any venue to play in outside of South Africa because no one wanted to collaborate with apartheid.
This is what Israel needs to experience.
And this is the peaceful appeal.
This is a peaceful appeal to Western sensibilities.
It's the olive branch that Arafat offered in one hand at the UN.
And in the other hand, he held a rifle.
And he said, that's the alternative.
And so today we're seeing the alternative.
We're seeing the rifle because justice delayed is justice denied.
And when injustice enters, when injustice appears, the sword enters the world.
That's what We learn in our traditions, and that's what we're seeing play as very basic.
So, BDS is just a basic part, something everyone can do.
And it's treated as anti-Semitic Nazism and terrorism by our mainstream Democratic politicians.
Yeah, it is considered that, but don't listen to them because they're corrupted and bought.
Max Blumenthal, the editor of The Gray Zone.
Everybody, check out The Gray Zone, also the author of two books on Israel and Palestine, Goliath, and the 51-day war, as well as the documentary Killing Gaza, which is available on YouTube.
Max Blumenthal, thank you very much for making time for us and informing everybody about what's happening in Gaza and Israel.
Thanks a lot for speaking up, Jimmy.
Thanks for having me.
My pleasure.
President Joe Biden's calling me.
Hello.
Hey, mom, it's Joe Biden.
I'm standing in the Oval Office with a guy who says he's your son.
He's your Secretary of Labor.
Happy Mother's Day, you mother.
Be proud.
Your son, if he is your son, was confirmed as labor secretary by an overwhelming majority of the Senate.
And that's what you call the stamp of approval.
Hello?
Is anyone there?
Pick up the phone for fuck's sake.
Okay, fine.
So long.
President Biden.
Hey, man.
Fist bumped Eliz Chaney, a fine mother.
The beacon of light and truth in the Republican Party.
Fist bump across the aisle.
Meet in the middle.
I've always said that.
She symbolizes the truth seekers of this great country.
She did a very brave and truthful thing.
Oh, what?
What's that?
By courageously siding with the party currently running the government.
And I welcome all Republicans to do the same.
Why?
Because it's the best way to deal with the force to vote people.
I mean, what in the heck does force to vote mean anyway?
Anybody?
It's simply, in simple terms, it means do your job.
And what in HC double toothpicks is that supposed to mean for the God's sake?
We're not doing our jobs.
Don't you see us in front of the cameras every day fighting to give you a few months of Cobra?
You don't want it?
That's showing good money after bad son.
There's hungry kids in China going to bed every day without Cobra.
Maybe we should send your Cobra to them instead.
How'd you like that, you ungrateful bunch of kids?
You know, so many other countries have single payer.
Why can't we?
Because it's candy.
Yeah.
And secondly, it's just like that Noam Chonsky guy said on your show about Medicare for all.
He said it's candy.
Yeah, he did.
I'm sorry, but why do you believe Medicare for All is candy like Noam Chomsky does?
Because it makes you look like a dumb kid for bringing it up.
See?
All you want is your candy.
Candy.
Well, candy's for children.
We're the adults in the room, and trust us, we know what we're doing, man.
And what are you doing?
About what?
About what?
Hey, you know, there's a lot more to that phone call, but we don't have time in today's podcast.
How do you hear the entire phone call?
You got to become a premium member.
Go to JimmyDoorComedy.com, sign up.
It's the most affordable premium program in the business.
Today's show is written by Ron Placone, Mark Van Landowitz, Steph Zamorano, Jim Earl, Mike McRae, and Roger Rittenhouse.
All the voices performed today by the one and the only of the inimitable, Mike McRae, who can be found at MikeMcRae.com.
That's it for this week.
you be the best you can be, and I'll keep being me.
Don't freak out.
Do not freak.
Do not freak.
Do not freak out.
Don't bring out.
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