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Oct. 1, 2024 - Judging Freedom - Judge Andrew Napolitano
36:01
Cpt. Matt Hoh: Is Peace Possible?
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Hi, everyone.
Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom.
Today is Tuesday, October 1st, 2024.
Our dear friend Matt Ho joins us now.
Matt, thank you very much for your time, as always.
I want to talk to you at some length on the morality, lawfulness, lack thereof, of the assassination of Nassan Hasarala, ordered from inside the UN building itself.
By Prime Minister Netanyahu.
But before we get there to the breaking news, let's look at a clip from our friends at CNBC.
This is showing Iranian missiles being aimed at Tel Aviv.
And you'll see that several of them got through.
They actually escaped the so-called Iron Dome and struck some of their targets.
You'll see this in a minute.
The arrows that you see were added.
By producer Chris to show exactly which ones are getting through.
How significant is it that the Iranian missiles evade the so-called Iron Dome defense of the Israeli government?
It's incredibly significant.
This is a huge shock.
To Israel and to its supporters, particularly the United States, the fact that Israel has been able to launch an attack and we have yet to see the effectiveness, but the fact that, you know, there are plenty of videos online right now showing multiple, many Iranian missiles making impact demonstrates that Israel does not have this impunity.
They are susceptible to attack and that Those who scoffed at the Iranians in April, if we remember the last Iranian attack on Israel, Judge, was last April, and the Iranians gave three days notice, and then they sent their oldest inventory at Israel.
They sent 300 drones and cruise missiles and ballistic missiles, most of them very old stock.
I mean, in fact, it was so telegraphed.
That the Iranians video, they broadcast the firing of the drones at Israel, knowing that those drones had a six-hour flight time.
I mean, so the purpose of those warning shots by Iran were just not understood.
And were mostly and mainly mocked.
By Israel and the United States and others in the West who believe in their superiority, particularly their technological superiority.
We saw how well Israel's technological superiority worked on October 7th.
And here we have another example of that where you have multiple missiles getting through.
We don't know what the targets are yet.
I heard earlier that when the Americans earlier today issued these warnings that Iran would conduct an attack on Israel, that the targets would be IDF bases, primarily air bases, as well as the Mossad headquarters, and so not striking civilian populations.
Unlike the IDF, the Ukrainian military is seeking to avoid hitting civilians.
You know, seems to be the case.
But the issue with the Israelis, the Israeli conduct of war, their concept of war, how they carry it out, civilian casualties are part of it.
Killing civilians is part and parcel of how the Israeli military conducts itself.
It's part of Israeli warfare.
There's no distinction between killing civilians and the military.
They are as equal and as worthy targets as military targets because that's Israel's doctrine.
And that's been Israel's doctrine throughout its history.
Is there any other country that has this doctrine?
Because that is in utter defiance of the laws of war and of treaties to which Israel is a signatory.
I don't know of any state that acts in that way.
Certainly you could point to, say, the conduct of both Russia and the United States and Syria, where they both just completely devastated and destroyed Syrian cities as they fought al-Qaeda and Islamic State.
You know, particularly, say, the U.S. Air Force and the U.S. Navy, from 2014 through 2017 or so, our air forces demolished every city in western and northern Iraq that the Islamic State had occupied.
So you see that type of brutality in the warfare of all states.
But in the sense of that, civilians are the target.
You know, civilians are what we are aiming to hit because our policy, and this relates to what was called, or what is called, Israel's iron wall policy, is that we are going to be so brutal, we're going to be so heavy-headed, that our actions, our vengeance, is in and of itself the ends.
And also, you have to remember as well that what we've seen occur, say, in Lebanon, which follows on what we've seen occur in Gaza, is what we've seen occur in the West Bank.
This deliberate targeting of civilian infrastructure, including residential buildings, is meant to terrorize the population because the Israelis see that as a legitimate war aim in itself, and they actually have a doctrine for that, the Dahiya Doctrine, which, of course, as many people know now, Dahiya is the part of Beirut that Israel has been bombing.
For the last week, killing and wounding and burying under the rubble thousands upon thousands of Lebanese.
The Dehia Doctrine comes out of the 2006 invasion of Lebanon by Israel when the Israelis bombed that same part of Beirut in the same fashion.
And this established this policy within Israeli war making that destroying civilians is a key part of their military plan for Israel.
I want us to listen to it.
You hear the Israeli cameraman wailing in Hebrew.
We ran it through translation.
Oh, no.
Let's hear it and watch it, Chris.
Let's hear it.
Matt, can you tell what it's being struck or at least what is being aimed at?
No, I mean, it's hard, Judge, right?
Because of the camera angle and the distance.
I mean, some of those strikes look like they line up on top of each other, right?
But that could just be the way the camera angle and the distance and everything else.
Just to be very clear, is each one of those yellow bursts at the horizon a direct hit?
That's what it certainly looks like.
It's hard to tell judge, right?
When particularly when you're seeing the video of, But what happens is the interceptors, whether Israelis have three different levels of interceptors.
The Iron Dome is more the short range.
The David Sling, which is equivalent to our Patriots, the medium range.
And they have the Arrow, which is the Arrow system.
This is the one that's supposed to be taking out these ballistic missiles.
Oftentimes, you'll see the video of these, and you'll see these explosions in the sky.
You'll see things fall, and they explode again.
Oftentimes, that's just the fragments, the shrapnel, the body of the missile that was hit by an interceptor.
But those certainly look like they are direct hits as if those missiles are striking the targets that they were intended to be striking.
But also, too, you definitely have some missiles that are going to be.
And those fragments, that shrapnel, the bodies of the missiles are going to fall wherever.
And so what it looks like is you're going to see if there's any civilian casualties, and there probably will be, although we have to note the Israelis have a very good and effective civil defense system.
So as soon as they had the warning, they would have blown their sirens and Israeli citizens would have gotten into the shelters that are near their homes and their businesses and their schools and whatnot.
Civilian casualties, more than likely it's going to come from these missiles being hit by the interceptors breaking apart in the air and falling to the ground and falling wherever they may.
Tell us what the Iron Dome is.
I mean, contrary to the impression of some people in the government, it's not a dome.
No, the Iron Dome and then, of course, these other systems, again, the David Sling and the Arrow, and progressively for different types, longer range, higher altitude missiles.
The Iron Dome is the one we hear most of.
That was essentially the most popularized one, the one that became well established in our hexagon that the media reported on, that our politicians became enthralled with.
And the Iron Dome is essentially a system that allows Israel to shoot down incoming rockets and missiles, particularly shorter range ones, unguided missiles, the Katusha rockets that you hear so much about that dominate most of the attacks on Israel over the last decades, these unguided rockets that predate the Second World War, I think so.
They really are.
You are essentially hitting a bullet in the sky with another bullet.
And so the technology involved in all this is really remarkable.
And up until several years ago or however long, the technology wasn't feasible.
I mean, people in our own, in the United States, we understand this.
We know this.
How long has it been since Ronald Reagan proposed the Strategic Defense Initiative or Star Wars and the idea of being able to hit?
A missile with another missile is incredibly hard.
Now, the issue is, and this is why this type of missile defense is folly, and the person really to talk about this is to get Scott Ritter on here and have Scott talk about this.
But the idea with missile defense is that your missile defense is always going to be trying to play catch-up to the actual missiles, so that once you get a missile defense in place, well, then your opponent's just going to make a missile that's faster or that can maneuver.
And that's essentially what we may be seeing here.
We may be seeing Iranian ballistic missiles, their most modern ones, being used for the first time that are simply too fast and can maneuver in a manner that evades the Israeli air defense systems.
So that might be what we're witnessing here.
But we have to, you know, there's the implications of all this, where this goes.
But certainly these missiles getting through, unless there's some real good explanation.
Such as some sergeant in the IDF headquarters tripped over the power cord and knocked out the whole system, right?
You know, and that's why the system isn't performing the way it's supposed to be performing.
It's an easy mix to it.
You know, if that's not the case, then the Israelis, and by extension the Americans, have a real problem here.
Because the Iranians have a lot of these missiles.
And the built-in flaw is there's always going to be debris.
There's always going to be debris.
Always going to be debris, which itself can be fatal and even catastrophic in terms of starting fires and other conflagrations.
Right.
The one person who was killed in April's attack by Iran and Israel was, if I remember correctly, a young girl, and she was killed by debris.
So it's oftentimes the civilians, the people who are not targeted, the innocents.
I think also, too, in Jordan, somebody was killed by an Israeli drone that was shot down over Jordan.
What would be interesting to see, Judge, too, is it's not just the air defense system of Israel, but it's the American, the coalition air defense in the region that may not have been able to effectively defeat these attacks.
Because remember, you go back to April.
The majority of Iranian missiles, drones, and cruise missiles that were shot down came from the U.S. and its allies flying out of air bases in Jordan and Saudi Arabia, in Qatar and UAE, also by our Patriot Air Defense Missile Systems.
So what happened there?
How come the U.S. and the Brits and the Jordanians and so forth weren't in disguise shooting these things down?
Quite possibly because they can't shoot them down because these types of ballistic missiles you can't defeat.
Via our fighter aircraft.
So it'd be interesting in the next day or two to get an understanding of not only what the Iranians hit, why the Israelis didn't respond as well to it as everyone expects them to, but what happened to all those American fighter squadrons in the region?
What happened to all our Patriot batteries there?
We supposedly knew about this early today.
We gave hours of warning to the Israelis that this attack was going to happen.
So what happened there?
How come the American air defense in the region didn't respond in the way it did in April?
And we haven't even broached, Judge, at all the strategic reasons for this.
Why did Iran conduct this attack?
What does that mean?
Let's go there, because right after a very, very antagonistic and bellicose speech to an empty General Assembly filled with employees of the Israeli consulate, They busted in the American Congress into the gallery.
Wouldn't surprise me, although I didn't see any standing ovations.
He left the podium, went to an office, an Israeli office, in the building.
And ordered a murder.
A federal crime and a state crime.
As if some mafia Don had ordered somebody assassinated in Sicily.
Instead, he ordered somebody assassinated in Beirut and then the murder was carried out.
That's what started this.
The person murdered, of course, was Hassan Nasrallah.
Your take on the impunity and bellicosity with which Netanyahu behaved in New York.
We come back to this so often, Judge, the propaganda, right, the narrative, the theater of it all.
What I was thinking about on Friday and you brought up, you know, Mafia Don was that iconic scene from Scorsese's The Godfather, right, where Michael Corleone is at the baptism and he's renouncing evil and everything else.
And in the same moment.
There's that really iconic scene that if people aren't familiar with, go to YouTube and look up the godfather baptism scene.
But you had essentially that.
You had Netanyahu standing at the podium.
He opens up on Friday declaring that he has come in peace.
He is in search of peace.
Israel wants peace.
At the same time, as you said, those Israeli jets were getting prepared.
For that assassination campaign.
And it was a horrific assassination campaign.
Israel dropped about 170 pounds of ordnance in the Dahiya neighborhood of Beirut in order to kill one man and several of his lieutenants.
About 700,000 people live in that section of Beirut and Israel dropped at least 170,000 pounds in its initial bombing of trying to kill.
That's exactly what Alistair Crook and Scott Ritter said it was approximately 80, 8-0, 2,000 pound American-made bombs.
Many of which went one right after another in the same place so as to continue going down into the earth, oblivious, heedless, careless of the civilians killed, or maybe intentionally doing it in an area where hundreds of thousands of civilians were tightly packed in an inner city.
I think there's certainly the military aspects of this, of destroying Hezbollah's command and control network.
That's obvious, and that does have an effect on Hezbollah.
How long of an effect?
We'll see.
And also, too, I think this was a prime reason why Iran launches their attacks.
Because Iran, I think most people agree, Iran does not want to go to war in a manner that's going to be a regional war that's going to bring in the United States.
We have another clip, courtesy of the Associated Press.
This is the Jerusalem.
There's the Temple Mount.
This is the Jerusalem skyline as Iran fires missiles at Israel.
So I guess we don't see any missiles there.
They're not targeting Jerusalem.
There are no presumably substantial military or intelligence targets in Jerusalem.
Obviously, they're spread about throughout Israel, concentrated in Tel Aviv, which is the de facto capital of Israel.
They call Jerusalem their legal capital, but the seat of the government and the seat of Israel.
Right, right.
And so this point about why did Iran do it now, though, I think their hand was forced.
And the danger is Iran may have taken Israel's bait as well.
But Iran was faith with, one, the grotesqueness, the horror of what Israel is doing, killing, wounding, burying under rubble thousands of people within a week.
I mean, even before those strikes on Hassan Nasrallah, On Friday, earlier in the week, so a week ago, Israel was in the midst of its largest bombing campaign ever.
The Israeli Air Force had never launched a bombing campaign in its history as big as the raids it launched at the beginning of last week.
Aside from the grotesqueness, the horror, the fact that we're witnessing, because we have to remember too, right?
The Israelis pledged to turn Beirut into Gaza City.
So along with that, Iran is also faced with a very real strategic issue of their seeing their alliance being peeled apart, right?
The alliance is effective because of its unity.
You know, it's like the comparison of a fist to five outstretched fingers.
And Iran cannot allow Israel to peel off.
One of its allies after another, to defeat one of its allies after another, or else the Axis loses effectiveness.
So I think Iran was put in a position where they had to react because they are seeing the degradation being done to Lebanon, to Hezbollah, as well as the grotesqueness, the horror of it.
They can't stand by watching that.
But they also realize that now they're taking Israel's bait because this is what Israel wants.
Israel wants Iran.
To act in a manner that causes the United States to come in.
And I'm sure right now, if we were to click over to CNN or MSNBC or Fox, there's some American Congress member on television saying, this is why we have to go defend Israel.
I'm sure he'll be all over the news tonight.
Pepe Escobar, who's on in a couple of hours, says that the, or will say from a piece that he published and sent to us pre-publication, Um, The Arab Street is as livid, furious, and unified as ever.
So I think you're quite correct.
Iran probably had no choice.
The government has to be, to some extent, a reflection of what huge numbers of people One of the videos I saw before I came on, Judge, was a video from Beirut, from Gaza, and from Iran of people in the streets cheering.
I mean, the video from Gaza of people cheering because they could see the incoming strikes from Gaza into Israel, the Iranian strikes into Israel.
From Gaza, you know, what this does.
And the idea that somehow you're going to defeat someone by just killing them, killing your way to victory.
Again, you see the folly and you see the arrogance and you see the bias and the chauvinism in Western thought, Western views, in our imperial mindset.
Who are these people to think they can fight us?
You know, we have analysts who really do believe that what Israel did back in April was a true sign of what they're capable of.
And now, the Iranians have been clear in their statements so far, what we've seen just today is only the beginning.
This is only the first stage.
They said, we're leaving the door open no more.
So even now, they're giving Israel a diplomatic out.
They're giving Israel the chance to say, okay, you know what?
We escalated, you escalated, we're all going to back off now.
But Iran is saying that this is your option.
This is what you can do.
Of course, the Israelis have no interest in that.
The Israelis have an interest in war.
They have no interest in peace.
This gives them carte blanche this Iranian response because for the Americans, of course, history will start at, you know, 1 p.m. this afternoon or whenever those attacks actually began.
That's when history will start.
The invasion into Lebanon, the attacks on Lebanon, the terrorism in Lebanon, none of that matters.
And certainly what's been happening in Occupy Palestine for the last 75 years doesn't matter either.
That's the dynamic we're in.
Let me ask you some technical questions about military and intel.
Israeli commando raids in southern Lebanon.
What is a commando raid?
How many people are involved and what do they do?
Taking over a village?
Are they killing the mayor?
Are they killing people in their bedrooms?
What do they do?
Sometimes these raids can be very specific.
In that example, several weeks ago, the Israelis launched a raid into Syria, which supposedly targeted a joint Syrian Hezbollah missile production facility.
And the idea, you can see that almost like a movie.
Where they send their people in, they destroy the facility, they kill the people working there.
So this is a manufacturing facility that they attacked and destroyed?
Yeah, the reports are mixed.
Whether it was manufacturing only, whether it was storage only for missiles, whether it was both.
But the idea being is that you could see very pointed missions sometimes.
Other times it's much more gray.
In the sense of when they go into these villages, what are they going in for?
Are they going to try and take out?
Are they going in to try and take out Hezbollah command and control or whatever type of early warning network Hezbollah has?
Are they going into, like in a World War II movie, going to sneak in and blow up the bridge?
The size of their raids can really vary.
Certainly you have the idea where they can insert a team, so three or four men, all the way up to a raid that's going to involve Hundreds, including helicopters.
It all just depends upon what they want to get out of it, how violent the raid is going to be.
Are we going to be shooting?
Are they going to be shooting back?
Are we going to need people to protect our flanks and our rear?
Are we going to need people to help us egress, get out of there?
Right?
I mean, so you can see how very quickly, just to give you an example, like for when we would do with the Americans to do a kill capture mission, you would have essentially a platoon.
30 or so, roughly, American commandos.
You're talking about Delta.
You're talking about SEALs who would go in with an equivalent or maybe even larger Afghan commando force or Iraqi commando force.
And as the years went by, there were less American commandos and more Afghan or Iraqi commandos.
But in the case where we have our guys going in, in addition to those Delta Force and SEAL team units that go in.
So roughly 150 to provide perimeter security to prevent the commandos from being attacked.
Got it.
So the idea of having granularity and clarity on what they were doing, it's difficult until afterwards.
And certainly last night the reports were that a ground invasion had started.
That turned out not to be correct.
However, we do know that Israel has ordered the evacuation of 26 Lebanese city or Lebanese villages.
And after they ordered that evacuation.
The Israelis make a big show about saying, we told them to evacuate, whether it's in Gaza, whether it's in Lebanon.
We issued warnings.
We told them to evacuate.
Look how humanitarian we are.
We don't want to hurt civilians.
That's all for show.
It's a big PR effort.
One, because this way they get it out there.
It's a preemptive statement.
This way it says, any civilians who got killed, it wasn't our fault.
We tried to warn them.
The other side of that, then, is once you put that evacuation order out, that makes that area a free fire zone.
That makes anyone you kill there a terrorist.
And so you can see, really, the nefarious, the insidiousness, the duplicity when they issue the evacuation orders.
And in listening this morning to Al Jazeera, their correspondent in Lebanon, He was in one of the villages that was ordered to be evacuated.
And he said when the people started to evacuate, the Israelis bombed the road that these people were evacuating on, just as we've seen them doing Gaza how many times.
And then when the Lebanese army came in and repaired the road so the people could get out of the area, the Israelis came back and bombed the road for a second time.
I mean, so this is the way of Israeli war.
This is the nature of the war.
This is who that military is.
And this is a longstanding aspect of how they conduct themselves because terror is an essential component of their war, particularly when their aims are ethnic cleansing.
Of course, terror is going to be a part of that.
So local media is headlining Iron Dome Overwhelmed.
We're going to show you some video.
Hundreds of Iranian missiles strike Israeli airfields, Matt.
It sounds like the Iranians are following the laws of war and they're attacking military targets, unlike what you just described as the Israelis attack civilian targets.
An aspect of effectiveness too, Judge, right?
I mean, the Iranians want their weapon systems to be effective.
They want them to hit the targets they're aiming at because that's the targets they're aiming at.
Iran's goal here is deterrence.
They want to get Israel to stop behaving the manner it is.
They want to get Israel to not invade Lebanon.
They want to get Israel to scale back their genocide.
So you have to go after the systems that will really hurt for Israel to be lose.
You think Netanyahu and Smotritz and Ben Gavir are going to lose any sleep if a residential building of Israelis is killed?
No, but they lose an F-35 squadron.
Okay, that actually matters.
So, you know, one of it is what are the targets and why is Iran and Hezbollah and others choosing to target those particular facilities?
Again, because that's what their strategy is.
That's what their aims are, as opposed to what we've been discussing, where for the Israelis, again, I can't say this enough, civilian casualties are a genuine military target in and of themselves.
What will the Israelis do next?
Will they unleash ballistic missiles at Iran?
I don't know, Judge.
I don't know.
Certainly what the Israelis have said just in these last hours is that this crosses all their red lines, that this opens up their escalation and the response will be overwhelming.
We have heard in the past that You know, Netanyahu and the governing coalition, but also to those who are not within the government.
So Benny Gantz, Yair Lapid, they're all the same mind frame.
To a degree.
You know, so this allows them to go after Iranian civil infrastructure to really punish the Iranians.
Because again, we've got to reinforce this.
This is part of how Israel conducts war.
This is what it does itself.
This is what Netanyahu wants.
Basically, war without end.
Peace is not what they want.
They want war.
And so, you know, this idea now we can really lay down the big stick on these people, right?
Again, you're also dealing with Jewish supremacy.
This idea that these people are the other.
These people are inferior.
They're some human.
So how do we, in our own lives, if our house is invaded by pests or rodents, how do we respond to that?
We annihilate them.
I mean, that's the mindset that will be here, I think, in Israeli thought as they go forward.
But certainly it gives them now the permission, if you will.
To launch overt strikes on Iranian civilian infrastructure.
And that includes going after the Iranian nuclear facilities.
So where this goes, and of course, we have to remind people, Israel has nuclear weapons between 200 and 600 or something like that.
And if anyone thinks after this last year, maybe a year ago, Judge, we could have had a question about will the Israels actually use those nuclear weapons?
You know, what would be the scenario where they would use those?
I think now, Judge, after a year of what we witnessed, the genocide in Gaza, well, you know, the idea that Israel would use nuclear weapons almost becomes a likelihood, not just a possibility.
Where do you think Netanyahu and his work cabinet are now?
They're in that bunker, Judge, and I think they're in their bunkers, and I think they've got two frames of mind.
One, Iran took our bait.
We're going to get the war with Iran that we want.
The other is that maybe it happened too soon.
I think the attacks on...
But one of those reasons is that the anniversary of October 7th is coming up this week.
And there's going to be a lot of uncomfortable, inconvenient, hard questions that Israel should be addressing.
And so rather than examining the failure of October 7th, Where is this war in Gaza actually going?
Netanyahu was able to launch these very popular airstrikes on Hezbollah, kill Hassan Nasrallah, a great boogeyman of the Israeli people.
And so for October 7th as an anniversary present, essentially Netanyahu, as in an ostentatious way of atonement, was going to present Nasrallah's head on a platter to the Israeli people.
Now these strikes from Iran, that changed that calculus again.
But again, I think overall Netanyahu and those like him are pleased that they may now be getting the war with Iran that they've wanted for so long.
A number of our viewers who email us who are from the Middle East are saying that Does that make sense to you?
You know, Judge, I got to tell you what, the way that Iran spoke in the spring, regardless of that telegraph demonstration that they did with their drones and missiles in April.
They spoke about their revenge being a time and place of their choosing, but also in a manner that people weren't expecting.
And particularly then after Ismail Hangyeh was assassinated by Israel in Tehran, you know, back in July, this idea of would Iran respond in kind?
Would they try and now with Hassan Nasrallah being assassinated, would the Iranians go for a decapitation strike against the Israelis?
Essentially do an eye for an eye.
And so it's very possible that maybe some of these missile strikes or the belief was in Israel that they would be coming after Netanyahu.
You talked about this back in August, how Netanyahu spent about half of August in a bunker.
So obviously that fear is there within Israel.
And I wouldn't pass put it past the Iranians to do that, knowing, of course.
Well, I think also to the Iranian leadership right now has to be with the understanding with launching these strikes, seeing how Israel has conducted itself throughout this last year, that they know that they are fair game as well.
So I think this may have been them just stepping into this game.
And this is where the escalation ladder takes us, of course, right?
And now we're in this position, and if you're in the White House, this is the worst place to be, because they're damned if they do, and they're damned if they don't.
And if they go along with this war against Iran, well, that's going to shoot gasoline prices up to $8 a gallon, and Harris is not going to win in November.
And on the other side, if they don't go along with this war, well, in these last four or five weeks, AIPAC and the Parisville lobby is going to throw everything they have behind Donald Trump and badmouth Kamala Harris, and she's not going to win in November.
You know, so and they're the and the White House.
They have only themselves to blame for the position that they're in.
Matt Ho, thank you very much for your analysis.
I had so many questions to ask you, but this is what we do.
Breaking News takes over and you are the ideal person to have on at this moment.
Thank you very much for your time.
Thank you, Judge.
Of course.
Gather as much information, including video, as we can in the next 20 minutes at 3 o 'clock.
Karen Kwiatkowski and at 5 o 'clock from midnight in Moscow, Pepe Escobar.
More as we get it.
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