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Oct. 7, 2024 - Judging Freedom - Judge Andrew Napolitano
32:03
Scott Ritter : The Middle East One year after October 7th 2023.
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Hi everyone, Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom.
Today is Monday, October 7th, 2024.
Scott Ritter will be with us in just a moment on the changing landscape in the Middle East.
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Scott Ritter, welcome, my dear friend.
Always a pleasure to chat with you.
How has the landscape in the Middle East changed in the past 365 days?
The world will never be the same.
What happened a year ago today has forever changed the world.
It's larger than simply Hamas versus Israel.
This is about...
I mean, let's be honest.
The Israeli-American relationship is an unnatural relationship when it comes to the geopolitical balance.
It's at odds with the natural sense of balance that exists in the Middle East.
I was going to say an abomination, which it is, but it's also a cancer.
It's a cancerous tumor attached to the Middle East that disrupts the natural functioning of everything, and it's sustained by its relationship with America.
What Hamas did on October 7th, 2023, is begin the process of causing the entire world to recognize Israel for what it was.
On October 6, 2023, the world was still behaving as if Israel was part of the normal balance.
It's not.
The world was behaving as if Israel could be treated as part of this global, you know, economic entity.
Joe Biden, in the summer of 2023, had promoted Israel as being a core element of what he called the Middle East, the India, Middle East, European economic.
Israel was getting ready to normalize relations with Saudi Arabia to begin this process of regional normalization that had Israel serving as the centerpiece of this, with no talk whatsoever of a Palestinian statehood, no consideration of the Palestinians.
It was an Israeli-centric version of the Middle East, which is part and parcel of an American-centric vision of the world.
Today that's done.
In two weeks, there's going to be a meeting in Kazan, Russia, with the BRICS, that's going to have more relevance today because of what was exposed through Hamas's attack.
The world now sees Israel as the genocidal apartheid state that it has always been, but has somehow fooled us all into believing didn't exist.
And they see America as a nation that is totally let If that's truly what America stands for, statements written by Thomas Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence, then why do we support a nation that commits genocide, that's an apartheid state, that thinks it's okay to kill women and children by the thousands as part of collective punishment and total disregard for international law?
We see the world standing up to Israel now for the first time, and we see Israel no longer being this nation with an invincible army that has this deterrence that everybody fears.
Iran has put that to rest.
Israel now fears Iran.
There's only one nation right now in the Middle East that can destroy the other nation, and that's Iran can destroy Israel with the next missile attack.
Israel cannot destroy Iran, even if they use...
This is a fundamental shift away from what it was.
The world will never be the same.
The world will never be the same toward Israel.
Will other countries in the world besides Iran resist Israel in such a way as to retard or arrest its slaughter of innocents in Gaza and in Lebanon?
I mean, we see this gradual transformation, transition in the United Nations, for instance.
Palestine has now been invited in as a member.
Nations are talking about the recognition of Palestine.
People are talking about the absolute necessity of a Palestinian state.
And you see nations like Turkey and others increasing the strictness of their rhetoric when it comes to Israel.
I don't think we're going to see nations aligning themselves violently against Israel like Iran is doing.
That's, first of all, counterproductive and it's unnecessary.
Iran has fulfilled that goal.
What nations are doing now is calling out Israel for the Again, abomination that it is.
This apartheid, genocidal state.
That is becoming how the world recognizes Israel.
Not as this freedom-loving bastion of democracy, but this horrific regime that mirrors the actions and the ideology of Nazi Germany.
I mean, it was Nazi ideology that led to the Holocaust, that led to the creation of Israel.
Now the Israelis have come full circle or behaving in a manner that's similar.
It's not me saying this.
This is Holocaust survivors.
We're coming out saying that they condemn Israel for becoming that which they survived.
This is what's going to undo Israel.
The fact that the world is seeing Israel for what it is.
A cancerous tumor that has to be excised.
You can't allow cancer to continue to survive in the human body.
It must be excised.
And this is what's going to happen to Israel.
won't be violent.
I believe Israel will probably die from self-immolation.
It'll collapse from within.
Israel has become, Zionism has become a notion that's no longer compatible with civilized society.
And you're going to see people turning their back on Israel, and you're going to start to see Israelis flee Israel.
And at some point in time, when a sufficient number of Israelis have fled Israel, it'll become demographically impossible to sustain.
And that will be the end of Israel.
That's the future of Israel.
I think I know the answer to this question, but let's crystallize it.
Israel has never been weaker and more unstable than it is today, and it's solely because of the so-called leadership of Benjamin Netanyahu.
When the history of the decline of Israel is written, Benjamin Netanyahu will be the man who destroyed Israel, singularly.
I mean, he's the man who made it happen.
There was a time, back when Yitzhak Rabin was the Prime Minister, where Israel was divided, where you still had right-wing Likudniks like Netanyahu who said there will never be a Palestinian state, but there were a number of people in labor who said there's an absolute necessity for it, and labor was prevailing.
And then Netanyahu orchestrated the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin by encouraging Talmudic rabbis to give voice to the need to kill a man that has been singled out as an enemy of the Hebrew people, encouraging right-wing Talmudic students to pull the trigger on the gun that killed Yitzhak Rabin.
Netanyahu pulled that trigger, not physically, but rhetorically, and now Israel's paying the price.
They've never been weaker, and they've never been more isolated, and it's all because of Benjamin Netanyahu.
If Israel feels seriously threatened by Iran and asks for the United States to assist it militarily in repelling Iran, do you think the U.S. assistance would take the form of defensive assistance or an actual aggressive, offensive attack on Iran.
I mean, Lindsey Graham, Senator Graham, wants us to attack their oil I realize the two of them are out there, but will that mentality prevail in Joe Biden or Kamala Harris or Donald Trump's Washington?
Let's remember that in Donald Trump's Washington that previously existed, the Iranians shot down a Global Hawk drone worth over $100 million.
And Donald Trump was enraged, and he said, we need to strike the Iranian air defense sites that took down the Global Hawk.
The Pentagon at that time told him, "If you do this, and we can do this, you're going to set in motion a cycle of escalation that will end with Iran destroying every single one of our bases.
There's nothing we can do to stop them, and shutting down the Strait or Hormuz and disrupting global." Oil supplies, bringing down an absolute collapse of the global economy.
Then you're going to order us to invade Iran.
We can't do that right now.
It would take us at a minimum months, probably years, to assemble the forces necessary to carry out the action you're talking about.
And even then, there's no guarantee of victory.
Are you sure you want to do this, Mr. President?
And he said no.
That same calculus exists today.
Joe Biden's been briefed on this reality.
If Kamala Harris becomes president, she will be briefed on it.
Donald Trump's already familiar with it.
We cannot defeat Iran in a conventional fight.
And here's the game changer.
I don't know if you saw it this morning, but the IRGC came out with a press release that basically said, we know that the Supreme Leader has said that nuclear weapons are anathema to the Islamic faith, If a threat Manifest itself to the Islamic people, to the Islamic Republic.
And if this threat does manifest itself, Iran will reconsider its stance on nuclear weapons.
Iran is literally days away from being able to produce nuclear weapons.
If the United States wants to play nuclear games, if Israel wants to play nuclear games, Iran is ready to play that game.
And this changes everything, because no longer can Israel say, we can nuke you, you can't nuke us.
I believe that Iran has put all the pieces together and that it will be a matter of days before they have a functioning nuclear device capable of being mounted on a missile that cannot be shot down and that missile can be fired against Israel or against American targets in the region.
This is a game changer.
The day of the United States intimidating Iran is over, past, finished.
And the same thing with Israel.
Israel can be wiped out tomorrow.
Iran is prepared to fire 2,000 missiles against Israel in a span of time.
encompassing just a few hours these missiles would destroy the entire I'm talking about every power plant, every water purification plant, anything that deals with modern civilized society will be eliminated because it can't be defended and there's nothing Israel has to fall back upon.
They will literally be put back into the Stone Age and that's not using nuclear weapons.
Three to five nuclear weapons takes Israel off the face of the earth.
There will be no Israel.
That's the reality of Israel today.
That's the weakness that Benjamin Netanyahu has brought upon the Israeli state and the Israeli people.
On Saturday, a major seismic event was detected in an area of Iran not consistent with earthquakes.
Was this some sort of a nuclear test, Scott?
I don't believe so, and there's a couple of reasons why.
One, my understanding is that the event took place around 10 kilometers or 10 miles below ground.
There's no oil drilling that goes that deep.
I think the deepest oil is 7.7 miles.
You know, this is about digging a borehole down for the test of a nuclear device 10 miles below ground.
And then the other thing is the International Atomic Energy Agency maintains a very close watch on Iran's nuclear stockpile, basically the stockpile of its enriched uranium.
Iran has enriched enough 60% uranium.
It has it stockpiled.
That could be readily converted into the 96-98% needed for a nuclear device.
But any diversion of this material away would be detected.
And for Iran to have a secret enrichment capability, that would have been detected.
So until the IAEA talks about not being allowed to account or has detected diversion, by then it's too late because the bomb will exist.
I don't believe Iran has actually tested a nuclear device.
What you described a few moments ago about the offensive weaponry available to Iran, does that take into account the Iran-Russia defense pact, which is about to be signed at the end of this month?
No, this is purely the offensive weaponry that Iran has developed on its own, Iran's own considerable ballistic missile capabilities.
The Russian-Iran Defense Pact will harden Iran to any potential Israeli strike.
Understand this, striking Iran is a very difficult proposition for the Israelis.
Their aircraft, in order to have the range to reach Iran, will require Refuelings have to take place over territories such as Iraq that is not guaranteed to be friendly to the Israelis.
If the Iranians, for instance, get the SU-35s or the SU-32 fighters and they're able to fly patrols into Iraq to shoot down the refuelers, there can be no attack.
The attack profile that's being planned by the Israelis is based upon existing Iranian defensive capabilities.
That's 300 missiles in Iranian indigenous equivalent.
It doesn't mean it can't be defeated, but it means that Israel has to rethink its entire attack strategies, how it's going to approach, what preparatory work is going to be done, things of that nature, which means Israel right now has to redo all of their attack plans because of what Russia has done.
And it's only going to become more difficult for Israel to plan to attack Iran because I think this Russian-Iranian defense pact is not going to be about, you know, Giving a little bit of defense.
I think it's going to be about making Iran as strong as possible to repel any Israeli and American attacks.
Does China have an interest in preventing Israel from attacking Iran?
Or, stated differently, does China have an interest in a prosperous and commercially viable Iran?
You know, a very large, worth hundreds of billions of dollars, you know, energy deal that extends over several decades.
China, you know, has a huge interest in not just commercial relations with Iran, but stability in the Middle East.
so China can have viable commercial relations with Iran's neighbors, with Saudi Arabia, who's the largest seller of oil to China, to the United Arab Emirates, to Iraq, to the entire region.
China is working,
trust me, behind the scenes very hard to try and I'm switching gears slightly.
The negotiations being conducted intended to Lesson tensions between Hezbollah and Israel at the behest are under the supervision of Amos Hochstein, an official of the State Department who was born in Israel and fought for the IDF but now has dual citizenship and is an official of the Biden State Department.
And by Bill Burns, the director of the CIA, intended to bring about peace or at least a ceasefire in Gaza.
Do you think that Mr. Hochstein and his team and Director Burns and his team were duped by the Israelis who never had an interest in lessening tensions in Lebanon or a ceasefire in Gaza?
Or do you think they willingly went along with a facade of negotiations?
I'm going to take a different tact on this.
I don't think they were duped because the United States is fully cognizant of everything Israel plans to do, wants to do, is doing, will do.
There's an intimacy between Israel and the United States that make it impossible for Israel, whether formally or informally, to keep America out of the loop.
We know everything.
We knew about the pagers.
We knew about everything.
We know about everything.
We knew about the pagers before they exploded and killed children.
One hundred percent.
We may not have known exactly the decision that was made to put that in, but I can guarantee you that the NSA and other American, the CIA, were involved in this.
The same with Stucnix, you know, the virus that was used, that was jointly developed by the United States and Israel.
We had the Israelis build a test facility in the Negev Desert where they replicated the Iranian centrifuges so that we could test the effectiveness of this virus.
We know everything.
There is no gap between Israel and the United States on this.
Okay.
Back to where you were before I interrupted you about the pagers.
Policy-wise, we continue to labor under the pretense that we can influence the Israelis.
Even though we've been lied to by them over and over again.
We know what Israel's policies are.
Nothing Israel's doing is taking us by surprise.
But we like to believe that, you know, the United States can put pressure on Israel.
So I'm not going to say that our diplomacy was a facade, but I'm going to say it was dangerously naive and very deceptive of us because diplomacy isn't just about what we're trying to get Israel to do.
It's what we led the Iranians and Hezbollah and Hamas to believe we could get Israel to do.
And they bought into it.
Hassan Nasrallah agreed to a ceasefire right before he was murdered by the Israelis.
This ceasefire was brokered by the gentleman you just mentioned, this dual citizen.
So today, no one trusts the United States.
We will never be trusted in the region again on issues of this nature because...
Israel will do whatever it wants to do.
And more importantly, we know what Israel is getting ready to do, and yet we're pretending to the rest of the world that we can somehow contain this problem.
We can't.
Israel is literally out of control.
Did the Biden administration tell the new president of Iran that if Iran did not retaliate, Remember, that the sanctions would go away and there'd be peace in Gaza and in Lebanon.
Did the United States make such a representation to him, and did he think it was valid?
the new Iranian president ran on a platform that said he wanted to have better relations with the United States.
And so, you know, there was already connectivity there, talking about, for instance, how to breathe life back into the JCPOA, the Iran nuclear deal, which would bring with it the lifting of sanctions by necessity.
So this was already on the table.
I think what the United States said is that an Iranian attack against Israel would put this at risk, that in order to keep this initiative alive, we need Iranian restraint.
And then they threw in the sweetener.
And because we understand that this has a regional component to it, we will get Israel to agree to a ceasefire.
If you don't attack Israel, we will get the ceasefire that you are seeking.
And the Iranian president went back to the inner sanctum.
And briefed them on this and was able to prevail, was able to convince the Supreme Leader, despite the misgivings of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Command and others in Iran who say you can't trust the Americans.
They always lie.
Everything they do is a lie.
They signed the Iran nuclear deal and they backed out of it.
They have never told us the truth.
They are never going to tell us the truth.
The time to strike Israel is now.
the Iranian president prevailed and bought the time only to be betrayed by the United States government.
Again, he will never again be able to play the card of peace.
And that's thanks to the United States, not thanks to Iran.
Our friend and colleague, Ambassador Charles Freeman, maintains that Secretary Blinken is the worst Secretary of State in the post-World War II era.
Is this emblematic?
Of Blinken or of the West in general, that the United States would out and out lie and dupe someone with whom it's, attempt to dupe someone with whom it's negotiating on a matter of life and death?
Michael McFaul, former U.S. Ambassador to Russia, was on a panel.
Sometime, I believe last year, with John Mearsheimer.
And Mearsheimer called him out and said, that means you lied to the Ukrainians.
And he said, of course we lied.
That's what we do.
Put on your big boy pants.
This is what we do.
It's not what we do, Mr. Ambassador.
You can't be an ambassador if you lie.
Your job is to represent your nation to tell the truth.
You don't have to tell the whole truth and nothing but the truth.
So help you God all the time.
But you don't lie.
But we have become a nation of liars.
This is what we do.
Tony Blinken is a liar.
Jake Sullivan is a liar.
Joe Biden is a liar.
When the President of the United States, the Commander-in-Chief, is a liar, who can trust us?
Who can trust us?
Nobody.
Even Saddam Hussein, back in the day, I would always tell people, because I studied him very closely, I studied his inner circle, the tribal relations, I said, "Saddam can't lie." You will find out all the statements that are put out there.
Saddam's not saying them.
Other people say them.
Saddam is a tribal leader.
Saddam's a man who sits down with his chas, the five circles of his family, and they look to him and he can't lie.
He has to tell the truth.
He doesn't have to tell you the whole truth, but he's not going to outright lie because he loses face.
He loses credibility as a leader.
Joe Biden, you lost face.
You lost all credibility.
Donald Trump, I'm warning you.
Stop lying.
But American leaders lie.
That's what we do.
The American public has come to accept it, and we've forgiven them for it.
We keep voting for them in.
Telling a lie when you're the leader of the United States of America, either as the commander-in-chief or as a member of the cabinet, Tony Blinken as the Secretary of State, should be automatically disqualifying for any future leadership position and should lead to the immediate nullification of you as a leader because you've just disgraced not only the oath you took, but you disgraced the people you represent.
Some commentators think that Israel is not being truthful that it has nuclear weapons.
Does it, in fact, notwithstanding international law, notwithstanding the UN, and you are intimately familiar with that, have nuclear weapons?
There's every reason to believe that Israel does have nuclear weapons.
The United States has been...
it creates legal problems for us in America.
So we have acted as if they do have them.
There was an Israeli scientist, Vanunu, who defected with documents, photographs, drawings, etc., that showed Israel's nuclear weapons.
People have evaluated them.
I have evaluated them.
They seem to be genuine.
They seem to be, you know, conducive.
They seem to be representative of what a real nuclear weapons program would be.
So I believe strongly that Israel does, in fact, have a viable, active nuclear weapons program.
Last week, Professor Gilbert Doctoroff started a small firestorm with you and others on the show when he argued that the United States uses Israel to kill Arabs rather than Israel using the United States to fund its expansion of its land area.
Is there any argument to be made for Professor Doctorow's argument that the United States is using Israel to kill Arabs?
We've killed far more Arabs than Israel ever has.
So I disagree with him completely.
This is what happens when you have businessmen turned academics speaking about issues of military.
The United States is fully capable of killing Arabs anytime, anyplace.
We never hesitate to kill Arabs.
We don't need Israel to kill Arabs.
What we need Israel to do is create A force of instability in the region.
It's easy to kill Arabs.
We do it on a daily basis.
We can starve them to death.
We can blow them up with bombs.
We've done it.
We've killed millions of Arabs.
Again, far more Arabs have died because of the United States than because of Israel.
So this is a totally incorrect analysis because it's predicated upon a factually incorrect notion that we need Israel to kill Arabs.
We kill Arabs better than anybody in the world.
We've proven that, and we can prove it again if we want to.
Why have we killed Arabs?
Because we don't care about them.
They're not people to us.
Look at the terms we use.
We call them ragheads.
We call them sand you-know-what.
We speak to them derisively.
We disrespect their religion.
We have no appreciation for their culture.
We don't view them as human beings, whether they live far away or even here at home.
How many Americans actually have gone out to a mosque to meet the local imam and speak to his following?
How many Americans have actually reached out to a Palestinian-American community or Syrian-American community to say, hey, we'd like to get to know you more?
I have.
I've been invited to them, into their homes, to restaurants, to sit down and break bread with them.
These are amazing people.
These are human beings.
And once you realize that, you realize how evil our policy is towards the Middle East.
Because we treat them like human animals, just like the Israelis do.
Madeleine Albright didn't blink when she was told that the sanctions of the United States have killed 500,000.
That's a half a million Iraqi children.
And she said that that's a price we're willing to pay.
That tells you everything you need to know about how the United States views Arabs.
When we're willing to tolerate the death by starvation and disease of a half a million Iraqi children to fulfill our policy objectives, it means we have no regard for Arab life.
What do you think will stop the Israeli war and genocide regime?
The collapse of Israel from within.
That's ultimately what it's going to do.
I mean, there's a chance if Israel does go forward with an attack against Iran, and, you know, I believe that they know how foolhardy that would be because Iran's not bluffing.
Even an attack against, you know, non-critical infrastructure will generate an infrastructure-destroying response by Iran, which will destroy Israel.
And that'll be the end of it because people can't live in Israel if there's no electricity.
They can't live in Israel if there's no running water.
They moved to Israel to be comfortable, to have jobs, to live in the land of milk and honey.
And this forever war, because that's what Israel is going to be locked into now by, you know, defining the conditions of victory with Hamas and Hezbollah that cannot be met.
The 60,000 will never return to the north.
The 20,000 will never return to the south.
Israel will never be the same, and people will start fleeing Israel.
Once they start fleeing Israel in sufficient numbers, the demographics dictate the end of Israel, and that's the future of Israel.
Thank you, Scott Ritter, for all of your courage and deep and extraordinary knowledge.
Maverick is thanking you also.
All right.
Thanks for having me on.
Maverick waited until the end.
All right.
Coming up tomorrow, Tuesday, Professor Jeffrey Sachs at 1230 in the afternoon.
At two in the afternoon, Captain Matt Ho.
At three in the afternoon, Colonel Karen Kwiatkowski.
And at four in the afternoon, Colonel Douglas McGregor.
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