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Dec. 24, 2024 - Judging Freedom - Judge Andrew Napolitano
29:01
Scott Ritter : A Dangerous World.
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Hi everyone, Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom.
Today is Tuesday, December 24th, 2024, Christmas Eve.
Scott Ritter joins us now.
Scott, I must thank you publicly and personally for all the time you've given us and all the work you and I have done together.
It's been a joy and it's been an education for me and it's been a privilege to me and I thank you for it publicly as I've done privately.
And I hope we can continue to do it again next year.
I want to talk about the two principal hotspots in the world now, the Middle East and Ukraine.
I would like to start with Ukraine.
In the past 10 days, the Ukrainians have assassinated a Russian general on a street in Moscow.
They have dispatched drones to attack a residential building.
500 miles east of Moscow.
And according to Slovakian President Fitsou, Ukrainian President Ukraine offered President Fitsou a $500 million bribe with American cash to change his position on the war in Ukraine.
Where is Ukraine going?
Straight to hell.
That's a horrible thing to say.
You know, on Christmas Eve, but it's the truth.
In the last 10 days, Ukraine has suffered an average of 2,000 casualties, many of them fatal, per day.
That's 20,000.
The Russians have advanced, you know, scores of kilometers surrounding Ukrainian troops, capturing more cities.
Their advance is unstoppable and will not be stopped.
This is the reality.
What Ukraine can do right now is die, which they are very good at lately, and commit acts of terrorism, which they're becoming better at.
But nothing that this fake president, Zelensky, and he is a fake president, understand that he did not run an election.
He has no legal authority to rule.
If there are negotiations eventually with Russia on Russia's terms, one of those terms is that Russia insists on negotiating with the legitimate leader of Ukraine, which means Ukraine is going to have to jettison this failure and put somebody else in his place.
Russia's not in the mood right now to play games.
These are reindeer games that Zelensky's doing, horrible reindeer games, terrorist acts, but they're games.
They don't change anything that's happening.
They don't change the trajectory of this conflict at all.
And that's all he has left in his little stupid bag of tricks.
I don't mean to be mean, and I apologize for my language on Christmas Eve, but we're talking about war, and we're talking about a man who has shown absolutely no concern for the welfare of his people or his nation.
How does something like drone attacks on residential buildings 500 miles east of Moscow resonate in the Kremlin?
Does it infuriate them?
Does it change or modify President Putin's patience?
Of the Russian spirit, oh, it enrages them.
I mean, it's a flagrant act of terrorism, hate-filled terrorism.
There's nothing to be accomplished other than death and destruction.
But Putin has his eye on the ball.
And I've mentioned before, the ball, the game isn't killing Ukrainians.
That's a consequence of the game.
The game is getting a new European security framework.
This has always been Russia's strategic goal and objective, is to engender stability on the European continent between, you know, what...
What they call Europe and Russia, which is a European power, whether Europe wants it to be or not.
It's also an Asian power.
It's so dang big.
But what the Russians want is security.
They want an end to this madness of multiple decades of American policy of bringing Russia down.
You know, it's amazing.
Just this week, I think the National Security Archives of the United States published a, you know, we've all heard of George Kennan's famous long telegram that he wrote back in 1946 that set the stage for the Cold War.
Well, apparently in 1994, a diplomat named Merriman wrote a similar cable out of the Russian embassy.
It was suppressed.
But what he said is, what we're doing is You know, we're seeking the destruction of Russia.
We don't care about it.
We don't care about democracy.
It was basically about propping up Yeltsin.
He was talking about, you know, we're making a political decision to the economic and social detriment of the Russian people, and it will come back and bite us.
Well, it has.
The Russians have risen up, and they're tired of this game being played by the United States and Europe of trying to destroy Russia.
Destroy Russia.
Not, you know...
Have, you know, say, oh, we're going to halt you here.
The physical destruction of Russia is the goal and objective of the United States and Europe for the past several decades.
How would we as Americans feel if China said, we don't want to just out-compete you, we want to physically destroy you, we want to break America up into components and have your entire society collapse?
We would be resentful.
And yet, that's where the Russians are.
They want peace.
That's what they want.
We are the ones who created this conflict in Ukraine.
We're the ones who created it.
We're the ones who set it up so we could destroy Russia.
And the Russians are saying, that ain't going to happen.
And we do want peace, but it'll be peace on our terms.
The Financial Times on Monday, yesterday, reported that the Trump transition team advised Kiev and some European leaders that President-elect Trump, upon his inauguration, Add to that some of the crazy things this General Kellogg,
an emissary appointed by President Trump, who apparently is acting as an emissary already, even though Trump is not yet in office, has been saying that the Russians lost six times as many I don't know if you think the Financial Times report is accurate,
but it is clear that General Kellogg is either being intentionally deceived by whoever is briefing him or is profoundly in error and knows it.
He's profoundly in error.
Whether he knows it or not is another thing.
But, you know, generals at some point in time have to stop blaming it on their briefers.
You have three stars for a reason, pal.
It's because you're supposed to be able to think and see through the briefers and be smarter than the briefer.
So, you know...
Captains blame lieutenants.
Generals have to take the responsibility for themselves.
Kellogg is responsible for every word that comes out of his mouth.
It's his duty and responsibility to fact check the briefers, to ask them questions, to ask, where did you get this data?
What is your source?
Are there any competing sources?
These are the things that I know every time I briefed a three-star general or a four-star general.
These are the questions I got.
They don't accept anything at face value.
They push back because they want to know the hard truth.
However inconvenient that truth may be.
I don't trust the mainstream media.
Their job is to poison the well.
So, you know, there are so many people out there right now on the periphery of Team Trump who are talking to the media as if they are Trump himself.
What I do know is that Donald Trump recently said that this is only going to be resolved when he meets and speaks with Vladimir Putin.
And that's the most accurate statement there.
Putin is not going to sit down with Kellogg or Intermediary.
Putin doesn't give a damn.
What the United States wants, thinks, or whatever.
Russia, I told you, is sick and tired of this game of America seeking to destroy Russia.
This is existential.
And so Trump's going to get one shot to stop this war.
One shot.
And that shot is, you will do what Russia tells you to do, and then Russia will throw in some trimmings to make it look like there's a political compromise.
But Russia has won this war.
And if the United States wants to broaden the scope and scale of this war, Russia will engage in that.
For victory, not to play a game.
And so Trump, like I said, he realizes, I think he has one shot, and he started to pull back and say, I'm going to, this is going to be resolved when I meet with Putin.
But understand that he's not going to get that meeting unless he puts something on the table.
Putin's not going to just say, hey, come here, let's sit down, let's talk.
Putin's going to say, what do you want to talk about?
Give us some details on this.
So Trump's got to get better advisors than Keith Kellogg and Michael Waltz or whatever the National Security Advisor's name is and all these people.
He has the worst advisors in the world when it comes to Russia.
These people don't know anything about Russia and they are all products, and this is the most important part, they are all products of a system that has sought for the past four to five decades to physically destroy Russia.
That's the only thing in their mind.
That's all they're programmed to do.
They're not programmed to peacefully coexist with Russia.
If Trump wants to peacefully coexist with Russia, he needs to wipe the slate clean, bring in people of a like mind, and come up with sound policy.
At the risk of raising your blood pressure, I guess you're advising Trump that when he meets with the Russians, he should not bring Sebastian Gorka with him.
I don't think Gorka would be allowed into Russia right now.
I'll be surprised if Gorka stays on the team much longer.
I think this was a political throwaway.
The man can't hold a security clearance.
His brain doesn't work.
His mouth is connected to the brain that doesn't work.
And every word he says is to the detriment of American national security and the success of a Trump presidency.
So, Sebastian Gorka, notice he...
He made that one statement about Putin being a thug, and then we haven't heard from him since.
And I think that's probably the best way to deal with Gorka is to just ignore him.
Why is Syria being torn apart as we speak?
Because Syria is a fake country that was artificially constructed by the French with a mandate given to them by the League of Nations in the aftermath of the First World War.
They tried to...
Bring together a variety of religions and creeds and sects and nationalities.
It was a failed country.
The Ba'athists, who are Arab socialist nationalists, came in and said, We can unite everybody with a vision of what Arab statehood should look like.
But that vision was incompatible with a number of things.
Competing Arab nationalism, the Nasserites, they called them, named for Nasser, the Egyptian president.
They joined together to create an Arab League or an Arab Union back in their Republic back in the 60s.
The Muslim Brotherhood, which is a major Islamic movement.
You know the...
The Ba'athists were incompatible.
They went to war.
It's a nation that's always had this strife built into it from the very start.
It was suppressed violently by the Ba'athists.
But they held this thing called Syria together.
And if they had ever been given a chance, maybe it could have succeeded.
But we've been trying to destroy Syria in the name of Israel since 1948.
And finally, the Zionists...
The agenda was fulfilled.
We got rid of the Ba'athists and now we're watching a nation self-destruct before our very eyes.
Can the HTS, the group led by Al Jelani, actually put together a government and is there a land mass over which they could actually govern once the Turks and the Israelis are finished dividing up Syria?
Well, I mean, there is a limit to what Israel can do.
If you take a look at the actual You know, territorial acquisition with Israel.
It's purely on the periphery.
I'm not defending it at all, but it's not as though Israel's making a grab for Damascus or anything of that nature.
It's bad what they're doing.
The biggest offender will be Turkey.
Turkey right now is, of course, playing a political game, but Erdogan clearly has, you know...
Visions of reviving the Ottoman Empire, his rhetoric has said that.
He speaks of Syrian sovereignty, but he also speaks of the inevitability of Turkish expansion in the region such as Idlib.
Aleppo, Raqqa, these are, you know, former Ottoman provinces along the border with Turkey that Erdogan said should have been Turkish to begin with, but the French stole it from him.
It's time he's going to reverse history.
So I think you're seeing Turkey headed towards creating the conditions for a referendum, you know, so that Turkey can say, well, we're just abiding by the United Nations principle of self-determination.
Funny, Russia did it and the world condemned it, but Turkey's going to do it.
Let's see how the world reacts.
But it's the end of the Syrian nation.
What's going to be left is a rump state that's ungovernable.
I mean, to answer your question, Judge, do you believe that Al-Qaeda is capable of governing a nation like Syria that has secularism in its DNA without resorting to violence to suppress that secularism?
The answer, of course, is not just no, but hell no.
As long as Jolani and HTS and Al-Qaeda is at the helm, don't expect anything good coming out of Syria.
We're going to take a break for just a minute, Scott, for a commercial announcement.
When we come back, I'm going to ask you if you think that Donald Trump and the Republicans will effectively undo the goal of a Palestinian state right after this.
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Do you think that President Trump and the GOP and the Congress and the people that he has indicated he's going to appoint around him will effectively undo the quest for a Palestinian state?
Not just effectively undo it.
They will destroy the quest.
Their goal is not to have a Palestinian state.
Their goal is to have a greater Israel.
And, you know, there was an opportunity prior to the fall of Syria that Israel, you know, where Israel would have become, if not mortally injured, severely injured, so that a Trump term.
Would be more about, you know, critical care than fulfilling a strategic vision.
But the collapse of Syria has allowed Netanyahu's right-wing government to survive and now thrive.
There's still a lot of problems in Israel.
I'm not going to pretend that Netanyahu is out of the woods yet, but he's in a much stronger position today than he was a month ago.
The end result is when Trump becomes president, he's not going to be dealing with a weakened Netanyahu, but a strong Netanyahu, an emboldened Netanyahu who will be dictating terms.
Look, we've seen this game before.
Trump inherited an Iranian nuclear deal from the Obama administration and immediately withdrew from it on the advice, indeed the demands of Netanyahu, citing Israeli intelligence, much of it manufactured.
It was Trump that envisioned and implemented the Abrams Accords, which was all about destroying Palestinian statehood, any potential of Palestinian statehood, because it was about promoting Israel and what was good for Israel.
And so this is where we're going to go.
Now, I've been lectured by many pro-Palestinian groups that...
Palestine exists in the hearts of the Palestinians, and that even if the United States and Israel succeeds in depopulating Gaza and eradicating West Bank settlements and all that, you can never get rid of Palestine.
And I'm not going to dissuade people of that thought.
I mean, I respect people who believe in something in their hearts.
But the fact of the matter is, what myself and others have been working for...
Some people for many decades, myself more recently since October 7th, is the creation of a Palestinian state, a physical entity that Palestinians could call their own home.
And that's done.
That's finished.
It's not going to happen in 10 years, 20 years, 30 years, 40 years now because the system is so fundamentally broken.
And what I mean by the system, I mean the Middle East.
There is no support whatsoever outside of...
Lebanon, the Hezbollah, outside of Iraq, where you have some pro-Shia militias, outside of Iran or Yemen.
Other than those four entities, there's no support whatsoever for a Palestinian state.
Even European nations that speak of recognizing Palestine, watch how quick they walk away, because when you take the scales of geopolitical importance, Preserving the European Union or preserving your status in the European Union will far outweigh the creation of a Palestinian state.
So all those European states that have jumped in and said, this is what we want.
This is where we're going to go.
Watch what happens when Trump starts putting the screws to them.
Watch how quickly they jump the ship because nobody out there other than Hezbollah, the Iranian militias.
uh in in iraq iran or the hoodie have shown a willingness to sacrifice on behalf of palestine i mean the palestinians have yes hamas but even what is palestine In the West Bank, we have the Palestinian Authority, led by Abu Mazen,
President Mahmoud Abbas, who is literally a servant of Israel.
So you have the president of the Palestinian Authority, paid for and working on behalf of Israel, sending his Israeli-trained Palestinian security forces to fight Palestinian freedom fighters in Janine.
That's Palestine.
So there is no Palestine.
Palestine doesn't exist.
There's Gaza, there's Hamas, but that's being destroyed.
As we speak, I mean, these brave guys are still popping out of tunnels and doing heroic things, but at some point in time, without the support of the axis of resistance, they can't last forever.
And then, you know, at some point in time, the people of Gaza, who are, by the way, every day, Judge, dozens are being burned to death, murdered, slaughtered, butchered, blown to pieces by Israeli airplanes dropping American bombs.
Israeli airplanes dropping American bombs, killing innocent civilians.
But we're not talking about it anymore because we're worried about HDS, Al-Qaeda in Syria.
We're worried about other things.
This was the danger of expanding the conflict.
It's something I've said all along.
Keep your eye on the game.
If the game is a Palestinian state, then the only thing we can be talking about is Gaza and the Israeli genocide of Gaza, which empowers.
Have Hamas and Hezbollah been degraded as military forces that the Israelis have to contend with?
As a military force, their job wasn't to physically defeat Israel, so we have to keep that in mind.
All they had to do is survive.
By surviving, they defeated Israel because Israel defied victory as the physical destruction of Hamas and Hezbollah.
Right now, Hezbollah is off the map.
They've been removed from the plane board because of a ceasefire, and their ability to reconstitute their...
Military capabilities has been severely diminished by the loss of the land bridge to Iran through Syria.
So even though Hezbollah still has some fire in their heart, I've listened to the statements, the idea that Hezbollah is not going to be able to turn around and begin anew the war of attrition with Israel.
We'll see what happens there.
Hamas, look.
These are children of the camp.
I've talked about this before.
These are people that are born into a concentration camp, born into a prison, and they've got the jailbreak going, and they're not going to stop until they either achieve their objective or they're dead.
Hamas has suffered tremendous losses, but in the last several months, because of Israel's genocide, Hamas has recruited 5,000 to 7,000 new fighters.
Now, these may not be as well-trained as the old ones, but all they have to do is have courage in their hearts, a prayer on their lips, and they pop out of a hole, run and place a mine on a tank, shoot an RPG, gun down a couple Israelis, disappear down the hole.
Now, many of them are going to die.
But as long as they keep bleeding the Israeli Defense Force, you can't talk about an Israeli victory.
So I don't know how long this is going to go.
But Israel has not defeated Hamas at this juncture.
Israel has fought Hezbollah to a tie, so to speak.
But then politically, because war is an extension of politics by other means, the fact of the collapse of Syria has created a political problem for Hezbollah and puts Israel on top of them politically.
But Israel, there's no...
There's no appetite in Israel to go back to fighting Hezbollah.
Remember why there's a ceasefire.
It's not because Hezbollah surrendered.
Because the Israeli army turned to Netanyahu and said, we can't keep doing this.
We just put our two best brigades in there.
They got chewed up and spit out.
We can't do this anymore.
We're exhausted.
We have to have a ceasefire.
So they got the ceasefire.
Then Syria collapsed and they're all able to flex their muscles into a vacuum.
As opposed to taking on the lions of Hezbollah head-on in southern Lebanon.
But neither Hezbollah nor Hamas has been physically defeated at this point in time, so we can't talk about decisive Israeli victory yet on military terms.
But politically, Israel is definitely in a stronger position today than they were a month ago.
Last question or last subject matter.
Is war with Iran, U.S. and Israel versus Iran, likely?
I don't think so.
I mean, this is where I'm going to get in trouble with a lot of Iranians out there.
But my take on the Iranian president is that he does not want a war and that he and his moderate faction inside Iran have considerable political clout at this juncture.
The more conservative members of the Iranian government, the IRGC and others.
Are looking for a continuation of this fight.
They believe that they have the military capability to do harm to Israel.
But the fact of the matter is, if there's a war between Israel and Iran, Israel will suffer as well, very much.
But so will Iran.
And that's not the direction that the Iranian leadership wants.
I remind everybody that in 2023, I met with a...
President Raisi in September at the UN General Assembly, I and others.
I wasn't there solo, but I listened to him, asked him some questions, etc.
He made a point that the effort that was built up around this Kurdish girl who tragically died in Iranian police custody over a hijab violation led to demonstrations that then were turned into a nationwide Insurrection run by various anti-regime forces controlled by foreign intelligence services,
including the United States.
He said this is one of the greatest struggles in the history of Iran.
Here in the West, we don't talk about it.
He said that in 2023, Iran had one of the greatest challenges to the continuation of the revolution.
This revolt was real.
They beat it.
And he said they beat it because of the support of the Iranian people and the perseverance of the Iranian security forces.
But he said it was touch and go.
It was a big deal.
And I think that the regime does not want to create a situation where you have a fracture between the Iranian people over Israel, over whether they go to war with Israel or not.
That you need to unify the Iranian people.
And the best way to do that is to fulfill the wishes and desires of the Iranian people for peace and security, especially economic security, which requires the sanctions to be lifted.
And that's the direction this president is going to go.
So I think you're going to see negotiations with the Trump administration and that Iran is going to put its nuclear program on the table and see what they can get in exchange for it.
Boy, do I wish Trump would listen to you, Scott.
Scott, thank you very much.
Thank you for everything you've done for us throughout the year.
Thank you for your time today on Christmas Eve.
Thank you for all the other projects on which I've been privileged to collaborate with you, and I look forward to doing even more of the same in 2025.
Merry Christmas to you and your family.
Merry Christmas to you and your audience.
Thank you.
Thank you, Scott.
Thank you very much for watching and watching and helping us to grow.
Throughout 2024.
Because of you, we have gone from 93 subscriptions in October of 21 to 500,000 subscriptions in December of 24. We will continue to produce the same quality of fearless,
intelligent analysis that you rarely see anywhere else.
And of course, we can only do that with your continued support.
This is our last live show for the year, but we will have some surprises for you.
Producers Chris and Sonia have put together some of the best of the best of's that you've seen, and they, of course, will be popping up between now and January 2nd, when we'll be back here live.
From my heart to yours, from my family to yours, thank you, and Merry Christmas.
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