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Jan. 8, 2025 - Judging Freedom - Judge Andrew Napolitano
21:39
Max Blumenthal : More Lies on Syria.
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To avoid dipping into whatever's left of his own fortune to fund his campaign.
So I wouldn't assign too much meaning to it, although it's funny.
It's hilarious to watch the freakout within the Israel lobby.
And what Jeff Sachs was saying was not only that Netanyahu's a dark figure, that he's responsible for sabotaging all the negotiations that would have led to a ceasefire and prevented...
Where we're going, which is regional war, something I think Trump wants to avoid at the beginning of his term.
But he also talked about how Obama, and this is what I think might have appealed to Trump.
Obama was responsible for the disaster in Syria with the Operation Timber Sycamore.
Dirty war, secret funding of Al-Qaeda.
I agree with you.
That type of criticism of Obama would very much appeal to Trump.
Back to Ukraine.
This will aggravate you a little bit, but I'd like you to watch it.
In one of his end-of-the-term interviews, Secretary of State Blinken spent about an hour and a half with the New York Times.
Here's 90 seconds of it.
Where the line is drawn on the map, at this point, I don't think is fundamentally going to change very much.
The real question is, can we make sure that Ukraine is in a position to move forward strongly?
You mean that the areas that Russia controls, you feel, will have to be ceded?
Ceded is not the question.
The question is...
The line, as a practical matter, in the foreseeable future, is unlikely to move very much.
Ukraine's claim on that territory will always be there.
And the question is, will they find ways, with the support of others, to regain territory that's been lost?
I think the critical thing now, going forward, is this.
If there is going to be a resolution, or at least a near-term resolution, because it's unlikely that Putin will give up on his ambitions.
If there's a ceasefire, then in Putin's mind, the ceasefire is likely to give him time to rest, to refit, to reattack at some point in the future.
So what's going to be critical to make sure that any ceasefire that comes about is actually enduring is to make sure that Ukraine has the capacity going forward to deter further aggression.
And that can come in many forms.
It could come through NATO, and we put Ukraine on a path to NATO membership.
It could come through security assurances, commitments, guarantees by different countries.
To make sure that Russia knows that if it reattacks, it's going to have a big problem.
That, I think, is going to be critical to making sure that any deal that's negotiated actually endures and then allows Ukraine the space, the time, to grow strong as a country.
He's in an alternate reality, Max.
Well, he's been there next to Biden throughout this whole process of paving the path to war with Russia.
And now it's so clear.
Why the war took place, which is that Tony Blinken wanted to NATO-ize, along with Joe Biden and the whole gang, wanted to NATO-ize Ukraine.
This was Putin's principal complaint.
This was what Bill Burns, current CIA director, outgoing CIA director, warned would take place back in 2008.
Jack Matlock, U.S. ambassador to Russia, warned that the NATO-ization Of Ukraine and putting Ukraine on the path to NATO would lead to direct war with Russia.
And on his way out, Tony Blinken said, well, if we're going to have a deal for a ceasefire or peace, the NATOization will have to continue, which means there would never be a deal.
Russia would never accept that because Russia understands putting NATO at its doorstep would lead to the destruction of Russia.
As Kissinger said, that if we control Ukraine...
Russia will be balkanized.
So, I mean, Blinken cannot pry himself away from the dream of destroying Russia, even as he discusses an inevitable peace deal or ceasefire deal.
It's completely crazy.
And if you read deeper into that interview, I don't know if it's deliberate or not, but he misunderstands what Putin's objectives in Ukraine were.
This is a war about the Donbass.
That's what it was about.
And Blinken declares victory and said, we actually prevented Putin from taking total control of Ukraine and taking over Kyiv, which is something that...
I mean, if Putin had wanted to do that, why did he just send the equivalent of an expeditionary force of 80,000 towards the Kiev Oblast, which was quickly swamped?
Why did he do that if he wanted to take over the whole city and fight Ukraine in a kind of a fortress warfare?
It wasn't going to happen.
Is there any evidence whatsoever that Putin wanted to take over Ukraine?
I think the answer to that is no.
And the line from the Biden administration, which I think is propaganda for the consumption of the American public, or at least those parts of the American public that have no political education, is that Putin wanted to restore the glory of the Soviet Union,
or actually restore the Soviet Union itself.
And it's just a fundamental misunderstanding, a willful misunderstanding of Russia's position.
Where it's just simply a country that is under siege and has been under siege since the collapse of the Soviet Union when the first Bush administration violated its verbal agreement with Gorbachev.
To not expand NATO past Germany.
I mean, and it began with the destruction of Yugoslavia, and you just slowly have this malign military alliance creeping towards your borders.
Would the United States...
I mean, the academic Vladimir Posner put this really well to a class.
Would the United States tolerate China and Russia?
Placing advanced dual-use missile systems on its border with Mexico?
What would the United States do?
It would immediately carpet bomb Mexico City.
Right. You're right.
You're right.
Are you surprised that the New York Times rejected a full-page ad from American Quakers who wanted to encourage the government?
Well, it's funny because in that interview with Tony Blinken, his interviewer, Lulu Garcia Navarro, repeatedly comes very close to accusing him of being involved in genocide.
Okay, stop right here because it's a very quick...
This will make your blood boil, although you've seen it.
Sonia, cut number six.
Do you, Secretary Blinken, worry that perhaps you have been presiding over what the world will see as a genocide?
No. It's not, first of all.
Second, as to how the world sees it?
I can't fully answer to that.
But everyone has to look at the facts and draw their own conclusions from those facts.
And my conclusions are clear.
Look at that body language.
Wow. Go ahead, Max.
Well, it speaks for itself.
You know, if Tony Blinken is unable to muster a response to the charge of genocide and does not immediately deny, he doesn't take issue with the term genocide.
He just squirms because he's afraid of it because he knows something horrible has happened.
He has a guilty conscience if he has one.
He pauses.
He didn't have a pre-prepared response even though he knew that the question was coming.
And yet the New York Times, as an institution, Refuses to allow that word to be featured in a paid advertisement.
That says that the New York Times is siding with Tony Blinken, a political official who is implicated in the Holocaust of our times, over the International Court of Justice, the International Criminal Court, which is accusing Israel's leadership of crimes against humanity,
and its own reporters who have used that term.
And it's doing this against the Quakers, the American Friends Service Committee, which is on the front line of the fight for justice for Palestinians, as it was during the fight for abolition of slavery in the United States.
And I think it's clear who's on the right side of history.
It's not the New York Times, which has published lie after lie after lie, which just yesterday...
Featured a headline declaring that Israel might have actually had just cause to destroy and burn the Kamal Adwan Hospital in northern Gaza and arrest its entire staff, including its director, Hussam Abu Sophia, who is being tortured right now in an Israeli dungeon in Stay Teman,
because they acquired testimony from the Israeli state security of one of the staff.
Who said that Hamas was inside the hospital or operated within the hospital.
How did Israel get that testimony?
Through torture.
So the New York Times is basing a headline off of coerced testimony through torture, which is a violation of the Geneva Conventions.
And at the same time, refusing a paid ad from the Quakers to accuse Israel of genocide.
The New York Times as an institution is just completely been morally destroyed along with the rules-based order.
Articulated by Tony Blinken that its editorial board supports by this Holocaust that we've witnessed since October 7th.
Has CNN been morally destroyed by the nonsense and fake news, literally faked, created, crafted, that it has put out about Syria?
I mean, it's like...
CNN as an institution is sociopathic.
I don't think anyone there, except maybe lower-level employees, care or have any sense of shame.
And they're performing a very specific task, which is as a force multiplier for U.S. imperial objectives.
They basically are the mighty Wurlitzer of the CIA and the State Department.
And so CNN in Syria...
For years, it's been spreading every possible lie in order to bring to power what I call the Islamic State in Suits Administration, or ISIS, which currently rules in Damascus.
And right now, they're not telling the public about the implications of this regime change operation.
They're using their $800 million annual budget to just spin out more lies.
I mean, most notoriously, the prisoner liberation hoax.
Which looks really ironic, not only because the prisoner who Clarissa Ward, CNN's top international correspondent, liberated, turned out to be a corrupt local government official who was just faking it, but because HTS,
or what I call Islamic State in Suits, the junta that's in power in Damascus, is now on a hunt for all of the prisoners that it let free from all of these prisons because they turn out to actually be...
Many of them murderers and rapists who are causing crime on the streets of Syria right now.
Joe Biden has declined to lift the denomination of terrorist organization from HTS at the same time that his State Department and his Central Intelligence Agency are interacting with them as if they're normal Western diplomats.
Sanctions waiver, which is amazing.
I thought the sanctions were about three things.
One, taking down the quote-unquote Assad regime.
And two, democracy and three, human rights.
But now you have the former deputy head of ISIS, founder of Syrian al-Qaeda in power, presiding over the slaughter and repression of Alawites.
On the coast and in the Homs countryside, hideous repression is taking place in Syria.
Torture, all on camera.
There's no democracy.
They came into power through force and have suspended the constitution for three years and said it'll take another four years for elections.
Jolani is placing in high positions.
The justice minister of Syria is someone who oversaw on-camera executions of women in the streets of Idlib.
For the alleged crime of prostitution.
They were just shot in the head after he read out sentences.
I mean, this is like a medieval character.
Jolani's putting Uyghurs and Tajik jihadis who are on the State Department sanctions list in senior command positions in his defense ministry.
And the U.S. has just granted a sanctions waiver.
And HTS has responded.
This is Jolani's government, by stating that the sanctions, if they're extended after six months, will hurt the Syrian people and prevent the Syrian economy from developing.
But this was supposed to be about only harming Assad.
You had U.S. officials under Trump testify to Congress, these sanctions only hurt Assad and his gang of bad guys.
No, it turns out that they've impoverished the entire Syrian people.
It was just about strangling an entire country in order to achieve the desired result.
So why are sanctions being lifted?
Why are U.S. officials meeting with these characters as they turn the Syrian government into the planet of the apes?
Because they've agreed to allow Israel to expand in the south.
Israel has taken 40% of Syria's water supply, six major reservoirs.
It's setting up checkpoints in the South.
And Syria is totally powerless to resist the U.S. presence in the Northeast, from Al-Tanif all the way up.
So that's why.
It's not about democracy.
It's not about human rights.
And it was always harming the Syrian people.
Here's Jelani making a plea to President-elect Trump to lift the sanctions.
Sonia, cut number eight.
Syria cannot continue without relations with a large regional country like Iran, but they must be based on diplomatic relations Respect for the sovereignty of the two countries, non-interference in internal affairs, and only relations that are compatible with the interests of the two countries without interfering in the matters of sectarian hatreds.
We hope that the new American administration will not follow in the same approach of the previous administration in continuing these sanctions and will lift them without entering into negotiations or bargaining.
Might have been part of the deal, who knows?
There definitely was a deal, a very cynical deal.
But after the holiest shrine of the Alawites and Nusiris was vandalized by Jolani's men early on after they had seized Aleppo,
and the video was released in, I believe, late December.
And the guards of the shrine were massacred.
Alawites rose up in protest.
And Jolani then initiated a campaign of incitement against Iran and against religious minorities, including Shiites in Syria, blaming Iran for these protests and basically accusing Iran of trying to inspire some kind of color revolution,
as if people weren't just genuinely indignant about what was done.
To their shrine, it would be like if someone had dropped a bomb on Mecca.
I mean, that's what it was like to see that level of desecration for Alawites.
And they are facing extinction now in Syria.
And Jolani's blaming Iran for the whole thing.
We're talking about an existential threat to Iran on its borders developing in Damascus.
Let's see how they respond.
We don't know how they're going to respond.
How do Jelani's people treat Christians?
And are there Jewish Syrians?
And if so, how are they treated?
Well, most Jewish Syrians left after the establishment.
Of Israel, because Zionism implicated all Jews in the Arab world as potential agents.
And it did so through events like the Lovan Affair in Cairo, where Ben-Gurion and his defense minister, Pinhas Levan, actually recruited Egyptian Jews as spies to carry out bombings.
In Egyptian theaters, which they would then blame.
They were planning to blame it on the Muslim Brotherhood and the Egyptian Communists so that the British would reoccupy the Suez Canal.
And they found out that was the end of Egyptian Jews.
In Iraq, bombs were planted in Jewish community centers by the Zionist underground in order to compel Jews to leave Iraq.
And there was a similar process in Syria.
Jews bombing Jews.
Well, Zionists bombing Jews.
And, you know, what we're experiencing right now is Zionists spiritually and politically bombing Jews around the world with the poison they're spilling out on social media.
So it's one process.
So there are very few Syrian Jews.
However, Syrian Jewish heritage, what's left of it, was protected under the Assad government.
And Jews were still able to visit a synagogue in Damascus.
And Christians...
Obviously, we're very well protected and we're part of the government.
Syria was pluralistic.
And Jolani has attempted to meet with Christian bishops and patriarchs and to try to prevent the dissolution of relations between his government and Christians because it would fatally damage his soft power and his relations with the West.
It would be fatal.
We're good to go.
Correspondent in the Middle East was just on Democracy Now claiming all the Alawites were complicit in crimes against the rest of the Syrian people and Syrians are just getting their just desserts now.
So I think we're seeing a very muted response to the possible extinction of this ancient...
Religious minority community from the West, and it's because they're seen as a stronghold of Assadist loyalism, which isn't true at all.
You know, if you talk to Alawites, they're not crying because Assad left.
There isn't a personal cult-like attachment to him.
They just want to live on the land that they've been on for hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of years.
Max Blumenthal, thank you, my friend.
You're such a wealth of knowledge.
It's almost like a graduate school class in what's going on over there and the history that led up to it.
But I appreciate it deeply and profoundly.
All the best.
We hope we'll see you next week.
Thanks. See you in class.
Okay, okay, Professor.
Coming up later today at 1 o'clock this afternoon, Ambassador Ian Proud at 2 o'clock.
Professor John Mearsheimer at 3 o'clock, Colonel Larry Wilkerson, Judge Napolitano for Judging Freedom.
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