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Jan. 19, 2025 - Judging Freedom - Judge Andrew Napolitano
24:24
Larry Johnson :
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Hi everyone, Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom.
Today is Monday, January 20th, 2025.
Larry Johnson will be here with us in just a moment, but first this.
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Larry Johnson, good morning, my friend.
Welcome here.
I want to talk to you about the Kurds in Syria because you wrote about it recently.
But more recently, you have written about...
The Israelis and Hamas and who are the true terrorists.
What is the core, the core of the violence between the Palestinians and the Israelis?
I like to deal with facts, Judge.
Not perceptions, not opinions.
Let's just look at the raw numbers.
Since 2000.
And going through 2022, just take that 22-year time frame.
If you're going to define terrorism as acts of violence against civilians for political purposes, you have to say, well, how many Israelis have been killed over that period of time?
That 22-year period by...
The Palestinians, and particularly Hamas.
The number is fewer than 1,500.
When you turn the question around and say how many Palestinians were killed, the number is almost 11 times that.
So in other words, for every single Israeli that ever died in a terrorist attack, 11 Palestinians died in a terrorist attack by Israel.
Similarly, when you say, how many hostages did Hamas take over that time frame?
19 in that 22-year period.
Well, and then you asked the correct question in a note to me yesterday about what's the difference between a hostage and a prisoner.
And it's just like, whoever gets to write the history books, they get to define who's who.
Because during that period, that same period of 19 Israelis being taken hostage, almost 28,000 Palestinians were grabbed off the street, taken to prison, locked up, not provided due process, not presented with charges,
and not going to court.
So they were hostages as well.
It was official hostage-taking.
So again, just by those numbers.
And then once we go to October 7th and move forward, Instead of 11 Palestinians dying for every Israeli, that number jumps to 50. 60 Palestinians died for every Israeli that died.
So just on numbers alone, the Palestinians are the victims.
They're not the perpetrators, as they are often portrayed in the West.
And I know people can get upset.
And I had a dear Jewish friend write me.
He said, well...
You know, how about if it's unprovoked?
Well, let's start with unprovoked.
There was no justification in Israel.
Let's just assume that, you know, you had these, I think the number of 652 total terrorist attacks between 2000 and 2022.
And so 652 terrorist attacks.
So let's say that there were two perpetrators for each of those attacks.
That'd be 1,200 people.
Why do you risk, why do you grab 28,000 folks, put them in prison, torture them, deprive them of their rights with no due process?
So that's, as I said, this is just completely out of whack.
It's unprovoked.
And really the thing that's driving this is religious extremism.
And it's often presented that it's Muslim religious extremism driving it.
But in this case, it's those who believe that The Jews are entitled to take all of the land of Israel from the Nile River to the Euphrates River, and that any Arab, any Druze,
any Kurd, any Turk who's in there, they are Amalek, they are evil, they are to be destroyed because this all belongs to Israel.
That belief is driving this entire madness.
That belief and acting upon it is the core of the dispute between the Palestinians and Israelis.
The Israeli belief that God the Father gave this land to them and their descendants, and whoever has lived there in the interim has to go or be killed.
Yeah. Well, in fact, you know, you go back and reconstruct it.
You know, initially the promises were made to the 12 tribes of Israel.
Well, 10 of those tribes disappeared after they were conquered basically through, I think it was the Assyrians that took them out back in the day.
So, you know, you wind up with just two of the remaining tribes.
But again, they insist that this is a covenant that God made with them.
You know, it's not just Jews who believe that.
You've got a lot of Christians, evangelical Christians in particular, who subscribe to that.
Yes. And therefore justify Israel committing all the Zionists.
I don't want to necessarily label it as Israeli, but it is Zionists committing all sorts of atrocities and genocide against Palestinians.
People like Mike Huckabee.
Mike Johnson, the Speaker of the House of Representatives, they belong to this Christian nationalism which believes that Israel was given by God the Father to the present-day Israelis and presumably to all of their successors.
Why did Hamas take hostages on October 7th?
For the same reason they've been taking hostages over the last 25 years to secure the release of the thousands of Palestinians.
They've been pretty effective.
They'll give up one hostage for a hundred other prisoners.
But it speaks to the fact that there are so many Palestinians in rotting away inside Israeli prisons.
And they're not being held in humane conditions.
And there is valid, credible evidence that these Zionist prison guards have been raping the Palestinian prisoners.
So, you know, Hamas in particular, they're trying not to forget and leave people behind.
They're trying to say, you know, we have your back and we will get you out.
So that's why they take hostages.
I'm not advocating the taking of hostages because, you know, oftentimes it doesn't.
It really hasn't panned out.
But, you know, I worked the whole Beirut, Lebanon, American hostage crisis back in, you know, when I was a state from 1989 until they came out in 1992.
And, you know, so this has been a tradition over there of taking hostages in order to try to wrest concessions from the people who are in political power.
Often, you know, the United States or Israel.
No, it's Israel hands down.
I mean, just the numbers.
One of the numbers collected that I was just stunned is that since 1967, 800,000.
Palestinians have been picked up and put in Israeli prisons.
800,000.
Wow. As a percentage of total Palestinian population, you know, that's getting somewhere upward around 45%.
I mean, it's an astonishing number.
And then when you add to that the number of Palestinians that have been killed.
You know, it's one thing if an Israeli soldier is out confronting a Hamas fighter and, you know, both are wearing uniforms and they're blazing away.
But that's not what's happened.
Israel has been dropping bombs indiscriminately.
And they always use the excuse, oh, well, you know, that Hamas is using human shields.
But, you know, think about this.
If Hamas had no regard...
For civilian lives.
How is it that these hostages are still alive?
You know, they've taken pains in the face of horrific attacks to protect and preserve the lives of these Israeli hostages.
And, you know, again, I'm not saying that they were right in doing so.
But I now understand why they did it.
Because they saw getting...
For every Israeli hostage that they could take, they might get 100, 200 of their brothers and sisters that have been illegally detained and put into Israeli prisons.
So, I mean, you know, nobody's hands on this are clean on either side.
Does Hamas use civilians as human shields?
No. No, I think that's an Israeli excuse.
You can't, when you're a guerrilla force in the midst of a population, you know, by definition, they're, quote, human shields.
They're fighting within that population.
But, you know, they're really doing no different than what my ancestors did in fighting the British in the colonies.
In Virginia, principally, in South Carolina, that they fought against the Brits, and they were, you know...
Militia people.
They were part of the population.
They were fighting to defend their land.
Right. And that's what we in the West continue to neglect or to ignore.
We like to pretend that these people have no history there, have no claim there.
It's just the opposite.
The ones coming in to try to create a history are the Jews who survived the Holocaust coming out of Ukraine, Poland.
Other parts of Europe.
In some of the Western press this morning and in Haaretz, there is articulated this fear that Netanyahu will sabotage the ceasefire.
Is that a legitimate fear?
Yep. The sun's going to come up in the east tomorrow, too.
Exactly. That's the history of this, Judge.
You know, you go back, the second intifada, which went from roughly 2000 to 2005, was settled by an agreement, Sharm el-Sheikh agreement, I believe it was, signed between Abbas, Mahmoud Abbas, and Ariel Sharon.
Well, how'd that last?
Well, it didn't.
And I think Netanyahu is going to be looking for any pretext possible.
To return to the fight.
But, you know, again, can we at least objectively step back and look at how did Israel do by having the most powerful military in the Middle East, supposedly, and fighting against a force that didn't have any kind of heavy armament,
no tanks, no artillery, no air cover, no air defense systems.
And yet after 15 months, Israel was not able to vanquish them.
Not at all.
In fact, that was one of the really interesting things when you saw the release of these three women yesterday who had been held hostage since October 7th.
They were surrounded by Hamas fighters who are fully decked out in their military gear carrying weapons.
You know, they're still alive.
They're still fighting.
And in fact, some of the reports, even the CIA was indicating that Hamas has increased its strength.
Why? Because people have had mother, father, brother, sister killed, and they seek revenge.
That is a powerful, powerful motive.
Talk to me about the Kurds, the Turks, and Syria.
Boy. We only have a few minutes.
I know.
Give me an hour here.
You know, the Turks and Kurds have been going at it for, you know, let's see, we're now the 21st century, about 10 centuries.
So there's been, the Kurds are a problem because they are a distinct ethnic group.
They are primarily a Sunni Muslim, but they inhabit parts of Turkey, parts of Syria, and parts of Iran.
They're in all these different countries, and yet they share a common ethnicity, a common heritage, a common language.
Now, this also puts the lie, this thing about the Muslims or this monolith that they're going to take over the world.
Because here you have the Turks, who are Sunni Muslims, the Kurds, who are Sunni Muslims.
You think, hey, brothers of the faith, they get along.
Yeah, they get along about as well as the Ukrainians and the Russians who, the Ukrainians at least, come out of an Eastern Orthodox Christian tradition, as do the Russians.
So it's just to show that even though there's some shared religion, it doesn't necessarily translate into the culture.
So when Turkey engineered with the West and cooperating with these Islamic extremist groups like Hayat Tahrir al-Shem, Which is a Sunni extremist group.
The goal was to get control, you know, if you can, a rebirth of the Ottoman Empire under Erdogan's vision.
But that left them with how do we deal with these Kurds?
The Kurds have basically established an independent state out in northeastern Syria.
Well, the Turks aren't going to stand for that.
But the United States is backing and funding The Kurdish element there.
And this one sort of spinoff of the Kurds, it's the Kurdish Workers' Party.
They're a Marxist-Leninist group.
That's been sort of their, that was their founding.
So they're not devoutly religious, yet they make up a core of this movement that is fighting to control northeastern Syria.
All right, so the United States and Turkey are in NATO.
The United States and the Kurds are allies, and the Kurds and Turkey are mortal, and the Turks are mortal enemies.
You figure that out.
Yeah, well, and let's not forget that in the early days with the PKK, the Kurdistan Workers' Party, they were receiving funding and support from Greece.
Remember, Greece and Turkey were also their partners in...
In NATO, but Greece was actively worried.
You know, it had a significant covert action program to support the Kurds and using it to attack and weaken the Turks.
So what the Turks now face, as the United States faces, is are they going to go to war with the Kurds and risk a war with the United States?
And is the United States even willing to risk that war?
Are we going to back the Kurds no matter what?
You know, as long as it takes?
Or are we going to say, oh, never mind, you're not that important to us?
So it's just one more little issue that Donald Trump's going to be dealing with after he is sworn in here in about the next 30 minutes.
Last subject matter.
Can Trump pressure Putin to end the special military operation in Ukraine?
He's got one way to do that.
He announces Ukraine will not be part of NATO, never will be.
He withdraws, cuts off all funding to Ukraine immediately, and withdraws U.S. military presence from Ukraine, including CIA personnel.
That would be almost too good to be true, Larry.
Well, that would give him leverage with Putin, because he said, okay.
It's essentially saying, I put my gun down.
I'm throwing away my ammunition.
Let's talk.
At that point, Putin couldn't say, okay, we're still facing a threat.
He'd go, okay.
And I actually think that would work.
But as you correctly know, that's not going to go over too well in Washington.
There'd be heads exploding all over the city.
Certainly. With his buddies in the military-industrial complex, his rich billionaire buddies who are making a fortune off of the war.
Yeah, and that's, you know, war has been big business in the United States, unfortunately.
And, you know, it'd be one thing if it's just making the money, but boy, the lives at a cost and the people that have suffered, we're not just talking financial loss, but we're talking the loss of loved ones.
The death toll for the Ukrainians right now is probably in excess of a million.
Well, in excess of a million.
Wow. You can't even contemplate that.
How much longer do you think it can go on?
I mean, I guess the answer to that is it depends on what Trump does.
I don't know if Trump on his own will continue to fund the Ukrainians.
He can't do it without an act of Congress.
Well, just to draw, you know, lessons from the end of World War II with respect to the Soviet defeat of the Nazis.
Once, you know, by August of 1944, strategically, Germany was defeated.
They did not have the ability to stop the Soviet army, which was moving all across the front from north to south.
Yet that war went on, and the final battle that took place in April in Berlin was very, very brutal.
But again, at that point, there was no way that the Germans could win that, but they still fought to the bitter end, and tens of thousands of them died in that, as did the Soviet Union.
And do you think the same thing will happen in Ukraine?
Let's say Trump cuts off all aid tomorrow.
Zelensky can last how long?
A couple of months with what he has?
No, a week, two weeks.
Wow. They'd be done.
Once that word comes through, because Europe keeps making this noise like they're going to step up to the plate and provide aid.
Europe is a joke.
A malevolent, malicious joke, but a joke nonetheless.
They don't have any kind of unity.
They don't have any kind of industrial base.
Look at Germany right now, which is shedding key industrial sectors.
You know, they used to be a powerhouse in the production of luxury automobiles, whether you're talking Mercedes, BMWs, Audis.
You know, they're closing factories, laying workers off.
And within that, you don't see a majority of the Germans rising up saying, hey, wait a second, we're not going to take this.
At least we're fortunate here in the United States with this last election.
Again, whether you love Donald Trump, hate Donald Trump, whatever, the reality is a majority, a significant, undeniable majority of Americans voted for Trump in his vision.
And it's now going to push the United States in a different direction.
You don't have anyone in Europe which has that kind of mandate, that kind of support.
I'd hate to be Keir Starmer because here's a guy who put all of his chips on Kamala Harris.
And I guarantee you, he's not going to be getting any invites to the White House anytime soon.
I think you're probably right.
Alistair Crook said this morning he doesn't think Keir Starmer will last much longer as prime minister because of some domestic disputes now bubbling up over his failure to prosecute people when he was the head of public prosecutions.
Yeah. Another issue for another time.
Thank you very much, Larry.
All the best, my dear friend.
We'll see you Friday with Ray McGovern at the roundtable.
I'll be there.
Thanks, Josh.
Okay. Thank you.
Coming up after the inauguration of Donald Trump, if you're watching us live, at 2 o'clock this afternoon, the one and only Max Blumenthal.
Judge Napolitano for Judging Free.
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