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Jan. 28, 2025 - Judging Freedom - Judge Andrew Napolitano
12:21
Matt Hoh : The Palestinian Sufferings.
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Genocide, as if it were real estate to be redeveloped, turns my stomach.
It reminds me, Judge, a local story from here, and I think you'll like this as well.
I have friends of mine, part of a ministry that would go and feed the homeless in a park in Raleigh, and then they were arrested for feeding the homeless.
This is like 10 years ago.
And then, of course, the emails come out from the city council, from the mayor's office, ordering the police to do that in order to benefit the real estate developers.
And again, so going back to this idea of Emperor Trump.
And what is his background?
How does he view the empire?
He doesn't view it in the static terms.
He doesn't view it in the established terms that Joe Biden and his predecessors viewed it.
He views it more dynamically.
And if you're in real estate, right, you have to be willing to move.
You have to be willing to enter new markets, leave old markets, and you have to be able to take care of nuisances.
So just like my friends Hugh and Maggie were arrested.
For feeding the homeless because that was bothering the developers?
You know, you have to get rid of the nuisance.
And in this case, you know, as we were saying before, it is the Palestinian people.
And I think that's how it also, the larger context, there's not larger, but another context as well, Judge, I think, is Trump's ego.
And, you know, we have to understand that that's what motivates this man.
And you hear this conversation, these rumors or leaks or whatever, that Donald Trump really wants to win a Nobel Peace Prize.
And in order to do that, maybe it's solve the Ukraine war.
Maybe it's solve the Middle East.
But if he wants one, you know, ending the Israel-Palestine conflict, he probably believes as his best route to winning a Nobel Peace Prize.
I mean, he said it in his inauguration, his greatest legacy will be of peacemaker and unifier.
And so for Donald Trump, this is Roman, right?
I wonder if he's still going to play golf with Lindsey Graham, who wants to whisper in his ear, it's time to bomb Iran.
Another crazy person.
We have been talking yesterday and today about this terrific clip from Daniel Levy, a former Israeli negotiator, harshly critical of the Netanyahu government and characterizing the ceasefire.
As a defeat for Israel.
It's quite profound.
I'd like your thoughts on it.
Chris, cut number one.
One cannot underestimate the impact on the Israeli public psyche of the release.
The initial three who were released.
And of course, everyone therefore saw those images.
They've been told Al-Qassam defeated.
They've been told the public has turned against them.
They've been told so many things, and then they saw those images.
An occupying army, armed and aided by the most powerful military in the world, the US.
A nuclear armed state, Israel.
In a struggle between that and a resistance movement, we saw a very powerful display.
And Israelis saw that.
We're being told by Israeli analysts, talking heads, political leaders and their backers in the West that the next phase has to be to move forward.
We have to have the demilitarization of...
The reality is the most significant force in Gaza by a long stretch is Hamas.
Al-Qassam emerges from this with a very strong narrative.
Israel's narrative doesn't look so good at all.
What is Al-Qasam vis-a-vis Hamas?
Al-Qasam is named after a Palestinian liberation authority from 100 years back, and Al-Qasam is the armed wing of Hamas.
Are you surprised to hear this from a former Israeli government negotiator?
And I will tell you, two of your colleagues on this show know him and praise him to the skies.
Alistair Crook, and Ambassador Charles Freeman.
Yeah, I've never been fortunate to meet Daniel Levy, but he certainly is one of the best geopolitical commentators and analysts out there.
His background, of course, and certainly he, along with others like Gideon Levy in Israel.
I mean, this is something, right, Judge?
The fact that we know...
Much more critical elements of Israel coming from Israelis and the Israeli press than we see coming from the American press.
So to hear this type of conversation, you have to hear it from someone like Daniel Levy, a former Israeli army soldier, a former negotiator.
You won't hear that from American commentators.
And he's absolutely correct in what he's saying.
The images that are coming out of Gaza.
It should be a wake-up call for the Israeli people.
Now, it won't be, of course.
Probably some of them, I'm surprised Ben Gavir and Smotrich didn't have aneurysms and fall over dead when they saw those things.
But, you know, certainly these images and the reality of, like, you can go in, you can destroy their buildings, you can destroy their roads, you can destroy their fields, you can destroy the flesh, but you cannot destroy the spirit.
And that is something that the Israelis do not understand.
That is something the Americans do not understand.
I mean, I shouldn't say that.
The Americans certainly, I don't think, understand it at all.
The Israelis do, and they say, we're going to push through it.
You know, this is their iron wall concept.
It goes back 100 years, understanding that the Arabs will resist this, as Japa Dickensky said.
The Arabs will resist this.
This is where we must be an iron wall.
You know, so this idea of the only solution for the Israelis then is, of course, ethnic cleansing.
What other rational...
Choice is there from the Israeli perspective at this point than to fully carry out ethnic cleansing, than to exterminate these people, get rid of them, because we just spent 15, 16 months bombing them and looking at them.
They're out on the streets.
They're declaring victory.
Our soldiers, when they were returning home, are waving them and giving thumbs up to the crowds, leaving with smiles on their faces.
So the idea that somehow there is any other solution for the Israelis, then...
The extermination of the Palestinian people is only further heightened by what they're seeing coming out of Gaza in, again, these displays of defiance, the display of victory, and the resilience.
I mean, the videos that we have seen of the Palestinian people walking home in the hundreds of thousands.
I mean, these are historic videos.
The video we have certainly of the Al-Rashib Road, where there are literally hundreds of thousands of people on that road.
That has to be.
The most iconic photo of this century by far.
I mean, what else matches up with this in terms of going to the idea of the human spirit, the human desire for freedom, the human desire to live without occupation but achieve liberation?
So you see this.
And to the Israelis, then, of course, what can we do?
These people who are watching right now on the screen, Judge, where are they going back to?
They're going back.
To destroyed homes, entirely destroyed neighborhoods, nothing there.
And what's their first task?
They have to pull out of the rubble their dead parents, their dead children, their dead brothers and sisters, their dead neighbors, their dead husbands and wives.
That's what everyone who's walking right now, that's their first task.
And they are all doing it with joy and in a sense of victory, or if not victory, then defiance and resistance.
Do you think that when Trump makes these wild statements, he is being knowingly misled by the intelligence community or just shooting from his hip?
For example, I know this is going to veer us into Ukraine and Russia, but he also said the Russians have lost a million troops.
The economy is in tatters.
We know that that is absolutely not the truth.
They haven't lost, they've lost less than 100,000 and the economy is better than before Joe Biden's sanctions were imposed.
Do you think that the so-called deep state is intentionally misleading him or is he shooting from the hip and he doesn't care about the truth?
Oh, they intentionally are.
Absolutely. And I know Larry Johnson has written a couple pieces on this that are really great on Larry's blog, Sonar21.
I'm sure you spoke with him about that yesterday and on Friday with Ray.
But this is not new, Judge.
So when I resigned in protest for my position from Afghanistan in 2009 during the escalation of that war by the Obama administration, and I come back and I'm front page news in the Washington Post.
And I get a call, and I've got to go see Chuck Hagel, the former senator, former chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, who's now over at Georgetown University.
He's also, along with David Boren, a former chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, who's now the president of the University of Oklahoma.
Well, Hagel was also a former, unless he wasn't yet, Secretary of Defense.
He was not yet.
And that's a point we could kind of get into about the guy.
But what happens is that Hagel and Boren both say to me, And they're co-chairs of the President's Intelligence Advisory Board.
That's the important thing.
They both say to me, they say, Matt, look, we're hearing what you're saying.
We're reading what you're saying about Afghanistan.
It lines up exactly with what the Army and Marine Corps officers who have been in Afghanistan are saying when they're coming through our schools.
And it is completely 180 degrees from what the President is getting on his desk.
So this is the reality of the deep state.
I mean, I could tell you other stories like this.
I may have shared this one before.
Ike Skelton, former chair of the House Armed Services Committee, I went in to give him a briefing, a one-on-one briefing in March of 2010.
So we have been in Afghanistan at that point for almost eight and a half years.
And this is the chair of the Armed Services Committee, the House of Representatives, eight and a half years into the Afghan war.
He says to me, thank you for coming in.
No one has ever come into this office before and given me a negative assessment of the war in Afghanistan.
So this is the reality of the blob.
This is the reality of the military-industrial complex.
This is the reality of the imperial mindset that dominates everything so that it becomes nothing other than just a continual advancement of its own interests.
And everything is always done.
Policy follows the narrative rather than narrative following the policy.
So our policies...
Are almost always done to protect the already existing narrative.
And that includes the information that goes to the president's desk.
So you have this issue where Donald Trump is being told and he's saying confidently because his intelligence people are telling him 600,000 Russians are dead and a million more are wounded or whatever the crazy numbers was he was saying.
He has no other source.
And this is, you know, this is very problematic.
It's very difficult.
And it allows for the United States to continue this ruinous foreign policy that is not just causing death and destruction around the world, but also rapidly diminishing America's role in the world,
its place in the world, isolating it as well as then, of course, hurting the American people by extension.
So this is a systemic issue we have.
You can call it whatever you want.
We'll call it the deep state today.
We can call it something else tomorrow.
But this is a systemic problem we have with our national security state, which is, of course, is a fundamental aspect of our empire, controlling and dictating foreign policy, even when it's not in the best interest of the United States, especially when it's not in the best interest of the American people.
Matt Ho, thank you very much.
You're such a courageous guy, and thank you so much for all you've done and for the time that you share with us every week.
We look forward to seeing you again next week.
Thanks, Judge.
Of course.
Coming up at 3 o'clock this afternoon, Colonel Karen Kwiatkowski, Judge Napolitano for Judging Freedom.
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