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Feb. 18, 2025 - Judging Freedom - Judge Andrew Napolitano
22:34
Phil Giraldi : Trump Panders to Israel
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Hi everyone, Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom.
Today is Wednesday, February 19th, 2025.
Phil Giraldi joins us now.
Is President Trump's Middle East policy, particularly his policies toward Israel, the same as or a continuation of or worse than Joe Biden's?
That's a very difficult question to answer.
I would say if we are viewing the fundamental issue being the genocide of the Palestinians that is taking place, you'd have to say it's better.
I mean, he was, through his emissary, was the one that pushed to arrange the current ceasefire, which while it has not held in All details, generally because of Israeli actions,
is still better than what we were getting before, and it has led to a release of prisoners and hostages.
You have to say it's better, but at the same time, I think a lot of the messages that are being sent about, for example, Buying and obtaining possession of Gaza so you could build luxury villas and no Palestinians will be allowed to go back to their homes after the fact.
I mean, that sends another, that's a different signal.
That's pretty depressing.
And you combine it with the Israeli, shall we say, mowing the grass in the West Bank and apparently moving towards annexation, which...
Which Trump has given some signals that he's considering.
There are other things going the other way.
So it's hard to give a clear answer to that.
Can Trump realistically believe?
I guess it's not a fair question if I'm asking you to get in his mind.
Can anyone realistically believe?
Well, I think obviously there is a great deal of skepticism about that.
And if you combine it with the Palestinians on the West Bank, we're talking about a total expulsion of between three and four million people with no place to go at the present time.
So it is unrealistic unless one is willing to create something like a police state in Gaza after you've cleared it so nobody even attempts to come back.
But of course, you know, the objection to that is a humanitarian gesture, that question.
This is obviously a...
A war crime that goes beyond the war crime into the genocide area, and it's being looked at by the rest of the world in a very negative way, both for what the United States is doing, and that's both Joe Biden and Donald Trump,
and also, in particular, what the Israelis are doing.
The Israelis are against their understandings about what was Billed at the time as a ceasefire in Lebanon, there's still an occupation of a considerable part of the area they're calling a buffer zone.
And of course, they've also occupied a considerable chunk of Syria, including more of the Golan Heights and Mount Hermon.
So this process is going on, and there have been a lot of opportunities for the United States to step in and stop it.
But they haven't taken those opportunities.
The president of Lebanon told Mike Waltz earlier today that the five Israeli bases in Lebanon need to be vacated.
That's not going to happen, is it?
He'd have to talk to Trump, and Trump would have to tell Netanyahu, and that's just not going to happen.
Or am I wrong?
No, you're absolutely right.
And the thing is, the Israelis have taken it one step further.
They've actually been killing Lebanese who have been believing that the ceasefire is in place and have been trying to return to their homes, just as they have been intermittently killing more Gazans in spite of the ceasefire being in effect.
And so, you know, this has been going on for a long time, and the United States is, unfortunately.
Under both presidents, an enabler of all of this.
And people are getting killed for no reason.
And it would be quite easy for the United States to intervene with Israel, since Israel is totally dependent on the U.S. for weapons and for money, and could have stopped at least some of this.
The Trump administration recently 1,800 MOABs to Israel.
MOAB, an acronym for Mother of All Bombs.
Scott Ritter and Colonel McGregor inform us that these are so big and so heavy, the Israelis don't even have planes out of which they can be bombed.
I mean, for what reason would Trump have done this?
Well, you're quite right.
There's no other reason for it.
They're also called, I think, MB-84s.
They each weigh 2,000 pounds.
That's a ton of explosives.
And the only reason why you would want to have them is to destroy heavily What do you think?
What do you think?
What do you think?
What do you think?
Our good friend Benjamin Netanyahu was quite happy to receive these.
How would this work if these things are so big and so heavy the Israelis don't have a plane out of which to drop them?
Would American planes with American pilots and American personnel be pushing these bombs out of a chute so that they destroyed areas of Lebanon or Gaza or even Iran?
You know, I don't have an answer to that.
They certainly used them in Gaza.
There were situations where they were bombing hospitals and administrative centers and those kind of built up structurally more sound buildings.
They were using them in Gaza.
They found a way to deliver them.
But you're absolutely right in that it's been sort of the acquired or normal knowledge, perceptions, that these bombs are too heavy for the jet fighters,
basically, that the Israelis have.
They don't have any bombers.
So there's something that's been rigged up.
Do they take them up in a helicopter and drop them?
Maybe. Wow.
Trump has done something which in this country is unthinkable, and that is imposed sanctions on judges, judges of the International Criminal Court.
I don't know what the sanctions consist of, Phil, but where does this fit in international law, that a judge makes a ruling you don't like, so you're going to harm the judge financially?
Well, it's not just that.
They've also basically said that they're going to go after the judges' families if they should travel to a place where the U.S. can get access to them.
This goes beyond just going after assets.
It's actually criminalizing what they've done and basically accepting the Israeli definition that these judges are terrorists.
Working with terrorists, and here comes the big lie.
The big lie is that the ICC, by its action, is also threatening to do terrible things to politicians in the United States.
Now, to me, to a certain extent, the United States presidents and their secretaries of state have justified this, if anyone were to go after them.
But that is implausible.
And so this is the fear-mongering that's being used to justify basically banning an international court which exists to stop exactly what's going on when there's a genocide or when there are war crimes.
Do you think that Trump is ignorant of history?
Not only history, I think Trump is basically a guy who operates on a gut level, which sometimes can be good, as recent developments with Russia might indicate, and very often are just bad.
He follows his instincts.
I think everybody would agree that he has advisors who come with a certain mindset.
And he did that in his first term in office, too.
And these people giving him a lot of bad advice.
So I think he is ignorant of history, the history of the last, you know, since the Second World War.
I think he clearly, when he makes comments, there is no kind of historical understanding behind it.
And I think he then goes on to make an ignorant judgment about what is authorized as a result of his bad first step.
You have an interesting piece out at the UNS Review and elsewhere called Trump's First Month Panders to Israel.
in which you point out the influence of the donor class, the Israeli lobby, on domestic American policy as well as foreign policy.
What are some of the things that and this is terrifying because this is my end of the world, that the Department of Justice under Pamela Bondi Yeah,
well, I would say there are two general areas that are affected most.
They are freedom of association and freedom of speech.
And what they're essentially saying is, at some levels, that anyone who is critical of Israel Is not exercising freedom of speech.
He's instead himself committing a hate crime, which could have consequences that they are exploring right now.
Like, for example, if it's a student at a university and the student is an exchange student, they're looking at punishing him by taking away his visa, by making him leave the country.
These are all issues that are in prospect.
And Bondi, in fact, is pushing...
I found it astonishing.
She's pushing a joint Israeli-American task force to investigate.
Hamas and Hamas's actions back in October, on October 7th.
What conceivable argument is there that Hamas has violated American federal law?
She's a federal law enforcement, chief federal law enforcement official.
Right, except Hamas is in the Middle East.
How does she have jurisdiction over what Hamas did?
Why isn't she exercising jurisdiction over what Israel is doing with its war crimes and genocide?
Why isn't she just enforcing the Foreign Agent Registration Act?
She took an oath to enforce all federal law.
Why doesn't she enforce it?
Yeah, well, there is in fact a declaration that she came out with just last week about Farah.
The Foreign Agents Registration Act, making it more difficult for judges to go after an entity or persons who are ostensibly guilty of violation of the Act because of her obvious intention.
It's to make it more difficult for people to accuse Israel of this, even though Israel interferes in United States politics more than any other country.
But it is a felony for foreign agents to interfere in American politics, and it's a felony for Americans to work on behalf of a foreign country, be paid for that work, and not report it to the State Department.
That's absolutely right.
And one of the really depressing aspects of this task force that they're cranking up is the fact that it would work jointly with Israeli investigators.
You will have Israelis working in the United States with the Justice and the FBI to investigate Americans.
You know, this gets deeper and deeper.
This is why I'm saying that it is so difficult to really understand what the intentions are and who is really behind this and why they're behind it.
I got to bring you back to where we started about whose foreign policy is worse.
Now, maybe this is like how many angels are on the head of a pin and the viewers and listeners can decide which is more...
Trump's right now, on the basis of what you've just told us, seems more pervasive than Biden's.
Trump is not killing people as Biden was, because thanks to Trump, there is that ceasefire.
We don't know how long it will last.
But seeping this into the fabric of American law is terrifying to me.
Somebody's going to knock on my door and say, I work for Mossad.
I want to talk to you.
Well, that's it.
I mean, the point is our fundamental liberties.
And let's face it, these liberties were under attack with Joe Biden, too.
I mean, there was a lot of the same talk going on around.
Well, look at all the pressure that was put on universities last year to get them to shut down anybody demonstrating on a campus in support of the Palestinians or to...
Be critical of what Israel was doing, what it was mass killing Palestinians.
This pressure was coming out of the Biden administration, supported by Republicans.
But the fact is, this whole kind of viewing, I hate to put it this way, but viewing Palestinians as almost subhuman is bilateral.
I mean, both parties are into it to a certain extent.
And they're into it for different reasons, money being one of them, which you mentioned before, the fact that a lot of money that comes from Jewish billionaires in particular winds up in the pockets of politicians,
particularly in Congress.
But Joe Biden was a major recipient of...
Of money coming from pro-Israel sources.
And Trump, of course, we have the $100 million coming from Ms. Adelson.
So this is bilateral and everybody's into it.
And it's a major reason why Israel is always considered to be an exception to American laws and never held accountable for anything it does.
I don't know which is worse, Phil, a president ignorant of history or a Congress paid for by the Israeli lobby.
But we apparently have both.
Yeah, we have both.
And, you know, Biden, of course, was no genius when it came to foreign policy either.
Diplomacy under Biden with good old Tony Blinken.
It was a dead issue for nearly all of the four years that Biden was president and with Blinken.
And, you know, again, this is both sides.
The money has been right out in the open quite a bit.
And nobody does anything about it because anyone in politics or many in politics benefit from it or think that they benefit from it.
So it's a horror story that's unfolding right in front of us, and we're watching it.
The world is watching it.
And I have optimism right at the moment that we will maybe be moving in the right direction over Ukraine and Russia, but I don't see that necessarily the case in the Middle East.
Well, I think Trump has been terrific.
In the past few days on Ukraine and Russia, I mean, he accused Zelensky of playing Biden like a fiddle.
Is Netanyahu playing Trump like a fiddle?
Well, he's playing him.
How Trump is perceiving it, I don't think we know yet.
Trump has a big ego.
And Trump is not going to want to be perceived as someone who is being managed by Netanyahu.
But Netanyahu, nevertheless, has manipulated the situation through probably the donors in the United States and the Israel lobby to the extent that he was invited to the White House, the first foreign head of state to be invited to the White House after the The president was seated.
And he was the guest who was intimately involved in the discussion of these plans for Gaza.
So he has somebody's ear.
And how the president sees him is, I think, a very interesting question, which we will learn more about in the next couple of months.
Is the President of the United States afraid to say no to Benjamin Netanyahu?
That's another good question.
I think that every president or recent presidents of the United States have been nervous about saying no to Netanyahu.
And for that reason, we have seen issues, policy issues, going back to Obama In particular, where he clearly did not like Netanyahu, did not like a lot of what he was doing,
but felt it was expedient to bow his head.
And so we will see how this plays out.
Again, because Trump, in terms of ego and somewhat capricious behavior, more so in that direction than some recent other presidents have been.
Phil Giraldi, thank you very much.
It's a great piece at the UNS Review.
Trump's first month panders to Israel.
It's a typical Phil Giraldi piece.
Very, very well written, researched, and footnoted, and brilliantly presented.
Thank you, my dear friend.
I hope we can see you again next week.
Thank you.
I'll be out.
Of course.
All the best.
Coming up at four o'clock today, talk about the best.
The great Professor Jeffrey Sachs, Judge Napolitano for Judging Freedom.
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