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March 3, 2025 - Judging Freedom - Judge Andrew Napolitano
21:49
Pepe Escobar :
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Hi, everyone.
Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom.
Today is Tuesday, March 4th, 2025.
Pepe Escobar joins us now.
Not from midnight in Moscow, but from midnight in Indonesia.
That's in Thailand, Judge.
Thailand. Forgive me.
Forgive me.
Forgive me.
American ignorance of geography.
But welcome here, my dear friend.
I want to talk to you about the resistance gathering in the Middle East.
But before we get to that, since you are such an international traveler, what has been the international reaction?
To the confrontation between President Trump and President Zelensky in the Oval Office and the White House last Friday, as you have perceived it.
Yes. Well, I arrived in ASEAN, where I am, by the way.
We should explain that to the Trump administration.
ASEAN, Association of Southeast Asian Nations.
Ten countries.
Biggest partner to all of them.
China. So Thailand is an excellent point of view for the whole of East Asia.
In fact.
And the overall feeling is perplexity, of course, but people are enjoying it immensely, like a reality show, of course.
When you look at the Chinese media, especially the best outlets in China, like Guan Cha, for instance, a free translation would be The Observer, which is an excellent online newspaper.
And they are like baffled by what's going on.
They're not gloating, of course, but essentially they could see it coming.
For many reasons, especially the fact that Zelensky always thought that he was a protege of the collective West.
And what happened last week at the Oval was in front of world public opinion.
And everybody in Asia, everybody in Asia actually watched it and rewatched it.
That was the end of the free pass for basically a criminal and an illegal president in Ukraine.
It is generally understood, except amongst European elites apparently, we'll get to them in a minute, that he is in fact a criminal and he is in fact no longer the head of state of Ukraine.
Nevertheless, until last night, the United States was continuing to keep the spigot of military supplies flowing and keep that spigot open.
Trump administration says that there's been a temporary halt.
There's no way to verify this or to gauge it, but we'll take them at their word.
If there is a halt, I know you're not a military guy, but you know geopolitics.
A halt on the supplies.
How much longer can they last, Ukraine?
A few weeks.
And, of course, I'm not a military analyst, but when I was in Donbass, what, three weeks?
Less than three weeks ago, my commander friends in Donbass, from Donetsk all the way to Avdivka and Ugledar, they said, look, we're waiting for the order.
The order means the Ministry of Defense in Moscow.
And, of course, now the order might come considering that if they give the order, the collapse of the 1,000-kilometer-long front could be a matter of weeks maximum.
So the commanders on the battlefield, they are very optimistic.
They have the momentum.
The usual Russian strategy, which is attritional war.
It's working, and now they are advancing, let's say, slightly faster than before.
And now with the possibility of, let's say, the whole thing stops in the next few days.
No more deliveries.
What I have will be sufficient enough for a few weeks, four to five weeks.
And after that, that's it.
And if there's no Starlink, which is a major if at the moment, the whole Ukrainian armed forces are paralyzed.
Because they won't be able to communicate without Starlink.
Exactly. And we know who owns Starlink.
There you go.
The de facto prime minister of the United States.
Why do you think Zelensky has been so reluctant to say he's in favor of peace?
Is it the right-wing militias that he fears will end his life if he shows the slightest inclination towards reasonableness and away from violence?
Right-wing militias is a quite diplomatic church.
You mean the neo-Nazis, the neo-Nazi outfits as of battalion.
And they told Zelensky in his face over and over again, if you don't follow what, you know, what we really want, that's it.
You're done.
And your family is done.
So this is a criminal universe, sub-universe, in fact.
Apart from that, if the war stops, he loses his job, and the Russian War Crimes Tribunal will go after Zelensky big, big...
They don't want a man to Zelensky like Mussolini hanging upside down in a public square.
They want to try him for war crimes.
Meaning they will arrest him, physically seize him, and put him on trial.
Wow, this is the first I've heard of this, probably ordered by President Putin.
No question about it, Judge.
And, of course, there are They are organizing the legal proceedings for months now.
They're just waiting for, I would not say a ceasefire, but let's say a semi-formal end of the war to launch their war crimes legal procedure.
And this is huge.
So Zelensky has, and of course, the gravy train that involves the Zelensky clan and everybody around him.
S.B.U.
officials, etc., which everybody in the U.S. now knows that roughly 70% of all the weapons that are sent to Ukraine do not stay in Ukraine.
So it's the opposite of Vegas.
They leave.
They show up.
Where do those weapons go?
Exactly. Anywhere across the global south.
And including also Several nodes across the global north as well.
So it goes to criminal groups.
It goes to cartels.
It goes to all sorts of illegal organizations.
It goes to the similar neo-Nazi outfits with a similar ideology to the Azov Battalion, for instance, all over the place.
And, of course, this elite in the Russian...
Ministry of Defense and their intel services, they're making tons of money out of this.
I wonder if they'll arrest Boris Johnson and Jake Sullivan and Tony Blinken and Victoria Nuland.
They have blood on their hands too.
And of course, Joe Biden, he has immunity, but he has blood on his hands as well.
All these people should be in the dock, Judge.
There's no question about it.
They're all war criminals, period.
Documented in Russia.
Correct what I said.
Biden has immunity for prosecution in American courts.
He does not have immunity.
I mean, he's probably non-capas mentis, wouldn't even understand the case against him, but he does not have immunity for war crimes and international prosecution.
All right, switching over to Netanyahu.
On the cusp of Ramadan, maybe two or three days into Ramadan.
He announces that he will stop the movement of food, water, and medicine into the Gaza Strip, using as a pretext for this that it is being stolen by bandits.
So they're going to starve everybody.
What is the reaction to this even before the Arab League assembled today?
The Arab League assembled to do what?
To eat a collective kebab?
Everybody knows they're a joke.
You know, everybody knows that the Arab League does not represent the Arab street, first of all.
All of their governments are compromised, different levels, not only with the US, but with Tel Aviv as well.
So they will, you know, issue the usual proclamation and nothing is going to happen, de facto.
We all knew that Netanyahu would do everything to stop stage two of the ceasefire.
He doesn't respect ceasefires by definition.
And now that it's something is approaching that could lead to, let's say, really stop the destruction of Gaza.
Gaza is 90% destruct, more or less.
Stop the remaining 10% of Gaza to be totally destroyed.
He will never stop at that.
And there's also an element of revenge, Judge, which is exactly what I saw personally one week ago when I visited villages in South Lebanon bordering occupied Palestine.
The destruction of these villages, I think we talked about it in our last conversation, they were after the ceasefire with Lebanon.
The idea returned and they raised those villages to the ground, which is exactly what they plan to do with what remains of North Gaza.
And will Trump just let him get away with this?
Trump, the peacemaker in Ukraine, is he the financier of genocide the way Joe Biden was?
Can I ask you this question, Judge?
Seriously. The answer is yes.
The answer is yes.
Yesterday, the Secretary of State of the United States of America, in my opinion, committed an act of perjury when he lied under oath.
He swore on a document he filed with the Congress that Israel is in a state of emergency.
And requires $4 billion in military equipment bypassing the Congress.
Tony Blinken did this on a regular basis.
What is the emergency?
Why bypass a Congress that's in Netanyahu's pocket?
Why do all of this unless they know that Bibi is preparing to attack somebody with something and he needs more equipment with which to do it?
I would say the whole global majority can see at the moment is that they are committing a genocide.
This is in itself a state of emergency, a state of exception, like the great Italian sociologist and analyst Giorgio Agamben has described.
This is a state of exception, a state of siege, which now has been...
This is how it's conformed legally and illegally the current genocide, which has not ended yet.
So, who is the resistance and what are they going to do?
That's a very, very good question.
I use the resistance metaphorically, in fact, comparing these back-to-back trips to the front lines in Donbass, or very close to the front lines in Donbass, and then one week later.
To those villages in South Lebanon, bordering occupied Palestine.
It's a very humbling experience, emotionally very powerful, but you can connect the resistance on a Christian Orthodox vein.
In Russia, in Novorossiya, with the resistance in a Shiite vein in South Lebanon.
And all that compounded with that extraordinary ceremony, which was the Nasrallah funeral in Beirut.
So these are different aspects, let's say East and West, or Middle Eastern in a sense of West Asian and Eastern Europe of resistance.
At the same time, we can extrapolate and talk about resistance in terms of the Chinese resisting the new trade war that Trump to a point here is launching, not only against Canada and Mexico, as we all know, but also against China.
And the Chinese immediately retributed with their own 15% tariffs on a series of American products.
Tomorrow, very important, Wednesday, it's the beginning of the two sessions in Beijing.
Where Chinese legislators get together to frame, organize, suggest, and more or less organize what's going to happen with the Chinese economy in the next five years or so.
Today, one day before, one of their spokesmen said something extraordinary, and it was basically a short message to the whole Global South.
Essentially, this is what he said.
Are you looking for a credible...
Reliable, global partner.
It's us.
Work with us.
So this is going to be heard from Latin America to Africa to West Asia, Central Asia, and here, Southeast Asia.
It's Janice saying, look, we are reliable.
We are not going to sanction anybody.
We just want to trade with all of you.
Bring me back to the animosity in the Arab street.
About the genocide in Gaza, the destruction of South Lebanon, the seizure of portions of Syria, and the threats to attack Iran.
Exactly. Let me add to that.
Colonel McGregor says that General Alsizi...
Is under tremendous pressure to begin military actions against Israel, and his military is many times the size of the IDF.
True, because let's say a great deal of the Egyptian military represents the Arab street.
There's no question.
And the overall...
The consensus all across the Arab street.
And this goes way beyond Sunni and Shiite.
And this spreads to all the lands of Islam as well.
They clearly see the direct connection of the genocide in Gaza with what's happening in Syria now, where Syria is being divided.
In fact, it's already de facto divided between Turkey and Israel.
Support to the Hugo Boss-clad former moderate rebel beheader, which, by the way, is visiting Egypt nowadays.
And, of course, the resistance of Hezbollah and the Houthis, which also, by the way, if I'm not mistaken, today were designated by Marco Rubio as a terrorist organization.
So this is very, very serious.
This means that Marco Rubio has no clue what the Houthis and Ansarala are all about.
The only thing that he sees in front of him is that, ah, they are attacking Israeli-related cargo ships, etc.
So this is, from the point of view of the Trump administration, it's literally antagonizing.
Practically the whole Arab street.
Because now the Houthis, and this I talked to a lot of Yemenis in Beirut.
They were the coolest guys on top of it.
Very well informed.
And they were struck at how popular they are in all the Sunni nodes of the Arab street.
The Houthis are even popular in parts of Beirut that are essentially business Sunni.
Christians and glitzy like you are in Dubai or in Abu Dhabi.
And they respect the Houthis because they know exactly what the Houthis stand for.
Once again, resistance.
So this overall, this broader theme of resistance, it's even transcending this Sunni-Shiite divide.
This is extraordinary.
And extraordinary in the sense that those...
You have laid the background, and Colonel McGregor fully agrees with you, for a regional war which would probably draw the United States in.
Will Donald Trump, the peacemaker, say to Netanyahu what he has effectively said?
To Zelensky, enough is enough.
Stop now.
Or, because of the donor class in the United States, Mrs. Edelman and her colleagues, will he not do that?
Will he not be the peacemaker in the Middle East that he apparently, thanks be to God, is going to be in Ukraine?
Well, Trump would have to tell Netanyahu, you don't have the cards.
And he doesn't.
Netanyahu doesn't have any cards against anything, especially against a multi-front, I wouldn't say war, not yet, but a multi-front rebellion of all the neighbors, Sunni and Shiite.
Obviously, Syria is not going to be part of it because Syria at the moment is completely devastated.
And the southern city is controlled by Israel, essentially.
But Lebanon, even Jordan, Egypt.
Well, the Persian petro-monarchies, of course, they're not going to do anything.
They only care about money.
Iran, of course, and Iraq.
So, does Israel have enough to fight a multi-front confrontation?
No, they don't.
Do they have popular support to do that?
No, they don't.
Even though most of the Israeli population is completely brainwashed.
Can they afford to do this?
No, they can't.
Do they have enough weapons to do that, even with the new batches, which is still going to be sent by the Americas?
That's not likely.
So that's a very, very weak hand.
And what he plans to accomplish, what would he dream of accomplishing?
If they could not, and this is what I was discussing with Lebanese at the border, they could not even take...
A village of 600 houses where they threw everything against it.
And the local resistance of this village said, no, you're not going to take our village.
And they didn't.
And that's why they came back after the ceasefire and raised it to the ground.
Revenge. So it's a revenge killing machine, essentially.
This is what they excel at.
Pepe Escobar, it's a pleasure.
No matter where you are or what the time of day is.
Thank you, my dear friend.
We'll see you again next week.
All the best.
See you next week, Judge.
It was a pleasure.
Greetings from Asia.
Coming up later today at 1 o'clock, Professor Glenn Deason.
At 3 o'clock, Aaron Maté.
At 4 o'clock, Professor John Mearsheimer.
Judge Napolitano for Judging Freedom.
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