April 7, 2025 - Judging Freedom - Judge Andrew Napolitano
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| Hi, everyone. | |
| Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom. | |
| Today is Tuesday, March 8th, excuse me, April 8th, 2025. | |
| Aaron Maté joins us now. | |
| Aaron, a pleasure, my dear friend. | |
| I want to talk to you about a subject close to you and me about which you have written and spoken extensively lately, and that's the assaults on freedom of speech. | |
| Let me approach it in a variety of ways. | |
| Does the IDF admit to killing journalists in Gaza? | |
| They do admit to killing journalists in Gaza. | |
| They recently announced the killing of one journalist and said one of the reasons why they killed him is that he uploaded footage of October 7th, a.k.a. | |
| he did journalism. | |
| Because a journalist in Gaza uploaded footage to the Internet of what happened on October 7th, this, in Israel's eyes, was sufficient grounds to murder him. | |
| So Israel was actually declaring that the act of journalism can get you killed. | |
| This person who was killed, and I'm sorry his name escapes me, he wasn't involved on October 7th. | |
| He was simply doing what journalists do, which is upload footage to the Internet. | |
| And Israel, given so much impunity by their U.S. sponsor, felt as if this was legitimate grounds to kill him. | |
| And they've killed so many journalists throughout this 18-month genocide. | |
| Of course, they claim that many of them are members of Hamas with zero evidence. | |
| And they're able to get away with it because not only is the Trump administration and Biden administration before giving them complete impunity, but U.S. media also has no problem with Israel slaughtering mass numbers of journalists. | |
| In fact, a record amount of journalists since the Second World War. | |
| Isn't this a violation of Israeli law? | |
| Or do the laws not apply to the IDF? | |
| Well, I mean, Israel's legal system is a little complicated because they don't even officially have a constitution. | |
| But certainly, yeah, they have some protections for journalism. | |
| But the whole point of Israel is that those laws don't apply to Palestinians because Israel is not a state of its citizens. | |
| It's not a state of the people that it rules over. | |
| It's a state of the Jewish people. | |
| The self-described state of the Jewish people. | |
| So it's a Jewish supremacist state, and therefore, in its eyes, and legally, really at this point, Palestinians simply just don't have rights. | |
| Is that supremacy, or does that supremacy at all have a racial animus, since the Palestinians are darker skin-colored than the Jewish people? | |
| Well, it's... | |
| I would say it's more ethnic because, yes, Israel is a European settler, colonial state, but there are Jews that come from the Middle East, that come from Ethiopia. | |
| You have black people in the Israeli military from African countries because they identify as Jewish. | |
| So I wouldn't say it's quite racial. | |
| It's certainly a form of ethnosupremacy, which is Jewish supremacy. | |
| Is there a racial component to American foreign policy in the Middle East? | |
| Well, that's a great question. | |
| I mean, this is a matter of psychology. | |
| To what extent is U.S. sponsorship of Israel and fidelity to Israel, is it based on a sort of shared European settler? | |
| Solidarity, right? | |
| Like a fellow European settler state, just as we are. | |
| I think there's a component of that. | |
| It's hard to get into. | |
| Who knows what's buried deep in people's psyches? | |
| But yeah, I think there's an element there. | |
| If the Palestinians were considered to be white people, would Israel be able to get away with slaughtering them by the tens of thousands? | |
| Would the daily massacres of children, as we're now seeing day in, day out inside Gaza, would that be acceptable to... | |
| A broad spectrum of opinions had the U.S.? | |
| Probably not. | |
| So yeah, I think it's fair to say, psychologically, there is a racial component. | |
| Here's Prime Minister Netanyahu's most recent statement about the Palestinian people. | |
| I think this will aggravate you no end, but I want you to see it and comment on it. | |
| This is Yesterday in the Oval Office. | |
| Chris, cut number six. | |
| And we're committed to getting all the hossages out, but also eliminating the evil tyranny of Hamas in Gaza and enabling the people of Gaza to freely make a choice to go wherever they want. | |
| I mean, they should have that choice. | |
| And the president put forward a vision, a bold vision, which we discussed as well, including the countries that might be amenable and are amenable. | |
| to accepting Palestinians of their free choice if they choose to build their head. | |
| What the hell is he talking about free choice? | |
| Hey, Bibi, do they have the free choice to stay and be alive and have food, shelter, clothing, water, electricity, and medical care? | |
| Yeah, exactly. | |
| Or do they have the free choice to return to their ancestral homes that Israel expelled them from in 1948? | |
| the majority of the people of Gaza are refugees or the descendants of refugees, meaning people who used to live in what is now Israel but were ethnically cleansed in 1948. | |
| Do they have the free choice to return to their own homes? | |
| And if you meet Palestinians around the world, many people still have the keys to their | |
| Wow. Wow. | |
| Never acknowledged that they were expelled and never offered to compensate them for their losses. | |
| So there's this ongoing denial of ethnic cleansing and now a new campaign of ethnic cleansing because that's what Bibi Netanyahu is talking about. | |
| Wanting to get people under the guise of their free choice to be expelled yet again to other countries because they want to make Gaza completely unlivable and only livable for Jewish settlers because Israel is a Jewish supremacist state. | |
| Here's Netanyahu and President Trump together back and forth on this. | |
| This will also get under your skin. | |
| Chris, number 13. Do you think blocking humanitarian aid is also an effective pressure? | |
| Well, you know how I feel about the Gaza Strip. | |
| I think it's an incredible piece of important real estate. | |
| The level of death on the Gaza Strip is just incredible. | |
| And I've said it. | |
| I don't understand why Israel ever gave it up. | |
| Israel owned it. | |
| It wasn't this man, so I can say it. | |
| He wouldn't have given it up. | |
| I know him very well. | |
| There's no way. | |
| They took oceanfront property and they gave it to people for peace. | |
| How did that work out? | |
| Not good. | |
| They gave it away for a good intention, and it didn't work out that way. | |
| I think what the president talked about is, first of all, to give people a choice. | |
| Gazans were closed in. | |
| Any other place, including in arenas of battle, I mean, whether it's Ukraine or Syria or any other place, people could leave. | |
| Gaza was the only place where they locked them in. | |
| We didn't lock them in. | |
| They're locked in. | |
| And what is wrong with giving people a choice? | |
| Now, we've been talking, including over lunch, about some countries, I won't go into them right now, that are saying, you know, if Gazans want to leave, we want to take them in. | |
| And I think this is the right thing to do. | |
| It's going to take years to rebuild Gaza. | |
| In the meantime, people can have an option. | |
| The president has a vision. | |
| Countries are responding to that vision. | |
| We're working on it. | |
| I hope we'll have good news for you. | |
| Where to start to dissect that? | |
| Where to start with Trump's fundamental ignorance of the history of those peoples and that geographic area? | |
| It's so easy to just shake your head and disgust at that and pass a moral judgment, but I'm just going to try to stick to the facts. | |
| What's factually wrong with both those statements from Trump and Netanyahu? | |
| So let's take Trump first. | |
| He says that Israel owned Gaza and says never should have given it up. | |
| Israel never owned Gaza. | |
| It occupied it. | |
| It stole it in 1967. | |
| When it took it over by force. | |
| That's illegal under international law. | |
| There's a UN Security Council Resolution 242 passed in 1967, which calls on Israel to withdraw from the West Bank and Gaza, which it illegally occupied. | |
| So it was never Israel's to give up because they never owned it. | |
| They occupied it illegally. | |
| And what he's referring to is when Israel finally, in 2005, pulled out its illegal settlers from Gaza. | |
| And Trump is basically saying that he embraces The ultra-extremist spectrum of opinion inside Israel, which says, we never should have removed our illegal settlers from legally occupied Gaza. | |
| The reason why Ariel Sharon, who was Prime Minister at the time, why he pulled out of Gaza... | |
| It's not because all of a sudden he had a moment of consciousness, but because it was getting just too costly for Israel to maintain a few thousand settlers in Gaza when really the most valuable land they wanted to steal was in the West Bank because that's where the water is. | |
| So Sharon simply transferred settlers from Gaza to the West Bank so that Israel could focus on stealing West Bank land from Palestinians. | |
| Not the Gaza Strip. | |
| And Trump is now saying, in joining the ultra-fanatic Israeli settlers, we shouldn't even have done that. | |
| So it's just, his extremism there and revisionism is just off the charts. | |
| And then Netanyahu goes and says that the Palestinians have been locked in Gaza, unlike in other war zones like Ukraine and Syria, as if there's some sort of natural phenomenon. | |
| He says, we didn't lock them in. | |
| What is he talking about? | |
| Ever since Israel withdrew from Gaza in 2005, it's put Gaza under siege, where people can't leave. | |
| Cancer patients die in Gaza, even before October 7th, because Israel won't let them leave. | |
| And Netanyahu now wants to pretend as if it's Israel that's not letting people leave. | |
| It's just the revisionism is off the charts. | |
| And for a U.S. president to be so extreme that he's now joining the ultra, ultra, ultra fascist right of Israel, not just the mainstream. | |
| But the ultra-fascist, right? | |
| That's a new level of moral depravity at the White House. | |
| Is Israel behind the censoring of free speech in the United States? | |
| The Justice Department setting up task forces to look for anti-Semitism? | |
| The Secretary of State boasting that ICE has removed the student visas of 300 students? | |
| Because they did nothing more than participate in demonstrations or watch demonstrations and show their approval or write letters to the editor of a student newspaper? | |
| Yes, Israel is. | |
| It's a joint production between Israel and pro-Israel forces in the U.S. and their allies inside the Trump administration who are completely We're violating all the basic principles of free speech to crack down on voices in support of Palestinian rights. | |
| And it's especially glaring given that the Trump administration had an accurate argument to make about censorship under the Biden administration, where there was censorship of dissenting voices on many issues. | |
| And the Trump campaign achieved success, I think, by calling that out and saying we're the party of free speech. | |
| They've shown that to be a complete lie ever since taking office by going far beyond what Biden and his people ever did and cracking down on free speech. | |
| I've been very critical of the Biden Democratic Party censorship regime for a long time, silencing people by calling them Russian agents or by labeling facts as Russian propaganda and disinformation. | |
| I was against all that, but I'm equally against the Trump administration having the same playbook. | |
| And it's so bad that even a character like Nina Jankiewicz... | |
| I don't know if you remember her, but she was the short-lived disinformation czar tapped by Joe Biden. | |
| Oh, right, right. | |
| She supported the lie about Hunter Biden's laptop being the product of Russia. | |
| She pushed disinformation in the name of policing disinformation. | |
| But she appeared last week at a congressional hearing, and she pointed out accurately that the Trump administration, their crackdowns on free speech, whatever you think of Biden's. | |
| It's far more egregious. | |
| The term administration is so extreme that I even have to agree with Nina Jankiewicz, of all people. | |
| Here's how extreme it might actually become. | |
| President Trump on Air Force One very recently. | |
| The president there said he would be willing to take American citizens in the federal prison population. | |
| Is that one of the ideas they're going to be? | |
| Well, I love that. | |
| If we could take some of our 20-time... | |
| Wise guys that push people into subways and that hit people over the back of the head and that purposely run people over in cars. | |
| If you would take them, I'd be honored to give them. | |
| I don't know what the law says on that, but I can't imagine the law would say anything different. | |
| If they can house these horrible criminals for a lot less money than it costs us, I'm all for it. | |
| But I have suggested that, you know, why should it stop just the people that cross the border illegally? | |
| We have some horrible criminals. | |
| American grown and born. | |
| And if we have somebody that bops an old woman over the head, if we have somebody that is in jail 20 times and goes back, has a bad judge or a bad prosecutor that do nothing about him, all they worry about is politics, | |
| they don't worry about that. | |
| I think if we could get El Salvador or somebody to take them, I'd be very happy with it. | |
| Good mother of God, if this is where law enforcement's going to go in the Trump administration, just let me comment first. | |
| Every single crime he mentioned is a state crime. | |
| It's not a federal crime. | |
| And thanks be to God, he would have no jurisdiction over it. | |
| And the Supreme Court has already ruled you can't ship people outside the jurisdiction of federal judges. | |
| And putting them in a hellhole like this place in El Salvador would obviously violate the Eighth Amendment. | |
| But, boy, none of this seems to deter him. | |
| No, you know, Trump capitalized on what I think are many legitimate grievances, but he keeps coming up with answers that are not only, I think, morally depraved, but actually fuel the very problems that he rails against. | |
| So, for example, migration. | |
| He had a lot of success. | |
| And railing against that. | |
| But what do his policies do? | |
| They create migrants. | |
| When you try to overthrow foreign governments, like in Venezuela, which has been a target of a regime change campaign since Trump's first term, you create migrants. | |
| And Trump knew that. | |
| He was warned. | |
| This was in the Washington Post last year. | |
| Trump was warned. | |
| If you impose these crippling sanctions that are going to destroy Venezuela's economy, you will create migrants. | |
| and he went ahead with it. | |
| So he creates migrants and then rails against them and comes up with these unprecedented schemes to try to deport people and take away people's rights. | |
| And some of the latest victims of his deportations include a gay Venezuelan hairdresser who had come to the U.S. to seek political asylum. | |
| And he was deported because he had tattoos of his mom and dad. | |
| And that was deemed by ICE agents to be sufficient evidence of his ties to gangs. | |
| So this is getting farcical and you can go across the board. | |
| Trump also talked about reducing waste and fraud. | |
| Cutting the military budget. | |
| What did he just say in the White House the other day? | |
| He said, we're going to have the first $1 trillion Pentagon budget. | |
| The Pentagon can't even pass an audit. | |
| And Trump, who campaigns against waste and fraud, sets up Doge, now is going to give the Pentagon $1 trillion. | |
| You think there might be some room for waste and fraud in giving $1 trillion to a Pentagon that can't even pass an audit? | |
| I saw an X posting by the Secretary of Defense. | |
| Boasting about how he'll have a trillion dollars to spend on lethality. | |
| You're right. | |
| They haven't passed an audit in the past 10 years. | |
| ICE is now boasting that it is searching social media, the social media theoretically of just foreigners who are here on some sort of a visa. | |
| If that isn't... | |
| Evaluating the content of speech, an act absolutely prohibited by at least a dozen Supreme Court interpretations of the First Amendment, then I don't know what is. | |
| But they're boasting. | |
| Tom Holman is boasting that they're doing that. | |
| He's also boasting that ICE, and not the courts, will have the final say on who is deported. | |
| I guess he misread. | |
| Justice Kavanaugh's concurring opinion yesterday, which said all nine members of the court agree. | |
| Before deportation, you get a hearing. | |
| Yeah, and what I would ask supporters of Trump is, is this what you voted for? | |
| I've met many supporters of Trump over the years, especially because I challenged the fake claims that he was colluding with Russia. | |
| And I saw in them, first of all, in many people I met, people have a genuine distaste for Elitism for government officials telling them what to think, for coming up with these scams like Russiagate, falsely painting people as foreign agents. | |
| But unfortunately, you see Trump adopting that exact same playbook, basically painting people who criticize Israel as supporters of Hamas. | |
| I mean, that's the case that they've made in cracking down on all these students that they want to deport, that simply by criticizing Israel, they're somehow supportive of Hamas. | |
| This is not what I think many Trump voters signed up for. | |
| They didn't sign up also for Trump increasing the Pentagon budget to $1 trillion and bombing Yemen after on the campaign trail. | |
| He called out the bombing of Yemen and said we should try diplomacy. | |
| So on promise after promise that I think appealed to many of his voters, not all of them, because no movement is a monolith, I think he's betrayed them. | |
| And I wonder if we'll see any pushback from Trump's own supporters because of this. | |
| Well, you see some pushback on the tariffs, but that's an economic issue that touches everybody every day. | |
| I don't know that enough Republicans will be, aside from Rand Paul and Thomas Massey, will be devoted enough. | |
| To the First, Fourth, and Fifth Amendments to push back on it. | |
| Aaron, thank you very much for your time, my dear friend. | |
| Sorry the show was a little short. | |
| My schedule's crazy today. | |
| We'll make it up next time, but I always appreciate your thoughts and your analysis. | |
| Thanks for joining us. | |
| Thank you, Judge. | |
| Of course. |
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