April 9, 2025 - Judging Freedom - Judge Andrew Napolitano
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| Hi everyone, Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom. | |
| Today is Wednesday, April 9th, 2025. | |
| Dear friend of the show and my personal dear friend Phil Giraldi joins us now. | |
| Phil, a pleasure. | |
| You have a great piece out at UNZ and elsewhere called, Is the United States a Two-Tier Country? | |
| Which you answer regrettably, yes. | |
| We're going to get to that in a minute. | |
| But first, some of the events that have happened recently. | |
| On Monday, Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu and President Trump met for three hours at lunch. | |
| And then they came out and chatted rather amiably in the Oval Office. | |
| We'll play some clips for you in a minute. | |
| The BBC and The Economist I love The Economist. | |
| I'm not crazy about the BBC, but whatever. | |
| The two of them reported that Netanyahu was crestfallen, that in fact he came to Washington expecting to talk Trump into verbally attacking President Erdogan of Turkey and authorizing a war against Iran, and Trump said no to both. | |
| Our mutual friend, whom we both know and love, Gerald Salenti, says this is a head fake. | |
| In fact, Trump agreed to do both but is pretending to do neither in order to lull the Iranians into a false sense of security. | |
| What's your thought on Trump and Netanyahu? | |
| Real on Monday or head fake? | |
| Well, I would rather suspect it was a bit of both. | |
| Gerald is a very, I think, Good observer of what goes on internationally. | |
| And there are all kinds of reasons, for example, why Turkey as a NATO member, as a major player in Syria now, has to be treated in kind of a careful way. | |
| There is no question but that Erdogan of Turkey is Playing the card, playing the Islam card when it comes to Israel and comes to Netanyahu. | |
| And this, of course, has Netanyahu preparing to do perhaps some dangerous things in Syria, like advancing to Damascus, I suspect. | |
| So anyway, we're going to see stuff like that. | |
| But I think at the same time, Trump is serious, sort of, about talking. | |
| to the Iranians directly rather than going straight to war and he's going to probably give it a shot in the next few days but I rather suspect that it's preordained to fail because the conditions that Netanyahu has been laying down is that he insists that Okay, | |
| there's got to be a nuclear agreement, a nuclear weapons type agreement. | |
| Fine. We all understand that and accept that. | |
| But Netanyahu has several times alluded to the developmental aspects of Turkey, of Iran, meaning its ability to generate its own weapons and to get weapons from its new allies. | |
| So our colleague, | |
| two colleagues, Gilbert Doctorow and Pepe Escobar, report that, excuse me, Foreign Minister Lavrov and his colleagues are the ones who orchestrated the in-person meeting between somebody from the United States, | |
| I don't know if it's Witkoff, I don't think it's Rubio, and the foreign minister of Iran in Qatar or wherever it's going to be this weekend. | |
| It would be hard to imagine if that whole thing is a fake. | |
| However, to what you said, Here's what Netanyahu said. | |
| It's really disgusting. | |
| So, Chris, back to back. | |
| Number seven, and then number two. | |
| And, of course, we also discussed Iran. | |
| Look, we're both united in the goal that Iran does not ever get nuclear weapons. | |
| If it could be done diplomatically, in a full way, the way it was done in Libya, I think that would be a good thing. | |
| But whatever happens, we have to make sure that Iran does not have nuclear weapons. | |
| We agree that Iran will not have nuclear weapons. | |
| This can be done by agreement. | |
| But only if this agreement is Libyan style. | |
| They go in, blow up the installations, dismantle all of the equipment under American supervision and carried out by America. | |
| This would be good. | |
| The second possibility that will not be is that they drag out the talks and then there is the military option. | |
| Everyone understands this. | |
| We spoke about it at length. | |
| The first statement was seated next to Donald Trump and in front of American and Israeli diplomats and press. | |
| The second statement was, I think, from the Israeli embassy in Washington. | |
| It was just a few hours later. | |
| It was in Hebrew and it was directed to the Israeli people in front of whom he has tremendous political instability. | |
| But there is no way on the planet Yeah, that's exactly the point I was trying to make with that, where he's insisting on the developmental and other aspects of... | |
| Iran's ability to defend itself, and he's calling for U.S. troops to go in and do this dismemberment of Iran's defensive capability. | |
| This is not going to go anywhere. | |
| And to the extent to which Trump has bought into this, of course, we don't quite know. | |
| But it seems to me when you put this together with the fact that they are stationing these bombers and there's been a lot of talk in Washington from the usual talking heads in Congress and elsewhere in the media that war is kind of on the cards at the moment. | |
| So I think this is something where you have to be a little Right, | |
| right. Moving closer to your article about the two-tier system. | |
| The Department of Homeland Security announced today that it is monitoring the social media of immigrants looking for hints of anti-Semitism. | |
| By definition, this is speech. | |
| It's social media. | |
| The government, under all the standard interpretations of the First Amendment, as recently as yesterday by a federal judge appointed by Donald Trump, Who told him he's got to let the Associated Press back into the Oval Office. | |
| The court is uniformly and universally in the modern era articulated the view that if the First Amendment stands for anything, it means the government cannot evaluate the content of speech. | |
| Okay, Kristi Noem and Pam Bondi, where are we going with this? | |
| Well, I would say that we are going to a very bad place. | |
| Just because the Department of Homeland Security said we're monitoring the social accounts of people who are foreign, who have special visas in the United States, or might even have green cards, | |
| what makes you think they're not monitoring us? | |
| We are opposing policies that have been dead solid for both the Biden administration and for Donald Trump already. | |
| And Trump's language is totally unrelenting in terms of getting rid of people like us, who he basically refers to as terrorist sympathizers, as anti-Semites because we're critical of Israel. | |
| And anti-American. | |
| But this is the stuff that comes out of Trump's mouth and has come out of his mouth in the past week. | |
| I don't trust anyone in the government. | |
| I have reached the point where we have been betrayed by our governments for many years now. | |
| If there's going to be a turnaround on it, it ain't going to be coming from Donald Trump. | |
| So the IDF...has claimed that it fired on an ambulance because its lights weren't on, which meant it was trying to hide itself, which meant it was carrying fighters. | |
| Turns out the lights were on, the lights were flashing, and there are videos of this. | |
| We can only show you a picture of the ambulance with the lights on. | |
| We can't show you the videos because it's against the standards of the people that carry this program. | |
| Of these people being slaughtered, 15 of them, one by one by one, shot execution style as they attempted to get out of that emergency vehicle. | |
| When the State Department's spokesperson was asked about this, take a guess who she blamed. | |
| The UN's Humanitarian Affairs Office has said that 15 paramedics, civil defense, and a UN worker were killed, in their words, one by one, by the IDF. | |
| They have dug bodies up, they said, in the shallow grave that have been gathered up, and also vehicles in the sand. | |
| Have you got any assessment of what might have happened? | |
| And given the potential use of American weapons, is there any assessment of... | |
| Well, I can tell you that for too long, Hamas has abused civilian infrastructure, cynically using it to shield themselves. | |
| Hamas's actions have caused humanitarians to be caught in the crossfire. | |
| The use of civilians or civilian objects to shield or impede military operations is itself a violation of international humanitarian law. | |
| And of course, we expect all parties on the ground to comply with international humanitarian law. | |
| But there's specifically a question on any, it's a question about accounting and accountability, given that may have been the use of US weapons. | |
| So it's a question about the State Department rather than Hamas. | |
| Well, every single thing that is happening in Gaza It's happening because of Hamas. | |
| Every single dynamic. | |
| I'll say again, I've said it I think in every briefing, all of this could stop in a moment if Hamas returned all the hostages and the hostage bodies they are still holding and put down its weapons. | |
| There is one entity that could stop it for everyone in a moment, and that is Hamas. | |
| An entity that could stop it in a moment, and that's Donald Trump. | |
| But what the hell is she saying? | |
| She won't articulate the State Department's position on the murder in cold blood of 15 UN health workers. | |
| Yeah, I mean, she won't. | |
| And this is a characteristic of both the Biden and the Trump administrations in terms of never, ever, ever criticizing Israel directly. | |
| It's clear that Israel murdered these people. | |
| They were in clearly identified ambulances with lights on. | |
| These people were unarmed. | |
| They were attacked by Israeli soldiers and taken prisoner and the survivors taken prisoner. | |
| And as you noted, they had their hands cuffed behind their backs and they were executed style shot in the heads. | |
| And the Later on, they found many of the bodies were just riddled with bullets. | |
| This is disgusting. | |
| It's a war crime, a war crime of the worst crime, and the United States is complicit in it. | |
| If this woman is a spokesman for the administration or for the State Department, she should be held accountable, and her boss should be held accountable. | |
| And Donald Trump, if he approved of this language, Should be held accountable. | |
| I might add that on Monday when Netanyahu and Trump were talking, they were laughing and giggling away as they were talking about how they were going to get rid of the two million or so Gazans who remain in place and are starving. | |
| And this was, all this stuff is just obviously a lot of fun for them. | |
| I was taking note of the fact that Netanyahu, of course, has been indicted by the International Criminal Court for war crimes, and that includes every country in Europe with the possible exception of Switzerland. | |
| Yet all those countries permitted him to fly over their airspace. | |
| I'm surprised they didn't bring the plane down or tell them they couldn't fly over the airspace because he made this quick trip to and from the U.S. Before we get into some of the detail in your article, do they take, these European countries, take these indictments seriously? | |
| Well, I think they do, but I think they have the same realization that many people have and that which I cite in my article about, you know, messing with Israel is just too much trouble, largely because of the United States and to a certain extent, | |
| Britain, Germany, France, their role in protecting Israel. | |
| No matter what Israel does. | |
| So you bring down an Israeli plane, you force it down, and you arrest Netanyahu, which God, I would love to see. | |
| And you do that, and you're going to be in a lot of trouble from the United States, which of course sees Israel as an ally to the extent that it would be willing to use U.S. armed forces to bail out somebody like Netanyahu. | |
| And so you'd be in a lot of trouble. | |
| And that's why these countries don't get involved with doing the right thing. | |
| And we don't get involved with doing the right thing. | |
| Here's Trump and Netanyahu happy with each other. | |
| Cut number 10. 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 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. | |
| Gaza, 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. | |
| If you give, you know, it's going to take years to rebuild Gaza. | |
| One of them is utterly ignorant of history and the other is a bald-faced liar. | |
| Yeah, that's right. | |
| Donald Trump demonstrated, if it was needed, just how fundamentally he is ignorant about what is going on in a place where America is committed up to the eyeballs in sustaining a war. | |
| And if this doesn't show you how stupid he is, he does not know the history of Gaza. | |
| He does not know what's been going on there for going on 80 years. | |
| He does not know that it was a prison camp run by the Israelis. | |
| Israel never had it, never had possession of it. | |
| It was a place where people that they had dispossessed farther inside Palestine fled when the Israelis stole their homes, stole their property, stole their occupations, and stole everything else they | |
| had. So this is Donald Trump. | |
| If you need any proof about how ignorant this guy profound | |
| And as for Netanyahu... | |
| Who is he saying confined them there if it wasn't the IDF? | |
| What the hell is he talking about? | |
| Yeah, it must have been they had school safety patrols out there making sure nobody was crossing the lines. | |
| Two of his retired generals coined the phrase open air concentration camp. | |
| Yep, absolutely. | |
| Is Netanyahu running a racist government? | |
| Oh, absolutely. | |
| I mean, you know, Israel, by law, is a Jewish state. | |
| It several years ago in the Knesset passed a law and declared itself a Jewish state. | |
| Now that's about as racist as you could be, as if you and I were to declare New Jersey a Catholic state. | |
| But the fact is, yeah, Israel is as racist as it comes. | |
| It sees the Palestinians and Arabs in general as subhuman. | |
| This is in the Talmud and elsewhere. | |
| And it's said all the time by senior Israeli government officials like Smotrich and Ben-Gavir that they have no No assumptions that Palestinians are worth saving or are worth not killing. | |
| What did you mean when you wrote that the United States is a two-tier T-I-E-R country? | |
| Yeah, I basically would, I could have said one tier. | |
| Basically what I was trying to say was that there are issues where If Israel is involved or if the Jewish community in the United States is involved, the whole reaction or response of government, how it treats them and how it treats the rest of us is on two levels. | |
| Israel always gets the pass. | |
| The Jewish community always gets the pass, and more than that. | |
| It gets incredible amounts of support that other taxpayers do not get from the US government. | |
| And this is systemic. | |
| So I'm saying it's two different levels of things. | |
| Like, for example, in the... | |
| What's happening to the pro-Palestinian demonstrators right now who are being punished in various ways and threatened with deportation? | |
| Many of them have been incarcerated without any charges, I might add. | |
| And yet there were a significant number of Jewish demonstrators, counter-demonstrators, some of whom were apparently Israeli soldiers, who beat up on the peaceful pro-palestinian demonstrators and as far as i can make out from follow-up in the media and everything none of these people were ever punished never even looked at twice and yet it was the palestinians That are | |
| being systematically punished, that are being identified by Jewish hate groups, and their names and identities are being posted online and sent to the Department of Homeland Security for these people to be prosecuted and kicked out of the country. | |
| So there's the double standard right there. | |
| And the double standard, I was looking at it, two-tier. | |
| The other double standard is, of course, what Israel gets away with in foreign policy, which does grave damage to United States national interests. | |
| And yet these people are carrying out a genocide, which they've sucked us into, thanks to our so-called politicians. | |
| Anything that has to do with Israel, anything that has to do with Jewish interests, there are several ways of looking at it, and the rest of us are kind of out for the count on how this works. | |
| Another area that they've sucked us into is the repression of free speech in the United States. | |
| Why is the Secretary of State boasting, boasting, That he has terminated, without hearings, the visas of 300 international students in this country. | |
| Yeah, because that's all part of the song that they have to sing. | |
| And there was a report that just came out that apparently there's some hundreds more on top of those 300, and they have a little list. | |
| So this is going to be going on for some time, and it's targeting them. | |
| It's not... | |
| Targeting what Jewish demonstrators are doing and saying and advocating. | |
| And it's only directed in one direction. | |
| It only goes in one direction. | |
| And this is what upsets me after observing this thing over a course of 15 years now. | |
| It's never ending. | |
| And that's just the way the system has been corrupted. | |
| And that's the way it works now. | |
| Thank you, Phil. | |
| Thank you for all that we've been able to discuss today. | |
| Much appreciated. | |
| Gerald, I'm sure, is watching and is happy at your comments about him. | |
| And we'll look forward to seeing you again next week. | |
| Thank you, my friend. | |
| Thank you. | |
| I look forward to it. | |
| Of course. | |
| Coming up on all of this and more on Prime Minister Netanyahu's domestic woes, the always worth waiting for at four o'clock. |
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