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June 17, 2025 - Judging Freedom - Judge Andrew Napolitano
22:56
AMB. Charles Freeman : What Remains of the Resistance?
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Hi, everyone.
Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom.
Today is Tuesday, June 17, 2025.
Ambassador Charles Freeman will be with us in just a minute.
Whatever happened to the Arab resistance to Israeli bellicosity?
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Ambassador Charles Freeman, a pleasure, my dear friend.
Thank you for joining us.
Thank you for accommodating our schedule.
Last month when the president was in Saudi Arabia, a country to which you were once the U.S. ambassador, he denounced neocons.
He condemned military adventurism, intending to change governments and culture in the Middle East.
He proclaimed himself a president of peace.
Was this just a deceptive ploy to lull the Iranians into a false sense of security?
I don't think so.
I think he is full of contradictions.
That was then.
This is now.
Apparently we're on the verge of Bombing the hell out of Tehran.
He's demanded that it be evacuated.
I think to answer your first question as you open the show, the only country in the region that wants wars and starts wars is Israel.
The others either have had a bad experience.
Egypt basically took the initiative to reach out with Sadat's famous trip to Jerusalem.
To reach a peace with Israel.
The Iran-Iraq war killed probably two million people, and it convinced Iran that it absolutely did not want to get into another war.
Of course, Israel's now put it into one.
The Saudis, despite all their arms purchases, basically have until very recently been very risk averse.
Mohammed bin Salman, the Crown Prince and Defense Minister at the time, Of course, launched a war with Yemen, which didn't go very well.
The Saudis have made their peace with Iran.
Mohammed bin Salman called the supreme leader in Ayatollah Khamenei in Iran to express solidarity with Iran under Israeli attack and to condemn the attacks.
So we look at a history in the region.
Israel began with a war which it launched on the eve of UN-approved partition of Palestine.
It seized much of what had been awarded to the Arab side in that.
The 1967 war began with an Israeli surprise attack on Egypt and Syria on a pretext which the Israeli cabinet well knew was not justified.
When Egypt counterattacked against the Israeli occupation of the right bank of the Suez Canal, it was not started by Israel, but it ended with Israel launching aggression and taking even more territory from Syria.
And of course, recently we've seen the Israeli genocide in Gaza, the evictions and pogroms in the West Bank.
The decimation of Hezbollah in Lebanon, the bombing of Beirut, the destruction of the regime in Syria.
And now Israel's going for broke, trying to establish complete absolute security in West Asia.
But absolute security for Israel means absolute insecurity for everyone else.
And it's really laughable at the G7 summit to hear Ursula von der Leyen say that the source of instability in the region is Iran.
Iran hasn't invaded anyone.
It hasn't even started a war in 200 years with anyone.
And the source of instability is clearly Israeli expansionism.
I mean, Will, what is the effect on American diplomacy of a president either engaging in material substantial deception or changing his mind?
You've frozen it.
Say again?
You froze for a moment, so I couldn't hear you.
Okay.
Sorry about that.
What is the effect on American diplomacy of a president engaging in deception or changing his mind?
Before you answer that, Chris, play the clip of President Trump.
Trump in Saudi Arabia.
Before our eyes, a new generation of leaders is transcending the ancient conflicts of tired divisions of the past and forging a future where the Middle East is defined by commerce, not chaos.
This great transformation has not come from Western intervention, the gleaming marvels of Riyadh and Abu Dhabi.
We're not created by the so-called nation builders, neocons, or liberal non-profits like those who spent trillions and trillions of dollars failing to develop.
Kabbalah, Baghdad, so many other cities.
Instead, the birth of a modern Middle East has been brought by the people of the region themselves.
In the end, the so-called nation builders.
They told you how to do it, but they had no idea how to do it themselves.
Peace, prosperity, and progress ultimately came not from a radical rejection of your heritage, but rather from embracing your national traditions and embracing that same heritage that you love.
Do you think he understood what he was saying and meant what he said?
I think it was an inspiring statement that fully reflects the schizophrenia of the administration and its division between neocon interventionists and America Firsters.
I wish Mr. Trump had stayed true to what he said.
But at the very moment he was speaking, let's not forget.
The United States was arming Israel to the teeth and supporting its genocide in Gaza.
And it was doing nothing about the programs in the West Bank.
And now it is fully complicit in an unprovoked attack on Iran.
Unprovoked.
Because even Mr. Netanyahu's statement about the supposed imminence of an Iranian nuclear weapon said it could be weeks, it could be months, it could be years.
You know, in other words, there's no evidence whatsoever of anything.
And indeed, intelligence agencies, our own CIA and national intelligence establishment, Mossad, have all said Iran has not made a decision to build a nuclear weapon.
I suspect that decision is going to be provoked by this unprovoked attack.
And indeed, there is apparently a bill now introduced.
In the Iranian parliament to withdraw Iran from the nonproliferation treaty, which it has adhered to, under which it has the right to enrich uranium, under which it has subjected itself to inspection of all of its nuclear facilities, by contrast with Israel, which is not a signatory, has nuclear weapons already, does not accept foreign inspection, and attacks its neighbors.
With whatever means it finds expedient.
How did Israel obtain its nuclear weapons?
The initial trove of uranium was apparently stolen from the United States, a nuclear plant in Pennsylvania.
The basic technology and know-how originated, I think, with the French.
There was a cooperative program between Israel and apartheid-era South Africa to build nuclear weapons.
Which apparently were tested in the South Atlantic.
There was a double flash, which the intelligence community believed was an Israeli nuclear weapon being tested alongside a South African nuclear weapon.
South Africa gave up its nuclear weapons when it adopted majority rule and democracy.
But Israel, of course, has not.
We have this strange game going on in West Asia where Israel has broken every international law, including, by the way, the Geneva Conventions, which prohibit attacks on nuclear facilities.
Israel claims it is attacking nuclear facilities.
I think it's actually engaged in a misguided regime change operation with nuclear elements.
But that's a gross violation of international law.
Genocide is a violation of international law.
Eviction of people from their homes.
Ethnic cleansing is a violation of international law.
Assassination is a violation of international law.
It's very hard to name a law that Israel does not contemptuously brush aside in the interest of expanding its power in the region.
Before I ask you about the likely consequences, here's Prime Minister Netanyahu.
At the United Nations, claiming that Iran is 90% of the way to developing a nuclear weapon.
Do you know when that was?
September 27, 2012, 13 years ago, and they're nowhere near there.
And he's been peddling this nonsense since then.
As ambassador to Saudi Arabia in 1997.
I think Iran is quite close to the capability to build a nuclear weapon, and the reason for that is that we tore up the agreement which we made with Iran, which they respected, the JCPOA, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action.
And they responded slowly, slowly, enhancing enrichment.
Why?
As a bargaining chip to get us to restore the agreement or something like it.
And, you know, at the moment, we have the irony that they were engaged in an active negotiation with the United States.
We were to have met in Muscat Oman on Sunday.
And yet Israel attacked them.
The talks were off.
And now we're saying that our whole objective, well, we've got to bring them back to the negotiating table.
Well, you know, we deceive them, apparently, deliberately.
And you ask the question, what does this do to our credibility?
The answer is it's disastrous.
It has implications not only for the situation in West Asia, but also Ukraine and Russia.
Who will trust the United States when...
and then gives Iran the provocation that strengthens hardliners within Iran to gain the ascendancy.
And overcome theological objections to this.
And all of this, by the way, I mentioned theological objections.
One of the phrases that Prime Minister Netanyahu used in calling for regime change in Iran very arrogantly, and I think on the basis of mistaken appraisals of Iranian politics and Iranian reactions to being attacked, he talked.
About Iran being run by theological thugs.
Well, that's a pretty good description of some of the people in his cabinet.
And so, again, we have a case of projection.
Israel starts a war and then claims when others defend themselves against the attack, that Israel has a right to defend itself.
But Israel isn't defending itself.
It's attacking others preemptively.
Wow.
Here's an interesting statement from Trump in 2011.
America should not be pressuring Israel to show restraint against Iran.
We should be working to stop Iran's nuclear drive.
It had no nuclear drive then.
It has no nuclear drive today.
This is a canard, I would think, perpetrated by Prime Minister Netanyahu, picked up by his allies in the donor class and politicians who were the beneficiaries of the largesse of the donor class.
It's almost that Goebbels thing.
If you repeat an untruth over and over and over again, people start believing it.
Very, very accurate description.
I'll just add that the oligopoly-owned media echo all of this nonsense.
And, you know, I think it is remarkably cynical to have done what we appear to be doing.
We withdrew civilians, family members from military bases in the region.
We drew down the embassy in Baghdad.
So far, there have not been attacks by Iranian-aligned militia in the region.
But if the United States does attack Iran, you can be damn sure that those attacks will take out a lot of Americans scattered around the Middle East, military and diplomatic.
And so we're playing with fire here.
And the probable result of this, in my view, It has greatly increased the chances of Iran actually going nuclear, and it has totally discredited the NPT, the Non-Proliferation Treaty.
Why would you sign up for that or adhere to it when a country that hasn't signed up to it reserves the right to bomb you at will on the basis of paranoid fantasies that it is promulgated internationally?
Domestic political needs of the unpopular and bellicose prime minister.
Precisely.
A great deal of what Israel has been doing is explicable in terms of Prime Minister Netanyahu's desire to survive politically.
And that is a factor that has destabilized the Middle East.
And I think if you look at this, Millions of people in the Middle East have died as a result of Israeli war mongering.
And now hundreds and thousands of people are dying.
And there's a total indifference to civilian life.
So Israel assassinated a bunch of nuclear scientists, some generals.
It did that by blowing up the apartment buildings and everyone in them where these people lived.
In the case of one of the negotiator with us at Oman, in Oman, who would have been there on Sunday, when they killed 60 people in his apartment building, including 20 children were killed to get him.
So when you see...
Why kill a messenger?
Because they don't want to deal.
That's the same thing as when they killed this...
He was a negotiator.
He was actually a force for moderation within Hamas.
And they killed him.
And they killed every negotiator that Hamas put forward.
And they now kill any Iranian who wants to have a deal, apparently.
This is no way to conduct a sensible foreign policy.
And the notion that somehow or other, Our president's notion that somehow or other he can leverage all this murder and mayhem to persuade Iran to come back to the negotiating table where it was and capitulate is just not going to happen.
Over the weekend, President Trump apparently had a telephone conversation with Dana Bash of CNN.
And she didn't record it, but she divulged her memory of it and her notes from it when she called in to CNN.
Here's what she said.
Pay attention to the last four or five words which so repulsed our friend Alistair Crook that he said it's not worthy of a response.
Cut number 12. And then he went on to say this.
Iran should have listened to me when I said, You know, I gave them, I don't know if you know this, but I gave them a 60-day warning, and today is day 61. And then he said, they, meaning Iran, should now come to the table to make a deal before it's too late.
And then he said something really noteworthy.
He said, the people I was dealing with are dead, the hardliners, to which I just wanted to underscore.
So what you're saying is Israel has now killed the people who you were dealing with.
And he said very sarcastically, they didn't die of the flu.
They didn't die of COVID.
And hardly consistent with an effort to reach a peaceful resolution of a real problem, which is nonproliferation in the Middle East.
The root of that problem is Israel's Proliferation of nuclear weapons to itself, which creates an imbalance.
Israel's going to war to maintain its nuclear monopoly in a region so that it can dominate the region.
It is going to war to encourage regime change, explicitly stated by Prime Minister Netanyahu, in the belief that it can put some kind of puppet government in place in Tehran with our assistance.
That was done before, of course, during the overthrow of Mossadegh, the democratically elected prime minister of Iran, whom we overthrew with the British in the early 1950s.
The history is not good.
It does not encourage the belief that this kind of policy can succeed.
Ambassador Freeman, thank you very much.
Dark days.
But you're shining a light with your analysis.
Much appreciated.
Thank you for your time, as always.
We look forward to seeing you next week, no matter what there is to talk about.
I hope there isn't much.
Thank you, Ambassador.
All the best.
Coming up later today, at 10 o 'clock this morning, Professor Jeffrey Sachs.
At 11 o 'clock this morning, Aaron Maté.
At 3 this afternoon, Colonel Karen Kwiatkowski.
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