Aug. 11, 2025 - Judging Freedom - Judge Andrew Napolitano
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| Hi everyone, Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom, Squeaky Voice and All. | |
| Today is Tuesday, August 12, 2025. | |
| Aaron Mate is here with us in just a minute on Israel a criminal state? | |
| But first this. | |
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| come no one is going to protect your wealth for you you need to do it yourself and now is the time aaron mate uh welcome here my dear uh friend did the israeli government intentionally target and eventually murder al jazeera journalists yes they did and they took credit for it they claimed that uh that Anas al-Sharif, | |
| who was the most famous journalist working in Gaza, was a member of Hamas. | |
| Complete lie. | |
| There's no evidence for it whatsoever. | |
| And there's a long list of Israeli lies, obviously, that preceded. | |
| And they took credit for it. | |
| They took credit for a war crime, for killing five Al Jazeera staff, including Anas al-Sharif, in the tent where they were sheltering near al-Shifa hospital. | |
| So they haven't even hid the fact that they did it. | |
| And they're proud of it. | |
| They boast that they killed these journalists. | |
| Haven't unarmed journalists been off grounds in war for a high school? | |
| a hundred years well yes that's international law is you're not allowed to target journalists not allowed to target civilians but Israel has thrown all that out the window. | |
| More than 200 journalists in Gaza have been killed by Israel since October 7. | |
| And of course, there's a long history of Israel killing journalists before that. | |
| Most famously for American audiences is when Israel killed Shireen Abu Akleh, correspondent for Al Jazeera in the West Bank as she was covering Israeli military raids there. | |
| So this is now standard procedure for Israel and they brag about it and they come out with this excuse afterwards, oh, everyone's Hamas. | |
| You know, that's just their excuse for everything. | |
| Didn't they kill Israeli journalists who work for publications critical of the Netanyahu regime? | |
| The number of Israeli journalists killed by Israel, I don't recall any examples of that. | |
| It's mostly been Palestinians. | |
| They also kill American peace activists who stand up to Israel. | |
| So, for example, people like Rachel Corey, a young woman who was ran over by an Israeli bulldozer in Gaza more than 20 years ago. | |
| And they also kill with impunity Palestinian American, two recently killed by Israel and Israeli settlers in the occupied West Bank. | |
| Has anything been done about this? | |
| Is there any judicial action taken against the people that do it? | |
| Well, no, because Israel claims that these are members of Hamas, so there's no investigation needed. | |
| And they got an endorsement from Mike Huckabee, who said that he'll take Israel's word over Hamas's. | |
| That's what he told Piers Morgan. | |
| So, and what matters here is what the US says, and the US has basically given its endorsement of Israel continuing to murder brave journalists. | |
| Really, the bravery of these people just has just has to be underscored. | |
| Israel, in the case of Anas al Sharif, openly threatened him and told him to stop reporting. | |
| He refused to obey. | |
| He insisted on bearing witness to the extermination of his people. | |
| And so at great risk to himself, he went out every single day, put on his press vest, and reported on the carnage that he was seeing. | |
| He was only 28 years old. | |
| He leaves behind two young children and a wife. | |
| He barely saw them because he was always out there reporting on the Gaza genocide. | |
| And as Israel was now getting into the phase of its genocide where it's going to essentially obliterate Gaza City, it's obvious that they wanted to take out journalists, especially the most prominent one who was going to be there to cover it. | |
| So one of the first things they did as they launched this attack on Gaza City is murder Anas al-Sharif and his colleagues. | |
| Here's a clip that bemoans his death and shows him. | |
| Chris Cutt number one. | |
| He was one of the most recognizable voices reporting from Gaza since the war began in October 2023, among the few international journalists who remained in northern Gaza throughout the conflict, broadcasting even as Israeli forces ordered more than a million Palestinians to evacuate the area. | |
| Born in Jabalia refugee camp, Al-Sharif graduated from Al-Aqsa University's media faculty. | |
| He became one of the key voices from Gaza's front lines. | |
| Throughout the war, the 28-year-old reporter paid a high personal price for his commitment to truth. | |
| In December 2023, his father was killed when Israeli forces struck the family home in Jabalia. | |
| This came weeks after death threats. | |
| Israeli officers told him to stop reporting, but he refused. | |
| And in recent weeks, the pressure intensified. | |
| The Israeli army targeted him and his colleagues online, falsely accusing Al Sharif of being a Hamas member, a pre prepared message was posted on his ex account after his death, saying, If these words reach you, know that Israel has succeeded in killing me and silencing my voice. | |
| I have lived through pain in all its details, tasted suffering and loss many times, yet I never once hesitated to convey the truth as it is, without distortion or falsification, so that God may bear witness against those who stayed silent and accepted our killing. | |
| He ends, Do not forget Gaza, and do not forget me in your sincere prayers for forgiveness and acceptance. | |
| The End I've watched this a half dozen times. | |
| It still puts goosebumps on my arms. | |
| How does the Israeli public react to this? | |
| I don't think they care. | |
| It just doesn't matter to them. | |
| This has been normalized. | |
| Most Israelis support the genocide in Gaza. | |
| They support ethnic cleansing. | |
| And so if their government tells them that they killed another member of Hamas, even though it's just another blatant lie, People shrug. | |
| Life goes on. | |
| You know, Israelis are living a comfortable life. | |
| You know, they like to show the footage of people on the beach in Tel Aviv while there's a genocide going on not that far away. | |
| So this murder of a brave Palestinian journalist is just considered normal and it's considered totally acceptable in the eyes of Israel. | |
| Is there no sense of virtue or intellectual honesty? | |
| Is there no recognition of Judeo teaching that everybody has the right to live? | |
| No, that's long been... | |
| Again, this is a country founded on ethnic cleansing, expelling forcibly hundreds of thousands of Palestinians, stealing their homes, and then just being in denial about it, coming up with all these fictions to just erase the Palestinian history inside of Palestine. | |
| And so a country predicated on that kind of denial was bound to go this direction where essentially the very existence of a Palestinian is considered to be a democrat, a demographic threat to a Jewish supremacist state. | |
| And we're seeing this now with the continuing genocide. | |
| In that clip you played from Al Jazeera of Anas al-Sharif, there's a... | |
| I believe the last ceasefire that was negotiated by Steve Wyckoff. | |
| And there was a famous moment where, as he's report the first time he can not worry about being murdered for doing his job. | |
| But of course, his press vest had to go back on because the genocide continued. | |
| And of course, Israel inevitably was going to murder him because he was, before he was killed, he was the foremost journalist left in Gaza after so many before him have been assassinated by Israel. | |
| And there's no repercussion for this amongst Israeli society. | |
| Is there, we've talked about this before, Aaron. | |
| Is there an anti-war movement of any significance? | |
| There are small protests that happen and you have a small sliver of people who show concern for the people of Gaza. | |
| And there was a symbolic flotilla that was launched recently, actually, by families of captives against Netanyahu, trying to basically reach Gaza in protest of Netanyahu abandoning their loved ones because he'd rather continue the genocide. | |
| So there's a little, you know, and the captive families are vocal. | |
| They know that Netanyahu has abandoned them. | |
| But if you look at polls. | |
| There's no serious opposition to Netanyahu's genocide and at the cleansing agenda. | |
| Chris, play the clip of the young man that Aaron knows. | |
| One thing that you need to keep in mind is Israel has been lying insistently since the beginning of the genocide. | |
| It's been the cornerstone of Israel's genocidal campaign to lie every single day about everything possible and to come up with the most lunatic lies possible, imaginable. | |
| Israel lied about massacring the ambulance workers in Rafah. | |
| They lied about the GHF massacres. | |
| They lied about the Sheffer Hospital, the Flower Massacre, the beheaded babies, Hamad Hospital, Hind Rajab, the terror list at the Rantisi Hospital that turned out to be a calendar, the World Central Kitchen workers, babies in ovens, white physiphorus, deliberately starving gazans, | |
| Sinwar surrounding himself with 20 hostages in a tunnel, gazing hostages, the Ahli Hospital, killing women and children with white flags, mass raping Palestinians, non-existent tunnels under graveyards, Nasser Hospital, Hosem Abu Safelia, mass graves, snipers targeting kids in the hits, providing protection to criminal gangs that are looting aid systematically. | |
| Israel also lied about wiping out Gaza. | |
| incrementally gradually they lied about refusing and collapsing the ceasefire blowing up gazas gazans fleeing now south blowing up and destroying Kemal Al-Douane hospital, claiming that dead Gaza children are fake plastic dolls. | |
| Is this true? | |
| All of those claims that he listed are documented Israeli lies and it goes on and on and on and it's striking just how many he was able to list off in such a short amount of time. | |
| I mean, it's an extra, Crisp turned it into a, pardon me. | |
| into a full screen. | |
| Yeah. | |
| So you can see it on the screen. | |
| There's too much for me to read and it basically repeats what he said, but it's just an extraordinary catalog of lies. | |
| perpetrated by the Israeli government. | |
| Yeah, and it speaks to the Israeli desperation to sustain the genocide. | |
| It knows it can only do that if it has the tacit support of its allies and the full support of the U.S. And so to do that is to constantly put up propaganda to just bombard Western audiences with so that people are intimidated. | |
| into pushing back, into standing up. | |
| So that's where all this propaganda comes from. | |
| There's been so many of them. | |
| It's basically, Norman Fickelstein says that everything Israel says should be presumed to be false until proven true it's true at this point they're just pathological liars because they're pathologically committed to genocide is there no um well, here he is again. | |
| Israel murdering Gaza's most prominent journalist tonight is about creating a full blackout ahead of what's coming, the total annihilation of Gaza City and completion of genocide. | |
| So that's what they expect. | |
| Can Hamas resist that? | |
| I can't predict what Hamas can do. | |
| Hamas has surprised me in terms of their staying power so far. | |
| But look, the people of Gaza are totally defenseless and they're going after Gaza City because Gaza City hasn't been completely demolished. | |
| There are a lot of people still sheltering there. | |
| And Israel wants to destroy the parts of Gaza that are still somewhat habitable and push people to the south so that it can prepare them for ethnic cleansing or just pin them in permanent concentration camps within the larger Gaza concentration camp. | |
| You mentioned Israeli allies. | |
| What allies does Israel have besides the U.S.? | |
| Well, the US is the most important one. | |
| And as long as they have the US, they can continue doing this. | |
| And other allies have started to be a little bit more critical. | |
| Even Germany, which has been totally subservient to Israel, recently said it would pause some weapon sales to Israel. | |
| Just, and that's a reflection of just absolute revulsion that the public has for what Israel is doing and the government's inability to pretend anymore that Israel is following international law and is just defending itself. | |
| So it is losing some support internationally from its allies. | |
| But yeah, the most important one is the U.S. And on that front, there's nothing but a green light from Trump so far. | |
| Has Israel always been this degraded, this immoral, this reprehensible, or is it worse under Benjamin Netanyahu? | |
| I think the... | |
| Max Blumenthal, your frequent guest, wrote a book more than a decade ago called Goliath. | |
| The picture it paints is that this is just a fundamentally fanatic society, irredeemably fanatic. | |
| It's just the level of Jewish supremacy, chauvinism, was just off the deep end. | |
| And so something like this was foreseen by Max over a decade ago, because that's what happens when you're just when you build an ethnostat on stolen land, you colonize the West Bank, you pin Palestinians inside a death camp inside of Gaza. | |
| To do all that, you have to develop a level of fanaticism, extremism that is just off the charts. | |
| And so it's not a total shock to me that it's devolved into genocide. | |
| Is Israel a criminal state? | |
| There's no argument. | |
| It's the most criminal state in the world. | |
| I can't recall an example where a state has gone to these lengths to murder and just make suffer a besieged civilian population, at least not in recent memory. | |
| The criminality is off the charts on all levels. | |
| First of all, the occupation of Gaza and the West Bank is illegal to begin with. | |
| It's going on since 1967. | |
| That was preceded by the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians. | |
| Most of the people of Gaza are refugees or the descendants of refugees, meaning that their family homes are inside what is now called Israel that was stolen from them in 1948. | |
| And then after October 7th, you have mass murder, targeting hospitals. | |
| hospitals, targeting schools, targeting shelters, targeting mosques and churches, blocking aid, destroying the UNAID delivery system that was working as well as it could, replacing it with a fake aid organization called the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, which is essentially designed to lure Palestinians into death traps where they're killed. | |
| More than 1,100 Palestinians have been killed so far lining up for food. | |
| That's more Israelis than were killed on October 7th. | |
| So yeah, I mean, this is not only a criminal state, this is the most criminal state in the world. | |
| Well, And I guess nothing can be done about it other than trying to change Trump's mind, but they seem to have a lock on him, whether it's the Epstein files or whether it's his interaction with Mrs. Adelson and all the money she gave him. | |
| He doesn't have any philosophy of government. | |
| He doesn't have any philosophy of life. | |
| But yet he is devoted to what the Israelis want, unless you're of the view that Netanyahu actually controls him. | |
| I don't think Netanyahu controls Trump. | |
| I think that Biden and Trump have made the choice to back Israel out of sort of solidarity with a fellow. | |
| white colonial state, a proxy of the U.S. that serves U.S. hegemony, and also because of the power of the Israel lobby. | |
| People like Mary Madelson, who you mentioned, gave Trump more than $100 million in APAC, which can essentially buy off politicians and spend enough money to oust politicians who they don't like. | |
| That's why they're going after people like Marjorie Taylor Greene now, because Marjorie Taylor Greene has been increasingly critical of all this money and support going to Israel as it commits. | |
| Oh, I didn't know they were going after her, and I never thought I'd see myself rooting for her. | |
| Yeah, she's, you know, for her own reasons, she's been very critical of APAC. | |
| And so, yeah, now she's in their crosshair. | |
| So is Tucker Carlson, who continues to be critical of Israel. | |
| And they reflect, I think. | |
| think, an aspect of MAGA that actually believes in America first, that didn't sign up for this agenda of putting Israel first and not just sending all this money abroad to help Israel slaughter civilians, but then cracking down on civil liberties at home, the ongoing suppression of free speech in the name of Israel. | |
| Some recent examples came when the Department of Homeland Security said that disaster aid will be conditioned on whether or not a state boycotts, if a state boycotts Israel, then they could face a loss of disaster aid. | |
| There's just day after day we get new examples of how Trump is putting Israel first. | |
| And that's what Biden did too. | |
| And so that's why I'm not convinced this has anything to do with Epstein. | |
| This has to do with just his bipartisan policy and the control of the Israel lobby over Washington. | |
| And with no end in sight. | |
| With no end in sight. | |
| Aaron, thank you very much. | |
| It's very depressing discussing this. | |
| It's not depressing being with you. | |
| You're so smart, courageous, and articulate, but it's depressing listening to all this stuff. | |
| It's got to be articulated. | |
| You know, we've been doing this for coming on four years. | |
| uh in uh october i don't know what kind of progress we've made we have an enormous audience that loves you and max and mirscheimer and sax uh and the others but it doesn't seem to have any palpable effect on the policies of the American government. | |
| I agree with you, but change can happen very quickly. | |
| You never know. | |
| And look, on the other conflict we often talk about, there is some serious news this week with Trump and Putin sitting down in Alaska. | |
| I'm not very hopeful about that, but at least the fact that they're meeting, that's a positive sign. | |
| So yes. | |
| People are looking for some glimmer of positivity in the world. | |
| I think the fact that the leaders of the top two nuclear powers who are currently on the other side of a proxy war in Ukraine are speaking and that to me is a good thing. | |
| Agreed. | |
| Agreed. |
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