Aug. 12, 2025 - Judging Freedom - Judge Andrew Napolitano
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| Hi, everyone. | |
| Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom. | |
| Today is Wednesday, August 13, 2020. | |
| Max Blumenthal joins us now. | |
| Max, it's a pleasure. | |
| You probably saw this. | |
| Aaron Mate and I had, excuse me, a rather emotional conversation yesterday on this show about the slaughter of the Al Jazeera journalists. | |
| And he reminded me that you wrote a book a number of years ago predicting that this would happen. | |
| What's the backstory? | |
| on this. | |
| Does Netanyahu admit to targeting, tracking down, and killing unarmed journalists? | |
| Well, yeah, the past few days, we've seen Israeli propagandists, including the Israeli Foreign Ministry and who's who of Israeli government ministers openly defend, justify, and celebrate the killing of Anas al-Sharif, who was the top correspondent in Gaza and his entire crew while they were sitting at the journalist's tent outside Al-Jashifa Hospital. | |
| which was falsely labeled as a Hamas command and control center by CNN's Jake Tapper just about two years ago. | |
| The killing of Anas al-Sharif was preceded by the assassination of his immediate predecessor Hosam Shabbat killed by an Israeli drone while covering an Israeli attack in Beid Hanoun. | |
| They openly justified that. | |
| Hosam Shabbat's killing was preceded by the killing of his predecessor by Israel, Ismail al-Ghul, who was covering the mourners processions outside the home of Ismail Haniyah, who Israel had assassinated in Tehran, the late Hamas Palitburo chief. | |
| Ismail al-Ghul was literally decapitated by an Israeli missile. | |
| They justified that, claiming he was basically an enemy combatant. | |
| In each case, they claim that these young men were like leaders of Hamas divisions. | |
| And then before that, Ismail Ghul's predecessor, Wael Dadu, was had his entire family killed deliberately by Israel, including his own son while his son was reporting in the field. | |
| In each case, they said that his son was somehow involved with Palestinian Islamic Jihad. | |
| But at no point did any of these figures ever carry a gun? | |
| At no point, they carried a microphone and a camera. | |
| And that's the point. | |
| Israel is involved in a cover-up to eliminate all media as it plans one of the most dastardly operations of the crime of the century, which is the reoccupation and ethnic cleansing of Gaza's three main population centers, which has been already charted out. | |
| as an operation that will include shelling urban areas with artillery to force 1.2 million people south into a de facto concentration camp in Al-Mawasi. | |
| So they didn't want the most energetic journalist with the biggest platform in the world to be able to report on it. | |
| And you can see in the preliminary phases of this operation is Israel's doing a lot of bombing, killing a lot of civilians. | |
| There isn't as much coverage out of Gaza. | |
| Wow. | |
| Is there any other country in the world that openly targets and slaughters unarmed journalists? | |
| Well, the United States has sort of set the stage for this, starting with the bombing in April 1999 of radio television Serbia during its destruction of Yugoslavia. | |
| Wesley Clark, who was the NATO European commander who oversaw that operation referred to this channel as a command and control center for the Serbian enemy. | |
| They killed 16 people, 16 staffers including the makeup artists. | |
| Then almost four years later to the day in April 2003, the United States bombed the electricity generator of Al Jazeera's offices in Baghdad, killing a reporter, Turek Ayub, and another staffer. | |
| And the home secretary working under Tony Blair later confessed in his memoirs that he ordered Tony Blair to bomb Al Jazeera's transmitter on the grounds that they were the enemy. | |
| So they set the stage then a major building in Gaza City that I worked out of with Anya Parimpil when we were reporting from there that has the Associated Press offices, every major outlet worked out of there was bombed, brought down by Israel in 2021 during an escalation. | |
| It was the Al-Jalah Tower. | |
| And this was justified by Israeli propagandists. | |
| claiming without any evidence that Hamas had occupied the building. | |
| Again, I worked out of the building. | |
| There was no sign of any military, any Hamas figures. | |
| It was just, it looked like a normal meet media operation from floor to floor. | |
| And Brian Stelter at the time on CNN actually went along with this campaign to justify the bombing and said that there's been questions in the past about the AP's Gaza Bureau. | |
| And Jake Tapper also echoed this. | |
| Then as I mentioned before, Jake Tapper justified the Israeli raid and assault on Al-Shifa Hospital when he published a piece at CNN citing an unnamed U.S. official claiming it was a Hamas command and control center. | |
| And where are all these figures now, now that Israel's just openly declaring that it's slaughtering journalists willy nilly across Gaza they're all pretty much silent I mean if you go to Jake Tapper's Twitter account he's tweeting words out does the Israeli government who is this that's Anas al-Sharif and his daughter and son Wow that this is the Fellow about | |
| which about whom Aaron and I spoke yesterday and that is very touching tribute to him in which his own words were quoted if you hear these words quoted then you'll know that the Israelis have killed me in an effort to silence my reporting truthfully what's going on in Gaza. | |
| I'm paraphrasing what he said, but it's the same person. | |
| You can see a loving father and two. | |
| Chris put that up again, a loving father and two. | |
| Adorable, adorable little babies. | |
| Has the Israeli government ever produced evidence to support its claim? | |
| that all of these broadcasters are secretly jihadists or Hamas terrorists rather than the broadcasters that they purported to be? | |
| Well, they produced a selfie that Anassel Sharif took with the government, the leaders of the government in Gaza who have all been since assassinated, including Yahya Sinwar. | |
| So he has interviewed them. | |
| He knew them. | |
| They were popularly elected in 2006, the last time that a The US and Israel refused to allow any elections. | |
| But let's take, is that the standard for assassinating a journalist now? | |
| Because I have, there's a picture of me. | |
| You can search this easily, shaking hands with Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro. | |
| Attorney General Pam Bondi has just put out a $50 million bounty for Maduro's head, claiming that he is in charge of a non-existent drug cartel called Carteles del Sol or the Cartel of the Sun. | |
| There's no evidence this even exists, but by that standard, maybe I should suffer a drone strike here. | |
| I don't know. | |
| I take pictures with all sorts of leaders, some who I don't even agree with, but everybody can now be killed. | |
| Any journalist can now be killed under this twisted Zionist logic which defines any journalist working within Palestine as an enemy combatant. | |
| Remember, they deliberately killed Shireen Abu Akleh, who was the main al jazeera correspondent in the west bank who was an american citizen and the us did nothing she was very well known in the us is that so i think i think anybody can any anybody can be harmed under these rules max is that you that is And I subsequently interviewed Nicolas Maduro. | |
| and this was uh just not long after a drone strike uh an attempted drone assassination of maduro jeez didn't i interviewed him actually in a kind of like mountainside location i didn't know where i was going to interview | |
| him and he had just given a speech to a ceremony of firefighters and it was like in a nature reserve and he was you know amping them up to get ready to fight forest fires and so i asked him before our interview i said you know what what did you just do and he told me and he said you know and they're going to fight forest fires with uh with with fire engines and and maybe with drones and he kind of winked at me me, making a reference to the assassination attempt. | |
| And then as our interview commenced, he explained how John Bolton had personally authorized this attempted drone assassination of Maduro at a military rally. | |
| So this is just a lawless world. | |
| It's the law of the jungle. | |
| And it emanates from Washington. | |
| Just the war on international law puts us all in peril, especially those of us who are journalists who have interfered with the objectives of this lawless empire. | |
| Look at what they did to Julian Assange in order to silence him. | |
| Yeah. | |
| I don't want to get down to a rabbit hole, but didn't the Trump. | |
| administration send Rick Grinnell to negotiate with Maduro? | |
| And weren't Grinnell's negotiations deemed successful? | |
| And didn't he come home with Americans who had been imprisoned, maybe justly or unjustly? | |
| I don't know. | |
| We brought Americans home. | |
| Now they put a $50 million bounty on his head. | |
| The Trump administration just reauthorized a license for Chevron to continue to operate. | |
| in Venezuela right before doubling the bounty on Nicolas Maduro, which was first issued by William Barr in Trump's first term. | |
| So maybe this ridiculous $50 million bounty, which is the same bounty that was put on the head of Osama bin Laden after 9-11, is sort of a sop to the South Florida Venezuelans who want Maduro dead so they can continue to do business with Venezuela. | |
| Maybe they're just kind of trying to mollify what I call the Gusano industrial complex. | |
| To get back to serious and dreadful matters, do you sense world opinion turning against Netanyahu. | |
| And if the answer to that is yes, does it make any difference? | |
| That's a great question as well. | |
| Does it make a difference? | |
| I think it does make a difference, particularly in Europe, where we just saw the New Zealand Prime Minister state that Netanyahu's lost the plot. | |
| You know, the recognition of a Palestinian state, however pathetic and ultimately symbolic. | |
| is a shift. | |
| We're seeing a rhetorical shift everywhere but Washington where the Trump administration as Marjorie Taylor Green is openly saying aims to make Israel great again, not America. | |
| Trump is sort of an outlier in the Western world now. | |
| And just on a popular level, everyone I know, I mean, I'm talking about like yuppies or older Jewish people. | |
| people who are generally progressive but aren't as politically active as I am, they all absolutely despise and revile what Israel is doing and want nothing to do with it anymore. | |
| The problem is they don't really have a language for speaking out and they don't have a political vehicle to support because all of them are Democrats and there's virtually no one in the Democratic Party who's stepping up and doing anything meaningful, although more Democrats are signing on to Bernie Sanders' resolution to suspend military aid to Israel. | |
| I guess Ro Khanna is pushing it in the house. | |
| There's not even... | |
| There clearly... | |
| The most recent vote we saw was on suspending some form of offensive weaponry to Israel. | |
| And I think 28 Democrats supported it and the entire rest of the Senate. | |
| And then other Democrats like John Ossoff from Georgia bailed out when it came down to suspending like actual 2,000 pound bombs to Israel. | |
| Tony Blinken just published an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal about why a Palestinian state shouldn't be recognized. | |
| I mean, there's just, there's no vehicle for anybody. | |
| politically. | |
| So does it matter in the United States? | |
| Not quite yet, but something is building, particularly among young people. | |
| Support for Israel, it's just a wipe out. | |
| There is none among people under 40 in the United States. | |
| Is the... | |
| Professor Mirschamer and I have talked about it till we're blue in the face. | |
| But Colonel McGregor, who's going to be with us on Saturday at the Ron Paul gathering, said it in a rather matter of fact way this morning on this program, that Trump does not control Netanyahu. | |
| Netanyahu controls Trump. | |
| Is there enough evidence for you to make that statement? | |
| Well, clearly, I mean, Trump has said, and Marco Rubio has said, that we're going to let Israel decide what's best as it seeks to reoccupy Gaza. | |
| How are they going to do that without U.S. munitions? | |
| They don't have big munitions factories. | |
| How are they going to do that without U.S. military platforms like the F-15, F-35? | |
| So they've ceded all authority on the use of U.S. military platforms and U.S. weapons and U.S. military aid. | |
| and general U.S. economic aid paid for by the U.S. taxpayer, underwritten by us to Israel. | |
| They've subordinated themselves to a foreign authority. | |
| They're openly saying that they're doing it. | |
| And they're presiding over a controlled demolition of American institutions on behalf of Israel. | |
| Trump just cut $538 million in grants to UCLA for advanced research. | |
| that has contributed to American dominance over the internet, for example. | |
| This is somebody that you and I probably thought we'd never be praising Marjorie Taylor Greene. | |
| This is the sign on her office door in the House of Representatives. | |
| No foreign lobbying. | |
| If you enter this office, trying to read it, Chris, seeking funds on behalf of a foreign nation, you will be in violation of, and it states the U.S. Code. | |
| I guess AIPAC is not going to knock on her door. | |
| But I don't know of anybody else who is as out there as she is in identifying the manner in which the DOJ treats Israeli lobbyists by not requiring them to register. | |
| Everybody else gets indicted if they fail to register. | |
| Well, I have an interview request in with MTG staff and I haven't heard back from them, but I would like to ask her about that. | |
| Like, what was the turning point for her? | |
| her because i remember she censored rashida talib when she spoke out against the israeli genocide machine after october 7th she led the charge and she denounced protesters from jewish voice for peace when they staged a protest in the u.s capital now marjorie taylor green is a real voice of clarity and courage. | |
| Maybe she will join Ro Cahana and Thomas Massey in this effort to put a stop, even though they don't have the votes. | |
| That's two Republicans, her and Massey, joining Ro Cahana and I don't know how many Democrats to support Bernie Sanders' resolution, if they even let it come to the floor of the House for a vote. | |
| Well, it's confusing to me why there can't be more cross-partisan coalition building on this issue. | |
| We saw Alexandria Casio Cortez vote against Marjorie Taylor Greene's proposal to cut off aid to Israel because it included 500 million for Iron Dome and AOC. | |
| refuses to vote against the Iron Dome system, which is what prevents negotiations and has allowed Israel to carry out one-way slaughters in Gaza. | |
| And the U.S. taxpayer pays for it. | |
| And then you, I think only three or four Democrats supported MTG. | |
| Then you have Ro Khanna, who is pushing for a, this is a guy who's taken. | |
| repulsive pro-Israel positions in the past, including condemning the Obama administration for abstaining from a UN vote condemning Israeli settlement activity. | |
| And now he's supporting Sanders on suspending some aid to Israel. | |
| I don't know if he's working with Massey or Marjorie Taylor Greene, but what they need to do, I think Marjorie Taylor Greene has it right. | |
| The heart of the problem is APAC. | |
| APAC was launched as the American Zionist Council with money from Israel. | |
| through the Jewish agency, which is an arm of the Israeli government, which is illegal. | |
| Senator Fulbright investigated this. | |
| And the JFK assassination pretty much quashed that investigation. | |
| There needs to be a new investigation, a new oversight committee into foreign lobbying by Israel through APAC. | |
| And I think what we'll see is lots of espionage, lots of classified documents being taken out of Pentagon, State Department and Congressional offices and shared with Israeli intelligence. | |
| Oh my goodness, who would have the courage to mount that? | |
| I fully agree with you, but who the hell in the Congress would have the courage? | |
| Well, I think there needs to be a coalition. | |
| Well, I mean, she would presumably be that. | |
| Thomas Massey, I mean, look at what he's up against. | |
| Donald Trump called for Thomas Massey's head and look at the donors who came down to support the campaign to oust Thomas Massey. | |
| It starts Miriam Adelson as one of the major donors. | |
| Paul Singer is the other one. | |
| They're all Zionist billionaire donors. | |
| So they're targeting all the independent voices in America First and they're targeting the few foreign policy critics. | |
| on the left in the Democratic Party and they can't come together. | |
| They can't seem to come together as an register APAC caucus or a real oversight on foreign meddling caucus over partisan lines to actually target the heart of the problem. | |
| And Ro Khanna actually sent me a direct message two days ago asking me to support what he's doing to limit aid to Israel, but he has never called for registering APAC. | |
| So I'm going to respond to him and ask him where he stands on that issue. | |
| I have, I have to go in just a minute, but one of the last questions I want to ask you. | |
| Do you believe that Netanyahu is planning another attack on Iran? | |
| I think it. | |
| I think it. | |
| McGregor says the answer to that is yes. | |
| Yeah, he absolutely is planning another attack on Iran. | |
| It will happen. | |
| I don't know if it will happen in such a short time frame. | |
| Trita Parsi is predicted by the end of August. | |
| I think, you know, they do have to consider Iranian deterrence as a factor. | |
| So I don't know when it will happen, but certainly we've entered into a cycle. | |
| uh and i don't know how it will be resolved but israel's just two points israel's focus right focus right now is the ethnic cleansing of gaza there's a huge war between the military leadership al-zamir the chief of staff and the fanatic messianic fascists in netanyahu's coalition like ben gvir the military doesn't isn't really that eager about this operation and they're being pushed. | |
| And then point two, Donald Trump's having a lot of trouble with his base. | |
| Epstein destroyed his Mystique. | |
| And so, as I predicted, he's going to try to incite a race war in America. | |
| So he's allocating the military to do a show of force against the American public by occupying Washington, DC. | |
| This is much more convenient and fits more within the Stephen Miller brand of politics than a wag the dog style Israeli attack on Iran where Israel's ultimately going to demand the US come to its rescue. | |
| But we will see another round, I'm sure between Israel and Iran. | |
| And Israel will just, they're ultimately going to ask for U.S. boots on the ground. | |
| Yes. | |
| We're in for dark days, Max. | |
| Max, thank you very much. | |
| I look forward to seeing you and Anya with Professor Sachs and Colonel McGregor at the Ron Paul gathering. | |
| Join us on Saturday morning. | |
| We'll have a nice time there. | |
| It's a huge drive, right? | |
| It's going to be a live judge broadcast. | |
| Yes, yes, it is. | |
| We will take over the podium, the five of us. | |
| It'll be a live judging freedom. | |
| We won't have as much time to speak as we are accustomed to, but it'll be a lot of fun. | |
| And you and Anya and Saxa McGregor will be very much appreciated by that audience. | |
| But thank you very much for your time today, Max. | |
| Thanks for accommodating my schedule. | |
| All the best, my friend. | |
| All right, let's do it live. | |
| Thank you. |
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