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Sept. 10, 2025 - Judging Freedom - Judge Andrew Napolitano
22:08
Prof. John Mearsheimer : Israel’s True Goals.
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Hi everyone, Judge Andrew Napolitano here for a judging freedom.
Today is Wednesday, September 10th, 2025.
Professor John Mirsharmer will be with us in just a minute with his analysis on the Israeli attacks in Doha.
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Professor Meersheimer, uh, welcome here.
We've been talking, of course, almost nonstop in the past two days about the Israeli uh attack on uh Doha.
Well on the negotiators in Doha, on the Hamas negotiators in Doha.
What's your big picture take on this, Professor?
Well, in a certain sense, it's not surprising because it fits in very neatly with the Israeli strategy.
Uh here in the United States and in the West more generally, we pretend that Israel is serious about negotiating some sort of deal uh to put an end to the war in Gaza.
But that's not what's going on here.
What the Israelis are bent on doing is making sure there is no ceasefire, uh, and there's certainly no peace agreement involving Gaza because they want to ethnically cleanse Gaza.
And this is all designed to ethnically cleanse Gaza.
It's part of a bigger picture that involves uh raising uh Gaza City, uh, which they're now starting to do, making it unlivable, driving all of the Palestinians in the northern part of Gaza down to the south, where most of them are now, putting them in a giant concentration camp in preparation for either murdering them or driving them into Egypt or both.
Is there um is there any question about the whether or not the United States gave the green light?
It's hard to believe that the United States didn't give them the green light in the sense that the United States knew that this was coming and said it's okay to do it.
Uh, there's no way, in my opinion, that they could have flown into Qatar, given that we have a huge naval base, a huge air base there, and all sorts of surveillance capabilities.
They would have had to tell us they were coming.
Uh, and if they didn't tell us, we surely saw them coming.
And we could have told them to turn back if we wanted to.
But let's face it, the Trump could, the Trump administration is in cahoots with the Israelis.
Uh this is a tag team.
Uh they're executing a genocide in Gaza.
The Trump administration is fully complicit in that uh genocide.
With regard to the 12-day war against Iran, again, the TAM tag team was in action, the United States and Israel.
And you see it again here.
So I'm sure that they gave him the green light.
Is it credible that Trump did not know about this?
It is possible.
Do I think it's likely?
No.
I think that he was told.
But you can never know for sure.
I mean, this is not an administration.
It works in what I would call a rational legal fashion.
And in fact, it doesn't really even come close to acting in a rational legal fashion.
Sometimes the right hand does not know what the left hand is doing.
So it is possible that Trump didn't know that people down below, like Radcliffe, who's the head of the CIA or Marco Rubio didn't feel it was necessary to tell him.
I do find that hard to believe, but it is possible.
If he didn't know, who's running the executive branch of the federal government?
Well, they're all on the same page.
It really doesn't matter whether he knew.
If he knew he was going to approve it anyway.
He doesn't tell the Israelis they can't do something.
If they want to do it, they do it.
And if there's an outcry, the United States helps protect Israel.
That's just the way it works.
The administration is strewn with people who are basically Zionists.
They'll support anything that Israel does.
You really want to sit back and just sort of think about the relationship between the United States and Israel and just how truly remarkable it is.
There's nothing in recorded history that even comes close to this relationship.
Here we have a tiny little country that is able to wrap the United States of America around its finger.
If you look at how President Trump deals with almost every other country on the planet, he slaps them around at least once a week.
Every other country.
But here's this country, Israel, that can do anything it wants, and we support it.
And we give it huge amounts of military assistance, huge amounts of economic assistance, huge amounts of diplomatic cover.
This is truly remarkable.
And it's certainly not in our interest.
I mean, no great power would allow this to happen if it could prevent it.
Does uh Netanyahu asked Trump for permission or just tell Trump what he's about to do?
I don't think he asks for permission.
I think that Netanyahu is smart enough that he probably runs by, runs operations like this by the administration.
He tells them what's coming in most cases.
He may wait to the last moment to tell them in some instances.
Who knows for sure?
But uh I find it hard to believe that he would ask for permission.
He doesn't have to ask for permission.
He can do whatever he wants.
And whatever he does, we'll back him.
It's just the way it works.
Does this uh attack effectively seal the fate of the hostages?
I don't know for sure.
Uh it does, I think, depend on whether you get some sort of meaningful ceasefire uh, you know, in the next month.
I think the longer this drags on, not only the more Palestinians die, but the more hostages die.
Uh so uh this is a huge problem uh for keeping the hostages alive.
And uh you want to remember that there's a belief that a good number of those hostages are in Gaza City, and if Gaza City is razed and they push the Palestinians uh out of the north, uh one would imagine in those circumstances a good number of the Romanian hostages will die.
But uh it's quite clear that the Israelis uh don't care.
Let me put it differently.
The Israeli government doesn't care about the hostages.
Uh they'll make uh A lot of uh sounds about how they care about the hostages, how they want to defeat Hamas and how they want to get the hostages out.
Those are supposed to be the two principal goals.
But those are not the two principal goals.
The principal goal is to ethnically cleanse uh Gaza.
It's to drive all of the Palestinians out.
And if that means that the remaining hostages have to die, so be it.
That's the basic policy here.
The Israelis are, of course, of course, are not going to come out and say that.
But all you have to do is look at what's happening, and you can quickly deduce that that is their basic strategy.
So this is not the first time that this has happened.
By this, I mean Trump lured negotiators into what they thought was a legitimate bona fide negotiation, and then the Israelis pounced.
It happened with Nazarala in Lebanon, it happened with the uh atomic enrichment negotiators from Iran, and now it happened uh with the hostage negotiators uh and uh Hamas.
In this case, Trump personally lured them by offering a rather childlike but nevertheless 100-word uh proposal uh for them to generally uh agree with, and they generally accepted it, and then of course the Israelis then didn't even respond to it.
Question: Who would negotiate with the Israelis again after this?
Who would negotiate with Trump again after this?
Well, if I were in charge of any particular country or group out there, I would not negotiate in good faith with the United States or with Israel.
I've been making that argument for months now.
You cannot trust the United States.
It's a ruthless great power.
And the Israelis, they're just beyond the pale.
You can't possibly even think about trusting them.
But in this particular case, we don't know that Trump and Netanyahu were working together to lure the Hamas negotiators into a particular location and then allow the Israelis to murder them all.
We don't know that they were working together as uh that closely in this case.
It could be that Trump, who was giving them not Trump's proposal, but Netanyahu's proposal, because you always want to remember all these proposals that we put forward come from the Israelis.
Uh so he Trump was putting forward uh the Israeli proposal, and Hamas, of course, was going to meet to discuss it.
But I'm not clear that Trump knew that the Israelis would then attack uh the negotiators when they were concentrated in one place.
In other words, I don't know that Trump was trying to set up uh those Hamas negotiators so that they would be killed.
But the Israelis obviously saw this as an opportunity to kill the negotiators than to kill the negotiations and allow them to go about destroying Gaza City and eventually cleansing all of Gaza.
Uh Netzinyahu doesn't really care about the hostages, he cares about staying in office, his legacy, and uh ethnically cleansing the Gaza Strip.
I think there's no question about that.
Uh I think that he is willing, and I think uh people like Smotric and Ben Gavier as well, uh, are willing to sacrifice the hostages uh for what they think is the greater good.
Uh they think that you know the end justifies the means in this particular case.
And this is contrary to basic Israeli uh custom for dealing with the whole question of hostages.
It's always been believed in Israel that if anybody became a hostage, uh, that the government would go to enormous lengths to get those hostages back, uh, that it would not throw them to the wolves.
And I think there's a powerful sense in Israel that uh uh what Israel is doing, what the government is doing is directly at odds with a long tradition that is profoundly important to most Israelis, which is to know that if you're captured by Hamas or an organization like that, the government Will go to great lengths to get you back.
That's not happening here.
The government is willing to let those hostages die, all for the purposes of creating a greater Israel.
Because if Netanyahu negotiates a substantial cessation and violence in order to secure the return of the living hostages, he'll no longer be the prime minister because the right wingers will leave his coalition and the government will collapse.
Well, that's the other dimension to it as well.
There's no question about that.
He wants to stay in office.
As we all know, he faces all sorts of legal problems.
And at some point, there'll be a day of reckoning concerning what happened on October 7th.
He, of course, was the prime minister at the time.
He was working hand in hand with Hamas.
We don't want to lose sight of that before October 7th.
And there'll be uh some sort of government sponsored commission that looks into what happened, and uh I am sure that lots of blame will be dumped on him because he was in charge.
Wow.
Um does Trump take advice, or does he just shoot from the hip?
Well, I would imagine that there are some small number of instances where he takes advice uh, but not many.
I think he tends to shoot from the hip.
I mean, everything I see uh regarding President Trump tells me that he's a person who thinks that he's a genius.
Uh and uh he thinks that he can solve any problem.
All you have to do is go back and listen to how he was talking about solving the Ukraine problem before he moved into the White House and even after he moved into the White House.
When people would tell him this is a tricky problem, it's going to take a lot of work to shut it down.
He would just say, I'm planning to shut this one down before I move into the White House, before I move into the White House.
And then after he moved into the White House, he told us he was going to immediately shut it down.
It would be easy because the great Donald Trump can solve any problem.
He knows everything.
He's all seeing, all-knowing.
Uh, but it didn't turn out very well.
He's facing a huge number of complex problems.
Uh he needs good advice.
And one of the other problems he has, besides the fact that he thinks he's a genius and doesn't really like to listen to other people, is that he's surrounded by people who are at best uh third-rate strategists.
I mean, Pete Hexeth uh is not a person I would place much faith in, as somebody who can uh formulate and execute strategy at the national level.
And the same thing goes for Marco Rubio.
Uh so if you look at the cast of characters that he's surrounded with, it's not sure that even if he asked for advice, he'd get good advice.
Here he is denying uh that the Israelis told him about this uh this attack ahead of time.
It's almost inconceivable because Dilha is the location of the largest American airfield air base in the Middle East.
The that airfield provides air security for the entire country of Qatar.
The radar was down and the air defenses were down when the Israeli uh jets arrived.
They were refueled mid-air by British Royal Air Force jets.
If the Brits were involved, MI-6 was involved.
If MI6 was involved, CIA was involved, the CIA was involved, the American uh military uh and governmental establishment had to know about it.
There's just no question that the intelligence community in the United States would have picked up this attack uh well before it reached the final destination.
But I think the Israelis would have cleared it with um uh the White House or with the administration.
They would have just told uh people at the highest levels of the administration, maybe not President Trump, maybe President Trump, what was coming down.
I mean, I find it hard to believe they didn't.
But let's assume they didn't.
Let's assume President Trump wasn't told, and that nobody at the higher levels of the administration was told.
What does that tell you about The relationship between Israel and the United States.
What does that tell you about who's really driving the train?
What does that tell you about who's really the boss?
Right.
Again, it gets back to the point that I made earlier.
We have this truly amazing relationship, this perverse relationship with Israel, where it basically can do anything it wants.
And we will nevertheless support it unconditionally, whether it's in their national interest or not, just as long as it's in their perceived national interest.
Here's his denial.
You'll see the vice president standing around like a mannequin, the secretary of state, Well, you can't see him.
He's out of the picture, but he's there.
And the Secretary of Defense.
One wonders what Trump thinks their jobs are, that they can show up on a street corner with him when he's uh addressing uh the press.
Cut number 16, Chris.
Well, I'm not thrilled.
I'm not thrilled about it.
I don't have to do that.
I'm just I'm not thrilled about the whole situation.
It's not not a good situation.
But uh I will say this, we want the hostages back.
But we are not thrilled about the way that went down today.
Do you know how you advance, Mr. President?
Do you feel it's healthy?
Advance?
No.
You were caught by surviving.
I'm never surprised by anything, especially when it comes to the Middle East.
How do you keep learning about this happening?
I'll be giving a full statement tomorrow, but uh I would uh tell you this.
I was very unhappy about it, very unhappy about every aspect and uh we got to get the hostages back.
But I was very unhappy about the way that went down.
Did those denials sound very convincing to you?
No.
Were you surprised?
Instead of saying yes or no, was a typical Trumpian answer.
I'm not surprised by anything.
Yeah, I think that that's true.
By the way, it's interesting how he talks about or emphasizes the importance of getting the hostages back.
What I find quite remarkable about this is that he is involved in executing a genocide.
Uh you just want to remember that every time he talks about the Middle East, that this man is involved in a genocide.
But all he can talk about is getting the Israeli hostages back.
And with regard to the Israeli hostages, you would think that he could figure out that those hostages are never going to get out as long as the Israelis continue to do what they did in bombing Hamas negotiators.
It just, you know, you would think that he would understand this, but apparently he doesn't.
Is he working toward peace in Ukraine and in Gaza?
Well, there are separate issues.
He's not working towards peace in Gaza, as I just said, and we never want to lose sight of this.
He is engaged in a genocide in Gaza.
Furthermore, with regard to Iran, it's hard to argue that he's working for peace there either.
Now, with regard to Ukraine, in the beginning, he was very interested in shutting this war down.
And when he went to Alaska, it looked like he was again pushing in that direction, that he was interested in working with Putin to figure out a way to shut the war down.
Uh, but since the Alaska meeting, if anything, he's gone back to, you know, threatening the Russians and supporting Ukraine.
And there's no cause for optimism that he's going to be able to work with Putin to cut some sort of deal that uh shuts this war down.
So he is supporting Ukraine and uh doing hardly anything to shut that war down.
Professor Mir Scheimer, a pleasure, my dear friend.
Thank you for uh allowing me to go across the board and pick your brain on all of these subjects.
All my best.
We'll look forward to seeing you next week.
Likewise, Judge.
Thank you.
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