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Sept. 16, 2025 - Judging Freedom - Judge Andrew Napolitano
24:49
AMB. Chas Freeman : How Dark Are These Days?
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Hi everyone, Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom.
Today is Tuesday, September 16th, 2025.
Ambassador Chaz Freeman will be here with us in just a minute.
Just how dark are these days in America?
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Ambassador Gaudetti and my friend, welcome here.
And thank you for joining us.
Before we get to how dark these days are and Israel's attack on Doha and President Trump's uh escalation of the war in Ukraine.
Why do you think Benjamin Netanyahu saw fit to go on national television this weekend and deny that Israel assassinated Charlie Kirk?
Well, we are full of conspiracy theories.
Evidently, there is evidence that Mr. Kirk in his last days felt that he was being singled out for criticism by pro-Zionist elements.
And he apparently was fearful for his life.
At least that's what he said to a number of people.
And of course, he's been beatified by the Republican Party for...
And is basically being used, his death is being used to uh drive a wedge in politics.
Hopefully, um, from the from the point of view of the president uh bringing um youth uh to the polls uh in 2026 in the midterms.
So it's a very political thing, but there is this undertone of uh uh, you know, Israel has a reputation for assassinating people.
And uh there's apparently quite a bit of uh uh I think probably nonsense about this on the internet.
What do you uh think uh will be the geopolitical fall out of the American uh approved Israeli perpetrated attack on a domestic on a civilian neighborhood in Doha?
I think we are just beginning to see the uh results of that.
There's been a uh a big conference between Arab and Muslim nations um in Doha, both to express solidarity with Qatar and also to review uh the their stand on Israel and on the United States.
Um, I think uh we're now seeing the fallout from uh earlier Incidents brought together with this one, where uh Gulf Arab states have uh have uh mortgaged their future and uh depended on the United States to protect them, and they find that the United States doesn't protect them.
Uh when uh when Iran sinks uh shoots down a drone in the Gulf of uh Strait of Hormuz, uh Donald Trump shrugs, that's the first term, when uh the Houthis strike uh uh uptake, the main interchange for petroleum in the eastern province of Saudi Arabia.
Uh Trump says that's a Saudi problem.
Uh when uh Trump uh urges Hamas to examine what appears to be an Israeli drafted peace proposal, uh that turns out to be a ruse uh to uh bring everybody together in Doha and uh and Israel attacks them in a pattern that's now very familiar.
So the question is uh what does engagement with Israel by, for example, the United Arab Emirates, which is part of the uh so-called Abraham Accords get uh for the UAE.
It doesn't protect anybody in the Gulf, evidently, to have decent ties with uh with Israel.
Uh it doesn't seem to protect anybody to have ties with the United States.
So we're seeing um a number of uh proposals put forward.
One is that the organization of Islamic cooperation and its 57 members will never go after Israel in the in the General Assembly and in the UN.
Um they've not been favorable to Israel, but they've not been proactive.
Now, apparently they may be.
There is a review going on of defense ties with the United States.
There's a $42 billion set of contracts pending with Qatar from American arms manufacturers.
There's a chance now that that will not go through and that the Qataris will turn to China or someone else to meet their requirements.
In any event, I think what we're going to see at a minimum is an acceleration of a process that's been ongoing for some years, namely countries in the region diversifying their relations.
Countries in the region like the Arab Gulf Corporation Council countries and Iran making up, balancing an increasingly aggressive Israel.
And right in the middle of all this, of course, we have our president, President Trump, during the Qataris of two things.
One, he didn't know about this assault by Israel.
And that may or may not be true.
But second, more important, that Israel won't do it again.
Just after he did that, Netanyahu came out and said, of course we will.
We'll attack anybody in any country.
anywhere if we think uh that uh they're harboring an enemy of Israel.
Um and of course, Israel has made an enemies of all of the Palestinians and most of the countries in the region.
So this is the recipe for perpetual war.
Uh and it's happening as young people in the United States and elsewhere uh have a very negative opinion of Israel.
Uh Jewish Americans, many of them don't want to be involved with Israel, which they see as not a Jewish state, but a Zionist state, drawing a distinction between their religion and an ethno-religious uh tyranny over Arabs in the Middle East.
So a lot's going on, and uh I think uh not most of it is pretty dark, as you said.
What is the United States gain from its uh unique, even uh bizarre relationship to Israel?
Not very much, if anything.
Um over the years we've seen um Israel launch surprise attacks on other countries, for example, the 67 war.
Um of course they their independence war was the surprise attack as the um uh in which they took a great deal more than uh the UN proposed two-state partition of Palestine had uh proposed to give them.
Um they they have uh continued a pattern of doing things that uh uh get us into trouble.
Um so uh they are an albatross really around our relations with uh both the the uh the countries of west asia uh and more broadly the Islamic world.
Um they do provide uh brain power for defense research, um, but that could just as well be done in New Jersey.
It doesn't have to be done in Israel.
Uh they um they uh uh have invented an enormous array of police state enforcement measures, surveillance systems, uh drones and this sort of thing.
Um they've taught us how to torture people.
Abu Ghraib was uh a product of Israeli instruction.
Uh but you know, on the other side, uh they kill Americans with impunity.
Uh they kill other people with impunity, they defy uh uh requests from the United States for them to do or not do things.
Um they don't really pay much attention to our interests at all.
Uh and of course, they are the principal foreign interferer in our election process, uh, with all of the attention that's been given to the Russian alleged uh intervention in our elections.
Uh it's apparently taboo to talk about, the far more active, overt uh Israeli effort to skew elections in favor of its interests.
And of course, uh they have a nuclear weapon based on technology stolen from us, uh unauthorized, unacknowledged, and the federal government won't even admit it.
Well, that's another problem.
More recently, we've been forced to enforce an Israeli agenda, not just uh ignoring uh their violation of the non-proliferation treaty, uh, and uh the fact that uh um they've actually done what they accuse Iran of doing, uh clandestinely develop a new nuclear arsenal.
Uh, not only that, but we are actually enforcing Israeli censorship on our campuses.
We're arresting people, we're deporting people uh if they are critical of Israel.
Uh we're depriving universities of research funds if they're critical of Israel.
Uh this is basically the U.S. government acting on behalf of a foreign government against uh the protections that Americans are supposed to enjoy under the First Amendment, freedom of speech, academic freedom,
freedom to petition the government for a change in policy, in other words, to protest, uh surveillance, uh, and now we have a we have apparently got a visa process, though we won't give a visa to anybody who's been critical of Israel.
We insist on inspecting their cell phones and there are grave grave constitutional implications there that the government would that the government would condition a governmental benefit of visa upon the non-assertion of a fundamental liberty, your right to speak freely about anything you want to speak about.
They're grave constitutional implications.
This government doesn't seem to care.
I mean, there are grave constitutional implications about the president murdering people on speed boats in the Caribbean.
Well, I agree that it doesn't appear that the Constitution uh has any respect from this administration in quite a number of areas.
Um they have a theory that uh the second article of the Constitution gives the power the president the power to do anything he wants with no restraints.
Um they totally ignore the uh the uh Article One, which uh provides uh most power to the Congress.
Of course, they're helped in that by the fact that the Congress uh has decided to go AWOL.
Um it's missing in action.
It doesn't uh stand up for its prerogatives and powers.
Um, and of course, the judiciary uh has been uh skewed in favor of uh of Mr. Trump and his administration, and and uh we're not getting Much support from the from the Supreme Court, at least as a result.
Didn't Doha bribe, arguably bribe President Trump with a 400 million dollar jet that they gave him?
Well, there is a clause in the Constitution which prohibits um the acceptance of um of gifts, emoluments uh from foreign governments.
He doesn't seem to have paid attention to that.
Uh yes, uh the Gutteries have made every effort to ingratiate themselves uh with President Trump and the United States.
Um and I think they're genuinely shocked that we don't uh we don't come to their aid when they're attacked.
Do you think that uh Mr. Whitkoff uh is an unwitting dupe of the president?
I mean, twice now he arranged uh serious negotiations, and in one case we bombed Iran, and the other case the Israelis tried to kill the negotiators.
Uh or do you think he's in on the plan?
In on the on the Trump and Netanyahu orchestrated deceptions.
I would like to think that he is a dupe rather than a conspiracy in this regard, but I have to say uh those aren't the only two examples.
There's, of course, uh Operation Spider Web, which the Ukrainians launched in conjunction with peace talks in Istanbul.
So it sounds as though anything that involves American diplomacy on behalf of peace uh meetings in foreign lands, um, has to be regarded with great suspicion because it may be simply a distraction while um uh an attack is carried out.
Last weekend um, according to the police, 110,000, according to the media, a million human beings demonstrated in London against the government.
They did what is standard in America, but what is unheard of in Great Britain.
I didn't even know this.
It's actually against the law in Great Britain.
Uh they waived the Union Jack as they were uh marching.
Um what how significant is a is a crowd of this magnitude uniformly opposed to the government?
I think it's very significant.
And uh let's not forget that uh uh this crowd under British law um uh have been, if they are designated, if they are act active uh uh on behalf of Palestine and certain organizations arguing for Palestinian rights, they are officially branded as terrorists, and they are arrested under anti-terrorism laws.
So this, you know, a million people in London are terrorists, apparently.
You know, this is terribly significant, I think.
It also, however, um uh does draw attention to the classic now apparently erase differences between us and the English.
Um the English have all sorts of secrecy laws and and uh uh and and controls on their press and so forth.
And until recently, we didn't um unfortunately we're coming to resemble them now.
Well, how close to war do you think the United States is, whether it's a foreign war with the Israelis against uh Iran, whether it's uh boots on the ground in Gaza, intimated yesterday by Marco Rubio, or whether it's a civil war here at home.
Gosh, um Israel is going to attack Iran again.
They've made it quite clear they intend to do that.
I hope we have the good sense to stay out of that.
Um I I think uh in fact that the only thing that will stop the genocide in Gaza is military intervention, but I don't expect it from the West.
Um this whole uh issue has disgraced the West and in the eyes of the world and divided us.
Um we're no longer uh we no longer have the automatic moral authority and followership that we once did.
Um I think it's entirely possible uh that uh uh with there will be a misstep in Ukraine that draws us in, although we're trying very hard apparently to stay out and hand it off to the Europeans.
And I would note that there's another issue out there, which is um our intervention in the Chinese civil war to protect the losing side, um, Taiwan, um, against um uh China and uh the government of China, which um for many, many decades we refuse to recognize.
Um you know, there is uh the Chinese are are now now the military balance is very much in their favor.
They are restrained, they don't want to use force, but perhaps uh some somebody will do something, either accidental or intentional, that that sets off a war there, and and that would be a horror because it would very quickly, I think, go nuclear.
Why is it that aside from the fact that there's no alliteration, the genocide Joe moniker has not stuck to Donald Trump?
Uh his uh his supporters who are uh numerous enough to win him an election twice.
Um just reject all of that.
Um his supporters are almost a cult uh rather than a political movement, and uh uh they just reject that.
And we can see, you know, in the case of Charlie Kirk, per Charlie Kirk, um you uh asked about at the beginning of the program.
Um you know, uh he uh he has, as I said, been beatified, but you have people on the right who, for example, mock uh the dead kids at Sandy Hook.
You have people who said nothing about two dead, two murdered uh uh Michigan state senators.
Um so there seem to be different rules for the right and the left, and the right uh has the ability to hurl insults uh and the left does not.
I don't know, I don't know how to explain it.
It's not uh to use the phrase from Fox.
It's not fair and balanced.
Yeah.
Uh last night we did a a lengthy and fascinating interview with Max Blumenthal, who had just finished speaking with sources of his inside and outside the White House uh about uh Kirk's Charlie's uh conversion.
Well, figuratively and literally he was about to convert to Catholicism, but that's not what we were talking about.
We're talking about his conversion on the issue of uh Israel and Gaza.
Trump uh shouted at him when he tried to change Trump's mind, and Kirk was uh the object of attempted intimidation by some of his Zionist uh donors.
But here's a fascinating clip.
Now, this is October of 23.
This is right uh after October 7th, uh, in which he's uh musing aloud about his doubts about Israel.
Cut number one.
So I've been to Israel many times, the whole country's a fortress.
When I first heard this story, I still had the same gut instinct that I did initially.
I find this very hard to believe.
I've been to that Gaza border.
You you cannot go 10 feet without running into a 19-year-old with an AR-15 or an automatic machine gun that's an IDF soldier, right?
The whole country is surveilled.
I think some questions need to be asked.
Was there a stand-down order?
Was there a stand-down order?
They're live streaming the killing of Jews.
Was that somebody in the government say stand down?
That is a legitimate non-conspiracy question.
The whole country is the IDF.
The whole country is.
The essence is this.
This is the closest thing to the Holocaust that any of us have lived through.
But the fact is now Bibi and the Israeli hard right government has a mandate.
I gotta be careful the way I say this, to they're gonna try to Ethnically cleanse Gaza.
I mean that that's and I'm I don't use that term lightly.
Okay.
They're talking about basically removing 2.5 million people from there.
Okay.
There are some serious questions here, Patrick.
And let me tell you, my pattern recognition over the last five years has become pretty sharp.
COVID, Maui fires, you know, Epstein.
When I see a story and it doesn't click, we're our guts are usually right.
He's a realist.
And I guess realism these days is punished.
We still don't know really what the motive of the assassin was, but You know, he's made out to be a leftist anti-fay, but we don't have any proof of that.
On the contrary, he appears to have been quite uh on the other side on many issues.
Um but um as I said at the outset, um, and I'm sorry I haven't watched you and Max uh yet I will.
Um but uh I think uh there is a lot of evidence that uh Charlie Kirk was concerned about retribution from uh Zionist uh not just his donors, but uh but the actual uh Zionist government in Israel.
Dark days in a terrible uh state of affairs.
Uh in my view, we'll continue to get darker before we see the light.
Umbassador, thank you very much.
Thanks for your time as always.
Thanks for accommodating my schedule.
Thank you for letting me go across the board on all these issues with you.
I love our conversations, and we hope to see you again next week.
I would like to see Israel again be a light to the other nations of the world rather than an abomination, which is what has become.
And uh, if I may say so, I hope you can think of a some happy question uh or jolly issue to uh raise.
This it's pretty hard to take, actually.
Yes, yes.
Thank you, Ambassador.
All the best, my dear friend.
Thank you.
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