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Sept. 16, 2025 - Judging Freedom - Judge Andrew Napolitano
28:13
Aaron Maté : The Dead And Injured In Gaza.
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Hi everyone, Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom.
Today is Tuesday, September 16th, 2025.
Aaron Mate joins us now.
Aaron, thank you very much for accommodating my schedule.
I want to talk to you about these uh disputes raging over the dead and displaced and injured in Gaza.
But before uh we get there, why do you think Prime Minister Netanyahu felt the need to go on international television and deny that the Israelis had murdered Charlie Kirk?
Well, given what Israel is allowed to get away with, the impunity it has, there's so much suspicion about Israel and you know to what extent it manipulates people, is holding blackmail over people.
It's just it's such an evil state.
It gets away with such evil that people naturally suspect it now of being able to do anything.
And uh that's been bolstered in recent days by the reporting of Max Blumenthal at the Gray Zone, which you've covered.
You had a great interview with him, which I encourage people to see if they haven't yet, where uh Max spoke to a number of sources who relayed that Charlie Kirk was revisiting, uh rethinking, challenging his own support of Israel in light of all the atrocities there.
So given that, Netanyahu has to come out and sort of uh and and claim that Israel had nothing to do with it, and you know, I I don't think Israel was responsible for Charlie Kirk's murder, obviously.
I mean, there's a lot known about the alleged shooter, and that seems to be pretty straightforward.
But the fact that Charlie Kirk was apparently undergoing this transformation or at least questioning his support for Israel, it speaks to just how Israel has lost so many of its traditional supporters, and the debate that's been sparked by Max's article about you know the pressure Charlie Kirk was under to tow the line on Israel,
the backlash he was getting from Israeli government supporters, people like Bill Ackman and others for platforming uh conservative critics of Israel like Tucker Carlson.
Uh, this is a good thing, and this and this deserves to be amplified because the only way to stop Israel, this genocidal death machine that's a threat to the whole planet is for a real bipartisan coalition.
And it seems to me, if you read Max's work, that Charlie Kirk was you know on his way to becoming a part of that, uh, given the horrors that everyone is seeing in Gaza.
I mean, Max's reporting was really uh extraordinary.
Uh judging freedom was uh thrilled to be the first show to which he turned.
That may have been a coincidence of timing because he had his uh sources, was communicating with his sources yesterday.
But the picture that he paints uh of these people offering um Kirk huge amounts of money and then berating him when he wouldn't accept it and Kirk's belief that Netanyahu himself was behind all of this.
I mean, this is APAC at its worst.
Yeah, and that's how they operate.
And if you look at some of the major figures in the international um legal world who've been bullied by Israel, there's just a pattern.
They get offered inducements, uh, they get offered to till the party land, and if they don't, they get threatened.
Uh, there was a uh South African jurist named Richard Goldstone, a Jewish guy, committed Zionist, who wrote a UN report, who oversaw a UN report years ago about a previous Israeli assault on Gaza, and he documented extensive Israeli war crimes.
He eventually was pressured to recant.
And he did.
He renounced his own report.
And of course, the team of experts he worked with, they stood by it, but he but he recanted.
And this must have been after we know this was after a pressure campaign on him by Israel.
What exactly Israel did?
Did they buy him off?
Did they threaten him?
I don't know.
And there's a similar judge on the International Court of Justice uh who was pressured by Israel and I think likely bribed.
So this is just how they operate.
So they're used to getting away with um buying people off, bullying them.
And uh I wouldn't be surprised at all if they tried to apply the same playbook with Charlie Kirk.
Do you think anything will come of uh Max's revelations?
Or do you think people will say, well, this is the way the Zionists operate.
Turn the page.
Well, what's already come of it is encouraging to me.
You've seen a lot of discussion on the con in the conservative space about the role of Israel and conservative support for it.
You've seen people who previously expressed unwavering support for Israel, saying, you know, that they're uncomfortable now with Gaza, of course, which is way too late.
This should have been happening from the start, but I think it's better late than never.
And so already what I think Max has sparked is encouraging because it's it's highlighting the divisions that exist inside the conservative MAGA space about Israel.
Not everybody's on board.
Tucker Carlson is not Marjorie Taylor Green is not Candace Owens is not, and that's good.
I mean, however much I disagree with these people on so many issues, to me, Gaza is the moral issue of our time, and it's the existential issue of our time.
Because Israel has been granted a impunity to carry out mass murder.
There's no reason to think they will stop at Gaza.
And they have nuclear weapons, and they're an out-of-control supremacist state.
So this this country and this country's influence in domestic U.S. politics, where they're able to basically buy out politicians.
Corey Bush, Jamal Bowman, two progressive Democrats were essentially bought out of office.
APAC spent millions of dollars trying to get them ousted, and they and they succeeded in that.
So this country Israel and its lobby and its army of apologists are a threat to the world.
They're a threat to democracy.
Look at the crackdown on free speech as well, on top of APAC's role in Congress.
So it's just paramount that there is debate everywhere, and that there's as much of a bipartisan coalition as possible to stand up to this madness.
I wonder what uh Kirk thought of Netanyahu and Max's uh sources didn't know.
But uh there must be people to whom he uh whispered his own views of Netanyahu, whom he recognized as the figure behind these efforts to intimidate him.
I, you know, I can't speak to that.
I I never really followed the work of Charlie Kirk, and uh he he's gone now, so he's not here to speak for himself, and so I don't want to you know over speculate about what his feelings are but uh but but certainly the debate that this is the the discussion that this has sparked, just you know, Max documenting that there was some questioning going on and there was some pressure on Charlie Kirk to tow the party line.
That to me, uh, you know, it's important for people to understand that this is how Israel operates is is intimidates people, and there needs to be as much dissension as possible uh from this genocidal state.
And um what is to what is to stop them?
What is to stop them from bombing another Arab country because they claim they want to kill a Hamas uh official?
Nothing, nothing.
Uh and we've already learned recently that even Trump's claims that he didn't only that he only knew from Netanyahu at the last minute um was a lie.
That uh Axios reported that actually Netanyahu personally spoke to Trump and told him Trump had said he found out at the very last minute while the planes were already in the sky, and he tried to get Steve Wickoff to intervene, but it was too late.
I mean, it's just Trump gave Israel the full green light here, just as he did uh to give Israel the green light in Iran.
By the way, on that front, we learned some new information recently.
Uh Israeli media reported on uh leaked transcripts of the Israeli cabinet meeting uh about bombing Iran.
And uh these uh leaked transcripts acknowledge what you know we talked about extensively on your show that there was no imminent threat uh that Iran was going to acquire nuclear weapons.
They weren't even close.
Uh in fact, there's a reference inside the meeting by Netanyahu, he says that you know Iran could be nuclear capable within a few years.
Compare that to what him and Trump are saying in public that this could be weeks or months away.
So privately, Nanya was admitting that Iran, if even if it wanted nuclear weapons, was a few years away.
Uh the transcript also showed that drawing the U.S. in was uh an essential part of this from the start.
Uh and that they need they recognize that only the U.S. had the capability to destroy the Fordo plant, which was the paramount goal here.
And they talked about destroying even more civilian infrastructure inside Iran than they already did, but they decided to hold back on that because they worried that if they destroyed too much civilian infrastructure, that that might deter the U.S. from entering the war along with them.
But they said we'll we'll save that plan for a a later date.
So Israel still intends to bomb Iran and still intends to bomb Iran's civilian infrastructure.
Have you seen the um statements on X in the past two hours that 250 members of Congress are in Israel as we speak?
And do you know if that is possibly true?
I know that Marco Rubio is there.
I haven't seen the number by 250, but I wouldn't be surprised at this point.
Uh Israel has a bipartisan coalition in Congress.
It's a uniparty essentially when it comes to Israel.
There's some dissent in the Democratic Party now.
There's it's growing a little bit.
And of course, Marjorie Taylor Green and Thomas Massey are rare exceptions on the Republican side.
But I I know that Marco Rubio is there.
I know that Marco Rubio went to um a tunnel in Jerusalem built under uh the Al-Aqsa Mosque, a holy site for Islam, which Israel is basically saying we're never gonna give up.
We're gonna control forever, and we're gonna continue desecrating, uh desecrating as an insult to Muslims uh worldwide.
What do you expect will be the uh geopolitical uh backlash from the attack on Doha, other than the words of condemnation that came out in the past 48 hours from Arab leaders?
I think there will be no geopolitical backlash, and I think it stops at those words of condemnation, which are just meaningless.
Look, all these uh Gulf states are in a tough position.
They rely on the U.S. to basically keep them in power.
Uh and in return, the U.S. gets access uh to their vast oil wealth.
And but as a result of this, they're all complacent and they don't do anything to stand up to Israel.
Some of these states have been involved in facilitating arms transfers to Israel while publicly condemning it.
And uh that's what happens when you make yourself an appendage of the U.S. I mean, there's a massive U.S. military base in Qatar, the the biggest U.S. military facility in in the Middle East.
So they're not going to do anything.
Look, they've tried to resolve the Palestine issue diplomatically before.
For more than two decades, there's been a peace offer on the table to Israel called the Arab League Peace Plan or the Saudi Peace Plan, which said all of us will normalize with you uh with Israel if you simply end the occupation of the West Bank Gaza and allow for a Palestinian state in the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Gaza.
Just 22% of the land that Israel stole from the Palestinians.
Israel refused to even discuss that.
So these states have tried to resolve this diplomatically, but that's as far as they'll go.
They're not in any position anymore to do anything else.
Does Netanyahu control Trump or does Trump control Netanyahu or Or is that not an answer that not a question that can be answered in a straightforward way?
I think Trump is beholden to his pro-Israel donors.
Mary Madelson, whose top issue is Israel, gave him a lot of money.
And he's bragged about doing favors for her, like you know, giving uh her uh the gesture of moving the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem or recognizing Israel's theft of the Syrian Golan Heights.
Things like that.
According to Scott Ritter naming uh Marco Rubio Secretary of State, but she wanted him to be Trump's vice president.
Again, this is according to Ritter.
I haven't seen this anywhere else.
Yeah, well, that makes sense.
That makes sense.
So look, I don't if Trump wanted to, he could tell Netanyahu to stop the genocide, and I think Nanya would have to comply.
I don't think Netanyahu uh controls Trump.
I but I think Trump is letting himself be controlled by people like Mary Middleso and doing their bidding because they give him a lot of money and he identifies with them.
Jared Kushner, his son-in-law, is a uh committed pro-Israel fanatic.
So this is just who Trump is surrounded by, and this is who he listens to?
Well, he's he's surrounded by other committed Zionists, Mike Huckabee, Pete uh Heg Seth, Marco Rubio, himself, Rubio, uh quintessentially.
I don't know where Tulsi Gabbard is.
She was not a Zionist when she was in the Congress.
She may very well be one now, or maybe she gives them uh lip service.
Can you bring us up to speed on the current disputes about which you have been writing uh over the numbers of dead, injured, missing, displaced in Gaza?
The UN uh commission of inquiry for Palestine just came out with a new report saying that Israel's committing genocide.
And given now that this is just such a broad consensus of experts.
I mean, even the New York Times now has to print uh voices calling this a genocide because it's just so overwhelming.
Um given that this is a genocide, the official toll from the health ministry in Gaza is just it's just it's it's a vast undercount.
How can you possibly keep an accurate toll when all the infrastructure has been destroyed, when people are still buried under the rubble, and Israel is dropping the most powerful bombs on a defenseless death camp where people are trapped.
So we know that the toll, the official toll from the Gaza Health Ministry is a which is so often derided in the corporate media as the Hamas run health ministry.
We we know that the official toll is way too low.
As to what it actually is, there's all sorts of estimates, and I can't commit to a number, but all I know is um that I think this is in the hundreds of thousands at least.
And um the irony of uh uh of constantly trying to impugn the credibility of the Gaza of the Hamas run health ministry, quote unquote, when really the only criticism you can make of it is that its numbers are way too low.
Wow.
Uh Chris informs me that the um event uh where I asked you about with 250 members of Congress.
It's not 250 members of Congress, it's 250 members of state legislatures.
Uh-huh.
And the group is called the 50 states one Israel.
The conference is a gathering of state legislatures from all 50 U.S. states, together with members of the Israeli government.
It is hosted by Israel's foreign ministry with travel costs, accommodations, transportation, meals, etc.
paid by the Israeli government.
The timeline is September 14.
That was Sunday to September 18, which is Thursday of this week.
So this is probably more subtle bribery to get state legislatures to enact legislation uh to punish contractors who do business with the state that have expressed uh views critical of the Netanyahu regime.
Exactly, exactly.
I need to pass this off as this it's not significant, but it's so passe today, even though these are profound and direct assaults on the freedom of speech.
Marco Rubio announced this morning he may deport people here on visas who celebrate the death of Charlie Kirk.
Well, celebrating the death of Charlie Kirk is truly reprehensible.
He was murdered, slaughtered uh uh in public, but punishing people because of their speech.
Don't you read the constitution?
You took an oath to preserve, protect, and defend, Mr. Secretary.
He's taken that oath many times in Congress and to become Secretary of State.
It's almost like the Constitution's meaningless today.
Trump announced that they blew up a third speed boat today.
In Venezuela, yeah.
You know, on the free speech issue, the attorney general Pam Bondi just said that there's a distinction between free speech and hate speech, and we're not going to tolerate hate speech in the aftermath of Charlie Kirk's assassination.
This is the attorney general.
Um Charlie Kirk himself once pointed out that hate hate speech does not exist legally.
It's protected speech.
Yeah.
So he so even Charlie Kirk argued against what Pam Bondy is now claiming uh she will do in the aftermath of his assassination.
This isn't an administration that is uh I can't think of an administration that has been more hypocritical on on one issue as they have been on free speech.
They accurately pointed out that the Biden administration did crack down on free speech around issues of COVID, around you know, smearing people as Russian disinformation purveyors because they contradicted Ukraine proxyware propaganda.
But whatever Biden did, it pales in comparison to the Trump team, criminalizing criticism of Israel.
And now in the aftermath of the assassination of Charlie Kirk, saying they're not going to tolerate what they deem to be hate speech.
I mean, this is a radical administration opposed to the free speech principles they claim to uphold.
Here's uh the attorney general of the United States showing that she flunked constitutional law.
There's free speech and then there's hate speech.
And there is no place, especially now, especially after what happened to Charlie in our society.
All right.
It's a very simple statement.
You can say it was a political statement.
You can say it was a moral statement.
But she is the chief federal law enforcement officer of the land.
She must know of a slew of Supreme Court opinions that stand for the proposition that hate speech is protected.
I gotta get your take on this, even though usually dressed well on Israel.
You've also done a lot of work on uh Ukraine.
Oh, this will give you heartburn.
Um, so I'm playing it for you, in spite of the fact that I'm such a fan of yours, not to give you heartburn, but to see what your reaction will be.
Here's General Kellogg at his worst, and this is just three days ago.
Chris number nine.
If he was winning, he'd be in Kyiv.
If he's winning, he'd be west of the Dnieper River.
If he's winning, he'd be on Odessa.
If he's winning, it would have changed their government.
Russia is in fact losing this war.
Now, they may make movements and see, well, they're advancing uh in the Donbass region in the desk.
But if you consider advancing, moving by meters, not miles, well then okay, that's successful.
But if the cost they're having, it's enormous.
And I don't think people truly appreciate it.
It's a number.
But the numbers they have lost, when you're talking dead and wounded, well over a million, they left Afghanistan after losing 18,000.
We left Vietnam after losing 65,000.
They have lost over a million dead or wounded.
These numbers are world war two level numbers when you have when you think about it.
They're they're stunning in the loss.
And this is in and their first line units that they came and tried to take Kyiv with a little over four four years ago.
Those first line units are gone.
So they've gone through a second or third or fourth iteration of wartime commanders.
They're pulling tanks out of mothballs out of museums put on the battle line.
They can't operate in large movements because the Ukrainians will kill them.
Is there any truth to this?
The Russians are pulling tanks out of mothballs and museums, and this is the guy who gets to whisper into Trump's ear.
The one kernel of possible truth in there is that uh, you know, Russia wanted to overthrow the Zelensky government.
I do think it's quite plausible that that was their goal in the initial days, and they were overconfident.
They thought that just by sending in troops and putting a little bit of pressure on that Zelensky would fall, which didn't happen.
I think that's quite plausible.
Everything else to me reads like total fiction, including the death toll, which I've I've no way of knowing what it is, but a million dead Russians strikes me as obscenely high.
And even the notion that Russia tried to take Kiev, if you go back to the early days of the invasion, they advanced toward Kyiv.
Was there a concerted effort to capture Kyiv?
Well, not really, because there was no major bombings uh of of essential infrastructure around Kyiv.
So this idea that they tried to take it, I don't think is true.
What they tried to do, I think, was intimidate Zelensky, intimidate into uh basically resigning and falling, but they also tried to intimidate Zelensky into entering peace talks, which he had refused to do right before the invasion when he declared he wouldn't even speak to the leaders of the Donboss, the breakaway republics that the Ukrainian government had been fighting ever since the U.S. backed Made on coup in 2014.
So what Kellogg is doing here is just a lot of spin.
And to put a uh maybe a positive uh uh spin on Kellogg's comments, perhaps he's preparing Ukraine for a declaration of of surrender by saying, well, look, we've already won because we've uh prevented Russia from taking over the entire country.
Blinski said certain things too recently.
Zelensky used to say that you know, we're gonna expel every single Russian troop from our territory.
Now he's saying we've already won because you because Russia didn't take over all of Ukraine.
I don't think Russia ever wanted to take over all of Ukraine.
If they wanted to do that, they would have to send in way more troops than they actually did.
Uh that doesn't mean that they weren't overconfident that I think Putin maybe did not expect the resistance that he faced.
But the spin from Kellogg is really overblown.
I want to go back to hate speech for a minute because I'm astounded at what Pam Bondy said.
I'm going to play a clip from an African-American uh minister in the South.
Uh not a fan of Charlie Kirk at all.
And you and I will speculate as to whether, in the opinion of the attorney general of the United States, this constitutes hate speech.
This is Pastor Howard John Wesley, cut number 10.
Charlie Kirk did not deserve to be murdered.
But I'm overwhelmed to see the nation's flag.
Fly at half staff for a man who was a proud racist and spent his entire life sowing seas of division and hatred into this land.
Your death does not make you a hero.
It does not make you one who should be honored.
It does not make you one who should be respected.
I can be sorry about your death, but not celebrate your life.
That's absolutely protected speech by any standard, any judgment.
Yeah, and I and I actually agree with what he said.
I mean, uh, of course, Charlie Kirk did not deserve to be uh attacked, to be assassinated.
Of course, like that goes without saying, but that doesn't mean we have to venerate him as sort of sort of champion, as some people want to do, uh, whitewash his legacy.
He did say a lot of things that I find very distasteful.
And the reason why he's being honored as sort of like a as a, you know, I think Trump is going to give him the presidential medium the presidential medal of freedom.
The reason why is because he was a Trump accolade.
He was a part of Trump's movement.
And Trump has every right to mourn his friend, but to celebrate him as like a state hero, I just because he supported Trump's movement, is it it strikes me as ridiculous and an abuse of power.
But look, the one thing I want to say here, it's so unfortunate how how polarized this country is.
And Trump certainly plays into that.
He's a very divisive figure, and he offers no grace towards his political opponents.
But I would like to see on the democratic side still is some acknowledgement of where they've been excessive as well.
And I'm not trying to equate the two because Trump's rhetoric, I think, is very uh extreme and it's it's harsh, and he's, you know, and he has gone after very marginalized people in a dangerous way.
But what did Democrats do?
They framed Trump and his team as Russian assets, and there's still been no contrition over that whatsoever, no accountability.
There's still this belief that that was okay to do that.
And they also went after him and his team via really excessive lawfare campaigns that were not rooted in in fact and trying to get him off the ballot, which was an attack not only on him and and his movement.
So I'm not equating the two sides, but until someone can take some responsibility for their own actions and acknowledge that the other side has some legitimate grievances, then we're just gonna keep going down this path of increased polarization.
And for all the criticism we can make of Trump and his movement and all their hypocrisies, there needs to be on the Democratic side some awareness of what they've done to fuel polarization.
And to me, still it's I I agree with you, but if Ronald Reagan were president when Kirk was assassinated, he would have wrapped his arms around the country and tried to unite people with his soaring rhetoric instead of blaming the hard left and dispatching his secretary, his press secretary and FBI director saying we're going after left-wing organizations that were behind this.
Behind this?
This is a crazy Deranged human being messed up sexually and in so many different ways who pulled this off and they want to blame a political idea who came from a conservative Republican Mormon family and they want to blame an ideology.
Yeah, and who else did that was Benjamin Netanyahu.
He said before any details about the shooter were known, he said that Charlie Kirk was killed by a coalition of progressives and Islamists or something like that.
So he exploited this too to serve his own agenda because you know he just wants everyone to get behind uh his genocidal campaign and thinking that he's on some quest to save civilization as he openly talks about.
So yeah, of course the Trump team is exploiting it, and of course, there's no excusing that.
And of course, what they're doing is very, very dangerous.
I just think too, you know, we're everyone has some responsibility for everyone has the most responsibility for their own actions.
And I think, again, not to excuse anything Trump has done, but if liberals were to express some acknowledgement that they've also been excessive in their own way ever since Trump came to power, that could do something to sort of reducing the polarization in this country.
Because otherwise it's it's heading to a very scary territory.
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