Judging Freedom - Judge Andrew Napolitano - Max Blumenthal : Israel Resumes Killing and Blocking Aid.

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Oct. 23, 2025 - Judging Freedom - Judge Andrew Napolitano

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Max Blumenthal : Israel Resumes Killing and Blocking Aid.

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	Hi, everyone.
	Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Adjudging Freedom.
	Today is Thursday, October 23rd, 2025.
	Max Blumenthal joins us now.
	Max, it's a pleasure.
	I have a lot I want to talk to you about.
	Marco Rubio and Sergei Lavrov, Marco Rubio and the Knesset and the West Bank, Marco Rubio, tired of him, and Venezuela, but let's start with Sergei Lavrov.
	Do we know who called off the meeting between Trump and Putin, if it was the Kremlin or if it was the White House?
	We know that it happened right after a phone call between Secretary Rubio and Foreign Minister Lavrov, in which apparently Rubio raised a dumb and stupid thing that he knows the Russians would address, the idea of a ceasefire before negotiations were to resume.
	I honestly haven't been following it closely enough to have any more sourcing than what we know what we have on the public record.
	And it just doesn't seem like Donald Trump is the same person that he was in Alaska.
	He's now authorizing strikes inside Russia.
	He called off the Tomahawks, but now, I mean, it's so erratic that it's hard to keep track of what Donald Trump is doing.
	But the obvious fact is that a ceasefire does not serve Russia well at this point, that Zelensky's strategy focused on a pause of like 60 days so he can rearm, and that they are sending people from hospital wards.
	This is being reported in Ukrainian media.
	They're actually sending sick, ailing men to the front line because they're so depleted.
	So whether or not Zelensky gets the tomahawks is irrelevant at this point.
	A ceasefire in which the lines are frozen around Kherson and Zaporozhye does not serve Russia well as they continue to advance.
	They're in the middle of Pokrovsk.
	I mean, am I right?
	They've taken Pokhrovsk, which is transportation hubs.
	You are right.
	Colonel McGregor confirmed that just an hour or so ago.
	Strategically, it would make sense.
	It would not make sense for Russia to accept the ceasefire terms, which are between Kiev and Washington, very similar.
	And I mean, Zelensky's visit to Washington was humiliating.
	No one met him on the red carpet.
	There really was no red carpet except the Ukrainian ambassador.
	He left empty-handed.
	But now, again, Trump has reversed course and isn't able to, you know, he's not able to offer any terms that Russia can accept or accept reality, the reality on the ground, which is that Ukraine is losing.
	Well, let's face it, the neocon arch Zionist who is the secretary, the American Secretary of State, does not want the war to end.
	That crowd believes that they can drain Russia and somehow impair or even impede Putin.
	There have been a lot of Russian deaths, that's for sure.
	And now they have ratcheted up sanctions.
	And the goal here is to prevent India from buying Russian oil.
	This has been a real source of Russian economic sustenance, which has allowed them to survive under the most ruthless draconian sanctions regime in history.
	And I don't think they'll be able to do it.
	They've tried sanctioning the Russian so-called ghost ships, the shadow fleet of Russia.
	That hasn't failed to stop it.
	India needs Russian oil to grow for a growing economy and population.
	But they continue to try.
	And this is being clearly driven by Rubio and his team, which is one of the most powerful ascendant forces in the Trump world right now.
	And Rubio's, I believe, is his chief of staff, Michael Needham, not very well known outside official beltway circles.
	He's one of the most powerful people in Washington right now, as Rubio runs more national security cabinet-level positions than Henry Kissinger or than anyone since Kissinger.
	Right, right, right.
	On the other hand, in the even a stopped clock is correct twice a day category, Rubio just yesterday chastised the Israeli and then correct me if I'm wrong, Max, because this came from Rubio.
	is chastise the Israeli Knesset for enacting legislation that imposes Israeli law on the West Bank, which is the legal equivalent of annexing it.
	Well, they don't want the United States, whether it's a Republican or Democratic administration.
	There are two things they don't want.
	They don't want Israel to establish borders or to grant a Palestinian state.
	They want to keep a peace process or some phony process going that leads towards a Palestinian state, but ultimately ends up nowhere.
	And at the same time, they do not want Israel to declare that the West Bank is part of quote-unquote Israel or Greater Israel, because it will mean officializing and formalizing Israel as an apartheid state.
	And Israel will be required under international law to provide for the population in the West Bank as it did before the establishment of the Palestinian Authority.
	And they had to provide for like their postal services, sanitation, those kinds of things.
	So the contradictions are being exploded by the incipient religious nationalist movement in Israel, which has key positions in Netanyahu's coalition.
	Bezel El Smotrik, who's openly called for a Jewish settlement in the Gaza Strip just a few days ago while holding a Torah scroll at a public event.
	And they would like to annex the West Bank, but this is something Netanyahu understands will lead to an international crisis.
	And so they want to continue to keep the West Bank in a gray zone as Israel de facto annexes what's known as Area C, which are the most arable areas with the most water and the lowest Palestinian population and the most land across the West Bank.
	And that's where much of the settler terror is taking place right now.
	How can the United States stop Israel from annexing the West Bank?
	They're not going to stop sending military supplies, are they?
	They're not going to be able to stop it.
	There will be pressure from the EU and obviously pressure from the UN.
	And the United States is playing this dual role of condemning the annexation of the West Bank while supporting every single action that Israel wants to take there, including the U.S. defunding the Palestinian Authority, which the U.S. has funded.
	And the Palestinian Authority is the last thing between a full-on insurgency in the West Bank and what is the current status quo, which is sort of a low-intensity Israeli war on the entire population and an insurgency in the northern West Bank.
	There's really no, I don't think there's any way the U.S. under Trump is going to obstruct what Israel aims to do, which is to consolidate its control in the West Bank without annexation.
	I mean, that's what the sort of the national security leadership in Israel wants.
	All right, speaking of the national security leadership, and we'll segue to Gaza because of this horrific statement that Ben Govir made, but has Ben Gavir actually given out automatic weapons to settlers in the West Bank with which to kill Palestinians whose homes they want to steal?
	Well, this happened in early 2024 when they deputized the most fanatical settlers in the West Bank.
	They got U.S. automatic, they got like U.S. M4s.
	Some of them may have gotten M16s.
	They were deputized and given Israeli army uniforms, and they proceeded to cause a wave of terror across the West Bank.
	So that's something that has already taken place.
	This is Ben Gavir's private army, the same way that ICE is Stephen Miller's private army in the U.S., but they have much more power and they're acting against what's considered a terrorist population.
	So this is nothing new.
	Here's Ben Gavir two or three days ago in front of an Israeli flag saying, why wait?
	Let's resume the war, Chris.
	Number 17.
	Right now, we have the opportunity, especially today, to stop everything and say for a moment the hostages, thank God, life has returned.
	That was the main argument for why we are not continuing the war.
	And now we need to return to fighting.
	We need to go back to war.
	We need to unleash the gates of hell upon them.
	Need to unleash the gates of hell upon them.
	Wasn't the whole ceasefire a scam?
	Well, every ceasefire with Israel is a scam.
	And right now, J.D. Vance, who's not playing any meaningful role in the Trump national security decision-making team, is in Israel or has been in Israel as the BB sitter to try to enforce the ceasefire.
	Great line, my friend.
	Yeah, I've used it over the years because there's always a BB sitter.
	Like Obama was the BB sitter in the mid-2010s, and now it's fallen to J.D. Vance, who clearly doesn't like Netanyahu and has no leverage to exert on him because the Trump administration won't suspend weapons to Israel.
	In fact, Netanyahu delivered an address in Hebrew.
	This is where he's candid and actually reveals the truth in Hebrew, in which he said that Donald Trump and Joe Biden before him gave him all the weapons we need to resume the war at a time of our choosing, and we will use new tactics.
	So it's not just Ben Gouvir saying that the ceasefire was a sham.
	It's Netanyahu.
	They have already conducted very violent, deadly attacks inside the Gaza Strip on what appears to be false pretenses.
	This was last Sunday.
	Israel claimed that Hamas team attacked Israeli soldiers in Rafah and killed like three of them.
	However, Rafah is completely destroyed.
	It's depopulated.
	It's behind the 53% line.
	It would be very, very difficult for an al-Qassam team to enter that area and attack.
	And a senior White House official told the American Conservative and other media publications that they all know in the White House that it was actually an old IED that the soldiers ran over.
	And Israel used this as a pretext to violate the ceasefire, kill scores of people in the Gaza Strip.
	The attacks have continued.
	There isn't sufficient aid coming into the Gaza Strip as according to the deal.
	And Israel has kept the Rafah crossing closed.
	Israel has violated every ceasefire since 1948.
	And they do so in order to keep the pressure on their perceived enemies, in order to consolidate the control over the land they've gained, in this case, 53% of the Gaza Strip, and to impose their ethno-supremacist regime on it.
	So there's no way that Donald Trump's signature peace initiative, for which he believes he deserves the Nobel Prize, will hold under the current circumstances in which the BB sitter is actually the enabler and won't take away the candy in the form of 2,000-pound bombs and spare parts for F-35s from the predator state.
	So where is this going to go?
	Hamas has no leverage now since it surrendered the hostages.
	From Hamas's view, October 7th was a military operation to repel and deter unlawful occupiers, and they've given up what they achieved.
	Here's the agenda as spelled out by Jared Kushner as being spelled out by Palestinian collaborators, you know, Palestinian Gusanos writing in places like the Washington Post and Wall Street Journal.
	Israel has control over 53% of the Gaza Strip.
	These areas are mostly depopulated.
	There are no Palestinians there.
	Most of it is destroyed.
	Israel's destroying homes in Khan Yunis right now.
	And Jared Kushner has said that these are the only areas where rebuilding will take place.
	So they're going to try to create model cities in these areas, which are controlled by collaborator Palestinian militias, basically Israeli and what could be U.S.-backed death squads, the same kind that we saw in Syria that were used against the government of Bashar al-Assad.
	And there are basically four main collaborators.
	The most powerful one is named Yasser Abu Shabaab in Rafah.
	And they're going to weaponize them against the main populated areas, which are against the coast of Gaza, which are still controlled by Hamas, where they will not allow rebuilding.
	They'll try to prevent aid from going in there.
	And they will try to start a Palestinian civil war.
	And I believe those collaborators will get eaten alive if they attempt a civil war.
	And the new leadership of Hamas will emerge from its so-called shadow brigade, which has been at the forefront of identifying collaborators, catching them, and publicly executing them to the general applause.
	of the population because it's these collaborators that have stolen the aid, sold it at high prices on the black market, and have been used by Israel to terrorize Palestinians from within.
	But what we're looking at is basically a play at a coup attempt, civil war, in which I think the collaborators will lose.
	And in the meantime, Israel will try to establish Israeli-controlled Palestinian areas like, and eventually it will lead to some kind of Palestinian authority Vichy in Gaza.
	That's all a fantasy.
	And the bloodshed will continue in the meantime.
	You used an interesting phrase, death squads.
	And it reminded me that Donald Trump and Marco Rubio have unleashed American death squads on speedboats in the Caribbean and are about to unleash, we think, a massive American death squad on Venezuela.
	Why is Rubio so hot on invading Venezuela and murdering people as to whom there's no public evidence of any criminality on the high seas?
	Well, we've been following the war on Venezuela for years at the gray zone.
	And this is a war that began, let's say in 2002 with a coup, a military coup that removed the elected president, Hugo Chavez.
	The people of Venezuela marched on Miraflore's palace and demanded his release.
	And Chavez entered, was returned to office, won several successive elections after nationalizing the national oil company and using its wealth to fund social programs.
	The war was officialized in 2015 when Obama announced a sanctions regime on Venezuela and again attacking its oil industry, which led to migrant waves to the U.S., mass poverty.
	We saw the attempt at a military coup in 2019 under the watch of Juan Guaido and his mentor, Leopoldo Lopez, who helped lead the 2002 coup.
	That completely failed.
	What the U.S. and Venezuelan opposition got out of it, though, was Venezuela's largest foreign asset, sitgo, which is like foreign wing of Pere Vesa.
	And they're just feasting on that carcass and making millions and millions of dollars.
	It's now under the control of Elliott Capital Management, which is the hedge fund, the venture capital firm, sorry, hedge fund run by Paul Singer, the vulture capitalist who has funded Marco Rubio's entire career.
	But up until this point, all of the coup attempts have failed.
	The Operation Gideon attempt by Jordan Goudreau, the U.S. mercenary who I recently interviewed, failed.
	And as Goudreau said, the reason it failed is that his contacts in the Trump administration had no ability to recruit high-level military figures to actually flip.
	And the one that they had actually recruited that Goudreau was training with in the jungle of Colombia, Clivera Acala, after the coup failed, the Trump administration put a bounty on his head, arrested him, and threw him in a federal prison.
	So the rest of the military looked at this and said, there's no way we're breaking with Maduro.
	So now, as the Wall Street Journal has announced, basically citing U.S. officials, Maduro is coup-proof.
	So the only other option is straight up military force.
	But they needed a pretext for the military force.
	And so that's why Marco Rubio worked to portray Venezuela and Maduro as a narco-terrorist regime.
	This is how he got Stephen Miller on his side as well.
	And now they've defined any boats that are in the periphery of Venezuela as narco-terrorist targets.
	The terrorism designation allows them to completely skirt Congress, international law, any rules of engagement are any rules of engagement go.
	And this itself is a pretext for strikes inside Venezuela, which could potentially be decapitation strikes targeting the Venezuelan leadership because they have been defined as the leaders of a cartel which does not actually exist, known as the Cartel of the Suns.
	This is the source of the $50 million bounty currently over the head of Nicolas Maduro.
	As we've explained at the gray zone, the Cartel of the Suns was created by the CIA in the early 90s before Hugo Chavez had even taken power.
	And all it was were a series of Venezuelan National Guard leaders or figures who wore a sun patch on their uniforms who were recruited by the CIA and DEA to preside over drug shipments into the United States.
	So the CIA was presiding over drug shipments, 20 tons of cocaine into the United States.
	The command was let the dope walk.
	And they wanted to provide the DEA with intelligence on who received the cocaine and who was dealing it in U.S. cities.
	And so they flooded U.S. cities with cocaine.
	The CIA did that.
	And then this cartel totally disappeared and was resurrected in order to provide a pretext for Marco Rubio's military assault on Venezuela and potential decapitation strikes because every other U.S. coup attempt, color revolution, violent riots, everything else has failed up until this point.
	And I'm hearing some rumors that there are U.S. planes currently in Venezuelan airspace.
	I'm talking to Venezuelan sources who believe something big could happen at any point.
	And we are now on the precipice of a very, very dangerous war, which could destabilize a country of 28 million and lead to another massive migration wave, as well as a civil war if this regime change war succeeds.
	In the meantime, the president of the United States has given new meaning to the phrase covert action by announcing that he executed a finding to authorize covert action by the CIA.
	This, of course, I mean, I condemn what the CIA is doing, but this puts targets on their backs.
	They no longer have any sort of official cover whatsoever.
	What are they going to do?
	They can't seem successfully to bribe Venezuelan military officers.
	How are they going to destabilize the country?
	They're probably going to get shot.
	Yeah, well, the only thing they have left is assassinations of leadership and false flag attacks, those sorts of things.
	If it's the CIA, and I'm not sure how much the CIA is currently involved.
	Is this Paul Singer Marco Rubio orchestrated assault on Venezuela connected to the killings in the Caribbean Sea and now in the Pacific on these speedboats?
	Completely.
	I mean, the killings on the speedboats are now beginning to kill Colombian citizens, citizens of Trinidad and Tobago, who appear to be fishermen.
	Their families are demanding evidence that they were involved in the drug trade.
	It's a broader war on the Caribbean, but it is targeting Venezuela.
	And what Marco Rubio needed to do, not just because of his patronage from Paul Singer, but for ideological reasons, because he represents the Gusano Industrial Complex of South Florida.
	And his obsession is with toppling the government of Cuba.
	He must first topple the government of Venezuela, which has sustained Cuba under a constantly tightening embargo and now a terrorism designation from the U.S., which really strangles its economy.
	The first card has to be Venezuela.
	Then they believe they can topple Cuba because Cuba will not be able to get oil exports.
	And then they're going to go for Nicaragua.
	And then they get the trifecta.
	And at the same time, the U.S. has continually worked to fragment the Caribbean basin, the nations of the Caribbean basin that form CARICOM.
	Regional integration of the Caribbean, of these states, means a very powerful, economically powerful, progressive bloc that has consistently opposed these U.S. regime change attempts.
	And one of the key allies for the U.S. in the region is actually the Trinidadian prime minister, Kamla Prasad Besesar, who supports Donald Trump and has doubled down on her support for these U.S. military strikes, even as they begin to kill her own citizens.
	So that's part of the overall U.S. plan to fragment the Caribbean in order to realize Marco Rubio's wet dream of destroying what they call the troika of tyranny, which is really the axis of resistance in the Western hemisphere.
	My column this morning in the Washington Times points out the legal significance of two survivors of these death squads.
	who now have a cause of action against the president and the federal government for attempted murder and for kidnapping.
	They don't have to physically be in the United States and the statute under which they would sue expressly permits lawsuits by people who are not Americans and not actually here.
	Yeah, this is under alien tort law, right?
	Right, right, right.
	So there was a case.
	The moral equivalent of an alien being tortured by the American government and somehow being freed and now wanting to sue for it.
	Instead of torturing him, they tried to kill him.
	And this has been a successful legal remedy for, for example, survivors of the genocide in Guatemala, which the CIA and the U.S. regime sponsored under Ephraim Rios Mont, who slaughtered tens of thousands of indigenous Guatemalans.
	And one of them, I think, actually took their case under alien tort to the Supreme Court and succeeded.
	So there is a pretext here.
	And I think there's another point to make.
	And I would love to promote your column if it's not behind a paywall.
	But there's another point to make, which is that there was a boat of Colombian, a Colombian fishing boat, which was displaying a distress signal in the Caribbean.
	It had floated into Venezuelan waters.
	And so the U.S. sent a drone or a helicopter and attacked it, blew it out of the water without any legal process.
	And several members of that crew survived.
	They were detained, at least one member, he was detained on a Navy boat and repatriated.
	Okay, if it's a narco-terrorist that you capture at sea, you're not going to repatriate him.
	You're going to extradite him, take him to the U.S. and do a whole show trial like they've done for Kilmar Obrego and all these other migrants.
	But they repatriated him and acknowledged tacitly that none of these people are terrorists.
	It's even worse.
	The person they repatriated to El Salvador, where the government is in cahoots with Trump, released the guy and said there's no evidence of any criminality whatsoever.
	Right.
	So let me get this straight.
	He's a narco-terrorist.
	We tried to kill him.
	We kidnapped him.
	We let him go because we didn't have any evidence.
	You need probable cause to arrest him.
	We didn't have the probable cause.
	We sent him home.
	They examined and let him go.
	Wow.
	You tell me that's not a cause of action.
	The column is in today's Washington Times and at judgenapp.com.
	It's not behind a paywall, but thank you for your offer.
	Of course, I accept it.
	Before I let you go, you have just completed a documentary on something that many people would think is an oxymoron, the Jewish people in Iran.
	Tell us about it.
	It's called Uncaptured, Iranian Jews in the Islamic Republic, and it's a full-length documentary, a collaboration I did with an acclaimed Iranian filmmaker, Maria Mavati, that's now online at the Gray Zone on our YouTube channel.
	It's free for everyone to see, and you can get a window into the lives and the very rich history of Iranian Jews.
	And it was a real privilege for me to be able to rap to feel in with them during Sunday prayers in Isfahan and to talk to their communal leadership about the rights that they enjoy as an officially protected minority under the Islamic Republic,
	rights they did not have before the Islamic Revolution, the struggles they face, their portrayal in the outside world, and their views on Zionism, which are extremely negative.
	I learned that in many of these synagogues, there were ceremonies and protests held against Israel's assault on the Gaza Strip.
	The community is officially anti-Zionist.
	And I think it's fascinating to hear where their perspective comes from.
	As one communal leader in Isfahan told me, his name is Bijan Khakshur.
	There is an authentic Judaism and a captive Judaism.
	Authentic Judaism is friendly, compassionate, and human-oriented and puts humanity first.
	And captive Judaism is Zionist and is centered on politics.
	And we represent an authentic Judaism.
	The Persian word is Asil, and the Persian word for captive is Asir, I believe.
	And so that's what inspired the name of this documentary.
	And I encourage everyone to watch it.
	I think it's sort of a myth-busting documentary about a very misperceived aspect of Iranian society that is completely distorted,
	not just by our media, but by Zionist propaganda in order to convince Jews around the world that there is no place for them but inside the Spartan hyper-militarized walls of the self-proclaimed Jewish state of Israel.
	And in fact, the second largest Jewish community in the region exists in near total safety inside Iran.
	Wow.
	Where can we see it again on the Grey Zone channel?
	Yeah, just go to our YouTube channel.
	I'm going to tweet it out on, put it out on TwitterX.
	But yeah, anyone can just, if you're watching this right now on YouTube, whenever Judge stops live streaming, just pop over to the Gray Zone.
	Max, thank you very much.
	Thanks for your great work.
	Thanks for your intellectual honesty.
	I know I say that over and over again, but it's profoundly true.
	And thank you also for accommodating my schedule today.
	My regards to Anya and your family, and I hope we see you again soon.
	Same to you, Judge.
	Thanks a lot.
	Thank you.
	All the best.

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