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Sept. 23, 2024 - Ron Paul Liberty Report
30:21
Israel Bombards Lebanon As Full-Scale War Looms

Just weeks before the US election, Israel has massively escalated its attacks on southern Lebanon, killing nearly 300 (including many civilians) in just one day. Lebanon's Hezbollah militia is firing back as Israel warns of an imminent ground invasion. Will "wartime" Vice President Harris gain in the polls? Also today...Republicans cave yet again on the latest budget "deal."

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Escalation In Lebanon 00:14:16
Hello, everybody, and thank you for tuning in to the Liberty Report.
With us today, we have Daniel McAdams, our co-host.
Daniel, good to see you this morning.
Good morning, Dr. Paul.
How are you this morning?
I'm doing well, and it looks like we recovered our brief trip to talk to a few friends on Constitution Day or celebration up in the mountains.
That was different than the coast of Texas here.
A lot of good folks up there.
I met a few that watch our show, too.
Yeah, that's right.
How did all of them out there?
I love meeting all of you.
It was a great time.
Okay, and then today, though, we're going to go back to our usual battle.
You know, it seems like if you want to describe how we spend our energy, we've been working, what, maybe 20 years, I can't tell.
But a lot of years.
It's always been, can we stop the next war?
And so far, we haven't ever done it.
But we keep plugging away because eventually, you know, this morning I was thinking of the size of this, the size of the dollar problem, and the globalist notions and the failure of the system, that this is a mess.
And I don't think anybody can prevent it.
But we better try to prepare people to look for friends and look for truth and look for preparation and look for the rebuilding of the Republic.
Because if it's just left to flounder and the people just up for grabs and everybody's on their own, it's going to be some rough time for some people.
Maybe not the people currently living, but maybe the generation.
You know, I always keep saying, oh, the next generation, people would say the next generation has to pay for all this.
And I said, no, we're already paying for it.
But what happens if all the bills come due?
So that's what we try to do is prevent that.
And right now, there's an escalation.
There hasn't been a de-escalation.
And we want to talk about what's going on in the Middle East.
We've been there a long time.
And the United Nations has been there a long time.
NATO's been all over the place.
And the American people have been very supportive.
There's been very little complaint about how much money is being spent overseas, so it's helping to bankrupt our country.
And right now, though, our proxy war in the Middle East, because we pay, I think if we never had put a nickel into the Middle East, there would be a much greater chance for peace in that world.
So people say, well, that's blasphemy.
You can't say that.
You're unpatriotic.
You don't care about supporting the troops and supporting our obligation to bring peace in the world and spread democracy.
But right now, democracy isn't spreading into Lebanon.
And, you know, it just seems like old times.
You know, I guess it's 20-some years ago.
No, it's more than that.
It was in the early 80s.
That's 40 years ago.
We were putting troops in there and it ended badly.
And here we are doing it once again, sending troops in.
And that isn't the only way to look at this.
I think, Daniel, it has to be looked at at the proxy war.
The proxy war is probably the most important because there is a cost.
It causes more trouble, more resentment, more hatred toward us by just using somebody else and pretending that we can make some money on this deal and we don't have to send our kids over there to be shot at.
And yet right now, it looks like it's more likely that our young people will be engaged because It's inevitable because if the proxy war seems to be failing, then you can't lose this war.
You can't use this war.
I wish that attitude would change because that was the reason we had to go to Vietnam.
We can't, our image cannot afford the fact that we would lose a war.
Well, we lost the war.
Things became better in that area.
So it is there, but well, what do we have?
The news today that Israel now is very serious about attacking Lebanon.
Of course, their answer is it's all defensive.
And that's a long story to debate because right now it's accelerating.
And so much of it is due to the fact that we have subsidized sometimes both sides of these wars.
At least we're always there to pick up the pieces and see how we can expand our empire.
Yeah, it's a big day this morning.
I was getting up and getting started, and I got a text from Eric Garris, our friend at antiwar.com, and he said, Are you watching Lebanon right now?
And immediately I thought, oh, here we go, another war.
And I said, what's going on?
He said, massive bombardment.
I said, oh, great.
Dot, dot, dot.
But put up that first clip.
That is what's happening.
And I would say it's hardly a surprise because Israel said last week, we are going into Lebanon.
We're going to open a new front.
They sent apparently a bunch of their quote elite troops up to the northern part of the country toward the border with Lebanon.
Whatever council they have, they passed a war plan.
So they basically announced we are going to go into Lebanon.
And as we see this morning, they have started to do that.
Now, they haven't engaged with troops yet, but Zero Hedge conveniently gives us a good summary.
Thousands of Lebanese flee war zone with Israel as death toll surpasses 180 in a single day.
I think it's now closer to 300 with over a thousand wounded.
And they've flown, at least from the last I saw, more than 300 sorties with planes over southern Lebanon.
Now, what they want to do is they want, and we talked about this last week, they want to be able to move the Israelis back up to northern Israel that have been threatened by Lebanon's rockets coming back down in response to Israel's rockets going in there because it costs them a lot of money.
But it is a mass escalation.
Let's go to the next one from the Hedge article.
Israel appears to be encouraging the depopulation of southern Lebanon so that it can expand the war.
Many thousands have reportedly fled as panic sets in.
Israeli Army spokesman Daniel Hagari announced Monday, that's today, to all the residents of villages in Lebanon, soon we will attack terrorist targets in Lebanon and call on everyone who is near their properties or inside houses where Hezbollah is hiding ammunition to stay away from them immediately.
To this, I would say, Dr. Paul, we've seen this movie before.
Everything Israel bombed in Gaza was Hamas, whether it was a hospital, a church, what have you.
And we're seeing the same thing now.
Everything that Israel bombs in Lebanon is Hezbollah, regardless.
And we're seeing a lot of propaganda that there's munitions under every residential building.
So when they hit it, it's hit.
And I would say it's war, so I'm sure there's propaganda on both sides of the war.
But we do know that it's getting very, very deadly.
And there's really a question as to how far this will go.
And now, they're announcing they will be hitting the civilian areas.
And if you looked at statistics, the statistics shows that the casualties are much greater among the citizens of a country like that when they get bombed.
Even though they race from one place to another to try to be protected in Adiyanaz, but here is we're coming in and there's going to be higher force.
And I think The thing that has scared me the most about this expansion, this is terrible and it's going to continue, but it's what the foreign minister of Iran said.
He called it, this is a dangerous consequence.
And these are short, subtle words, but we have our people who fight our proxy wars.
But it is true when they charge around for the other people being proxy, at least they're allies and they help them and they have common interests, but they are in charge, and that's a different story.
And it almost seems like our policies are there to aggravate it and bring it on.
Some people want to bring on a statement this weekend.
You wouldn't be surprised about this.
But Lindsey Graham was sort of, you know, sentimental in a way.
Boy, what we need to do is get Iran.
They're the ones that are running this thing.
We've got to destroy Iran, which is really scary.
We would say to Lindsay, who's this we, Lindsay?
Because it ain't going to be you, that's for sure.
But, you know, you made a good point in what you just said because we saw this in Gaza.
The Israelis said, okay, everyone go north.
Everyone went north and they shot him and blew him up.
Okay, everyone go south now.
And they did the same thing.
I'm laughing, but it's not funny.
Now you go east.
Now you go wherever they went to hide from the bombs, the bombs came.
And so I can see that now being pretty terrifying.
Now, now, one of the ways they're justifying it, now this is from anti-war yesterday, I think it is, if you put the next one on.
So Israel's line is that Lebanon isn't really a state.
So therefore, we're not attacking a foreign country.
If you put that next one up, Israeli diaspora minister says Lebanon isn't a state.
He advocates taking the South.
So they've talked about this now.
They want to take a massive chunk of Lebanon, which remember, that's what they did with Syria.
They took the Golan Heights for themselves.
So it looks like now they want to take a big chunk of Lebanon for themselves, and they call it a buffer zone.
But tensions between Israel and Hezbollah are escalating substantially, with scores of people killed in Lebanon in the past week.
Israel's far-right government is stepping up the rhetoric.
The diaspora minister is the latest voicing pro-war rhetoric, declaring overnight in commentsonnex.com that Lebanon does not, in his opinion, fit the definition of a state.
And that gives Israel every right to invade and seize southern Lebanon.
So this is also very much a land grab, which is what we know Gaza is about as well.
They want all the Palestinians out so they have more beachfront territory.
It's very clear.
Israeli ministers are very open.
They're not shy at all about talking about it.
You know, it's a very open thing.
And so that's also what we're looking at in Lebanon.
You know, in the last year or so, the anti-Israeli, anti-Semis has expanded.
And I think when we get involved there in this type of operation and Israel does this, even you can see there could be, there's justifications on both sides and there's no period on either side.
But if the one thing that happens is I think when you read, most people of the world read and understand a lot of what we're saying, and it annoys them.
And although the people who live there and the fight that has been going on in the Middle East since 1948, which was rigged, they are saying that more and more people now, I mean, this whole idea that they were able to stir up those anti-Israel people into college campuses, I mean, that's much further along.
I knew that existed, but it is big.
And I think when they, well, this is just going to stir them up more.
This will be an incentive.
This is a sentiment that they're going to see and feel and express themselves.
And they'll just say, see, see what we told you.
And yet, sorting it out now, the longer it goes on and the more the people die, the more difficult it is to try to work on a peace.
And when there was offers in the various places, it was too often that we might pay lip service to it, but not do much because we could stop it by, well, we're coming home.
You let you fight it yourself.
But we're sick and tired of all this fighting and killing.
But there will be a lot of support in this country split.
Oh, no, that is terrible.
You cannot do that.
You have to do whatever Israel needs.
And they will insist on that.
But right now, I think that the policy that's going on with Lebanon just increases the anti-Semitic feelings for that.
But it doesn't change who's the most guilty.
But this is apparent, and it's a lot of arrogance, a lot of things, like you point out, land is taken.
And that's been, that's, you know, I bet it's been more land as the incentive.
People who lose their homes, they've had them for hundreds of years.
They've been in, you know, certain families.
And that is still existing.
And people aren't going to forget that very easily.
Yeah.
Well, I think you do have to recognize that opposition to the secular state of Israel's foreign policies and defense military policies is not anti-Semitism, you know, because many people in these protest movements, they're being led by Jewish people.
We know a lot of progressive Jewish people who are very much opposed to the policies of Israel.
So just because you don't like, say, 40,000 Palestinians getting slaughtered in Gaza doesn't mean you hate Jews.
You know, that would be a terrible thing in our view.
But they do want to conflate those two.
But I would say to friends of Israel, you're not doing them any favors by egging them on.
If you want them to survive and thrive, they're in the middle of a neighborhood where people don't like them.
And hitting the hornet's nest is not the best way.
Their economy is in shambles now.
There's no tourism.
People aren't at work.
The soldiers are not in their jobs where they're supposed to be because they have a conscription army.
They're not where they're supposed to be in the economy.
So they are in bad shape.
Now, they can kill a lot of people.
They can do a lot of damage, which is what they're doing.
But at the end of the day, they probably will be weaker because, as you would point out easily, there's a limit to what we can give.
We've given everything to Ukraine.
We can't even give them a BB gun practically.
Defending Israel: Proxy War Risks 00:05:24
But nevertheless, we are involved.
And here's the outside of it.
And this is the part that I, oh, go ahead, I want to make one more point following up on yours, because all Jews aren't alike, you know, in different factions.
Well, Christians or anything.
But what was reassuring to me that there was an individual approach to it, and there has been a lot.
They don't get much of a voice in Israel.
But what about during our campaigns?
Some people, they never mention that in the media.
There's a Jewish element that strongly supports this position.
And they were the ones that were pro-peace, and talking to people and trying to get along with people.
But unfortunately, that argument isn't very precise today.
Yeah, it's a real time.
But the thing that does concern us the most, obviously we don't like bombs, people dying on either side.
But what concerns us the most as Americans is, if you put on this next clip, is the fact that, surprise, surprise, the U.S. is directly involved.
Now, this is from Lord Bebo on Twitter X, and this is the flight of a Navy intelligence collection, EP3E.
The U.S. is actively supporting Israel in their operation against Lebanon.
So we are providing intelligence and targeting to Israel as it bombs Lebanon.
And in fact, just as before we started this program, Dr. Paul, the bombing now expanded beyond southern Lebanon.
If you go to the next one, the Israelis hit a high-rise residential building in the city of Beirut, which is pretty much a big deal now if they're going to be hitting Beirut proper.
You know, we talk about proxies.
When you see our airplanes there, we might not be able to use proxy.
We'll be, you know, part of the part of the war, definitely.
But we've used special forces and CIAs and coups and all kinds of things.
And one of the goals that our government's been involved in, and people have always been proud of it, because initially it started to spread a message of freedom.
But now that isn't, is to spread the power of our empire.
And, you know, one thing is disgusting, and because it's commonplace for what we do, is when we were behind the scenes involved in Syria, we ended up with a good honket here, Syria.
And lo and behold, it was just coincidental.
It was where the oil well were.
So that is not missed, believe me.
It's not missed by the Iranians or anybody else on the hypocrisy of our foreign policy.
Well, we haven't heard much of the administration yet, or maybe I just didn't see it.
But there have been some statements reported from the Defense Department.
Now, I'll put the next one up.
This is a statement attributed to, if we can put that next one up, attributed to the press secretary of the Pentagon, Major General Pat Ryber, Ryder, who said the Secretary expressed his support for Israel's right to defend itself.
As Hezbollah extends its attacks deeper into Israel, he stressed the importance of finding a path to diplomatic solution, et cetera, et cetera.
So it's kind of a one-trick pony.
No matter what Israel does, it's always defending itself.
It attacks a neighboring country, defending itself.
You know, bombs a bunch of kids, defending itself.
So there's that.
Now, the next one, I did not have the chance to verify.
I will warn our viewers, but I believe it's probably accurate.
If you can put that next one on, this is what concerns us much more than that, even, Dr. Paul, because this poster says, breaking from the U.S. Pentagon, we continue to consult with Israel and others in the region to avoid the outbreak of a wider regional conflict.
The potential of wider regional conflict in light of the tensions and escalation between Israel and Hezbollah, we are sending, I highlighted this part, we are sending a small number of troops into the Middle East in light of the current tensions.
We'll continue to provide security assistance to Israel.
So that question is, how many troops?
Where are they going?
What's their mission?
Has Congress been consulted in any way, shape, or form on this?
I think the answer to that question probably is no.
Yeah, this is sort of morphing into the acceptance.
You hear these stories now, even though we knew this was true, so we use this a little softer tone, a proxy war.
We'll use somebody else and they will fight our battles for it.
But now they're starting to recognize that we are involved, and that's when people should be more cautious.
But it's still easy to say, well, that's 6,000 miles away, and our government, we have a lot of officials that know and understand the region, and we have to sort of put a little trust in our government.
But I think that attitude is fading away because more and more people now don't trust everything the government tells us, whether it's on economics or whether it's on foreign policy.
Yeah.
Well, just closing this topic out, we also have to remember that we are very close to a presidential election.
And I don't know exactly what it means.
It's a very close election if you look at the polls.
So will wartime Kamala take her over the top or will Trump sort of embrace the peace perspective on Israel?
Loss of Trust in Government 00:06:48
You know, he's been very, very hawkish.
So I think that's just a factor we should keep in mind.
Right.
But we do want to move on now, just quickly to talk about the budget.
If you go to the next one, this is from Hedge as well.
There's also a piece in Politico we're going to talk about.
But Hedge is a little more spicy, so we use Hedge.
Johnson shrinks again as Congress reaches a shutdown deal without the Proof of Citizenship Save Act.
Now, it's easy to beat up on Mike Johnson, the Speaker of the House, Dr. Paul, but it's also hard to ignore his record of backing down.
Yeah, it would be a dilemma because if he's there to make the government work, see, the opposition is point out that the government doesn't work and you shouldn't work, and you have to change the fundamentals.
You just can't say we're going to have a compromise.
Yeah, yeah, Chuck Schumer, he's going to compromise real well.
And then you have people on the Republican side of the aisle.
And it's not going to work.
And when I heard 90 Days, I said to, you know, I said, guess when they're going to finish?
Oh, they're going to finish on December 12th.
I said, they want to be home for Christmas.
That's right.
That's right.
Those three or four weeks off.
They want to be home for Christmas to worship the principles of peace.
That's right.
Peace and love.
That's right.
But a big deal is the SAVE Act, you know, because to us, now it's presented by Politico, and I have a link later I'll show you.
But they present it as a kind of a right-wing anti-immigration bill.
But as far as I understand it, it's simply saying if you want to vote, you have to show that you're an American citizen, which doesn't seem like that big of a deal.
It doesn't seem that controversial.
But Johnson dropped it like a hot potato.
Now, as you said, if he wants to keep things rolling, then maybe that's not the hill to die on.
Nevertheless, it does set up a pattern of acquiescing.
Yeah, the whole thing that we're having, this debate, is so bewildering.
I bet it doesn't exist many places in the world.
Can you imagine in Japan if they're going to have an election, that they could bus in people from Taiwan or someplace and then have them vote a certain way?
I mean, the whole thing is crazy.
But that to me is just, you know, the obsession with radical democracy.
And democracy, you know, the dictatorship of the majority is a very evil thing.
And therefore, you have to just fit yourself into the people who are expressing themselves.
But you have to be a mob.
You have to gang up.
You have to have 20 different groups coming together.
And usually they're all very dedicated to stealing money from somebody else and getting their benefits.
And they all agree.
You get that piece.
We're going to go ahead and we're going to get rid of these crazy people who want to spend less money in the government.
Yeah, we'll bend a little bit of common sense.
If we don't have enough money, we'll print it.
What's the matter with that?
The people will take it.
That'll be all right.
Well, what happens is what's happening right now, and people are waking up.
I just wish they'd wake up to the true nature of the fraudulent money that we have been dealt.
Now, here's something that jumped out at me as this is classic about how Washington works, right?
So we know there was one extremely obvious Secret Service failure on the first assassination of Trump.
And the second one, maybe not as bad of a failure.
But look at this next one.
This is so classic.
You're going to laugh, Dr. Paul, if you didn't notice it.
Go to the next one if you can.
So this stopgap bill includes an additional $231 million to help the Secret Service protect candidates.
This is exactly what happens in Washington.
If you fail at your job, you go to Congress and say, I need more money.
And Congress says, sure.
I mean, I wish that was true in all of our jobs.
I wish if our viewership went down, our money would go up, you know, but it doesn't work.
When I saw that, I said, the money, you have to have some money.
But just saying, it's just like the people who don't like inflation is we need more money.
So they want more money for it.
And I wrote down, well, no, what we need is a bit more honesty and wisdom, you know, and knowing what they're doing.
But it also points out to me that when we talk about the FBI and the CIA, which we do, and the Secret Service, we usually use the blanket term.
But in a way, it's legitimate because some of these things shouldn't exist.
The CIA shouldn't exist.
You can't say, well, that means you just should condemn the bad guys, which I try to do because there's some that are worse than ever, worse than the rest.
But, you know, if you have the Secret Service, and they probably wouldn't be ahead of the CIA that we get rid of, but there's always a few bad guys in there.
And they can, all you have to do is have well-located, you know, when we saw this recent attempted assassination, all you need is two or three people, you know, manipulating the people that they were on their side and manipulate them.
And when you think of how well they did that, you know, with Oswald and the plants that they make and put in there and helping the assassin.
So it's a bit of character building that we need as much as anything.
But when you have a system, it's sort of like saying, well, when we get into office and we're going to get rid of the Federal Reserve, we have a better idea.
We have a better idea how to print money and limit the printing of money.
So there's always somebody that thinks there's better management.
You should try, but that isn't it.
If the principle is basically wrong, foreign interventionism for military gain and empire building, you can't have just better managers.
You might have a day or two because when somebody has a strike of morality, they might back off on some insane things.
But it's something that, you know, character is a big thing.
You can't legislate that.
And that's why the founders warned us about it.
You're not going to have this republic when the morality of a nation fails.
Yeah, absolutely.
Well, I'm going to close out with just a little announcement.
If you go to that very last clip, and I will say that if you're not, pardon me, if you're not on our mailing list for RPI, you should be on it.
You can hit subscribe and you go to rawpolicy.org.
If you did that, you would know this already.
China's Dollar Threat 00:03:35
But if you could put that last clip up, the videos for our late August or early September conference in DC are now available on a playlist on Rumble.
If you go to Rumble and look at the Ron Paul Liberty Reports channel, you will see playlists, and here it is highlighted in green.
If you click that link, you will go right to the playlist of all 10 videos of our recent conference.
And I hope when you watch these, you'll think to yourself, gee, why didn't I go to that?
That would have been really interesting and fun.
And that you'll join us next time.
So I hope you enjoy these videos.
Drop some comments in the comments section and let us know what you think about them.
And we thank you for tuning in today.
Over to you, Dr. Good.
And I want to close by mentioning another funding episode in foreign policy to say that there might be a few people, you know, and cynically I will say they're worried that we're going to win.
There won't be enough reasons to fight wars.
And then the military-industrial complex is going to fail, and our job depends on it.
And the answer to that is, well, don't sweat it because it's going to be around.
So with all this going on, whether it's in Syria, Ukraine, or the Middle East or wherever, there's a bunch in Washington around this country that don't want us to forget about China.
China is the real enemy.
Matter of fact, there are some who truly believe that.
And just recently, and we constantly do, is see how close we can get to the Chinese border and aggravate and fly an international airspace, which is in miles, just looking for a problem to happen.
But just to keep the anti-China attitude going and the so-called friendship with Taiwan, this week we sent another $567 million in military aid.
That would go a long way to help some people here in this country, I imagine.
But this is to perpetuate this constant argument about keeping our eyes on the target, which is China.
We have to want China because they're the ones who are threatening us.
But usually they're threatening us because they have a lot of our dollars.
How'd they get them?
Well, we spent our money over there and American people choose to buy their goods and now they have their money and they're spending it and we're complaining about it.
So we want to put on controls.
It doesn't make any sense.
It all emanates from this whole silly notion that you can come out, you can produce peace and prosperity with a printing press.
It doesn't work except for a short period of time.
There are benefits, but eventually fewer people get very wealthy and more people get very poor.
And that's what we're facing.
And it's a consequence of a ridiculous monetary system.
So to look at all these problems, if we don't deal with the monstrosity of the dollar agenda, we can't solve the problem.
And sometimes I think this dollar might last a lot longer than we think because we're in a global economy and the rest of the world has no place to go and they're still using our dollars and hogging them up and how it's going to end.
I think it's just going to be a bigger bubble.
The longer it lasts, the bigger the bubble and the worse the crash and the bigger challenge we have in preserving peace and prosperity.
I want to thank everybody for tuning in today to the Liberty Report.
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