Ron Paul Liberty Report - Brian McGlinchey  - "How the US-Israel Relationship Weakens America and Harms the World."
Aired: 2026-05-02
Duration: 40:37


=== Brian McLinchy Introduces (03:31) ===

[00:00:10]  Now, I want to introduce our first speaker, Brian McLinchy.
[00:00:13]  Um, Brian is a good friend of ours.
[00:00:16]  Uh, he has, uh, just this past year, uh, in D.C., he was one of the lecturers for the Ron Paul Scholars Seminar, which is an event that we do for upper division undergrads and grad students.
[00:00:28]  This is part of our educational mission, which I, to me is, I think is the most important.
[00:00:32]  In fact, we have two former Ron Paul scholars here.
[00:00:36]  TJ, I see you.
[00:00:39]  Where I, I can't see very well.
[00:00:41]  There you go.
[00:00:41]  Okay, there you are.
[00:00:44]  So, we have, they've actually come back.
[00:00:46]  Two of them have come back as host committee members, so they're helping support this event.
[00:00:50]  So, Brian was a speaker at this event.
[00:00:53]  He is a great friend of ours, and I think you're going to really be interested in what he has to say.
[00:00:58]  Brian, the floor is yours.
[00:01:16]  I'm going to begin our examination of the U.S. Israel relationship by taking you to an unlikely location, thousands of miles from Tel Aviv or Washington.
[00:01:26]  We're also going to be traveling 36 years back in time.
[00:01:30]  On December 20th, 1989, the United States invaded the Republic of Panama to oust its leader, General Manuel Noriega, who had outlived his usefulness to the empire.
[00:01:44]  At that point, it was the largest U.S. military operation by far since the Vietnam War.
[00:01:50]  And it marked the beginning of this era of endless regime change wars that we find ourselves in now.
[00:01:57]  Before Operation Just Cause was over, 23 American service members lay dead and 325 wounded.
[00:02:05]  At the time, I was a brand new platoon leader in the Army's 5th Infantry Division at Fort Polk, Louisiana.
[00:02:12]  Two of my fellow 5th ID soldiers, members of a battalion that was on a rotation to Panama at the time, were killed as they engaged in the assault on the Commandancia.
[00:02:22]  Which was the headquarters of the Panamanian Defense Forces.
[00:02:27]  I was not part of the invasion, but soon after, my military police unit was deployed to Panama with a mission of conducting joint security operations with their reconstituted and demilitarized security forces.
[00:02:41]  One afternoon, several weeks into my deployment, I had an interesting conversation with one of our Panamanian officer counterparts, a major.
[00:02:52]  As we stood outside a police station near the Tucuman International Airport, He told me that he was at the Commandancia on the night of the invasion.
[00:03:03]  Knowing that had been the site of one of the bloodiest battles of the invasion, I could only shake my head and offer my appreciation that he must have endured quite an ordeal under assault from my fellow countrymen.
[00:03:16]  And then, without prompting, he said, We knew you were coming.
[00:03:22]  How? I asked.
[00:03:25]  The Israelis told us.
[00:03:30]  And that's how 36 years ago, under a hot Panamanian sun, my education about the true nature of the U.S. Israel relationship began.

=== The Cost of Aid (14:03) ===

[00:03:42]  This is a relationship without parallel in world history.
[00:03:46]  It's no exaggeration to say it's the strangest relationship between two countries this world has ever seen.
[00:03:52]  One in which the largest economic and military power the world has ever known subordinates itself to a tiny country that would otherwise be.
[00:04:01]  Almost entirely inconsequential.
[00:04:04]  Not only systematically redistributing its own wealth to this tiny, well off country, but unconditionally embracing that country's geopolitical agenda to its own detriment, and taking extreme actions on behalf of that country in a way that causes immense harms to our own interests, while also inflicting death, displacement, and despair on millions of innocents.
[00:04:30]  Now, U.S. support for Israel comes at a staggering, multifaceted price.
[00:04:35]  The steepest costs of this relationship are not measured in dollars, but we'll start with dollars, mindful that every one of them, as Daniel alluded to, is borrowed at interest.
[00:04:47]  When aid is discussed, you'll often hear people discuss a very specific figure $3.8 billion.
[00:04:53]  That's what the United States is committed to under the current 10 year memorandum of understanding that's negotiated with the Israelis.
[00:05:02]  But thanks to supplemental authorizations, total aid is frequently far above that floor.
[00:05:06]  For example, in the first year after the October 7th Hamas invasion of Israel, Congress threw on another $8.7 billion without thinking about it.
[00:05:17]  Israel's routinely the top annual aid recipient by far.
[00:05:22]  Going back to World War II, Israel isn't just the largest beneficiary, it's received almost double what the next country has received.
[00:05:30]  Let's put that in perspective Israel represents just 0.12% of the world's population.
[00:05:38]  But it's received something like 20 to 30 percent of total aid since World War II.
[00:05:44]  That's even crazier when you realize that Israel is among the world's richest countries.
[00:05:50]  In per capita GDP, Israel is 20th in the world, above the likes of Austria, Canada, Germany, the United Kingdom.
[00:05:59]  And yet, Israel typically receives more than double what America gives to all of sub Saharan Africa combined.
[00:06:09]  But even that's a wild understatement, because in addition to what the United States gives directly to Israel, we spend so much more on behalf of Israel.
[00:06:18]  Since World War II, the second largest recipient of aid is Egypt.
[00:06:23]  And for all intents and purposes, aid to Egypt is aid to Israel, owing to the commitments that were made during the Camp David Peace Accords.
[00:06:32]  In recent years, the third place country is Jordan.
[00:06:36]  You can throw them on the Israel tab as well.
[00:06:42]  Owing to a 1994 treaty of their own, we see the same dynamic.
[00:06:46]  What you see here is essentially the United States taxpayer, the United States citizens, renting the cooperation of the Egyptians and the Jordanians in cooperating with the state of Israel.
[00:06:59]  Further obscuring things, Uncle Sam often uses bureaucratic tricks to conceal the actual amount of aid that's flowing to Israel.
[00:07:08]  For example, just the first six months following October 7th, The Biden administration structured 100 separate arms deals so that each one would be beneath the level that triggers automatic reporting requirements to Congress.
[00:07:25]  There are other tricks, like dishing out weapons from the U.S. stockpiles that are positioned in Israel, supposedly for our use, but giving them to the Israelis.
[00:07:35]  Now, all American aid comes in the form of military aid, which means Israel rakes in more than half of the global total of our military aid in the world.
[00:07:45]  And get this, because Israel's share is so embarrassingly high, Israel supporters actually push for the United States to increase its military aid to other countries, not for Israel's security, but just for the pure cosmetic reason of not making Israel's share look so bad.
[00:08:03]  And here's a stark reality every single dollar of aid to Israel violates U.S. law.
[00:08:11]  The Glenn and Symington Amendments, passed in the 1970s, prohibit any form of aid.
[00:08:18]  To countries that have gone nuclear without signing the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty.
[00:08:23]  You know, that treaty that Iran is a member of.
[00:08:32]  Now, far and away, the biggest costs of this relationship come from a phenomenon that Donald Trump emphatically promised to get rid of regime change wars.
[00:08:42]  Fully adopting Israel's agenda, U.S. policy puts priority in assuring Israel has no powerful rivals in the region.
[00:08:50]  In cases like Egypt and Jordan, that subservience is rented.
[00:08:55]  But throughout much of the region, Israeli primacy is pursued by repeatedly shattering and hammering these other states and societies.
[00:09:05]  Weakening them repeatedly.
[00:09:08]  At the extreme, that's done via regime change.
[00:09:11]  Two of the most prominent such campaigns, of course, are Iraq and Syria.
[00:09:18]  And in dollar terms, regime change puts us on a whole new level of magnitude.
[00:09:24]  The Brown University Costs of War Project estimates that just Syria and Iraq cost America $2.9 trillion.
[00:09:35]  Part of that is future medical and disability care for veterans, patriots who signed up to defend America but ended up serving as attack dogs for a tiny country on the other side of the world.
[00:09:47]  And now, of course, we're turning from dollar costs to incalculable human costs.
[00:09:51]  In Iraq alone, 4,600 U.S. service members died and 32,000 were wounded, many of them dreadfully.
[00:10:02]  Then there's the relentless pace of suicides from soldiers suffering from traumatic brain injuries, PTSD, and moral injury.
[00:10:09]  Which is the phenomenon where you suffer psychological distress from having participated in, allowed, or witnessed actions that conflict with your moral beliefs.
[00:10:24]  Iraq and Syria are at the forefront, but there have been so many other costly U.S. engagements that spring from the U.S. Israel relationship.
[00:10:30]  For example, the 1983 truck bombing of a Marine barracks in Beirut that killed 241 Marines.
[00:10:39]  Why were they there?
[00:10:40]  A peacekeeping mission to try to bring order after an Israeli invasion of Lebanon, one marred by ghastly atrocities and massacres.
[00:10:50]  Now, most people wouldn't realize it, but even the 2012 attack in post regime change Libya, the one that killed the ambassador, foreign service officer, and two CIA contractors, that has an Israeli connection.
[00:11:03]  Why was the ambassador in Benghazi?
[00:11:05]  Why was there a safe house there, two blocks away?
[00:11:08]  As Seymour Hirsch reported, it's because they were shipping weapons from Libya to Syria.
[00:11:14]  As part of the regime change effort there.
[00:11:19]  Now, in addition to the toll on Americans, these wars have victimized millions of innocent people in faraway lands, inflicting death, displacement, and mass suffering on a spectacular scale.
[00:11:30]  In Iraq and Syria, estimates of a half million dead, with far more believed to have been killed from indirect causes like disease.
[00:11:41]  Millions of refugees displaced.
[00:11:44]  Causing misery for them and also causing all kinds of trouble in the countries that they end up in.
[00:11:51]  Armed conflict isn't the only instrument the United States uses to inflict mass suffering on foreign people on Israel's behalf.
[00:11:58]  When the U.S. isn't dropping bombs on Israel's rivals, it's hammering their societies with economic sanctions.
[00:12:06]  Far too many people embrace the idea that economic sanctions are an alternative to war.
[00:12:15]  As Ron Paul helped me realize, sanctions are just a different form of war.
[00:12:22]  Conservative estimates on the number of Iraqi children killed by malnutrition and disease brought on by U.S. sanctions in Iraq start at 100,000.
[00:12:32]  When then U.S. Ambassador Madeleine Albright was confronted with a higher figure estimate of 500,000, she didn't even challenge that number, but infamously said, We think the price is worth it.
[00:12:48]  And of course, for decades now, the innocent people of Iran have been subjected to this kind of misery.
[00:12:56]  Strangling sanctions, they like to call them.
[00:12:58]  Devastating sanctions.
[00:13:01]  And what people might think of sanctions as economic warfare, they think, oh, we're going to put a dent in their GDP.
[00:13:07]  No, we're talking about Iranian people having to eat partially decomposed vegetables and food because that's all they can get to.
[00:13:14]  It's a young, aspiring Iranian hoping for a career and a job who can't afford their own apartment yet.
[00:13:20]  It's children in cancer treatment centers.
[00:13:24]  Who don't have access to medicine because everyone's afraid to ship anything to Iran, even things that are accepted under the sanctions regime for just fear of running afoul of the US Treasury Department.
[00:13:38]  And now, of course, we have this latest war of aggression launched on false pretenses, launched in the middle of negotiations, a war that in its opening hours killed something like 150 elementary age schoolgirls, a war that threatens global catastrophe and starvation.
[00:13:57]  This will only pad America's resume as the principal cause of misery for going back decades.
[00:14:06]  Now, all that harm on Israel's behalf comes back to haunt us here in the United States.
[00:14:12]  As Dr. Paul famously instructed Rudy Giuliani on that debate stage, Americans do pay a dear price for U.S. support of Israel in the form of terrorism inspired by anger and resentment over that support.
[00:14:27]  9 11 is certainly the biggest example.
[00:14:31]  While Americans were told it was an attack on our freedom, the evidence is clear that backing, U.S. backing of Israel was a central motivator.
[00:14:40]  In his 1996 declaration of war against the United States, bin Laden cited an IDF massacre of 106 Lebanese civilians who had sought refuge at a UN compound.
[00:14:51]  He said, Muslim youth hold the United States responsible for all the killings carried out by your Zionist brothers in Lebanon.
[00:14:59]  You openly supplied them with arms and finance.
[00:15:02]  He later would say that he was inspired to strike American skyscrapers when he witnessed Israel's destruction of apartment towers in Lebanon.
[00:15:12]  Investigators who looked at Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and studied him noted that he had spent time in the United States himself.
[00:15:21]  While many people would want you to think he was disgusted by what he saw of our society, they concluded no, that's not what it was.
[00:15:28]  It was his, quote, violent disagreement with U.S. foreign policy favoring Israel.
[00:15:34]  9 11 hijacking ringleader Muhammad Atta signed his will on the day Israel began its 1996 Operation Grapes of Wrath attack on Lebanon.
[00:15:43]  A friend said Atta was furious and used his will to commit his life to the cause.
[00:15:49]  An acquaintance, one of the hijacker pilots in America, asked why neither he nor Muhammad Atta ever laughed.
[00:15:56]  And he replied, How can you laugh when people are dying in Palestine?
[00:16:05]  Now, if you don't have a 9 11, Excuse me.
[00:16:09]  Were it not for the U.S. support of Israel, I don't think you have a 9 11.
[00:16:12]  There were other motivating factors, but I think if you take that one away, I don't think you get a 9 11, which means there would be no war in Afghanistan.
[00:16:22]  2,400 U.S. service members killed, 20,000 injured, $2 trillion.
[00:16:31]  While 9 11 is obviously the most prominent example, there are many other examples of terrorism motivated by U.S. support of Israel and military interventions on Israel's behalf.
[00:16:42]  The first World Trade Center bombing, the 1998 embassy bombings in Africa, would be shoe bomber Richard Reed, the Times Square bomber, and the mass shooting at the Pulse nightclub, all of them were explicitly motivated by U.S. support of Israel or resentment over U.S. actions in the region.
[00:17:04]  Now, after what Israel has done to Gaza and Lebanon, killing at least 72,000 people, And rendering enormous swaths of territory uninhabitable.
[00:17:17]  We have to shudder to think what might be in the pipeline for us coming down the road.
[00:17:24]  In addition to threatening American lives, the U.S. Israel relationship has become a menace to American liberties as the powerful pro Israel lobby weaponizes our own government against their political opponents.
[00:17:39]  More than 30 states have made it illegal for the state to do business with anybody, a company, or an individual.

=== Bogus Intelligence Partners (11:51) ===

[00:17:46]  That boycotts the state of Israel.
[00:17:49]  In Texas, that led to a bizarre spectacle in which families applying for hurricane relief from the state were handed a form to sign promising that they would not boycott the state of Israel.
[00:18:06]  Now, recently, the Heritage Foundation concocted a sinister scheme under what they call Project Esther.
[00:18:14]  Look it up, which the U.S. government would characterize as pro.
[00:18:18]  Palestinian activists, as effectively members of a terrorist support network, Orwellian, and then use that characterization to expel them from colleges, deport them, sue them, fire them from their jobs, and exclude them from open society.
[00:18:36]  The new Trump administration ran with it, first trying it out on foreign students.
[00:18:43]  In the most atrocious example, they targeted a mild mannered 30 year old PhD student from Turkey studying at Tufts University in Boston, studying child development.
[00:18:55]  She was suddenly whisked off of a street, shackled in leg irons, and taken to a prison in Louisiana.
[00:19:03]  Her crime was co-authoring a calmly written student op-ed.
[00:19:08]  All she did was urge Tufts University to formally characterize Israel's conduct in Gaza as a genocide and to sell the school's Israel-related investments.
[00:19:18]  That's all.
[00:19:19]  Marco Rubio doesn't want you to know that.
[00:19:20]  That was all there was to it.
[00:19:24]  It was easier to victimize her because she was a foreign exchange student.
[00:19:29]  But don't think for a second that they don't have ambitions to abuse Americans that way.
[00:19:35]  Watch what's happening in other countries.
[00:19:37]  Merely saying the phrase, from the river to the sea, can put you in prison in places like Germany and Australia.
[00:19:49]  Now, for years, the principal tactic in the broad campaign to silence critics of Israel has been to falsely accuse them of being anti Semitic.
[00:19:58]  But what was once just a terrible smear is increasingly becoming codified into laws and regulations.
[00:20:05]  In particular, we see governing entities around the world adopting the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, or IHRA, working definition of anti Semitism.
[00:20:16]  Under that definition, it can be deemed inherently anti Semitic to simply compare Israel's actions to those of Nazi Germany, or to argue that the state of Israel is an inherently racist endeavor, or to call for a new governing arrangement for the 15 million people who live between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean.
[00:20:37]  Our own U.S. Department of Education is now using that definition to pursue civil rights cases against American universities, hammering them with fines ranging from just millions to even hundreds of millions of dollars in the case of Yale, coercing them into donating to Jewish nonprofits that fund so called anti Semitism initiatives of the kind we just talked about, forcing them to adopt the IHR definition when evaluating complaints.
[00:21:07]  And accusations leveled at students and professors on campus, and even reviewing and modifying their Middle East studies curricula.
[00:21:17]  Of course, what's billed as a fight for civil rights is really a campaign to stamp out criticism of Israel and the U.S. Israel relationship, from the classroom to the quad.
[00:21:30]  Israel's supporters insist that all of these costs are worthwhile and justified.
[00:21:38]  But they're constantly, if you examine what they're saying, Their arguments are frequently circular.
[00:21:44]  For example, they say that we must support Israel because it's in a region where much of the population is intensely hostile to the United States government, ignoring the fact that most of that hostility springs from resentment over U.S. support of Israel, and particularly how that support has enabled the subjugation of the Palestinians.
[00:22:05]  Reduced to its core, their argument says the U.S. government has to arm Israel because people in the Middle East hate the U.S. government.
[00:22:13]  Because it arms Israel.
[00:22:16]  When they try to justify U.S. support on regional geopolitics, Israel's advocates take us into a real, true house of mirrors.
[00:22:26]  They'll tell you that Israel's a critical ally because it serves as a bulwark against Iran.
[00:22:32]  Ask them why we need one of those, and they'll say, well, Iran is an enemy of Israel.
[00:22:37]  None of that points to any actual U.S. interest.
[00:22:43]  This circular logic has a particularly perverse effect.
[00:22:45]  When Americans are killed by terrorists motivated by the U.S. Israel relationship.
[00:22:51]  Like clockwork, they'll rush to the nearest microphone and tell you that the incident demonstrates why the United States must support Israel more than ever.
[00:23:01]  Israel's advocates also like to insist that Israel is a vital intelligence partner.
[00:23:08]  However, time and again, Israel has used bogus intelligence to maneuver our government and our public into acting on Israel's behalf.
[00:23:16]  The Iraq war, who can forget Netanyahu in Congress?
[00:23:20]  There's no question whatsoever that Saddam is feverishly developing nuclear weapons.
[00:23:27]  Israel's repeatedly fed us bogus intelligence on Iran's nuclear program, including manufacturing fake intelligence and then laundering it through organizations like the MEK so as to mislead the American public.
[00:23:43]  Last summer, we had, during that initial phase of this war that we're in right now, you had.
[00:23:49]  Netanyahu coming out with this ridiculous claim in the hours after the attack was launched, he said, We have recently learned that Iran was planning to give nuclear weapons it would develop in the future to terrorist proxies.
[00:24:04]  Nobody believed it, and then he never said it again.
[00:24:06]  He just throws it out there and sees if it sticks.
[00:24:08]  This is our partner.
[00:24:11]  Now, of course, the world is knee deep in the consequences of fake, toxic Israeli intelligence.
[00:24:17]  In a mid February briefing that will live in infamy, The Mossad told Trump that Iran's ballistic missile capability would be gone in a couple of weeks, that the Iranian people would rise up against the government, that Kurds in Iraq might come across the border and invade, opening up another front, that there was little chance Iran would be able to hit bases in nearby countries, U.S. bases, that Iran would be, get this, too weak to close the Strait of Hormuz.
[00:24:46]  Thank you, vital intelligence partner and greatest ally in the region.
[00:24:53]  By the way, this ridiculous war for Israel isn't just weakening us economically, but also militarily, putting a huge dent in our readiness for any other potential conflicts.
[00:25:04]  Over the past seven weeks, the Pentagon has blown through half of its global Patriot missile inventory.
[00:25:11]  In fact, in just the first four days of this latest conflict, the U.S. fired more Patriot missiles than the United States has given to Ukraine in four years.
[00:25:22]  The Pentagon has also blown through almost half of its precision strike missiles, half of its THAAD anti ballistic missiles, and nearly a third of its Tomahawk missiles.
[00:25:31]  That will take years to replenish, and lots of money, of course, to the benefit of the military industrial complex.
[00:25:38]  When Israel actually has valuable intelligence, it doesn't always rush to hand it over.
[00:25:44]  Sometimes it stops to consider whether Israel might be better off leaving America vulnerable.
[00:25:50]  According to former Mossad agent Viktor Ostrovsky, That's what happened with that 1983 bombing of the Marine Barracks in Beirut.
[00:25:59]  He said the Mossad had learned that Shiite militants were constructing an enormous bomb of a whole different scale than what they'd seen.
[00:26:06]  From its size, they concluded it must be destined for a U.S. target.
[00:26:10]  However, he says the Mossad figured that a devastating attack on the United States would be beneficial to Israel, as it would help build American animus against the Arab world.
[00:26:22]  And so, rather than provide details, That Mossad merely provided a vague warning to cover Israel's back and let the attack proceed.
[00:26:32]  For those who claim Israel's a vital intelligence partner, they ignore the fact that it is also a huge intelligence adversary, spying on America to an extent that's far beyond what other supposed allies undertake.
[00:26:47]  Former CIA officer John Kiriakou likes to talk about when he first came on board, he was told the FBI had identified 187 undeclared Israeli intelligence officers.
[00:26:59]  Spying inside the United States, more than the KGB, most of them working to steal military secrets.
[00:27:08]  In 2014, a congressional staffer received a briefing on the scope of Israeli spying on America and said it was, very sobering, alarming, even terrifying.
[00:27:23]  And speaking of alarming things, one of the most alarming revelations from Edward Snowden.
[00:27:29]  Was that the NSA was routinely feeding raw intelligence to Israel that included intercepted phone calls and emails of American citizens, with Israel merely promising not to do anything nefarious with it.
[00:27:42]  And there's no reason to think that ever stopped.
[00:27:46]  And don't forget Jonathan Pollard, arguably the most damaging spy in the history of our country.
[00:27:54]  360 cubic feet of documents carried out in suitcases at a time from the CIA, NSA, State Department, Department of Justice.
[00:28:08]  And this included intelligence that had nothing to do with Israel's security, in particular, intelligence about how the United States. Tracked Soviet subs.
[00:28:21]  Our intelligence, many of them concluded that this was part, this was intelligence that Israel then passed on to get deals with the Soviet Union on the side.
[00:28:32]  And of course, what happened after he got out of prison?
[00:28:36]  Mega GOP donor and pro Israel advocate Sheldon Adelson puts him on his private plane and flies him to Tel Aviv, where he's greeted on the tarmac by Benjamin Netanyahu.
[00:28:48]  Giving him a simultaneously giving a hero's welcome and showing his utter contempt for the benefactor that he manipulates and plunders.
[00:29:00]  This is our vital intelligence partner.
[00:29:05]  And let me ask what kind of intelligence partner was Israel to the men of the USS Liberty?
[00:29:12]  In June 1967, it was the most sophisticated spy ship in the world, operating in international waters.
[00:29:20]  The Eastern Mediterranean as the Six Day War was unfolding.
[00:29:28]  And then the State of Israel launched a devastating attack on that ship, killing 34 people, wounding 170.

=== Shared Values in Question (08:31) ===

[00:29:37]  And let's be clear this was not some ill considered shot in the middle of the night.
[00:29:44]  This was a prolonged, multi wave attack on a clearly marked ship in broad daylight.
[00:29:52]  Using a succession of bombers and torpedo boats.
[00:29:57]  While the motive is unclear, some think perhaps a false flag to trigger the United States to engage in the war and attack Egypt, perhaps.
[00:30:10]  What we saw in the aftermath was a disgraceful treatment of the survivors and the memories of the men who perished.
[00:30:18]  A sham investigation rapidly undertaken.
[00:30:22]  To dismiss any notion that this was an intentional attack.
[00:30:26]  But the survivors fight on all these years later.
[00:30:30]  And Phil Turney, sir, is with us here.
[00:30:32]  And I'd ask you, sir, again to stand and be recognized.
[00:30:35]  We're with you.
[00:30:47]  Then there are the fluffier justifications of the US Israel relationship.
[00:30:52]  We're told that we have to support Israel because it's the only democracy in the region.
[00:30:57]  Yes, Israel has elections, but it's ridiculous to hold it out as a beacon of democracy because the privilege of voting is enjoyed by perhaps only half of the people that live under Israeli domination.
[00:31:12]  For all the talk of Israeli ambitions to annex the West Bank and Gaza, The reality is that Israel has been ruling over everything between the river and the sea for 58 years.
[00:31:23]  And the millions of Palestinian Muslims and Christians living in those territories don't get a voice in Israel's so called exemplary democracy.
[00:31:32]  Those in the West Bank, even worse, live under a form of martial law that subjects them to indefinite detention in Israeli military prisons and their cases adjudicated by military tribunals.
[00:31:46]  They're politically powerless as they're preyed upon by violent and depraved settlers.
[00:31:52]  And endure unending humiliations at the hands of the IDF soldiers.
[00:31:57]  We're also told we have to support Israel because we're two countries united by shared values.
[00:32:05]  Let's think about this claim of shared values in light of the absolute horror show that we've seen in Gaza and Lebanon.
[00:32:13]  And keep in mind that some of these worst allegations come from IDF soldiers themselves.
[00:32:18]  We've seen the systematic building by building erasure of towns, villages, Farmers' fields, factories, schools, universities, the purposeful deprivation of food and medicine,
[00:32:32]  2,000 pound bombs recklessly dropped in densely populated areas, lethal weapons used as crowd control at food distribution points, drones dropping grenades on clearly unarmed Palestinians merely wandering into unmarked no go zones, Palestinians used as human shields to clear buildings.
[00:32:58]  Intentional attacks on ambulance convoys and hospitals.
[00:33:03]  Over 75,000 dead in Gaza and counting.
[00:33:08]  Volunteer doctors from around the world have been astonished, those who've traveled to Gaza, by what they've seen coming into their clinics and hospitals.
[00:33:20]  Unmistakable patterns of deliberate gunfire on civilians, to include children.
[00:33:26]  A British surgeon returned from Gaza and he recounted observing.
[00:33:31]  Strange clusters of similar wounds.
[00:33:35]  One day they'd see an unusual number of headshots.
[00:33:38]  The next day, the abdomen.
[00:33:41]  The day after that, the groin.
[00:33:44]  He concluded that IDF soldiers were playing some kind of game.
[00:33:51]  As Daniel mentioned, the IDF routinely targets journalists.
[00:33:54]  And according to Brown University, the war in Gaza has killed more journalists than the Civil War, World War I. World War II, the Korean War, and the Vietnam War combined.
[00:34:08]  And yet another one, as Daniel told that horrible tale, just perished again this last week.
[00:34:15]  Then we've observed this perverted IDF social media trend with male soldiers going into the homes abandoned by Palestinians, dressing up in their lingerie and underwear, and posting it on social media.
[00:34:34]  And it isn't just the IDF.
[00:34:37]  Israeli society is increasingly depraved too.
[00:34:42]  In a poll last summer, 82% of Israeli Jews said they support the forced expulsion of Gaza's Palestinian population to other countries, ethnic cleansing.
[00:34:53]  82%.
[00:34:55]  56% want to forcibly expel all Arabs that are inside what is now considered Israel, inside that part that was supposed to be this valued democracy.
[00:35:06]  They want them out.
[00:35:09]  Before I share this next poll result, I want to emphasize something.
[00:35:13]  This is not some throwaway social media poll or a Facebook poll of some extreme group inside Israel.
[00:35:23]  This is a poll conducted by Penn State University and University of Maryland professors and published in Israel's oldest newspaper.
[00:35:31]  Listen to this poll question When conquering an enemy city, should the IDF act in a manner similar to the way the Israelites acted?
[00:35:41]  When they conquered Jericho under the leadership of Joshua, namely to kill all its inhabitants?
[00:35:48]  47% of Israeli Jews said yes, kill them all.
[00:35:54]  These are not values anyone in this room shares.
[00:35:57]  And as much as American society has its flaws, I'm certain it doesn't mirror the values of most Americans.
[00:36:06]  From a global relations perspective, it's hard to imagine a worse thing to proclaim than that America shares Israel's values.
[00:36:16]  Now, I want to tell you there is something wonderful about the U.S. Israel relationship.
[00:36:22]  In a major sea change, the American people are increasingly fed up with it.
[00:36:36]  According to a new Pew Research survey, nearly two thirds of Americans view Israel unfavorably.
[00:36:42]  The proportion that views Israel very unfavorably has tripled.
[00:36:47]  And though there's a big distinction between the parties, we're even moving towards a bipartisan consensus.
[00:36:53]  80% of Democrats view Israel unfavorably, and 41% of Republicans, which is previously unheard of.
[00:37:04]  And those trends are only going to strengthen.
[00:37:07]  When you look at Republicans under 50, 57% of them view Israel unfavorably, a clear majority.
[00:37:15]  And 74% of all Gen Z now say they sympathize more with the Palestinians than with Israel.
[00:37:24]  And in this election year, there's another remarkable development.
[00:37:28]  Reacting to that sea change in the electorate, more and more politicians, almost all of them Democrats at this point, are promising not to accept money from the Israel lobby.
[00:37:39]  And attacking their opponents who do.
[00:37:50]  At the same time, false accusations of anti Semitism, which have been wielded like a dagger against a long line of American patriots, are losing their impact.
[00:38:01]  Accusations that once drew political blood today increasingly draw defiance and outright ridicule.

=== Wielded Accusations Today (02:27) ===

[00:38:09]  These accusations have been wielded against me for what I've written.
[00:38:12]  And now they'll be wielded against me for what I've spoken here today.
[00:38:18]  But I've got news for Benjamin Netanyahu, Mark Levin, and politicians rented by mega donors like Miriam Adelson, and the defamatory Anti Defamation League.
[00:38:33]  With every malicious jab of that dagger, the blade only grows duller.
[00:38:46]  I began my tale with a tale from my post-invasion deployment to Panama.
[00:38:55]  That wasn't part of Operation Just Cause.
[00:38:58]  It had another name, one that would prove somehow prophetic for a 22-year-old Army lieutenant who would years later embrace the philosophy of Ron Paul.
[00:39:08]  It was called Operation Promote Liberty.
[00:39:16]  But now it's time for all Americans of all political stripes.
[00:39:20]  Progressives, real conservatives, libertarians, heck, we'll take the socialists, everybody's in the pool, to unite in a broad coalition to promote a particular form of liberty.
[00:39:32]  Liberty from foreign influence, which George Washington called one of the most baneful foes of Republican government.
[00:39:39]  Liberty from the relentless redistribution of American wealth from this nearly insolvent empire to one of the most well off countries in the world.
[00:39:48]  Liberty for America first patriots.
[00:39:51]  Who must no longer be vilified and slandered as anti Semites for merely opposing the most entangling of America's alliances.
[00:39:59]  Liberty from terrorism motivated by American support of Israel and America's catastrophic interventions on its behalf.
[00:40:08]  And liberty for patriotic American service members who must no longer be sent to lose their lives and limbs and minds in amoral wars carried out to advance the agenda of an undemocratic expansionist apartheid state.
[00:40:25]  Thank you very much.
[00:40:28]  Thank you.
[00:40:36]  so much.