U.S. Backing Has Given Israel License to Kill & Maim

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Headlines
by Amy Goodman
DemocracyNow
December 09, 2024
https://www.democracynow.org/2024/12/9/headlines

Bashar al-Assad Ousted as Syrian Leader Following 12-Day Offensive
Dec 09, 2024

In a development that could reshape the Middle East, armed opposition groups have overthrown Bashar al-Assad in Syria following a lightning 12-day offensive. Assad has resigned and fled to Russia, where he has been granted asylum. Assad’s family had ruled Syria with an iron grip for over 50 years.

Thousands of Syrians living in exile have poured back into the country, while tens of thousands of prisoners held by the Assad government have been freed. At the Sednaya prison in Damascus, rescue workers are now trying to access underground cells at the site, which has been described as a “human slaughterhouse.”

The uprising was led by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, or HTS, a group listed as a terrorist organization by the United States and the United Nations. Members of the group spoke on Sunday after seizing Syria’s state television.

Syrian rebel: “In the name of God, the most gracious, the most merciful, by the grace of God Almighty, the city of Damascus has been liberated. The tyrant Bashar al-Assad has been toppled, and all the unjustly detained persons from the regime’s prisons have been released.”

A deal has been reached to allow Syria’s Prime Minister Mohammad Ghazi al-Jalali to remain in his position to oversee the state’s institutions until a transition government is formed.

Many Syrians across the globe held celebratory rallies to mark the fall of Assad. Sabri Chikhou took part in a rally in London.

Sabri Chikhou: “We are going towards democracy and building a new Syria with a new system, democratic system. And we will depend on society and establishment, not to the single regime who control every part in our country.”

Israel & U.S. Bomb Syria as Questions Swirl over Future of Post-Assad Syria
Dec 09, 2024

Many questions remain as to what will happen next in Syria, which has been devastated by a 13-year civil war that has been fueled in part by numerous foreign countries, including Russia, Iran, the United States, Turkey and Israel.

The U.N. Security Council will hold an emergency meeting today on Syria. The U.N. Syrian envoy, Geir Pedersen, has called for an inclusive transitional government to restore a unified Syria.

Geir Pedersen: “All armed actors on the ground maintain good conduct, law and order, protect civilians and preserve public institutions. Let me urge all Syrians to prioritize dialogue, unity and respect for international humanitarian law and human rights as they seek to rebuild their society.”

Israel responded to the uprising in Syria by invading and seizing part of Syria’s Golan Heights in violation of a 1974 agreement with the Syrian government. Israel also bombed a number of areas, including a Syrian air base and weapons depots. The United States carried out dozens of airstrikes inside Syria targeting areas held by the Islamic State. Meanwhile, in northern Syria, Turkish-backed armed groups have seized the city of Manbij, which had been controlled by U.S.-backed Syrian Kurdish forces. We will have more on Syria after headlines.

Israel Kills Dozens in Gaza; Electricity, Oxygen & Water Cut at Kamal Adwan Hospital
Dec 09, 2024

In news from Gaza, an Israeli attack on Rafah killed at least 10 Palestinians who had lined up to buy flour. In a separate attack, Israel struck a home, killing nine members of the same family in the Bureij refugee camp. Most of the victims were reportedly women and children. On Friday, an Israeli strike in the Nuseirat camp killed at least 20 Palestinians, including at least six children and five women. Survivors had to be pulled from the rubble.

Radi Abdulfatah: “There was suddenly an explosion. This was not an explosion; this was a tsunami. Like you see, it took not only one house, but many. There was fire and flames, flames that burned us. They burn us. They damage us. They cut us in pieces. There were bodies in pieces. I was pulled from under the rubble yesterday, and I have stitches in my head.”

Meanwhile, the head of Kamal Adwan Hospital in northern Gaza is warning the lives of more than 100 patients are at risk after Israeli attacks cut off the hospital’s supply of electricity, oxygen and water. On Friday, Israeli troops stormed the hospital compound.

Pope Francis Unveils Nativity Scene of Jesus in Crib Lined with a Palestinian Keffiyeh
Dec 09, 2024

Pope Francis has repeated his call for a ceasefire in Gaza. On Saturday, the pope unveiled this year’s nativity scene at the Vatican. It portrays baby Jesus in a crib lined with a Palestinian keffiyeh. At the ceremony, a top Palestinian official praised the pope for his “ongoing efforts to end the genocide in Gaza and his steadfast support for the Palestinian cause.” Over the weekend, Pope Francis also called on U.S. authorities to commute the sentences of prisoners on death row.

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“Assad Is Gone”: Writer Yassin al-Haj Saleh on Syria, His 16 Years in Prison & Wife’s Disappearance
by Amy Goodman
DemocracyNow
December 09, 2024

“We needed to turn this page. … We’ve been under this inhuman condition for 54 years.” Following a lightning 12-day offensive, armed opposition groups have overthrown President Bashar al-Assad’s regime and his family’s five-decade rule in Syria. Assad has fled to Russia, where he has been granted asylum, while tens of thousands of political prisoners have been freed. The uprising was led by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, or HTS, a Turkish-backed group listed as a terrorist organization by the United States and the United Nations. The release of prisoners from conditions of “hunger, humiliation, extreme despair” is a welcome and hopeful sign for the new balance of power in Syria, says the writer, dissident and political prisoner in Syria from 1980 to 1996, Yassin al-Haj Saleh, but it remains to be seen if others who were disappeared during the Syrian civil war, including al-Haj Saleh’s wife Samira, will be recovered or their fates identified.

Transcript

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: We spend the hour looking at the fall of the Syrian government and its impact on the Middle East and worldwide, after armed forces entered the capital city of Damascus Sunday, bringing an end to President Bashar al-Assad’s regime and his family’s more than 50-year rule.

Armed opposition groups have overthrown al-Assad’s regime in Syria following a lightning 12-day offensive. Assad has fled to Russia, where he’s been granted political asylum. Assad’s family had ruled Syria with an iron grip for more than half a century.

Thousands of Syrians living in exile have poured back into Syria, while tens of thousands of prisoners held by the Assad government have been freed. At the Sednaya prison in Damascus, rescue workers are now trying to access underground cells at a site that’s been described as a “human slaughterhouse.”

The uprising was led by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, or HTS, a Turkish-backed group listed as a terrorist organization by the United States and the United Nations. Members of the group spoke on Sunday after seizing Syria’s state television station.

SYRIAN REBEL: [translated] In the name of God, the most gracious, the most merciful, by the grace of God almighty, the city of Damascus has been liberated. The tyrant Bashar al-Assad has been toppled, and all the unjustly detained persons from the regime’s prisons have been released. The Fatah Damascus Operation Room calls upon the mujahideen brothers and citizens to preserve all the properties of the free Syrian state. Long live a free and independent Syria for all Syrians of all sects.

AMY GOODMAN: As video showed prisoners streaming out of Assad’s notorious prisons, others celebrated inside Assad’s luxurious presidential palace. Scenes of celebration erupted across major Syrian cities. These are just a few voices from Aleppo, from Homs and from the capital Damascus.

SYRIAN 1: [translated] This is something else. Something else. May God help this country. And congratulations to all.

SYRIAN 2: [translated] This is the happiest day of my life. We were reborn. This is the day when the believers rejoice with God’s victory. Thank God. He gave us more than we deserve. Just some advice: Be united, and do not allow foreigners to come between you.

SYRIAN 3: [translated] Our happiness is immense. It’s priceless. Thank God we have no losses and no one has harmed anyone. We are just happy with our victory. We are also happy for the prisoners who have been released after years in prison. May God protect the rebels and grant them victory.

SYRIAN 4: [translated] First of all, I thank God for granting us the chance to see this place once more. After 10 years of fleeing Homs, I am returning today with my head held high in pride. Homs is free now. This is the Homs we dreamed of.

SYRIAN 5: [translated] I am a mechanical engineer. For years we have been waiting for this day. We have been resisting. We have been enduring. We have been holding on. And we’ve been waiting for this day until the regime fell. And finally, the regime has fallen. From now on, the Syrian people are one! The Syrian people are one! The Syrian people are one! The Syrian people are one!

AMY GOODMAN: Israel responded to the uprising in Syria by invading and seizing part of Syria’s Golan Heights and bombed a Syrian air base and weapons depots.

The United States carried out dozens of airstrikes inside Syria targeting areas held by the Islamic State. Meanwhile, in northern Syria, Turkish-backed armed groups have seized the city of Manbij, which had been controlled by U.S.-backed Syrian Kurdish forces.

President Joe Biden welcomed the Assad regime’s downfall as a “historic opportunity.”

PRESIDENT JOE BIDEN: After 13 years of civil war in Syrian and more than half a century of brutal authoritarian rule by Bashar Assad and his father before him, rebel forces have forced Assad to resign his office and flee the country. We’re not sure where he is, but there’s word that he’s in Moscow. At long last, the Assad regime has fallen.

AMY GOODMAN: For more on all of this, we begin in Paris with Yassin al-Haj Saleh, a Syrian writer, dissident, former political prisoner. He was jailed in Syria for 16 years, from 1980 to 1996. He’s the author of several books, including The Impossible Revolution: Making Sense of the Syrian Tragedy, also co-founder of the award-winning independent media platform AlJumhuriya.net.

Welcome back to Democracy Now! It’s great to have you with us, Yassin. If you can respond? You were out in the streets of Paris yesterday celebrating with many other Syrians. Assad is now in Russia, where he’s been granted asylum. Your response to what has happened and the lightning speed, would you say, that it’s happened in this last phase of the overthrow of the Assad regime?

YASSIN AL-HAJ SALEH: Hello, Amy, and thank you for having me.

So, among hundreds of people yesterday, I was at the Republic Square in Paris. We were overwhelmed by emotions, mine, I guess, similar to everybody else, crying, laughing and breathing. It was a rare moment of convergence of mourning and happiness and just feeling alive.

On the personal level, I lived almost all my life under this genocidal regime, and I felt as if tight hands were on my neck, on my throat, and for the first day I regained the ability to breathe. So, it is a great day, glorious day.

Everybody, I guess — of course, myself included — have many layers of feeling about this day. We need to turn out this dirty, criminal, discriminatory, fascist and very reactionary — I guess this is the right word to describe the Assad regime, because many in the West thinks that it is modernist, this is progressive. Far from it. So, we needed to turn out this page. And we are sure that many pages with difficulties, with hardships, with crisis, with struggles, with problems are ahead of us.

But the forever is over. And yesterday was the first day of history with all its problems and tensions and, of course, I mean, apprehensions. So, it was a mixed feeling. And there are many elements for hope. And, of course, there are other elements that I’d like to talk about, if you will allow me.

AMY GOODMAN: Yes. Why don’t you continue? But why don’t you start off by grounding us in your own experience? I mean, we’re sitting here looking at the Sednaya prison, the freeing of thousands of prisoners, many women, as you see them being told that they are now free. If you can talk about your own experience? Tell us about the Sednaya prison and its significance, and talk about why people were imprisoned.

YASSIN AL-HAJ SALEH: So, in my years in jail, I was not in Sednaya prison. And in those days, in the 1980s and ’90s, it was not the slaughterhouse as Amnesty International said some seven years ago, early 2017, I guess, in a very good report. It was before Sednaya. It was Tadmor prison, in which I spent only my last year of the 16 years, after I finished my sentence, by the way. I mean, look, I was arrested in 1980. I was, among hundreds of my comrades, brought to Supreme State Security Court only in April 1992, so at that time I was in jail for 11 years and four months. It took two years to get a sentence, and I got a sentence of 15 years. Instead of being released — by the way, the day before yesterday was the 44th anniversary of my arrest. Instead of being released in 1995, I was sent with 30 other people to Tadmor prison for an extra year. And Tadmor prison is the Sednaya of today. It is the most brutal jail in Syria. It is — well, it is a torture camp; it is not a prison. It is like Sednaya today.

These places are the factories to manufacture the essence of power in Syria. They are places of torture, of hunger, of humiliation and of extreme despair. And I believe that tens of thousands — you know that now we have 131 people, at least, we don’t know about their fate. So, many of them may be killed. The league of Sednaya prison former prisoners released a report a year and a half ago, I guess, and they took that maybe 30,000 to 35,000 were killed in Sednaya prison, mostly under torture, and some of them were executed. And many, I believe, died of hunger and of diseases.

So, it is — we’ve been under this inhuman condition for 54 years, which is more that a half of the whole Syrian history as a modern polity. Syria appeared only after the First World War. And more than half of its history is under the Assad rule, very thuggish, very corrupt. And you saw that it was rotten from inside. It fell in 11 days, without its foreign protectors, Russians, Iranians, the thugs of Hezbollah and other sectarian militias. The regime, we overwhelmed, so it fell in 11 days, because it is extremely rotten from inside.

So, this was my experience. And I feel very hopeful for the future of Syria because of the release of prisoners, because they gave — they have given the top priority for releasing these prisoners from many places, in Aleppo, in Hama, in Homs and now in Damascus, especially this torture camp of Sednaya.

AMY GOODMAN: Today, Yassin, is the 11th anniversary of the disappearance of your wife. Can you explain what happened to her?

YASSIN AL-HAJ SALEH: Well, because Syria, especially in 2013, so the third year of the Syrian uprising, is the most brutal, the most painful, the most tragic year of our struggle. So, Syria, by that time, let’s remember that it was the intervention, military intervention, of Hezbollah in Syria. It is the year of the appearance of Daesh, ISIS. It is the year of the chemical massacre. It is the year of the sordid American-Russian deal to absolve the regime from violating the international law, and disarming, taking away its chemical weapons. We find now that they were aware all the time that the regime kept a lot of chemical weapons. So, they were happy, or they were not unhappy, that these arms were used against — only against the Syrian people, now they are targeting them.

So, because Syria, by that year, was turning to a paradise of immunity and unaccountability, many factions seized the opportunity and started to act like the regime. Daesh is one of them. Another, Salafi military formation called Jaysh al-Islam in eastern Ghouta was one. And they took Samira, my wife, Samira Khalil, with Razan Zaitouneh, internationally known human rights activist and very good writer; Wael Hamada, her husband; and Nazem Hammadi, a lawyer and a poet. This happened today 11 years ago.

And for me, it is — as much as I am happy of the liberation of the bigger parts of my country, at the same time I see it as a criterion to judge these new developments now to liberate my wife and my friends, or to know about their fate, and to bring the culprits before justice. This is very important. We know the criminals by names.

And this is an opportunity for me just to say these simple words. This should end now. It is like releasing thousands of people from jail and trying to find out about the fate of others. Samira is one of these people. Samira and Razan and Wael and Nazem are among these people. And we need to know. We need them among us. We need to know about their fate. And we need to see a measure of justice. This will tell if the future of Syria will be better than its past.

AMY GOODMAN: I have a final question, Yassin. In one of your posts, you write, quote, “We can’t embrace HTS’s military effectiveness against the regime while ignoring its ideology.” In this last minute we have, if you can explain, one of the groups, the leading group, that overthrew the Assad regime?

YASSIN AL-HAJ SALEH: Amy, this was written in January 2013, so 11 years ago. And someone digged it out and published it, republished it on X.

So, of course, as you see, they are very effective militarily, but they have an ideology. And this is one reason why I am a bit worried, because this is one — this tension between the Islamic formation of the new liberators and the general seat of nationalism is one of my sources of worries.

Beside that, Assadism is not yet dead. Assad is gone, very cheaply and very — he showed how sordid and how trivial he was, but Assadism is still there in the form of sectarianism, corruption, thuggery, security complexes. Still we don’t know the fate about them.

And unhealthy — a third reason why I am a bit worried is a brutally unhealthy regional and international environment. You mentioned that the Israelis seized some Syrian lands. And they bombed in Damascus after Damascus was taken from the regime. This is colonial — I am not surprised by it, but Israel has been a plague for us for decades and for generations. But this will not go away from the Syrian memory.

AMY GOODMAN: Yassin al-Haj Saleh —

YASSIN AL-HAJ SALEH: If I have time —

AMY GOODMAN: We just have 30 seconds.

YASSIN AL-HAJ SALEH: OK. So, the reasons why I am a bit hopeful — I talked about my worries — is that the release of prisoners, the return of displaced people, from Turkey — from within the country, the camps are almost empty, and from Turkey and from Lebanon. And I guess many people from Europe are planning to go back. It is a Syrianized thing — it is not like what happened in Iraq 20, 21 years ago. The Syrians did it, and with minimal violations so far. I guess this is a sort of basis to build on for a better future.

AMY GOODMAN: Yassin al-Haj Saleh, Syrian writer, former political prisoner from 1980 to 1996, author of several books, including The Impossible Revolution: Making Sense of the Syrian Tragedy. He was speaking to us from Paris.

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Syrians Are Celebrating Fall of Assad, Even as “the Bigger Picture Is Grim”: Scholar Bassam Haddad
by Amy Goodman
DemocracyNow
December 09, 2024
https://www.democracynow.org/2024/12/9/ ... transcript

The fall of the Assad family’s 50-year regime in Syria brings with it “many more questions than answers,” says the executive director of the Arab Studies Institute, Bassam Haddad. While the regional and global implications are “not good,” as Israel in particular is celebrating the loss of Assad’s material support for Palestinian and Lebanese armed resistance, Haddad says the immediate relief of those suffering under Assad’s totalitarian regime should not be ignored or invisibilized. Haddad also discusses the political prospects for the rebel forces led by the group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, which he says will likely form a coalition with other groups as the future of Syria is determined in the coming days and weeks.

Transcript

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman, as we continue to look at how the Assad family has lost control of Syria after more than half a century of brutal dictatorship, following a rapid advance of rebel fighters. Today, U.N. Security Council will hold an emergency meeting on Syria. The U.N. Syrian envoy, Geir Pedersen, said an inclusive transitional government is needed to restore a unified Syria.

GEIR PEDERSEN: All armed actors on the ground maintain good conduct, law and order, protect civilians and preserve public institutions. Let me urge all Syrians to prioritize dialogue, unity and respect for international humanitarian law and human rights as they seek to rebuild their society.

AMY GOODMAN: Israel responded to the Syrian uprising by invading and seizing parts of Syria’s Golan Heights in violation of a 1974 agreement with the Syrian government. Israel also bombed a number of areas, including a Syrian air base and weapons depots. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Sunday the collapse of Bashar al-Assad’s regime in Syria was a “direct result” of Israel’s military campaign against Hezbollah in Lebanon.

PRIME MINISTER BENJAMIN NETANYAHU: [translated] This is a historic day in the history of the Middle East. Assad’s regime is a central link in Iran’s Axis of Evil. This regime has fallen. This is a direct result of the blows we inflicted on Iran and Hezbollah, the main supporters of the Assad regime. This created a chain reaction throughout the Middle East.

AMY GOODMAN: Meanwhile, the United States carried out dozens of airstrikes inside Syria targeting areas held by the Islamic State. And in northern Syria, Turkish-backed armed groups have seized the city of Manbij, which had been controlled by U.S.-backed Syrian Kurdish forces.

For more, we go to Philadelphia, where we’re joined by Bassam Haddad, associate professor at George Mason University, author of Business Networks in Syria: The Political Economy of Authoritarian Resilience. He’s the co-founder and editor of the Jadaliyya ezine and is executive director of the Arab Studies Institute at George Mason University. His forthcoming book, Roots, Dynamics, and Transformation of the Syrian Uprising.

Professor Haddad, first, your response to what took place this weekend?

BASSAM HADDAD: Thank you, Amy. It’s good to be with you again.

The first thing I’d like to say is that there are so many more questions than answers, so it’s important — especially today, so it’s important to keep that in mind as we go along. I would like to be analytical, but there is no way to avoid the importance and the value of watching what happened and what it means, the collapse of the regime after 54 years — or 71, if you want to consider the Ba’athist rule — what it means to ordinary Syrians who have actually been living under this regime for so many decades.

It is a moment that if you look at all the news, that cannot be overlooked and cannot be trumped by analysis of the bigger picture at this very moment, although the bigger picture is grim, is very problematic, and it’s really important for us to get to it, and I hope we can get to it today. But it is not something that we could underestimate, given the brutality of the regime, not least its lack of ability completely to govern in the past several years, at least after 2019, 2020, and its inability to provide the infrastructure, social services and the basic needs for its people, which actually did play a role in the very rapid march of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham into all of the major cities of Syria.

AMY GOODMAN: Explain HTS, its history, and Julani, its leader, and what you’re most concerned about right now.

BASSAM HADDAD: Well, you know, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham is a coalition of a lot of groups, primarily Jabhat al-Nusra,which everyone loves to say it’s al-Qaeda-affiliated, although there’s been some sort of break. Nonetheless, it is what it is. As Yassin al-Haj Saleh said, he is worried about the ideology of HTS and some of the potential consequences. And if Yassin al-Haj Saleh is worried about HTS, where Yassin al-Haj Saleh called Hezbollah thugs, you can imagine what — or, how worried everyone else is about the future. But we will get to that.

HTS has actually acted in a manner that is not alone. HTS cannot move out of Idlib and could not have moved out of Idlib without Turkish approval. And even the Turkish government cannot make this decision alone. So, the question is: Who did Turkey connect with, coordinate with, to produce this issue or this campaign or this operation? The second question is: Were there any connections between the ceasefire in Lebanon and what Turkey did today or 10 days ago or right before the coordination took place or around then? And what kind of also coordination took place between Turkey and Russia, as well as between Russia and the potential group HTS and otherwise? Because they apparently, from recent reports, they have actually allowed the Russians to keep their air base. This has to be checked. So, there are a lot of questions.

And I wanted to insist again that at this point, although we can keep going and talk about the regional and global implications, which are not good, but I would like to insist on seizing this moment to recognize what it means for millions of Syrians who are actually very happy that this has happened. Many others are concerned, including those who are actually celebrating. They are concerned about the future. They’re concerned about how this took place, where this is going to go, who’s going to be in the lead. And many are concerned about what this means to the expanding, global, superpower, imperialist, American-Israeli hegemony, domination in the region, in the absence or far weakened, what we call, the Axis of Resistance. This is not a small issue, and it will become part of the major headlines very, very soon.

AMY GOODMAN: Talk more about this. What would — the amount of Syrian participation in reshaping Syria, will that be challenged because of the international support Syria will need to rebuild, that will include the U.S., players like the Gulf Arab monarchies? Turkey will also be, as you pointed out, and already is, deeply involved. Will that push what happens to Syria in a certain direction?

BASSAM HADDAD: Again, I must reiterate the importance of having so many questions with very, very few answers, because we do not know exactly how this was coordinated and with whom and what are the trade-offs that have actually already been in place.

But it’s going to be a phase, the next phase — or, this current phase is actually not the phase that we can focus on, because, according to the best analysis, the current configuration is not going to be transferred into the next phase. The political and economic and the military configuration today, the people that actually have the guns and are in control, are not likely themselves alone, maybe part of a coalition, a bigger coalition, a more diverse coalition, but not alone, move forward.

There’s so much trepidation in Syria. There’s so much trepidation in Turkey, by the United States, by many of the Arab states that are powerful and will probably be somewhat relied on to help rebuild Syria, about the singularity of a particular group, HTS, and how it need not and should not be the only player in the field. But the questions right now are just that. It’s very difficult to recognize where things are going.

But we do know that the United States and Israel are extremely comforted. Israel, yesterday on Channel 13, called what happened an “accomplishment.” And this “accomplishment” is something that will allow Israel to move forward with its genocide on Gaza, along with the United States. The United States is not just complicit; it’s a full partner in this genocide. And much bigger issues will come to fore in the coming weeks.

And the jubilation, while it’s important today for the people who have been under the boot of the regime — and we cannot underestimate this, no matter how concerned you are about imperialism and global political economy and so on. This has to be recognized, because one of the things that will actually cause me trouble and will cause my phone to blow up in just a few minutes by my own friends is that a lot of people who overemphasize the question of imperialism on a day like this or on a week like this, unfortunately, unwittingly, make the Syrian people invisible, as if they are not important and only global power politics is. And that is something that I would like to caution against.

Despite the fact that, yes, we can analyze that what has just happened is a triumph for global power, like the United States, for imperial designs, for conservative Arab states in the region, for normalizers in the region, and certainly for Israel or anyone who would like to weaken any sort of resistance — forget even Iran and Hezbollah — in the region to these kinds of plans that are not just about land theft and political domination, but also about economic plans and prescriptions that will disempower the working classes in the region and continue to do so.

AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk more about HTS and whether you believe it will be one of the leading partners in a new Syria, its background, its running of Idlib, how Idlib, that whole area, was run?

BASSAM HADDAD: I mean, honestly, HTS, first of all, wasn’t in complete control of Idlib. It was the dominant power in Idlib. There are various groups in Idlib that were actually also somewhat powerful. HTS has been able to govern, for the most part.

It is not likely that HTS will ever singularly rule Syria. This is something on which there is regional and international consensus, if not even domestic consensus. Despite everything that we have seen, Syrian society is among the most secular of Arab societies. And even if affinity with conservatism in Islam has grown considerably in the past few years or decades or even more, there is no appetite for what HTS has been advocating for, including its recent — recent as in in the past several years or in 2014, '15, ’16 — a sort of discourse that is exclusionary. Now it says it's repudiating this discourse. Now it’s actually trying to make sure that its forces do not repress, although what we have seen in many parts of Syria are various forms of exclusion, destruction of alcohol stores, burning of Christmas trees and things of the sort, that supposedly HTS has repudiated and tried to correct the path. This new vision or approach of HTS is interesting. It’s probably also coordinated with those who gave it the carte blanche to move forward. In all cases, the HTS is not the kind of apple pie that — well, in Syria, it won’t be apple pie, it’ll be knafeh — that Syrians are looking for.

And in the very, very near future, as the new government is established, as the new military formula is formed and reformed, we will discover that there will be attempts to broaden the coalition and potentially also avoid the horrible mistake that the United States did after its fraudulent and brutal invasion of Iraq in 2003, which is to completely dismantle the state, the ruling party, the army and so on, because that had created the kind of chaos that actually ended up being counterproductive for the invading power and beyond. So, I think it will be a different path than we have seen in Iraq. It will also be a more difficult path, because Syria does not possess the kind of resources like Iraq’s oil at least, or part of it, because it’s not all within the control of the government right now.

So, Syria will have an even more challenging future, economically, socioeconomically and politically. And what I fear is that within a short period, Syria will be off the news, and we will see what I was talking about earlier, the analytical framework of what that means to the region, quite soon actually, as developments take place.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, Bassam Haddad, we want to thank you for being with us. Of course, we’re going to continue to follow this, founding director of the Middle East and Islamic Studies Program at George Mason University. We will link to your work at democracynow.org.

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“Remarkable Moment”: After Fleeing Syria, “For Sama” Director Waad Al-Kateab Celebrates End of Assad
by Amy Goodman
DemocracyNow
December 09, 2024
https://www.democracynow.org/2024/12/9/ ... transcript

“Whatever’s coming next, I don’t believe at all that [it] would be worse than what we’ve been through, what we lived through,” says Syrian activist and filmmaker Waad Al-Kateab as she celebrates the fall of Bashar al-Assad’s dictatorship to Syrian opposition groups. Al-Kateab, who was forced to flee her hometown of Aleppo with her family in 2016 and now resides in the United Kingdom, says the end of Assad’s rule has reignited the “dream of a free Syria.” Her Oscar-nominated documentary film For Sama, released in 2019, offered a rare glimpse into Syria’s civil war. The devastating personal account was filmed over the course of five years during the uprising in Aleppo and is dedicated to Al-Kateab’s daughter Sama.

Transcript

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman, as we continue to look at the fall of the Assad regime with activist and award-winning filmmaker Waad Al-Kateab. She was forcibly displaced from her hometown of Aleppo with her family in 2016. Her Oscar-nominated film For Sama, released in 2019, offered a rare glimpse into Syria’s civil war. The devastating account was filmed over the course of five years, starting in 2011 during the uprising in Aleppo. Amidst airstrikes and attacks on hospitals, Waad falls in love with one of the last remaining doctors in Aleppo, gets married, has a baby girl Sama, to whom the film is dedicated. When protests against the regime of President Bashar al-Assad first began in 2011, she was a young economics student who began filming on a cellphone. This is a clip from For Sama.

WAAD AL-KATEAB: [translated] Sama, things have got so bad now. Your dad can’t leave the hospital, so we live here now. This is our room. Behind those pictures are sandbags to protect from shelling.

Yes, I’m coming.

We do our best to make it feel like home.

AMY GOODMAN: The sound of a bomb. We now go to London, where we’re joined by Waad Al-Kateab, Syrian filmmaker, activist, co-founder of Action For Sama.

Your thoughts today? As we listen to the bomb exploding as you’re with your baby, tell us where that was in Aleppo and what your hopes are for the future, Waad?

WAAD AL-KATEAB: Yeah. Thank you so much for having me. And just really, I don’t have maybe the right words really to explain. I’ll do my best. Sorry.

But, like, for years, for these last 13 years, I don’t think any Syrian have seen the light at the end of the tunnel. There was something, it was keeping us moving forward, keeping us fighting. And we just, like, didn’t want to lose. And, you know, today, what happened, and this feeling today is just something. I’m over the moon, in one second, happy, dancing, laughing, and then so much crying and pain and grief and mourning, I think. It’s just — I’m so happy and grateful for where we are today.

AMY GOODMAN: And can you talk about what hope you have for the future, how you see a new Syria emerging, and who will be the players, and how people like you, an activist deeply involved with Syria, though you left, forced out of Aleppo, what, like eight years ago, what your plans are? Will you return?

WAAD AL-KATEAB: Yeah, I mean, since the Syrian revolution started in 2011, that was the time when I and so many other Syrians have felt that we belong to this country, we can fight for this country, we can own our country. And, you know, today, we do have the same feeling exactly as 2011. This conversation about what’s going to happen next, who’s going to rule, how the government would look like, all of this conversation, we were thinking about that like 11 and like 13 years ago, as well. And the last five, six, seven years, I think it was just so much of no end and no hope, no justice.

And, you know, today, when we are looking at all of this, yes, there is concern. Yes, there is so much things to worry about. And there’s a huge work to be done. There’s a long path forward. But we can’t, like, forget or not acknowledge and not feel. And this is now a moment, a remarkable moment, in our history, in our life in Syria.

Whatever is coming next, I don’t believe at all that would be worse than what we’ve been through, what we lived through, this for 13 years of being sieged in our own cities, being bombed, being attacked, hospitals, schools, prisoners, people who are detained. Whatever this future would hold, you know, if we managed to go through this, if we are now on the other side — and we are — I don’t believe that whatever happened will be worse than what we’ve been through already.

AMY GOODMAN: Are you concerned now about the possibilities, for example, HTS, the leading the way for the overthrow of Assad; the leader of HTS, Julani, what he represents? How will everyday Syrians or Syrian civil society control the future?

WAAD AL-KATEAB: Yeah, I mean, there’s definitely concern, but they are coming on a long list of concern. For me, this is one thing which is definitely important and fair, but, again, there’s much more things to be looking at, especially today, which I think you mentioned that earlier on, when Israel, you know, at al-Jolan area and the bombing of some areas and stuff in Syria, the Turkish involvement, the U.S. involvement. Like, there’s so many players who are working on Syria. HTS is definitely one of these players.

And it is, like, what we see on the ground, and this is — I think it’s something, even for us, we’re still trying to process and understand. For years, you know, these statements, even when it’s like much less, different from how HTS think, it used to be only statements. It was not matching what was going on on the ground. Today, what we’ve seen in the last, like, 11, 12 days, it was just something so much different, in everything, not just the statements, and how this group and other groups who are — were leading this battle today are thinking, but also on the ground. We all have connection there, and we’ve heard from so many people. We’re looking at all the footage that’s coming out. We did already set up, like, groups where we are organizing what’s going on in the new liberated cities. And what we are hearing from people on the ground are very much similar to what we have seen in the statements.

AMY GOODMAN: Finally, let me ask you —

WAAD AL-KATEAB: I have so much hope —

AMY GOODMAN: The voices of Syrian women are so often underrepresented. Your journey from student activist to award-winning filmmaker has been extraordinary. How do you see your role fitting into the future as a storyteller and an advocate? We have 30 seconds.

WAAD AL-KATEAB: Yeah, I think we’ve seen this dream of free Syria like 13 years ago, and we thought at some point this will never be happening. Today, it is happening. It’s real. We have so much work to be done. We have so much lobbying within our community. You know, like, the Syrian people were divided by the Syrian regime for years, and now is the time to live together, to move forward, to think together, to see this future that’s coming together. And this is now the reality of the situation. So, yes, so much hope, so much amazing feeling, and our hearts still with everyone who’s still waiting for their beloved ones who they were disappeared in Assad’s prisons for so many years.

AMY GOODMAN: And how old is your daughter today?

WAAD AL-KATEAB: My daughter now is 9, and my second daughter is 7.

AMY GOODMAN: Waad Al-Kateab, I thank you so much for being with us, award-winning Syrian filmmaker, her film, For Sama. This is Democracy Now! I’m Amy Goodman.

[admin]

Headlines
by Amy Goodman
DemocracyNow
December 10, 2024
https://www.democracynow.org/2024/12/10/headlines

Israel Launches Massive Airstrikes Across Syria Following Assad’s Ouster
Dec 10, 2024

Israel’s military has launched a wide-scale assault on Syria after the fall of Bashar al-Assad’s regime, bombing military sites, weapons warehouses, airports and army air bases in cities and provinces across Syria, including the capital, Damascus. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights reports in just the two days, Israel has carried out some 340 airstrikes. Meanwhile, the governments of Iraq, Iran, Saudi Arabia and Qatar have condemned Israel’s seizure of more land in the Israeli-occupied Syrian Golan Heights, saying it violates a 1974 ceasefire. Israel seized the Golan Heights in 1967 and later annexed the region. On Monday, the armed groups who toppled Syria’s longtime authoritarian President Bashar al-Assad said a Syrian transitional authority would be headed by Mohammed al-Bashir, an engineer who served as the fifth prime minister of the self-declared Syrian Salvation Government. We’ll have more on Syria after headlines.

As European Nations Freeze Asylum Applications, Austria Will Begin Deporting Syrian Refugees
Dec 10, 2024

The government of Austria says it will begin deporting Syrian refugees following the revolution that toppled Bashar al-Assad’s regime. About 100,000 Syrians have resettled in Austria in the 13 years since Syria’s civil war erupted. Meanwhile, the governments of Belgium, France, Greece, Germany and the United Kingdom said they would pause applications for asylum by Syrians. More than 14 million people have fled Syria since 2011. The largest share of refugees — about 3 million — live in Turkey. On Monday, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan ordered the reopening of two border crossings in southern Turkey, where hundreds of refugees queued up to return to Syria.

Israeli Massacres Across Gaza Target Flour Line, Wipe Al-Kahlout Family Off Civil Registry
Dec 10, 2024

In news from Gaza, multiple massacres carried out by Israeli forces across the war-torn Palestinian territory killed dozens of people since Monday, many of them children. These included an Israeli air attack on a flour distribution line in southern Rafah and strikes on central Gaza’s Nuseirat camp. In northern Beit Hanoun, separate Israeli strikes killed 25 people belonging to two households of the Al-Kahlout family, wiping the prominent Gaza family entirely from the civil registry.

Israel is also continuing its deadly assault on Gaza’s beleaguered hospitals. Dr. Marwan al-Sultan, director of Indonesian Hospital in northern Gaza, called on international actors to help ensure the safety of health facilities after Israeli attacks injured patients and destroyed parts of the hospital.

Israeli Airstrike Kills 2 West Bank Palestinians in Tubas; Israeli Army Makes Arrests Amid Ongoing Raids
Dec 10, 2024

In the occupied West Bank, at least two Palestinians were killed in an Israeli airstrike on the city of Tubas Monday. The victims were 26 and 32 years old. The attack came about a week after Palestinian authorities reported Israeli soldiers besieged the Tubas Hospital, assaulting and arresting medical staff and patients.

Meanwhile, the Israeli army detained at least 16 Palestinians during raids across the occupied West Bank Monday. Israeli forces have arrested over 12,000 Palestinians in the West Bank since last October.

This all comes as the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem has released a new report detailing the gruesome abuse of Palestinians by Israeli soldiers in the city of Hebron. B’Tselem documented the testimonies of over 20 Palestinians, one as young as 14 years old, who described being beaten, sexually assaulted and, in one case, even being stabbed by Israeli soldiers. We’ll have more on this report later in the broadcast.

Benjamin Netanyahu Takes the Stand in Delayed Corruption Trial
Dec 10, 2024

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu returned to a courtroom in Jerusalem today to face multiple charges of corruption, fraud, breach of the public trust and bribery. All three trials have been postponed on multiple occasions, first due to the COVID-19 pandemic and later as Netanyahu led Israel’s devastating assault on Gaza. In one case, Netanyahu is accused of enacting regulatory decisions worth hundreds of millions of dollars to the owner of an online news site in exchange for a promise to drop negative stories about Netanyahu. In another case, Netanyahu is accused of accepting champagne, cigars and other gifts from two wealthy businessmen in exchange for political favors.

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“Politics Is Finally Possible”: After Surprise Fall of Assad in Protracted Civil War, What’s Next?
by Amy Goodman
DemocracyNow
December 10, 2024
https://www.democracynow.org/2024/12/10 ... transcript

As Syrians celebrate the fall of the Assad regime after more than five decades of iron rule, many are grappling with the enormity of what has happened to their country, with nearly 14 years of war leaving much of the country in ruins, killing over 350,000 people and displacing 14 million more. Meanwhile, foreign powers, including Israel, Turkey and the United States, have carried out strikes across parts of the country, and Israel has invaded and occupied additional land in the Golan Heights. For more on the monumental changes underway, we speak with Syrian American political economist Omar Dahi, the director of the Security in Context research network, who has been involved in several peace-building initiatives since the start of the conflict in 2011. He says many Syrians have “mixed emotions” about this moment, celebrating the end of Assad while mourning the immense human cost of the war and confronting the difficult road ahead to rebuild the country. “Politics is finally possible,” Dahi says.

Transcript

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: We begin today’s show with Syria and the aftermath of the historic collapse of the Assad regime. Israeli forces are continuing to attack key military sites, airports and army air bases in cities across Syria, including the capital Damascus. In just the last 48 hours, Israel has carried out 340 airstrikes, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights. A resident from Qamishli in northeastern Syria described the strikes that took place Monday night.

ABDEL RAHMAN MOHAMED: [translated] The strikes happened at night. We went out after hearing the sounds, and we saw a fire there. Then we realized that Israel struck these locations. We didn’t get a break from Turkey, and now Israel came. Israel has been striking the area for a while now.

AMY GOODMAN: Turkey and the United States have also continued to strike targets in Syria since the lightning offensive led by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, or HTS.

In a message posted to Telegram Tuesday, the rebel commander Ahmed al-Sharaa vowed to hold senior officials in the Assad regime accountable for, quote, “torturing the Syrian people,” unquote.

As different factions of armed groups vie for power and their international backers defend their interests, Syrians are grappling with the enormity of what has happened to their country and what comes next.

In 13 years of war, over 350,000 people have been killed, according to the United Nations, over 14 million displaced. President Bashar al-Assad has now fled to Russia, where he’s been granted political asylum with his family. Syrians are adjusting to the new reality of life after 50 years of rule by the Assad family, Hafez al-Assad and his son Bashar.

MAHMOUD HAYJAR: [translated] Today we don’t give our joy to anyone. We have been waiting for this day for 50 years. All the people were silenced and could not speak out because of this tyranny. Today we thank and ask God to reward everyone who contributed to this day, the day of liberation. We were living in a big prison, a big prison that was Syria. It’s been 50 years during which we couldn’t speak, nor express ourselves, nor express our worries. Anyone who spoke out was detained in prisons, as you saw in Sednaya.

AMY GOODMAN: For more on the dramatic changes in Syria, we’re joined by Omar Dahi, Syrian American economics professor at Hampshire College, director of the Security in Context research network, where he focuses on political economy in Syria and the social and economic consequences of the war. He was born and raised in Syria and involved in several peace-building initiatives since the conflict began. Professor Omar Dahi joins us now from Amherst, Massachusetts.

Professor, welcome to Democracy Now! First, your response to Assad’s departure, him fleeing with his family to Russia, and what this means for Syria?

OMAR DAHI: Hi, Amy. Thank you so much for having me.

Yeah, I’ve been watching, like many others from outside the country, in shock and disbelief in this past two weeks, and with mixed emotions in many ways. First, shock and disbelief at the collapse of the Syrian regime and the way it happened after 13 or more years of conflict, where there were frontlines that were frozen for the past several years, but suddenly they disappeared. Of course, incredible joy at the personal level and also for millions of Syrians who were directly hurt by the regime, both through the violence of the war, the displacement, the killings and tortures that were taking place, as well as previously, before the war.

It’s been incredible watching the scenes of the liberation of prisoners from prisons like Sednaya, which have been referred to, I think correctly, as “human slaughterhouses.” It’s been incredibly moving to see people celebrating in the streets, people saying that they can finally go home, they can finally speak their mind. So, all that has been really a joy to watch and witness as we kind of see the sequence of events unfold with the — you know, Bashar al-Assad fleeing to Russia.

Thankfully, this process, which we can talk more about, happened, finally, with as minimal bloodshed as possible, even though there was plenty of bloodshed over the past years. But in the way it had happened, it actually provided a possibility for positive change, at least at the moment.

But this joy is also tempered with lots of other feelings, as well, primarily the costs at which this happened. And I would say the costs are the human costs, that you outlined, which may be even more in terms of the people killed. Entire generations have been destroyed. There is a generation of Syrians that grew up in displacement, in refugee camps, the destruction that happened to the country. All the human cost and the physical cost, I think, it’s hard to say that it was not too high. It’s impossible to say that it was OK that all this happened.

There are other costs, of course. The other cost is the loss of sovereignty of Syria, which has been a process ongoing for 10 years. Syria was occupied and invaded by the United States, by Turkey, on the opposition side. And on the Syrian government side, it drew on its allies to defend itself, Russia and Iran, which came to place the regime in a position of dependency. So, there were multiple foreign types of occupations in the country, which we see what is happening now in the Israeli airstrikes as a continuation of that loss of sovereignty. And I think this is something that Syrians have to grapple with.

There are other costs of the war, as well. There are the empowerment of actors that are not acceptable to a wide variety of Syrian society. Not that there isn’t some backing for them, particularly because they have a certain legitimacy for many Syrians because they fought the government. But the current government in power or the current, you know, HTS is not acceptable to large parts of Syrian society, and there’s already warnings that it’s acting as a de facto power, and people are warning against that.

And, of course, there’s the final thing, which is that this is tempered by the regional context, which is the ongoing Israeli genocide in Palestine that is empowered by the U.S. And we’ve seen over the past couple days a complete destruction of what was remaining of Syrian Army military assets by Israel, with complete impunity.

So, all of those, we’re trying to take all those contradictions together — joy for the people, joy for the moment that many millions had dreamed of, which is the departure of the Assad family from power, and the feeling that politics is finally possible in Syria. Despite all these contradictions, there is a chance for political life to resume. There’s a chance for advocacy for a collectively better future. And this is something that we all have to try and hold and support.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Professor, I’m wondering if you could talk briefly about your own family’s history. In the 1990s, your father helped smuggle out names of political prisoners, many of them accused of belonging to the League of Communist Labor, yet the Ba’athist party and the government of your country often talked about being socialist.

OMAR DAHI: Yeah, this was a kind of a spur-of-the-moment post that I did on social media to share these documents that I received after my father passed away three or four years ago. And basically, my father was a lawyer and was among two or three or maybe four lawyers who stepped up in the 1990s to defend a large group of political prisoners, many of them communists, many of them who were accused of being members of the Muslim Brotherhood. They were basically detained without a trial — or not even just a trial, but without a formal charge. They were accused of belonging to this outlawed party of Communist Labor, which was accused by the government of mounting an insurrection against it in the late '70s and ’80s. So, most of those who were detained were detained in the 1980s. They had been disappeared. Their families didn't know anything about them. Most people didn’t know — like many of the people we’re discovering in Sednaya prison today, were not aware whether they were dead or alive or their whereabouts.

So, my father would basically meet with some of those prisoners, when allowed to do so. And really, it was the courage of the prisoners to assemble a lot of this data, to write down their names, their dates of birth, their professions, where they were — when they were arrested, what’s their charge, where they were being held — mostly, in this case, in Sednaya prison — and also if they were in — you know, they needed medical attention, they were traumatized or they were injured in some way.

And I asked my dad why he did this, actually, because, you know, there was no sense that these prisoners would be freed. So, most of them ended up being put on trial en masse and convicted. So, he told me that he had no expectation of justice at that time, but that he felt it was necessary to do it, to use any opening and any chance to expose the hypocrisy of the government, for the same reasons that you mentioned, that he didn’t expect them to actually be — you know, receive a fair trial, which they didn’t, but there has to be a chance to basically put the government’s declared principles against its actions and expose the government.

So, this was a historical document that I was kind of moved to share when the images of the prisoners who were being released from Sednaya. Most of those names in those documents have either, unfortunately, passed away or were released from the prison, so I didn’t expect that there would be some of those people actually there. But, yeah, that’s why I shared that.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Yeah, I wanted to ask you also — you mentioned the foreign presence in Syria. Hasn’t the country, effectively, during this civil war been already partitioned, with Turkish troops creating a buffer zone in the north, the Israelis not only recently, in the past few days, entering Syrian territory, but conducting military operations in the territory previous to that, with the Kurds backed by the U.S., ISIS still controlling portions of territory, and the Russian bases in the country? Do you have any sense of the integrity of the country being reconstituted anytime soon?

OMAR DAHI: I don’t think so. I think it’s going to be a long-term struggle, and partly because of the reasons you mention, because this is something that has been happening for a decade, and there are kind of entrenched interests that have developed, not just in terms of a foreign occupation, but in terms of the connection of various parts of Syrian society and their ties to those countries in ways that they’ve come to basically be affiliated or allied with them. And this is reminiscent, for people who observe Syria, of the post-independence period in Syrian history, when Syria was a site of struggle by external powers because it was weak, it was politically divided, and various regional powers basically came to have significant influence in the country through Syrian political elites. This was transformed by the Assad family and the Ba’ath Party in ways that actually flipped this around, where Syria consolidated its power and projected its power, at least regionally. But it came at a price, I think, that was high and unsustainable, particularly for Syrian society.

Now this is actually completely shattered. And I think there’s going to be an attempt to rewrite the history of the Syrian conflict in ways that pin the blame completely on the Assad regime, which I don’t think is the case. I think they are primarily at fault for this, not just because of their governance, which was brutal and tyrannical and maintained an exclusive monopoly on power for decades, without recognizing any dissent, without recognizing any political opposition; not just because of their reaction to the uprising when it first started, where they completely closed down any meaningful political transition; but also because even after they won the war, they spent many years refusing any political initiative to reconcile, after they had, with the help of Russia and Iran, won the war, basically. So, the frontlines had been frozen for many years.

But all the other international actors also contributed to the destruction of the country. I think there were ways in which, you know, this fragmentation didn’t just imply an obvious loss of sovereignty in the abstract sense, but also destroyed the economy and fragmented the Syrian national economy. It created kind of perverse war economies in the country. And as you said, Israel has been bombing Syria for the past decade. This bombing escalates after the collapse of the government. They further invaded Syrian territory, and we saw the incursions and the devastation that took place in the last couple days.

AMY GOODMAN: If you can talk about who Mohammed al-Bashir is, the man who’s been appointed the temporary prime minister right now of Syria, and also HTS, its role, listed as a terrorist movement by the U.S., the EU, the U.K. and Turkey — the U.N. special envoy for Syria told the Financial Times that international powers seeking a peaceful transition in the country would have to consider lifting this designation — who Abu Mohammad al-Julani now — his birth name is Ahmed al-Sharaa — is?

OMAR DAHI: Yes. Well, I mean, I’m not an expert on Ahmed al-Sharaa’s personal history. Some of that has come out in recent days about his birth in Syria. He claims he was radicalized by the Palestinian intifada, and he joined al-Qaeda in Syria and Iraq.

And Hayat Tahrir al-Sham is basically a splinter group from al-Qaeda that had basically come — it was based in Iraq and then came back to Syria after the uprising started. And there was a period of time, which maybe your audience will remember, when Syria fragmented into various militias. And there was just as much infighting among those militias, among themselves, between the opposition groups, just as much as they were fighting the Syrian government. So, basically, groups similar to Hayat Tahrir al-Sham were fighting each other. And then there was a period of reconsolidation, particularly in the aftermath of the attack on ISIS, and the kind of permanent or the, you know, more or less, consolidation of Syria into various spheres of influence, with a U.S. presence and Kurdish-led political and military groups in the northeast, Turkish control in the northwest. And under the areas that were generally under Turkish influence, there were areas that were directly tied to Turkey and areas in which Turkey had influence, and this is the area that came to be consolidated by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham. So, they have a bloody history not just prior to the war, but actually during the war, with respect to even other opposition groups, and kind of, basically, you know, during the time of the rule in the province of Idlib.

Right now and during these past two weeks, there’s been a lot of positive signs in terms of the way they approached the collapse of the Syrian regime, the signs that were verbal, the signs that were actually in actions in terms of trying to protect all government institutions, all public institutions, despite the fact that there have been incidents of looting and sabotage in various ways, but at least they’ve been trying to speak of a national interest in some ways. That, of course, has to be put to the test. There’s already critiques of their rule, because they unilaterally imposed a transitional government on Syria, which most Syrians would reject as something that they don’t have the authority to do. It’s also happening in a context where, of course, Syria is still under economic sanctions, so you’ve had devastation from many years of the war, and you’ve had also devastation of Syrian society because of the crippling economic sanctions, primarily imposed by the U.S. and the European Union. So —

AMY GOODMAN: We just have 30 seconds.

OMAR DAHI: So, all of that is really going to be, basically, coming into play over the coming days, basically, and months. And we’ll see how the regional context basically influences what’s happening domestically.

AMY GOODMAN: We want to thank you so much for being with us. Of course, we’re going to continue to follow what happens with Syria. Omar Dahi, Syrian American economics professor at Hampshire College and director of the Security in Context research network.

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“Unleashed”: Report Details How Israeli Soldiers Brutalize West Bank Palestinians in Hebron
by Amy Goodman
DemocracyNow
December 10, 2024
https://www.democracynow.org/2024/12/10 ... transcript

A new report by the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem documents a shocking rise in harassment, detention and abuse of Palestinians in the occupied West Bank city of Hebron. The report includes testimony from 20 Palestinians who were attacked by soldiers in the city center of Hebron between May and August 2024, apparently chosen at random and detained for spurious or arbitrary reasons. The victims describe being punched, kicked and sexually abused, beaten with rifles, clubs or chairs, being whipped with a belt, having foul-smelling liquid poured on them, and, in one case, even being stabbed by Israeli soldiers. The violence in Hebron is part of a larger Israeli “war against the entire Palestinian people” and directly connected to the genocidal assault on Gaza, says B’Tselem international outreach director Sarit Michaeli. She says that given the dehumanization of Palestinians by top officials in Israel since October 7 of last year, “it’s not surprising that Israeli soldiers who listen to Israeli leaders will act in a way that reflects this dehumanization.” Michaeli adds that such abuses are often broadcast and celebrated. “None of this is being done in a secretive way. It’s all being done in broad daylight.”

Transcript

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González.

As Israeli raids continue across the occupied West Bank, we turn to a new report from the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem that details the gruesome abuse of Palestinians by Israeli soldiers in Hebron. B’Tselem documented the testimonies of over 20 Palestinians between May and August. They describe being punched, kicked, sexually abused, beaten with rifles, clubs or chairs, being whipped with a belt, having foul-smelling liquid poured on them, in one case, even being stabbed by Israeli soldiers.

One of the Palestinian teens B’Tselem spoke to is Mahmoud Ghanem, an 18-year-old engineering student attacked by five Israeli soldiers at a checkpoint in July. A warning to our audience: These testimonies are graphic.

MAHMOUD GHANEM: [translated] They dragged us to the jeep and made us kneel. I was still tied up. Then he blindfold me, grabbed me by the hair and banged my head against the jeep door three times, each harder than before. He hit me violently on my chest and stepped hard on my legs. Then he started punching me in the stomach. One of them grabbed me by the neck and pulled me up until I couldn’t breathe. The other punched me hard in the stomach. Then, while I was trying to catch my breath, he stepped on my testicles.

AMY GOODMAN: And this is the testimony of 52-year-old Yasser Abu Markhiyeh, who lives across from the Gilbert checkpoint in Hebron and is the director of the Ibrahim al-Khalil association in Tel Rumeidah, which is involved in cultural and educational projects in the occupied West Bank. He was questioned, detained and beaten by Israeli soldiers in July.

YASSER ABU MARKHIYEH: [translated] They treated me barbarically and arrested me for no reason. I was in pain and suffered beating, humiliation and mental torture. I was very confused and scared. … When I got to the Gilbert checkpoint by my house, an Israeli soldier demanded my ID card, and I handed it over. He demanded the phone, too, and I handed it over. Then he said, “You’re making a lot of trouble. You gave an interview on Al Jazeera.” And I said, “That’s right. I did.” He tied my hands and ordered me to sit on the ground. The four soldiers from the military post arrived. They blindfolded me, and before they took me away, they hit me on the head and kicked me.

AMY GOODMAN: Those are some of the disturbing testimonies included in B’Tselem’s new report titled “Unleashed: Abuse of Palestinians by Israeli Soldiers in the Center of Hebron.”

Since launching its war on Gaza last October, Israel has intensified attacks across the occupied West Bank, carrying out near-daily raids that have led to the arrest of some 12,000 Palestinians.

For more, we go to Tel Aviv, where we’re joined by Sarit Michaeli, the international outreach director for the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem.

Sarit, welcome back to Democracy Now! We are seeing images of thousands fleeing Syrian prisons, and hearing the stories of hell inside. You, at the same time, have come out with this report on what’s happening to Palestinian prisoners in Hebron. Describe what shocked you most in what you are learning.

SARIT MICHAELI: I mean, thank you very much, Amy and Juan. It’s good to be with you.

And I think the most fundamental issue is that Israel claims to be a different society to Syria, right? Israel claims to be a democracy. We would argue that this is not the case. But in terms of the standards we have to set, these are just absolutely different standards to what we would expect.

In terms of what we discovered in this report, I think, on some levels, in a sense, the obvious. We’ve seen the increase, the massive increase, in the violence that Israel has inflicted on Palestinians since Hamas’s criminal actions, criminal attack on October 7th, in the slaughter in Gaza, and also in the dehumanization discourse inside Israel. And therefore, on many levels, it’s not surprising that Israeli soldiers who listen to Israeli leaders will act in a way that reflects this dehumanization.

But there is also something extremely shocking about this, because the violence that we documented, it was new, not because there hasn’t been violence by soldiers against Palestinians in the West Bank and in the city of Hebron before, but the scope of it, the scale of it, the fact that it was done in broad daylight, the fact that it was almost random in terms of the choice of victim. It wasn’t people being beaten up for something they allegedly did, like throwing stones or being rude. It was Palestinians being beaten up and facing severe abuse merely for being Palestinians. In some way, it’s as if the soldiers were just revenging Hamas’s attack and kind of imposing this vengeance on all Palestinians. They were selected almost at random, and this was done broadly. It’s very clear that everyone was aware that this was being done.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Sarit, very few, according to your report, of the people who were initially detained were even charged with any offense?

SARIT MICHAELI: I think this is exactly the point. It’s not as if Palestinians [sic] arrested someone, had an actual, realistic allegation against them, whether that’s true or not, and then proceeded to beat them up. Soldiers approached Palestinians who were going about their daily business. In some cases, they looked for some sort of so-called, quote-unquote, “excuse” to beat them up, right? So, if they had some sort of photo in their phone that the soldiers could interpret as being problematic from their perspective. Or in other cases, just the mere fact of walking down the street while Palestinian was enough to trigger this abuse. That’s why we talk about this as being quite arbitrary. The victims were selected just by — you know, for just going about their daily business.

Additionally, I think one of the other really relatively new things or the new developments about what we see on the ground is that there were many threats of sexual violence. This is something I think we should be aware of, we should be mindful of, over the past year, you know, sexual — types of sexual violence and threats, in our context.

Additionally, I think several of the witnesses reported that the soldiers were documenting these incidents, presumably to broadcast them then on social media or, in one case, to send to a fiancée, to friends. So, none of this is being done in a secretive way. It’s all being done in broad daylight.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And also, is Hebron unique in this situation, or is it emblematic of what is going on across the West Bank?

SARIT MICHAELI: So, Hebron is unique in the sense that it is the only Palestinian town or city in the West Bank where there is a constant military presence right in the city center because of the Israeli settlements that are based in the center of Hebron. So, because of that, there is always a constant contact. There’s an interface between Israeli soldiers and Palestinians in their daily lives. So, in that sense, Hebron is unique.

But we surmise, we think, and we’ve reached the conclusion that this level of violence would reflect not just the conduct of soldiers, of Israeli soldiers, and other members of the Israeli forces in Hebron city center, but that they are a much broader phenomenon. And as an Israeli organization that includes both Israelis and Palestinians, we look also at Israeli society and at what this indicates about the current moment in our society. And I think this is a really important point, the fact that these soldiers know what the spirit of the commander is. They’re not doing something of their own private initiative. They’re performing abuse that has been called for, has been incited for by Israeli leaders, by politicians, by Israeli media extensively over the past year.

AMY GOODMAN: Finally, Sarit Michaeli, so, you have close to 800 Palestinians dead on the West Bank since October 7th, killed by Israeli soldiers. You have — and settlers. You have 12,000 imprisoned. What are you calling for? What is B’Tselem calling for?

SARIT MICHAELI: Well, we have discussed in detail what we call the silent war that Israel is conducting in the West Bank. On some levels, it’s not totally silent. But this is what one of our witnesses really referred to it.

I think one of the main issues that B’Tselem has been addressing over this past year is the connection between our war against the entire Palestinian people primarily, what we, what my government essentially has been doing in Gaza, the mass killing of civilians, the utter destruction of Gaza, the devastating humanitarian disaster that our government has caused, together — the connection between this and violence and abuse by soldiers and the use of lethal force, very extreme and disproportionate use of lethal force in the West Bank.

These are all connected issues, and they can only be addressed with some level of accountability, not just for the crimes being perpetrated in the Gaza Strip, but also for these crimes, for these abuses. We know accountability isn’t going to come from within. The Israeli system is unwilling and unable to hold Israeli soldiers and Israeli forces accountable. On the contrary, what they are doing is the result of official incitement. And therefore, there has to be international accountability for this. And as we have always stated, the international community has to also act to hold Israeli policymakers accountable for these violations.

AMY GOODMAN: Sarit Michaeli, we want to thank you for being with us, with the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem. The new report, we’ll link to, “Unleashed: Abuse of Palestinians by Israeli Soldiers in the Center of Hebron.”

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Headlines
by Amy Goodman
DemocracyNow
December 11, 2024
https://www.democracynow.org/2024/12/11/headlines

Israel Declares “Sterile Zone” in Syria Amid Massive Bombing Campaign
Dec 11, 2024

Israel’s military has continued its massive bombing campaign of Syrian military targets, carrying out some 480 strikes within just 48 hours. Israeli defense chief Israel Katz said his forces had destroyed 15 naval vessels, anti-aircraft batteries and weapons factories and were working to create a so-called sterile zone in southern Syria.

Israel Katz: “Together with the prime minister, I instructed the IDF to establish a sterile defense zone against weapons and terror threats in southern Syria, in order to prevent the establishment and organization of terror in Syria and to prevent creating a situation that would be similar to what existed in Lebanon and Gaza before October 7th. We will not allow this. We will not allow threats against the state of Israel.”

On Tuesday, Syria’s ambassador to the United Nations called on the Security Council to act decisively to end the bombings, which he said targeted civilian and military infrastructure. The U.N.'s special envoy for Syria, Geir Pedersen, condemned Israel's assault.

Geir Pedersen: “We are continuing to see Israeli movements and bombardments into Syrian territory. This needs to stop. This is extremely important.”

Pedersen said the United Nations would consider removing the Syrian armed group HTS from a list of designated terrorist organizations, but only if it supports a government that is inclusive of all communities.

Syria’s Interim Leader Calls for Return of Millions of Refugees
Dec 11, 2024

On Tuesday, Syria’s new caretaker Prime Minister Mohammed al-Bashir met with members of Syria’s transitional government, pledging to bring back millions of refugees who fled Syria’s 13-year civil war and to keep Syria’s public services and institutions running after the ouster of Bashar al-Assad.

Meanwhile, human rights groups have confirmed the killing of one of Syria’s most prominent opposition activists. The body of Mazen al-Hamada was discovered inside the notorious Sednaya prison near Damascus alongside about 40 others in the prison morgue who also showed signs of torture.

Israeli Attacks Across Gaza Kill Dozens, Including Children
Dec 11, 2024

Israel has continued its relentless attacks across northern and central Gaza, killing dozens of people, including women and children, in the last day. Earlier today, Israeli forces bombed a residential building in Beit Lahia where displaced families were taking shelter, killing at least 20 people. At least seven Palestinians, all members of the same family, were killed in a separate Israeli attack on a house in the Nuseirat camp. People who lost loved ones were seen sitting and crying amid the destruction, with some victims still trapped under the rubble. This is one of the survivors, Issam al-Hossary.

Issam al-Hossary: “We were sleeping. We didn’t hear the sound of the missile at all. Suddenly, I found myself waking up like this, and I saw the rubble all over me and the children. I found myself trying to remove the rubble and pull out the children, and they were suffocating. I got out of the tent, and as I stepped outside, I saw the people — bodies everywhere, blood and limbs scattered among the trees.”

This all comes as Palestinian health authorities warn dozens of wounded patients receiving care at the Indonesian Hospital in northern Gaza are at risk of dying due to a lack of water and food.

Israel’s Yoav Gallant Welcomed to White House Despite ICC Arrest Warrant for Crimes Against Humanity
Dec 11, 2024

Israel’s former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant has met with President Biden’s special envoy for the Middle East and North Africa, Brett McGurk, at the White House. Their meeting on Tuesday came just weeks after the International Criminal Court in The Hague issued an arrest warrant against Gallant for crimes against humanity and war crimes committed in Gaza. On Monday evening, the prominent Adas Israel synagogue in Washington, D.C., canceled a planned event featuring Gallant amid protests.

Meanwhile, Republican leaders have selected Brian Mast to lead the House Committee on Foreign Affairs. Mast has previously compared Palestinians to Nazis, has said Palestinian civilians “are not innocent,” and called on Israel to destroy more infrastructure in Gaza.

[admin]

Headlines
by Amy Goodman
DemocracyNow
December 12, 2024
https://www.democracynow.org/2024/12/12/headlines

Israel Bombs Syria’s Ports; Turkish-Backed Rebels Seize Territory Held by Kurdish Militias
Dec 12, 2024

Israeli forces are continuing a large-scale bombing campaign of Syrian targets following the ouster of Bashar al-Assad, attacking the Port of Latakia and a weapons storehouse in Tartus. Israeli troops have pushed deeper into the occupied Golan Heights and a demilitarized buffer zone established by the United Nations a half-century ago.

In northern Syria, fighters with the Turkish-backed Syrian National Army have seized more areas, including the city of Deir ez-Zor, amid clashes with U.S.-backed, Kurdish-led militias. Elsewhere, Turkey’s intelligence agency bombed a convoy of trucks driven by Kurdish fighters who had seized heavy weapons and ammunition abandoned by Syria’s military. Fighting in northern Syria has displaced more than 100,000 people.

U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken has arrived in Jordan for emergency talks on Syria. He heads to Turkey next.

Families of Syria’s Disappeared Search for Loved Ones in Sednaya Prison
Dec 12, 2024

In northern Syria’s Latakia region, opposition fighters set fire to the tomb of Hafez al-Assad, Syria’s longtime authoritarian leader and father of ousted President Bashar al-Assad.

Tens of thousands of Syrians are gathering in Damascus today to attend the funeral of opposition activist Mazen al-Hamada, whose body was discovered in a morgue of the notorious Sednaya prison, showing signs of torture. On Tuesday, families of disappeared prisoners continued searching Sednaya for signs of their long-lost loved ones who were locked up under Assad’s brutal regime.

Hayat al-Turki: “I will show you the photo of my missing brother. It’s been 14 years. This is his photo. I don’t know what he looks like, if I find him. I don’t know what he looks like, because I am seeing the photos of prisoners getting out. They are like skeletons. But this is his photo, if anyone has seen him, can know anything about him or can help us. He is one of thousands of prisoners who are missing. I am asking for everyone, not only my brother, uncle, cousin and relatives.”

In Damascus, the leader of the armed group HTS, Abu Mohammad al-Julani, has vowed to shut down Assad’s notorious prisons, including Sednaya, and to dissolve Assad’s security forces. After headlines, we’ll get the latest on Syria.

Israel Kills Dozens of Palestinians in Strikes Across Gaza Strip, Incl. Humanitarian Workers
Dec 12, 2024

In Gaza, an Israeli drone strike on a humanitarian aid convoy west of Khan Younis has killed at least 13 people and injured dozens of others. It’s the latest Israeli attack on relief workers, after the U.N. reported last month that Israel has killed at least 333 humanitarian personnel since October 7, 2023.

The Palestinian news agency Wafa reports other Israeli attacks over the past 24 hours killed seven people, including children, in a bombing of a residential building in Gaza City; another 15 Palestinians were killed when Israel bombed a home west of the Nuseirat refugee camp.

Israeli Sniper Kills Kamal Adwan Surgeon Dr. Saeed Jouda
Dec 12, 2024

Palestinian orthopedic surgeon Dr. Saeed Jouda has died after he was shot by an Israeli sniper in northern Gaza. Dr. Jouda had left retirement to treat patients at the besieged Kamal Adwan Hospital, which has endured weeks of bombings and direct attacks on its staff.

UNGA Overwhelmingly Votes for Gaza Ceasefire; WSJ: Hamas Agrees to 2 Key Israeli Ceasefire Demands
Dec 12, 2024

On Wednesday, the United Nations General Assembly voted overwhelmingly in favor of a resolution calling for an immediate and unconditional ceasefire in Gaza. Just seven countries joined the United States and Israel in voting against the resolution.

Meanwhile, The Wall Street Journal reports that Hamas has agreed to two of Israel’s key demands for a ceasefire in Gaza. For the first time, Hamas has revealed a list of hostages it holds in Gaza, and Hamas has reportedly agreed to a deal that would allow Israeli forces to remain in Gaza temporarily when the fighting stops.

Israeli Forces Withdraw from Southern Lebanese Town as Israel’s Violations of Truce Continue
Dec 12, 2024

The U.S. military said Israeli forces completed their first withdrawal from Al-Khiyam in southern Lebanon as part of a ceasefire agreement reached at the end of November. Israel has continuously violated the truce, including on Wednesday, when its forces struck several southern Lebanese towns, killing at least five people, according to Lebanon’s Health Ministry.

U.N. Experts Urge World to Hold Israel Accountable, Call on U.S. and Germany to Halt Arms Supplies
Dec 12, 2024

At the Geneva U.N. headquarters, a panel of experts held a news conference and called for a halt to direct arms transfers to Israel, and a review of Israel’s U.N. membership over its genocide in Gaza. This is U.N. special rapporteur Ben Saul.

Ben Saul: “If lawlessness on this scale and of this extremity has no consequences, then it sends a signal to everybody else that you can behave in the same way, and the whole system begins to break down. … Germany and the United States supply 99% of the weapons exported to Israel. They could stop this conflict overnight if they stopped the weapons that kill the Palestinians.”

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After Fall of Assad, “Struggle from Below” Needed to Build a Free & Democratic Syria
by Amy Goodman
DemocracyNow
December 12, 2024

The fall of the Assad regime in Syria continues to reshape the country and the greater Middle East. In Damascus, leaders of the armed group HTS have retained most services of the civilian government but vowed to dissolve Assad’s security forces and shut down Assad’s notorious prisons. “People have this sense of regained freedom,” says Syrian architect and writer Marwa al-Sabouni in Homs. Still, she warns oppression in the country has left the populace weakened and vulnerable. “Syria is up for grabs now. … We are completely disarmed.” In northeast Syria, more than 100,000 people have been displaced due to fighting between Turkish-backed forces and U.S.-backed Kurdish forces. Israel continues to seize more land in the Golan Heights and has carried out over 480 airstrikes on Syria since Sunday. Swiss Syrian left-wing activist and scholar Joseph Daher explains how civil society is attempting to rebuild democracy through “struggle from below,” and how that could unleash popular support for Palestine. “Israel wanted a weak Assad and is not happy with the fall of this regime,” says Daher. “A democratization process in the Middle East is the biggest threat for Israel.”

Transcript

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: We begin today’s show looking at the toppling of the Assad regime in Syria and how it could reshape the Middle East.

U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken has arrived in Jordan for emergency talks on Syria. He heads to Turkey next.

This comes as celebrations continue in Syria over the fall of Bashar al-Assad, but many are concerned about what might happen next.

In northeast Syria, more than 100,000 people have been displaced due to fighting between Turkish-backed forces and U.S.-backed Kurdish forces. Israel has carried out over 480 airstrikes on Syria since Sunday. Israeli troops have also seized part of the Syrian Golan Heights.

In Geneva, the U.N. special rapporteur on human rights, Ben Saul, criticized Israel’s actions in Syria.

BEN SAUL: There is absolutely no basis under international law to preventively or preemptively disarm a country you don’t like. I mean, if that were the case, it would be a recipe for global chaos, because lots of countries have adversaries they would like to see without weapons. This is completely lawless, that there is absolutely no basis in international law to do it. But it’s a continuation of what Israel has been doing in Syria for at least a decade.

AMY GOODMAN: Meanwhile, in Damascus, the head of the armed group HTS that led the coalition against Assad has vowed to dissolve Assad’s security forces and shut down his notorious prisons, including Sednaya, which has been described as a “human slaughterhouse.”

We begin today’s show with two guests. Joseph Daher, a Swiss Syrian left-wing activist and scholar, author of Hezbollah: The Political Economy of the Party of God, as well as Syria After the Uprisings: The Political Economy of State Resilience, he’s in Geneva, Switzerland. And in Homs, Syria, we’re joined by Marwa al-Sabouni, award-winning Syrian architect, urban thinker and writer, author of two internationally acclaimed books, The Battle for Home and Building for Hope.

We welcome you both to Democracy Now! Marwa, let’s begin with you in Homs. Just describe the scene there after the fall of Assad.

MARWA AL-SABOUNI: Well, thank you for having me, Amy.

The general atmosphere is an atmosphere of relief, of joy, of celebration, like you mentioned in your report. But also there’s this background of apprehension, of uncertainty, of observing what — the strikes that Israel has been conducting since the first moment of the Assad’s fall.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: And, Marwa, could you talk about your piece for Middle East Eye? You wrote, “Syrians have flown the cage. We must not lose our freedom again.” If you could elaborate on the points you make in the piece?

MARWA AL-SABOUNI: Well, primarily, we were, for now over 50 years, under one oppressional regime that, you know, was denying Syrians from all liberties. And now with the lift of this regime, people have this sense of regained freedom.

But like I mentioned in the piece, there are a number of dangers around us, mainly by the foreign powers, which are looking at the map of Syria, proposing division, also planning the future of Syria, mostly by the vacuum and the absence of Syrians from the political scene due to the oppressional regime.

You have something that is rarely on the news, that is the control of the U.S. over the petrol in the eastern part of Syria, where the Kurdish forces, backed by the U.S., do the guarding effort for that. And for the past 14 years, even under the Assad regime, we were denied as Syrian citizens from access to fuel, from access to electricity. We don’t have electricity. Imagine living, you know, and having two hours of electricity within the 24 hours. So, it’s each six hours, you had half an hour of electricity. And imagine how this will reflect on the economy, on health sector, on production and all of that. Also you don’t have heating. You don’t have fuel for commuting. So, each car has access to only 20 liters of fuel every 15 days. So, the U.S., you know, just grabbed this piece of resource and put its hand, while the regime was here, and continues to do that until now.

And so, mainly, Syria is up for grabs now. You have all those powers who can have access to those resources. And now, like your report mentioned, we are completely disarmed. We are in a sitting duck position. And God knows what could happen to the Syrians afterwards.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: So, I’d like to bring in Joseph Daher into the conversation. If you could respond to what Marwa said? You’ve followed Syrian politics for decades. You wrote a book called Syria After the Uprisings: The Political Economy of State Resilience. Your response to, you know, first of all, the fall of the Assad regime, what you see happening in Syria, the celebrations across the country, Assad statues being toppled and so on, Hafez al-Assad’s tomb being burned? Your response to what’s happened, and then, also, the role of foreign powers in his fall? In particular, you’ve focused on Turkey. Joseph?

JOSEPH DAHER: Thank you. Good morning.

I think the key issues to understand, first of all, following the overthrow of the regime, is how little and small the popular base of the regime was. It fell just like a house of cards. It was weakened structurally, politically, militarily, economically, and was basically surviving because of the assistance of Russia and Iran. And when these two forces were themselves weakened, this allowed the opportunity for the fall of this regime, which had, first of all, initially, a military dynamic which remained dominant, but, as we can see throughout the process, people started to go out in the street, attack symbols of the regime. And we can see in the past few days a large majority of the Syrian people were opposed to this regime, in all its sects, ethnicities. We saw statues being brought down in Kurdish-majority inhabited areas, but also in the coastal areas, Damascus, Aleppo, Suwayda.

So, this is the first thing to say, that for the first time in decades, Syrians have a hope for the future, to build a more equal, democratic, social society. Obviously, there is fear, but fear was existing for the past five decades. But at least there’s an opportunity to be seized.

With this opportunity to be seized, a lot of challenges exist. First of all, I think, internally, the groups, the armed opposition groups, such as Hayat Tahrir al-Sham or the Syrian National Army, are far from being democratic. Quite the opposite, they’ve shown the authoritarian behavior, policies in the past. Therefore, there will be a need to rebuild, you know, democratic movement, new popular organizations, trade unions, feminist organizations, and to rebuild basically struggle from below, to build the possibility of an alternative political structure, you know, social structure.

Again, there’s another kind of threat. There’s also the ethnic division between Arabs and Kurds that must be tackled. It must be tackled. And unfortunately, Turkey is playing a very negative role by pushing, you know, SNA forces, Syrian National Army, which is acting as a proxy of Turkey to attack Kurdish-held areas.

Just to precise something, autonomous administrative areas, where you have the majority of oil production, sold part of its oil to the regime. But even if, you know, the same unity came back and they had access to all the oil in the northeast, it won’t be enough for internal consumption. The vast majority of oil was imported from Iran, was provided from Iran.

And after, I want to speak about the external threat. Obviously, Turkey, I talked about it, but Israel, as well. Israel has no interest to see a democratization process in Syria, just as in the larger Middle East, because it knows it will bring more solidarity with the Palestinian cause. And this is why the day after, the actor that was the regime, the Assad regime, protecting the road with Israel for the past 40 years, preventing any form of resistance, attacked all the military infrastructure’s capacity, so at least a large majority of them, throughout the country to destroy them, to make the future Syrian state weaker and also send a political message to the future people that will be in power in Syria, that any kind of hostile and belligerent position towards Israel will be attacked by Israel and could create instability. So, these are the two main threats, internal and external, as well.

AMY GOODMAN: So, if you can talk about these Israeli attacks? There have been hundreds and hundreds, well over 500, attacks, as you just began. You have the U.N. the envoy, special envoy for Syria, Geir Pedersen, condemning Israel’s assault. What Israel is trying to accomplish right now in this massive bombing campaign of Syria? And you’ve written a book called Hezbollah. Where that fits into this at this point?

JOSEPH DAHER: Well, I think what we’ve seen in the past few days is this demonstration that as soon as the Assad regime fell — and again, it’s important to remind the auditors that contrary to some commentators that saw the Assad regime as a resistant actor against Israel, Israel had to intervene now to bomb massively the military structures, infrastructures of the Syrian state, because it was scared that the main actor protecting its borders for the past 40 years disappeared, and, again, sending a message, a clear message, to the future forces that will be in power in Syria that any hostile position could be punished directly.

Similarly, I think there’s another thing to take into consideration, is that Israel wanted a weak Assad and is not happy with the fall of this regime. Moreover, there have been increasingly documents that have been leaked showing that Assad regime was collaborating, in a way or another, with the Israeli state.

In this perspective, more largely, I think, definitely, Iran and Hezbollah are the great loser of the fall of the regime. But no resistance against Israel can be built with supporting authoritarian regimes or participating in the repression of people struggling for democracy, freedom and social justice. So, the weakening of Hezbollah and Iran is definitely the result also of Israel’s war on Lebanon and attacks in Syria against a pro-Iranian position, pro-Hezbollah position. But more largely, we have seen that these actors have not acted largely in the interests of the liberation of the region, of the popular classes, but, moreover, of the Palestinians.

And one other indicator in this direction is the latest statements of Hamas and Islamic Jihad. I personally don’t disagree with — I personally disagree with their politics, while supporting the right of resistance. But they saluted the liberation of the Palestinian people — or, the Syrian population from the dictatorship of Assad. That shows us that, basically, the key importance for a future strategy of liberation for Palestine is connected to the liberation of the population of the region.

And we have to come back to the statement made by Foreign Minister of Israel Avigdor Lieberman in 2011 following the overthrow of Mubarak in Egypt, that a democratic Egypt is a bigger threat to Israel than Iran. Similarly, a democratization process in the Middle East is the biggest threat for Israel.

AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to go — last month, the ICC, the International Criminal Court, decided to indict Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, as well as the Hamas commander Mohammed Deif. The Biden administration rejected the ICC decision, claiming it doesn’t have jurisdiction to try Netanyahu. Well, this week, a reporter asked State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller if the U.S. would support Assad standing in front of the ICC as a war criminal. This begins with Matt Miller, who’s then interrupted by the Associated Press reporter Matthew Lee.

MATTHEW MILLER: So, we support the work of the ICC. I know that, obviously, we have disagreed with their —

MATT LEE: Wait a second.

MATTHEW MILLER: Hold on. Hold on. I’m going to — let me address it.

MATT LEE: No, you support the work of the ICC —

MATTHEW MILLER: We do support —

MATT LEE: — until they do something like with Israel.

MATTHEW MILLER: We — so, we have had a lot — let me just answer the question.

MATT LEE: And then you don’t like them at all, or the U.S.

MATTHEW MILLER: You know what, Matt? Let me — Matt, let me answer the question, because I was addressing that before you interrupted me. We obviously have had a jurisdictional dispute with them as it relates to cases against Israel. That is a long-standing jurisdictional dispute. But that said, we have also made clear that we support broadly their work, and we have supported their work in other cases, despite our jurisdictional dispute when it comes to Israel.

AMY GOODMAN: A jurisdictional dispute, Joseph Daher, if you could talk about that?

JOSEPH DAHER: Well, who will be surprised that the U.S. has double standards? We’ve seen this continuously and that U.S. has never pushed an agenda for real democratization of the region and has foreign policy according to its own geopolitical interests. So, this is, for me, not a surprise to see the difference in this kind of behavior.

We have to remind that the U.S. is the key actor allowing for the continuous genocide of the Palestinians in Gaza, for the continuous annexation of lands in the West Bank. Israel would not have been able to continue its genocidal war without the support of the U.S. Actually, Israel is only the implementer of U.S. politics, according to the Palestinians. Similarly, Israel could not have been leading a war on Lebanon without U.S. support.

And finally, Israel informed the U.S. of the invasion of Syrian lands, of the bombing of military infrastructures in Syria, with the support of the U.S., that also are seeking to protect its key ally in the region, Israel. So, it’s not a surprise at all to see these kind of double standards by the U.S. or any kind of Western states.

AMY GOODMAN: By the way, Yoav Gallant, who was one of those charged by the ICC, for whom there is an arrest warrant, just met with Brett McGurk in Washington, D.C., this week.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: And before we end, Joseph Daher, if you could talk about what you see unfolding in the next weeks in Syria? You spoke earlier a little bit about the different groups, not just HTS, that are now operating in Syria. How do you see this playing out in terms of the plan that they’ve laid out, and, in fact, of their changing political orientation, ideological orientation, as the head of HTS has suggested they will do?

JOSEPH DAHER: Well, there’s a clear strategy by the HTS that started in 2016, following its break with al-Qaeda, to present itself as a rational, moderate actor, not only locally but also regionally and internationally. It has, you know, branded itself as would like to participate any kind of counterterrorist campaigns, that it’s not a threat to the West. It’s also sending messages to regional actors. And we’re seeing a change, according to regional, international actors, towards HTS.

Does that mean that HTS, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, is a democratic organization? No, far from it. It is an authoritarian organization with an Islamic fundamentalist ideology and that is seeking to basically consolidate its power now in Syria. One of the latest indicators is the nomination of a prime minister that was previously the head of the government of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham in Idlib. Hayat Tahrir al-Sham’s first priority is to consolidate its power in the region it took control over.

And this is a challenge for the Syrian democratic and social aspiration of Syrian popular classes in the country. This is why I was saying that we have a lot of — Syrians, in general, have a lot of hope, but also there’s contradictions and challenges in the space that was opened by the fall of the regime. And obviously, there will be a lot of work of rebuilding to do among democratic and progressive sectors of the society to constitute a bloc to challenge the power of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, but also of the Syrian National Army.

And the developments in the following weeks and months will depend on the ability of democratic and social groups to develop, and also, according, as I was saying, to regional and international developments, because a lot of the country, despite their differences, also want to see a form of authoritarian stability reimposed on Syria, that basically meaning a damage control for the region.

So, again, the hope is back, but there’s a lot of challenges. There’s a lot of obstacles. But at least, for decades, we have the ability as Syrians to think of a better future. Nothing is done yet, but, again, there’s a lot of hope. And it will depend on the balance of forces within the country and the ability to constitute democratic, progressive bloc, challenging the Arabic-Kurdish division, on the ability of challenging these authoritarian local forces, but also regional and international forces, because none of them have the best interests of the Syrian popular classes.

AMY GOODMAN: We just have 30 seconds, but I just wanted to ask you about the significance of the finding of the corpse of Mazen al-Hamada. Tens of thousands of Syrians in Damascus now are gathering to attend his funeral.

JOSEPH DAHER: Well, it’s a tragedy, like thousands, hundreds of thousands, of other disappeared, forcibly disappeared, of political prisoners that we don’t know what happened with them. This is a reflection of the barbarism of what was the Assad regime for the past 54 years, a regime that not only killed Syrians, but attacked Lebanese, occupied Lebanon, attacked Palestinians, Palestinian national movement, and has been really a center of authoritarianism and reactionary politics, not only for the Syrians, but for the whole region.

AMY GOODMAN: Joseph Daher, thank you so much for being with us, Swiss Syrian left-wing scholar and activist in Geneva, Switzerland. We’ll link to your recent piece for The New Arab, “From Syria to Palestine, liberation comes from below.” And thanks also to Marwa al-Sabouni, the Syrian architect and writer in Homs, in Syria. We lost our connection with her in the middle of the conversation.

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Another Winter of War: NRC Head Jan Egeland on Visiting Ukraine & Latest on Sudan, Gaza and Syria
by Amy Goodman
DemocracyNow
December 12, 2024

International humanitarian leader Jan Egeland joins Democracy Now! to discuss aiding civilians in war-torn areas of Ukraine, Syria, Sudan and Gaza. In Ukraine, residents are bracing for another winter of war as a Russian offensive reaches within two miles of the key eastern Ukrainian city of Pokrovsk. “The population is exhausted, so imagine how it is in the trenches with those soldiers. Many of them have continuously been in battle for two years now,” says Egeland, secretary general of the Norwegian Refugee Council. “The courageous humanitarian aid workers … are targeted like the civilian population. Even ambulances are repeatedly hit.”

Transcript

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman, with Nermeen Shaikh.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: We turn now to Ukraine, where residents are bracing for another winter of war as the U.N. estimates 60% of its electricity-generating capacity has been destroyed. Russian troops are now reportedly within two miles of the key eastern Ukrainian city of Pokrovsk.

The Russian offensive comes just weeks before Donald Trump returns to the White House. Trump has threatened to reduce U.S. support to Ukraine. Trump recently met in Paris with French President Emmanuel Macron and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. After the meeting, Trump wrote, quote, “Zelensky and Ukraine would like to make a deal and stop the madness. There should be an immediate ceasefire and negotiations should begin,” Trump wrote.

Meanwhile, the Biden administration announced Saturday it would send a new $1 billion military aid package to Ukraine that includes drones and ammunition.

AMY GOODMAN: To talk more about the war in Ukraine, the humanitarian crisis there, we’re joined by Jan Egeland, secretary general of the Norwegian Refugee Council. He’s joining us from Chișinău, Moldova, where he’s just arrived after several days in Ukraine. Before that, we spoke to him after he had just left Gaza saying he was broken, and has recently been in Sudan.

Jan Egeland, describe what you’re seeing in Ukraine right now, as we here in the United States see in Paris [President-elect] Trump meeting with the Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.

JAN EGELAND: Well, what I see and those with whom I met are all testament of this third Cold War winter becoming the worst. I’ve been five times now in Ukraine these last three years, and every time you come, people are more exhausted. They have less resources. There is less electricity, less water supply. And there is this relentless bombardment, that has increased tremendously in recent weeks, on civilian population.

I was in one place that is really frontline. It’s Kherson, was the one provincial capital that the Russians were able to take in their offensive in February two-and-a-half years ago. That was then retaken by Ukrainian forces, but the Russians are on the other side the river, Dnipro, so next door. And there is multiple attacks every single day, including the day I was there.

We meet in bomb shelters with the population we serve, and help them there, but were able to create an office now there and do massive also cash relief. So, it’s so important that the United States and the other Western countries continue to support the Syrian people. What USAID is doing through us is giving tens of thousands of families much-needed cash assistance to survive this winter.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: And, Jan, if you could also speak about — you were in Kherson, but you were also in Odesa and Mykolaiv. If you could describe the situation on the ground there, and then, also, the difficulties in providing humanitarian assistance? In this year alone, 2024, dozens of humanitarian aid workers have been killed in Ukraine.

JAN EGELAND: Yes, they have, because the courageous humanitarian aid workers, especially from the local frontline organizations that we work with, are targeted, like the civilian population. Even ambulances are repeatedly hit. First night in Odesa — first afternoon in Odesa, we had to go to the bomb shelter underneath, the Norwegian Refugee Council bomb shelter in Odesa, because there was an alert of incoming ballistic missiles.

They hit Zaporizhzhia, which is another city in the south, and a hospital was obliterated, really. I think it’s now — the toll is more than 10 dead, multiple wounded, in a hospital, really.

In Odesa, the ancient city of culture and civilization, there is blackouts all the time, as in Mykolaiv, which, of course, means that life is tough, and on top of that, hundreds of thousands of internally displaced from other locations in the south and from the east of Ukraine.

AMY GOODMAN: And the number of deaths of Ukrainian soldiers, also Russian soldiers, just astronomical, and the reports in Ukraine of recruiters going and almost, basically, abducting men to try to get them to the frontline, people increasingly resisting, and where you see this heading around the issue of whether there would be any kind of negotiation at this point between Zelensky and Putin?

JAN EGELAND: Yeah, I mean, the population is exhausted. So, imagine how it is in the trenches with those soldiers. Many of them have been continuously in battle for two years now or more. But, well, what about the future? I mean, I think everybody yearn for peace, ceasefire, an end to the bombardment. But it’s not very clear to see how they could agree on anything, when one side says that they want to annex large parts of Ukraine and the other side says, “We want to liberate all parts of Ukraine.” Well, hopefully, there will be a ceasefire and there will be a negotiated end to this, so that the civilian population that we serve can have a respite in the middle of this madness.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Well, Jan Egeland, just in the previous segment, we were talking about Syria, so I’d like to get your response to these extraordinary events in Syria in the last days. You were in Syria not long ago. And earlier this week, you know, in terms of the response around the world, especially in countries where there are large numbers of Syrian refugees, Austria, although by no means the majority of Syrian refugees — Austria announced it will begin deporting Syrian refugees following the revolution that toppled Bashar al-Assad’s regime. About 100,000 Syrians have resettled in Austria in the 13 years since Syria’s civil war started. Meanwhile, the governments of Belgium, France, Greece, Germany and the United Kingdom said they would pause applications for asylum by Syrians. More than 14 million people have fled Syria since 2011.

You tweeted in response to this news, quote, “Hi European populist politicians, you want to push Syrian refugees back to these homes while foreign powers are still bombing and no one knows how and who will be governing the various regions of the country? It would be cruel and reckless. Those who can will voluntarily return.” So, Jan, if you could elaborate on this? First, your response to Assad’s ouster, and then this response from European governments about the status of Syrian refugees already there and applications from Syrians for asylum?

JAN EGELAND: Yeah, and when I tweeted this, that you quoted, I had a photo with it that I took myself only four weeks ago in Syria, where you have entire cities leveled to the ground and not rebuilt since the horrific civil war that was going on continuously from 2012 to 2019. And I said this: “Is it this rubble you want to deport people to?”

I know Syria well. I worked with it every week now since 2011. There is jubilation and anxiety on top of each other, and in Damascus, mostly jubilation, because those who have taken over say all of the right things at the moment. But in the northeast, there is a lot of fighting between — and the various armed groups are taking territory from each other, Israel, Turkey trying to bomb the place. The various groups that are now partly or fully in power were listed by many of these Western governments as terrorists. And then they want to deport people back.

I think it’s a testament how bad politics have become in Europe and, for that matter, in the United States, that the idealism, the openness, the biblical saying, “I was a stranger, and you took me in,” that’s gone. Now people are looking at their own navel and really cherishing their nationalism and their xenophobia, it seems. I’m ashamed what are the signals coming out of one European country after the other. This is the time to invest in hope and possibilities in Syria, not to deport people back to a chaotic situation where they will have to live in rubble.

AMY GOODMAN: And, Jan Egeland, before we go, we just wanted to address Sudan, which you’ve talked about as the worst crisis in the world. The headlines today, Sudan’s military is accused of carrying out an airstrike on a marketplace in the western region of Darfur, in which more than a hundred people were killed. Emergency Lawyers rights group described the bombing as a “horrific massacre.” The fighting between the Rapid Defense Forces and Sudan, and what needs to be done, the level of hunger there, as well?

JAN EGELAND: It’s just tremendous. And these generals are really willing to fight each other to the last woman and child, it seems. I was in West Darfur, which was bombed three weeks ago, where I saw large parts of the city of Geneina ethnically cleansed from the Masalit people, the African tribe, by Arab militias in this case. In other parts of the country, there is indiscriminate bombing, etc., etc.

But there is also a lot of humanitarian heroic aid workers on the ground, including in the Norwegian Refugee Council, that with, again, assistance from the USAID, is able to provide the daily subsidized bread to a million people every morning through 800, 900 bakeries.

So, we’re there. We’re going to be fighting for the civilian population, but we need attention to this, the biggest crisis on Earth, at the same time as the Middle East is in turmoil, Ukraine is having its worst winter. We need to have — we need to really mobilize international solidarity in the months ahead.

AMY GOODMAN: And finally, we have just 30 seconds, but our headline today out of Gaza is the bombing of another humanitarian convoy in Gaza. An Israeli drone strike on a convoy west of Khan Younis killed at least 13 people, injured dozens of others. You were not just in Sudan and Ukraine, but also we spoke to you right after you came out of Gaza, and you said you were broken by that.

JAN EGELAND: Yeah, and it’s a pattern. This civilian population and these women and children had nothing to do with the horrors inflicted on Israel on the 7th of October. They are innocent, and they are bombed, and they are starved by this besiegement from Israel, with American arms and American support. It’s the worst part of the Biden administration’s foreign policy. Hopefully, that will change, because it’s costing the United States and the Western powers, really. They look at hypocrisy: How come occupation by Russia in Ukraine is bad, and it’s tolerable when Israel is doing exactly the same?

AMY GOODMAN: Jan Egeland, we want to thank you for being with us, secretary general of the Norwegian Refugee Council, joining us from Chișinău, Moldova, where he’s just arrived after several days in Ukraine, before that, Sudan, before that, in Gaza.

[admin]

Cashing in on the War in Gaza
by Ralph Nader
Oct 19, 2024
https://www.ralphnaderradiohour.com/p/c ... ar-in-gaza

Ralph welcomes back William Hartung of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. They'll discuss the Cost of War Project's latest reports on US military spending in support of Israel, and the humanitarian costs of the war in Gaza. Then, Ralph is joined by Palestinian writer and analyst Sumaya Awad to discuss the mass civil disobedience at the New York Stock Exchange, which was organized by Jewish Voice for Peace to protest the weapons manufacturers that are making millions off the genocide in Gaza.

William Hartung is an expert on the arms industry and US military budget, and a Senior Research Fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. He is the author of Prophets of War: Lockheed Martin and the Making of the Military-Industrial Complex, and the co-editor of Lessons from Iraq: Avoiding the Next War.

In all my years of watching the operations of Washington—including the Bush/Cheney criminal invasion of Iraq—I have never seen such a servile position by top officials of an administration to a foreign power. Not even close. They are humiliating the United States of America. They are jeopardizing the United States of America—because as you know, the Department of Defense, CIA, NSA have studies and scenarios of blowback. So this war in the Middle East is gonna come back to the US in terms of reprisal and retaliation. And we are not able to anticipate that because we think, as the ruling empire in the world, that we're invulnerable. But we're not invulnerable.

Ralph Nader: The Biden administration is living in the past. They’ve got this “Israel, right or wrong” ideology. They think it's a political detriment to criticize Israel, and the fact that the younger generation is not locked into that point of view. But I think they’re going to hurt themselves more by enabling the war crimes that Israel is committing than they would by taking a stand. And of course, they keep trying to say that they're pushing for a ceasefire…But as long as they're doing the weapons and the financing, that is laughable.

William Hartung: It's just stunning. Given the record of this century—two failed wars, $8 trillion spent, hundreds of thousands killed—and yet they could say with a straight face, “We need a dominant military.” As if that’s the tool that's gonna solve any of these problems, rather than make them worse.

William Hartung: Sumaya Awad is a Palestinian writer and analyst based in New York City, and she is the spokesperson for Jewish Voice for Peace’s mass civil disobedience event at the New York Stock Exchange. Ms. Awad directs strategy and communications for the Adalah Justice Project, and she is a cofounder of the Against Canary Mission Project, which defends student activists targeted by blacklists for their Palestinian rights advocacy. She is the co-author of Palestine and Elections and co-editor of Palestine: A Socialist Introduction.

There were over 200 arrests—the majority of them anti-Zionist Jewish New Yorkers, who want to send a clear message both to the US government and the American people that Israel weaponizes their identity in order to justify crimes against humanity and that they are not okay with this. That they refuse for their identity and Jewish people to be weaponized in this way. And that in fact, what Israel is doing and what the US government is funding and politically backing is actively making this country and certainly the rest of the world unsafe not just for Jewish people, but for others.

Sumaya Awad: We are strategizing about how to push back against the role of AIPAC and the grip of AIPAC. I think the reality is that there are many people in Congress that are actually benefiting financially from what is happening in Gaza. We know that at least 50 members of Congress have links to the military-industrial complex—whether that's through stocks or other things. And so it's about unraveling this network, these connections between our government, the way it's profiting from the genocide and then what that means in terms of these elections across the country.

Transcript

Listeners who want to know the history before October 7th, 2023, back to 1948,
ought to read the book, The Hundred Years' War on Palestine by Professor Khalidi, retired Columbia University, a bestseller and worthy of that status. And Hannah, you have an announcement to make.
I sure do, Steve. It's tort law day season. The leaves are falling. The air is brisk. And on Saturday, October 26th at 12 p.m. Eastern, the American Museum of Tort Law is hosting its free virtual panel on blockbuster torts. You can register at tortmuseum.org. And Ralph has a little bit more to say about it. Ralph?
Yeah, this is a wonderful compressed education, listeners, so you bring yourself up to date on one of the great pillars of private law in our country, the civil justice system under the law of torts, the law of wrongful injury, and the remedies you have to go to court, have a trial by jury, get compensation for your losses,
as well as generate deterrence for safer behavior and disclose information through processes of depositions that alert people to various hazards like the opiate drugs, the oil spills, the defective motor vehicles, and many other products that need to be recalled. This is a very good event. It's free, and you'll learn about mass torts, litigation, its pluses and minuses.
You'll learn about the connection between artificial intelligence and harm to people by an expert, and you'll also learn about something most people are not aware of, that most crimes, including street crimes and corporate crimes, are also violations of tort law. And so if the prosecutors and the law enforcers in the Justice Department and
around the country don't do their job on issues like police brutality or cancerous toxic waste emissions by corporations, people can initiate their own lawsuits before trial by jury under the law of torts. So learn all about it. Tell your friends, relatives, coworkers. October 26th, Saturday, 12 noon, Eastern Time, free of charge by Zoom.
And now on to the show. Let's face it. As much as we on this program have posed, exposed, and decried the last year's genocide of the Palestinian people in Gaza, we are also accomplices. And that's because our tax dollars help pay for this slaughter. If we want our government to divest from this genocide,
one of our first steps must be a brutally honest accounting of what exactly we've been paying for. Our first guest today, William Hartung, is a longtime contributor to Brown University's Costs of War Project, and he has co-authored a recent paper on the cost of U.S. military aid to Israel and its parallel military buildup in the Middle East.
This report tells us what $22 billion has brought us over the past year. And a companion paper analyzing the full humanitarian costs of the war in Gaza describes, quote, the chains of impact leading towards indirect deaths. caused by Israeli military operations in Gaza and the West Bank.
It examines the impact on population health of the destruction of public infrastructure, livelihood sources, reduced access to healthcare, water and sanitation, and environmental damage. So Mr. Hartung will give us a full accounting. And some of those tax dollars are going straight to American manufacturers like Boeing, Raytheon, and Lockheed Martin. Since last October,
Jewish Voice for Peace has been staging mass civil disobedience events in New York, including at Grand Central Station and the Statue of Liberty, and other cities, demanding the United States stop funding Israel's genocide in Gaza. This past Monday, hundreds of activists from Jewish Voice for Peace gathered outside the New York
Stock Exchange to protest the weapons manufacturers that are making millions of dollars off the genocide in Gaza. That brings us to our second guest, Samaya Awad. Ms. Awad is a Palestinian writer and spokesperson for this latest demonstration. We'll speak to Ms. Awad about the event and the reactions to it. As always, somewhere in the middle,
we'll check in with our irrepressible corporate crime reporter, Russell Mokhyber. But first, the human costs of war in Gaza are even greater than we think. David. William Hartung is an expert on the arms industry and U.S. military budget and a senior research fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft.
He was previously the director of the Arms and Security Program at the Center for International Policy and the co-director of the Center Sustainable Defense Task Force. He's the author of Prophets of War, Lockheed Martin and the Making of the Military-Industrial Complex, and the co-editor of Lessons from Iraq, Avoiding the Next War.
Welcome back to the Ralph Nader Radio Hour, William Hartung. Thanks so much for having me. Thank you very much, Bill. You've been proven right year after year in your analysis, and we want to get the depth of it in a few moments. Now, in all my years of watching the operations of Washington,
including the Bush-Cheney criminal invasion of Iraq, I have never seen such a servile position by top officials of administration to a foreign power, not even close. They are humiliating the United States of America. They are jeopardizing the United States of America because, as you know, the Department of Defense, CIA, NSA have studies and scenarios of blowback.
So this war in the Middle East is going to come back to the U.S. in terms of reprisal and retaliation. And we are not able to anticipate that, because we think, as the ruling empire in the world, that we're invulnerable. But we're not invulnerable, and our defense and national security agencies have very realistic scenarios of any
possible counterattacks. Now, with that background, William Hartung, you've written a very revealing article for Forbes magazine. this month, and you participated in the costs of war and the human costs of war at Brown University. And so I want to put this question to you. How do you get a handle as a citizenry in a presumed democratic society?
to challenge these entrenched illegalities that are resulting in the risk of a wider war involving Iran in the Middle East with a blowback to the United States. How do you get a handle on it, representing a majority of Americans now who want a ceasefire and an arms suspension to Israel?
Well, I think part of the problem is that democracy is at the speed. People don't feel like they can make a difference and they're not weighing in as strongly as they should. But I think also the Biden administration is living in the past. They've got this Israel right or wrong ideology.
They think it's a political detriment to criticize Israel. In fact, the younger generation is not locked into that point of view. I think he's going to hurt himself more by enabling the war crimes that Israel is committing than they would by taking a stand. And of course, they keep trying to say that they're pushing for a ceasefire.
They're trying to get not being more responsible. But as long as they're giving them the weapons and the financing, then that is laughable. And, you know, every time Blinken or one of those officials says they want a rules-based international order, they can't be taken seriously. And, in fact, I think possibly for years to come,
this is going to hurt the United States standing in the world, diplomacy. people's ability to believe anything or efficient say. So, of course, the first issue is the suffering of the Palestinians. And there was a companion paper to the one I worked on about the human cost, which found that, you know,
the 40,000 direct deaths are just the beginning. The author believes over 60,000 people have died of starvation. There's disease. There may be 10,000 bodies that they still haven't dug out of the rubble. And now they're, of course, spreading deaths and refugees in Lebanon and West Bank.
I think they would love to take the Harris Biden administration into backing them in a war on Iran. And all this is backwards. It's our tax dollars financing this, but Netanyahu is setting the pace. If he attacks Hamas or Hezbollah and they respond, the Biden response is, well, we have to defend Israel.
But Netanyahu is the aggressor here. So that doesn't make any sense. And the question is, how far are they going to go? Are they ever going to stand up to him? And I think only much larger levels of public pressure. I think politicians who are kind of mired in ideology,
the only thing they would understand is if they'd lose their job. And, you know, I don't, we don't take positions as an organization on elections, but people need to make their voices heard and understand also that elections are just one step in the process. On that point, Bill,
they're going the wrong way if they want to win the election, because they're losing votes in the swing states here, like Michigan. It's not just Arab Americans or Muslim Americans. There are a lot of people now who are ready to stay home. They don't have to vote for Trump. They don't have to vote for the Green Party.
They just stay home. And with the Electoral College and razor-thin polls between Harris and Trump, you would think they would be more sensitive to the domestic electoral consequences in the remaining days until November 5th. But they're not. I've had doctors ask, why isn't Biden at least airlifting some of these children, these babies that have horrible burns,
and are dying, or amputees shot by snipers, airlifting them to U.S. hospitals. I mean, never mind the humanity of it. You would think they'd want to do it just in terms of public relations, and they're not even doing that. And the Congress has no fiscal restraints. Tell us about your study on, since October 7th,
how much Congress has shoveled, knee-jerk, without hearings, over the Biden dissent to Israel. Well, we found $17.9 billion in military aid, another $5 billion for stepped-up military operations in the region. And that's probably a low estimate because the U.S. government has been so non-transparent. We're probably missing things. And of course, the costs are going up every day.
It was before they agreed to send the missile banner to Israel, the 100 troops. You know, every time Israel takes another step forward, the U.S. gets behind them. So I mentioned in my article, at the beginning of the Bush invasion of Iraq, Lawrence Lindsay, an economic advisor, said it might cost $200 billion.
And he was slapped on the wrist. The administration said, oh, no, it'll be $50 billion. It was a trillion dollars or more. Now, it doesn't automatically mean that this will go that way, but it means the government inevitably understates the cost of war. And, of course, if our troops get involved,
there's going to be money to take care of the veterans and, you know, possibly aid to help reconstruct the territory that we helped Israel destroy, which is ironic, of course. So the cost could be huge. There's still a push to send more to Ukraine.
They're pushing the Pentagon budget close to a trillion dollars to deal with like a caricature of the military threat they claim is posed by China. And diplomacy is in the backseat. I mean, if anything, this century should have proven that force is not the answer. It wasn't the answer to Iraq. It wasn't the answer to Afghanistan.
It made matters worse. Well, on that point you just made, the Biden-Blinken duo have not engaged in any arms control negotiations. A lot of the nuclear arms control treaties with Russia and others have been very severely shaken or suspended or their time is expired for renewal. Nothing going on. No ongoing nuclear arms or other arms control treaties.
There are no peace negotiations underway in the Middle East. No peace negotiations by the U.S. underway in Ukraine, Russia. The more you add it up... More you wonder, it is not just Trump that's unstable and berserk as he goes around the country. The actual performance and lack of performance and total surrender of U.S.
executive power to Netanyahu's regime represents a different kind of on-the-ground instability and going berserk. It is almost inconceivable, Bill, to try to explain what's going on here. Why are they going this far? What is their thinking here? They're operating like servants of a foreign power. If the Foreign Registration Act applied to government officials,
they'd have to register Biden and Blinken as foreign agents of the Israeli regime. Hands down, evidence. How do you explain it? Well, it's irrational in the sense that it's not good for anyone. It's not good for the future of Israel. It's not good for the possibility of peace in the Middle East.
Even if they eliminate Hamas, they're creating a generation of anger that could well create another one. Just as ISIS grew after Al Qaeda was someone on its back heel. So I think it's kind of a case of ideology kills. They're trapped. in an earlier mindset that says you must support Israel at all costs.
I don't know if they believe this notion that Israel is the only democracy in the Middle East. How is it possible when you have people under occupation? I think Netanyahu is the worst case of an Israeli prime minister we've seen in a long time.
And of course, part of this is about his survival and not about the people that he clearly doesn't care about. So it's baffling. I agree. You know, when I was a student, you know, we talked about American empire, economic exploitation, and creating, you know, military dominance in the world.
Even if that's what you were aiming for, this is not going to achieve that. This is going to hasten the decline and lack of influence in the United States, hurt our reputation in the world, hurt our economy. This is the 100th year since the birth of James Baldwin.
And one of the things he said that stuck with me from when I was a teenager was, You know, in a system of oppression, of course, the oppressed are severely damaged. But the oppressors are also damaged because they essentially distort themselves and sacrifice their humanity. And I think that's where we're at right now.
And you either have to stand up or not. You know, we can't let this stand. Well, let's talk about the human costs now in that area. So someone asks you, given all you know about the direct and indirect costs of the war, what's your estimate of death and injury? Because that will change the dynamics.
The press will have a higher sense of urgency. even citizen groups, a higher sense of urgency. Maybe the government would have a higher sense. Maybe there'd be more people in Congress. If they know that 400,000 have died, maybe a million in the next few months will total a million deaths of the 2.3
million Gazans in an area twice the size of the District of Columbia. Packed, crowded, forced into brutal marches. What estimate are you willing to give, absent, you know, strict epidemiological analysis, which are not possible until the war stops, the genocide of the Palestine Holocaust? Well,
the researcher who did the human cost chapter put it at about four times as many indirect deaths as direct, so maybe 160,000 or so, with the understanding that we cannot really know, given that reporters can't get in, human rights people can't get in. But even so, many more people have died indirectly and directly,
and that will continue even if the bomb is set tomorrow because it's disease, it's starvation, it's lack of health care, and not to mention the trauma psychologically of having your family killed, your neighborhood destroyed, you know, living in rubble as a refugee. You know, the cost, human and otherwise, will last for many, many years. I mean,
we're still, you know, paying the cost of helping the vets who served in Iraq and Afghanistan with PTSD and traumatic brain injuries and So, never when a war started, the government ever mentioned the fact that the cost can go on forever, both to individuals and the war cells and even our own personnel. So, it's just stunning.
Given the record of this century, two failed wars, $8 trillion spent, hundreds of thousands killed. They can say with a straight face, we need a dominant military. Is this the tool that's going to solve any of these problems and make them worse? Well, privately, Netanyahu must wonder how lucky he is. Here he is before October 7th,
despised by three out of four Israelis for trying to destroy the independence of the judiciary. He's under prosecution by Israeli prosecutors for corruption. He's just not popular. in Israel until October 7, and he's looking at this world, and he's king of the hill. He's twirling the U.S. government around his finger.
He's about to start another war in Iran. The two volleys by Iran produced no damage. Explain to our listeners, the first volley was flagged, and the second one produced some material damage at military bases, but didn't kill anybody except the Palestinian in the West Bank who was hit by falling debris.
What do you mean when Iran sent all these missiles months ago and they flagged it? Well, I think, you know, prior to that, I don't believe Netanyahu let this happen, but I think what Hamas did was terrific. But at this point, the death toll is about 100 Palestinians, every Israeli that died in the Hamas attack,
which is indiscriminate and therefore a war crime. And the Iranian response, I think, was meant for domestic violence, to say we did something, but not to do major damage to Israel and escalate the war. But at this stage, we don't know what will be escalating the war. It's out of control.
If there's any conflict, I can remember it, you know, in decades. And so to let Netanyahu set the pace and follow behind is just irresponsible and unconscionable. Well, how do you, as an observer of Congress, how do you explain the minimal number of members of Congress like Bernie Sanders
and Senator Von Hollen from Maryland and Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar and a few others are standing up and demanding ceasefire and suspension of arms? But they're in a distinct minority, even among their own Democratic Party. And, of course, the Republican Party, under McConnell and Mike Johnson, the Speaker of the House,
just are openly using language that says, kill them all. In fact, Lindsey Graham and Tom Cotton, two senators, essentially said that. How do you explain that their positions are contrary to the public opinion in the United States, which is turning against the Israeli-Palestinian holocaust? I mean, it's not like they're hooraying public opinion back home. It's not happening.
How do you explain to our listeners the situation in Congress now? Well, I think, you know, despite the opinion polls, they're in fear for their political lie. If you look what happened to Jamal Baldwin and Cori Bush, about the money that came in against them, even if you look at the students who were being suspended, you know,
for basically exercising free speech and being on the right side of history, it's a very dangerous moment. I remember after 9-1-1 taking a lot of heat from fighting back against the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. This seems worse to me. You know, I was a student activist at the end of the apartheid period.
You know, we weren't getting suspended. We weren't getting dopped. We weren't getting vilified. We weren't living in universes that ran more like autocracies than democracies. So it's almost like a virus that has yet to be eradicated. And, you know, people need to stand up. And there are organizations certainly, you know, skiing through the Palestine and, you know,
give a voice to peace, but also groups that have been working prior to that, like the Poor People's Campaign, which was anti-militarism building a flank. I think basically we need to go far, far beyond the traditional peace movement and basically realize that this is about the future of this country.
Is it going to be a democracy or isn't it? Can it become a better democracy? You know, people need to figure out what level of risk they're willing to take and they need to take it. But it's so different from how we've been trained to operate. I mean, we live in kind of this infotainment society.
People have felt for a long time you can't really get the government to do big, important things. and of course people who have been down and out i mean you know white male life expectancy is down and many of them have lost their careers and they're being
didn't scapegoat who haven't been answered and some of them are gravitating to that so you know unfortunately the the forces of hate have this imploded message and to convince people that we can you know, build a better country, which takes time, also takes a different attitude that it's not going to happen tomorrow, but it's worth the fight.
And so I think it's going to have to be more like some of the movements that have changed for the country, be it slavery, be it women's suffrage, be it the civil rights movement, environmental movement, LGBTQ movement. Those things involved people organizing for years before the moment came and the public got on board.
I mean, of course, now we don't have a lot of time giving Climate crisis. So, you know, Dr. King talked at the end of his life about the fierce urgency of now. It couldn't be more apt than the situation we're in.
But I do believe that, you know, a lot of people think, oh, you know, fighting is grim. I don't want to hear about it. Actually, people know about it. It's affecting them. The only way to feel better is to try to be something about it. And that's the kind of ethos you have to inject it.
And it's going to take, I think, some old-fashioned face-to-face meetings with your colleagues, friends, and I think also capture the stories of how people have beaten great odds before, the inspirations of greatest people. So we need all of that now. And, you know, whether we can do it in time, we don't know, but that's not the point.
The point is to make the effort. Well, the historical analogy is the Vietnam War, which Congress dilly-dallied and supported the Johnson administration, for example. And then the pressure from the public demonstrations and marches and pressures on members of Congress led Congress to end the Vietnam War. They simply cut off the money. to the Republican administration.
I think it was 1974. They said, we're done. No more money for the Vietnam War. And then the US had to get out. That's the sequence, listeners, that we have to emulate on this situation if there's time. In your Forbes article, and I urge listeners to pick up William Hartung's Forbes article of October 15th, 2024,
called The Human Costs of the Gaza War Are Even Greater Than You Think, you have this harrowing paragraph. You say, Further escalation is a distinct and dangerous possibility. The decision to deploy a battery of US THAAD anti-missile systems to Israel, along with 100 US support personnel, is the next step in that process. In essence,
President Biden is given the power over whether or not the war escalates to Benjamin Netanyahu. When Israel attacks Hezbollah or Iran, the Biden administration pledges to help defend it against the inevitable counterattack. This policy of, quote, Netanyahu right or wrong, which rewards his reckless behavior, with yet more support, must stop. Without a sharp reversal in US policy,
the human and economic costs of supporting Israel's war could easily spiral out of control." Those are your words. Early in the genocidal invasion of Gaza, Biden would lecture publicly Netanyahu to let humanitarian trucks in. He's not even doing that now. We're seeing mass starvation and mass death from lack of clean water and no medicine and health care.
Now, why does he have to go that far in giving Netanyahu and his genocidal army the green light to block thousands of humanitarian aid trucks paid for by the US taxpayer from going into Gaza? Why does he have to go that far? I don't think there's a rational answer. I mean, in some cases,
people in power with their eyes, they believe they're on high, they're trying to get money to cut the considerable action. But as you said in Raza, it's impossible to do that given the scale of the production. So, I would put that in the mind for the folks that are supporting this war that we have to fight.
They never had a psychological state of consciousness. If they're not paying attention, they have to build it and resume the bank. Bill Hartung, you've studied over the years and written about the military-industrial complex. Tell us the role of Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, Boeing, General Dynamics,
and others who are making a lot of money selling all these arms to the Middle East and elsewhere. What's their role in the influence game over the Biden administration? Well, in the current conflict, they almost don't have to lift a finger because Biden is so all in and so pressured by the Israel lobby.
So they're mostly, the big companies mostly cashing the check. But the tech folks in California, like Peter Thiel, Palantir, they actually had their board meeting in Israel to show support for the war. And when asked about whether he cared about how his weapons were being used, Peter says, oh, we don't keep track of that.
We trust the Israelis. So it's kind of a split. I mean, it's kind of the new tech folks. They're all in, shamelessly so. And I think the big companies would rather just catch the check and not be associated in the public eye with the war. What about the interest, technically speaking,
of these arms manufacturers in testing new forms of weaponry by shipping these weapons to the Israelis? They like to get feedback from the field, don't they? Well, but they're not the ones driving the train in this case. But they will, as they did in Ukraine, once the war starts,
they'll claim that their weapons are the greatest things in flight spread. But in Ukraine, actually, some of their drones, the Wall Street drones, were so poor that they stopped using them and bought Chinese drones. But certainly, you know, they will capitalize after the fact, either as a marketing tool.
But in the case of Israel, there's no need for them to weigh in. There's so much ideology and so much lobbying already. They don't need to lift a finger. Well, in case our listeners at this point, Bill Hartung, feel that there's nothing they can do, they're frustrated, they're fearful, they're anxious, there is something you can do, listeners.
It's called Congress. Congress can stop this cold, and you are outnumbering those 535 senators and representatives. Probably about 20 or 25% already would like an arms cutoff and a ceasefire and moving towards serious peace negotiations over there. Stop the genocide, stop the Palestinian Holocaust. So there it is. Congress is in recess.
They're going around shaking hands, smiling before the election. Hold on to their hand and give them your peace of mind. Tell them exactly what you want done in no uncertain terms and that you're not going to go away. Congress can cut this off and stop it cold. Anna?
Mr. Hartung, could you put the last fiscal year's spending in some historical context? How does it compare to previous years and does the nature of the spending change recently?
Well, the aid to Israel is far and away the highest in the history of the U.S. relationship with the Israeli military. The Pentagon spending as a whole is pushing towards a trillion dollars, which is sort of similar to where it was at the peak of the Iraq and Afghan wars
when there were hundreds of thousands of troops on the sea. And if the hawks have their way, a trillion is just a sign on the highway going higher. So we really need to push back. I mean, we've got natural disasters. We've got the danger of disease. We've got poverty. We've got to invest in education.
You know, there's all kinds of things we need to keep our country strong and resilient. And if we're going to pour so much money into weapons of war, we're not going to be able to do that. This is the first year ever that interest on the debt was higher than even the Pentagon budget.
So, you know, if we're going to make a difference, we have to shift priorities within that budget. And we can't let the Pentagon get in the flu's eyes. And the looming danger, Bill, if there's blowback, there's an attack like 9-11 on the U.S., the forces of concentrated power, both corporate and government,
will try to suppress all dissent and shove aside the priorities you just mentioned to deal with climate violence. to deal with preparedness for coming pandemics and to deal with the normal necessities of life for tens of millions of Americans. That is the danger,
and that is the message that citizens have got to communicate to their senators and representatives, that they are, by a rubber stamp supporting of the terrorist Netanyahu regime, inviting disaster back into the United States. And they're going to be held responsible.
This is not just a conflict far away that people can look at on social media and network television. It's going to come back here, as it already has, in distorting public budgets, depriving the necessities of life for tens of millions of impoverished people, and the crumbling of our public service infrastructure.
Before we end, Bill Hartung, is there anything else you want to say? Just that people should act, and if they don't want to act alone, there's good organizations like the French Media Foundation. There's Action Corps. Josh Paul, who designed over all this, just started a new organization focused on the Hill,
which I think is called something like Change America. There's Dawn, which is the group that was founded by Jamal Khashoggi before his murder. So sometimes that can be helpful to help you focus your pressure, get a sense of what's happening on the Hill. You don't have to feel like you're acting alone.
And there's Code Pink, which lobbies every day on the Hill. There's Veterans for Peace with 100 chapters around the country. There are many organizations, listeners, you can choose to support and swell their ranks. Remember, it's our sovereign power that has been delegated to 535 elected officials in the U.S. Congress.
And it's about time to pull in the reins. Thank you very much, William Hartung. Thank you. We've been speaking with William Hartung. We will link to his work at the Quincy Institute at ralphnederradiohour.com. In an effort to strike at the economic heart of the genocide in Gaza, Jewish Voice for Peace demonstrated at the New York Stock Exchange.
When we come back, we're going to hear how that all went down. But first, let's check in with our corporate crime reporter, Russell Mokhyber.
From the National Press Building in Washington, D.C., this is your Corporate Crime Reporter Morning Minute for Friday, October 18,
2024.
I'm Russell Mokhyber. The world's largest corporations have racked up $700 billion in monetary penalties linked to regulatory infringements in 45 countries since 2010. Major banks, especially those based in the United States and Europe, account for more than one-third of the penalties. Ninety-five parent companies have received $1 billion or more in penalties.
These are some of the revelations from data contained in Violation Tracker Global, a new website created by Good Jobs First, which previously produced similar databases focused on the United States and the United Kingdom. Violation Tracker Global documents more than 50,000 regulatory penalties imposed on 1,600 multinational corporations and their
subsidiaries by over 700 regulatory agencies and courts in 45 of the world's largest economies. For the Corporate Crime Reporter, I'm Russell Mokhyver.
Thank you, Russell. Welcome back to the Ralph Nader Radio Hour. I'm Steve Skrovan, along with David Feldman, Hannah, and Ralph. On October 14th, roughly 500 protesters descended on the New York Stock Exchange to, in the words of our next guest, send a message to the American people that our government is using our tax dollars
to fund a genocide. David? Sumaya Awad is a Palestinian writer and analyst based in New York City, and she is the spokesperson for the Jewish Voice for Peace mass civil disobedience event at the New York Stock Exchange. Ms. Awad directs strategy and communications for the Adala Justice Project,
and she is a co-founder of the Against Canary Mission Project, which defends student activists targeted by blacklists for their Palestinian rights advocacy. She is the co-author of Palestine and Elections and co-editor of Palestine, A Socialist Introduction. Welcome to the Ralph Nader Radio Hour, Sumaya Awad. Thank you. It's great to be here. So, Maya,
you were very much engaged in this unprecedented protest in front of the New York Stock Exchange, spearheaded by Jewish Voice for Peace. As you know, they did a demonstration at the Statue of Liberty. They did a huge demonstration at Grand Central Station. And now they're focusing on the military-industrial complex and the profiteering from war by
protesting before the New York Stock Exchange, and over 200 of them were arrested. I don't think there's been that amount of civil disobedience in decades in front of the New York Stock Exchange. Tell us about the reaction to it, both when it was occurring with the police and whether you think it got adequate
coverage in newspapers like the New York Times, Washington Post, or the television and radio. This is quite an unprecedented, well-organized protest. Yeah, thanks, Ralph. This was what we think, this was the largest civil disobedience protest in front of the New York Stock Exchange to happen. And it was very powerful and sending, you know,
a clear message that there are companies, there are arms manufacturers that are profiting, that are making tens of millions of dollars off of the murder of Palestinians and Palestinian children. There are over 200 arrests, the majority of them anti-Zionist Jewish New Yorkers who want to send a clear
message both to the US government and the American people that Israel weaponizes their identity in order to justify crimes against humanity and that they are not okay with this, that they refuse for their identity as Jewish people to be weaponized in this way.
And that in fact, what Israel is doing and what the US government is funding and politically backing is actively making this country and certainly the rest of the world unfaithful, not just for Jewish people, but for others, because the safety of Palestinians is connected to the safety of other people.
We've seen this firsthand of this country when we see the destruction of the South and the Southeast from these hurricanes, the fact that infrastructure in the US is falling apart, healthcare, et cetera. Meanwhile, we have money, billions of dollars to send to Israel to commit war crimes, to commit the genocide. In terms of the media, you know,
there was a lot of media there, you know, and for sure it disrupted everyday life down there and in front of the stock exchange. I think there are obviously some of the mainstream news that did not cover this or did not cover this adequately because they don't want to show that Israel does not
in fact represent all Jewish people. They don't want to show that it is becoming more and more mainstream to be against what Israel is doing. Well, you know, we've had protests at the New York Stock Exchange during our political campaigns, and we've had hundreds and hundreds of people. And we look up,
and people in the Stock Exchange and the neighboring buildings were looking out the window, and some of them were coming by and chatting. Did you get any feedback from people from the New York Stock Exchange complex down there? So it's a great question.
We didn't have a lot of people stop and join in chanting, stop and ask questions, stop and show support. I don't know how many of them were from the New York Stock Exchange. It was also Indigenous Peoples Day on Monday. So I think a lot of the usual foot traffic down there was maybe decreased a bit,
but we did have a lot of people stop and support. I couldn't tell you where they were coming from. And did you all have pro bono lawyers who managed to follow you down to wherever you were booked and had you released? Or did you have to stay overnight in jail? What was the follow-up by the police arrest?
So the police brought in over four buses to take the arrested protesters, including two MCA buses that they repurposed for this. Everyone got out and we did have pro bono lawyers from the movement with us the whole time at the New York Stock Exchange.
And then who came with us to one police plaza, which is where the protesters were being held. And they all got out within that night. And did you have any other citizen groups in New York City or members of the large New York City Council come and support you? Yes, we had multiple electeds there, actually,
both from the New York City Council, like Alexa Diaz, and we had members of the New York State Senate and the New York State Assembly, like Zohran Mabdani from the New York State Assembly, and New York State Senator Jabari Bruceport was also there. Claire Valdez was also there.
All of these are electeds that come from the GSA chapter in New York, the Democratic Socialists of America, on a city and state level. You know, Somalia, there are at least 16 Israeli human rights groups, ranging from the Breaking the Silence and Refuse Next Reservists, who protested Netanyahu's imperial policies, to Beth Salem, the great civil rights group,
to Rabbis for Human Rights. They put a notice in the New York Times on December 13th, 2023, open letter to President Biden titled, Stop the Human Catastrophe in Gaza. Do your groups ever connect with these brave Israeli human rights groups who are obviously under a lot of pressure now to stay quiet? Yes, of course.
And many of these groups are really doing tremendous, tremendous work. Many of the groups in the Palestine movement, including Jewish Voice for Peace, including Palestinian advocacy groups, like the one that I actually represent, Adana Justice Project, work closely and are in conversation with organizations like Beth Salem and others
that are making it clear that what Israel is doing is wrong and that they are against it, even on the inside. And as far as strategy in Congress, because I know you're doing all these grassroots protests in order to put pressure on Congress, which can cut off appropriations for these arms shipments to Israel and leverage
the Biden administration. There's never been any testimony before Congress by prominent Israeli and Palestinian peace advocates since 1948, the establishment of the State of Israel. They've never been given a voice. AIPAC has dominated the Congress. And there is the House Foreign Relations Committee, the House Armed Services Committee, and their counterparts.
need to be given a request by many of these prominent peace advocates in Israel. Some of them are former generals, former mayors, major cities, ministers in the government, former heads of the Israeli CIA and FBI, public intellectuals, very prominent, who despise the Netanyahu regime. Are you making any effort, and Jewish Voice for Peace, and if not now,
to get formal invitations sent to these congressional committees by these prominent Israeli and Palestinian peace advocates who have been working together for years to resolve that conflict. Have you thought about that as an approach which would break the grip of AIPAC and actually get a lot of media?
Who's going to deny the authenticity and experience of these prominent Israelis? Yeah, I mean, it's a great point. And I think that it's a strategy that is on the list of strategies being explored. And I can say with confidence that all of our groups have explored and have used every single tool at our disposal,
especially in the last year. I think that with Congress, with the role of AIPAC and the fact that they've already spent so much money and taken, you know, Cori Bush, they've gotten Cori Bush to lose her election using their money and Jamal Bowman and who knows what's next.
And so we are strategizing about how to push back against the role of AIPAC and the grip of AIPAC. I think the reality is that there are many people in Congress that are actually benefiting financially from what is happening in Gaza. We know that at least 50 members of Congress have links to the military industrial complex,
whether that's through stocks or other things. And so it's about unraveling this network, these connections between, you know, our government, the way it's profiting from the genocide, and then what that means in terms of these elections across the country. So I hope that begins to answer that question. Let's look at the election.
What do you and Jewish Voice for Peace and others think about the Biden administration's presence of full-throttle support, unwavering support for whatever the Netanyahu terrorism does in that region, Lebanon, Palestine, Syria, elsewhere, maybe Iran? Do you think the Biden administration is going to lose more votes than gain more
votes by this estranged position and refusal to demand a ceasefire? Because a lot of people are going to stay home. They may not vote for Trump and protest to Biden or for the Green Party, which is a peace agenda party. They just stay home.
How are you reading the pluses and minuses for the election of Kamala Harris and Tim Walz? So I can't say much about the elections, but I can say is that I think successive US administrations, US government administrations have all largely had the same line when it comes to
support for Israel and the blank check that the US sends to Israel, whether they are democratic or Republican administration. And I think what we're seeing this year is similar to that, except that The fact that the majority of Americans across party lines have shown that they are critical of Israel,
that they are openly saying and questioning why we send weapons to Israel, and that the arms embargo campaign or movement is gaining ground. More and more Americans across party lines support an arms embargo. And I think all of that goes to show that there is disillusionment with our government.
And that people are increasingly seeing that our government is not actually following the will of the people. And perhaps this is something we've always known, but I think on the issue of Palestine, on the issue of Israel's occupation, that hasn't been the case in the past, but it is now.
The people are seeing that the government is not actually listening to what the majority of Americans want on this. And it's choosing to go forward while giving us like hollow rhetoric about a ceasefire or hollow rhetoric about humanitarian rights. Well, you know, in our interview with William Hartung, I mentioned the analogy of the Vietnam War,
which dragged on year after year, and it was ended when Congress cut off the money in 1974. They just said to the Republican president, no more money, end of Vietnam War. Isn't that your ultimate goal, Congress? Our ultimate goal, yes, is an arms embargo, is for there to be a full arms embargo.
Congress has the power to make that happen. I mean, obviously the sitting president has the power to make that happen very quickly, but Congress has the power to put the pressure on to make that happen. And that is the only way to really get Israel to commit to a full ceasefire and for
the US to stop sending these bombs that are killing Palestinians. So that is, that is our ultimate goal right now. I think ceasefire at this moment comes with arms embargo. There's no other way to get a ceasefire without an arms embargo at the moment. Well, I think another approach that you might take, if you haven't already,
is to join with Jim McGovern and dozens of members of the House who are now cosigning a letter to demand, along with the demands by the established press, to open up Gaza to reporters. from the United States, all foreign countries, and Israel. They are barred by Netanyahu, even Israeli reporters. If you had war correspondents in Gaza,
it would change the dynamics and what Israel's genocidal policies can get away with. Are you supporting all these major newspapers and press organizations who put a full-page ad in the Washington Post in July demanding to open Gaza demanding that Netanyahu allow reporters into Gaza. Are you joining that effort too? I mean,
we definitely support any effort to get journalists into Gaza because that is one of many ways to show the world what is happening. At the same time, we also recognize that we need these media outlets to take seriously and to protect and show support for palestinian journalists who are in gaza you know palestinians
in gaza who are reporting on this and who are risking their lives every day and are being killed for doing it so of course we support the efforts to get journalists and and to lift this ban on journalists because the fact that there is a ban means
you know what what else are they hiding we already think so much on our phone screens and on our televisions. And yet there's more to be covered and Netanyahu doesn't want that. And of course, making sure that we take seriously the work, the effort, the risks that Palestinians in Gaza are taking to show us what is happening.
Well, it's good that you focused on the killing of Palestinian journalists. Over 160 Palestinian journalists and even larger numbers of their immediate family have been targeted by the Israeli military regime. And they've also done everything possible to destroy the communication systems by these brave journalists during all the bombardments that go on day after day.
Let's go to Steve for a question. Samaya, how do you explain to your friends or people who are adamant supporters of Israel that this war, what's going on now, is not good for Israel ultimately? How do you articulate that? I mean, well, I think the bottom line is that any state,
any society that is saying that the only way for them to be safe is to exterminate, to ethnically cleanse another people, that there are some serious question marks about what that means. And I think, you know, Ilan Papad, the famous Israeli historian, wrote in his book, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, he wrote something along the lines of,
you know, Israel will eventually dig its own grave. And I think that's what we're seeing right now. The way that this genocide is being carried out, the violence, the brutality of all of it, many have said it's like nothing that we've seen in recent history. And something like that doesn't just happen. That leaves a mark.
You can't just scrub that away. And I think we're starting to see things fall apart within Israel. I mean, no society that is built on genocide and ethnic cleansing, that is built on the occupation of another people, on this really brutal supremacy and racism, that should not exist. right? We should not allow that to exist.
Apartheid should not exist. And so I think we seriously need to think if we want to build a society that is safe for everyone, that is not built on what your religion is, what your ethnicity is, then it means we need to rethink what Israel is and what it stands for and how it came to be. Well,
if any listeners want further elaboration, there was a long article in the New York Times this past Sunday, which is getting a lot of attention, written by a doctor who's come back from Gaza and several dozen other doctors. American doctors and healthcare workers back from Gaza describing their firsthand observation of the massacre, the slaughter,
and the sniper murders, including little children being brought to hospitals with bullets in their heads or in the left side of their back. So this is calculated slaughter of children that's going on. And listeners may want to read that long article that was in Sunday's New York Times. David? David Friedman,
who was Donald Trump's ambassador to the UN, and Jared Kushner have both talked about relocating the Palestinians, ethnically cleansing Gaza and moving them to the Negev. What do you know about this? I mean, I know that it won't happen because I think that as we've seen from the last year, that Palestinians, not just last year,
last 75 plus years, that Palestinians are not going to all leave their land because this is their land. They're not just people that can go to another Arab country. And I think these claims that, you know, this is just a simple transfer or this is what should happen if they want to stay alive,
this reflects not just the deep racism, but the fact that Palestinians are not seen as humans and not seen as equals. And I think as a result, we're seeing what's happening right now, which is just becoming a full regional war. And I don't think that's going to go away.
I think the only way for things to truly deescalate, that's the word that the US government keeps using, deescalate, deescalate, while they continue to fund escalation. The real way to deescalate is for there to be a ceasefire. And I think, like I said earlier, and I'm going to repeat it again, that with a ceasefire,
that means an arms embargo, if we're serious about a ceasefire. Now, of course, the Israelis are applying the Gaza massacre strategy to southern Lebanon and all the way to Beirut and Tripoli. In the north, they're basically using the same technique, blowing up cafes, blowing up apartment buildings, saying, oh, there's a Hezbollah guy.
And they blow up and kill hundreds of people, children, women, innocent civilians in the way they're laying waste to Lebanon. which the Biden administration calls our ally. The Biden administration is allowing this to happen and giving all kinds of weapons of support to destroy one of our allies, Lebanon, in the Middle East,
as part of the servility of the B.B. Biden, B.B. Blinken regime. Anna?
This week's protest was organized for Indigenous Peoples Day. America is a settler colonial state. The parallels have been drawn between America's foundations and the foundations of the Israeli state. It seems like there's this... Dual tension. America, you know, we should be able to look at a settler colonial state committing ethnic cleansing
and see the horrors that we committed and and see a moral obligation to step in and not repeat our own horrific mistakes. But there also must be some reluctance on the part of Americans to confront the gruesome reality. Could you speak to that piece of your strategy?
Yeah, I mean, you know, I think that the contradictions of like, you know, the US honoring indigenous people's day while actually still actively within the United States oppressing and repressing indigenous, the indigenous rights movement and many indigenous communities across the US sort of shows why, like you're saying,
it's the leap to get them to get the US government to take seriously the settler colonialism happening in Palestine. I think it turns out the American people, it's a little bit, a little bit more complicated because I think, I think actually a lot of the American public does not know enough about what is happening in Palestine.
I think this past year has given, you know, there's been more coverage on this than there has been in probably the last few decades, especially with the use of social media. So people are able to see things on their own without having to resort to the mainstream news, which is, you know, as we know, we're biased, understatement.
But I think that there's still a lot of ignorance and there's still a big role that Islamophobia and sort of the fear mongering about the quote, quote terrorists that keeps a lot of people from being able to see what is happening for what it is. And, and, you know,
Ralph just mentioned Lebanon and I think like with Israel's invasion of Lebanon, what Israel is doing with Lebanon and the way that it's provoking Iran. A lot of people seem to be more supportive of what Israel is doing in Lebanon while they're still criticizing what Israel is doing in Gaza.
And I think that's part of that same mindset of, you know, how deep rooted Islamophobia is and that the results of like the post dead off war America and how that the propaganda that's sort of seeped into American society around this. So I hope that sort of starts to answer that question. Well,
to those millions of Americans who don't care what's going on over there, they ought to care about what's going on over here as a result of what's going on over there, and not just the crashing of civil liberties and free speech, but the serious distortion of public budget priorities away from domestic needs in our country,
blowing up areas around the world as part of the U.S. empire, consider Iraq, for example. and what happened in Afghanistan and Libya and elsewhere, and the very real possibility is going to be blowback, as the Department of Defense and CIA and others have been studying scenarios of counterattacks, and that will completely convulse our country, as 9-11 did.
So, citizens of the USA, you've got a few weeks to buttonhole your senators, representatives who are campaigning frantically every day in your community. Give them your opinion, give them your demands, and tell them you want to have town meetings where you set the agenda.
And they come, and they listen to you, and receive your instructions as they return to Capitol Hill. Thank you very much, Samaya, for all your work and the work of Jewish Voice for Peace, If Not Now, and many other organizations who are collaborating because they have a uniform interest in peace and justice and are opposing,
with all their civic strength, the destruction of our own democratic society by the concentrated powers of big government and their big business servants. Thank you. Thanks for having me on. Thank you.

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Part 1 of 2

Bibi Biden & Bibi Blinken
by Ralph Nader
RalphNaderRadioHour.com
Oct 12, 2024
https://www.ralphnaderradiohour.com/p/b ... bi-blinken

Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson (retired) joins us once again to give his unvarnished view of the now yearlong ethnic cleansing of Gaza, an assault that has now extended into Lebanon, Syria, and Iran. Plus, our resident constitutional expert, Bruce Fein stops by to give us a quick take on how U.S. material support of the Israeli aggression in Lebanon, an ally of ours, is a clear violation of The Neutrality Act.

The Institutional Insanity (of) “Defense”

Lawrence Wilkerson is a retired U.S. Army colonel. Over his 31 years of service, Colonel Wilkerson served as Secretary of State Colin Powell's Chief of Staff from 2002 to 2005, and Special Assistant to General Powell when he was Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff from 1989 to 1993. Colonel Wilkerson also served as Deputy Director and Director of the U.S. Marine Corps War College at Quantico, Virginia, and for fifteen years he was the Distinguished Visiting Professor of Government and Public Policy at the College of William and Mary. He is currently a Senior Fellow at the Eisenhower Media Network, senior advisor to the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, and co-founder of the All-Volunteer Force Forum.

The Jewish state in the Levant is finished. Now, if it wants to be a liberal democracy— if it wants to become a real democracy, it could possibly remain. But this Jewish state, especially in its current manifestation, which is the ultimate manifestation, has ended. It's through. The rest of the world, if nothing else, will terminate it just as it did the South African apartheid state. And it will happen—and it will happen despite the Empire's (The U.S.) protestations to the contrary. In fact, I predict ultimately when the Empire smells the tea leaves, it will probably join the crowd and tell them they have no choice but to be a liberal democracy—to invite what that means, which is ultimately a Palestinian Arab majority, and to even change their name to Israel-Palestine or Palestine-Israel or whatever. That's the future. The future is not Bibi Netanyahu.

Col. Lawrence Wilkerson: Netanyahu talks about Joshua who moved on after Moses had given him instructions, and after the leadership had sort of fallen apart, and Joshua takes over. And they go in, and under God's instructions they are to kill everything in sight— leave no human being alive. And that's Netanyahu. Netanyahu thinks he's a latter-day Joshua, and that's what they're doing. They brought a thousand years of history's most rude, most bloodthirsty, most unbelievable procedures in waging war against another state or another people back into vogue again. And we're supporting it.

Bruce Fein is a Constitutional scholar and an expert on international law. Mr. Fein was Associate Deputy Attorney General under Ronald Reagan and he is the author of Constitutional Peril: The Life and Death Struggle for Our Constitution and Democracy, and American Empire: Before the Fall.

The Neutrality Act of 1794 in substance prohibits anyone in the United States from directing or supplying arms or assistance— or otherwise engaging in war—that is against a country with which the United States is formally at peace. The United States at present is at peace with Iran. It's at peace with Lebanon. Indeed, Lebanon's an ally. We already know that President Biden had ordered Navy ships to use their Aegis Ballistic Missile Defense in collaboration with Israel to shoot down Iranian missiles—an act of war. And now they basically said we are combatants with Israel and probably planning covertly to join military forces on the next initiative that Israel takes against Iran. So it's a clear violation of the Neutrality Act.

Bruce Fein: Listeners, you have your Senators and Representatives campaigning, as we speak, in your communities. You ask them to come to your town meetings where they can hear you out, and where you require them to respond. This is their moment of vulnerability before the election.

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Transcript

This is Reverend Dr. William J. Farber, and we are listening to the Ralph Nader Radio Hour.
Welcome to the Ralph Nader Radio Hour. My name is Steve Scrove, analog of my co-host David Feldman. Hello, David. Good morning. And the man of the hour, Ralph Nader. Hello, Ralph. Hello, everybody. As we record this program, we see the devastation of Hurricane Helene and the recent devastation of Hurricane Milton. Would the U.S.
Weather Service name them Hurricane ExxonMobil and Hurricane Chevron? We just passed the first anniversary of the October 7th Hamas attack in Israel, followed by Israel's year-long assault on the Palestinian people in Gaza. Reliable sources estimate that when the dust settles and the rubble stops bouncing, hundreds of thousands of Palestinian civilians will be dead. Now,
Israel has escalated its aggression against its other neighbors, sabotaging thousands of pagers and walkie-talkies ostensibly destined for Hezbollah hands, carrying out bombings, assassinations, a full-scale ground invasion of Lebanon, and trading missile strikes with Iran. To give us his perspective on the state of the Middle East, we welcome back Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson.
Regular listeners to the program know that Colonel Wilkerson is a retired Army colonel, Colin Powell's former chief of staff, senior advisor to the Quincy Institute. Colonel Wilkerson suffers no fools. He's been an outspoken critic of the United States. Reckless, foolish, some might even say, and that would include Colonel Wilkerson,
stupid military policies in the Middle East and elsewhere. So we look forward to his take. on the current state of affairs. And at the very end of the program, we're going to take a few minutes to welcome back our resident international law expert and constitutional scholar, Bruce Fine.
Bruce argues that as long as the Biden administration backs Netanyahu's escalating aggression, the United States moves from being co-belligerents to co-combatants in violation of the Neutrality Act. As always, somewhere in the middle, we'll check in with our ubiquitous corporate crime reporter, Russell Mokhyber. But first, Benjamin Netanyahu has threatened Lebanon with, quote,
destruction and suffering like we see in Gaza, end quote. Can anyone stop him? David. lawrence wilkerson is a retired u.s army colonel over his 31 years of service colonel lawrence wilkerson served as secretary of state colin powell's chief of staff and special assistant to general powell when he was chairman of the joint chiefs of staff
Colonel Wilkerson is currently a senior fellow at the Eisenhower Media Network, senior advisor to the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, and co-founder of the All Volunteer Force Forum. Welcome back to the Ralph Nader Radio Hour, Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson. Thank you. Good to be with you again. Thank you, Larry.
Let's tap into your deep knowledge as a person in the military and State Department because the newspapers really aren't going to go as deep as this interview is going to go, and people need to know. The first is the year has transpired since October 7th, and all the newspapers are talking about it,
and they're starting with the Hamas attack. But the Hamas attack would have been impossible without the collapse mysteriously of the multi-tiered, sophisticated, technologically advanced border security apparatus by Netanyahu. What do you make of this collapse? Well, I think there are several possibilities, Ralph,
and I think this is one reason why Netanyahu is not going to allow investigation to occur, not while he's still got blood pumping through his veins anyway. One is that his cooperation through principally Qatar with Hamas, his funding of Hamas, His desire to have Hamas be the principal representative of the Palestinians, if you will,
because their principal objective also jibed with his principal objective, which was no two-state solution under any circumstances, backfired on him, and he was caught flat-footed. Another possibility is that he actually used those same channels to coordinate with them some event that he knew would be in the future and would come as a surprise to him, cough, cough,
and give him the opportunity, as 9-11 did for some really nefarious people in the United States, to respond wholesalely and finish off Gaza. And then there's a third possibility, and that's a combination of both with the things that led up to the actual October 7th events, really going haywire to a certain extent for both sides.
I don't know where the truth is. There could be a third or fourth option, too. I just don't know where the truth is. Well, there's a bizarre consensus between Netanyahu, Hamas, and Hezbollah to exaggerate the power of these two militias, Hamas and Hezbollah. And they both have different reasons.
Hamas and Hezbollah like to exaggerate their power for obvious leverage reasons, etc., And Netanyahu loves to exaggerate their power because he wants any military position on the borders to be viewed as an existential threat for the very existence of Israel, which is absurd. Israel is a military, economic, and technological superpower backed by the U.S. to the hilt.
And these two groups are militias with small arms, some grenade launchers for Hamas in the tunnels. And Hezbollah has these missiles, which have done a tiny fraction of the damage in northern Israel that Israel has done to Hamas even before the massive attack on Lebanon. What do you see is going on here?
Well, first thing I have to say is I disagree with what you just said. It might have been Israel's intent at one time, and it might have been the truth at one time. But given what Israel has done for the past year and what is happening with what they've done, I would say that Hezbollah, Hamas, the Houthis,
Iraqi militias, Syrian militias, and others are giving Israel everything it can handle. I got the KIA WIA count, which I think is fairly legitimate, for Lebanon this morning. and they're getting their rear ends handed to them just like they did in what 78 82
2006 and now today so the formidable nature of these terrorist groups is i hesitate to call them terrorist groups they're simply groups that oppose israel and for good reason in both cases In fact, in all cases, with regard to those that I just cited that we call the axis of resistance, indeed they are.
They are an axis of resistance growing more solidified every day to Israeli hegemony over the region. They don't want it. And I can understand. I can understand clearly why they don't want it. Israel is an existential threat to them, ultimately, as it is an existential threat to Jordan and to Egypt.
And I could say to anyone who has water, gas or oil in the region. So I don't agree with your assessment of the gorillas, as it were. And I don't agree with your assessment that that assessment suggests about the power and the invincibility of the IDF. It's being proven every day now that power is ebbing.
The invincibility and the image thereof is ebbing. And no matter how much the superpower, the American empire, backs them up, it's going to be extremely difficult for the empire to stop what is the end of a Jewish state in the Levant. Well, that's an interesting viewpoint. But, you know,
if you look at the casualty levels on both sides, the Israelis have cited less than 365 soldiers killed in Gaza since October. The Israelis lie through their teeth, Ralph. The Israelis have not uttered an official, truthful word since October the 7th. All right, but it's quite clear that the casualties in Gaza are massively greater. Absolutely. They're civilians.
They're babies. They're children. They're women. They're journalists. You just got the figure this morning. They've killed 176 journalists. Yes, 176 journalists they've killed. This is pretty easy to kill journalists, babies, women, children. Yeah, we'll get to the rules of engagement for soldiers of breaking news as we record this.
the blatant YouTube videos by Israeli soldiers in Gaza bragging about their brutality. We'll get to that because I know you know a lot about rules of engagement. But it's quite clear that Hezbollah and Hamas have no air force, no navy, no mechanized army, and they're taking the brunt of the casualties. whether it's 20-fold, 100-fold.
But you don't think that Netanyahu is exaggerating this in order to get more weapons from the US and in order to get more sympathy and support from Western powers so he can say it's an existential threat? I don't think he needs any more support. I really don't.
I mean, he's going to get the support and he knows it, especially from the United States. Now, there are some European powers that are thinking twice and even thrice about continuing this. and the performance he put on at the united nations probably did the rest of the
world the final deed if you will in terms of just declaring israel the pariah state and hoping and praying that it goes away or that the united states support for it goes away which as you insinuated is just not going to happen but i do think there's a prospect for that support to fall off quite a bit
I don't know if it'll fall off with this current administration, but it might fall off markedly if we move through this election process. And there's a big, big unknown. And we get to some place where Kamala Harris, for example, were she to win, has some political space because the polls are turning against both Ukraine and Gaza.
they're substantially turning against it in terms of Ukraine. So if political space opens up, then we might return to an era where US presidents had at least a modicum of courage in dealing with the Israelis. But it doesn't really matter. The Jewish state and the Levant is finished. Now, if it wants to be a liberal democracy,
If it wants to become a real democracy, it could possibly remain. But this Jewish state, especially in its current manifestation, which is the ultimate manifestation, is ended. It's through. The rest of the world, if nothing else, will terminate it just as it did the South African apartheid state.
And it will happen, and it will happen despite the Empire's protestations to the contrary. In fact, I predict, ultimately, when the Empire smells the tea leaves, it will probably join the crowd and tell them they have no choice but to be a liberal democracy, to invite what that means, which is ultimately a Palestinian Arab majority,
and to even change their name to Israel-Palestine or Palestine-Israel or whatever. That's the future. The future is not Bibi Netanyahu. Well, let's look at the entrenchment position day after day by Biden and Blinken. As you know, ProPublica broke a story a few days ago that AID, directed by Samantha Power, the Agency for International Development,
they basically documented that month after month, the Israeli regime is blocking humanitarian aid trucks. in all kinds of ways, violent, harassment, bureaucratic, seizures of trucks. And the same conclusion was reached by the refugee section in the State Department. So what did Blinken do? He went to Congress and basically denied it. He said, we have no current evidence.
So we've asked Samantha Parr to resign in protest and give the reasons for doing that. But does this surprise you at all? I mean, he overruled agencies, in and around him who have been documenting this and exonerating Israel under Netanyahu. I agree with Ambassador Chas Freeman,
who called Tony Blinken the worst Secretary of State the United States has ever had. I would go further than that. I would say that he and Amos Hochstein, in particular, the so-called diplomatic envoy with Hezbollah for the United States, and Tony Blinken are agents of Israel. I would say they're working for Israel.
Just as I would say Dennis Ross was working for Israel when he screwed up the peace agreements when Bill Clinton was president and Madeleine Albright was Secretary of State, And Dennis Ross colluded with Ehud Barak to foul the talks and blame it all on Arafat and the Arabs. We have a fifth column operating in the United States,
and one of them happens to be the Secretary of State himself. And the President of the United States. We're dealing here with no longer co-belligerents. against Gaza by the United States government. They are now co-combatants from what you've been saying. They're actually working hand in glove with the Israeli military, dealing with Yemen, the Houthis, dealing with Gaza,
dealing with Lebanon, dealing with Iran. And if they were private citizens, they would be violating the Foreign Agents Registration Act, wouldn't you say? You're right. You're right. Let me ask you this question here. Iran has sent two salvos of missiles to israel the first one in april was flagged by iran they actually
alerted jordan and others to alert israel in the u.s and they apparently were all shot down very minimal damage mostly from the debris and then the second volley the press said that most of them were shot down but ted postal said when he looked at the videos very few were shot down
intercepted because a huge ball of fire occurs when they're shot down in midair. And he thinks considerable damage was done. And they were only directed toward military targets and intelligent targets. Iran directed at two air base and I think the intelligence building, and they avoided civilians. So there were no casualties either time.
The only casualty was a Palestinian in the West Bank hit by debris from a falling Iranian rocket. So two questions. Do you think that most of the missiles on the second volume landed? And second, did they do much damage? Under military censorship, we can't find out. I think from reliable sources, I have learned that
many of them did hit. I have learned that they did some damage to Mossad's headquarters. And I've learned that they did considerable damage to two airfields. So Israel lies about all of this. They lie about their KIA. They lie about their WIA. They lie about it right now in Lebanon. Their WIA count is humongous right now.
And that hides things. You're talking wounded in action? Yes, wounded in action. That hides the casualty rate, if you will, because these guys aren't going back to war and gals. In most cases, they're not, you know, slight wounds. They're bad wounds. They're amputation wounds and things like that.
And this is getting back within the Israeli civilian communities, too. They're finding out that there are so many wounded in action. And it's not doing much for morale there. On top of that, of course, the continued service on active duty of all these reservists who are out of the economy is causing the Israeli economy to fall apart.
48,000 firms, Shir Eber tells me, an economist living in Europe now, but nonetheless knows the Israeli economy fairly well, have closed down, gone bankrupt. The port of Eilat is bankrupt. Israel is having considerable problems and will have to be propped up majorly by huge transfusions of cash by the empire.
So this is a combination of things that are going to read, as I said before, and much more than this, the end of the Jewish state in the Levant. Are you for a single state with equal rights, Palestinians and Israelis, since it's essentially a single state now? Yes, that's the only solution.
And it's got to be a liberal democracy, a true one that accepts all citizens and all people and doesn't treat people as third and fourth class citizens who happen to be Arabs, or in the future, when the power of the womb overcomes the Jewish content, doesn't treat Jews with third and fourth class citizen status.
That's the reality of what's going to have to happen there. Well, let's look at it from Netanyahu's point of view. Every time he pushes the envelope, people think the U.S. is going to say back off, and he keeps pushing the envelope successfully. He booby-trapped pagers, thousands of pagers, walkie-talkies in Lebanon, blew apart hands, eyes, heads. War crimes.
A lot of them being held by civilians. Yeah, war crimes. Yeah, different war crimes. Lincoln and Biden didn't say anything. Now, the Secretary of Defense in the US is huddling with the Minister of Defense about how and when and where to attack Iran, which would expand the war. So we have at the head of the US government,
in the name of the American people, in the name of coerced U.S. taxpayers, two men who should be called B.B. Biden and B.B. Blinken. So why do you think that Netanyahu is being restrained or thinks he can't push the envelope again and again and again as he blows up... An ally? An ally, Larry?
Levin is considered an ally, and he's blowing it up, and B.B. Blinken and B.B. Biden are supporting him actually, surreptitiously, openly, and in their public statements. Why should he be worried? I think he should be worried because he's put himself in a circumstance militarily, if not politically, though I think the latter too,
but militarily where he's causing the situation to be existential for Israel. Now, I have no doubt in my mind that he will reach to Dimona for the ultimate solution to that. And that's very frightening because I think he will do that if it becomes quite clear to him.
that his ship of state is going to go under on his watch. What do you mean the ultimate? Nuclear bomb? Nuclear weapon, yeah. You've talked about Yoav Galant, and my understanding this morning is that Yoav Galant was held back from coming to the Pentagon. Now, there's two ways that you can interpret that.
Yoav Galant was coming to coordinate with the United States how it would participate in an ultimate response to Iran, which I assume will come after the next response from Iran to the next response by Israel, or maybe it won't even have that iteration. It will just happen from Israel. And Netanyahu got worried about, you know,
Gallant coming to Washington and revealing anything or maybe being rebuffed in certain aspects of what he wanted to do. And so he called him, didn't call him back. I don't think he ever dispatched him. He kept him from coming. So that tells me that one of two things is possibly going to happen now.
Netanyahu is going to respond, and he's going to respond as forcefully as he possibly can to Iran's latest attempt, even though that attempt was, like the one before it in April, fairly circumspect. And he's going to do it in such a way that Iran is going to then come back violently against him,
this time not coordinating with anybody, Jordan, Egypt, the United States, Saudi Arabia, anybody. And they're going to put everything they possibly can on Israel. They're going to do some really extensive damage. So that's probably what's going on right now with this Gallant, Netanyahu, Pentagon, Austin, Biden coordination. Do we do it 1st,
all by ourselves and then they'll have to come in because we'll be an extremist or do we coordinate it and do it together in that case? I think he's worried that we might say, no, we're not going to do it and try to bring some pressure to bear on him not to do it.
So, he wants to go ahead and do it now. Let's just look at what he's going to do. He's already proven, demonstrated to Tehran, the strikes on Hodeidah in Yemen were vicious, brutal strikes where they killed lots of civilians and destroyed lots of civilian infrastructure. But that's an Israeli forte today. That's what the IDF does today.
It kills innocent civilians and it blows up civilian infrastructure. But it did that to demonstrate that it has the legs, the legs with its fighter force, its bomber force, to fly to Tehran and drop bombs. That was 1,800 nautical miles. They tanked. How did they tank? Well, they tanked because over the last 20 years,
Netanyahu's been getting tankers from us and to the point now where he can do 1,800 nautical mile and further strikes. So he would go ahead and do that to Iran. One has to parse closely here, what targets is he going to hit? Is he going to hit the oil facilities? Is he going to hit the nuclear facilities?
What's he going to hit? I suspect he's going to hit them all. Then Iran is going to come back at him with a vengeance, which is what he's trying to get them to do. And then the United States, he thinks, will have no choice but to help him finish off Iran. I got news for him.
Ten years, $5 to $10 trillion, thousands of casualties, and we still won't have beat Iran. just like we didn't beat Iraq, not ultimately, and just like we didn't beat Afghanistan, not ultimately, and just like we left Libya a basket case and really didn't beat anyone except get Gaddafi, the only person holding Libya together,
murdered in the streets in an ignominious way. Just consider extending your remarks. If they have a major attack on Iran, and it's an existential threat, to the Iranian government, isn't it likely that they're going to block the Straits of Hormuz and cut off 12 million barrels of oil going into world markets every day?
If the United States makes the second most disastrous decision, and it might turn out to be the first in the early part of the 21st century, the first one being the invasion of Iraq, if it makes a second of equal or even surpassing proportions stupid decision and backs Israel to the hilt on that, yes, you're right.
We will probably see the Saudi oil fields majorly attacked now, not just pinpricks like the Iranians did before. We will probably see other facilities in the region attack. We'll probably see the Strait of Hormuz closed, which is about 20% of the world's oil. And we'll see the price of oil go to $200 or $300 a barrel overnight.
That'll do real things for the US administration in terms of its relationship with the American people, because gas at the pump will go to $4, $5, $6 a gallon We're looking at all those possibilities. And as I said before, the only way you militarily prevent this or reverse it is by invading Iran.
And that is a recipe for the end of the American empire as we know it. Well, just to intersperse here with your comments and give them a framework, I want Steve Skorvan just to read very briefly the quotes by some former distinguished Israeli politicians and chiefs of staff for prior Israeli governments about civilian casualty targeting. Steve.
Former U.N. Ambassador and Foreign Minister Abe Ibn wrote of Israel under then Prime Minister Menachem Begin that Israel, quote, is wantonly inflicting every possible measure of death and anguish on civilian populations in a mood reminiscent of regimes which neither Mr. Begin nor I would dare to mention by name, unquote. Meaning Hitler. Yes, right.
And that was 1982, Larry. I remember those remarks. In 1978, Israel's most prominent military analyst, Ze'ev Schiff, summed up remarks by Chief of Staff Mordecai Gur as follows, quote, The Israeli army has always struck civilian populations purposefully and consciously. The army has never distinguished civilian from military targets, but purposefully attacked civilian targets, end quote.
My student at the George Washington University in 2009, 2010 or so, somewhere in there, maybe it was a little bit later, he served in the IDF. And he took me aside one day after we'd had a particularly boisterous seminar session discussing Steve Walt and John Mearsheimer's then paper with it, which they'd sent me an advanced copy of.
It will become their book, The Israel Lobby. And he told me about his participation in Operation Cast Lead. I was blood curdling, blood curdling. His commanders told him, kill everything in sight. We have to make an example. We have to reestablish deterrence. We have to kill everything in sight.
Kill dogs, cats, women, children, babies, kill everything in sight. He left. Well, this gets me to my next question for you about the rules of engagement. The Israeli soldiers who have returned from Gaza, some of them have been speaking out and saying they were told just what you said,
shoot to kill anybody and anything you want in Gaza. Now, the Israeli soldiers that go into Gaza, they are screened, we are told. That is, if they show any mercy, they're not allowed to go in. That same holds true for the West Bank. So they get the more vicious treatment. brutish soldiers to begin with.
And now they're bragging about it in YouTube videos. Tell us, as a military man, what's the situation with an army that basically allows its soldiers to go berserk and kill anything that moves? I mean, how can Blinken and Biden abide that? It's disgusting, and it's disgusting particularly since 1948, 49,
and Nuremberg and the Geneva Conventions and the solidification of the different parts of what I would call the law of warfare. It's disgusting. But it's not unusual if you go back and look over the last 2,000, 3,000 years of human history. This sort of thing was fairly routine. I mean, you know,
Netanyahu talks about Joshua who moved on after Moses had given them instructions and after the leadership had sort of fallen apart and Joshua takes over and they go in and under God's instructions, God's instructions, they are to kill everything in sight, leave no human being alive. And that's Netanyahu.
Netanyahu thinks he's a latter-day Joshua, and that's what they're doing. They brought a thousand years of history's most rude most bloodthirsty, most unbelievable procedures in waging war against another state or another people back into vogue again. And we're supporting it, Ralph. We are supporting it. We are as disgusting as they.
Which gets me to this amazing situation here. None of this would have happened without Netanyahu's blunder or deliberate collapse. of the border security apparatus on October 7th, which in effect opened the door and lured Hamas in, which he may have desired in order to generate his broader regional plan of violent devastation.
How are all these countries, all these leaders, basically in a level of tumult and risk and wider war? They don't focus on his intent, his blundering, which caused it all. Now, there are six prominent Israelis, as you know, wrote a letter to Congress asking Congress to disinvite Netanyahu from speaking.
One of them was a former prime minister, Ehud Barak. Another was a high official of the Israeli CIA. Others were the leading intellectuals, leading novelists, civic leaders. And they all said the same thing in the letter, that without the collapse of Netanyahu's border security apparatus, none of this would have happened.
Hamas wouldn't have been able to go 10 feet into Israel. How does everybody ignore this? The New York Times, the Washington Post, the Congress, of course, with its supine obeisance to Netanyahu, the U.S. government, the other Western countries, even the ones that are more independent of the U.S., they're not focusing on causality here.
How do you read it? We're talking with Colonel Larry Wilkerson, retired. It's a combination of things, but it still leads to a culmination that is very hard to believe. I don't know if you've seen the video that the Turks made, I'm told. I used it yesterday on Dialogue Works, and I've sent it to Korea.
I've sent it to Istanbul in case it didn't get out really widely there. I've sent it to other places in Europe. It's about a minute and a half video, and it is gut-wrenching. You're in tears when you finish watching it. And it's just a little piece of exposure of what's going on right now, set in the future,
some years ahead. And people are commenting in South Korea, they're commenting in Paris, they're commenting in Berlin, and children are watching the scenes and looking at the monuments that have been built and so forth. And they're asking their parents, Where were you? How did you let this happen? Why did this happen?
Mama, tell me, you approve the killing of babies and women? How did this happen? It's a riveting video, and I hope it gets all over the world, because it absolutely damns Israel, and it absolutely damns the reason Israel can do it, the American empire.
Well, it's not just AIPAC and the Israeli government can do no wrong lobbying in the US. They work with the military industrial complex. I mean, Lockheed Martin and Boeing and Raytheon, they're making a lot of money selling all these weapons. Which is why the BDS movement should catch on and go and gain power and gain
results if anybody really cared. We should boycott, divest, and get rid of the principles of cooperation They keep us all alive, especially the war machine keep us all alive. I mean, the bastards amongst us. Well, you have a good network of retired military people who want to wage peace instead of foster the empire. And it's,
boomeranging effect on the U.S., not only free speech and civil liberties, distortion of public budgets, for example, the complete co-optation of Congress, which has enabled all these resources to be sent over there to support Netanyahu. I'm told that the Defense Department and CIA have teams assessing blowback.
Blowback, listeners, is a CIA word for retaliation, like 9-11 was considered blowback. What do you know about the risk of blowback coming into this country, especially with the ease with which armed drones can be built in garages these days very inexpensively and other problems? Do you think the war is going to come to the U.S.? ? Absolutely.
I think there's a huge risk there. And I don't think it'll be the sophisticated things that you hinted at there. There could be some of that. But we happen to enjoy a fairly impregnable geographic situation, if you will. And we happen to have two relatively benign neighbors north and south.
but it's going to come about because they're going to come through our rather porous border i think they're already here one thing donald trump has talked about that i think is absolutely valid and ali soufan for example probably the greatest expert or the best expert on al-qaeda and arab based terrorist groups in general, like ISIS and others,
says that the numbers of Al Qaeda today, for example, far outweigh the numbers of Al Qaeda on 9-11, and that they are going to hit us again, and they're going to hit Europe, and it's going to be a recurring phenomena rather than a one-off here and a one-off there. I think we're going to get hit.
An individual told me the other day, for whose views I have a lot of respect, he was in Morocco, And he said, I will tell you that in every souk, every bazaar, every tavern, every bar, everywhere you go, if you hear 18 and 19 year old women and men talking,
all they want to do is join the fight. They want to bring the fight to America. and they will do it in any way they possibly can. So yes, we have a future of very insecure, and not just because hurricanes are hitting us, but because I think, sometimes I think the divine providence,
if he's up there or she's up there, whatever his or her name is, is angry at us so badly that the climate is being used to batter us. And I think we've got more of that coming too. And we don't have a clue, Ralph, nationally, what to do about it.
despite all the protestations to the contrary, the Climate Corps executive order and so forth. This is just going to get much worse. A senator said to me, Larry, when Wall Street is under 16 feet of water, I don't know where he got to 16, but that happens to be a very carefully calculated figure,
then we might take some action. I said, Senator, too late then. He went back in his office. You know, our country cannot take casualties like that. We go into total convulsions. All priorities domestically are shoved aside. Look at the reaction to 9-11. It cost us trillions of dollars, millions of casualties overseas. I think will fall apart.
I think you're talking about worse than 1860 in terms of some of the violence we might see, and certainly worse than the Civil War actually produced, because it produced a sort of unity in a much more powerful federal republic. This one is going to produce disintegration, I'm afraid. Well, what do you think the Defense Department,
the more sound heads there in the CIA and NSA are thinking about this? Because they know about the risks of blowback. I think they're pulling their hair out if they have any will. Are they conveying that? I don't know, Ralph. I do not know. I do not know.
I know we had a lot of, we, all Volunteer Force Forum, others of us had a lot of hope for General C.Q. Brown, the Air Force general that took Mark Milley's place as the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. We even tried to get to him.
We tried to use a number of different venues and vias, ways to get to him. We couldn't. And we gave up. And we have been very disappointed in what we're hearing is nothing but a yes man, nothing but an echo chamber between the body of the Pentagon, as it were, and Lloyd Austin.
And all we were hearing from Lloyd Austin was an echo chamber too. Biden had said this, I say this. Biden said this, I say this. Blinken said this, I say this. No contradictions will be offered. Recently, Lloyd Austin at least has shown some kind of drive to deliver a different message.
His message to Yoav Galant in Israel was diplomacy, diplomacy, diplomacy, 21-day ceasefire. We do not need an invasion of Lebanon. Well, the next day, of course, they invaded Lebanon. So it didn't have any impact. But at least he said something, but no one else that we can detect in uniform or out is saying anything at all.
We know those in uniform whom we still talk with are very worried, but nothing's being done. But would you say now, without exaggeration, that the most powerful person in the United States today is Prime Minister Netanyahu of Israel? In terms of ability to do damage to the empire? Absolutely. Well,
you remember a longtime member of Veterans for Peace, and they're really trying all over the country with demonstrations, nonviolent civil disobedience at factories producing missiles that are slaughtering civilians in Gaza, but they can't get much access to Congress. Can you see yourself helping bring some of these veterans to their members of
Congress and start some kind of activity there? Because they do have some allies in Congress and they can be expanded in number. There are, I'm speaking to a VFP regional group a couple of weeks from now. They do have some impact and they do influence various and sundry members of both the House and the Senate,
but they're few. And they're few because there aren't very many members who are influenceable. All you have to do is watch with regard to Gaza, for example, Medea Benjamin's group over on the Hill and just watch some of those videos. of what venomous comments are made back to her sometimes by people who otherwise
you would think were pretty straight people. I watched Blumenthal in a tag team press conference with Lindsey Graham the other day. And I was just stunned that these two people could see eye to eye on anything. But it was clear when it was over, clear in the middle of it.
that Blumenthal's love of Israel was transferring over to, yeah, I'll tolerate you, Lindsey, while we talk about these matters. I really don't like you very much, but I'll tolerate you. So there's so many people who are dominating the Hill right now, like Tom Cotton, like Josh Hawley, like Ted Cruz, like Lindsey Graham.
And on the other side, their counterparts. It's mostly over Israel that it's very difficult for a Veterans for Peace organization, regional or the national, to get in and make any impact. It's the same with others, like the Friends Committee for National Legislation, with whom I worked a few years ago on the JCPOA and other groups like that.
They're finding that it's almost impossible to influence anybody. They don't even want to talk to you, Ralph. If you're talking about anything regarding Israel, they don't even want to talk to you. Unless you're coming in waving an Israeli flag or two and bringing some more money for their campaigns. Well, as we speak,
Congressman Jim McGovern from Massachusetts is circulating a letter for co-signatories in the House of Representatives demanding that Biden and Blinken force Netanyahu to open up Gaza for independent reporters from the United States foreign countries i might add and even israel he's been blocking independent
reporters from going in don't you think that if we had our reporters in there it would change the dynamics of carpet bombing and and all the brutal genocide that's going on there it would depend on the reporters you put in there if you put any
from the new york times in there it'd probably get worse the lies would get deeper that rag is just what i said a rag today it's a rag for israel Let's try one more approach, C, if you think it's promising. What if prominent retired Israeli peace advocates who were ministers in prior governments, mayors of major cities,
former generals, former high officials in the Israeli FBI and CIA, asked to testify before the House Foreign Relations, Senate Foreign Relations Committee and their counterpart Armed Services Committee and said, look, you haven't allowed our viewpoints to be heard in Congress in decades. And we want to be heard, APEC notwithstanding. What do you think would happen there?
Well, I think they would refuse to hear them. I really do. That's the latest tactic I'm watching in both houses. And it is shared by the Schumers and the McConnells. It's shared equally that if anyone is coming before this committee that's invited usually, you know,
the course of events is usually that the minority will invite the person who's going to be somewhat conflicting with the current policy or vice versa, depending on the policy. They're colluding now. They don't want anyone in there, period, who's going to testify against what is the structured wisdom of the Hill.
And the structured wisdom of the Hill on Israel is both parties' philosophy and view. So good luck trying to get before a committee. Well, listeners, how many times have we talked about Congress, Congress, Congress? That's where it's got to start, and that's where you have to put your impact on as citizens back home.
Larry, I just wanted to ask you this. You indicated that Iran, if it's attacked in a major way by Israel, backed by the U.S., has the ability to wreak havoc both in Israel and the Straits of Hormuz and so forth. But what's the explanation for their two volleys,
that they literally engaged in self-restraint and they set these missiles up just to show they could reach their target, and even though they were all shot down? Do they have ballistic missiles that can evade Israeli defense counterattacks? Yes, and you just answered your own question.
against a war because they realize that the potential for the United States to come in and do really terrible damage to their country is very, very real. And they have let us know through good offices in Oman and Qatar and elsewhere that they don't want a war. And this is both sides.
This is the Ayatollah on the one side, the Guardian Council, the IRGC on the one side, and it's the new president on the other who has really been adamant about this and even offered a unilateral deal with the United States that would repeat the JCPOA, but just with the United States. as enticement, as bait, if you will.
So they've been very circumspect. They do not want to be the people that start the war. At the same time, they wanted to demonstrate to the bastard in Jerusalem that they do have the capacity to make his life truly horrible if they want to, and that they might do that even as they, so to speak,
went down contemplating the United States joining the the crisis. I don't think Iran even knows ultimately what it could do to us if it really tried and we invaded. It'd be terrible. As I said, 10 years, trillions of dollars, lots of casualties. Try to draft in the United States, Ralph, today. Try to draft.
All of my colleagues that are still alive in the military, and out of the military and the all-volunteer force forum know that half the American youth between 18 and 24 would go to Mexico and Canada in the first 48 hours. They're not going to draft millions of people, and that's what it would take to invade Iran.
So Iran is trying to keep the region from being dominated by Israel at the same time as trying to protect its own bona fides and not go to war with the United States. It could be ruinous for both of us. And yet, Netanyahu is using the tension, the pressure,
and the sold-out nature of Washington to start that war. But maybe he thinks that his air defenses backed by the U.S. can intercept the most modern ballistic missiles that Iran has. Talk to Ted Postol. He'll tell you that's bull. There are missiles, and we know it too, because we examined, you know,
there was a certain truth about George W. Bush's phrase, the axis of evil. There was a lot of work between North Korea, Pyongyang, and Tehran. And that work was on two major matters. One, how to bury facilities so far under the ground that no weapon system known to man presently, other than nuclear weapons,
could destroy them or do major damage to them. That was the first thing. The second thing was the most sophisticated ballistic missile technology the world knew. And Iran has that now. And they have missiles that will make Israel's Iron Dome look like chicken feed. And they have refrained, except a few, on shooting those.
But if they barrage them, Israel would have serious, serious trouble. Steve, read Ted Postol's comment in our previous interview of Ted Postol, the retired engineering professor from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who is a major expert on missile technology. I don't know if you've heard his latest.
I heard it the other day when he was with me on a video. The latest is about what we've done to the MIRV warhead technology so that now we can rest assured that if there are 10 warheads in that missile nose cone, they are not likely to have seven or eight actually hit the missile silo.
All 10 will hit the missile silo. and they will hit it within a circular error of probability of about a yard. So that gives us a much more dynamic first strike capability. We could, for example, eliminate all of Moscow's ballistic missiles in a strike before they could do anything else.
That gives us a first strike capability that we might think we could use. And that is a disaster in my view. Ted Postol said last week in our program, quote, the loss of life in Gaza is almost certainly in the hundreds of thousands. It's not in the tens of thousands like are being reported.
There have got to be enormous numbers of people who are buried under these buildings, which have been destroyed by the Israelis. That is a massacre, end quote. Yeah, and I'll tell you something else, and Ted knows this, I'm sure. He's a very impressive guy when it comes to the science of all these things.
The military has developed a template, and that template has about 10, 12, 15, depending on the geography, components to it and what you do is you look at the tonnage drop the type of tonnage drop the type of terrain the type of urban terrain the people the density
and by the way gaza is smaller than the greater london area and you come up with a casualty count using that template it's three hundred thousand three hundred thousand dead yep and counting As they fall from disease, starvation, lack of medicine. There's the kicker.
If you've seen these scenes of the wards such as they are, where these kids are just dying. They got no food. They got no antibiotic. They got nothing at all. They're all going to die too. You're right. It's going to triple. And 5,000 babies born every month in Gaza into the rubble. This is Joshua.
I have God's order. God's order to kill everything in sight. Just before we leave, Larry, would you call what's going on in Gaza the Palestinian Holocaust? Yes, I would. A rabbi in New York and I had a telephone conversation last night, and I said, Rabbi, you remember what we talked about, where the oppressed becomes the oppressor,
and even worse than the previous oppressor? Yes, he said, that's what's happening. And would you call Prime Minister Netanyahu the chief terrorist in the Middle East right now? Absolutely. He has more ability to affect damage on civilians than anyone, and that's the quintessential definition of terrorism.
And still, the corporate media talks about military operations in Gaza instead of terrorist operations. If you look at the bombing runs I was telling you were to demonstrate to Tehran that they had the long legs to do Tehran, if you look at them, what they really did, they didn't hurt the Houthis. The Houthis laugh at them.
They're the most resilient people on the face of the earth, in my view. They laugh at the Israelis dropping their bombs. What they did was destroy civilian infrastructure and civilian lives in Yemen. Well, we could have a whole program that the strategy of Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis has not been very smart,
taking on the most massive military superpowers in the world, willing to use every available weapon against them. But that's another program. We've been talking with Larry Wilkinson, retired Army colonel, former chief of staff in the State Department to Colin Powell, and now a vigorous and constant advocate for peace against illegal wars, empires,
and all the other distortions of what's left of our republic and democratic society. Thank you. Take care. We've been speaking with Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson. We will link to his work at RalphNativeRadioHour.com.

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Part 2 of 2

Up next, we'll talk to our resident constitutional scholar and legal expert, Bruce Fine, to let us know how the Biden administration is violating the Neutrality Act.

What has Bibi Netanyahu dragged us into? David? Bruce Fine is a constitutional scholar and an expert on international law. Mr. Fine was Associate Deputy Attorney General under Ronald Reagan and is the author of Constitutional Peril,
The Life and Death Struggle for Our Constitution and Democracy. Welcome to the Ralph Nader Radio Hour, Bruce Fine.
Thank you very much.
Glad to be here. Yes, Bruce. There are two questions I want to ask you right away, and that is the U.S. government under Bibi Biden and Bibi Blinken seem to be co-combatants who are intensifying their daily collaboration with the Israeli military under Prime Minister Netanyahu, both toward Lebanon, toward Iran, and toward Yemen, in addition to Gaza.
As a co-combatant, What laws are they violating other than the Constitution's requirement that armed force overseas has to be declared by Congress, which Congress has declined to do?
The Neutrality Act of 1794 in substance prohibits anyone in the United States from directing or supplying arms or assistance or otherwise engaging in war that is against a country with which the United States is formally at peace. The United States at present is at peace with Iran. It's at peace with Lebanon. Indeed, Lebanon's an ally.
We already know that President Biden had ordered Navy ships to use their Aegis ballistic missile defense in collaboration with Israel to shoot down Iranian missiles, an act of war. And now they basically said, we are combatants with Israel and probably planning covertly to join military forces on the next initiative that Israel takes against Iran.
So it's a clear violation of Neutrality Act. Now, the legal issue arises, well, does it apply to government officials? That's not clear. Supreme Court has never opined on it. It was an issue that was raised when we had the Iran-Contra scandal and whether Ali North was violating the Neutrality Act by siding with the Contras engaging in
warfare against Nicaragua. We were never declared war against Nicaragua. but at least on its face, clearly violating the Neutrality Act.
But the criminal prosecution function is entrusted to the executive, and obviously Biden's not going to prosecute himself. The second question is, you've written that Biden is violating six federal statutes, the conditioning, the shipment of weapons, to foreign countries. These are knowing and willful violations.
The Secretary of State just told Congress that they have no evidence that Israel is currently obstructing humanitarian aid trucks from going into Gaza that the United States is paying for, overruling a contrary memorandum by the Agency of International Development run by Samantha Power and his own refugee section inside the State Department.
Are there no sanctions for this kind of behavior, which is basically lying to Congress?
Well, when you lie to Congress, that is a felony. You may recall, Ralph, in our earlier years, Richard Helms, the former CIA director, was prosecuted and was criminally punished for lying about CIA involvement in Chile's political affairs. So that is a crime. But let's use President Biden's own standard that he articulated in running for the
Democratic presidential nomination in 2007, where he boasted on Chris Matthews' hardball. I'm virtually quoting. If President George W. Bush attacks Iran without a congressional declaration of war, I will be the charge to impeach and remove him from office. I've been chairman of the Judiciary and Foreign Affairs Committee.
I have very smart professors who advise me from Yale and Harvard, and that would be an impeachable offense. So under President Biden's own standard, he should now be sitting in trial in the Senate for impeachable offense of initiating or engaging in war without a congressional declaration.
There you have it, listeners. the latest assessment from Bruce Fine, who's willing to debate any constitutional or international law specialist on these subjects. Thank you very much, Bruce. Thank you. I want to thank our guests again, Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson and Bruce Fine. For those of you listening on the radio, that's our show. For you podcast listeners,
stay tuned for some bonus material we call The Wrap-Up featuring Francesco DeSantis with, in case you haven't heard, a transcript of this program will appear on the Ralph Nader Radio Hour Substack site soon after the episode is posted. Subscribe to us on our Ralph Nader Radio Hour YouTube channel. And for Ralph's weekly column, it's free.
Go to Nader.org. For more from Russell Mokhyber, go to CorporateCrimeReporter.com. The American Museum of Tort Law has gone virtual. Go to tortmuseum.org to explore the exhibits, take a virtual tour, and learn about iconic tort cases from history. To order your copy of The Capitol Hill Citizen, Democracy Dies in Broad Daylight, go to capitolhillcitizen.com.
And remember to continue the conversation after each program. Go to the comments section at ralphnaderradiohour.com and post a comment or question on this week's episode. The producers of the Ralph Nader Radio Hour are Jimmy Lee Wirt, Hannah Feldman, and Matthew Marin. Our executive producer is Alan Minsky.
Our theme music, Stand Up, Rise Up, was written and performed by Kemp Harris. Our proofreader is Elizabeth Solomon. Join us next week on the Ralph Nader Radio Hour. Thank you, Ralph. Thank you, everybody. And thank our guest, Larry Wilkerson. Listeners, you have your senators, representatives campaigning as we speak in your communities.
You ask them to come to your town meetings where they can hear you out and where you require them to respond. This is their moment of vulnerability before the election. Hi, this is Jimmy Lee Wirt, and welcome to The Wrap-Up. First off, Steve, David, and Hannah join the conversation with Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson.
Colonel Wilkerson, let's say you're back in the White House, which I'm sure is- God forbid. Yeah. Yeah. back in the white house and you're advising the new president kamala harris how would you make the case for her politically not on moral grounds or ethical grounds
or anything like that how do you make the case that it is good for her to end this thing to to stop funding it how do you paint that picture That's a good question, and it would have to come inevitably. But I will say the occasions where I was privy to,
either directly or indirectly through others who were privy, presidents actually telling Israeli leaders, giving them ultimata, giving them guidance they couldn't refuse, let's say. You did it, and then you explained it to the American people.
Yes.
You stopped the killing, and then you did it to the American people. And to the American people, you simply are very honest, as Reagan was, for example, after the big brouhaha with the F-15s and the AWACS that he sold to Saudi Arabia and all the publicity that just ran into the United States like a scalded rabbit to
punish him. He just told them the truth. He said, if we didn't do this, the balance of power would be blah, blah, blah. You go into all this language. in this case I think enough political space is opening up for Kamala Harris and I'm
increasingly of a mind she's not going to win but if she does win and we don't go through absolute chaos in the streets and a mini Civil War to get her inaugurated then she's got the political space it'll only open up further as we go along we go
to war with Iran I don't know what that means but It'd probably be very difficult to do this. But you use that political space, that 60% of the electorate that already is tired of Ukraine, tired of Gaza, and you exploit it. And you carefully exploit it. And you maintain enough political support for yourself while you're using that
political support to battle the other 40% that's trying to get you assassinated. Let's not forget Congress, you know, as the Vietnam War was dragging on in the 1970s, Congress finally just stopped it by cutting off the money. They cut off the appropriations. I'm hoping, it's a forlorn hope, I'm sure, but I'm hoping,
and I'm monitoring a few of the races just to see if there's any hope there, that we get a sea change in the Congress. I don't care who has the majority, but it needs to be a sea change in the way these people look at use of military power and sanctions to dominate the world.
It has to be, I hope. David? Colonel, the peace movement, I've read that the protest movement in the lead up to George W. Bush's invasion of Iraq worldwide was the largest peace movement possibly in world history.
People say, and yet he invaded.
Had there not been this peace movement before during this invasion of Iraq, what would it have looked like if there weren't Cindy Sheens and the continuation of the peace movement throughout the war in Iraq? If people had remained silent, what would the war in Iraq, the war on terror, the global war on terror look like right now?
All I can say is it probably would have been even worse, but that's hard to imagine because it's pretty bad the way it is. I was in London when the London peace protest occurred. I've never seen anything like it. Bobbies couldn't even move on their horses. People were crowded around them so thickly.
I feared for the life of some of the bobbies because the horses didn't like that, you know, the horses were giving them. And I feared for the life of the people around the horses. It was awesome, absolutely awesome. And yet then we went ahead and invaded anyway.
And Tony Blair was right there, our little poodle to the end. It started something, I think, that's still alive today. And God hope it becomes more vibrant and more useful in the future, if not tomorrow morning. And that is that there are a lot of people who see this as insanity. They just don't have a voice.
And they particularly, as Ralph was saying, they don't have a voice in their own House of Representatives, which the Constitution made the people's house That's where the government is supposed to be most democratic, most representative of, and closest to the people. And we've contaminated that. Look at the Speaker.
The Speaker's a Christian nationalist fool and a dangerous man. We have to get rid of these people.
The issues at stake are obviously existential, but my question is about the more mundane aspect. You know, everyone involved in this decision-making process is doing it when they go to work. They're going to their job. And as much as these issues are huge, These are, you know,
we've all worked jobs with people who should know what they're doing and make stupid calls. What is it like in those rooms? What is the workplace like where people are making these, I'll say, stupid decisions to stand by and watch a crazy man, you know, escalate, escalate war?
There's a lot of answers to that. And I'm afraid one of them is something that is truly brutal, cruel, and vicious. My sister, 70 years old, with a husband who has Alzheimer's really badly, is in the fringe in South Carolina of Helene's aftermath.
And she was emailing me and texting me all these things that I just had to finally respond to. And I found out where she was getting a lot of it. It was all manner of accusations against FEMA, against indeed the military and the National Guards and the leaders thereof,
and just vicious calumnies about the response to Helene in all of the states, eastern Tennessee, South Carolina, North Carolina, Florida. And I found out it was a Trump propaganda campaign, a formal financed by billionaires propaganda campaign to discredit the Biden administration. Think back to when they had for the first time in a long time,
a really good piece of legislation for immigration. Both parties agreed to it. Trump went to McConnell and asked him and went to the speaker and asked him at the time, asked him to thwart it, not to pass it because he wanted to use it as a political campaign issue. And they did, unconscionably, they did.
One of the most intractable problems we have, and they had a fairly good legislative solution to it, and they killed it for Donald Trump and for his political prospects. That's the same thing they're doing with the hurricanes now. Imagine that. This is absolutely unconscionable to me. They're down there lying about the Biden administration's response to get people
pissed off so they'll vote for Donald Trump. That's the state of our country. That's what happens in those rooms like where my sister is right now with no power and an Alzheimer afflicted husband and 70 years old. Anything else you'd like to say, Larry? Why aren't you on Meet the Press?
Why aren't you in the New York Times? That's a very disturbing symptom that you, Ted Postol and others have been excluded from even what's called the liberal press. I'm going to do the judges show again tomorrow afternoon, and I'm going to ask the judge on air if he wants to be my cell partner in July or
August of next year, because we're both going to go to jail if Donald Trump is elected. You're talking about Andrew Napolitano, right? Right. Okay. Thank you very much, Larry. To be continued, we're going to spread this message far and wide, even among people who don't want to hear it, but have better listen before it's too late.
Now, after hearing Colonel Wilkerson, Bruce Fine comments on the presidential election.
If Larry and Napolitano need a lawyer, I'll be right there with them. If they want to lock me up, that's okay, too. Trump can do that. I don't know where he gets this idea. Maybe it's just because of my mental resistance. Larry said he thinks that recent events indicate he's going to lose. I just don't see that.
When Mike Pence says he can't vote for him, these are rock-ribbed Republicans, Mitt Romney and others. Obviously, the core crazies, they will vote for him no matter what. I can't see the people who have not been completely deranged, and I don't think that's a majority. I can't see them voting for him.
Well, also, because he's offending Republicans in North Carolina and other devastated areas by the way he's lying. He's had Republican lawmakers speak out against him. Even when Ron DeSantos is defending Biden... In Florida? The 80s providing? Okay, man. This guy really isolated everybody. Yeah.
Well, we'll see what the latest polls are post-hurricane after Hurricane Milton does its devastation. Which will occur by the time this program goes up, Steve. What's really alarming to me, Steve and David and Ralph, is that, okay, Pamela Harris wins. People will think, okay, we made it. We didn't.
She hasn't done anything differently than Biden on the Middle East. She's still inside the military industrial bubble. Continue all this idiocy and crazy, you know? And as long as we think that this whole movement is about Trump and not something
where he just kind of is a drum major who got in front of a parade that was already on its way, that there will be others who will carry this work on. We're not out of those woods at all. No, the military industrial terrorism security complex, it runs Washington. It's amazing.
It's the same as true for the fossil fuel complex. They're going to go down with the ship. They're omnicidal and suicidal. Yeah. It's going to be hard to... As I say, the only way to begin to turn it around is with Congress.
Is Donald Trump's game plan to get this into the House of Representatives?
And given the six to three majority in the Supreme Court right now, the Republican six to three majority. In 2020, they refused to hear Texas State Attorney General Paxton's lawsuit against, I think it was Pennsylvania. This time around, would this iteration of the Supreme Court take Trump's lawsuit and then say, you know what, there's just too much
There's insufficient evidence to prove that this was a fair election. Let's do the honorable thing and have it thrown into the House of Representatives where Trump wins because of the way the votes are weighted. Is that the plan?
This court is really, really, really bad. I think they do havoc, whether Kamala Harris, they did havoc when Biden was there as well. So I just I can't conceive of them saying that state has challenged, which was the issue raised in Texas. Well, we have standing to challenge whether Pennsylvania applied its laws properly in counting votes.
And somebody walking off the street, a Martian could bring the lawsuit. So I don't see that happening. And this is the other thing that makes it very tricky for Trump this time around, unlike the last time. The vice president of the United States who's going to count those votes is Kamala Harris.
So if he sticks with his, oh, the vice president can nullify the state certified votes, then He's like he's shooting himself in the head. So I don't know how he's going to get around between that rock and a hard place because Kamala Harris isn't going to do anything like that.
So the vice president overrides these state certified votes. And the other thing that makes it more difficult is they amended the electoral count to make it quite clear that this was just a ministerial function that the vice president played. I think it was clear anyway.
So I just think it's going to be very, very, very hard to get around that. I just think his only chance, in my mind, is Kamala Harris loses a lot of the youth and Arab vote because she's not really said anything about what's going on in the Middle East.
And they may not vote for Trump, but they're not going to show up and vote for her.

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Part 1 of 2

Boobytraps, Bombs & Blowback
Ralph Nader
RalphNaderRadioHour.com
Sep 28, 2024
https://www.ralphnaderradiohour.com/p/b ... d-blowback

Ralph welcomes Middle East expert and executive VP of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, Trita Parsi, to fill us in on the consequences of Israel boobytrapping pagers and walkie-talkies in Lebanon and how those tactics have the potential to blow back on us in the United States. Then we welcome back surgeon and humanitarian, Dr. Feroze Sidhwa, who has worked in Gaza during the Israeli assault, to update us on his efforts to get the Biden Administration to convince Israel to stop the killing.

Trita Parsi is the executive vice president of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, and the co-founder and former President of the National Iranian American Council. He is an expert on US-Iranian relations, Iranian foreign policy, and the geopolitics of the Middle East, and has worked for the Swedish Permanent Mission to the UN, where he served in the Security Council, handling the affairs of Afghanistan, Iraq, Tajikistan, and Western Sahara, and in the General Assembly’s Third Committee, addressing human rights in Iran, Afghanistan, Myanmar, and Iraq. He has authored three books on US foreign policy in the Middle East, with a particular focus on Iran and Israel— Treacherous Alliance: The Secret Dealings of Iran, Israel and the United States, A Single Roll of the Dice – Obama’s Diplomacy with Iran, and Losing an Enemy: Obama, Iran and the Triumph of Diplomacy.

We're in a very sad situation in which we have a president who has been sitting on the front lines of American foreign policy for one-fifth of America's history, who thinks that he knows everything best, and clearly doesn't seem to be listening to anyone. And there's plenty of discontent inside the Biden administration itself—and people appear to have just given up and are waiting for the elections—but there's no clear signs yet that there won't necessarily be much of a change even after that.

Trita Parsi: Let's first remember that if any other entity had done this to Israel—or to us—we would not have hesitated for a second. We would have called it an act of terrorism, and we would have called it an act of war.

Dr. Feroze Sidhwa is a trauma and critical care surgeon as well as a Northern California Veterans Affairs general surgeon, and he is Associate Professor of Surgery at the California Northstate University College of Medicine. Dr. Sidhwa served at the European Hospital in Khan Younis in March and April of this year, and he has done prior humanitarian work in Haiti, the West Bank, Ukraine, and Zimbabwe. Dr. Sidhwa and 45 other American doctors and nurses who have served in Gaza recently sent a letter exhorting President Biden, VP Harris, and First Lady Dr. Jill Biden to effect an immediate ceasefire.

It's hard to appreciate, but really literally everything in Gaza that makes a place, a society, has been destroyed. I think of it in three levels— at the very base is agriculture, food production, and housing, at the level above that is healthcare, and at the level above that is things that are for a higher level of society, education, arts, industry, whatever. That top level is gone. Literally every university in Gaza has been obliterated, physically destroyed…The hospital system is almost completely useless right now…the functionality of the hospitals is very little more than a four walled space in which people can walk into and ask for a doctor to put bandages on them. And then even the lowest level…something like 85 or 90 % of the water sanitation and hygiene infrastructure in Gaza has been destroyed.

Dr. Feroze Sidhwa: This is just outrageous. I mean, why are we doing this even to ourselves? Is it worth corrupting the entire executive department of the United States so that we can murder more children? Is that what Americans want? I don't think so.

Dr. Feroze Sidhwa: Let's talk about Lebanon itself, not just Hezbollah. This is war on Lebanon—that has a dysfunctional government, to be sure— but it is a state that the U.S. is allied with in a way, supplying modest weapons to the Lebanese army, and France has had long relations with Lebanon going back to the mandate period. In the U.S., this is a whole new constituency where they're losing relatives and friends.

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Transcript

I'm Tom Morello, and you're listening to the Ralph Nader Radio Hour. Welcome to the Ralph Nader Radio Hour. My name is Steve Scrovan, along with my co-host David Feldman and the rest of the team. Hello, David. Good morning. And the man of the hour, Ralph Nader. Hello, Ralph. Hello.
Will any of these politicians running for office stand for increasing Social Security benefits? that have been frozen for 40 years and make the rich pay for it by higher Social Security tax on higher income Americans. Don't hold your breath. We have a jam-packed program today. Our first guest will be Trita Parsi,
the Executive Vice President of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft and an expert on U.S.-Iranian relationships, Iranian foreign policy, and the geopolitics of the Middle East. Ralph is going to speak to him about the United States role in Israel's relentless aggression, Israel's continued assaults on the Palestinian population in Gaza,
and the new front they've opened up by attacking Lebanon. We look forward to his analysis of the likely repercussions in the region, as well as the risk of blowback in the U.S. Next up, we welcome back Dr. Feroz Sidwa. He's a trauma surgeon and medical school professor who has done extensive humanitarian work abroad. Earlier this year,
he worked at the European Hospital in Khan Yunus, and Dr. Sidwa and 45 other American doctors and nurses who have served in Gaza sent a letter exhorting President Biden, Vice President Harris, and First Lady Dr. Jill Biden to effect an immediate ceasefire. We'll get an update from Dr.
Sidwa on what response these physicians have received from the Biden administration. As always, somewhere in the middle, we'll check in with our ubiquitous corporate crime reporter, Russell Mokhyber. But first, Israel is widening its war on Gaza into Lebanon. What are we going to do about it? David?
Trita Parsi is the Executive Vice President of the Quincy Institute for Responsible
Statecraft and the co-founder and former president of the National Iranian American Council. He is an expert on U.S.-Iranian relations,
Iranian foreign policy, and the geopolitics of the Middle East. Welcome to the Ralph Nader Radio Hour, Trita Parsi.
Thank you so much, David. Great pleasure to be with you all.
Welcome indeed, Trita. I just saw your recent post on the invasion of Lebanon, which is what it really is, air invasion, booby trapping, pagers, two-way radios, and other instruments that were infiltrated. And on September 17th, you said, quote, the more Biden has armed Israel, defended Israel, made excuses for Israel when it has killed Americans,
vetoed resolutions at the UN and accused American critics of Israeli genocide. of being anti-Semitic, the more dismissive of U.S. wishes Israel's become. And like clockwork, after Israel has attacked Lebanon or any other country in the region, Biden will launch an extensive campaign to stop the attacked entities from retaliating,
while doing nothing to truly prevent Israel from escalating in the first place. And on September 23, listeners, he posted, every time Israel escalates and bombs more countries. Biden calls for restraint, yet sends more U.S. troops to the region to protect Israel. Israel can attack, but not be attacked. The media calls this Biden's efforts to stabilize matters.
In reality, he ensures escalation. And finally, on September 22, you said, quote, this isn't just genocide, referring to Gaza. It is a genocide of children. Only way to stop it for the U.S. to stop sending Israel more bombs, end quote. So let's go to the present news. In the last week, over 4,000 Lebanese, most of them civilians,
were injured by booby traps, pagers, two-way radios, solar panels, etc., all coming from the Israeli regime. Several dozen were killed. And after that, did Israel stop? No. It continued bombing something like 1,600 targets throughout Lebanon, and already it has killed hundreds of Lebanese, and many of them women and children.
And one report out of Beirut said it's almost one half of the total casualty toll from when Israel invaded Lebanon in 2006 for a 34-day war. Now, Leon Panetta... as former Director of the CIA, former Secretary of Defense on CBS News Sunday called the Israeli attack of pagers and two-way radios terrorism.
And he did because it's opened up a whole new window of risk across the world, because who doesn't have pagers and two-way radios and computers and iPhones? So people are dreading it. And it's quite interesting. I'd like to hear your voice on this.
He doesn't make a statement like that and say now the whole supply chain around the world is at risk. He doesn't make a statement like that unless the CIA and Pentagon wanted him to make a statement like that. So how do you look at this latest escalation, which is not only geographical but also technological?
Well, first of all, it's a great pleasure to be with you. And I'm fortunate that we're talking under these terrible, terrible circumstances. In regards to Leon Panetta's comments, I think let's first remember that if any other entity had done this to Israel or to us, we would not have hesitated for a second.
We would have called it an act the terrorism, and we would have called it an act of war. And in that sense, I am pleased to see that someone like Panetta, given his establishment credentials, also made that quite clear on TV. And I do tend to agree with you. I don't think he went out on his skis.
I think there is a recognition inside of the American defense establishment that the degree to which Biden has been deferential to Netanyahu and to Israel is beyond anything we have seen in U.S.-Israeli history. And it is ultimately a great danger to the U.S. itself, not only because of the risk of essentially legitimizing these methods that are in
contradiction of international law, and we would call it terrorism if others did it, but also because Biden has shown an unbelievable, shocking degree of tolerance for the escalation risks and the escalation that Israel has engaged in, knowing quite well that it is constantly risking, actually designed to drag the United States into a war,
a war that the United States should not be fighting, has absolutely no interest clear red lines much earlier on and enforced them to prevent itself from constantly being on the verge of getting dragged into yet another war in the Middle East. But Biden has been unbelievably tolerant of what Netanyahu has been doing and
leading him towards this war. And I wouldn't be surprised that there's plenty of folks in the defense establishment that are quite uneasy, if not unhappy about it.
Well, do you foresee in the next few days a ground war with Israeli soldiers? They've been planning all this. This is not something new. They have all kinds of surveillance, all kinds of spies in Lebanon. They have all kinds of total dominance. This media keeps referring to Hezbollah as a powerful force. It's a totally weak force.
They have no air defenses. They just sent 140 missiles into Israel. Fortunately for Israelis, no deaths, six minor injuries. At the same time, the Israelis have complete control over the skies, complete control over surveillance, over the spies, the informants in Lebanon. and an endless supply of weapons.
And it seems like the differential in armed force between Hezbollah and Israel is about what has been between Hamas and the Hamas rockets, which hardly caused any damage, and the Israeli armed forces. Why do you think the media is exaggerating Hezbollah? They've taken tremendous losses. They've been infiltrated. They've been booby-trapped. Their commanders have been killed.
Israel seems to know through their espionage where apartment buildings are in, where they have meetings in South Beirut in order to eliminate them. Why is the media, which, by the way, the Post and Times have not had a single editorial condemning the booby-trapping and the act of terrorism in Lebanon the way Leon Panetta, former Secretary of Defense,
did on CBS? Not a single editorial. Why do you think they're exaggerating what is really a very weak Hezbollah? They don't have many cards to play, and that's been quite clear in the last week and a half.
So I think, on the one hand, you have an exaggeration of Hezbollah's capabilities in order to portray a constant situation in which Israel is in battle, to kind of sustain the image that Israel is the underdog, even though that does not correspond to reality in any way, shape or form.
And it's used to further justify American support for Israel, armaments, et cetera, et cetera. I do think at the same time that there is a difference, of course, between the capabilities of Hamas and Hezbollah. And we saw that in 2006, in which the Israelis did fail with their ground invasion.
And since then, of course, Hezbollah's capabilities have also advanced. But you're quite right. They don't have any air defenses. They don't have any of those things. What they do have, however, which makes them quite different from Hamas, is an ability to actually penetrate Israeli air defenses. Because even though there's not been any reported death,
the Israelis have imposed military censorship on the damage that Hezbollah has inflicted on Israel at military sites. Because it's quite clear at this point that Hezbollah has only targeted Israeli military sites, not targeted any civilian sites. unlike the Israelis who are bombing just everywhere. But the Israelis have put in a military census group on that.
So we don't have an entirely clear image of exactly what has happened. What I think we can see, however, based on the little reporting that has damage to Israeli military installations. But most importantly, both them and the Iranians have shown their ability that they actually can get through Arrow One, Arrow Two, David's Sling, Iron Dome, Patriot.
And those are billions of dollars of investments, frankly, billions of dollars of American taxpayers' money that has been given to Israel that ultimately provides a degree of protection, but is in no way, shape, or form a perfect shield for the Iranians.
It's true that Hezbollah has advanced missiles to use, but their hands are tied. They've used the least advanced missiles, and most of them have been shot down by the Israelis.
They don't want a war. I mean, after 11 months, it's absolutely clear. It was clear in the first month. Hezbollah doesn't want a war with Israel. Iran doesn't want a war with Israel. The Houthis are a bit of a different story. But Israel, from the outset, had plans for invasion of of Lebanon.
The Biden administration claims that they dissuaded the Israeli government from doing so. But the early mobilization that we saw was largely geared towards invading Israel. Right now, they have called out the orders for mobilization of three divisions. This would still take some time before those are ready.
But three divisions is not enough for an actual ground invasion of Lebanon. That's actually the amount of troops they had last time around. And that was an utter failure in 34 days. So if they're planning for a larger ground invasion, we have not yet seen clear signs of the preparation for that.
But as you pointed out quite correctly, this is an air invasion. They're targeting plenty of sites, all the way up to Beirut. Beirut itself. This is all clearly a declaration of war without the actual declaration. Now, there's plenty of rumors flying around right now that there is a potential 21-day cessation of hostilities that is being prepared.
And it may be achieved in the next couple of hours or days, that would obviously be quite welcomed by particularly the civilian population in Lebanon, who has been suffering tremendously. The vast majority of those killed in Lebanon have been civilians. According to the Lebanese health minister, who is now part of Hezbollah,
it is actually all of the casualties so far in the last two days of bombings actually been civilians.
Well, let's talk about Lebanon itself, not just Hezbollah. This is war on Lebanon that has a dysfunctional government, to be sure. But it is a state that the U.S. is allied with, in a way, supplying modest weapons to the weakest Lebanese army. And France has had long relations with Lebanon, going back to the mandate period.
In the U.S., this is a whole new constituency where they're losing relatives and friends, Lebanese Americans. include retired generals, major business figures, major academic figures, major religious officials. Do you think they're mobilizing to put pressure on the Biden administration to stop this? I haven't seen many signs. We're talking with Trita Potosi of the Quincy Institute, executive director.
So we have seen in the last 11 months a tremendous amount of public pressure on the Biden administration to end the war in Gaza, stop sending shipments of weapons, stop protecting Israel and enabling Israel to continue zero responsiveness from the Biden administration to these demands.
And these are demands that are coming from people that are in many ways at the very center of Biden's winning coalition from 2020. And he's been completely disregarding it. So I sense that a lot of folks have just given up on the idea that Biden is going to be responsive to any of these type of pressures.
The question is if pressures on Kamala Harris can have some impact. that she gave a very different message and tone in the way that she spoke to Israel and about Israel. But since then, she has quickly backed off of that. And what happened at the DNC, of course, is well known to everyone,
in which not even a Palestinian American was allowed to speak at the convention. So we're in a very sad situation in which we have a president who has been sitting on the front lines of American foreign policy for one fifth of America's history, who thinks that he knows everything best and clearly doesn't seem to be listening to
the Biden administration itself. And people appear to have just given up and are waiting for the elections. But there's no clear signs yet that there will necessarily be much of a change even after that.
I want to ask you about another aspect of Biden's abdication, and that is he hasn't even demanded from Netanyahu to open Gaza up to U.S. reporters who are banned, along with all foreign reporters and Israeli reporters, from going in as war correspondents. and independently covering what's going on in Gaza.
And this is pretty extraordinary because all Biden has to say to Netanyahu is, you open him up tomorrow, American taxpayers want to know what's going on there. How do you explain this pathetic, pitiless abdication by this weak president of ours in this issue?
It's absolutely shocking, I have to say. It's acting against his own self-interest. complete application, as you put it. But it's not just his application. I would say that it's also the application of much of the democratic establishment that has been going along with this.
Let me interject here. In July, the mainstream corporate press put a full-page ad demanding access to Gaza. We're talking about The Washington Post, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, AP, BBC, Agent France, all the major professional associations, 76 signatures. So here Biden has to support the entire corporate press. Open up Gaza.
Why are you allowing Netanyahu to block reporters from going into Gaza, which he's done for years, by the way, including Israeli reporters, from freely reporting?
Don't you think it would change the dynamics of what the Israelis could do in Gaza? Absolutely. And this is part of the reason why, of course, the administration doesn't seem to be pressing for it. In fact, it was even reported. I believe it was in Politico.
that prior to the six-day ceasefire that we had last November around Thanksgiving, as you recall, in which there was six days of a ceasefire in Gaza, a lot of the hostages were released during this period, that the Biden administration hesitated about going along with the ceasefire because they were fearing that once there was a ceasefire,
journalists would get into Gaza and they would see the carnage. And seeing the carnage, reporting the carnage would then further fuel opposition amongst Biden's own democratic base to the war. So the administration is well aware of what's going on. They have an interest themselves in hiding it from the American public.
And we saw just the other day, ProPublica had an absolutely stunning piece that revealed that the State Department's own investigations show that clearly the Israelis were preventing foods from coming in and that this violated U.S. law and that this would mean that there would be consequences and the United States needed to prevent further arms sales, et cetera,
because of American law. And then Tony Blinken goes a couple of days later and testifies to the contrary and essentially lies to Congress about what the evidence is and what the conclusion and analysis of the State Department itself has been on this point. So they're as complacent as Netanyahu, and as a result,
have an interest in hiding as much as Netanyahu has.
Let's go to the undercount. Everybody knows there's a vast undercount, and Hamas doesn't want the real count because they don't want to be assailed by their own people for not being able to protect them and provide shelters. Of course, Netanyahu likes an undercount. More and more, it seems there's over 300,000 deaths.
There is absolutely no doubt, I would say, that there is an undercount. Whether it is the Lancet estimation was to about 186,000 was a conservative estimation, but it was up until June. Newer numbers based on the same analysis would put it exactly where you put it, somewhere around 300,000. Let's put that in context.
of what we know happened in Ukraine and how strongly Biden administration reacted to that, very quick to call it war crimes, very quick to call it a genocide, calling out the Russians for shooting and bombing schools and hospitals, finding that to be absolutely unacceptable. But when the Israelis are doing it, it's a completely different story.
In Ukraine, in over two and a half years, about seven hundred children have been killed. None of them should have been killed. This was an illegal invasion. But in Gaza, we're talking about more than 10,000 in 11 months. And the reaction of the Biden administration is diametrically opposed.
There is a reason why the Biden administration more or less has stopped using the word or the term rules-based international order, a term that they absolutely love, the used it consistently and constantly on Ukraine, they have more or less stopped using it since October 7th because the hypocrisy, the double standard is just so blatant.
So they themselves have come to recognize that they're no longer using that term.
Well, the death toll in Gaza now exceeds the combined death toll in Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and Dresden, which was 240,000 during World War II. Before we get to the biggest issue, as we conclude, which is blowback, which is being assessed now intensively in the CIA, NSA, and Department of Defense. That's their word, blowback against the U.S.
by what we're supporting and destroying over there, whole extended families wiped out. Give our listeners a minute and a half on why Iran fears the U.S., starting with the overthrow of their prime minister.
So the history between the United States and Iran tends to start in the American mind in 1979, when the Iranian students take American hostages from the embassy for 444 days. In the Iranian mind, it starts back in 1953, because that's when the United States overthrew the democratically elected prime minister of Iran. Iran was a
embryonic democracy at the time, gave the Shah all powers, and he ended up actually becoming a much, much more brutal dictator after the coup and reigned for another 25 years. Since then, of course, both countries have a long list of sins against each other. The United States did support Saddam Hussein during the Iraq-Iran war.
It was seen partly as a revenge against what the Iranians had done with the host. But since the mid-1990s, Iran has been under a tremendous amount of sanctions by the United States that has devastated their economy. The United States has bases all around Iran. We've seen the assassination of generals, including Soleimani, etc.
Threats of war with Iran were daily on the news in the United States in the 2000s. Every day there was a debate, should we bomb Iran, should we not bomb Iran? So the Iranians perceived the United States as their number one threat, the fear of invasion, the fear of regime change,
the fear of what happened during the Trump administration, which the Trump administration was deliberately seeking to destabilize the country, and to a certain extent actually succeeded in doing so. And fully backing Israel's sabotage inside Iran. Oh, yeah. The United States was part of the Stuxnet, for instance.
Of course, the Israelis have done a lot of other assassinations and sabotage inside of Iran. The extent to which the U.S. has been involved is perhaps unclear, but certainly the U.S. has not been particularly objecting to it. You have right now Now, a new president in Iran who has brought back the team that negotiated the JCPOA,
the Iran nuclear deal that was negotiated between the U.S. under Obama, Iran, and a couple of other countries, they're sending very clear signals that they want to go back to it. They want the U.S. to go back to it since the U.S. left it, and they're willing to rein negotiated. They're willing to go with a new deal.
It doesn't have to be the exact same deal as before. Clear signals of wanting talks. We are not seeing any reciprocity right now, of course, because of the elections. But it's also unclear to me as to whether a Harris administration or certainly a Trump administration would actually pick up on the opportunity that exists to be
able to reduce tensions with Iran.
Let's go back to blowback now, which is the fear by the defense establishment in the U.S. that the war is going to come to the U.S. in terms of retaliation, like 9-11 or worse. What's the Quincy Institute knowledge about all that?
Well, the degree to which Biden's support for Israel's slaughter in Gaza has angered people in the Middle East and beyond, isolated the United States on being comprehended in the U.S. right now. And I fear that we will see blowback. We will see attacks. We will see other measures against the United States.
And it will very much be because of what has happened in Gaza, particularly when the full picture of the human suffering in Gaza comes out. This is part of the reason I am so stunned care about Palestinian lives. And I do believe that he doesn't really seem to care about that at all.
He doesn't seem to have the capacity to have empathy for the Palestinians. He shouldn't, nevertheless, care about American lives. And I think what he's doing in Gaza and increasingly in Lebanon is also putting the United States in danger.
We've been speaking with Prita Parasi, the executive director of the Quincy Institute in Washington, D.C. Before we conclude, Prita, is there anything else you'd like to say that we haven't asked you about?
No, I think this was a great conversation. I just reemphasized the last point. I think the most important point from the American perspective is to make sure that we don't get dragged into another war, unnecessary war in the Middle East. That certainly does not serve our interests.
And I fear that the approach that the Biden administration has pursued is one that is putting us constantly on the verge of getting dragged in. And we're getting in an even more dangerous situation right now. And for that reason alone, this absolutely has to be stopped. Do you see things as bad or worse under a Trump regime?
It's a tough question, but I would have to say this. I don't think Trump would have any empathy whatsoever with the Palestinians. I don't see him necessarily having it with a lot of other Americans. I do think he would have taken the escalation risk more seriously because he does
seem to be very disinclined to get dragged into wars that doesn't serve his personal interests, and this one I don't think does. So this, I think, is a very crucial difference between the two of them. But in many other ways, he could have also been worse.
And how can people get more information from the Quincy Institute? Can you give us the website slowly?
Yes, it's Quincy Institute. The website is q-u-i-n-c-y-i-n-s-t, short for institute, dot org.
Thank you very much, Trita Parsi, Executive Director of the Quincy Institute in Washington, D.C. To be continued. Thank you so much. We've been speaking with Trita Parsi. We will link to his work at ralphnaderradiohour.com. Up next, we welcome back Dr. Feroz Sidwa.

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Part 2 of 2

Our next guest is a doctor who worked in Gaza and signed on to a letter urging the Biden administration to use its leverage with Israel's Netanyahu government to demand a ceasefire. That was in July.
Let's get an update. David? Dr. Feroz Sidwa is a trauma and critical care surgeon, as well as a Northern California Veterans Affairs general surgeon, and he is associate professor of surgery at the California North State University College of Medicine. Dr. Sidwa served at the European Hospital in Conunis in March and April of this year.
and he has done prior humanitarian work in Haiti, the West Bank, Ukraine, and Zimbabwe. Welcome back to the Ralph Nader Radio Hour, Dr. Feroz Sidwa. Thanks for having me. Welcome, Feroz. Listeners, this is going to be a pretty remarkable narrative that you're going to hear now. Almost 50 doctors who have come back from Gaza,
risking their lives to help Palestinian doctors and nurses and staff in crumbling hospitals under attack. by the Israelis, wrote a letter on July 25th, 2024, to President Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris and Dr. Jill Biden. And just to give you a flavor of what they observed, here is a Dr. Mark Perlmutter, orthopedic and hand surgeon, quote,
Gaza was the first time I held the baby's brains in my hand, the first of many, end quote. Then there's Dr. Feroz Sidra himself, quote, I've never seen such horrific injuries on such a massive scale with so few resources. Our bombs are cutting down women and children by the thousands.
Their mutilated bodies are a monument to cruelty, end quote. Then there's Dr. Dalia Pachi Yanaki, an obstetrician and gynecologist, quote. I saw so many stillbirths and maternal deaths that could have easily been prevented if the hospitals had been functioning normally, end quote.
And the last quote by Asma Taha, pediatric nurse practitioner, quote, Every day I saw babies die. They had been born healthy. Their mothers were so malnourished they could not breastfeed, and we lacked formula or clean water to feed them, so they starved, end quote. Let me ask you the first obvious question our listeners are thinking about.
Did the Biden White House, did President Biden, any of his staff, Dr. Jill Biden, any of her staff, or Kamala Harris, Vice President, respond? No, unfortunately, I did not get a response from anybody in the White House. I got some people were able to give me some national security staffers and stuff like that.
Some of them did respond just with a boilerplate. The Biden administration continues to work on a ceasefire sentence, but there was no substantive response from anybody and no response at all from the White House or there was no IRS campaign back then. But yeah. Well, see, this, listeners, is another characteristic of the White House as a monarchy,
a dictatorial monarchy. It doesn't encourage Congress to assert its constitutional authorities. It spends money any way it wants abroad. It destroys anything it wants abroad, not just Gaza, with their proxy Israel. These are doctors who've been all over the world in the most dire situations.
seen horrific casualties, but I think most of them have never seen anything like Gaza. 2.3 million people crammed together before October 7th, destitute, under an Israeli illegal embargo, inadequate food, high levels of anemia among the children, inadequate medicine, basically the world's largest open-air prison, unable to leave and barely able to survive.
So let me ask you another question. These are youngsters. Many of the fatalities, I've estimated over 300,000 deaths so far and even more coming, even if there's a ceasefire. There's so much disease and trauma and untreated wounds and infections. Every day, day after day, these children are subjected to the deadly whining of drones night and day.
They're subjected to explosions in their schools, in their hospitals and clinics. They're subjected to bombs, 55,000 tons of bombs, the Israelis now estimate, have been dropped on this tiny enclave about the geographical size of Philadelphia. What's the assessment of their lifelong mental damage here? This is trauma of unprecedented severity and frequency. Yeah, it really is.
There is no time, I think, in all of history that I can think of, at least if somebody can correct me, I'd love to know another example where a captive population made up of half children, Gaza is 51% of the people in Gaza are under 18.
18 years of age, and about 40% are under 15 years of age. There's never been anything like this, where that population has been penned inside of a wall on the eastern and northern side, a wall on the southern side, and the sea with gunships on it on the western side. Their airspace, their electromagnetic spectrum,
even their population registry, everything is controlled from the outside by the United States and Israel. And since October 7th, that's last year, that's really been, that control has been used to impose starvation, destruction of the water infrastructure, and just massive destruction of the educational infrastructure. Really, really just pretty, it's hard to, it's hard to appreciate me,
but really just literally everything in Gaza that makes a place, a society, has been I kind of think of it in like three levels, I guess, like up at the very base is agriculture, food production, and housing. At the level above that is healthcare.
And at the level above that is things that are for a higher level of society, education, arts, industry, whatever. That top level is gone. Literally every university in Gaza has been obliterated, physically destroyed. Almost none of it during fighting. All of it in controlled demolitions afterwards when there was no fighting.
The hospital system is almost completely useless right now. It's not literally. It's better to have four walls to give birth in than three walls. But the functionality of the hospitals is very little more than a four-walled space in which people can walk into and ask for a doctor to put bandages on them.
And then even the lowest level, Oxfam, I think I might've mentioned it last time I was on your program, Oxfam wrote a report called Water War Crimes. It has to be read to be believed. It's just shocking. It's something like 85 or 90% of the water sanitation and hygiene infrastructure
in gaza has been destroyed i can't remember which u.n report it was just a few weeks ago that reported that the average cost of a 75 gram bar of soap in a market in gaza right now is 10 us dollars The estimate in that report was that an unskilled worker,
please forgive me if I have the numbers exactly wrong, but the estimate was that an unskilled worker in Gaza, if they were employed, which of course they're not right now, an unskilled worker would have to spend 60% of their income just to acquire adequate hygiene products for them and their family. Can you imagine it? Well, we know.
It's the violence. It's the starvation campaign. It's the widespread killing. I mean, there has never been a campaign of killing like this directed at children. All of this is combining to lead to children who, you know, I actually just for another project, I just conducted a poll of American health care workers who've been back from Gaza.
I can't remember what percentage, but I think it was about 80% agreed with the statement that I'm paraphrasing. The violence and deprivation in Gaza is so severe that I regularly saw children who were suicidal and wish they had died with their families. That's outrageous. That doesn't exist anywhere else.
So, yeah, this is torture and torment of an entire society, which, again, is half kids. So, yeah, that's going to happen. And it's going on a year now, leaving aside what Gaza was on October 6th of 2023, which is something take a long time to talk about. But it wasn't a pretty place. This is horrendous.
And of course, It's going to have absolutely detrimental effects on the development of children, on their mental health, on their capacity for empathy, on their capacity to learn. And that's assuming they survive. So, yeah, no, this is an awful and devastating problem that's going to have a generational effect.
Even if it stops right now, it's going to have a generational effect. And these are American bombs, American tax dollars, and Biden's shielding of the Israeli genocidal regime day after day, diplomatically, politically, before the United Nations. He hardly mentioned the horrors in his speech. at the United Nations the other day.
There's a ProPublica article that really everyone should read from, I think maybe yesterday or the day before, about how the Biden administration deliberately undermined the US's own accountability mechanisms. In other words, it's not only corrupting the UN, all the rest of the world nobody cares about,
but it's even corrupting its own internal processes that are supposed to function. A lot of it is focused on the NSN 20 report. That was the State Department report back in, I can't remember, July, August, something like that, that was meant to discover whether or not Israel is violating the myriad U.S.
laws on provision of assistance to foreign governments that violate international humanitarian law. There are tons of these laws. There's the Leahy Law, there's the Foreign Assistance Act, something like that. But there's plenty of them. And this article has to be read to be believed. The State Department, Lincoln specifically, They overruled their own experts,
both USAID and the State Department's Refugee Department, I believe it is, or Department of Population, something like that, which handles refugees. That's the department Stacey Gilbert resigned in over protest of this nonsense. They just changed their conclusions. The Republic doesn't put it that way, but that's clearly what happened. They just said, no,
these conclusions that Israel is blocking USAID are politically inserviceable to us because we want to continue arming Israel. we're going to just change them. We're going to just make this report say what we want it to say. So this is just outrageous. I mean, why are we doing this even to ourselves?
Is it worth corrupting the entire executive department of the United States so that we can murder more children? Is that what Americans want? I don't think so. Well, we'll see. Forthcoming are the two inspector general reports, according to the Washington Post, from the Defense Department, State Department, and they're supposed to be telling the truth.
So we'll see how strong those reports are about the illegalities that you just mentioned and other extraordinary departures from the rule of law and from whatever appropriations standards these two departments are supposed to be observing. This letter didn't get as much media as I thought it would get.
After all, you came back with eyewitness accounts from Gaza from which U.S. reporters are banned. All Western reporters, Israeli reporters cannot go into Gaza because of Netanyahu's years-long prohibition. He doesn't want to have reporters freely reporting what's going on in that tiny, surrounded, embargoed enclave. You got some CNN, you got an article in The Guardian,
but it should have been front and center in The Washington Post, New York Times, AP, Reuters, which, by the way, illustrates the devaluation of Palestinian lives, not only the devaluation of what you and other courageous doctors have documented. In fact, you said on another occasion that the doctors hardly met anyone, very few exceptions,
in Gaza who isn't sick or injured, apart from the ones who have died or are on the verge of starvation death. You're now preparing another letter. Tell us about this. Yeah. So my skills as an organizer are quite lacking. So that last letter,
I was scrambling at the last minute because it just made sense to release it on July 25th. That was the day after Netanyahu's speech, if you want to call it that, to Congress. So I was only able to find about 44 other healthcare workers who worked in Gaza to sign it. But since then, we've kept gathering signatures.
And now we have almost 100. I'm hoping we'll have more than 100 by the same thing because nothing's changed. Things have only gotten worse. We also released a very long appendix to the letter, which is really just meant as more of a reference for reporters and people who are interested in it.
I do know plenty of reporters from major papers in the US who have Called me, got in touch with me anyhow, and asked me about the details of the appendix, the details of the letter. So there are reporters who are very good and they're very interested and they want to report on these things.
And when I asked them why they haven't, they usually say their editors have this absolutely absurdly high standard. for what has to be met. And, you know, like you mentioned CNN, actually we weren't on, we were on Amanpour, which I believe is on CNN International.
And we were on, it was me and Dr. Perlman, the Jewish American hand surgeon that you mentioned earlier. He and I were in Gaza together. I've become good friends since then. And he and I were on the Amanpour show, and Christiane Amanpour wasn't on that day.
I'm kind of curious what it would have been like if she had been. But the anchor who was on, I forget her name. She's a Moldovan woman. Smart, smart lady. Between every time we would go from me to Mark, she would interject and say, oh, and we want to point out that CNN can't independently confirm what Dr.
Perlmutter and Dr. Sidwar are saying. And we reached out to the IDF, and they had no comment. They said everything's a lie. It's like, why are you being a spokesperson for the IDF? This is very strange behavior. If the Russian military doesn't respond, do you point out that you can't independently verify crimes that the Ukrainians are reporting?
Or if there was a Western doctor in the Donbas working there who reported a massacre in the Donbas by Russian troops, Would you say, oh, we can't independently confirm? What are you talking about? I am the independent confirmation. This is absurd. It was such a bizarre experience. I didn't know what to do with it.
What are these letters demanding of the Biden administration? So the original letter had several points. The major ones were obviously to stop arming Israel so it can't keep doing these things. Beyond that, there are several restrictions that Israel imposed on the even the traveling of humanitarian workers to Gaza after Israel took it and
destroyed the Rafah crossing on May 7th. So at that point, if listeners don't understand it, at that point there was no connection to Gaza with the outside world that Israel didn't control. So now Gaza was literally 100% under the control of Israel. And at that point they said, no doctor of any Palestinian descent can go into Gaza.
That's been enforced sporadically. Some have actually gotten in, but that's the restriction. This is told to the WHO. And so then the WHO actually started enforcing this, which is just crazy. I mean, that's outrageous. So we asked for that to be reversed. We asked for humanitarian aid.
that is bound for Gaza to be inspected by an independent entity, not by the Israeli army, which, again, just makes sense. Nobody thinks Russia should be inspecting aid that goes into the Donbas. Why should Israel be inspecting aid that goes into Gaza? It's just absurd. And as The Washington Post, as CNN, as American senators like Van Hollen,
who is the other one, Markley, I think, have given – speeches about on the Senate floor, they've seen Israel with their own eyes in Rafah. They've seen Israel arbitrarily denying aid for clearly no reason. They saw warehouses full of aid that should have been delivered that was just completely arbitrarily denied. If anybody's interested,
that Washington Post article about what is denied and what isn't is absolutely shocking. Children's toys, medical scissors, just all sorts of ludicrous nonsense that just couldn't possibly be any security justification for it. So that was another thing, was that we asked that these humanitarian corridors be opened up,
but not allowing Israel this bureaucratic runaround that is the main mechanism by which they're blocking aid. And the new letter is basically going to reiterate those demands, but also asks primarily for a meeting between us and the Biden and Harris administration, because what's going on right now is just absolute insanity, and it cannot be allowed to continue.
What about the doctors in the United States? Have the medical associations start to speak out? The American Pediatric Association did. The American Public Health Association did. Pretty modest protest. But what's your read of your profession's medical societies, which you and others have been trying to get to take a stand here? We have.
The American Medical Association voted down even a ceasefire resolution, which I was pretty surprised by. I don't know of any direct contacts with the American College of Surgeons, but that's the kind of thing that association effort was spearheaded by Code Pink, which they do good work, but they do it in their way,
which is really to get in people's faces and be pretty aggressive, which isn't always wrong. Maybe it isn't even usually wrong. But I think in the case of approaching medical associations, it's probably a different tactic. We'll work a little bit better, and we're going to keep working on that. What makes you do this?
And your colleagues, this is incredible what you've done over the years all over the world. What makes you do this? Me personally, I don't know. When I was in my freshman year of college is when the second Intifada broke out in the Palestinian territory. And I didn't know anything about the world as an 18-year-old kid.
So, you know, you start learning, you start reading, and it's something I ended up sticking with. And it's hard to learn about what Israel is doing to the Palestinians without realizing And it's kind of an overall consequence of U.S. control over the world.
So I felt like it's important for me to do work in my professional area that also complements my vision of a world where people can actually make their own decisions instead of having them made by force from Washington. You also have great empathy for your colleagues working over there who are natives of these lands. For example,
you say you quickly learned, quote, that our Palestinian health care colleagues were among the most traumatized people in Gaza and perhaps in the entire world, end quote. It's well known the Israeli military has killed hundreds of health care workers in Gaza. They've killed over 170 journalists, over 200 people working for the United Nations relief.
I mean, nothing is out of bounds. But describe, how do these Palestinian health care workers, doctors, nurses, they have nothing to work with hardly, people pouring in in various states of dismemberment and blood. How can they keep going, having lost their own members back home and other bombings? Yeah. Just to give people a sense of scale,
I believe it was June 26th was the last time that Medical Aid for Palestinians updated their count of Gaza healthcare workers who've been killed. At that time, it was 500. That was the 500th healthcare worker who was known to have been killed. But just a few days ago, maybe last week,
the Ministry of Health actually released the names of almost 1,000 healthcare workers who've been killed. I think it's 969, if I remember the number exactly. And then they said they suspect another 150 or 200 are dead and another 200 are in Israeli detention, which basically means disappeared.
Three Palestinian physicians have died in Israeli custody and not after like a day, not like, oh, they were shot while they were getting arrested and then they died the next day or two. This is after months in captivity. That's shocking. These weren't infirm people to begin with. What are the Israelis doing?
positions in Israeli detention has said that they are specifically being targeted for torture, for torment, and for humiliation in front of other Palestinians. We've all, maybe we haven't, but we should have read the reports about literal rape of Palestinians. detainees and other torture facilities that the Israelis are using. The widespread torture of Palestinians is not new, unfortunately.
The Public Committee Against Torture in Israel reported, gosh, back in 2004 or 2005, that the number of Palestinian detainees, I'm quoting almost exactly, the number of Palestinian detainees against whom no method of ill-treatment or torture was used is negligible. And it's important to remember, I think it's something like almost half of Palestinians
males have been arrested at some point by Israel. That means almost half of Palestinians have been tortured by the Israelis. That's just wild. Again, there's just nothing similar to this. And so the effect on the healthcare workers is dramatic. And then on top of that, they're no different from the rest of the Palestinians.
In fact, they're even more heavily targeted in some ways. Actually, a 23-year-old medical student that I knew, Abdulrahman Al-Najjar, was blown up in the house he was staying at on August 30th. That's the same day that Kirsch Goldberg-Paulin is thought to have been killed. If you look at their pictures, they look identical. There are over 10,000 hostages,
Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails who have gotten very little attention compared to the 100 hostages that Hamas took on October 7th. And this preceded October 7th as well as afterwards. They're arresting people from the West Bank, some of them women and children from Gaza, and throwing them into these Israeli jails. jails, as you pointed out.
But not any rules of engagement here by the Israeli military for their own soldiers in Gaza. It's just shoot to kill anybody you want. They have snipers shooting them in the back. People are desperately trying to rescue their loved ones under the debris after a building was bombed. They shoot into hospitals, into patients.
into maternity wards, what's left to them. And here's an example of how out of control. Just recently, Israeli soldiers saw a man who they thought was a Palestinian, and they drilled him with 400 bullets, except that he was not a Palestinian. He was an Israeli soldier. Yeah,
I think we should all recognize that the Israeli military is allowing its soldiers to do whatever they want in Gaza. A lot of it is also it's not just like the bad actors. That's not it either. Like they're like random soldiers don't decide what to bomb from the air. That's a coordinated high level decision.
But leaving aside that, you know, the massive destruction of Gaza was an Israeli policy decision, the Israelis are also—the Israeli military is consciously choosing not to stop its soldiers from doing things like you just mentioned, not to stop its soldiers from shooting each other.
Every—this is one of the points we made in the letter, and that we'll make again. Almost everybody who has been to Gaza, almost every single physician and nurse who's been there since October 7th has— I don't mean like 17 and a half-year-olds. I mean the young children, visibly identifiable as children,
every day throughout Gaza in the catchment area of every single hospital. Well, the Israeli military is very sophisticated. They have video surveillance. Almost all of their soldiers wear body cameras. I believe the sniper scopes and things have video recording equipment. They know exactly who they're shooting. There's no question about it. If they don't,
I know that our letter and the appendix to the letter, which details these things in excruciating detail, has been downloaded in Israel. I know it's been read there. I can see where it's been downloaded. So it's not like they don't know, but they're consciously choosing to ignore it. Well, that's the same thing as setting policy.
You know what's happening. You don't stop it. And it's not like it's been happening for a week. It's been happening for a year. So, yeah, there are no rules of engagement. The use of Palestinians as human shields by the Israeli military is something else that just—it's just—someone at some point will write a history of American media
coverage of the Israel-Palestine conflict, and no rational person will believe that it could have been this mendacious. The use of human shields by Israel, even just in the past year, including children and not even even only in Gaza, especially including, in fact, in particular in the West Bank, is shocking. It's on video.
It's oftentimes on Israel's own body cam videos, which for some reason, I don't know how they've actually been released. I'm not sure about that. And beyond that, it's not just sending, say, a Palestinian to go knock on the neighbor's door, the so-called neighbor procedure. The Israeli military is actually dressing up. And again, this is all video document.
There is no question about it. whatsoever. The Israeli military is putting Palestinians in Israeli military uniforms and marching them through buildings to see if someone will shoot at them, see if they'll trigger a booby trap. This is outrageous. It's crazy. I mean, and then on the flip side, when they say Hamas or whoever is using human shields,
it's almost laughable because why would the Palestinians think that the presence of Palestinian civilians civilians will stop the Israeli military from blowing something up. It's just ridiculous. It doesn't stop anywhere else. They drop these huge bombs on tents. They shoot children in the head constantly. Why would they be hesitant about blowing up this or that civilian?
It's just ridiculous. Well, much of this is being documented by 17 Israeli human rights groups, Rishusniks, Breaking the Silence, B'Tselem, Rabbis for Human Rights, Physicians for Human Rights Israel, yeah. Yeah, and you know, they're trying to do their part, but you can imagine what it's like trying to speak the truth as Israelis in Israel through these groups.
I want to read the last two or three lines of your letter to Joe Biden and Dr. Joe Biden and Kamala Harris to say, we are simply physicians and nurses who cannot remain silent about what we saw in Gaza. Every day, that we continue supplying weapons and munitions to Israel is another day that
women are shredded by our bombs and children are murdered with our bullets. President Biden and Vice President Harris, we urge you, end this madness now, end quote. You're echoing what Joe Biden told Joe Biden in December after watching slaughtered children pictures. Stop it, stop it now, Joe.
That's where her exact words were, according to President Joe Biden himself. And he ignored it the way he ignored your letter. That's the kind of president we have, listeners. Not even the courtesy of responding to the letter, much less meeting with a delegation of these brave doctors. These things seem hopeless and overwhelming.
And it's almost like, what can I do in the face of this kind of just absolute chaos? monstrosity, just this kind of behavior. How do I think about this kind of thing? What I would encourage people to do is just not think about it all that much, what's actually going on.
You know what's going on, just accept that it's horrible and think about what you can do about it. And we can do a lot about it because it's our funding that is the crucial aspect of all of this. The Israeli, there's actually a Horowitz article about this from maybe two or three weeks ago.
The Israeli military absolutely cannot continue its assault on Gaza, on Lebanon, on anyone else without the backing, the full-throated backing of the United States. If we just stop sending the weapon, the killing stops, and they actually have to come to some kind of negotiated settlement. So that's our task.
Don't let yourself get drowned in how terrible it is, because it is terrible. And I understand as a trauma surgeon, I see a lot worse stuff in the world than most people do. And it's really overwhelming. But don't let that paralyze you, please. We as Americans are cursed in some way because we're responsible for this,
but we're also privileged in that we can stop it very easily. We don't have to invade anybody. We don't have to kill anybody. We just say, no, you're done. That's it. The least listeners can do and their friends and relatives is register their objection to their two senators' representatives, 202-224-3121. That's the switchboard.
Then ask for your representative's senators. The Congress has gone back home. for the rest of the weeks until the elections. They're going to be coursing through your neighborhood, your community, shaking hands. Give them a piece of your mind. They do get affected by this.
There are more people critical of Israel now in Congress than there was a year ago. So do your part. We've been speaking with Dr. Feroz Zidwa, who's come back from Gaza along with dozens of other heroic American doctors and who have penned collectively a letter
to the President of the United States about what they found and what they're urgently recommending in terms of a ceasefire, humanitarian aid, and a long-term settlement of the conflict. They received no response from the White House. Thank you very much for your ongoing efforts, Peruz,
as you just keep going and going along with those of your valiant colleagues until you break through. Thank you all. I want to thank our guests again, Trita Parsi and Dr. Feroz Sidwa. For those of you listening on the radio, that's our show. For you podcast listeners, stay tuned for some bonus material we call The Wrap-Up,
featuring Francesco DeSantis with In Case You Haven't Heard. A transcript of this program will appear on the Ralph Nader Radio Hour Substack site soon after the episode is posted. The producers of the Ralph Nader Radio Hour are Jimmy Lee Wirt, Anna Feldman, and Matthew Marin. Our executive producer is Alan Minsky.
Our theme music, Stand Up, Rise Up, was written and performed by Camp Harris. Our proofreader is Elizabeth Solomon. Join us next week on the Ralph Nader Radio Hour. Thank you, Ralph. Thank you, everybody. Be active. Got a few weeks left for the campaign to end in November. Hi, this is Jimmy Lee Wirt, and welcome to The Wrap-Up,
where we broaden our conversation with Dr. Feroz Sidwa. Let's go to Lebanon and the slaughter in Lebanon now, and the booby-trapping of pagers and two-way walkie-talkies. The health situation now is dire in Lebanon. The hospitals are overloaded. Do you envision doctors like yourself going into Lebanon?
Are you willing to call for an airlift of these people who've had their limbs blown off by booby-trapped pagers and two-way radios to be airlifted to the US, UK, France maybe for aid? What are you all seeing about Lebanon now before israelis turn it into another gaza yeah so that's it's a very scary prospect you
know what israel is doing what israel did to gaza it's not doing it's pretty much done it really actually stems from the 2006 lebanon war that's when israel's what's called the dahlia doctrine was formed it's a fancy term for just blowing up everything until your enemy gives in so now they're taking it back to dahlia is a
uh is a suburb of beirut where where hezbollah is well established So now they're taking the Dahya Doctrine back to where they first conceived of it. And, you know, the thing about Lebanon is it's very scary. It's a very scary time for not just Israel, Gaza, Lebanon, the Middle East, but really for the whole world.
The Israelis, you know, they can blow up pagers. And I was actually pretty surprised by the American elite response to that. I think there have been two opinions in the New York Times. One was by Stephen Walser. Is that his name? The just war theoretician, if you want to call him that,
who is just an Israeli apologist of the highest order, even he wrote that this was completely unjustifiable. I was shocked, even accepting every point of Israeli propaganda about why they did it and who they targeted and blah, blah, blah. He still said it was completely unjustifiable. He said it has no place in a just war.
I think that was the headline. And then there was a security expert whose name I forget. He's at the Harvard Kennedy School, who also said, this is a total disaster. This is a major red line that's been crossed. It's going to cause all sorts of problems for the entire world. And that's obvious. How should I,
I don't know if people can see what we're doing, but I'm holding my iPhone right next to me. Is this going to blow up right now? Well, I don't actually know. That's terrifying. The whole world is dependent on these devices now. It's just completely insane. The behavior is nuts. But it's very scary.
I'm no military analyst or strategist, but we've seen in past wars that Israel does not have the capacity to fight Hezbollah. in southern Lebanon. They just don't. They can blow up all of Lebanon, but they can't stop Hezbollah from firing rockets into Israel. If they can't do that, then there's no chance of actually declaring victory.
And this Israeli government has gone very far off the rails and very, very far off to the right. It's doing all sorts of vindictive, crazy nonsense, like, for example, this pager attack. It's important to realize they could have used their control of these pagers to gather data and intelligence to keep people safe.
like to keep Israelis safe, but instead they just chose to harm people and name them. Well, you know who agrees with you? The former head of the CIA and Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta on Sunday. He called it a clear act of terrorism and jeopardizing the security, quote, of the entire global health supply chain.
This is going to go all over the world now. People are going to start wondering, is their products booby-trapped? That's another out-of-control Israeli performance. But the differential between Hezbollah and Israel is vast. Hezbollah is overrated. It just sent 140 missiles into Israel. Most of them were intercepted. Fortunately for Israelis, no fatalities,
six minor injuries compared to massive modern precision missiles going the other way into Lebanon. and endless supply by the United States. So as one high military official said a few weeks ago, they said, you know, if we go in, goodbye Lebanon. They already destroyed it in 1982, very substantially blowing up the infrastructure.
And because the Lebanese army was so weak, it couldn't protect the Shiites in southern Lebanon. That's how Hezbollah emerged, to protect their own people in southern Lebanon against a long occupation by the Israeli invaders. And so this has been going on a long time. In terms of positions going to Lebanon, actually,
a friend of mine is organizing a trip to Lebanon, so I'm hoping I can go there soon. But we'll see. I mean, as soon as Israel—if Israel bombards Beirut directly, the airport's going to be closed, which means there's no way to get there. But yeah, what's happening in Lebanon is very frightening,
because there may not be a military endgame for Israel. If there isn't, it's not clear how that shakes out. It's very scary. Americans should know if they don't remember the last time Americans went into Lebanon to save Israel from its own quagmire. We all know what it was.
We should know what happened in the 1983 Beirut barracks bombing. We should not be putting Americans in harm's way to protect this just completely crazed Israeli project. What we should be doing is just telling them to stop. It's very simple. Stop and open the way for U.S.
correspondents to get it to truth here, other Western Israeli correspondents that are being blocked. How do people get the letter? Right now, it's only on Twitter. If you just search for my name on Twitter, it's in the little highlights section. But we're building a website that's going to house our letter and also, you know,
really almost shockingly identical letters from Canadian and British physicians who've worked in Gaza as well, saying almost exactly the same thing. I'm sure other websites are carrying this letter as well, listeners, so you'll be able to get a full copy.

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Part 1 of 2

Throw Down for Peace
by Ralph Nader
RalphNaderRadioHour.com
Sep 21, 2024
https://www.ralphnaderradiohour.com/p/t ... -up-cities

Ralph welcomes back Hassan El-Tayyab, the Legislative Director for Middle East policy at the Friends Committee on National Legislation to talk about the FCNL's recent lobbying efforts in support of a ceasefire in Gaza, as well as the recently-introduced bill to restore funding to UNRWA. Then, Ralph is joined by journalist Rachel Corbett to discuss her recent article for the NY Times Magazine "The For-Profit City That Might Come Crashing Down" about Próspera, the private, for-profit city off the coast of Honduras. Finally, our resident international-law expert Bruce Fein stops by to discuss Israel's recent coordinated attacks in Lebanon.

Hassan El-Tayyab is Legislative Director for Middle East policy and Advocacy Organizer at the Friends Committee on National Legislation (FCNL). Previously, he was co-director of the national advocacy group Just Foreign Policy, where he worked to reassert Congressional war authority and promote human rights in the Middle East and Latin America. He played a major role in the successful passage of the War Powers Resolution to end US military aid to the Saudi-UAE coalition’s war in Yemen.

I've been reading a recent statement that the Friends Committee has put out on the Gaza situation. They just can't seem to keep up with the massive expansion of Israeli state terrorism and the death and destruction that's being wrought on hundreds of thousands of Palestinian civilians, families, children, mothers, fathers, and the civilian infrastructure. [Their] effort on Capitol Hill—which is a longstanding feature of the Friends Committee on Legislation—seems hopelessly overwhelmed by the AIPAC-led Israeli-government-can-do-no-wrong lobby.

Ralph Nader: We try to find common ground. As you know, the Quaker way is to believe that there's a spirit and light in everybody—whether we agree with them or not, we want to engage. And that's just a philosophy that we've had for over 80 years as an organization, and much longer than that as Quakers doing peace advocacy work going back hundreds of years. So we try to engage with everybody. Maybe we don't agree on the weapons shipments, but we can agree on sending US Navy hospital ships to the region.

Hassan El-Tayyab: If we care about peace, we have to throw down for peace. And not just support humanitarian aid, but actually get involved in the political end of this as well. Because we are spiraling. We're spiraling into a dark place if we don't get our act together.

Bruce Fein is a Constitutional scholar and an expert on international law. Mr. Fein was Associate Deputy Attorney General under Ronald Reagan and he is the author of Constitutional Peril: The Life and Death Struggle for Our Constitution and Democracy, and American Empire: Before the Fall.

There is no way that Israel was able to limit the distribution of the pages to Hezbollah, so they knew that they were taking a very high risk that civilians would be killed or injured—which is a violation of the Geneva Convention prohibition upon resorting to any military endeavor where the risk of harm to civilians is dramatically disproportionate to the military objective at issue.

Bruce Fein: Even with the low bar that many people present before the Biden administration, it is unsettling to see White House spokespeople day after day knowingly lying about Israel “complying with all laws.”

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Transcript

This is John Nichols of The Nation Magazine, and you're listening to the Ralph Nader Radio Hour.
Welcome to the Ralph Nader Radio Hour. My name is Steve Scrovan, along with my co-host David Feldman. Hello there, David. Good morning. And, of course, the man of the hour, Ralph Nader. Hello, Ralph. Hello, everybody. More turbulence this week. We're closing in on a year since the October 7th attacks in Israel and the
subsequent escalation of Israel's assault on Gaza. One of the many casualties of this assault has been UNRWA, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East. UNRWA is the most significant direct provider of humanitarian aid in the territory, with more than 2 million Palestinian civilians relying on it for critical necessities and services.
The Israeli government of Benjamin Netanyahu accused 12 UNRWA staffers of aiding Hamas's attack on October 7th. And in response, the Biden administration and Congress halted all U.S. funding for UNRWA until March 2025. Critics of the move assert that Israel is conflating humanitarian aid with aiding and abetting violence. And even if those 12 staffers,
12 people among 13,000 UNRWA workers in Gaza, did what the Israeli government alleges, defunding UNRWA is an unjustified and disproportionate response that exacerbates the ongoing humanitarian crisis in Gaza. Our first guest is Hassan El-Tayeb, Legislative Director for Middle East Policy at the French Committee on National Legislation.
We'll speak to him about how Gaza is being starved and his work lobbying the U.S. to reverse its knee-jerk reaction and restore UNRWA funding. Now, imagine a world designed by your favorite technocrat. a completely privatized Xanadu, a fever dream of unfettered capitalism, defined not by a constitution, but by a 4,000-page arbitration agreement,
without any pesky government regulations to limit the creative energy of this truly free enterprise ecosystem, a free market Gilligan's Island. If Elon Musk was Gilligan, Ayn Rand was Thurston Howell III, and Milton Friedman was Ginger. Well, dream no more. Such a place exists off the coast of Honduras in Prospera.
Prospera is a private for-profit city with its own government that courts foreign investors through low taxes and light regulation. And it's being built in a semi-autonomous jurisdiction known as ZED, a Spanish acronym for Zone for Employment and Economic Development. Our second guest, journalist Rachel Corbett, profiled Prospera for the New York Times Magazine. What did she find?
Is Prospera's goal of, quote, building the future of government privately run and for profit, unquote, working? Or is it just another banana republic? You won't want to miss our discussion with Rachel Corbett. And to close out the program, we welcome back our international legal expert, Bruce Fine,
to give us his take on the recent Israeli attack in Lebanon involving the coordinated blowing up of pagers and walkie-talkies, which not only killed a number of suspected Hezbollah members, but also many innocent civilians. As always, somewhere in the middle, we'll check in with our tireless corporate crime reporter, Russell Mokhyber.
But first, our first guest contends that Gaza isn't starving. It's being starved. David? Hassan El-Tayeb is legislative director for Middle East Policy and advocacy
organizer at the Friends Committee on National Legislation, FCNL. Previously, he was co-director of the national advocacy group Just Foreign Policy, where he worked to reassert congressional war authority and promote human rights in the Middle East and Latin America. He played a major role in the successful passage of the War Powers Resolution to end U.S.
military aid to the Saudi-UAE coalition's war in Yemen. Welcome back to the Ralph Nader Radio Hour, Hassan L. Tayeb.
Thank you so much for having me. Yeah, welcome, Hassan. I've been reading the recent statements that the Friends Committee has put out on the Gaza situation. They just can't seem to keep up with the massive expansion of Israeli state terrorism and the death and destruction that's being wrought on hundreds of thousands of Palestinian civilians, families, children, mothers,
fathers, and the civilian infrastructure. Your effort on Capitol Hill, which is a longstanding feature of the Friends Committee on Legislation, seems hopelessly overwhelmed by the AIPAC-led Israeli government can do no wrong lobby. You just seem to be hopelessly overwhelmed. And so I want to ask you some questions about how you escalate your lawful lobbying
with new strategies and tactics. The first one, is that Joe Biden and his cohorts are going along with Netanyahu's prohibition of the entry of U.S. war correspondents and other country war correspondents into Gaza. Netanyahu has blocked even Israeli reporters from Gaza, other than a few three-hour tours in a
armed vehicle that the Israelis have allowed some reporters but they can't freely report. They're just toured in and toured out. Are you making a major issue of this on Capitol Hill with your coalition? Ralph, thank you. Super important question. And absolutely, we're making an issue of this. It is critical that not only the American people,
but the entire world knows exactly what's going on in Gaza. And that can't happen without access to journalists. But we know that this is not a new thing, that the Israeli government has, one, killed many journalists, including Palestinian-American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh, who was killed while reporting on the Israeli military invasion of Jenin.
And we still don't have justice for Shireen. We don't have justice for dozens of journalists that have been killed. Those are well-said statements. But I'm asking you, how are you making this a major issue politically in the United States. You have a coalition of 50 groups Yeah, absolutely.
So I can say that there's a lot of things going on right now. We're doing our best to keep up with everything. We've signed on to statements from committees to protect journalists and other groups like that and have been incorporating this in our direct lobbying, both with Congress and the administration. But obviously it's insufficient.
It hasn't happened yet and more needs to be done. And we're trying to find the levers we can to actually force the question. Some of that is really, we've been very focused on security assistance in particular as one of these levers to compel the Israeli government open things up, not just with journalists,
but to stop these gross violations of human rights. Okay, let's get down to that. For those who don't know what UNRWA is, it's the United Nations Relief Organization. that's been providing since 1948 to displaced Palestinian refugees, not just in Palestine, but Lebanon and Jordan, food, education, and health care.
And UNRWA has been a target of the Netanyahu terrorist regime. And they've been attacking UNRWA facilities, bombing the schools, the health clinics. They've killed over 200 UNRWA employees. And you and A coalition of 50 groups, 50 groups, wrote a letter to President Biden demanding that USAID 2 UNRWA, which has been going on for decades under Republican-Democratic administrations,
be restored. Because, first of all, Biden cut it off right after October 7th. Number two, the Congress, with the Republicans in the forefront, inserted an amendment that prohibiting the Biden regime from providing any further aid, along with Norway and Germany and other countries, to UNRWA in their critical life-saving function until April of next year.
So now you've sent a letter with 50 groups, call it a national coalition urging President Biden to restore UNRWA funding to aid Palestinians, dated February 14th, 2024. Did the Biden administration respond to your letter? Yeah, another good question. So Congress actually, they suspended funding to UNRWA till March 2025. So that was one.
We did not hear back from the Biden administration. I think they may have confirmed receipt of the note that we sent them, but I don't believe we got any formal response. We have been meeting with the State Department and other Biden administration officials about this, and we keep raising it in our coalition of faith groups.
You find these coalitions being rebuffed. So, actually, yeah, you know, and we escalate by working with Congress to introduce new legislation. I did want to touch on that. Because, as you know, Ralph, the people of Gaza aren't starving. They're being starved. And we've got over two million Palestinian civilians facing a manmade humanitarian
catastrophe with famine and disease spreading due to the lack of this aid access. And at the same time, the Biden administration and Congress are withholding U.S. funding to the largest aid organization in Gaza, which is UNRWA. And they've been working for over seven decades in the Gaza Strip, but also Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, West Bank,
And UNRWA is the backbone of all aid delivery and ensuring that people get the help that they need. So we need to turn this funding back on and do so quickly because it's not just famine now, it's also a polio epidemic and UNRWA is playing a lead role in some of these vaccinations.
There are some proactive steps that we're trying to take on the UNRRA situation that I think your listeners would really benefit from hearing about. Rep Carson, Rep Jayapal, and Rep Schakowsky are introducing a bill called the UNRRA Funding Emergency Restoration Act, and this would completely remove all congressional limitations on UNRWA funding immediately if passed,
and then call on the Biden administration to restore funding as well. I think this is absolutely critical that the US join the other 15 countries that had initially suspended support to UNRWA to resume funding. This includes US allies like the UK, the European Union, Canada, France, Germany, Australia, And again, as the largest contributor to UNRWA, the U.S.
has to join that group. Just a little background, you know, the decision to suspend this funding was made after, you know, we think it was a knee-jerk response to Israeli allegations in January of 2024 this year. Let's not get into that because I want you to talk about a lot of other things,
and we have a time factor here. You shouldn't even give that any credibility, by the way. The whole thing is a setup. Let's talk about Congress. We're talking with Hassan El-Tayyib. He's the legislative director for the Middle East Policy and Advocacy Effort of the Friends Committee on National Legislation.
That's the Quaker group of longstanding efforts over the decades to advance peace and wage peace. There are prominent Israeli and Palestinian peace advocates over the years, as you know, very prominent in Israel, former ministers, mayors of major cities, public intellectuals, people who formerly headed the Israeli FBI and the CIA.
And they are not allowed to have hearings on Capitol Hill since 1948. That's what AIPAC has blocked. And if you made an issue of this, your coalition has good contacts over there. You can get these prominent people to write a formal letter to the heads of the House Foreign Relations Committee and the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and
the House Armed Services Committee and the Senate Armed Services Committee and ask to testify. All the witnesses are on one side for decades. Have you decided to make that an issue? Because it would produce a new dynamic in this country and it would be free to speak. Absolutely. Yeah, I think this is critical.
The fact that we don't have hearings that really reflect a balanced and rational perspective on this. And we've been making requests of all these different committees that you just mentioned to actually have committee hearings that center Palestinian human rights and regional de-escalation, diplomacy with Iran.
But we also intervene on specific hearings saying, why don't you have this individual? Maybe we're not gonna get the entire topic that we want, but make sure we lift up Palestinian voices and Israeli voices who actually want peace. Hassan, you know, they will not allow Americans, whether they're Jewish Americans or Arab Americans or Muslim Americans, to testify.
The only possible way you can get there is to get prominent Israeli and Palestinian peace advocates who have been working together for years, because they cannot be accused of anti-Semitism. which is a slur and a gag against free speech. It's now been weaponized, as you know, on college campuses and all over the country.
The only way you're going to get through is to have very prominent people, former prime ministers, former members of the Knesset, as I mentioned, in Israeli society, and leaders of Israeli human rights groups. You probably saw the December 13th New York Times op-ed, where 17 Israeli human rights groups demanded of Biden that he stop what they called,
quote, the catastrophe in Gaza, end quote. And you probably saw the more recent letter by six prominent Israelis, including retired prime ministers and national security people, demanding of Congress that they disinvite Netanyahu from speaking. These are the people that have the only chance to get hearings under both the Democratic Senate and the Republican Senate.
Are you ready to push for that? Because everything else is not working. Just to level set here, I agree with you that it's very difficult, but judiciary just featured Maya Barry from Arab American Institute at a committee hearing they did on stopping the spread of hate just yesterday.
granted that was a horrific hearing and they asked her some really downright racist and hateful questions but we are able to get some good arab american witnesses and you know that's one example but to your larger point completely agree it's been the focus of our advocacy and trying to make sure that We get better hearings,
we get better witnesses, and we get better questions asked of the witnesses during the hearings by members of Congress and congressional champions. So we are totally on the same page. Also, one body didn't mention is the Tom Lantos Human Rights Commission. also headed by co-chairman McGovern.
And we want them to use that platform to lift up the need for Palestinian human rights, protecting U.S. citizens in the West Bank, like Aisha Noor-Eggy, who was just slain by an Israeli sniper just about a week ago. So totally with you. And I think it's just absolutely critical to change the conversation.
Let's look at the access you're getting. Have you gotten access to the fanatical Republicans like Senator Lindsey Graham and Senator Tom Cotton, who have basically said, kill them all over there, total support of the Israeli genocide? Do you ever have an opportunity to sit down and talk with them or their staff?
Or are you mostly talking to people who are semi-sympathetic to you? we are getting access to republicans and we lobby them we try to find common ground as you know the quaker way is to believe that you know we believe that there's the
spirit and light in everybody whether or not we agree with them or not we want to engage and that's just a philosophy that we've had for you know over 80 years as an organization and much longer than that as quakers doing peace advocacy work going back hundreds of years So, we try to engage with everybody.
Maybe we don't agree on the weapons shipments, but we can agree on sending us Navy hospital ships to the region. Give us some names who have you met? Have you met speaker? Mike Johnson? Have you met Lindsey Graham? Tom cotton. Members or staff either way.
yeah sometimes when i walk down the hall you know staff and members run the other way they're like oh my god we're going to hear from this piece nick which it's all gravy but yes we have met with massey we've met with graham we've met with grand
paul we've met with mike lee you know we're pushing initiatives like the hospital ships by rep adderholt another republican we've met with nancy mace a number of times You know, I could go on and on. We try to, like I said, we try to engage with everybody, even if they don't agree with us.
We still try to have the conversation. We try to bring Palestinians and Israelis into some of these meetings. And I think that's just absolutely critical. Even if we don't get to a good place, just having those conversations is just critical. And I got to say, a lot of people aren't engaging with Republicans on this issue.
And I think FCNL, you know, we're trying to fill that gap. And we think getting Christian voices in the mix, also to highlight the plight of Palestinian Christians in Gaza, in the West Bank, is really critical. And like I said, we try to find common ground where we can. You know, we're really grateful to Rep.
Massey for voting against the Israel security supplemental package. What about the Christian groups here? They're supposedly worried about what's left of the Christian population in Bethlehem and in West Bank and in Gaza. What is the position of the National Council of Churches based in New York?
Do they join your coalition or are they remaining silent month after month? Yeah, so National Council of Churches, they do work with us and they're on the board of Churches for Middle East Peace. So yeah, we do work with them. There's a whole bunch of other folks that I think are really wonderful to work with.
The Presbyterians, the Mennonites, Mary Knoll, yeah there's just like really a whole i could just keep going and going and the united methodists as well and so we're trying to build this faith coalition to push on a whole bunch of things whether it be the need for an immediate ceasefire and
hostage deal whether it be humanitarian access including the hospital ships including unrefunding halting arms sales to make sure that u.s weapons are never used to violate human rights regional de-escalation and also protecting palestinian christian communities in the west bank and gaza so those are all things that we're doing we're trying to reach
out to the trump campaign and the harris campaign to request a meeting to discuss five key demands that i just mentioned we're going to request those meetings with a whole bunch of faith groups so we're trying to engage and we think it's really important that the christian voices are being heard right now Well,
I'm sure many of our listeners now are saying to themselves, well, we certainly haven't read this in any of the media, newspapers, magazines, radio, TV, NPR, public broadcasting. Let me go to another initiative that I think our listeners would like you to describe. In early May, you went back to the Ramallah Friends School.
That's the Quaker school in Ramallah in the West Bank. And you talked with sixth graders and seventh graders, and you ask them why they support a ceasefire in their own words. And Mira in this grade six said, quote, I support the ceasefire because each child must have the right to live in peace and freedom.
The ceasefire will preserve the innocent lives of children, not to mention half of the population in Gaza are children, end quote. This leads me to a question, Hassan. Have you thought of encouraging the children in Palestine to communicate with the children in the United States and the children in Israel.
You know, children have a moral authority that's unique. They speak very often, much more truthfully and forthrightfully than their wayward adults. What do you think of that idea? And have you had it before I just mentioned? What do you think of that proposal because I think it might change the dynamics of the media here if
it's done in a consistent manner. That's a great suggestion, Ralph. And I think, yes, children weighing in on this is huge. They do have a moral authority and their voices are so needed right now. I went to Palestine. I went across the West Bank to the Ramallah Friends School in January.
This was the second trip I'd actually taken to the Ramallah Friends School. And I was just horrified by just the kind of traumas that the kids are dealing with. And so getting their voices out there is really critical. I will say that we sent a letter on behalf of the Ramallah Friends School students.
After October 7, a whole bunch of these Friends School students wrote a letter calling on US lawmakers to press for an immediate ceasefire. And so on behalf of them, we sent that up to Capitol Hill. And I think doing more things like that, whether it be engagement directly with US children and US students, and also Israeli students,
I think is critical. So totally in agreement. And if I may, I'd just love to share maybe a few of the things that these students told me. there was this one girl sixth grade palestinian student lena at ramallah friends she passed me a handwritten note in saying palestine is witnessing a genocide right
now a child's dying every five minutes of the day gaza needs a break the palestinian people are desperate for a ceasefire that's what she's calling for the third grade cousin of the ramallah friend school graduate who had been paralyzed by that hate crime attack in vermont
in he cried in front of his whole class he had this big assembly that i had done and he just threw tears he said please tell the american people like stop these crimes of hate against palestinians And he just broke down in tears again. His teacher gave him a big hug, and that really gutted me.
I mean, just seeing that. Not only did his cousin get shot and paralyzed in this hate crime, but he's also seeing the fact that the United States continues to send weapons to the israeli government that are being used to kill and name innocent civilians
in gaza to perpetuate these attacks in the west bank like the one on aishanor just a week or so ago and it's really devastating to see that so that's that's why i said i had my speech as you know ralph i like to talk as a lobbyist
I had my speech all ready to go in front of one of these assemblies. And I just said, you know, it's time for me to actually listen here, listen to what the students are saying and what they want is what a lot of us have been calling for, which is an immediate ceasefire, right?
They want an end to this war so we can move forward in peace and try to rebuild from here. But for its part, I think the United States needs to do more to put pressure on the Israeli government, suspend the security assistance, making sure that U.S. weapons are never used to violate human rights.
That's an understatement, Hassan, but you're known for your prudent understatements. Let's fill out the scene here. One of the reasons three out of four Israelis despise Netanyahu, not only because what he tried to do to break the independence of the judiciary, it's not only that he's under prosecution by Israeli prosecutors for political corruption,
it's that they accuse him of collapsing the sophisticated border security apparatus on October 7th, which opened the gates for the Hamas fighters to pursue a plan that was in the possession a year earlier of the Israeli security forces. They got the plan a year before and did nothing, and then collapsed the border,
still unexplained and still without an official Israeli investigation, which is blocked by Netanyahu. All this point was made in a letter by six prominent Israelis to Congress, urging Congress to disinvite Netanyahu. Well, as we're recording this conversation, the news is covering the latest threshold of war crimes by Israelis by blowing up booby-trapped agers in Lebanon.
And now they're blowing up two-way radios and other equipment, communications equipment in South Lebanon, leading to thousands of casualties, including people who have these pages in hospitals, supermarkets, strolling with their children down a pathway. So all this is challenging you, the Friends Committee, all those wonderful groups in your coalition, from all religions, peace groups, citizen groups,
to introspect and say, how are you going to take this peace movement to a higher, broader, deeper, and more effective level in Congress, on the Biden administration, and on the media? Otherwise, you are not going to make any headway. You cannot continue the way you are, Hassan.
I want to urge you to expand it and not just go through your list which makes everybody feel good because it's so just. It's all about Congress and the White House. That's where the pressure's got to be, and it's got to be with different arguments, different supporters from Israel and Palestine,
and a different attentiveness to the congressional press corps, which doesn't even bother covering you because they don't think you matter. I would say, Ralph, my mom agrees with you. I need to adjust in a big way, you know, and sorry to be cheeky here, but yeah, you're right. The peace movement needs to get more muscular.
We can't just be doing a rally on a Saturday where no press is present, right? We have to actually figure out how to be strategic, grow our base across the board. You know, I think some of folks in the peace movement really need to get more muscular on electoral politics.
I think things like the uncommitted campaign need to expand, not just to withhold votes, but to actually look at primary challenges for people that don't support human rights and know that that's working. But we need to do a lot more. And everyone listening, if we care about peace, we have to throw down for peace.
you know not just support humanitarian aid but actually get involved in the political end of this as well because we are spiraling you know we're spiraling into a dark place if we don't get our act together the couple silver linings i
wanted to flag because i don't want us to just be in darkness here is that one our ideas are just more popular than theirs like when you look at polling across the board The majority of Americans want the immediate ceasefire. They want a suspension of security assistance when they can be used to violate human rights against Palestinians,
and they want a way forward, right? So there's a larger coalition just waiting to be mobilized, and that's exactly what we need to be focused on. I'm trying and doing what I can, and we just need a lot more folks to weigh in. Tell our listeners your website.
How can they support what you're doing, ask for, get more information? Tell our listeners your website slowly and repeat it. Absolutely. Get involved and join us at FCNL.org. FCNL.org. You can take an action today calling for the ceasefire, no weapons, unrefunding at FCNL.org backslash ceasefire. And that's a link we set up so you can directly email Congress.
And as Ralph said, that is just step one. We need to do a lot more and really make sure that we get out of this endless cycle of violence. And I believe it can be done, but we got to be clear eyed that this is going to be a long haul effort.
It can't be done overnight, but I believe that we can make it happen. It cannot be a long haul effort because the Palestinians are running out of lives. Don't you understand that? You can't have an attitude for a long haul effort, maybe for a long haul peaceful conflict resolution of permanence,
but not with the issues that you've been raising. These are immediate haul efforts. And tell our listeners what FC stands for in case they don't. Didn't get the Ralph, I'm going to push back. Actually go ahead now. I totally get the urgency, right? And we have to have that immediate, like, let's get it done right now.
And that is what we're doing. But we also have to make sure we're building infrastructure. So we can sustain our peace movement and grow it for the long haul. That includes, you know, electoral engagement. That includes actual advocacy and getting serious because, you know, like you said, like the AIPAC lobby and all these other groups,
they've been at this for decades. And that's entrenched power. And I'm not going to sit here and pretend like we can undo that. you know, immediately when they're, you know, knocking off members of Congress like Bowman and Cori Bush, you know, and I think having that long-term perspective and looking at, you know,
these structural issues are going to have immediate impacts when they see that, oh my God, they're actually mobilizing in a serious way. But I agree with what you're saying as far as the urgency. That's good. Short haul, long haul. As we close, Hassan al-Tayyib, can you
Give the website and indicate what F and C stand for just so people can get clarity. Yeah, thank you all Ralph, Hannah, David, Steve for having me on. I'm just so grateful to have this time to chat. Our website is FCNL.org and it's Friends Committee on National Legislation.
We are the Quaker Peace Lobby in DC working for peace for over 80 years. oldest registered faith-based peace lobby in the country and i am really just grateful i can do this work and i'm going to keep doing it and i and i hope more
and more of us get involved again we're fcnl.org well thank you very much hassan and listeners you encounter a member of congress running for re-election in the coming weeks or a reporter or a tv producer Ask them why don't they cover the efforts of the peace lobby in this country, the many,
many groups with millions of members around the country who want our government to wage peace, to stop building the empire of war, destruction, which is going to boomerang back on us in many, many ways, apart from just busting the civilian budget so we can blow up areas around the world in contradiction of international law.
Geneva Conventions, and even U.S. statutes. Thank you very much, Hassan. Thank you. We've been speaking with Hassan El-Tayeb. We will link to his work at the Friends Committee on National Legislation at ralphnaderradiohour.com. Up next, we discuss a startup city in the original Banana Republic.