07/08/14 – Max Blumenthal – The Scott Horton Show

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Thank you.
All right, now to, uh, I can't even say the, uh, one of the most important stories going on right now, of course, is, uh, the chaos, really the madness that has gripped Israel and their collective punishment of the Palestinians for the kidnapping and murder of three Israeli teens a few weeks back.
And Max Blumenthal, uh, you might have heard if you hear my other show, um, he was on last, I think, Friday, uh, talking about, you know, giving us as much as he knew on the story, but, uh, boy, does he have a write-up for you here at the Electronic Intifada.
Netanyahu government knew teens were dead as it whipped up racist frenzy.
Welcome to the show, Max.
How are you doing?
Are you there?
Oh, I hit the wrong button.
Now how are you?
Now I'm, I'm even better.
Oh, good.
I always get my Skype and my phone buttons crossed.
Anyway, hey, uh, this is a really great piece of work.
We're going to run it as a news story rather than an opinion piece, uh, tomorrow at antiwar.com up in the top news.
Uh, this is a great piece of journalism that you've put together here and, and it's a long one and a very detailed one.
So I'll just go ahead and give you the floor.
Please take us through it.
I'll interrupt if I think I have to.
Well, you know, before we get into the piece, um, you know, Gaza is being basically carpet bombed as we speak.
Uh, in the last few hours for 90 precision guided missiles have fallen on the Gaza Strip.
32 people are dead, um, including all members of an entire family except the 10 year old boy.
The Gaza Strip is in flames and Hamas, which, um, controls the Gaza Strip has authorized, uh, rocket launches into Israel of homemade rockets and really outdated, antiquated grad style rockets, uh, which are reaching pretty far.
Uh, just one, one recently hit just South of Tel Aviv, um, causing zero casualties.
These rockets really cause any casualties that are not psychological, but you have the biggest escalation, military escalation since November, 2012 went over 200 people in the besieged Gaza Strip were killed by Israeli airstrikes.
This is a direct result of Netanyahu and his inner circle and the military intelligence apparatus in Israel milking an extremely dangerous, but very contained situation of three missing Israeli teams, um, for all the political propaganda they could get out of it.
Um, and it's led directly to revenge, racist, revenge, killings, uh, near put Brahms across Israel against Palestinian communities, um, rioting in Palestinian neighborhoods.
The brutal beating of a 15 year old American boy who was on vacation in East Jerusalem, a Palestinian American who was beaten nearly to death by Israeli police, who is still being held by Israeli police without charges, um, who the U S has not pressured Israel to release.
Um, and just to make a long story short, two weeks ago, three Israeli teenagers went missing while they were hitchhiking.
They were kidnapped apparently by a rogue Hamas cell.
There's no indication there were any orders from Hamas to do this.
No one's taking responsibility.
Um, and the accused killer, accused kidnapper, one of them is from a family with a long history of acting in contravention of Hamas orders.
You have a rogue cell that takes these kids.
There is a phone call by one of the kidnapped team to Israeli police.
He called for help.
He said, we've been kidnapped.
Gunshots were heard on the phone call.
Then the kidnappers can be heard declaring, we got three of them.
We got three and singing celebratory song.
The three kidnapped teens were dead.
The parents of the teens were called in by the shin bet Israel general security service.
They were played the phone call and they said, what are those gunshots down the shin bet?
And the Israeli police told them those are blanks lying to the parents that their teens were dead so that they could use the parents for propaganda value.
One of the mothers was even sent to the UN human rights council in Switzerland to plead for international health.
A gag order was placed on the Israeli media forbidding them, um, under punishment under, under anyone who reported on it, they could go to jail.
So forbidding them from reporting on the investigation, the details, even the gunshots and the phone call.
In other words, to trick the Israeli public into believing that the teens were still alive.
Within 24 hours, the Israeli police shin bet and army knew who the two suspected kidnappers were, where they lived and were combing their home.
That too is kept from the Israeli public.
Israeli forces rampaged throughout the West bank rating over 15,000 Palestinian homes, arresting over 560 Palestinians, most of whom were remotely affiliated with Hamas.
200 are being held without charges.
Most people were killed and the entire, um, region or Israel, Palestine was plunged into political chaos.
So about a week and a half go by and the bodies are found.
The bodies of the three Israeli teens lay in a shallow grave on the property of one of the suspected kidnappers who is the Israeli, um, military intelligence apparatus and Netanyahu had known all along were the suspected kidnappers were being investigated.
They were not even found by Israeli police.
They're found by a volunteer team to show you that just the, how incredibly botched this investigation was and how the manipulation, um, fed into, um, the bungling practices of the police.
So the bodies were found.
Netanyahu releases an insane statement, completely inflammatory calling for blood vengeance, um, and invoking pogroms against Jews in turn of the century, Europe.
Israeli society goes mad, mobs march into the streets, chanting death to Arabs.
And a group of young men who met at one of these marches, which were staged all over the country as thousands upon thousands of young Jewish Israelis took to Facebook, um, to call for revenge, to post pictures of themselves with their weapons and their military gear, calling for revenge.
So a group of young men met at one of these, um, marches and decided to look for Palestinian boys to kidnap and kill.
They found one in the occupied neighborhood of Shafat in East Jerusalem, forced him to drink gasoline, burned him alive, dumped his body in the woods.
Rioting broke out as the Israeli police put a gag order on that investigation and held that boy's body while attempting to implicate his own family in the crime.
Six young Jewish nationalist men have been arrested and they are the killers.
But by now that's all forgotten.
Israel had started bombing the Gaza Strip, claiming that Hamas was responsible.
Hamas was responsible for the kidnapped teens.
Therefore all of Hamas will pay in the words of Netanyahu, who called them in his official statement, human animals, human animals leading to this, this spree of bloodshed.
Now because the Gaza Strip is governed by Hamas, the Israeli Air Force has started bombarding it.
Hamas fired rockets and the bombing of Gaza is intensified.
And here we are in a situation of chaos that shows no sign of ebbing.
All the results of political manipulation and incitement from the highest levels of the Israeli government.
Unreal, unreal except for how common it all seems.
And these are established facts on the record, Scott.
None of this is disputed.
Well, we're going back over the more controversial ones here in just a second.
Let me remind everybody, I'm talking with Max Blumenthal.
Here he is at electronicintifada.net and the article is Netanyahu government knew teens were dead as it whipped up racist frenzy.
And again, I'm urging you guys to read this thing.
It's I don't know, three or four thousand or five thousand words or something.
Very well reported piece of work here by Max Blumenthal.
I do hope that you guys will find it, read it, pass it around on your social media and all of that kind of thing.
If you could, you'll want to once you're done reading it, I promise before you're done.
But now, so let me go back over a few of these facts just to make sure you have a chance to actually establish them here when it comes to.
And this is just in the order of my notes, not importance or anything here when it comes to the the the known your certainty that they knew the boys were dead.
It wasn't just that you can prove that they had heard the 9-1-1 call or its equivalent, right.
The call of the police recording with the gunshots in it.
But it's the fact that they lied to the parents and said that somehow they knew that that those were blanks and then, of course, denied any evidence of actual bullets or bullet wounds, say for example, like blood in the car, that kind of thing.
The fact that they lied.
Is there any other thing that's leading you to your certainty that they I mean, that's pretty strong evidence.
Don't get me wrong.
But do you have anything else on?
They had to have known the boys were dead by that point.
Well, the lying to the parents was shocking and the refusal to even prepare, emotionally prepare the Israeli public for the possibility that they might be dead was the most dangerous part because they set the Israeli public up to believe that the boys would be released in some kind of prisoner exchange, as Gilad Shalit was.
And then when they were given the news, they were actually dead.
It was like a jolt to this very tribal, closely knit society.
And it led directly to the revenge spree.
So I'm saying they didn't even make an effort to allow the Israeli public to consider the possibility that these teens might have been dead when all of the evidence to about a ninety nine percent certainty that they were dead from the phone call to the lying to the parents to the simple fact that the Shin Bet, Israel's intelligence, the General Security Service has the West Bank under lock and key and knows what's happening in every corner of the West Bank.
It has collaborators, Palestinian collaborators, completely honeycombed through every hen house, flop house, outhouse and coffee house, and was able to zero in on any Hamas member it wanted to and arrest them in their bed.
But it couldn't simply determine that these teens were nowhere to be found because they'd been buried.
So it really is mind boggling that this was some kind of mistake.
The Israeli government has also admitted that it knew who the suspects were within twenty four hours.
But when you say they found bullets and blood in the car and when did they find the car right away?
The car was found right away and this is reported a burn stolen car was found right away.
And the Israeli police denied told the parents that no DNA was found in the car when in fact bullets and blood were found in the car.
If bullets and blood are found in the car, that means that they are probably dead or extremely wounded.
And then later you say they admitted that they knew all along the identity of their two prime suspects or they admitted all along that they knew the identity of their two primes.
Oh, it was because they raided their houses right away.
It was how that leaked.
Right.
Well, I was able to determine the names of the suspects through Palestinian media, through Arabic language media, which was not subject to the gag order.
The families had been had gone to Arabic language media and said, our hospitals are being raided.
They're coming for our son.
The mother of one of the suspects, Marwan Kolasme, said, well, if he did it, I'm proud of him and I hope he gets away.
So there was not even an attempt to deny that they were gone.
Their names had been given to the Israelis by the Palestinian Authority, which coordinates its security with the Israeli army and is basically an arm of the Israeli occupation.
It's basically the Bantustan Authority.
So this information was basically whitewashed out of the Israeli media or prevented from reaching the Israeli public by the gag order.
And you know, in a normal criminal investigation in this country, if a suspect is wanted for a high crime, their posters appear everywhere.
In every post office, they'll be on TV even.
And the police will give press conferences announcing their names and asking the public to help find them.
In Israel, what happened in an incredibly abnormal society was the opposite.
Their names were concealed from the Israeli public so that the public could believe that they could be anywhere in the West Bank among any Hamas cell to justify the military escalation.
And Hamas, again, Hamas was blamed, the entire organization, although the organization had no knowledge of the kidnapping, took no responsibility for it, and really has a very tenuous relationship with the two men who were accused.
And yeah.
Now let me get back to that, too.
That's a very important point.
You say it's this rogue faction, but it's not just that, oh yeah, three different people use the term rogue faction.
You actually know a thing or two about this break off group, basically, of Hamas.
You say they have a history of screwing things up for Hamas.
Yes.
Shlomi Eldar, who is an Israeli reporter, a veteran Israeli correspondent who's covered Hamas and the Palestinian Authority for about 20, 30 years, wrote a piece for Al-Monitor about the history of the Qawasme clan and their role in attacks that were carried out during ceasefires between Hamas and Israel during Second Intifada, and how Hamas leadership privately condemned the attacks and phone calls to the Israeli government and said, we had nothing to do with these suicide attacks.
We were trying to honor the ceasefire.
The Israelis would then use the opportunity to assassinate major Hamas leaders, which, you know, suggests- Raises questions, doesn't it?
Yeah.
Raises serious questions.
I mean, let's just say that in the 1970s, there was a figure named Abu Nidal, who was probably the world's most prominent Palestinian terrorist.
And in his hijackings and killings, besides the hijackings and killings that he was known for, he mostly killed Palestinians who were from rival factions.
He mostly carried out attacks during ceasefires, and he was widely suspected of being a Mossad agent.
So, and it's pretty well established that he was.
So there is precedent for that.
I'm not saying these men were agents of the Shin Bet or Mossad.
It's just that this attack, this kidnapping, occurred at an extremely suspicious time, right after Fatah and Hamas signed a unity deal, which both factions were celebrating in which the U.S. recognized, so the U.S. de facto recognized the legitimacy of Hamas.
And Netanyahu went crazy.
He had a conniption fit and wanted to find a way of fracturing the unity deal.
So let's just say this was a moment of opportunity for Netanyahu and he wasn't going to let it go to waste.
Yeah.
All right.
And now, in the scheme of things, compared to what you just said about, you know, the global politics and all this, this is back to the microscope, but it's just so outrageous.
The spin that the boy that was lynched and did you say made to drink gasoline before being set alight, that they blamed his own parents for his murder?
The Israeli police leaked information through the Israeli media that Mohammed Abu Qudair, who was killed in a revenge crime by Jewish terrorists, was gay and was killed by his family in an honor crime.
Absolutely zero evidence, which is consistent with the Israeli government's deployment of the tactic of pinkwashing, where they present themselves as this haven for LGBT rights, for gay rights in the Middle East, and they paint their enemies as haters of gays in order to appeal to liberals who might otherwise be disgusted by the Israeli occupation and human rights abuses.
And in this case, they attempted to deploy that tactic in order to deflect blame from their own society for the killing of this young boy.
And these kind of killings, these lynchings, which recall the lynching of Emmett Till in this country, are not uncommon.
This is just one of the first times we've seen it reported in our mainstream media.
In my book, Goliath, Life and Loathing in Greater Israel, I detail numerous lynchings, which were carried out almost in the same place and by the same kind of character, products of the Israeli education system and its culture of militarization, lynchings of young Palestinian men in Jerusalem.
And this is a fact of life in Israel today.
It's a fact of the status quo.
And you say this is a microscope.
We're looking at it through a microscope.
We are looking at it through a microscope.
But where we're standing is in the United States.
While we look in that microscope, we're standing in the benefactor of this occupation, the benefactor of apartheid.
And it's the special relationship between the U.S. and Israel, which is responsible for all the hideous bacteria and toxins that we're viewing under that microscope right now.
Yep.
Well, and see, that's the thing, man, is, you know, I'm not one for negotiating with terrorists.
And so the fact that Osama bin Laden and his hijacker pilots constantly cited Israel as part of their motivation for attacking the United States and just getting, you know, round two of the terror war started back 13 years ago now.
Yeah.
Well, it would just be an interesting piece of trivia if what they hated about Israel was nice little Israel minding its own business.
And these guys are just basically a bunch of Arab Nazis who can't leave Israel alone because of just how much they hate Jews for no reason or some kind of thing.
Well, then screw them.
I guess we have to fight them.
Except that's not what's going on here.
They've cited the crimes of Israel.
But any honest, decent, objective person can describe as the immoral behavior of the Israeli government and what it does to the people in the occupation.
At the time of 9-11, they included the occupation of Lebanon, of course.
But same difference, too.
And so it's what Israel is doing wrong that America is backing that got us attacked on September 11th.
So, you know, sorry if that's just a utilitarian argument for you or something, but that was a pretty damn big deal when it happened.
And I bet most Americans wouldn't think it was worth it if they had anything like the facts to compare, you know, what's going on here to the consequences and see what they think the policy should be then.
I'm really glad you raised that point.
I was about to raise it myself.
In his book, The Looming Tower, Lawrence Wright writes about al-Libi, who is one of bin Laden's commanders, who was radicalized by the Israeli attack during Operation Grapes of Wrath in southern Lebanon on Qana, which left hundreds of women and children dead in a U.N. shelter with precision-guided weapons authorized by then-Prime Minister Shimon Peres, who's portrayed around the world as this man of peace.
That was the moment that turned al-Libi into an al-Qaeda, a radicalized al-Qaeda recruit, and many more are being created as we speak, to see the seeds of hatred be sowed right before our eyes.
We also have to remember that the first intifada in 1987 began with a very small incident that occurred under a microscope.
It was an Israeli jeep, a military patrol, running over a Palestinian worker in Gaza and leaving the scene.
The jeep was surrounded by Palestinians who stoned it and chased the soldiers out, and that led to the first major Palestinian uprising.
The second intifada began with Ariel Sharon ascending the Temple Mount in a staged incident to provoke Palestinians to violence.
It led, after 1.3 million Israeli bullets were fired at mostly unarmed Palestinian protesters and stone-throwers, it led to the wave of suicide bombing inside Israel.
So these minor incidents have a way of snowballing, and there's no reason to believe that we won't be talking about a greater wave of catastrophic violence, whether it's in Israel-Palestine or somewhere else in the next month or six months or year, and that's why it's important to keep an eye on this and to scrutinize our own media for whitewashing it and omitting the facts and context of these incidents.
Yeah.
Well, you know, I think one of the most important things that you hit on here tonight was the language of the Prime Minister of Israel denouncing his enemies, their enemies, supposedly as animals.
That ought to be the top headline of the New York Times, that this is what...
I mean, imagine if Barack Obama was calling, you know, even the Taliban or anyone, animals, they're animals.
American presidents don't talk like that, not in public anymore or whatever, anyway, not since Nixon, I don't know.
There's some kind of thing here where, well, since World War II, right, where that kind of dehumanization of the enemy is a little bit, at least a little bit suspicious and is the kind of thing that we should be very wary of because we know what happens when people really start believing that this group of people is actually some kind of vermin rather than some kind of person.
Yeah, we've seen it throughout history and, you know, Jewish history paints a pretty clear picture of how incitement can lead to mob violence, pogroms, and even genocide.
The genocide of Jews in Europe began with that kind of dehumanization and incitement and didn't reach a genocidal phase until the Wannsee Conference before then, before the Final Solution was devised.
It was basically the Nazis kind of trying to decide what to do with this population that they had condemned as animals.
We're not in a genocidal phase in Israel-Palestine, but we're witnessing troubling incitement that's causing a lot of even liberal Zionists who, you know, people who had ignored or criticized my book on the fascist trends in Israel to draw these comparisons between Israeli society today and German society in the 1930s.
These kind of comparisons are becoming increasingly common.
By the way, you mentioned that last week on the show, and I meant to ask you the follow-up.
I'm glad you mentioned it again.
Can you recommend some articles to read about that?
Who it was that had criticized you, who then now is using that same kind of language?
I'm interested in that.
Well, I would point to Chemi Shalev, who is the U.S. correspondent for Haaretz, which is the main newspaper of the liberal enlightened public of Israel, who has just drawn a direct line between 1930s Germany and current-day Israel in an opinion piece he wrote last week.
And while Shalev never criticized me, he typically interviews authors' books about Israel.
He compared Peter Beinart to Mick Jagger, and he basically ignored my book.
The only mention of my book in Haaretz was through extremely negative reviews.
And you know, he's been praised by people who either ignored my work or participated in a kind of criticism and smear campaigns of it, and I find that really ironic.
You know, it's just terrible to be vindicated in this way.
And I always wind up saying, unfortunately, I was right.
So it's another case of, you know, being unfortunately right.
Sure.
And, you know, this isn't that whole thing, argument ad hitlarum or whatever, where whatever law that you're not supposed to bring up, the Nazis are like, no, we really are talking about pogroms and race hatred and that kind of, you know, like you said, we're not at the Wannsee conference period yet here, but we do seem to be, you know, we got demagogues like Netanyahu in charge of the place.
You know, they're not the backbenchers.
And he's considered a centrist.
I mean, in his own coalition, one of the rising stars, Ayelet Shuckett from the Jewish Home Party, which controls major ministerial positions in his cabinet, issued a call for Palestinian genocide on Facebook, and it got thousands of likes from Israelis.
So the calls for genocide are right there.
They're in the streets of Israel and they're in Netanyahu's cabinet.
How much more evidence do you need to be troubled and shocked and to be, you know, jolted out of your stupor where you consider this to be a situation that's too complex to take any position on?
I mean, it's all right there.
It's all unfolding right before our eyes.
Oh, Max, I'm sorry.
Are you still there?
I'm sitting there talking with the mic off the whole time.
Anyway, that was the great Max Blumenthal, everybody.
I completely blew the ending.
I was trying to ask him to end with what is going on in the Gaza Strip right now.
But as he said, airstrikes, 90 something airstrikes.
Last I saw it was at least in the double digits killed.
I'm not exactly sure.
And they call up the reserves.
Was it 40,000?
They look at antiwar.com, you know, one time 40,000 troops mobilized for possible, at least threatened ground invasion of Gaza.
Based on this whipped up campaign.
So there's your bad news.
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