07/29/15 – Philip Weiss – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, you guys.
I'm Scott Horton.
It's my show, The Scott Horton Show.
Earlier this week, somebody sent me a tweet with a link to my last interview of Philip Weiss and said, I demand to know how you justify having this man on your show.
I thought, oh, man, I better get him back on.
Hi, Phil.
How are you doing?
Great.
How are you doing?
I'm doing real good.
I didn't even answer that guy.
I was like, yeah, whatever, dude.
What's his constituency?
I think he was just kind of a right wing Zionist nationalist type.
I assume that.
I mean, you know, I think I clicked on his little description and that's pretty typical kind of a Glenn Beck fan.
Anyway, best I could tell.
But yeah, yeah.
Anybody who's going to say, how dare you give a platform to Philip Weiss, is pretty much ridiculous to me in the first place.
I love giving you a platform because, hey, you're an honest guy and you're interested in the same stuff as me.
So thanks.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I don't get a platform a lot of other places.
So, hey, I love it.
Yeah.
Well, listen, your website's awesome.
I want everybody to read it.
That's really what this show's about.
It's about me telling people what to read.
Hey, everybody, go read Phil Weiss.
See, that's great.
That's how it works.
That's great.
All right.
So and it ain't just you.
You got a bunch of great writers over there at Mondo Weiss, too, for everybody to enjoy.
Let's talk about politics in Washington, D.C., the politics of the Iran deal.
Now, if I understand it right, Phil, correct me if I'm wrong.
The House and the Senate, the Republican majority in both houses, they can pass a bill that says no to this thing.
They don't need to pass a yes bill for it to go into effect, but they need to pass a no bill to kill it.
And they need to be able to override the president's veto when he delivers his promised veto for the bill.
So that much, pretty much, I guess, is assumed to be fait accompli.
But then the question is, when it gets to the overriding the veto on the second vote, will they have the votes to override the veto?
Will they be able to recruit enough Democrats to destroy the Iran deal?
And so then my question to you is, you know, basic ballpark estimate head counts, whether we're close, whether it's going to be a real battle, whether the president's a shoo-in on this thing now or what?
I think it will be a real battle.
I think we're going to win.
I think that, and let me emphasize, I'm not a great nose counter.
I'm just sort of a consensus follower of the mainstream.
And there are real indications that the Democrats that they're counting on, that they would need to override the president's veto, the Democrats they'd need are people like Cory Booker and Chuck Schumer, Senator Kirsten Gillibrand of New York.
And I don't think they're going to get them.
I think that it's a good sign that neither, that Schumer, Cory Booker, and Gillibrand have said nothing so far.
They've been studying it.
It's a good sign because they're afraid of coming out for the Iran deal, but I think that they will.
So, and there are signs that the Democratic mainstream, first of all, the Democratic Party voters are for this deal overwhelmingly.
Polls suggest anywhere from 50 to 20% against to like 75, 12% against.
So the Democratic Party, whom these people are members of, which people these people are members of is overwhelmingly for, their constituents are overwhelmingly for this deal.
So they are, I think, looking for ways to justify supporting the deal.
And yesterday we saw a big Jewish Democrat out of Michigan, and people are looking at the Jews because that's where the focus has been, is all the Jewish organizations saying this is bad for Israel and some other Jewish organizations saying it's good for Israel.
And John Kerry going to the Council on Foreign Relations and acting as if he's the foreign minister of Israel to try to get the deal.
I mean, that's how crazy the politics of this are.
Anyway, back to Sandy Levin of Michigan.
He came out and said, after a long study, I know I'm going to support this deal.
And so I think that's what we're going to see from these Jewish centrist liberals and other Democratic Party centrist liberals types.
They're going to end up, they're not going to sandbag the president on this.
And they're worried that they're going to be seen as supporting Israel too strongly against an American interest.
That's my view.
I'm very hopeful about it.
But I think it will be a battle just because, you know, it's not over till the final vote is counted.
And I think Obama is going to be doing a telephone call tomorrow, and Netanyahu is going to be doing a conference call tomorrow.
All the Americans, and again, chiefly Jews, to kind of rally Jewish support for this.
And by the way, American Jews are overwhelmingly for this deal.
It's the Jewish organizations that are so pro-Israel that they can't make a move without checking in with the prime minister.
All right.
So there's a hell of a lot to go over there.
First of all, are there any Republicans in the House of Representatives who've expressed even the slightest doubt that they would oppose this thing?
I don't know.
I don't know.
I should check with Walter Jones.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah, that's a good idea.
I mean, that guy's a great, he's a great congressman.
I bet he, I bet he, I can't believe he's against this.
Now, Rand Paul, of course, has disappointed us.
And I think that that's a presidential money thing.
But, you know, who can figure it?
Yeah, well, never mind him.
Anyway, so now here's the other thing.
No, I like what you say, too.
I think it's really important that people understand that not just a majority, but a significant majority of American Jews, I think maybe even a super majority of American Jews polled, say that they support this vastly out of proportion compared to the rest of the American population.
So even though, you know, Israel's government has its fifth column and the institutions that put the state of Israel first pursuing their policies, they are not representative of American Jews.
No, they're not.
And neither is the Israel lobby representative of American Jews.
I mean, again, you know, I always feel funny about wearing my parochial hat when I come on, you know, general interest shows.
But, you know, I'm interested in the Jewish what's happening in the Jewish community.
And happily, the Jewish community is finally beginning to divorce itself from the Israel lobby.
It's going to be a really slow process.
American Jews generally support the heck out of Israel.
But on this case, this is one instance where American Jews are saying, hey, we're with our president, we're with our country.
And the more you say that it's going to be for Netanyahu, I think a lot of Jews in America are kind of freaked out by that.
Like, what the heck?
Yeah.
Well, of course, there's a major opportunity here for a libertarian lesson for Americans and Israelis and a lot of other people that your country and your government are not the same thing.
So if you really put Israel first, then you ought to support the Iran deal because you'd have to be an idiot or a Likudnik to be against it.
When it's clearly in Israel's interest, assuming that you accept the premise that there ever was such a thing as a nuclear threat from Iran in the first place.
Right.
It's a bogus premise.
But yeah, I think you're right.
I think it's a great point that country and government have a very limited connection in this.
And the government of the American Jewish community, it's all these Jewish organizations that are completely unrepresentative.
And yeah, the Likud government in Israel is not helping.
It's not in the people's interest.
And now.
So tell me more about this talk that Kerry gave at the Council on Foreign Relations.
I saw there were a couple of headlines from it, but I didn't watch the whole thing.
Apparently, I should have.
No, I just think that the takeaway for me is that Richard Haass, the head of the Council on Foreign Relations says, well, you know, what's so great about this deal?
What what is it going to do for us?
And, you know, how does Kerry answer it?
Let me read you some of what Kerry says.
You know, he says, look, I've been around this thing for a long time, 29 years in the Senate.
I'm very proud of the 100% voting record for Israel in the course of that time.
And nobody, I think, has worked harder to try to bring peace to the Middle East or to Israel than I did over the last few years.
I think I've had more meetings with an Israeli prime minister, more visits with than any secretary of state.
Richard Haass didn't ask about that.
Yeah.
He asked, what's this going to do for us?
For us.
Yeah.
But who's us?
All right.
Hang on one second.
It's the great Phil Weiss from Mondoweiss.net.
Yeah, we'll be right back.
Hey, all.
Scott here.
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All right, y'all.
Welcome back.
I'm Scott Horton.
It's my show, Scott Horton Show.
I know I slur my last name, don't I?
People always say, what?
Horton.
Like, here's the who.
Honest, 100% and all that.
On the line is Phil Weiss.
Mondoweiss.net is his great website.
Thanks, Scott.
All about America and Israel and Middle East policy, mostly.
We're talking about the domestic politics, the D.C. politics of the Iran deal.
And, you know, I read a thing where Ehud Barak, the former prime minister and former defense minister of Israel, defense minister, under Netanyahu, said, now, I don't want to contradict the prime minister or anything, but let me contradict the prime minister.
And then he goes on to say that he just could not possibly disagree more with Netanyahu's policy of still trying to take on the president over this and demanding that anyone he could possibly get to fall in line behind him in America and that he's openly trying to hijack and use one branch of government in order to stop the president from doing what he's doing.
How short-sighted this is for Israel's interests.
And that what they ought to be doing now is crying uncle and then trying to have meetings where they get to decide what lines to draw so that they can accuse Iran of cheating later or whatever that, you know, like that.
But for it to make it where it is so obviously Israel versus America in the capital city of America seems like maybe a bridge too far.
And I was wondering, you know, is it really not that obvious to Netanyahu that what a risk he's taking here?
Because Barak seemed to say it like, you know, I thought long and hard about this and it occurred to me that this could possibly be counterproductive here.
Right.
I mean, I think the answer is that it's obviously counterproductive.
And when they lose on this deal, they're going to lose twice because they're going to lose on the deal.
And they're also going to fracture the Israel lobby in this country because they've gotten the right wing side of the Israel lobby to support them completely.
And so as to what Netanyahu's thinking, I think that this guy is just this.
First of all, the whole country is a spoiled brat.
The political culture of that society is a spoiled brat.
They've, you know, depended on the United States forever and counted on our support.
And Netanyahu said it best himself.
15 years ago, he said the United States is something that can be easily moved.
That's what he believes.
And on this one, he's going to end up being wrong.
I mean, it won't be easily moved.
It would take a lot to move it.
And he has not been able to do it.
So imagine if he did succeed.
What about the blowback from that?
We're like, aha.
How do you like that, Americans?
We killed your peace agreement.
Oh, OK.
Yeah, no, none of us are going to resent that going forward from here.
Yeah.
And have you noticed that they've lost their they felt they had a fig leaf in the Saudis?
You know, they would always say, well, the Saudis are good.
Saudis, they've lost that fig leaf.
The Saudis are for the deal, too.
Right.
So they're completely exposed.
And I think even their opposition is going to be it's just a great moment because they're going to go down and they're going to be exposed.
And the right wing neocon part of the lobby is going to get discredited.
Yeah.
Well, and I think it's important to I mean, I don't know whether just regular folks can tell or not, but it seems so blatant to me that the war party's got a bunch of slogans, but they don't want to talk about safeguards agreements at all.
They never have.
You know, Iran's been under safeguards agreement all these years, but they don't want to talk about the details of this.
They just want to try to cram Obama's giving them nukes down our throat.
And if we're stupid enough to believe that, then I guess we'll go with them.
That's basically their plan.
Right.
And they don't you know, in the end, I don't think they really care about nukes.
I mean, they understand how nukes work.
They understand that even if Iran got one, they would never use it.
What they want is they want Iran limited as a regional competitor to Israel.
And this deal has the potential for making bringing Iran back into the community of nations, you know, all that stuff.
They're going to be get a lot of money out of it and they'll be normalized.
And then Israel is going to face more and more pressure against its occupation of Palestinian lands.
And that's what they're worried about.
Yeah.
In fact, Netanyahu even said as much in a couple of pieces here.
He and Barack both explained to Jeffrey Goldberg back in, I think, 2012 that they're not afraid of a nuclear first strike, even if Iran did have nukes.
They know Iran wouldn't do that.
They're just worried that talented Israelis might go to America for grad school and then stay.
Right.
And there would be a brain drain.
And that's their existential threat that we're supposed to get into a war for.
Yeah.
I mean, they're going to manipulate us any way they can on this about the Iranians being the Nazis and it being the Holocaust.
You know, Mike Huckabee and Netanyahu are on the same page on this one.
So claiming that they're the Nazis.
But it's absurd.
It's just ridiculous.
And people aren't that stupid.
So I need to ask you about Pollard.
What do you think of the Pollard thing?
Well, you know, I'm I'm interested to see how this is going to play out, because in the Clinton years, of course, when he was going to pardon Pollard, George Tenet and apparently a lot of the rest of the leadership of the CIA and other intelligence agencies were all going to resign en masse, which was going to be a real bad political hit against Bill Clinton.
I mean, that was going to make him the worst president ever.
Yeah.
And his whole damn national security state resigned over something like that.
Now, whether anybody's holding Obama's feet to the fire, I guess times have changed now.
It's sort of a fait accompli, it sounds like.
And there's nobody left to oppose it.
It would be a parole thing, right?
I mean, he's eligible for parole.
Yeah, but if the government said we would prefer that you don't because we think he's still a continuing danger, just like Casper Weinberger said, that would be the end of that.
Right.
All they have to do is say, please don't.
And he would not be paroled.
Right.
But I agree with you.
I think the security establishment has changed since then.
And, you know, I have to say the guy's been in 30 years.
He's in bad health.
You know, I think he's paid his price.
I mean.
Yeah, but that has nothing to do with it.
It's all about, you know, pandering to Netanyahu.
Please lighten up on us a little bit.
Yeah.
Oh, of course.
They've always wanted Pollard out and now they're going to get Pollard out.
And by the way, let's just let's just stress that, you know, the secrets that he leaked.
The reason the security establishment is so upset is not just that they went to Israel.
They promptly went to the Soviet Union.
Yeah, it was the entire nuclear war plan against the USSR and our greatest allies in the whole wide world.
Israel just turned him right over to the USSR.
I know.
So they could get more immigrants out of it.
It's just like and this is one of the great, you know, Israel just they they are so self oriented as any of these, you know, countries is they're just completely self oriented.
They don't give a hoot about what we what's in our interest.
And the more that that's exposed, the better.
Yeah.
And yeah, again, in a real counterproductive kind of a way, you know, like in the book By Way of Deception, Victor Ostrowski says that, you know, their entire attitude is the Americans better tell us everything they know about everything all day, every day.
But if they find out something the Americans need to know, like the Amal militias about to blow up our barracks in Beirut.
Well, they're big boys.
They can take care of themselves.
Screw them.
That's good.
So, I mean, and, you know, we're talking about where the rubber really meets the road when you're talking about a suicide truck bombing of a barracks full of American Marines.
I mean, we're not just talking about little stuff.
No, no.
So, hey, I need to promote one thing while I'm on.
Please do.
Okay.
You know, yesterday I exposed the fact that you remember that Netanyahu bringing that cartoon to Congress and to the UN and saying that, you know, Wile E.
Coyote, they're going to blow Iran's about to blow up the world.
The guy who designed that cartoon was is works at Time Warner.
He's an executive vice president, one of their top executives for marketing and communications, a guy named Gary Ginsburg, good friend of Netanyahu's, who's been working on his speeches in English for the last few years.
And this only came out through me and Michael Oren, who's new book, you know, all about Israel, the former ambassador.
He exposed his good friend, Gary Ginsburg.
And then I looked into it and called Ginsburg.
And Ginsburg admitted that to me that Netanyahu is a good friend when he comes to the country, works on his speeches for him.
So this guy's working as a speechwriter for him.
And he's one of the leading executives at one of our major media companies.
Well, I'm sure that all the media people that work for him have no idea what his views are and would never even consider the slightest bit of pressure to conform to what he would have them say or think.
That's right.
That's right.
No, that is an important scoop.
I'm glad you brought it up.
I had it here in the tabs, but I had too many tabs.
It's just shocking.
No, it's huge.
It is shocking.
I'm routinely shocked.
I just can't believe the depth of the pro-Israel influence inside our country.
And again, it's like Kerry going to the Council on Foreign Relations and a guy, Richard Haass, who's Jewish and who has supported Israel a lot, asked what we get out of it.
And Kerry starts talking about the Jewish interest in this and how it's in Israel's interest and for good for Jews.
It's like, wait, wait, wait.
What about our country?
Jewish Americans who don't identify chiefly in that.
Think of themselves as Americans.
What about Americans who aren't Jewish?
It's shocking.
Yeah.
Well, I mean, that's the good part about it.
That's the silver lining in it all is that was what I was saying about Max Blumenthal's new book, just reading the first chapter of the thing.
It's like these are the kinds of things where if you were smearing the Israelis and making stuff up to put words in their mouth, you would have them saying this stuff.
But no politician from any country would openly talk about killing women and children this way and that kind of thing.
But yeah, there they are.
Read it and weep, man.
There's the Israelis saying, yeah, well, you see what we got to do with these Gazans is just keep killing them and killing them.
Whoa, dude, you never hear even the meanest American general talk that way about civilians.
I mean, I agree with you.
It's crazy.
I agree with you.
And you know, it's a comment on the left to always say, well, America does all this stuff all over.
Norman Finkelstein.
America does worse all over the world.
No, it doesn't.
I'm not with him there.
And I think that the American foreign policy in the Middle East, which is so awful now, a lot of that's influenced by Israel.
No doubt about it.
In fact, you have the great quotes, maybe two of the most important quotes along these lines, Irving Kristol and Norman Podhortz both saying, this is why we put such a high premium on American global empire, Israel.
Yes.
Right.
So we got to keep America engaged in China just to keep them engaged overall in general forever, no matter what.
Right.
Right.
All right.
Listen, I know you need to go.
So otherwise, I just keep you overtime all the way through the day.
Thanks so much for coming on the show, Phil.
It's great to talk to you again.
Great talking to you, man.
Appreciate it.
All right, y'all.
That's the great Phil Weiss.
He's at Mondoweiss.net.
Mondoweiss.net.
He's got a whole bunch of really great writers over there joining him.
Hey, I'll check out the audio book of Lou Rockwell's Fascism versus Capitalism narrated by me, Scott Horton at audible.com.
It's a great collection of his essays and speeches on the important tradition of liberty from medieval history to the Ron Paul Revolution.
Rockwell blasts our status enemies, profiles our greatest libertarian heroes and prescribes the path forward in the battle against Leviathan.
Fascism versus Capitalism by Lou Rockwell for audio book.
Find it at Audible, Amazon, iTunes, or just click in the right margin of my website at Scott Horton dot org.
Hey, I'll Scott here.
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