I'm not a cool guy anymore, if I ever was before.
I took a look at all the science.
Alright y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's Antiwar Radio on the Liberty Radio Network.
This part of the show is gonna work, I promise.
I'm on the phone with Jason Ditz, news editor of Antiwar.com.
That's news.antiwar.com.
Welcome back Jason, how are you?
I'm good Scott, thanks for having me.
Alright, speak up loud and clear there.
Okay.
Alright, so, flotilla fallout.
Actually I don't want to talk about that, but that's a great article.
Let's talk about specific things that the Israeli government said about the attempted peace flotilla that turned out not to be right.
I want to start off, well, you use your best judgment whether you want to just go in order of funniest to least funny, or the other way around.
Well, I'm not sure that anything they've said has really turned out to be true.
Anything at all?
Yeah.
Well, come on, this whole thing did take place in the Mediterranean Sea, right?
Yeah, there was a boat involved.
We have consensus there.
But the initial story was that they had bats and knives and slingshots, and the people that were there were just attacking the soldiers at random.
And, you know, I guess it's difficult to prove or disprove that given the footage we've seen so far.
But that wasn't really altogether convincing as far as having Israeli commandos kill nine people and wound however many they ended up wounding.
So it quickly snowballed, and not long after that they were saying that there were 50 Turkish soldiers hiding in the hull of the ship that were all armed with automatic weapons and concussive grenades, and that they all burst out and attacked the soldiers, but that they also all had the presence of mind to throw all their guns and apparently every fragment of every grenade overboard before they were captured.
Those are some smart terrorists.
Yeah.
Okay, so here's the thing, too, because we've got a whole list here, I do, for us to go over of the specific ridiculous accusations.
I should let you elaborate about the knives and the bats and how that kind of whole thing has turned out, the faked pictures and the rest of it, but just for a taste of why I think it's so necessary, all these lies.
I mean, really, for anybody who's paying attention, whether they're biased against the Likudniks or whether they're impartial observers or whatever, this is all preposterous.
But the reason that it's all so preposterous is sort of the same thing as the lead-up to the Iraq War, where anybody could see right through the madness of all this.
But for the people who are already on board, to keep them on board, you've got to really scare them with a bunch of nonsense, and, in fact, I think the more nonsensical it is, the better it is, because it makes it so believable that you wouldn't lie that much and so hard to find any evidence disproving or proving it one way or the other because it's so outlandish, right?
We all laugh when they say Al-Qaeda was on the boat.
We all go, come on, who are you kidding, a six-year-old?
But the answer is no, they're fooling conservatives in Israel and America.
Well, right, I mean, after they sort of backed off of the claim about the 50 Turkish soldiers, then over the weekend their foreign ministry came up with 75 Al-Qaeda mercenaries were on board, and they were all heavily armed, and they were apparently all captured, but none of them were charged with any crimes, and Israel released everybody that was on the boat.
Yeah, this one here says, Israelnationalnews.com, it's official, there was no humanitarian aid on Mavi Mamara.
The Ministry of Foreign Affairs has informed Israel's representatives the world over that there were never any humanitarian supplies or equipment aboard the Mavi Mamara where Israeli commandos were ambushed by armed mercenaries posing as peace activists.
The commandos opened fire, killing nine of the attackers, after three soldiers had been brutally and temporarily captured.
That's the narrative being fed to the people of Israel, and, well, if anybody was even talking about this on TV anymore, it would be what they were still telling the American people.
This is what they told the American people two weeks ago.
Right.
I mean, when the story first broke, it was, Israel attacks aid ship, and that was the headline most every place, and kills nine aid workers.
That was quickly replaced with it being a battle that broke out on the ship, and now it's gotten to the point where, to the extent that it's reported at all, you're right, these mercenaries or these pro-Palestinian extremists attacking the innocent Israeli soldiers that were just trying to board this ship to protect Israel, and just happened to kill nine of them.
You know, Max Blumenthal has done a lot of great work.
He debunked the fake audio that was supposedly, this is a direct quote of what the direct audio purported to show, was someone saying, go back to Auschwitz.
Sure hope nobody ever quotes that out of context.
Me quoting somebody else there, quoting Israeli propaganda.
It turned out that was completely fake.
They even had an interview of the husband of the lady whose voice was on the same recording, and he says, look, she wasn't even there this time.
She was there a couple of years ago.
And then they admitted it.
The Israelis actually came out and came clean on that, that they had faked that audio.
But, of course, Max Blumenthal shows people on his blog at the protest in Israel, and shows numerous people citing that, that they said to go back to Auschwitz, these people.
That's what the evil Turkish attacker terrorists on the boat who were trying to invade Israel had said on the radio.
That was their kamikaze call sign, I guess.
Right, and the breaking story is always covered better than the retraction is.
So even if there had been a retraction in most of the media, which there really wasn't, it wouldn't have gotten much attention anyway.
Right.
Yeah, there's like that old saying about the lie gets halfway around the world before the truth can get its boots on.
Right, and as far as that no humanitarian aid on board the Mavi Marmara, there actually is an argument to be made there, because that claim is based on what is officially defined as humanitarian aid.
And they're saying, well, electric wheelchairs aren't technically humanitarian aid, the medicine that was on board the Mavi Marmara isn't technically humanitarian aid, because it was like bottled medicine, pills and things like that, where legally speaking humanitarian aid, that medication has to be fresh medication, that sort of perishable good.
So the argument is...
Still in boxes direct from Big Pharma.
Right.
Technically this doesn't count.
But it's still medicine, and it's still electric wheelchairs.
So I think it really doesn't matter too much if that is...
Right, and why would anybody in Gaza need a wheelchair?
It's some crutches, no matter what you define it as.
All right, thanks.
Hold it right there, Jason.
We'll be right back, y'all.
That's how we're radio.
That's 760-569-7753.
All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
Anti-war radio, the Liberty Radio Network.
Anti-war radio, the Liberty Radio Network.
Oh, man, it got too quiet too fast.
I was listening to that.
All right, well, anyway.
I got Antiwar.com's news editor, Jason Ditz, online.
News.antiwar.com.
And we're talking about all the ridiculous things that the government of Israel claims about a bunch of people trying to bring crutches and wheelchairs and food and medicine and mattresses for sleeping on and maybe a little bit of concrete to the people of Gaza.
And, of course, concrete, we all know, is a dual-use item.
It can be made to construct the offensive weapon, a bunker.
That's what I read in Haaretz.
Maybe it was the Jerusalem Post.
All right, so I got a couple on my list here of lies.
But first I wanted to get back to sort of the larger narrative.
I don't know if you saw this at Max Blumenthal's website, where he went to the anti-Turkey protest rally in Tel Aviv, and he filmed the crowd and asked them a bunch of questions.
And it ends with an interview of a five-year-old kid wrapped in an Israeli flag.
And now they were perfectly fair.
They weren't picking on the kid.
They asked him very simple, non-leading questions and whatever.
What's going on?
Why are you here?
Whatever.
And his brother's in the Navy, and he wants to grow up and be in the Navy and all that.
And so what was going on?
What's all this about?
And the kid, you know, he's five years old.
He's a smart kid, and he's capable of rehearsing the narrative for you about what he understands about the crisis going on here.
But he's only five, and so he doesn't have the knowledge or wisdom in the background to let him know which parts of this are too ridiculous to repeat out loud as though, you know, they make any sense at all and that kind of thing.
So he just tells it with a straight face.
It's perfect for a five-year-old.
And he tells the story of how the Turks, not the Turkish Navy, but the Turks, they came to attack us.
They're terrorists.
Turkish terrorists came to attack us with sticks.
And so we had to send the Navy to go and stop them and save us from, you know, another Holocaust or whatever it is.
And that was it.
But what he was repeating, that five-year-old kid, was the same thing that every idiot in that crowd believed in the same context.
The Turkish terrorists came to attack us with sticks, even though Turkey has a Navy, and it wasn't their Navy.
It was a peace flotilla full of humanitarian supplies.
And at best, they defended themselves with sticks and were right to do so.
And yet these people are like living in Neverland over there, man.
Terrorists with sticks, Chase.
Well, that's certainly the way it was covered early on.
And the sticks quickly morphed into knives and slingshots and eventually assault rifles and grenades.
Yeah, well, and they even had to admit, because I think everyone in the world called them on it at the same time, when the Israeli military put out a picture of a guy with a scary-looking curved knife like a bad guy in Indiana Jones would have or something, some weird ancient eastern oriental scary-looking curved blade knife.
And yet it's 4 o'clock in the afternoon out the window behind him.
And we all know this whole thing took place at 4 o'clock in the morning.
And, I mean, this was actually working on people.
Look at the scary brown man with the knife.
And you could see the sun.
Well, the Israeli press coverage of the incident has been terrible.
But in all fairness, the military censors in Israel have been hard at work making sure that nothing that questions that narrative gets out.
I guess the editorial page of Haaretz has a permission slip, but that's it.
And all the actual factual reporting has to be checked with Israeli censors officially first?
Right.
Anything news-related that covers the military at all has to go through the military censors in Israel, which is why things like the detention of a Haaretz reporter a few months ago was able to be kept a secret for so long.
And not even a well-kept secret, because a lot of the Western media was already covering it.
Officially, in Israel, no press outlet could cover it because the censors wouldn't let them.
Now, it seems like the biggest lie to me in this whole crisis is the purpose of the blockade in the first place.
And everyone, in fact, well, a congressman on this show, I said, look, it's all about calories.
The aide to Olmert said that the purpose of the blockade is not to make the children of Gaza hungry, but to put them on a diet.
They're counting the calories of their victims here, encaged here.
And he's saying, no, it's to keep the weapons out.
Even when confronted with, no, the guy said it's to put them on a diet.
No, it's to keep the weapons out.
No, but that was the guy from the Israeli government that said that.
No, it's to keep the weapons out.
And McClatchy Newspapers has an Israeli document.
Gaza blockade isn't about security.
It is not to keep the weapons out.
Right, and that McClatchy article is great, covering the official Israeli documents, which of course were never meant to be made public, about why the blockade is on, and that Israel does consider it a form of economic warfare to have that blockade on, but it's one that they feel like they can get away with.
Well, and I guess they can, except for you, over there at news.antiwar.com, pretty much.
You've got some Max Blumenthal here and there.
It seems like they can.
I mean, the U.S. government certainly seems to have their back on this, no matter what the State Department has already said, no matter what Israel's internal probe of the Gaza attack eventually comes up with for a final official story, that the U.S. is going to support it.
Well, and that's not just prejudice on your account either.
I mean, you reported yesterday that Netanyahu said, we're going to have a report, and it's going to say that everything was great.
Right, Netanyahu's already...
I mean, the probe hasn't even really started.
They just announced it two days ago, and Netanyahu's already saying, well, here's what the results are going to be.
That it's going to prove that the military acted appropriately, that it's going to prove that the aid ship was full of whatever it was supposed to be full of, some sort of terrorists or extremists or whatever.
Yeah, you know, I'd almost forgotten this one.
Heavy weapons, they said.
Oh, behind some flour, some bags of flour, we found these rockets and missiles and heavy machine guns and all this, and yet Jonathan Turley on his blog pointed out that this was a hoax, that these are all weapons that were smuggled in from who knows where, certainly not a peace flotilla boat years ago, and all they did, again, and FireDogLake had a whole thing about this too, that they were just faking pictures en masse and using old pictures and subbing them in.
That's where they got the guy with the knife and the sun in the background there.
Right, and a lot of the more hawkish blogs picked that up as absolute truth, but it was ridiculous.
I mean, in the first place, the Israeli military has been so desperate to have any proof of any wrongdoing by these people.
I mean, they went out and called five of the people on the boat known terrorists when some of those people, they did absolutely nothing, and there was never any evidence of any wrongdoing.
And the idea that the Israeli military is not reporting that they found all these huge weapons, it's just ridiculous.
Well, and it's ridiculous to the point where you have American congressmen saying that any Americans who participate in this thing ought to be convicted of terrorist charges, if not Liebermanized, stripped of their citizenship, and sent off to Bagram to be stress-positioned and frozen to death.
Right, and foreign participants in the flotilla, there are members of Congress saying that they ought to be barred from ever entering the United States.
Wow, it really is.
It's like when Republicans put out, you know, some Republican congressional committee puts out a report saying, oh, al-Saddam's nuclear bomb program was moved to Syria at the last minute before the war, and whatever, and then Newsmax and World Net Daily and whatever, this little circle of neocon lunacy echo chamber.
It's a separate reality from all of the rest of the 6 billion other people in the world, and yet it seems almost impenetrable, you know?
Right, and to this day we still hear that about Syria supposedly having all these Iraqi nuclear weapons.
Yeah, because Obama just promoted the guy who pushed it inside the government.
All right, we're out of time.
Thanks, man.
All right.
