07/19/10 – Eric Margolis – The Scott Horton Show

So over the weekend, a video from the year 2001 was released, leaked somehow to channel 10 in Israel.
So this video was of Benjamin Netanyahu, the prime minister of Israel right now.
I don't think at the time.
And he was paying a condolence call, I guess, to some widows of some IDF soldiers who'd been killed in the Second Intifada.
And he starts kind of, well, just kind of talking off the cuff and saying things that he wouldn't have said on video normally.
But in this case, he kind of, well, I guess mass media won't cover it, Eric.
But for people who are paying attention to things like this, this has made a lot of news over the weekend anyway.
And I guess, why don't you just fill us in on basically, you know, what was said there and what was revealed.
And then we can talk about how important it is and why and so forth.
Well, what Netanyahu said in this sort of unguarded moment, if this is, in fact, accurate and genuine, which it looks like, is that, and this is back in 2001, that he restated his bitter opposition to the Oslo Accords that Israel's prime minister had signed with Yasser Arafat and the Palestinians, and indicated that he'd found a loophole in the agreements that Israel agreed to withdraw its settlements in the West Bank.
But Netanyahu, like a good lawyer, suddenly found out that he said, except for military ones, and he said, well, we'll just make all of our settlements military ones.
And then finally, his opposition was questioned, well, what's America and the rest of the world is going to say?
And Netanyahu essentially said, don't worry about America, they're with us, we can move America, we can change America, and I'm going to go ahead with the program.
Now, for people who are just tuning in, not sure what we're talking about, it's a brand new video from 2001, just leaked, of Benjamin Netanyahu in a living room, the prime minister of Israel, explaining how it was that he got over on Bill Clinton.
Basically, you can read the transcript of the whole thing at mondoweiss.net, Philip Weiss's blog, the title of the entry is, The World Won't Say a Thing, Netanyahu on the ongoing Israeli expansion.
And as Raimondo says in his column today, Eric, here is, or at least what's new here is not the degree to which Israel controls the American government.
We already know that the new thing here is the disdain that Benjamin Netanyahu has for us.
And when he talks about how the American people, we have 80% support over there.
It's absurd, he says.
Well, he says, he said, in America, he said, I know, as Netanyahu is being quoted, I know what America is.
America is something that can be easily moved, moved to the right correction.
You know, Netanyahu's predecessor, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, said it even more pithily.
Somebody said, Prime Minister, what's the US going to say?
He says, don't worry about the US, I control the US, leave it to me.
So, well, this is simply stating the obvious, but we're not allowed to say that in North America.
Yeah, well, I mean, it's funny, because when I searched Netanyahu in the news, I found a whole bunch of reprints of his Fox transcript and that kind of thing.
There's very little return for this in Google News, unless you, you know, are more specific, type in Hebron or something else.
Well, you know, Netanyahu, unlike many other politicians, has not been as hypocritical as most of them.
He's been clear, and he's been consistent from day one, that he bitterly opposed the Oslo agreements with the Palestinians to withdraw from the West Bank and create a Palestinian state.
He's been adamant ever since he's done his best to sabotage them and the right why river accords that he worked out with a very pro Israel, Bill Clinton.
And, and then ever since now, he said no withdrawal, he's made it plain, the right wing coalition in Israel, not one inch will be given back to the Palestinians.
Wow, okay, I want to read through a little bit of this transcript, just because I like it so much here.
Again, for people just tuning in, this is a video of Benjamin Netanyahu from the year 2001, talking in a living room about what his policy was in the 90s, when he was the Prime Minister talking about the Oslo Accords.
Well, we have to basically beat the Palestinians into submission, he says, and then the woman asks, but wait a moment, then the world will say, how come you're conquering again?
And Netanyahu says, the world won't say a thing.
The world will say we're defending.
Aren't you afraid of the world, BB?
Netanyahu, especially today with America, I know what America is.
America is something that can be easily moved, moved to the right correction.
Then the child speaks up.
They say they're for us.
But it's like Netanyahu says, they won't get in our way.
They won't get in our way.
So let's say they say something.
So they said it.
They said it.
80% of the Americans support us.
It's absurd.
We have that kind of support.
And we say, look, the administration was extremely pro-Palestinian.
I wasn't afraid to move maneuver there.
I was not afraid to clash with Clinton.
I was not afraid to clash with the United Nations.
I was paying the price anyway.
I prefer to receive the value, value for the price.
And then as they go on, she says, yeah, but you had to give up some of Hebron.
And then he explains, yeah, but all that really meant was what, Eric?
That he was just going to reclassify the area as a military area and not withdraw.
He was going to give give two inches to keep the rest of a mile.
Yeah, there you go.
And quotes his own father.
Yeah.
My father always said, yeah, make it look like you're giving up something and then keep almost all of it, which has been his strategy ever since.
Yeah.
Well, it really is amazing.
And I guess, well, it's not amazing about Benjamin Netanyahu.
What is amazing again, I guess, is the well, the denial that mostly American population are in and the disdain that Benjamin Netanyahu has for our support for him.
It's absurd, he says.
We got Eric Margulies on the phone.
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All right, everybody, welcome back to the show.
It's Antiwar Radio.
I'm Scott Horton.
I'm talking with Eric Margulies.
His website is EricMargulies.com.
It's spelled like Margolis.
I think probably sometimes I say it wrong because I'm just not thinking.
It's Eric Margulies.
And he's the author of the books American Raj, Liberation or Domination, and War at the Top of the World.
He's covered, I don't know, I think more than a dozen wars all around the world for more than a generation.
And he's a foreign correspondent for Sun National Media in Canada.
Still hanging on the line there, Eric?
I'm still here, Scott.
May I make a correction?
I'm from Sun Media only for another three weeks.
Oh, really?
Yes.
The owners of the paper, apparently they're starting a new TV network in Canada, which is supposed to, reputed to be the Fox TV of Canada.
And it's designed to...
And you're going to have a show on there.
No, no.
My contract has been ended and I'm too heretical even for this chain that's carried me for 27 years.
Apparently the new Fox TV station is designed to support the conservative Prime Minister of Canada, Stephen Harper, who's simply following George Bush's playbook to the letter.
So heretics like me who question war in Afghanistan or deficit spending or any of these other things are being shown the door.
Yeah, well, you should come back to America where you're from anyway, right?
I should, I should.
And I will.
In fact, I'm looking to get myself another apartment in my native hometown of New York City.
Yeah, there you go.
And then you can start writing for the New York Times.
I have in the past.
I've been banned from the Wall Street Journal, another New York paper.
It's not easy being a outspoken person in today's American media.
Yeah, well, because the media is there to serve the empire.
And if you're not there to serve the empire, then you don't quite fit in with that.
Fortunately, my columns are still carried by the Huffington Post and by LewRockwell.com and on my own website, EricMargolis.com, as you kindly noted.
Yeah, there you go.
And again, everybody just spelt like Margolis and you'll find it.
M-A-R-G-O-L-I-S.
Yeah, there you go.
And we'll have a link to it, of course, on the entry for the archive of this interview here.
All right now.
So, well, let's continue with this theme for a minute here.
The media, the Washington Post covered the Netanyahu video on their blog and that's it.
Nothing in the New York Times today say the guys in the chat room went and checked the whole Middle East section to make doubles sure this morning.
Still nothing at the New York Times.
And this is not news that the prime minister of Israel thinks it's absurd the way he's able to steamroll and Buffalo the United States of America and that the American people still support him no matter what.
Well, the mainstream, the big corporate media in the States has played an important role in making this happen.
And, you know, I keep saying I used to cover the Soviet Union in the 1980s and our corporate media today in the States, it reminds me incredibly of the Soviet media, particularly Pravda and Trude in those days where they had bootlicking journalists and editors who self-censored, censored themselves, glorified their leaders, attacked anybody who opposed the Soviet Union and knew when to censor themselves and what not to say.
There sure are, you know, seem to be a lot of similarities.
I mean, I remember when I was a kid, people would make fun of the Soviet media and say like, ha ha, look at what the Soviet Union is, you know, what their state media organs are telling the people over there that's not true or whatever, you know, and they thought it was funny because it usually was funny, right?
Usually it was, you know, headlines written by bureaucrats who are out of touch.
They don't know, you know, how to tell a lie right either, you know?
We have better propaganda in the United States today than the wretched Soviets had, but it's still propaganda.
It's higher quality, it's made for TV quality, written by professional writers and things, but it still promotes the government line.
All right, now, so on the Israel issue, Raimondo in his article today says, look, you know, supposedly our democracy is the greatest thing about us and all this, and yet it's the chink in our armor because ultimately the squeaky wheel gets the grease, and so if, you know, Bill Kristol and his two dozen friends can set up three dozen think tanks and write at, you know, five major editorial pages, then they control the entire discourse in America, and then the Israel lobby, of course, has major influence on the Democratic Party in terms of fundraising.
You have the John Hagee crazies on the right in the Republican Party, and, you know, Congress is, no matter what Israel does, the U.S. Congress, you know, votes a resolution to support it by 90-something percent in each house, and it doesn't seem like that's going to change until, you know, the whole thing comes crashing down.
Well, how long is it going to go on, we wonder?
You know, the Israeli thinker Uri Avnery, who I enormously admire, a wonderful line he said that if Israel ordered the U.S.
Congress to repeal the Ten Commandments, it would do it, and the Congress now has been so Pavlovian trained by the Israel lobby that it enacts legislation or, you know, motions even before the Knesset does in Israel.
It's absolutely like a trained dog, and as Pat Buchanan said, you know, Capitol Hill is Israeli-occupied territory.
It's a fact of life, but you risk your career even talking about it.
Yeah, well, I interfered because I don't have a career, so how about the fact that Barack Obama went and did some PR with Israeli media, directly to Israeli media, you know, the same way Bush used to go on, like, controlled Arab media to try to talk to the people of the Arab world.
That's what Obama's got to do, to try to talk to the Israelis, and he says, well, I think, you know, probably a lot of you mistrust me just because my middle name is Hussein, but, you know, my chief of staff, his name is Rahm Israel Emmanuel, and he's a veteran of the IDF, and my other right-hand man, he's a descendant of Holocaust survivors, and, you know, it was the Israel lobby in Chicago, the Jewish lobby, says, in Chicago, that propelled me to the Senate in the first place, so please accept my undying loyalty to you, and they still don't like him.
It's pretty pathetic.
There is great antipathy to Obama and Israel.
They just don't trust him, period.
He's not kosher.
He smells there's something wrong about him, and most Jewish Americans, many of them, many, not all, but many Jewish Americans have the same concerns, but it's pathetic.
Yeah, because he implied one time that he was going to do anything at all about the permanent occupation, right?
That's right, that's right, and his middle name is Barak, I mean, Hussein, rather, but, you know, it's pathetic that Obama has to go on his knees to the Israeli electorate, and it's called elections, you know, November is coming, and Barak already got his wrist slapped by the Israel lobby for being cold to Netanyahu on his last visit after he humiliated Vice President Biden, so we now see Obama making as nice as he can.
Well, you know, I think I read somewhere, too, I wish I remembered where, although I bet I could find it if I looked around, that the Likud party gets the majority of their donations from right-wing Jews in America, well, and probably from the Christian Zionists as well, and that it's not even necessarily, you know, if Israelis were the only ones allowed to donate to their own candidates, we might not have the Likud at all.
Well, you know, you have in the U.S., you do have a number of very wealthy financiers.
You've got the Ronald Lauders of the world who's trying to portray himself as a Jewish patriot.
I'm sorry, Eric, we're all out of time.
Okay, well...
Heartbreak's built into this thing.
It's true.
Everybody, that's Eric Margulies.