All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's anti-war radio.
And our next guest is the great Sheldon Richman.
His blog is called Free Association.
He's also a fellow at the Future of Freedom Foundation and the editor of the Foundation for Economic Education's journal, The Freeman.
Welcome back to the show.
Sheldon, how are you doing?
I'm doing great and always glad to be with you, Scott.
Man, I've been doing this a long time.
I got everybody's bio memorized.
I don't have to pull up a thing anymore.
Good.
All right.
Hey, so you've got this great blog entry.
It's called Newt Gingrich Demagogue Pseudo Intellectual.
And boy, well, you got that right, but that could be the headline for any topic.
So what exactly is this about, Sheldon?
Well, this is about all the attention that Gingrich has been getting for the last week now when he declared in his, you know, in tones that always sound so profound, which is his favorite word, that the Palestinian people are a recent invention and therefore, I guess, basically have zero rights because invented people can't have real rights.
Yeah, there are some on my Facebook page said, oh, they're like our invisible friends.
You can do what you want with them.
Anything that is perfectly fine because they're an invented people.
Yeah.
Even even some people who, you know, tend to be on his side of things have found themselves nervously inching away even from that.
Well, now, here's the thing.
I'm an individualist and I guess I always have been.
Maybe Jeff Riggenbach is right that we're all determined to believe in this free will thing or whatever it is.
But I remember in first grade saying, well, what the hell is a people?
That doesn't make any sense at all.
Those two words don't go with each other.
You're the ones who taught me how to speak English and write it.
Lady, what the hell is an a people?
Well, to talk about, you know, the Palestinian people or the Irish people or whatever is not to sacrifice our individualist philosophy.
It doesn't mean there aren't individuals in that mass.
They a people can still exist.
You know, I go back now to the philosopher Gilbert Ryle, who talked about, you know, making a category error.
It's a meaningful concept.
You know, he talked about how if you take someone on a tour of a university and you say there's the science building and there's the administration building and there's the gymnasium.
At the end of the day, the person said, well, I've seen all these buildings.
Where's the university?
I didn't see a university.
Well, sure.
You talk about a X people, you're talking about some number of individuals.
But that doesn't mean they don't have something in common that justifies the convenience of calling them a people.
And then they think they may well think of themselves as as a people in some sense.
So, you know, I don't think it's getting into the area where we have to be.
We're denying individualism or methodological individual much, much less political individualism to talk in those terms.
Yeah.
Well, when they asked Ron Paul about it in the debate, he couldn't really take on what Newt didn't say, but really meant.
I mean, what he was the idea that was conveyed to me anyway was that nobody lived there, that they they must have come from Iraq or Saudi Arabia or some other place where Arabs lived.
And they showed up just to be a pain in the ass for the Israelis.
Right.
Well, he is echoing a totally discredited book that came out in the 1980s by a woman named Joan Peters called From Time Immemorial.
This was a big, thick book that came out, looked very scholarly, a lot of footnotes that proclaimed that they really it really was a land without a people.
And Arabs didn't begin to get attracted to that area until the Jews came.
The European Jews came and began to develop the place in the 20th century, early 20th century, and up to the time when Israel was became a became a state under the UN.
This book, which was a slobbered over by the Alan Dershowitz of the world and other people who are complete, just basically slaves to the Israel, Israel was totally discredited in Israel and in England, where scholars of this region looked at it, you know, with a fine tooth comb very carefully and basically destroyed the book.
And then some of that was done in the United States.
Norman Finkelstein, for one, was one who took the book apart and showing how the footnotes didn't say what the author said.
So he's echoing this.
He didn't name her.
But in the debate, he mentioned that there were no people there.
Basically, they were all attracted later.
Look, he wasn't making a scholarly point, even though he loves to put, you know, use this tone of profundity.
He was making a demagogue's invidious point.
Since they're an invented people, they have no rights.
That's all he was saying.
It was a pseudo-intellectual way of saying, these are not people.
And therefore, whatever the other terrorists, he said, therefore, whatever the Israelis do is fine and just, and we should be helping them and not criticizing them.
That's all he was saying.
And we almost get distracted if we start, like, you know, in a scholarly way, examining his words.
Yeah, but it really doesn't deserve it.
I mean, if someone else pointed out, look, there's no Iraqi people then by that standard.
This is all created by the British and the French after World War One.
Well, and there never have been Kurds, apparently, either.
Well, there's still Armenians.
There was no country called Jordan or Transjordan before Churchill drew lines in the sand.
So, you know, he both proves too much and also, you know, is really saying nothing at all except making the demagogues point that these people can all be killed or transferred or whatever the Israel wants to do, gassed, whatever they do.
And they do all kinds of horrible things every day.
And he's saying, hey, that's fine because these aren't even people.
Yeah, and you're right.
I mean, he did say they are terrorists.
They're all terrorists.
He didn't say Hamas in Gaza or even, yeah, and the PLA in the West Bank, too.
He said they, as in just anybody who lives there who's non-Israeli, I guess.
He says missiles are being launched every day.
Well, it's true that Hamas has sometimes launched missiles and they shouldn't do that in civilian areas.
It's Israel that broke truces with Hamas in 2008 and, yeah, 2008, leading to that horrible event, the horrible events of late 08, 09, Kislev.
They've broken truces with Hezbollah.
So, yeah, obviously totally one-sided.
And, of course, he doesn't care about the larger context, which is that Palestinians were run off their land in 47 and 48 and even earlier because big tracts of land were bought from feudal absentee landlords who had registered the land under the Ottomans, never were really owners in the John Locke sense.
And then so those lands were then bought.
And then the peasants who had worked them for more than a thousand years, whose families had worked those lands for a thousand years and lived there, and by Lockean standards, by good libertarian standards, where they should be recognized as the owners, they were kicked off.
Of course, you know, he doesn't know that history and he wouldn't care about it even if he did know it.
Right.
Well, and the thing is, is this is all a big applaud line.
I mean, the way he spun it in the debate when they criticized him for it was, I'm standing up for the truth at all costs and whatever.
You mentioned a couple of times there his sort of I forgot exactly the words he used, but that self-confidence that he has, that behind every word he speaks comes, believe me, I know what I'm saying.
And he believes in himself so much.
He actually sounds like he knows what he's talking about a lot of time.
Well, he thinks that if you use the word fundamentally and profoundly a lot, you're a profound thinker.
I mean, watch him carefully.
Listen to him carefully, that those words are peppered throughout all of his rhetoric.
And he does it in this tone that tells you, hey, I, I think deeply, unlike you, I am a deep thinker.
Well, he's I can't even say what I think of him, you know, on the air because it would, you know, it wouldn't be nice.
And there may be kids, I hope there are kids listening to this.
He's, you know, anybody, I'm taking the attitude now, anybody but Gingrich, anybody but Gingrich.
Oh, yeah, no, he's the most horrible guy in the world.
And my whole thing about him is I've been rooting for him to join the campaign for years now because I think he's the most hilarious guy in the world.
I mean, this this is the third time this time he actually joined up.
But the two presidential elections before this, he put his toe in the water about it.
And his initial exploratory committee told him, everyone hates your guts.
Dude, you're the least likable person in North America.
He's the biggest, most fat headed bully in all of American history.
And I guess maybe a fat headed bully leader for a fat headed bully population now, you know, but I can't imagine he's going to last.
I mean, yeah, yeah.
When we get back, we'll be talking more.
We'll get back to the real point about Israel and Palestine and Newt, too.
After this was Sheldon Richman, y'all.
All right, y'all, welcome back to the show and anti-war radio.
I'm talking with the great Sheldon Richman from the Future Freedom Foundation and the Foundation for Economic Education.
He's the editor of their journal, The Freeman.
And he keeps a blog at free association dot blogspot dot com, which is Sheldon Richman dot com will get you there.
Sheldon Richman dot com will get you there.
All right.
Anyway, so listen, before I let you talk more, I got to say this real quick.
So listen, before I let you talk more, I got to say this real quick, which is that one time I said to Gordon Prather, I said, I don't know, Doc, I'm no expert.
He said, yes, you are, because I'm telling you and you have access to me.
And so you learn what I tell you.
And that makes you an expert.
Simple as that, because the fact is, he used to make nuclear bombs.
That was his job.
He believed and I think still believes at least kind of that he was really keeping the Russians from pouring through the folded gap and that it was worth it and whatever.
But anyway, so he's the expert's expert on all this stuff.
And he taught me all about this bogus threat of the electromagnetic pulse.
And I'm proud to see William J.
Broad in today's New York Times.
Whenever he writes alone, there's actual truth to be found in his articles.
Whenever he writes with David Sanger, of course, his articles are full of singers.
But this is debunking Newt Gingrich's propaganda about the danger of an electromagnetic pulse.
And I read that just very and they don't really he doesn't really explain in the article why it ain't so, but why it ain't so is that a regular atom bomb, even if it's an implosion, plutonium bomb, as Gordon Prather taught me, for it to turn out your lights, it's close enough to turn you to dust.
So you don't need to worry about your lights getting turned down.
You're dead.
Well, that's that's comforting to know that.
Right.
So the only thing that can cause the electromagnetic pulse effect is a hydrogen bomb going off in space.
And this would be one that's an enhanced radiation device, which is basically a neutron bomb, which would be used for anti-missile defense systems.
You know, nuclear bombs going off in space.
And then the radiation is supposed to fry the electronics of the incoming rusky nukes and that kind of deal.
But anyway, so that H-bomb, an enhanced radiation neutron H-bomb going off in outer space above the ionosphere can cause an electromagnetic pulse.
But of course, they've known this for 50 years and everything is hardened against that kind of thing anyway.
The only people that could do it to us would be the British or the Russians or the Chinese and certainly not Iran or North Korea in 300 years.
And this guy, Gingrich, is he really is on the level of like Frank Gaffney, the lowest scum of the neoconservative movement, who's not even invited to AEI or WNEP or anything like that.
Well, I wanted to show you in this in connection with the Palestinian remarks about how racist this is.
Let me read a quick passage from his statement to when he was on Jewish TV.
He says, and I think we've had an invented Palestinian people who are, in fact, Arabs.
There's a revelation.
They're actually Arabs who knew that and were historically part of the Arab community.
And they had a chance to go to many places.
Now, I've reworded that to the following.
And I think that we've had an invented Pennsylvanian people who are, in fact, Americans and were historically part of the American community.
And they had a chance to go many places.
So, in other words, if you if some group outside of Pennsylvania were to move into Pennsylvania and drive all the Pennsylvanians out and they complained, all we need to say is, wait a second, you're really Americans and there's 50 other states, the 49 other states.
So what are you complaining about?
Are you getting kicked out of Pennsylvania?
It's like you're really Pennsylvanian.
It's the same thing.
So he thinks, oh, if if you're a generic Arab whose family has lived in Palestine for over a thousand years, then if somebody wants that land, what's the big deal if you move across the Jordan to another kind of another place?
There's Arabs over there, too.
I mean, this is a thoroughly evil, racist man.
Yeah, well, you know, Americans have a tradition of supporting Trail of Tears type of forced marches of death and that kind of thing.
So, well, you know, why not carry on the proud tradition?
USA, USA, and let's not let it pass, either, that in the debate the other night when the subject was being discussed, Rick Santorum, who I guess really isn't worth talking about since he's not doing anything.
He said that all of Palestine belongs to the Israel.
He said the Israelis, I guess, rather than the Jewish people, but the Israelis, including, he said, the West Bank, which he which he put in sort of, you know, invisible quotation marks.
He said, including the West Bank that belongs to the Israelis.
So I guess that means he supports so-called transfer, which is the euphemism for kicking out, expelling ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians from the West Bank.
He obviously supports that.
So who the heck are these people?
Why are they treated with any kind of respect?
And what is the meaning of the debate the other night got insane where Romney and Gingrich and Santorum and Bachman were all fighting over?
Oh, yeah.
Well, I met Benjamin Netanyahu more times than you.
And I say that whatever Benjamin Netanyahu says, that ought to be what America does.
Oh, yeah.
Well, I say that even if I disagree or if anyone ever disagrees with Benjamin Netanyahu, which I would never do, then they better never air that disagreement in public.
And oh, yeah.
Well, I love him more than you.
And on and on it went for a good, what, seven, ten minutes?
Yeah.
I mean, didn't Michelle Bachman promise to go over there after Inauguration Day and put a Palestinian in the headlock?
Oh, no.
Wait, that was Jon Stewart's satire of it.
But that was the last word.
Jon Stewart treated that exactly the way it should be treated.
He called it the tuchus kiss off.
And it was that it was disgusting.
It was a disgusting display.
And I would think any self-respecting Jewish person should have been like running to the bathroom to barf.
I mean, it was how could you possibly stand that?
I mean, I don't think FDR could have gotten away with talking about England and Churchill like that, could he?
I mean, he called Stalin Uncle Joe and all that.
But but like, look, no matter what Churchill rules America from now on, we do whatever England says and nobody better ever disagree with them in public.
And I don't think he would have been elected to his fourth term, you know.
It's I mean, look, here's the little secret that they don't want to talk about.
And Alan Brownfield of the American of the Council for American Judaism has pointed this out in detail.
American Jews rank Israel very far down on their list of concerns when it comes to electoral politics.
Their list of concerns are identical to anybody else's in the United States.
The economy, you know, jobs, stuff like that.
And so I don't know who they think these economics think they're lusting after because that's not where Jews generally vote.
Well, typically, though, the more rich you are, the more right wing you are.
So it's not so much about Jewish votes as it is donations.
Money.
Well, that may be the answer.
It's certainly no there's no there's no massive votes to win by slavishly taking the Likud line and even out Likud in Likud.
Yeah, well, and that was Romney's point was like, hey, of course it's OK to murder all those people, but you shouldn't say that unless Benjamin Netanyahu tells you to say that.
Well, yeah, it's just right now here.
I'm going to be a selfish American for a minute like everyone else and say, but what about 9-11?
Because the truth is, and I don't really care whose feelings are hurt by this because I'm an American nationalist.
And how do you like that?
I'm a patriot.
The motivation, not just for Osama bin Laden, as documented by Michael Scheuer, the former chief bin Laden hunter in America who gave Bill Clinton 10 chances to kill him, but also the hijackers themselves, according to their biographers, basically Lawrence Wright and Terry McDermott, they were motivated to it.
And for that matter, how Ramsey Youssef statement before the court in 1995, 1996, their war against the United States, Al-Qaeda's war against the United States is about 50-50 about the bases in Saudi Arabia and endless support for Israel's endless support for the endless occupation of the West Bank and Gaza and at that time, Lebanon, which had gone on for 20 years.
That's right.
Because the Americans don't realize the daily brutality and humiliation that the Palestinians in the occupied territories and Gaza, which is a big open air prison, suffer.
And that's only part of it because the Arab inside Israel, or inside that green line, are second class citizens.
They do not get the kind of public services that Jewish citizens get.
And it's not an honest democracy.
It's an ethnocentric democracy.
So anytime you hear an American politician say, oh, we have shared values and it's the only democracy in the Middle East.
I mean, you have to keep in mind that it's not a true democracy for the Arab citizens.
It's true they can have parties and vote, but they can't make any kind of fundamental change.
And think about it.
I mean, how can something be both a democratic state and a Jewish state?
I want someone to reconcile those two things.
Well, and especially with the permanent occupation, people in Gaza and the West Bank don't get to vote for representatives in the Knesset.
And a wall is being built through the West Bank, snaking through the West Bank, separating people from their olive groves and other places where they work.
Total humiliation.
Total grinding.
Barbarism.
And Americans have no conception of it.
Yeah.
We pay the price, though, both ways, in the first place and in the blowback that comes later.
All right.
Thanks so much, Sheldon.
I sure appreciate your time, as always.
Anytime, Scott.
Take care.
That's the great Sheldon Richman, everybody.
FFF.org.
And also check out the Freeman.
He's the editor.
FEE.org.
And his blog is SheldonRichman.com.
Free association.
