07/28/14 – Eric Margolis – The Scott Horton Show

Oh, John Kerry's Mideast peace talks have gone nowhere.
Hey y'all, Scott Horton here for the Council for the National Interest at councilforthenationalinterest.org.
U.S. military and financial support for Israel's permanent occupations of the West Bank and Gaza Strip is immoral, and it threatens national security by helping generate terrorist attacks against our country.
And face it, it's bad for Israel, too.
Without our unlimited support, they would have much more incentive to reach a lasting peace with their neighbors.
It's past time for us to make our government stop making matters worse.
Help support CNI at councilforthenationalinterest.org.
All right, you guys, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is my show, Scott Horton Show.
I'm joined on the phone now by Eric Margulies.
He's covered more than a dozen wars around the world for decades now.
He's the author of American Raj, Liberation or Domination.
He writes at unz.com, at lourockwell.com, at ericmargulies.com.
Welcome back to the show.
How are you doing, Eric?
I'm glad to be back with you, Scott.
Very happy to have you here.
So just talk to me about Gaza.
You got 10 minutes.
Say whatever you want.
Well, this horrible situation is continuing without relent.
The death toll is, I don't know what it's at.
At this moment, it's heading towards 2,000 dead, most of whom are civilians, 70 percent of whom are civilians, women and children.
Israel is continuing to pound Gaza with U.S.-supplied weapons, 155-millimeter heavy howitzers, F-16s dropping bombs, helicopter gunships, all in violation of U.S. law for their use against civilians.
Israel, I don't know what.
Israel is trying to completely liquidate Hamas or force it to bend its knee and agree to obey Israel.
Hamas is dug in and is fighting a last-ditch fight for survival, hoping that if it can survive this attack, that it will regain a lot of its stature and may be able to break at least part of the eight-year Israeli blockade of Gaza.
And, well, what do you think, how do you think the war's playing out so far as far as, you know, in that context of whether Hamas is going to survive and thrive from this?
Well, you know, we really shouldn't call it a war.
I mean, I do, you do, but it is a killing.
It's reprisals against civilians.
Both sides are doing it.
The Palestinians are very foolish, in my opinion, in firing these rockets, which are absolutely useless except to make them feel good.
They are less lethal than stones being thrown.
All they do is get the Israelis madder and give Israel a pretext to go and pound the hell out of Gaza.
Israel's real objective here is not all this baloney one hears about tunnels and rockets and things like that.
Netanyahu, the very far right-wing leader of Israel, his plan is to completely thwart, collapse, stymie any attempts to create a Palestinian state.
He's said it repeatedly.
There's no reason not to believe him.
By stomping on Gaza and killing so many Palestinians, he's making sure that the Palestinians will be unlikely to be able to make a deal with him.
And he's terrorized Israelis into thinking that any Palestinian state, any state on the West Bank would be another Gaza showering rockets onto Israel.
So he's been very successful in derailing U.S. and international and U.N. plans to create an independent Palestinian state, which is, as everybody knows, the solution to the problem.
Well, it sounds like he'd rather have the problem.
He wants to keep Hamas there because what does he think he's doing?
Fighting for, I mean, obviously he doesn't think he's fighting to install Fatah in power in Gaza because that would make it even worse from his point of view as far as the international legitimacy of the Palestinian authority in seeking a Palestinian state.
Well, it's just killing a bunch of kids for nothing, really.
Well, and Israeli soldiers, too.
The Fatah run by Mahmoud Abbas is a sock puppet for the Americans and the Israelis.
It's it's completely useless.
This whole episode has shown that another sock puppet for Washington, Ban Ki-moon, the mouse-like head of the U.N.
It's also useless.
So Netanyahu's calling the shots and he knows he can do whatever he wants because he controls the U.S. Congress and much of the media.
Yeah, but I mean, so I'm still just trying and maybe it's the wrong thing to try to understand Netanyahu's plan from a reasonable point of view or whatever, but it doesn't seem like he's eradicating Hamas at any insurgency.
All they have to do is not be completely eradicated and they win.
And so they'll come out as the champions of the underdogs, at least in Gaza at the end of this.
And the whole policy.
Well, I mean, I don't know.
I mean, is he not trying to deliberately kill civilians in order to turn the population against Hamas?
And is that not a complete failure?
That may be part of the plan, no doubt about it.
We Americans did that in Iraq.
We tried to bomb them and starve them and blow up their sewage systems to try and get them to overthrow.
But Eric, it just seems obvious that Hamas is going to benefit from this in every way rather than lose.
I mean, the ones that don't die in it, but as an organization.
As you just suggested earlier, having still having Hamas there is not necessarily a negative for Israel, because Netanyahu can keep saying these Arab beasts, these wild beasts, look, Hamas, they're terrorists, they're terrorists, tunnels and terrorist children, etc.
So really, it is just an exercise in mowing the grass, as they call it, you know, diminishing the power of Hamas a little bit, maybe tricking them into releasing their store rockets for a little while and that kind of thing.
And then just we'll do this again in a year and a half.
Hamas has got to be running out of rockets.
And it's, I don't know how much longer it can really take these civilian casualties.
The Israelis are making the rubble bounce now.
In Gaza, there's been total devastation violating every tenet of international law.
And look what the Arab states have done.
Egypt is a complicit in Israel's attack on the Gaza civilians because it's locking up the back door to Gaza and is cooperating with the Israelis to try and crush, stamp the life out of the Gaza resistance.
Well, you know, I've noticed that all the pro-Israel arguments are just complete nonsense, based on the premise that somehow, you know, the Gaza Strip is the massive armed aggressor against poor little Israel surrounded by enemies, this kind of nonsense.
Everyone else who's looking at the reality of the situation is opposed to what's going on there.
And it makes me wonder if the Americans, it's really only the Americans who are falling for this crap.
And it seems like if we can continue, the American people can continue being fooled into supporting this kind of thing, that we really are putting ourselves in danger of further terrorist attacks against the United States.
You started this interview saying, yeah, they're killing them with our F-16s, you know, bombing them and shooting them with our M-16s.
And that's not going unnoticed here.
There will be another 9-11 type attack for sure, because there's so many people around the world.
You're right.
Americans and Canadians, let's say North Americans, have a cockeyed view of what's going on.
All you have to do is watch French TV or German TV or Italian TV or any foreign TV services or read the papers, and you won't get this idea of tiny little Israel being attacked by, you know, 100 million bestial Arabs.
They're reporting this fury against the United States around the world.
But our media has filtered that out and is completely reporting the Israeli narrative developed by a bunch of PR experts and lawyers in New York.
Yeah.
I saw where Lindsey Graham said, well, you know, I guess the UN has just become an anti-Semitic.
Like, yeah, that's all this is about is just the bigotry of the 7 billion people in the world who aren't Jews.
They just all wake up in the morning hating Jews for no reason at all, I guess.
That must be what's going on here.
Well, this is generating anti-Semitism around the world, which is terrible.
And Israel, it bears a significant responsibility for this.
Yeah.
Well, and of course, things are getting pretty bad in France.
There's been, I saw some clips this morning on TV of, you know, riots and people chanting, supposedly at least, chanting death to the Jews, that kind of thing.
That's worse than it's been in Europe in a long time, isn't it?
It is.
France has the largest Jewish population in Europe, followed by Ukraine.
And it's opening old, ugly wounds.
The Israelis had better tone down their actions before they generate more anti-Semitism.
All right.
Thanks very much, Eric.
You're the best.
You're welcome, Scott.
EricMargulies.com, y'all.
Hey, I'm Scott Horton here.
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