Sorry, I'm late.
I had to stop by the Wax Museum again and give the finger to FDR.
We know Al-Qaeda, Zawahiri, is supporting the opposition in Syria.
Are we supporting Al-Qaeda in Syria?
It's a proud day for America.
And by God, we've kicked Vietnam syndrome once and for all.
Thank you very, very much.
I say it, I say it again.
You've been hacked.
You've been took.
You've been hoodwinked.
These witnesses are trying to simply deny things that just about everybody else accepts as fact.
He came, he saw us, he died.
We ain't killing they army, but we killing them.
We be on CNN like Say Our Name been saying, say it three times.
The meeting of the largest armies in the history of the world.
Then there's going to be an invasion.
All right, you guys, it's Friday, so it's time to talk to Sheldon Richman.
Hey, Sheldon.
Hello, Scott.
How you doing, man?
Okay, I'm here in Indianapolis, Indiana, visiting.
Oh, cool, man.
I went to Indianapolis, Indiana once for a Liberty Fund conference.
I was invited by the great David Beto, and I saw David Letterman out in front of the hotel.
Oh, well, I'm doing a Liberty Fund conference also.
Oh, very good.
Of course, Indianapolis is the home of Liberty Fund.
Hey, man, I would like to go to a race there someday, maybe.
Seems like that would be fun.
It's an individualist kind of a sport in a teamwork kind of a way.
Sure.
Hey, man, at least it's not team sport.
Even though there's teamwork involved, I guess I have to concede.
Anyway, listen, man, I'm happy that I'm talking with you because you're my good friend and you write all this great stuff.
This one here, The Goal is Freedom, TGIF, every Friday at the Libertarian Institute and oftentimes featured at Counterpunch and other places.
Has Reason been publishing any of your stuff lately?
No, not really.
I think they're not too crazy about the Middle East stuff.
They sometimes do when it's not about Palestine.
And this one's about Palestine.
The Art of the Smear.
The Israel Lobby.
Busted.
Emphasis on busted.
Go ahead and tell us here in this piece, Sheldon.
Well, it's about a four-part documentary, actually undercover investigative journalism, that the Al Jazeera satellite channel of Qatar, which is based in Qatar, did in 2016 and 2017.
However, it's not been shown on Al Jazeera for some reasons that are a matter of controversy, pressure from the Qatar government and also the Israel lobby.
But anyway, this documentary, and I have the links to where you can watch it in the piece, shows, again through this undercover investigative journalism, that the Israeli government, this is all happening in the U.S. now, the Israeli government, along with a constellation of organizations that really constitute the Israel lobby, student organizations, AIPAC, a whole bunch of different organizations, including the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, have a comprehensive program to smear pro-Palestinian student activists, and not just student activists, adult activists who are involved in the boycott, divestiture and sanctions movement, the BDS movement, and also various other efforts to bring to the American people's attention the plight of the Palestinians at the hands of the Israelis.
So there's a comprehensive campaign to portray anybody involved in this as anti-Semitic, as pro-terrorism, as anti-American, as anti-democracy.
I mean, they pile on all these epithets on people for doing one thing, criticizing the conduct, the mistreatment that the Israelis visit on the Palestinians every day and have been doing for decades.
And it's a devastating investigative report because this guy goes undercover, he's actually a British national student age guy, a young guy, who became trusted by important people in this pro-Israel effort, and they bring him in and give him a job and he's at high-level meetings and he's videotaping, videoing, it's not tape I guess anymore, he's videoing these meetings.
It's unbelievable that he never gets caught.
Al Jazeera did something similar in England a few years ago, Britain, where they were doing the same kind of thing.
So it's extraordinary and I urge people to go to either YouTube or the Electronic Intifada, I have the links there, and watch this four-part report.
Yeah, man, it really is incredible, isn't it?
It's, how do you say, shocking, but not surprising, but really shocking, the degree of, well, you know, it's funny, right?
You put a guy undercover like this, I mean, hey, he might, he's a young Jewish-British guy, this is why they accepted him into their group, he might have learned that these Israel lobby groups are really great and they're doing great work, but no, that's not what he learned.
He must have been, I don't know if there's a, I didn't see the very last bit, I don't know if they talked with him or what, but he must have been reaffirmed in his suspicions that led him to volunteer to do this in the first place.
I mean, and this is just in and of itself, this is just absolutely stellar journalism.
I mean, you think of any reporter who has hidden camera footage uncovering real scandal, I mean, the kind of information that the public absolutely deserves to know, like infiltrating a big tobacco company or some corrupt institution, a federal court where the judge is corrupt or some kind of thing.
I mean, this is absolutely the highest level of investigative journalism.
It's not like hack stuff either, it's not like ambush stuff, it's not twisting quotes and spying, I mean, this is absolutely legitimate and I think people will really appreciate just the craft of the journalism that went into this and that young man, whatever his name is, had some real courage to do this and it is just, well, it's as absolutely revelatory as only hidden camera footage and this kind of deep undercover journalism could be, right?
I don't even see how they could carry it off because you'll see him at a restaurant speaking to a woman who's the, you know, a person actually was an American working in the Israeli embassy who's a liaison to these other Jewish-American organizations that are out to smear, you know, anybody who's sympathetic to the Palestinians and he's sitting there speaking to her and you can hear her, the audio is fine, but also they put the text on the screen so you can, but, you know, the audio is perfectly legible, there's no way they're making a leap and putting words in her mouth and they have three different camera angles on the one.
I don't see how they carried off this undercover investigative report over such a long period of time without getting caught, it's just amazing to me.
I mean, like three different camera angles of this woman.
I mean, I realize cameras are small these days, but still, I'm amazed by that.
And there's no doubt about what she and these others are saying.
They're saying things like to discredit the message, namely like the BDS message, you have to discredit the messenger.
I mean, they admit they're going after people, they're trying to wreck their reputations, wreck their careers, they're trying to wreck students' career potentials by putting all kinds of vicious stuff on social media, so when these people go for jobs after they get out of school, you know, their HR departments will look them up on Facebook and stuff and they're going to see allegations that they're sympathetic to terrorists and they're anti-Semitic.
And that's the heart of this, this canary mission.
This is a blacklist against college kids.
Yeah.
So that when they graduate, they're radioactive, they're going to make your company look bad.
We're going to publicize that you hired this person who, when he was 20, went to a pro-Palestine human rights event that they claim is equivalent to a KKK rally.
Right, was a member of Students for Justice in Palestine, which is a growing organization around the country.
They've targeted certain campuses.
The stories, the campuses focused on in the report is UC Davis, where they've done a lot of this, and also the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, where they, you know, they basically invent anti-Semitism stories to the point where, and I think you were saying this the other day with one of your other guests, you know, the Jewish students at Knoxville are saying, we don't see anti-Semitism.
Why are we seeing stories about, you know, rising, vicious anti-Semitism?
We know about it, but we don't see it.
Yeah, I mean, that was a really important part of the documentary.
So you have these outside organizations that come in and you have a few pro-Palestinian groups and the outside Israel lobby groups, you know, build up this whole narrative about this vicious anti-Semitism.
And then you had these young, it's like the Jewish organization on campus, I guess, and they came and forcefully defended these Palestinian kids against the lies against them and said, you know, seriously, you're building up this whole thing that there's anti-Semitism on campus.
I think we of all people would have noticed if that was true, which is pretty brutal shutdown of these smears.
And after all, I mean, what actual anti-Semite who really hates Jews also cares about the Palestinians, right?
Anybody who hates Jews also hates Arabs.
Stupid.
So no, no leftist, no liberal civil rights type is anti-Semitic, except for the dumbest kid who says the dumbest thing one time.
But that in no way defines left wing pro-Palestinian sentiment, which is straight out of the civil rights movement or heaven forfend the social justice warrior movement or whatever.
But you can't call that anti-Semitism, that they're so civil rights that they think that Jewish Israelis should stop violating and oppressing and defying the rights of the Palestinians that they occupy.
Yeah, right.
Well, and it's interesting in this documentary, you have some of the, again, some of the officials, the operatives who are trying to discredit these students, and they're not just students, even some politicians, acknowledging that the anti-Semitism charge doesn't stick so well anymore, doesn't have the power that it used to have.
And so they've broadened it to anti-democracy, anti-American.
At the same time, they want to claim that the activists are also pro-terrorism.
There's no evidence for this.
There's nothing to show this.
But they want to plant the thought that to be sympathetic to the Palestinians means you're sympathetic to terrorism, which in effect means all Palestinians are terrorists.
So it's a vicious smear.
It's a collectivist, that's a racist smear.
All Palestinians are terrorists.
And they also want to make the point that BDS and SJP are hate groups.
That's the thing.
In fact, there's even a scene where, again, I think it may be the same woman, the head of one of these groups, is saying, she's prepping a group to go out and demonstrate or prep.
She says, what's the talking point?
The talking point is BDS is a hate group.
SJP is a hate group.
This is what they're pounding into the heads.
And even the people on their side claim it's, what's the term?
It's not grassroots.
It's turf.
It's astroturf movement.
Right.
They're paid to go in and disrupt meetings or at least stand at meetings with signs.
It's not grassroots.
Well, here's the thing of it, too.
The real point is this really works well.
And they really have done major damage to these pro-Palestinian groups on these campuses.
I mean, people still like them anyway.
They survive.
But in terms of smearing and hurting individual people and setting back their efforts at pushing BDS through and that kind of thing, it has worked, which only encourages them, apparently.
Yeah.
So it's not as ineffective as it deserves to be.
Right.
Like people should just be rolling their eyes at this and saying, oh, come on, you know, these left-wing protester kids are anti-Semites.
That doesn't fit at all.
Give me a break.
Right.
I mean, that should be the reaction.
I think the anti-Semitism charge does still have, unfortunately, has power to it, even though even if the other side doesn't think so.
I mean, look, look, there's perfectly good reasons for.
You know, if you're if you know history at all, especially the history of the European jury.
Yeah, you would.
You would obviously not want to have anything.
You wouldn't want to get it within 100 miles of anything that stinks of anti-Semitism.
So that's why the other side has used that.
And it's and it has been effective.
I don't think it's lost its effectiveness.
They may believe it's been losing it, but I'm not sure it does.
And I think it does scare people off.
Yeah.
You know, and, you know, some of us, you, me and, you know, lots of other people have been trying to try to break that connection.
I mean, come on.
The Palestinians have suffered terribly at the hands of Israeli government and, you know, and the pre-Israeli government and militias.
And it's not anti-Semitic to point that out, even apart from the fact that the Palestinians are Semites.
But even apart from that, I mean, that's that's maybe a technical detail.
Semites are that's a that's a language group.
It's not a racial group.
Semite, they're Semitic languages.
Right.
There's not a Semitic race.
Just like there's Aryans.
It refers to languages, not not to race.
That was all distorted over the years by all sides, the Germans and the Nazis in particular.
The point is, it's got nothing to do with Jew hatred.
To say Palestinians shouldn't be subjected to Israeli oppression is not in any way related to dislike of Jewish people for being Jewish.
Essentially, they're doing our work for us because what they're really saying is they cannot defend the policy which says that their tribe is chosen by God and has the right to violate the rights of innocent civilians from the land of Israel.
And so they're doing our work for us.
They're doing our work for us.
They're doing our work for us.
They're doing our work for us.
They're doing our work for us.
They're doing our work for us.
They're doing our work for us.
They're doing our work for us.
They're doing our work for us.
They're doing our work for us.
They're doing our work for us.
They're doing our work for us.
And so, they're making up the stories from other tribes.
No one else believes that.
That's a bunch of crap.
And so, instead of saying that, they have to just lie and smear their opponents as hating them for who they are rather than what they do.
They're the ones who invoke who they are to justify what they do when it amounts to no justification whatsoever.
Well, that's right.
Look, Israel recently passed what's called the nation-state law which declared what was already de facto in their eyes their eyes that the Israel is the nation-state of the Jewish people none of the Jewish people who are citizens of the state of Israel that would be circular circular they mean it's the nation-state of every Jew everywhere in the world whether that person ever set foot in Israel or was born in Israel period so they they proclaim it the state of the Jewish people now if you criticize Israel if you criticize Israel then that side will say hey you're attacking the Jewish people but they're the ones that proclaim the state as this as the state of the Jewish people so they want it both ways I mean the pro Israeli people want it both ways on the one hand don't attack Jews on the other hand hey we've declared our state to be the state of the Jewish people so if you attack us you're attacking Jews right well that I don't know why I can't say I'm not attacking Jews but I'm attacking you and your state right because in essence virtually everyone who attacks Israel does not attack Jews for being Jews because again real anti-semites also despise Arabs right so why would they defend the other side and all they don't the Jewish anything yeah the Nazis invoke Israel's ethnic supremacy and say this is how it's supposed to be see well and how do they explain all the all the Jewish anti-zionists or anti Israel exactly from the very beginning of Zionism there was Jewish opposition in fact Zionism was a minority position until after World War two and and then the Zionists as a matter of public relations said oh this is just a refugee solution to the displaced people of Europe but that's not what was ever intended by Zionism it was to get all Jews to move to Israel because it was a you know Jewish sort of Jewish chauvinist movement even though they were secular Jews that and the religious Jews thought they were charlatans it's got nothing really to do with Judaism it's kind of latched on to it and then there were Orthodox and Reform Jews who really object to that that they've hijacked the religion well and also as you've shown in your recent series of articles on this issue that they said from the beginning that of course this will necessitate the expulsion of all the people who live there because otherwise how are we supposed to have a state if there's a bunch of people who already live there and then they lied for decades isn't it true Sheldon that it was like a conspiracy theory some kind of wacky kookery that people even there that there were Palestinians everybody knew it was a land without people like Eric Margulies told me when his mother reported about the way that Palestinians were living in the refugee camps in the West Bank that they were threatened like this was a real secret and that they even threatened to kill him as a little boy because of his mother bearing witness to that in the press well yeah this early on this phrase a land without a people of people without a land or a land without a people for a people without a land and then one of the theater Herschel's lieutenants what you know went and visited Palestine and came back and said something along the lines this may be apocryphal the exact quote but something like the bride is beautiful but she's married to somebody else in other words it wasn't a land without a people there were people there were villages there were towns the the Jaffa orange was a worldwide export beginning in the 1860s I mean there wasn't like there were just a few Bedouin you know wandering around nomadically from area to area of an undeveloped desert I mean that's the story they want to give us but no there were Jaffa and another another well-developed villages and towns we and by the way we're Jews Jews live for many generations peacefully with the Arabs there were not pogroms in in Palestine the way anything like what happened in in Europe over you know centuries not at all I know and I don't mean to say oh there were lesser pogroms there were not pogroms but the violence in the late 20s and into the 30s that's already after the Zionists are making their moves and kicking Arab farmers off land after acquiring big tracts of property from absentee feudal landlords and then kicking off the Palestinian peasants who have been working for generations on those lands all right now that's when that's when the feeling against Jews began it wasn't it wasn't before that all right now so as far as this news and we really got to go but again it's at the Electronic Intifada they have all four parts now released of this documentary and it really is relevatory you guys are going to want to watch this if you have not seen it you really have to see it and as Sheldon said it's all embedded on YouTube as well but there's one more thing here that I want to bring up even at the expense of my next guests timing here Sheldon I was hoping I could get you to address it's worth they just openly brag and boast about their control of the Washington Post editorial page and and then they show in the document I forget if they brag specifically about how they did it but they really the case is shown how the Washington Post at the Israel lobbies behest destroyed this senator by calling him an anti-semite for sticking up for the Palestinians in the slightest way I forget what it was are you thinking of Congressman Moran or yes yeah yeah oh he's a congressman I'm sorry I'm the house yeah because he and they had Moran on there talking about the remark that he made I forget exactly what it was certainly not anti-semitic yeah there's a big part of that documentaries about how the press is cultivated both here and in Israel right there they have a new new correspondent gets to gets to Jerusalem or Tel Aviv is immediately courted by the was it the Israel project and a couple of those organizations that all have links to the u.s. to you know to wine and dine them and make them sympathetic and this and that I mean they put on they put on quite a show and and reporting over over decades has always been you know much greatly sympathetic toward the Israelis and very little time given to the Palestinians it's might have might have changed a little bit in recent years because the Palestinians are again like Arabs are always considered terrorists and the Israelis are considered cultured and civilized and on the right on the right side the post was specifically named of course they denied it the AP also was it was talked about as what changing a headline under under pressure because they denied that too but there's yeah there's the strong indication that the lobby works full-time to cultivate the media and there's just this there's this sympathy some of it you know some of it understandable I mean the Jews in Europe had a very had a very bad time for a very long time culminating with the Nazis and so there yeah there's natural sympathy but you can't let it cloud your judgment when when a group of people from Europe calling themselves Jews go to Palestine and kick people out you shouldn't let your sympathy for the you know Nazi victims stop you from being sympathetic to the Palestinians yeah imagine that you know morality being a universal thing that could apply in this situation and that one hey we can walk pretty fancy stuff you got there Richmond we can walk and chew gum at the same time yeah we can we can we can say yeah this group was wrong then but this group is now wronging another group now we can do both things of course all right yes that's the great show the Richmond please read his wonderful articles at Libertarian Institute org the new one is called the art of the smear and it's again about this great four-part documentary produced for Al Jazeera by them and then suppressed by them due to politics and now linked to electronic intifada and posted on YouTube so get them while they're hot there and thank you again Sheldon appreciate it my pleasure look forward to it next time all right y'all thanks find me at Libertarian Institute org at Scott Horton org anti-war calm and reddit.com slash Scott Horton show oh yeah and read my book fool's errand timed and the war in Afghanistan at fools errand dot US
