Sorry, I'm late.
I had to stop by the Whites 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 had.
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, on the line is the great Ramzi Baroud, journalist, author and editor of the Palestine Chronicle.
And he's also the author of The Last Earth, A Palestinian Story.
Welcome to the show.
How are you doing?
I'm doing great.
Thanks for having me, Scott.
Very happy to have you on the show here.
And I should have mentioned my father was a freedom fighter, is the book from the previous book.
And oh, Ramzi Baroud dot net.
And we rerun just about everything he writes at Antiwar dot com, too.
And man, there's been a lot going on in Israel, Palestine lately.
So I'm very happy to have you on the show here to share your expertise with us.
First of all, the biggest story could have been the biggest story of the year.
Maybe Project Censored Award material, something like that, is the daily and especially the weekly Friday protests in the Gaza Strip at the fence where, what, 170 or something?
I mean, pardon me, Palestinians have been shot by Israeli snipers and yet they persist in their virtually entirely peaceful demonstrations there.
Right?
So, in fact, the number is the number of casualties has already exceeded the 200 and over 16000 wounded since March 31st.
Now, this happened in commemoration of Land Day, but it continued ever since, especially every Friday where the protests become a lot more intense and popular.
Up to 30,000 people joined the protests on Thursday, Friday, and the Israeli army just basically has stationed hundreds of snipers across the border fence.
And they don't hesitate to shoot to kill with very little accountability by whether the United Nations or the U.S. or any other entity.
Alright, and now I'm sorry to do this because it's difficult to talk about all this stuff in context, in the proper current context, you know, without going back over and over again about the situation here.
Because it's so easy to imagine, Ramsey, that people who are ignorant of the overall context here would think that, hey, every country has a right to protect their borders from foreign invaders.
So here you have these Gazans, they live in the country next door to Israel called Gaza, and they keep trying to invade it.
And so what are the Israelis supposed to do?
That's right.
This is the message that Benjamin Netanyahu is constantly trying to convey in the media that Israel is a country that's trying to protect its border.
It's a democracy that's under threat by the Palestinians, by the Arabs, and so forth.
Israel has been conveying these messages for many, many years, in fact.
Yet the reality is Israel is an occupying power under international and legal obligations to respect the rules of what it takes to be an occupying power.
It hasn't.
It's stealing Palestinian land in the West Bank.
It has placed Gaza under this hermetic siege that's been going on for over 11 years.
It's killing people left and right.
It violates international law.
It's more than any other country in the world that has violated United Nations resolutions, again, with no legal accountability whatsoever.
So when Palestinians are going to the fence to protest, they want to break the siege.
No nation on earth should be subjected to this sort of maltreatment, this almost near starvation state under which they live in Gaza.
But, of course, this is not how the media conveyed it.
At best, it's as if there's these random clashes between Palestinians and Israelis, and there is very little by way of political or historical context to this ongoing crisis.
Right.
You know, and it's just so unfair, the gap between what's really going on there and the dominant narrative, where, you know, this is basically akin to the Attica prison uprising, although this is a peaceful one, no hostages or anything.
But this is, you know, to say that there's like, you know, Nelson Rockefeller, the governor, and the guys inside the prison are on equal footing here and that, you know, I mean, anyway, it's not a very good analogy because they're all convicted felons.
And the only reason that the prisoners of Gaza are the prisoners of Gaza is because they were born with the wrong religion.
But certainly, you know, Attica is part of New York.
It had been conquered by the Anglos a long time before that uprising ever happened.
They owned all the territory on the outside of the walls and the inside of the walls.
It's under their control.
In a sense, Gaza's already been annexed.
It is part of Israel proper.
It's just that's where people who are born with the wrong religion are warehoused so that they don't pollute the precious bodily fluids of the Jewish Israelis.
Well, when Israel so-called redeployed out of Gaza in 2005, if you remember, it was Ariel Sharon, the prime minister of Israel.
At that time, he decided, you know what, we don't want Gaza.
We don't care for Gaza.
So he redeployed out of Gaza, meaning that he stationed his army along the Gaza fence and he kept his navy along the Gaza naval waters.
And he had his airplanes and his drones just zooming in and out of Gaza whenever they wanted.
But they said, you know what, Gaza is an enemy territory now.
Gaza is obligated to respect Israeli borders as if Gaza is an independent territory.
The United Nations said, no, fella, it doesn't work this way.
Gaza is still an occupied territory because you can't besiege a land from all directions and say I have no business being there and they are obligated to respect my borders.
And this is so Israel wants to behave with this mindset that Gaza is on its own and it's not responsible for Gaza.
But you can't do that if you are fencing Gaza.
There is actually literally a wall.
There are walls all across Gaza from from various directions and fences and snipers and Israeli naval boats, military boats everywhere.
Last time I was in Gaza was a few years ago.
And I look outside my hotel window into the sea and it was the strangest sight you would ever see.
There's this long chain of Israeli military boats only two, three nautical miles off the coast.
And all of these tiny little Palestinian fishing boats fighting for very little space, trying to to catch some fish and Israeli boats just surrounding from all directions.
Not only this is an occupied territory, it's also occupied and besieged in violations of international law.
So Israel cannot easily get off the hook simply because it decided to redeploy for whatever strategic reason they had at the time.
Right.
And now, you know, for Americans, people should wonder.
I think they do wonder, but maybe they just think it's too complicated to try to figure out.
And they got more or less a standard narrative that whatever's going on here, poor little Israel is the victim and the mean old Arab terrorists are coming to get her.
And so she has to do what she has to do to defend herself in this kind of thing.
And yet even someone who's only barely kind of interested in current affairs has got to wonder, how come so many American Jews are anti-Israel and agree with you?
I mean, you don't hear about American Irish who hate Ireland and are constantly attacking the government of Ireland and are constantly attacking, you know, or or just want nothing to do with, you know, their kind of relationship.
And it's not exactly the old country where they come from, after all.
Israel is a new settlement in the way America is.
But still, I mean, the obvious answer is because the government of Israel is committing crimes against humanity.
It's the sins.
That's why American Jews would side against Israel.
There's no other reason.
Why would they?
It makes no sense unless something that they're doing is actually really a problem.
And then all you have to do is just take a minute to look at it and recognize, I mean, to me, this is the real key.
Not just the Nakba and the ethnic and sectarian cleansing of the land during the creation of Israel after World War II.
Because I think people think, yeah, it's a long time ago and the whole world was in disarray at the time and this and that and who knows.
But the fact that the West Bank and Gaza were conquered in 67, that it's not the country next door, Palestine is not the country next door.
That's why they're always talking about a two state solution someday.
Right now, they are already lost.
They are already conquered.
They were under the control of these foreign states, Jordan and Egypt, which got into a war.
Let's not get too deep into that question of how that started.
Israel started it.
But they got into a war with Israel and the Palestinians lost and they've been conquered and rights less ever since then.
In East Jerusalem, the rest of the West Bank and in the Gaza Strip.
And for that matter, the people of the Golan Heights, which we hardly ever talk about.
But that's the important part, right?
This would be like if Mexico invaded and conquered San Antonio and we had military occupation troops ruling and saying, OK, all the whites now have to live in the worst part of town and under Mexican military occupation for 50 years.
That's the position that the Americans have helped the Israelis put the Palestinians in.
Only bad analogy because the Anglos stole Texas from Mexico in the first place.
But anyway.
That's right.
But the thing is, I don't I don't even think that the two state solution was really ever on the table in the first place.
I mean, if that was the case, if indeed the two state solutions was ever a factor in Israeli calculations.
Well, what have they really done by way of actual steps to to make that happen?
And what did the United States that have championed the so-called two state solutions for decades?
What have they done to pressure Israel to carry out the so-called two state solutions?
It's just it's an illusion that they have been selling Palestinians all along and the poor Palestinians are playing along.
And by the way, their Palestinian leadership, this Palestinian authority is so extremely corrupt and has played along, specifically because they are getting a lot of money.
They have been getting a lot of money from the U.S.
And the money hasn't really been trickling down on most Palestinians who are poor and be seized.
So you have this trail of American Israeli, you know, attempt at subjugating Palestinians and stealing their lands and ensuring the demise of any Palestinian national project.
Then you have the Palestinian Authority, on the other hand, playing along, being another Vichy government.
And of course, you have the Arabs who are now normalizing.
I don't know if you've heard the news, but the Sultan of Oman, you know, is now opening the doors to Benjamin Netanyahu to come and visit.
He is normalizing.
The Saudis want to normalize.
The Emiratis want to normalize.
They want to normalize.
It's a crisis, this normalization thing that we keep talking about.
It's a crisis because when we say normalization, it means normalization while keeping the occupation, normalization while keeping apartheid, normalization while keeping racism.
I mean, Benjamin Netanyahu goes to meet with Arab leaders in Oman and elsewhere just days after they passed this racist Jewish nation state bill that basically says only Jews matter, their language matters, their culture matters, their religion matters, and nobody else matters.
I mean, that's pure racism in the 21st century.
And yet a few days later, the Arabs are embracing him in Oman and are ready and willing to meet with him in Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.
So this is not just a political crisis, but it's a moral crisis as well.
Absolutely.
And I mean, really, you're right to where it's at the point of just absurdity, the idea that the Israelis are in any way really bound by their treaty obligations or their – not necessarily treaty obligation.
Well, yeah, I mean, their membership in the United Nations, which is supposed to be the law there since they signed that, but also all their agreements with the Americans.
You know, I saw this thing this morning.
I was laughing out loud in here by myself reading this story in the BBC about Airbnb, which is for people who aren't familiar, this is like Uber for your apartment.
And you can rent out your house or room in your house to the room above your garage or whatever it is.
And it's the ultimate disruptive technology in the hotel industry around the world right now.
And the BDS movement and apparently even Human Rights Watch and some others have been pressuring Airbnb to stop allowing settlers in the West Bank, in the colonies basically, on the stolen property in the West Bank to participate in Airbnb because they have – and it's very specific.
It's not just because, oh, they gave into the pressure, but they said this is the only place on earth where our business requires us to discriminate against people based on ethnicity or religion.
And that's against our company policy to do that.
And so we're living up to our policy.
This has been brought to our attention and with some pressure, and they did the right thing.
And then the reaction is hilarious.
This is the hilarious part.
The reaction is, oh, yeah, well, I don't think Airbnb needs to be making decisions like who's in violation of international law or not and this and that.
And how we would just urge the Palestinians to go by their agreement that they signed in 1993, saying that this will be worked out in negotiations over the long – wait, that's 25 years ago.
Is that the same agreement that says you'll stop building racial colonies on their private property you're stealing?
But I'm just supposed to swallow this.
1993.
There's a process going on since 1993, and only the Palestinians are supposed to be obeying it, huh?
Bah humbug.
I don't know who's impressed by their garbage anymore at this point.
That's right.
But this is fantastic news, this whole Airbnb.
I mean, I was traveling speaking in Britain and Turkey at the time, and then I just heard this in the news, and it was absolutely fantastic because this happened, Scott, just a few days after Israel held this massive conference in Brussels.
They brought all of their friends and supporters and lobbyists and their officials from various European countries to launch this major anti-BDS campaign in Europe.
They are dedicating $72 million – it's a largess – of money that is dedicated to defeating BDS.
And they felt so happy and proud that they are putting BDS in a corner, and they feel like it's just a matter of time before BDS disintegrates and disappears.
And then two interesting things happen.
Number one – nope, I changed my mind – three interesting things happen.
Number one, Leeds University in the UK, the first university in the UK that officially divests from Israel.
That's number one.
Number two, you have this Airbnb thing, and on the exact same day – that's November 19th – the largest student association, the Canadian Student Association, 500,000 students, vote for a resolution in complete and total support of BDS.
So here goes the Israeli plan.
They might be winning here and there by buying all these politicians and paying a lot of money for it, but they are losing at many other fronts.
They are being delegitimized as an apartheid state, as an occupying power among civil societies around the world, and that is good news.
And this is why the Israelis are very angry.
The minute they feel that they are gaining ground, they feel that they are losing a lot more.
Yep, well, you nailed it, and that's exactly what it is.
That's what the issue is, people, for those of you who don't know the issue.
What's the issue?
It's apartheid.
That's what it is.
It's like Mississippi during Jim Crow over there is what it is.
It's absolutely intolerable.
And you know what?
It's Ehud Barak, who was the former prime minister of Israel in the 1990s and into 2000 and was defense minister at the beginning of the Netanyahu reign, which began in 2009.
The second Netanyahu prime ministership, which began in 2009.
Former prime minister, former defense minister.
He says it's apartheid.
Yeah, it's apartheid.
That was an admission against interest.
That was him warning his countrymen that we're making some really bad decisions here, and we're creating a situation that is not sustainable for the long term.
How are we supposed to be able to get away with disenfranchising half of the people we rule or more forever?
It can't last.
Something's going to give.
We ought to be the ones who do the deciding to let them go so that this isn't a problem, and then we can create it our way.
That was his whole point.
So I'm not saying that's my point, but I'm saying that's all you need to know if you're a skeptic or a critic of Mr. Baroud's take here is, hey, that's what Ehud Barak says, that it's apartheid.
That it's Jim Crow racial segregation, religious sectarian segregation, and with the totalitarian denial of rights, too.
Not exactly the lynchings from the trees, but they kidnap kids out of their beds and torture them.
So yeah, pretty much.
So yeah, anyway, sorry.
Just like making that point because I think people just don't get it.
But you're right.
The narrative is changing, and that is the thing with BDS is really getting it accomplished.
Oh, and I remember which tangent I want to go on now because you talked about some of their successes.
And this is an opportunity for me to bring up again this incredible suppressed but now leaked, not officially published, but a leaked documentary about the Israel lobby in the United States that was supposed to be published two years ago or something.
And they held it, and it's an undercover British Jew who, working for Al Jazeera with many hidden cameras and microphones, apparently, just got the goods on all different, extremely important Israel lobby organizations in America.
And their dirty work that they've been doing against the BDS movement and attacking and smearing and attempting to destroy the lives of students who are pushing these things.
Their incredible influence over the Washington Post, over the U.S. House and U.S. Senate, and all the rest of it is just absolutely incredible to see.
And I got the same lesson from that that you're talking about here, too, which is that the reason they're so desperate is because their bluff's been called.
That whole thing where most people pretty much reason that they're the good guys because they're whiter or something is really wearing too thin now.
And people are starting to really get the idea that somebody's got to stick up for these Palestinians.
And they don't know what to do.
They're in a panic, and that's why they're behaving the way that they're behaving.
That's right.
I think the Israelis know that the gig is up.
And now they are using the language of threats and intimidations.
We know it's an apartheid.
It's always been an apartheid.
But the thing is, the Zionist narrative has been essentially predicated on the idea that you are not allowed to call a spade a spade.
I mean, you see Israelis on American media all the time.
They are in American newspapers all the time.
How often do you see a Palestinian with a counter-narrative?
Almost never.
Hardly.
I mean, when was the last time I was in American mainstream media?
They don't call you.
You don't belong in that story.
A story is being discussed almost entirely from a Zionist point of view.
And they are furious when you try to infiltrate that narrative.
They are furious when you try to challenge them and present a counter-narrative.
And yet, despite of the small little margins that we have, we are making such a massive impact that actually the Zionist narrative is falling apart.
I mean, the Airbnb is one thing.
But the fact that 500,000 students in Canada are now actually supporting BDS, how did this happen?
I mean, do you know what Canadian media is like?
I spend a lot of time traveling in Canada.
And it's actually more Zionist than American media is.
Yet somehow we managed to get the story across.
So whatever Israel is going to do, it can't reverse this anymore.
It's over.
So now it's all about, you know, as Ariel Sharon used to say to the settlers, go to the top of the hills and just grab as much land as you can.
And this is what they are doing, just grabbing as much land as they can, changing the rules.
Now they are passing the death penalty law.
The death penalty law.
Like there's not enough Palestinians that are killing in Gaza and elsewhere.
They need to ensure that more Palestinians are being killed who are already held prisoner in Israel.
I mean, this is completely outrageous.
And the thing is, the U.S. government doesn't lift a finger.
Whatever Israel does, the U.S. government has some sort of a political justification for it, you see.
And that has to change.
And this is why we are going to the streets.
This is why we are connecting with civil society.
And really the tide is turning on Israel.
$72 million will not be able to buy Israel anything.
When the apartheid government collapsed in South Africa, all the money in the world would have not stopped that collapse.
And now all of Israeli money will not be able to change the fact that it's being exposed for the ugly racist regime that it is.
And it has always been, by the way.
Hey guys, check out my book, Fool's Errand, Time to End the War in Afghanistan.
By me, Scott Horton.
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It's got all good reviews on Amazon.com and that kind of thing.
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Stuff like that.
And, of course, other than the U.S., who was the closest ally of South Africa in the 1980s?
But the Israelis, of course.
That's right.
Even helping with their nuclear weapons program.
That's absolutely right.
And this is why the South Africans are standing in solidarity with the Palestinians.
Because the Israelis have no favors with South Africans.
They know very well what Israel has done to train South African police and military to participate in the nuclear program of South Africa.
To trade with South Africa.
To provide political outlets for South Africa.
And legal justification for their infringement on human rights and their racism and their apartheid.
And now that's why the South Africans, the biggest support coming for Palestinians anywhere in the world, is coming from South Africa at the moment.
All right.
Now you mentioned that death penalty law.
Now the former defense minister, but he just resigned the other day.
He kept his job after this, no problem.
He, at one time, very seriously, I mean, I don't speak Hebrew or whatever, but I don't think anyone said that they detected sarcasm or humor or irony in any way in his statement that he thought that the death penalty should be applied to Palestinians with an axe.
That they should be beheaded, like in the Islamic State.
I don't even think he was specifying for what anyone else would consider capital crimes, premeditated murders.
Basically any act of resistance, I guess, against the Israeli state.
It was a very broad statement.
And apparently he really meant, let's cut their heads off.
That'll teach them.
And he just resigned.
Now why did he resign?
He resigned because Benjamin Netanyahu went to Gaza on November 12th, thinking, you know, let's go and mow the grass.
Let's go and teach those Gazans the lessons.
And, you know, the Israelis do this.
They have always been doing this.
Whenever they go and get stuff in Israeli politics, they go and punch a few Gazans, kill a few Gazans, and come back and pose as heroes.
And their ratings go up.
But something has fundamentally changed.
The resistance in Gaza, regardless of how we feel about what form of resistance works or doesn't, has actually been growing bolder and tougher with time.
When the Israelis thought that Gaza is completely on its knees, ready to completely submit, they go there, they try to kidnap a guy who is one of the local leaders of the resistance in southern Gaza.
Something goes terribly wrong.
Yes, they end up killing seven Palestinians, including the guy they tried to kidnap.
But the Palestinians killed several of the Israeli soldiers, including the commander of the unit that entered into Gaza.
Not just that.
They blew up an Israeli bus filled with soldiers at the border with Gaza, and they want many.
And then suddenly what was supposed to be a picnic turned out to be Benjamin Netanyahu's biggest disaster.
Of course, Avigdor Lieberman, the defense minister, is an opportunist.
He's always been.
And, of course, he wanted to take advantage of this by saying, listen, we should have not agreed to a truce after this.
We should have went all the way.
We should have went to war.
Netanyahu knows that he can't win this war because if he could have won that war, they could have won it in 2014.
They couldn't do that either.
So he knows that his hands are tied.
So he decides to pull out of Gaza, reach a truce, a truce that Israel desperately needed.
And, of course, Avigdor Lieberman wanted the government to collapse, so he pulls out.
Now the government of Benjamin Netanyahu is hanging by a thread.
Sixty-one members of parliament are in support of Netanyahu.
It means that he has only one member majority, which means that he is now held completely accountable and completely under siege of the far right and ultranationalist parties, especially the Jewish Home Party of Neftali Bennett.
And they are using this opportunity now to exact more concessions from Netanyahu.
Now, the odd thing in all of this, that crazy right-wing Netanyahu, this warmongering Israeli leader, is now, within the context of Israeli politics, is becoming a moderate because the likes of Neftali Bennett, the likes of Elit Shakir, the justice minister, you know, the justice minister, you were just quoting Lieberman about killing Palestinians with an ax.
The justice minister had that famous tweet that not only the little snakes, meaning Palestinian children, should be killed, their mothers, too, should be killed.
And the greater irony of that is that she is the justice minister, for crying out loud.
I mean, equivalent to the attorney general, the head law enforcer in the country.
Imagine, imagine, and they get away with it.
Palestinians scream for crying out loud to the world, just please look.
She just said that, and they are acting upon it.
Can someone please do something?
Where is the International Criminal Court?
Why isn't this person being dragged to the ICC for trial right now?
But they get away with it, and they act on it as well.
Yeah, well, so, and now let's talk about Neftali Bennett for a minute.
If the Netanyahu government, I know that, you know, Israeli electoral politics is not exactly your speciality here, but he really is the most powerful faction outside of Netanyahu.
It's everybody further right than him.
There virtually is no left, not in any, you know, political power sense.
The Labor Party, for what it's worth, I mean, they're just as right-wing on every issue, although I guess they're not part of the coalition right now.
But there is no, it doesn't seem like there's a bunch of groups to say, for example, ally with labor and elect someone who's sort of Netanyahu-ish.
It looks more like Bennett is in the catbird seat if Netanyahu's out, right?
He is the kingmaker right now, and he is, and there's a couple of interesting things about him.
Number one, he's the kingmaker in Israel right now.
And he decided to stay in the coalition despite the fact that everybody, every analyst in the world thought he is going to leave and let Netanyahu collapse so that they go for snap elections and perhaps he could win.
But he opted not to do that.
He opted not to do that because he's now saying, okay, sure, I will stay in the coalition, but in exchange of being the defense minister.
So that's number one, and that has to be kept in mind because if Naftali Bennett becomes the defense minister, things are going to get a lot worse than it already is.
And number two, he is very, very popular with certain right-wing elements and Republican elements in the U.S. government as well.
And he's very close to a lot of people with money, particularly a particular darling to Sheldon Edelson.
A lot of money is going to Bennett and his party.
And he knows that one day he is waiting for the opportunity to take over.
He is waiting for Netanyahu to be finally pushed off the brink, whether overwhelmed by the situation in Gaza, overwhelmed by the situation in the West Bank, overwhelmed by his own corruption and the various police investigations.
And he's waiting.
And he made very, very smart calculations.
He opted to stay in the coalitions just for now in order for him to see what he can exact out of Netanyahu at this moment before he is ready for a snap election.
So perhaps he could become the next leader.
Yeah, well, and then I really need to learn more about this stuff.
But I guess my understanding is the only real difference between him and Lieberman, Bennett, that is, is Bennett is one sect or another of religious right-winger.
I don't know exactly what he calls himself, but where Lieberman, as a Russian, is much more of a secular nationalist, but also very right-wing, just not as religious-based, more just nationalism and ethnic-based kind of deal.
But it's not much of a split.
I don't know.
I guess there's a question over how much of the West Bank they want to steal within what time frame or something like that.
But that's about it, right?
Right.
But there's one important distinction I think that should be made.
Avigdor Lieberman is an opportunistic person.
He's always been that way.
But he is not so ideologically driven, while Bennett is ideologically driven.
He has a major, major project going on in which the religious sector in Israeli society, the settlers in particular, and a growing number of recruits in the Israeli army love him and support him.
And he can appeal to that constituency, and he can manipulate that constituency.
While Lieberman is just this ultra-nationalist beast that he's always running around and shooting his mouth off and doing all these terrible things.
Yeah, so he is liked within a certain constituency, but he doesn't have the same ideological appeal that is so rooted and lasting as opposed to Bennett.
Yeah.
All right.
Now, on the death penalty law, I wanted to bring this up too because I think a lot of people, and not necessarily conservatives, but just a lot of regular people, we read the papers and we see some of the horrible crimes that people commit here, there, or anywhere else, and think, actually, you know, this dog should be put down.
Death penalty applies.
And, you know, I know that, well, for example, Ron Paul, my hero, very libertarian, formerly more conservative.
And at one point he explained, he goes, this is my issue that I flip-flopped on.
That was the one place where I changed my mind and I decided now I'm against capital punishment because, essentially, it's a government program.
And you just can't trust a judge and a DA and their local 12 dupes to get it right well enough to justify taking somebody's life.
And, he says, look at how it's applied.
And correcting for per capita this and that, the death penalty is applied to blacks and Hispanics far more than to white people for the same kind of crimes, and adjusting again for the population sizes and so forth.
And he says, so that's all the proof you need right there.
The proof is in the results right there, that it's applied unfairly, and that's the end of that.
And so that's why it must be opposed.
So here we have a situation where it's almost like the argument ad absurdum of guaranteed to be unfair.
We're like, if an Israeli machine-gunned a room full of Palestinians, they wouldn't get the death penalty.
They'd probably get, you know, what, a year in the pen or something and a gold medal?
Whereas a Palestinian could get the death penalty for jaywalking, basically.
That's exactly, I mean, you really just put your finger on it right there.
Because there are two debates going on.
You have the death penalty debate, which is a universal debate.
It happens in every society, and it has its, you know, all sorts of, you know, moral issues that are risen from this issue.
But in Israel, it's a whole different debate, because it's a death penalty that targets what they call terrorists.
When was the last time that an Israeli Jew was referred to or labeled as terrorist?
When we say terrorist or the Israelis say terrorist, it means that they are referring to Palestinians and Palestinians only.
That's one issue.
How can we possibly trust the Israeli judicial system that legalizes torture, that legalizes occupation, that legalizes the imprisonment, long-term imprisonment of children as young as 12-year-olds, that legalizes the shoot-to-kill policy Israeli soldiers are using against children who are throwing rocks in the West Bank?
And who holds people without trial under some bogus administrative detention?
Exactly.
Bravo.
That's 500 people are being held with no trial, and you can renew it as long as you want to forever and ever and ever.
This is the very judicial system that is going to be deciding whether this Palestinian so-called terrorist should be put to death or not.
So it's problematic for so many reasons.
And we know it simply means that the Israelis are going to be using this as a political tool in order for them to put pressure on the Palestinians to collectively punish the Palestinians.
That's what it is.
But as far as the Palestinians are concerned, this law has already been in practice.
What the Israelis call it, they call it the targeted killings, targeted assassinations.
I mean, they have always been doing it, but now why the fanfare?
You know, you do it with drones.
Now you want to do it in a court of some kind.
It's a political ploy because the law itself or the draft of the law has actually been drafted by no other than, guess who, Avigdor Lieberman.
He put this on the table in the Knesset in January, and he has been telling Netanyahu, listen, if you don't vote in this law, I will leave the coalition.
And he thought Netanyahu is not going to call his.
So Netanyahu said, you know what, just recently I am voting on it.
My entire party is now behind you in this law.
So they are using the life of Palestinians as some sort of a political game between the various parties to twist each other's arms.
And at the end of the day, it's the Palestinians who are going to pay the price for this madness.
Man.
All right.
So last subject here, Khalida Jarrar.
Who's that?
Sorry for saying her name wrong.
Khalida Jarrar is a Palestinian lawyer, and she is a Palestinian, elected Palestinian member of parliament, who is one of the strongest, smartest and most empowered women in Palestine.
And she was, in fact, carrying this research involving many Palestinian lawyers in the West Bank to take Israel to the International Criminal Court for its crimes against Palestinians in the West Bank, but mostly against the wars in Gaza.
So the Israelis, of course, don't want this to happen.
So they arrested her the first time and then the second time and then the third time.
And now she is back in jail and she's been there.
Her so-called administrative detention, meaning detention or arrest and imprisonment without trial, has been renewed now for the fourth time and each time anywhere between three to six months.
And this is a woman who has really done nothing that could in any way be understood as violation of law.
And now what are they accusing her of?
Just being Palestinian?
Well, I mean, the accusation, you know that the accusation is incitement.
Incitement meaning wanting to take Israeli leaders to international court of justice for violating international law.
That's what it is.
But I was looking at the list of accusations.
Well, let me let me interrupt here just for a second to, you know, for people who, you know, generally understand this, but maybe don't know specifically.
The standard for the limit on free speech in the United States of America under our First Amendment tradition is anything short of kill that guy is protected speech.
Anything short of a direct and immediate incitement to violence against someone else or, of course, you know, making a contract to hire a hitman or, you know, this kind of thing.
That is, again, a direct incitement to violence in a way where you can draw a very straight line.
None of this just, oh, we don't like the implications of where she's going with her political message here.
That's right.
But, of course, in the West Bank is a whole different situation or in Palestine is a whole different situation.
In fact, when they came came for her last time to arrest her, you would think that they have caught the person behind, you know, the you know, the greatest threat to the to the security of the state of Israel.
Hundreds of soldiers surrounded her house in Ramallah.
They dragged her down and they threw her in jail.
And one of the accusations in the list is that she attended an art exhibit at the University of Birzeit.
Some of the art in that exhibit, which, of course, celebrates Palestinian resistance and so forth and so on, included art that incites against Israel.
That's actually one of them.
Another accusation, she went to visit with a delegation of Palestinian activists, a freed Palestinian political prisoner.
She went to visit him at his home, and that was also listed as one of the 12 accusations against her.
So you can understand how ludicrous this whole process is.
But the thing is, this is a woman who has been elected as the representative of Palestine in the European Commission to speak on behalf of Palestinian women.
She has defended women rights in, you know, in Palestinian society for years.
She has taught generations of Palestinians as a teacher and a professor.
And here she is being paraded, being tortured, being thrown in Israeli jails for months after months with absolutely no redress to this issue.
And there has been very little by way of an international campaign to free her.
And this is what we are trying to do here.
We are trying to raise awareness of this issue so we can put enough pressure on Israel that they can release this woman.
Man, it's just insane.
And I know that we could go on like this all day, and you'll never run out of stories like this, you know, individualizing the cruelty of this occupation.
And I just want to say one thing at the end here, which is, and this is actually a couple of years old, but I had interviewed this guy.
His name was Charlie Davis, and he's not Charles Davis, the serial warmonger, water carrier for Al-Qaeda.
This is another guy entirely.
Charlie Davis from the U.K.
And he runs a charity called Skate Palestine, where he, you know, arranges donations to give skateboards to kids on the West Bank.
I don't know if he can get them into Gaza.
Maybe they're considered weapons or something under the siege of Gaza, but difficult as it is.
They've been giving skateboards to kids on the West Bank there, and particularly in Ramallah, I guess, they've got this young skate scene growing up.
And Vice, someone posted in my Reddit group where a couple years ago now, I guess, Vice had done an episode of Epically Latered that was about Skate Palestine.
I mean, they're in it, but it's actually about the skate scene in Ramallah and about basically this group of six or eight friends who are trying their best to have some freedom under military occupation and living their best life the way they can, by my standards anyway.
And it's just a taste, you know.
I think because all this stuff is so far away, and these places are at best maybe shapes on a map and usually not a very accurate map at that.
And maybe it's hard for people to really understand and to really empathize and put themselves in the position of the Palestinians here.
So this to me is a really good one, because what's more red, white, and blue than riding a skateboard down the street, man?
And here are these kids, and they're just skater kids.
There's nothing else about them that counts, right?
That they're Palestinians, that they're Muslims, or that they're Christians, or that they live in this town or that town.
They're just kids on skateboards, just like everybody else, only they don't have any rights, because they weren't born Jewish, and they live under the control of the Israeli state.
And it's just an absolute outrage.
And there's nowhere else on earth that our government would—well, let's put it like this.
That's not really the right way to put it.
If Russia or Iran were doing something like what the Israelis are doing to the Palestinians, it would be a real big problem or, say, at least a great excuse for American intervention against those countries, treating people this way.
And yet instead, in this case, the Israelis are only able to get away with it because of Americans and American support in the first place, which is intolerable.
And so anyway, I just want to recommend that for anybody who's interested in skateboarding at least or for anybody who wants to see some Palestinian humans walking around.
You get to hear Ramzi on the show talking.
But if you want to see some Palestinians, go watch them being good little American skater kids.
Man, they're great.
And a few of them are better than me, at least at—one of them was doing pretty good 360 flips, which I never was able to do.
I'm too old for that.
So yeah, man, I don't know, man.
I just—I'm stuck on this whole thing about how to snap Americans' imagination out of the BS and into a better way of looking at this.
And I think skateboarding's got to be part of it.
And I know it sounds completely ridiculous, but having American brand names on their T-shirts can really improve the estimation of the humanity of a person in the eyes of an American.
Like, are they—do they seem alien, or do they seem like really they're just like us?
And that's why I'm saying watch this and watch these kids skateboard, and they are.
They're just like us.
They're just like me.
You know, Scott, I'm just going to throw something back at you because I'm originally from Gaza, so I'm a bit ethnocentric when it comes to this.
Let the West Bankers skate, but go to Gaza.
Go to YouTube.
Write Gaza Parkour and see some of the best parkourists in the world.
And you know where they train?
They train on the ruins of their homes that have been destroyed by Israel in previous wars.
So this is really incredible.
In fact, it's rather inspiring because people are kind of turning the ruins of their homes into a place that brings joy to the children.
And it's just kind of their way of insisting on life despite of the fact that death hovers all around them.
So you're absolutely right.
Humanizing people is the best answer to the dehumanization that the Israeli Zionist campaign have been responsible for for all these years.
Yeah, cool.
I am going to look that up.
Absolutely.
Thank you so much, Ramzi.
You're great, man.
Thanks, Scott.
Appreciate it.
You too.
All right, you guys.
That is the great Ramzi Baroud.
Check him out at antiwar.com.
His latest is called Why Is Israel Afraid of Khalida Jarrar?
And also check out his books.
My Father Was a Freedom Fighter and The Last Earth, a Palestinian Story and at palestinechronicle.com.
All right, y'all.
Thanks.
Find me at libertarianinstitute.org, at scotthorton.org, antiwar.com and reddit.com slash scotthortonshow.
Oh, yeah.
And read my book, Fool's Errand, Timed and the War in Afghanistan at foolserrand.us.
