All right, y'all, welcome to the Scott Horton Show.
I am the Director of the Libertarian Institute, Editorial Director of Antiwar.com, author of the book Fool's Errand, Time to End the War in Afghanistan, and I've recorded more than 5,000 interviews going back to 2003, all of which are available at scotthorton.org.
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All right, you guys, introducing Sheldon Richman.
He is Executive Editor of the Libertarian Institute and author of the new book, Coming to Palestine.
He's got a brand new piece out on the Libertarian Institute and Antiwar.com today.
But Mr. Trump, is Israel lovable?
I think I already know the answer to this one.
Welcome back to the show, Sheldon.
How are you doing?
I'm doing fine, and great to be back.
So pretty big news on the whole Donald Trump, Israel, and American Jews front this week in a couple of different places.
But let's start here with his speech at Sheldon Adelson's Israeli American Council.
What was it last weekend?
Monday or something?
Yeah, it was early, I think early in the week.
Yes, very interesting speech.
It's got him quite a lot of flack, although I think for the wrong reasons.
Anyway, he was there, of course, giving a, oh, the kind of speech you would expect to hear before a Sheldon Adelson group or even AIPAC, so no big difference, totally in Israel's camp or Likud's camp.
It's not just Likud, because it's almost all the parties there, certainly Netanyahu's camp, really playing things up.
But the thing that got my attention and got a lot of other people's, that didn't get enough attention is that he criticized, first he criticized Americans on this count, but then he quickly slid into American Jews.
He went from all Americans then to American Jews.
Namely, he accused them of not loving Israel enough.
Now, the reason I think that's interesting is that it's not the first time he said things like that.
He accused Jewish Americans who vote for Democrats as being disloyal to Israel because he says the Democratic Party is much more interested in, you know, Ilan Omar and Rashida Tlaib, the two Muslim and pro-Palestinian members of Congress.
He says the Democratic Party is more interested in them than in Israel.
So if Jews, American Jews are voting for the Democrats, he says, they're voting basically against Israel.
So, you know, typically when someone claims that Jews are too loyal to Israel or duly loyal, they get criticized for being anti-Semitic.
That will often bring that person, the accusation of being anti-Semitic.
But here Trump's going the other way.
He's saying American Jews aren't loyal enough, and that's getting him accused of anti-Semitism.
So I don't understand.
Do you have to be Goldilocks?
Do you have to say American Jews are loyal to Israel, you know, are just properly loyal to Israel, like right in the middle between two and not enough to not get accused of anti-Semitism?
It's a little bizarre.
The other things that, the other couple of quips that got him accused of anti-Semitism, and I think this is a big stretch, is that he said to the crowd, look, a lot of you may not like me, but you're not going to vote for, you know, Elizabeth Warren and her wealth tax because you're going to lose your money in 15 minutes.
Well, he could have said that to any group of Americans.
I don't, I think it's a stretch to call that anti-Semitic.
The other thing he said was, he said, a lot of you people in this room are realtors and you realtors are brutal.
You're brutal killers.
Well, look, clearly it was a joke, and he could have said that, he could have said that before the American Association of Realtors.
So I think it's a stretch to call him an anti-Semite.
So that's my take on that speech, which was an outrageous speech.
And look, when he calls somebody a ruthless killer in business, that's a compliment, you know?
Yeah.
Yeah.
It's a stretch.
And what the people accusing him of being an anti-Semite can't make sense of, and this will sound reminiscent of the Russian baiting he also undergoes, he's ticked off just about every item on the most pro-Israel Americans checklist.
He's moved the embassy to Jerusalem, and he cited all this stuff in his speech.
He bragged quite a bit.
He's moved the embassy to Jerusalem.
He's recognized the annexation of the Golan Heights.
He's now declared, contrary to the International Court of Justice and international law and just about everybody else, including the U.S. government, that the Israeli settlements, the Jewish-only settlements in conquered territories, namely the West Bank, he now claims they're not illegal.
He's saying they are legal.
Oh, what else has he done?
He pulled out of the Iran nuclear deal, which was one of the biggest things that Netanyahu wanted and many Israelis want, and lots of Israeli-American defenders want, not all, but many.
Gosh, I probably missed some things.
He's saying he would recognize the annexation of the West, the full annexation of the West Bank.
What hasn't he done?
It kind of reminds me of the Russians- Well, and there was the fake peace deal that you've written so much about to make the Palestinians look like rejectionists.
Yeah.
Of course, they haven't released that yet, but what we know from Jared Kushner's own interviews, this is not just speculation, he's said enough, their deal of the century is going to be basically an attempt to buy off the Palestinians.
Look, let go of all your political aims, and we'll get the Saudis and the Egyptians to put some money into your areas so you'll have jobs and higher standard of living, and that's all you really care about, right, folks?
And of course, they say, no, that's not all we care about.
We care about freedom.
So I don't know what else he could do.
Like I said, it reminds me of the Russia business where they claim he's a Russian asset, but then, you know, as you and your guests have cited many times on your program and others have cited, he's done everything the anti-Russian people, the Russophobes, want, you know, expanding NATO.
I won't go through the list now because it's not on our topic, but it's really funny that what would he have to do in either case, but specifically on Israel?
What would he have to do to show he's pro-Israel?
I mean, if anything, he's a philo-Semite.
Anyway, it's very bizarre.
And now he's done, oh, to name one other thing he's done, the thing I wrote about yesterday on our blog or the day before, he's now signed an executive order, which isn't a radical break with Obama, it does really kind of formalizes what Obama had already done, but he's embracing that bogus, crazy definition of anti-Semitism that's embodied in the Anti-Semitism Awareness Act, which Congress won't pass because of First Amendment concerns.
But this is a definition, you know, cooked up by the American Jewish Committee and some other pro-Israeli activists in the United States, which lists among its examples of anti-Semitism things that are purely criticism of Israel.
So what more, I don't know what people could want that would demonstrate that he is totally in Israel's camp and in the camp of American Jews who are in Israel's camp.
It's true that the Jewish critics of Zionism in the United States are critical of him, but you know, the pro-Israel people don't care about them.
I don't know what they're complaining about.
They should be loving him.
Well, and this has been the case with Trump.
You know, as clumsy as he seems to be in some ways, he actually really just is a master of talking out of both sides of his mouth about every little thing and giving everybody something to believe in or be scared about, whatever it is that they pick and choose.
But it should have been obvious to the people who are for peace and who are for example peace in Israel-Palestine and in the broader wars and whatever, that he's just shining us on talking about the wars.
He's really tired of them, but there was no reason to think that he had the gumption to actually follow through with withdrawing from the Middle East, withdrawing from Europe and Asia.
For him to do so, you know, we know what he would be up against to try to do so and we know he doesn't have the wherewithal to do that.
And it was obvious from 2015 that when this guy is sworn in, he's going to do whatever they say and that's just how it is.
And so the people who were afraid of him and said, oh my God, he's going to pull us out of the Middle East and Europe and Asia and panicked about that, they're just as foolish as the people who believed in him.
Come on, there's no threat from this guy.
You just surround him with some generals and some spies and tell him that he'll look real tough if he does some horrible thing and he'll do whatever you say, which is of course how it's played out this whole time.
Well I would say you give him more credit than I give him.
I'm a Wittgensteinian on this issue.
If someone keeps telling me, yeah, I don't like these wars, we've got to get out of these wars, these are crazy wars, and then he doesn't do a damn thing about it except putting more troops in, I don't believe that he knows what the word want is then.
If he says I want to get out but I'm not going to get out, I'm going to double down, then I don't think he knows what the word want means.
And so he'll give everybody a little bit of what they want.
But I don't think we can conclude that, oh, he'd really like to get out except the heck with his words, his words are meaningless, look at what he does and show me where he's done something.
Well and he had said in the campaign, he had said, hey, I think we should be neutral in Israel-Palestine and people went completely crazy, neutral, why he's going to give away the whole game?
But of course he never meant that either.
You're right, he never meant that.
Look, his son-in-law, who he's put in charge of this, is effectively the de facto godson of Netanyahu.
When he grew up, his father was a friend of Netanyahu's and Netanyahu would spend the night at their house and he would give up his bedroom and take the little guest room in order to give up his bedroom to Netanyahu.
I think he's essentially the godson of Netanyahu.
The people, the other people he named, and this includes Kushner, all have investments in the West Bank settlements, the Jewish-only apartheid settlements.
Who's he put in charge?
Three people who all had ties to the settlements.
One was even a former guard at one of the settlements.
So yeah, look at what he does.
That's all I can say.
Don't bother to examine his words, you'll go crazy.
Your head will explode.
You'll lose sleep every night if you're going trying to parse his words.
I mean, and on this though, it's easy enough to read his mind on this.
I mean, American policy toward Israel is so biased toward Israel.
If he was going to change it from that to neutral, that would be a huge tilt toward the Palestinians.
And he has absolutely no political reason to do so.
If he had any reason to do so at all, it would be because he cares so much about the oppressed Palestinians like Sheldon Richman does.
And look at who we're talking about.
There's no way that he would side with them over- Well, first of all, he doesn't care about people.
He cares about himself, maybe his close family.
Of course.
He's cut off the Palestinians, obviously.
He's cut all aid and for the libertarians out there, no, he didn't give the money back to the American taxpayers.
He's going to use it other ways.
And look, look what he's done.
As head of the Office of Civil Rights in the Department of Education, he appointed Kenneth Marcus, who made a career, at least between his time in government, between his two stints in government, once under Bush, now under Trump.
Kenneth Marcus spent his time filing bogus, because they weren't even successful, bogus actions against pro-Palestinian students, student groups, and professors on colleges all around the country, claiming that they're violating the civil rights of Jewish students who are offended by pro-BDS and pro-Palestinian solidarity activities and speeches and stuff like that.
Now, yesterday, was it last night he signed, or the night before, he signed this executive order, which I blogged about the day before, which formalizes the work that Marcus has been doing.
And Marcus, by the way, declares, and I have an article earlier about this, people can look up my article about the Anti-Semitism Awareness Act, which discusses all this.
And then also I have an article on Marcus you can find, just search at our site on Kenneth Marcus's name.
He declared that he has deliberately tried over these years to define anti-Israelism, and that's a term he uses, anti-Israelism as anti-Semitism.
So in other words, in his eyes, and this is true of other people like Barry Weiss at the New York Times, anti-Israelism is anti-Semitism, not maybe.
I mean, sometimes they'll say it could be, I'm not saying there can't be anti-Zionism or anti-Israelism that isn't, you know, they'll sometimes throw that away if pressed.
But look at everything else they say and what they do, and you'll see they don't mean that.
They believe that, I don't know if they actually believe it, but they want other people to believe it, and they want the government to take action on this basis.
If you criticize Israel, you are criticizing Jews, you're criticizing Jewish identity.
Their identity, and again, this is the way the terms they'll use, their identity as a Jewish nationality, ethnicity, race, they're going at the very core of their identity.
Barry Weiss argues this, Marcus argues this, and that's what the import of this executive order signed the other day.
Now it's even more reinforced that if a university doesn't crack down on pro-Palestinian activities or speeches or professors who maybe let their views be known in classes, they're going to be open to bringing action against those schools.
Now, it's the Department of Education, so the only sanction they can oppose is, you know, take away federal money.
You and I, of course, are against any federal money to anybody, including education, but that's not the point here, of course.
The point is the grounds for withholding money.
They want to be able to step up their action against any, you know, institution of higher education that allows pro-Palestinian students and professors to engage in their activism, because some Jewish kids will say, some pro-Israel Jewish kids, there's a lot of Jewish kids, by the way, a lot of Jewish students who are on the side of the Palestinian solidarists, they're among them, so it's not all Jewish kids, let's be clear about this, but there are some, the very pro-Israel people, they get, quote, offended, and they feel like that's anti-Semitism.
That's nonsense.
I mean, it has nothing to do with discrimination.
They're calling it discrimination because that's the clause in the Civil Rights Act of 64 that they're talking about, Title VI, deals with discrimination, so they have to call it discrimination.
How is it discrimination to put on a program?
It's not discrimination, and it's not about national origin or race or color, because if you criticize the Israeli oppression of Palestinians or even its founding on the basis of ethnic cleansing and land theft, that's not an attack on anybody's religion, creed, color, ethnicity, race, you name it.
It's an attack on the activity, on the conduct, the oppressive conduct.
I think a Palestinian would be just as mad if a Christian took his land, or if somebody of another nationality took his land, or any other category of person.
It's not about any of the things that are specified in that civil rights clause, and they're trying to shoehorn this business into that, and it has no place in that.
It's all bogus, and it's all an attempt to inoculate Israel and their American defenders from criticism.
That's what this is all about.
It's an attempt to immunize, to build a cocoon around them so that you're not allowed to criticize them, because if you do that, you're going to get accused of anti-Semitism.
That will have a chilling effect.
Look, even the person, the author, the lead author of that definition that they all love so much has testified, both in Congress and in South Carolina at the legislature when they were considering adopting this language.
He said, I never intended this language to be used as an enforcement tool against schools.
This is going to, because that's a violation of free speech.
Even he says that's a misapplication of the definition he came up with, even though it's a horrible definition.
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So now let me ask you, in this thing there, are they explicitly saying Jewishness is a race or that's the implication?
No, no.
And that's where there was some confusion because when the New York Times broke this story, Slate Magazine immediately came out with a story saying the Times is wrong.
It doesn't redefine Jews or Judaism as a race or as a nationality.
But what the Times said, if you look at the Times opening paragraph closely, it said effectively that it did that.
In other words, it didn't say it explicitly did it, and it doesn't.
But it does say that, quote, discrimination that's based, as they put it, that's based on race, color, or national origin, is discrimination under the Title VI of the Civil Rights Act.
The thing is, so again, it's not discrimination, right?
How's putting on a program discrimination?
So it's not even discrimination, but OK, let's call it that.
If someone does that, how do you know it's on the basis of any of those things and not just outrage at oppression of a defenseless group of people?
So it's all bogus.
It's all bogus.
It's a rigged game devised by Kenneth Marcus and his allies and the people in the media like Barry Weiss and others and activists like a whole bunch of them to shut down pro-Palestinian You know, mostly BDS, because that's the focal point of student activism right now, is the BDS movement.
And that's been making headway.
It's been gating sympathizers, and some schools have, I guess, been interested in pursuing whether they should divest if they have some applicable investments.
But that's the whole point is to shut down Palestinian solidarity activism.
We got to talk about free speech for a minute here as a principle, because, of course, the same leftists who take the sides of the Palestinians are the same ones who want to shout down any right winger who tries to give a talk at a college anywhere in America now, apparently is the agenda, and refuse to allow that to happen.
Well, at the same time, the right wingers who now are in the position of being the free speech activists, oh, they relish the opportunity to, if they can invoke whatever excuse, if it's Israel, oh good, now we get to shut up the leftists in revenge somehow.
This is our opportunity to oppress them back and prevent them from speaking.
And when the whole point of free speech is it's the other guy's right to disagree with you, that's the principle at stake, not just your right to be a selfish jerk and say what you think.
And we are talking about at colleges and stuff, not a private property dispute.
We're talking about places of higher learning, most of which are, you know, government institutions of one kind or another, where people ought to be free to say whatever they want, even about different races, whites and blacks, and different religions, Jews and Christians and whatever.
If we can't debate this stuff, what is even the point of being educated at all?
Let's put on a jumpsuit and go get on the assembly line.
Look, I'm an advocate of courtesy and politeness and respect to a fault, I'll declare that.
So debate need not be rancorous or insulting or filled with slurs, and I abhor that.
But imagine a case where a student group, let's say a Palestinian student group, shouts down a pro-Israel speaker.
Well, schools, I think, ought to have mechanisms for dealing with that.
That seems perfectly fine.
I don't think you should shout down speakers.
And I don't care who's doing it, it seems to be all the same.
But why do we need the Department of Education to get involved and to declare, you know, some as being anti-Semitic and some not being anti-Semitic?
That's not something that federal government should be involved in.
They should stay the heck out of it, even with federal money, they should stay the heck out of it.
Now, this is one of the arguments, good arguments, against federal money.
You take federal money, you now open yourself up to, you know, all kinds of rules and regulations, which can be, you know, later spun out, even if they seem removed from the original law that was written about this.
So it's bad to take federal money for no other reason than there are going to be a lot of strings attached.
But you know, they take it, and most of these schools wouldn't dream of giving it up, because first of all, I guess they think they'd be broke without it.
But so that, leaving out the federal funding question aside, for the sake of the discussion, they have ways of dealing with students who disrupt other students.
And by the way, you know, there have been pro-Israeli students who have disrupted Palestinian activities which were peaceful.
So it happens, it can happen in both directions.
And there are ways to deal with that at the local level.
And if somebody even gets violent, okay, so the local police, there can be campus police, or even if they have to call in the municipal police, schools have a way to deal with that.
Get the federal government, the Department of Education, especially an ideologue like Marcus, or the state, the hell out of it.
It's got, there's no, Washington should have nothing to say, should not be involved.
It's crazy, because it gets them into this issue about whether students and faculty can debate the merits of Israel's conduct.
That's nuts.
That should not be happening.
You know what I think?
I think this is going to be terribly counterproductive, because I think people are just going to not go for it.
I think students are going to get expelled, and faculty are going to get fired, and they're going to protest, and they're going to fight, and they're going to have to take it back the hard way.
Well, you know, there were years, they spent years harassing a professor at San Francisco State University.
I think she finally, you know, prevailed in the courts, but they were suing her and doing all kinds of stuff and suing the school.
And, you know, a lot of these times, look, Marcus filed a series of actions against schools when, before he took the Trump job, he was ahead of this thing called the Brandeis Center for Human Rights or something, which got nothing to do with Brandeis University, by the way.
And every one of those cases were investigated by the schools, and they said, we see no evidence of anti-Semitism, and those things were not even upheld by the Department of Education.
So he's a loser, and he even admits, and I quote this in my article from last year, I look, the one about him, he even admits, well, it doesn't matter whether we win or lose, because we put a bad publicity over the school.
Lawfare.
Yeah, that's what it is, just using the courts for PR.
So he just was filing these actions, not caring about the merit, because it gets into the press.
Right.
Oh, you know, such and such university, accused by this Brandeis University, sorry, Brandeis Center for anti-Semitism.
And whoever follows up and reads in the next day, or a couple months later, or a couple years later, they did an investigation, the DOE did an investigation, the school did an investigation.
They found nothing to it.
They end up talking to Jewish students who say, I didn't see any problem, they didn't attack anybody, there was no offense, it was an event, they had a speech, they had a table with the literature.
I mean, they can always find Jewish students who say, I don't know what the complaint was about, there was no anti-Semitism here.
It's all a bogus thing to shut up people who are critical of Israel by tarring them as anti-Semites.
When are we going to recognize, you know, see through this very vicious game?
It's terrible.
All right.
Now, so back to your article, then.
Is Israel lovable?
What's to protest if you're a Palestinian or a Jewish or other student who is interested in human rights in Israel-Palestine, Sheldon?
Well, you know, Trump says Americans in general, or a lot of Americans and a lot of American Jews, don't love Israel enough.
So that opens up the question, and it entitles us to try to answer it.
Is Israel lovable?
Now, before you say you ought to love something, you should ask, is it worthy of love?
And of course, just if you look at today, we don't even need to go into history, although I do a little of that in my piece, we can talk about that.
But if you just look at, you know, these days, not going back very far, go back 70 years, go back 52 years when the 67 worker, what's lovable?
Palestinian citizens, the ones who managed to evade the ethnic cleansing in 47 and 48 and who were able to stay on, even though they were driven out of their homes, but stayed within Israel, they're second class or third class citizens.
Sure, they can have political parties and they can vote.
And they have some representatives in the Knesset.
But of course, none of the major parties want to bring the Arab parties into a coalition, even if it means being able to form a government.
That's what's been going on in Israel, right?
Netanyahu wouldn't do it.
Gantz wouldn't do it.
Those were the two leading contenders for prime minister.
Neither of them could put together a government because both were, you know, too racist to want Arabs in their coalition.
And so they're going to a third election, what, within well under a year, which is amazing.
So they're not nice to the Palestinians who live inside Israel.
And even though they're citizens, you see people get fooled by this, they'll say, but they're citizens.
Of course, Israel's a democracy.
There are non-Jews and Palestinians who are citizens.
Yeah, but what counts in Israel is not citizenship, but nationality.
And that's, I think, unique.
I mean, maybe there's some horrible little country somewhere that does the same thing, but among advanced countries, especially ones that call themselves democracies or republics, to be a citizen is to be a national of that country, right?
An American citizen is an American national.
An Italian citizen is an Italian national.
But in Israel, to be an Israeli citizen is not to be an Israeli national.
There's no such category as Israeli national in the state of Israel.
On your official papers and in your official government record, under nationality, for citizens, I'm talking about citizens now, not people who are visiting or fresh immigrants or whatever.
I'm talking about citizens.
Under nationality, it says either, there's like about 130 categories, and I'll just name the top two, Jew and Arab, Jewish and Arab.
That's the nationality of people.
So an Israeli citizen who is an Arab national is not treated the same way by the Israeli government as a Jewish citizen who's a Jewish national.
So wait a minute.
Are you telling me then that the Trump administration's policy, which has so many American Jews outraged this week for trying to pseudo classify Jewishness as a race or ethnicity or some kind of thing just like that.
That's essentially the policy in Israel that they support.
Right, right.
Because the view, the rising view in, well, it probably is there from the, it was there from the beginning really, is that Judaism is not just a religion.
And I put the word just in quotation marks.
It's not only a religion, which is what the reformed Jews have always said and what the Orthodox Jews say.
It's not just a religion.
Yeah.
There are Jews all over the world.
There are Jews in like virtually every country of every ethnic group, language group, cultural group, ethnicity, kind of the general term.
I was almost going to say of every race, but I'm of the view, and I think this is the prevailing view in what anthropology, there's only one race.
There's the human race, which split off and went in different directions, you know, long, long time ago.
But there's only one race.
So there can't be a separate Jewish race.
And besides, the idea that there's a Jewish race or Jewish blood or Jewish DNA or Jewish genes, that's the Nazi view.
You know, in the thirties, if you said there was a Jewish race, you might get accused of anti-Semitism.
Today, if you say there's no Jewish race, you could get accused of anti-Semitism.
Look how things have turned around just in, you know, since the thirties.
It's pretty amazing when you think about it.
Well, everybody's on both sides of the same issue just this week, right?
It's fine as long as Donald Trump doesn't say it.
Then it's an outrage.
I'll tell you what the essential problem is.
If you don't want to regard Judaism as a religion, as just a religion, they'll say, yeah, it's a religion, but it's also all these other things.
If you insist, if you want to deny that it's only a religion, in other words, a set of beliefs about the supreme, you know, creator and the Torah and the Talmud, you know, that's what constitutes Judaism and a group of practices, religious rights.
If you want to say it's more than that, then you got to say, well, okay, what is it then?
And this is where secular Jews, I think, have a problem because they want to throw out all the religious stuff, right?
They want to say, I don't believe in any of the religious stuff, but I'm Jewish.
So if you say, well, what do you mean by that?
They might say, well, I'm culturally Jewish.
The problem with that is there are many, there are Jews of many cultures.
A Yemeni Jew, a Jew in Yemen has a different culture from a Jew in Iran or a Jew in Brooklyn or a Jew in LA or a Jew in Buenos Aires or a Jew in Australia.
They have, they eat different food.
They have different, of course, on the day of the internet, there's a lot of, you know, cross cultural stuff, which is great, but there's no Jewish culture.
If you push religion to the side for a moment, and that's what secular Jews want to do, right?
They want to push religion aside and still say, no, but I'm Jewish.
The question is, in what sense are you Jewish?
There's no Jewish language.
Yiddish is not the Jewish language.
That was a language of Europe at a particular time in history.
They didn't speak Yiddish in Yemen or Iran.
They spoke the language of Yemen and Iran.
If you're saying it's more than a religion, you're driven to a genetic, even you may have to be dragged there.
You may not want to go there, but you're going to end up going there.
If you want to say it's something more than a religion, you are going to end up saying it's blood.
It's blood.
It's DNA.
There's Jewish blood.
You know, I was reading a case today about converts.
There's a married couple, Jewish married couple in Israel, Jewish, okay?
They're citizens of Israel.
They're Jewish.
But the woman couldn't carry a fetus to term.
So they had a surrogate mother.
The surrogate mother is not Jewish.
The baby was born and the authorities wouldn't regard the kid as Jewish.
So here's a woman, here's a baby that was created from a Jewish egg and a Jewish sperm, but it grew in a non-Jewish womb.
This is how they talk in Israel.
There's Jewish eggs and Jewish sperms and Jewish wombs and non-Jewish eggs and non-Jewish sperm and non-Jewish wombs.
And so they had to appeal, they had to go through hell to try to get this kid declared Jewish.
I mean, it's amazing, the stuff that goes on.
But that's how you're driven.
If you're going to say it's not just a religion, you're going to end up saying, you're going to end up taking the Nazi position.
I hate to say it, but the Nazis in effect won the ideological point that Jewishness is an essence.
It's not beliefs that you adopt or Jewish rituals that you practice.
It's your blood.
That's a Nazi view.
Why did Jews want to accept that?
Especially these days where there's concern about rising anti-Semitism.
We've seen reports of vandalism and shootings, even killing people in synagogues.
Terrible, terrible thing, which all liberal-minded people, I mean that in the broadest sense of liberal, need to stand up and protest and fight as hard as they can.
It's an ugly, ugly thing, anti-Semitism.
But how does it fight anti-Semitism to want to even imply that Jews are a separate nationality and a separate race?
Here's the other side of the coin, which has to be mentioned.
Don't forget, Israel has declared itself, it did this in a law last year, the nation state of the Jewish people.
The Jewish people, that doesn't mean the Jewish citizens of Israel.
That means all Jewish people, all people it defines as Jewish.
So it means even someone who's an atheist who says, I'm not Jewish, I don't believe I'm Jewish, but if that person is a Jewish mother, Israel claims that person.
And of course, that person could go and become a citizen immediately.
So why would you want these two, I would be worried about these two things, especially if you think anti-Semitism is on the rise, spreading the belief that Jews are a separate race and nation, and that Israel is really their state.
How does that combat anti-Semitism?
That's fanning the flames of anti-Semitism, I think.
And it's outrageous that Jewish Americans would permit this.
There are as many, by the way, there are roughly as many American Jews as there are Israeli Jews, right around 6 million, right?
I think there's more in America than in Israel.
The U.S. is the biggest Jewish community in the world.
I think it's quite a bit more, actually.
Actually, there's been a lot of out-migration of Jews over the last, I don't know, 10 years.
And also, there's the whole thing again about the Palestinians being the others here, because they're just not Jewish.
They're born, as Max Blumenthal likes to say, the prisoners of the Gaza Strip, the two million there, they're guilty of not being Jewish.
That's their problem.
They were born the wrong religion, slash nationality, slash ethnicity, slash whatever legal kind of metaphysical game the Israelis play here with that.
And since they're the wrong ones, they have to live there in sewage.
Yeah.
Israel says it's the Jewish state.
Now, what does that mean?
It doesn't mean that every bit of Jewish law is imposed on the Israeli people.
I mean, that's not true.
You can eat non-kosher, and you don't have to go to synagogue, and you're not taxed.
I don't think you're taxed to support synagogues.
I may be wrong about that, but I don't think so.
It's not Jewish in that sense.
It's Jewish in the sense that by its own documents, its own basic laws, it says it exists for the sake of the Jewish people.
And again, let me stress, Jewish people everywhere, Jewish people outside the borders who have no intention of going there or living there.
And so it is not the state.
It doesn't exist for the benefit of all its citizens, regardless of religion, race, creed, color, blah, blah, blah, which is what we say we are here and what Western countries claim to be, regardless of all those things.
Israel doesn't say regardless of all those things.
It's only for the benefit of Jews inside and outside the country.
So of course, that's a detriment of non-Jews, 25% of the population, 20% are Arabs, but there's another 5% of non-Jews who are not Arabs.
They're out of luck.
They don't have the same kind of access, and they have very inferior access to resources because the state is not for their benefit, which is, you know, that's Israel says that.
That's not me saying it.
They say we exist for the benefit of the Jewish people.
Only Jews in Israel have the right of self-determination, they say.
That's what was in that law from last year, the nation state law.
No one else has the right of self-determination except Jews.
That's a problem, and I don't think that helps prevent anti-Semitism, the rise of anti-Semitism.
I think it fans it.
It doesn't justify anti-Semitism.
That's evil.
I don't care who stimulates it.
It's still evil.
But if you really care about anti-Semitism and not want to see it erupt, why do you take these absurd positions that don't even, you know, have no basis in fact, and are just purely ideological, and that are detrimental to innocent people like the Palestinians?
Yeah, hey, now it's time to talk about our big fun drive going on at the Libertarian Institute.
It's our big fun drive at the Libertarian Institute.
So that's me.
I'm the director, and Sheldon, of course, is our executive editor.
And Pete Quinonez, aka Mance Rayder, on Twitter and Facebook and whatever, you know him, Meme Warrior, is our managing editor.
And of course, we have Kyle Anzalone, who does the news and has his own podcast there, The Foreign Policy Focus.
And I guess we really need to give him a title, don't we?
Donate today, and we will give Kyle a title.
I should also say, he's doing a great job doing my job at Antiwar.com, being the viewpoints editor right now, while I'm focusing more heavily on my book, and he deserves a lot of credit for that.
And then there's also Phil Gibson, Mr. Sue, who does his podcast and is an assistant editor of sorts, helping post the material on the site.
And we've got a small handful of some pretty good writers there, including this show goes up there and I write things from time to time.
And everybody seems to love the Libertarian Institute.
And all we need is money, and we can continue to be the Libertarian Institute.
What do you think of that, Sheldon?
I completely agree with that.
And I think it's a great idea.
I think we're doing good work.
And we need it.
We need it now.
I mean, I wrote a little piece for the Institute, which I don't know if it's been posted yet, on behalf of our fundraising effort here, pointing out to the most recent outrage of the U.S. government.
And namely, the Washington Post has published the Afghanistan papers, showing that we shouldn't be surprised by any of this.
But once again, the American people were systematically lied to about the war in Afghanistan.
Of course, you know all about this, having written a great book on the subject.
I mean, how many times does this have to happen before we say, that's enough?
There's no more next time.
Don't ask us to trust you next time, because you've broken the trust every time.
I mean, go back to the Pentagon papers and countless examples.
But here they admit, I mean, people should look up this Washington Post report and other accounts of it you'll find easily.
Here you have the generals and people admitting, this wasn't a Washington Post investigation.
This was an internal government investigation.
You have top people saying, we had no idea what we were doing in Afghanistan.
People would say, who are we fighting?
The troops would say, who are we fighting?
We didn't know who we were fighting.
We didn't know who the enemy was.
We had no idea.
We didn't understand Afghanistan.
We didn't know anything.
They say this.
How many times are we going to buy this crap?
And then, you know, it's just example after example.
The other thing was, of course, the FBI's conduct regarding the Russiagate investigation.
I mean, what more do we need to know?
And so if we're going to change things, we need the Libertarian Institute.
We need this forum for the writing, for the podcasts, and then we need people to give us money and also to spread the word, to send their friends the links and just let them know about this institute and this analysis, which is devastating.
I mean, I can't imagine Americans are just going to accept this, I mean, forever.
I mean, it just makes no sense.
Yeah, man, I'll tell you what, too.
I'm really proud of the books that we put out.
Fool's Errand, my book on Afghanistan, and my Ron Paul book, of course, The Greatest American Hero Ever, and my, you know, the transcripts of my 40 interviews of him there.
And also, you know, just this year, along with the Ron Paul book, we put out Will Grigg's great book, our first managing editor, Will Grigg, who sadly died in 2017, but we put out his book, No Quarter, The Ravings of William Norman Grigg, which is just absolutely awesome.
And I still get, you know, responses from people all the time about that, about how great it is, and thanks for putting it out and that kind of thing.
And by the way, every bit of the proceeds from that book goes directly to Will's family that he left behind here.
So it's for a good cause.
And it's such a great book.
It's just devastating.
It's just, man, it's Will Grigg's history of the first 15 years of this century.
And it reinforces what a loss his death was for all of us.
But also just what a great mind he had, and what a great man he was.
And then of course, your great book, Coming to Palestine, which is already making a real big splash as well, and tells the story of how you learned about the reality of who's zooming who over there, and what it's all about, and why that's so important.
I think the four of those books together, you know, really make the Institute look good as a good start here for our group.
And then we also have books in the works.
We have another Will Grigg book that the great Thomas Edlum is at work editing now, and that's going to be about the stolen life of Christopher Tapp, this poor innocent guy who was prosecuted for rape and murder in Idaho, that he did not commit, and that Will Grigg knew all about all along.
He's now finally been exonerated.
And so that's going to be a collection of Will's essays about that, and an afterword by Tom Edlum explaining, you know, how it all turned out.
And then I'm working on my book about the terror wars.
It should be done in another, I don't know, a couple of few months or something.
I'm really trying to get this thing knocked out.
And then you, my friend, are at work on a couple of more compendiums of essays about which issues now.
I have one called What Social Animals Owe to Each Other, which is a play on a William Graham Sumner essay, What Social Classes Owe to Each Other, which will be, yeah, I think some of my best stuff on political philosophy and, you know, not, I don't mean technical, it'll be totally accessible to, you know, any interested person, political philosophy, some economic philosophy.
And I hope people like it, because the stuff is, you know, when it's on different websites, it's scattered around.
It's hard to find it.
You have to even know it's there.
But if you put it into a book between two covers, you know, then it's got more permanence.
Yeah, I'm really looking forward to that.
And then you have another one in mind, too, don't you?
I had some ideas.
Yeah, I forget what they are exactly, because I have some other categories of essays I could put together, maybe some historical stuff.
We'll see about that.
I'm worried about the next one first.
Yeah, I hear you.
Okay, cool.
So there you go.
That's three right there coming up in the new year that we're working on.
And you know, I should say there's some people we've been running this fundraising campaign for a few weeks now, and we've got quite a bit of support coming in from very generous folks and people signing up for monthly Thingamajigs.
And there have been people who've been, you know, signed up for monthly donations and have been helping to support all along.
So I want to really extend my appreciation to everyone who's already helped, and everyone who plans on helping.
And we are 501c3.
You can find out all the information at libertarianinstitute.org slash support, which by the way, I guess I meant to say too, you can get all those books as kickbacks and, you know, premiums and our gift to you in response for your donation and support for our institute.
And we got signed copies of my two books, of course, and Sheldon's Coming to Palestine.
We also have a giant box full of Will Griggs' great book, No Quarter.
And we've got ebooks and some audio books, and at least we got my audio book.
And we got silver QR code commodity discs and other great things for you there too, at libertarianinstitute.org slash support.
And that includes all the information that you need to write it all off on your taxes, because we are a 501c3 tax exempt organization there.
And so, hey, isn't it funny about Libertarians that we don't really sell our stuff or price on the market.
We give it away free, and then we ask for donations to support our institutions.
But that's the way it goes.
Just like I've been giving away this show all along.
I got 5,000 interviews and change there for you at scotthorton.org, and at least hundreds at the institute.
And that's the way we do it, but we rely on you guys to help us get along in the world.
So we really do appreciate it.
And by the way, we do have now Stripe and all these different ways of getting around PayPal for you PayPal haters, which is understandable.
And we accept Bitcoins, of course, and all that kind of thing.
And all that is at Libertarian Institute slash whoops.org slash support.
And what else am I forgetting to say here, man?
I don't think you've forgotten anything.
I can't think of it.
Well, good.
You're doing a heck of a job.
I attempt to be comprehensive.
That's sort of my thing.
Great.
Well, so listen, yeah, I'm really proud of this thing.
I think and I owe a lot of gratitude to you, Sheldon, for putting your great name on it next to mine and making the site and the institution itself seem as important as we're trying to make it.
And so, yeah, and thank you again to everybody for all your support for that.
And check out if you haven't read it, seriously, you got to read Sheldon's great book, Coming to Palestine.
Get your signed copy at Libertarian Institute dot org slash support.
And thanks again, Sheldon.
My pleasure.
Anytime.
All right, y'all.
Thanks.
Libertarian Institute dot org at Scott Horton dot org, Antiwar dot com and Reddit dot com slash Scott Horton Show.
Oh, yeah.
And read my book, Fool's Errand, Timed and the War in Afghanistan at Fool's Errand dot U.S.
