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 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, he died.
We ain't killing they army, but we killing them.
We be on CNN like, say our name, say it, 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, introducing Robert Naaman from Just Foreign Policy.
He's the policy director there.
And he wrote the Syria chapter in the WikiLeaks files, The World According to US Empire.
What a great book.
I sure devoured the Afghanistan section of that thing for my book.
And I'm going to have to go back and check your work on Syria there, Robert.
Welcome to the show.
How are you doing, sir?
Good.
Good to be with you.
Very happy to have you here.
It's been a long time.
But I run your stuff all the time because it's great.
And I like about your writing that it's always a well-informed and detailed essay taking the correct position on why the U.S. government ought to stop bombing this, that, or the other country on whichever given day.
And then also, there's a direct call to action and a congressional phone number and mailing address and whatever kind of thing.
Always a bit of rubber-meets-the-road activism, at least a little bit, on everything you write.
And then sometimes you really get involved in these campaigns to push Congress, especially I think is your focus, right, Congress, to get them to force the executive to quit doing their worst deals.
Does that pretty much sum up your work right?
Yes, and that's a very nice summary.
And then particularly on the question of constitutional war powers, this is something that's been a focus of ours since we started in 2006.
We see this as tremendously important, key, the fact that under the Constitution, Article I, Congress, not the president, decides when the United States will use military force.
Reaffirmed in the War Powers Resolution of 1973 by Congress at the end of the Vietnam War, which is the War Powers Resolution is a law.
It was passed by Congress over President Nixon's veto.
And in particular, the War Powers Resolution trying to put in place a number of tools for Congress in the future to reassert its constitutional war powers.
And one of the key tools was the idea that the provision of the WPR that, you know, first of all, that this belongs to us, not the president.
But in case the president engages in an unauthorized war, even though we've said not to, even though the Constitution says not to, a single member of Congress can call the question.
This is a key provision of the War Powers Resolution, that any resolution introduced in the House or the Senate to end U.S. military participation in an unauthorized war shall be privileged.
It must go to the floor if the sponsor insists for an up or down vote.
It can't be buried in committee.
And that's exactly what Senator Bernie Sanders, Senator Mike Lee, and Senator Chris Murphy finally did in February and March after three years of this unauthorized war in Yemen.
They finally called the question by introducing such a resolution in the Senate.
And this was not only the first time that the question was called for a vote on Yemen in either House.
It's the first time in history since 1973 that this provision of the War Powers Resolution was used in the Senate.
So that was historic.
And now we are in yet another new historic chapter of this story, because just last week the Senate passed 63 to 37 a motion to discharge from committee this same resolution.
It was tabled in March on a vote of 55 to 44, unfortunately.
But this past week, Senator Sanders, Senator Lee, and Senator Murphy brought it back with the 63 to 37 vote on the floor of the Senate, with every single Senate Democrat voting to discharge the resolution, all 49, including Joe Manchin, including Joe Donnelly, and with 14 Republicans voting to discharge, including Lindsey Graham, including Bob Corker, the Republican chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
So this was a really historic vote.
And it's my hope and expectation that not only will we look back soon and say this was a key moment for ending the Yemen war, which in itself would be huge given the fact that millions of human beings are at the brink of starvation, is a deliberate result of Saudi Arabia's war on blockade enabled by the United States.
That would certainly be reason enough.
But I hope that we will look back on this moment and say this was a turning point for Congress to reassert its constitutional war powers.
And after that, the appetite of Congress and the American people was whetted, and they moved on to Afghanistan and Syria to challenge these endless wars and force them to debate and vote in the House and the Senate.
And also, I hope that this Senate action will put pressure on Paul Ryan in the House.
We saw that Paul Ryan used a parliamentary maneuver to scuttle the companion resolution in the House, 138, the Kana Massey war powers resolution in the House.
But now Kana and Massey and others are coming back in the House in the wake of this Senate action in the last week, the consideration will also next week be in the wake of what we hope will and expect will be the affirmative vote by the Senate.
So that's another huge opportunity to make history by forcing action in the House.
Again, making history by ending this terrible catastrophe in Yemen, but also make history by Congress asserting its constitutional war powers, which is so important if we want to have less war and more peace.
This is not like dotting your I's and crossing your T's thing.
This is a key tool that the people who made the Constitution and the Congress of 1973 bequeathed to us to end and prevent wars.
Sorry, just one second.
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All right.
So first of all, I like that, Thomas Massey.
I think he's one of the few, and Ro Khanna, too.
Those are two guys who are definitely reliable anti-war guys.
And I can't help, I'm sorry to start with this, but I can't help but notice that when you talk about the Senate version of this resolution here, Sanders, Lee, Murphy, nice and bipartisan with Lee there.
But Rand Paul is not one of the, is he one of the co-sponsors, but he just refuses to step up and lead on the issue?
Or do you know the status of Senator Paul on this?
I do.
This is a kind of an inside thing.
But Rand Paul is with us.
He's not a co-sponsor, unfortunately.
He was, I think he was expected to be, and then he did not at the last minute.
The, for people like Rand Paul and Justin Amash is similar on this in the House.
They see co-sponsorship as different from support.
And there's some things about the language of the bill that have to be the way that it is in order to get past the Senate parliamentarian and so on and so forth that Rand Paul didn't, you know, had a kind of inside disagreement about.
Now, let me ask you about the details of that, because, you know, I always look at him kind of sideways, but I should be fair to him that if he really is, you know, dragging his feet and only kind of half going along, maybe he'll vote for it, maybe he won't.
But it's because the problem is it really isn't good enough that there's some kind of fatal loophole in there.
And that would be a justification.
So what's the truth of that?
But here's the thing.
Let me just back you up a second.
He's not dragging his feet.
He's all in.
He just didn't co-sponsor.
He's on TV.
He's been at Rand.
Paul's been on TV in the last week saying, you know, this is totally wonderful.
I think that the Senate is about to do it.
So he is all in.
And it's a reason that, you know, the fact that Rand Paul is helping to lead, you know, there's more than one way to lead.
Like, one way to help lead is that you go on TV and you tell the story.
This would be great if it was, you know, like, you know, Democrat, Republican, Democrat, Republican.
It's the Sanders, Lee, Murphy, Paul bill.
These people who disagree about everything.
Boy, they disagree about a boy.
They agree about this.
And so importantly that they do and whatever.
That's that makes way better politics and narrative and the rest of it for getting that attention on TV.
That would be better.
And it would have been better.
Yeah.
But what's wrong with the bill?
Is there really a loophole in there?
And how bad is it?
It's not that there's a loophole.
It's a couple of things together.
So the first thing is that there's two wars, at least two wars.
But there's significantly two distinct wars that the U.S. is participating in.
One is the Saudi-UAE war against the Houthis that has nothing to do with the 2001 authorization for the use of force.
You know, after the al-Qaeda September 11th attacks on the United States, Congress passed an authorization of force that people refer to as the 2001 EOMF.
It said that the president is authorized to go after whoever did these attacks, whoever he deems that these attacks, whatever the president deems, and whoever harbored them.
And that's the 2001 EOMF.
That's the authorization that three presidents now, Bush, Obama, and Trump, have used not only for the war in Afghanistan, but for drone strikes against al-Qaeda in Pakistan and attacks on al-Qaeda in Syria and so on and so forth.
So that's controversial.
It was widely understood at the time.
You know, the 2001 EOMF was incredibly expansive in its language.
It was incredibly vague.
It doesn't even have the words al-Qaeda in it.
There's no geography in it.
And, you know, if you look at Barbara Lee's vote against the bill in her speech that she gave in 2001, it was incredibly prescient.
She criticized exactly this.
She said, we're doing this.
This is way too broad.
It's way too vague.
And we're doing it too fast.
But that's what Congress passed in 2001, this very broad EOMF with no named targets, no geography.
So that's controversial, that fact that, you know, for 17 years, we've been living under this EOMF that's vague and has no geography and has no named targets and has been steadily expanded by presidents, three presidents, to countries and continents and groups that Congress probably never had in mind in 2001.
And that includes Yemen.
There is al-Qaeda in Yemen, and the U.S. has attacked al-Qaeda in Yemen.
In fact, it's widely considered, included by the U.S. government, to be the most dangerous branch of al-Qaeda.
Okay, so that's one thing.
Now, on the other hand, you have this Saudi war in Yemen against the Houthis that started in March 2015 that the U.S. has been participating in since March 2015.
And that has nothing to do with fighting al-Qaeda.
The Houthis are not al-Qaeda.
The Houthis are Shia.
The Houthis hate al-Qaeda.
They're mortal enemies of al-Qaeda, and vice versa.
You know, al-Qaeda are Salafists.
They hate the Shia.
They want to murder the Shia.
You know, like these two groups couldn't hate each other anymore, want to kill each other anymore.
And so this war that the U.S. is—and in fact, you know, al-Qaeda is on the U.S.-Saudi side of the war against the Houthis.
The Saudis have recruited them, al-Qaeda, to fight the Houthis.
And the U.S. has been a knowing collaborator in that.
And the Saudi war has helped—the Saudi war against the Houthis has helped al-Qaeda.
And this is—this is, you know, like U.S. government documents.
This is AP reports.
This is, you know, New York Times.
This is a known thing.
So these two wars are totally distinct.
No, and in fact, contradictory.
Now, the war against al-Qaeda is controversial for the reasons that I've said.
But it also has widespread support, you know, because after all, al-Qaeda did attack the United States in a terrible way in September 2011.
And there still clearly are al-Qaeda— Look, this—I mean, the point is this new resolution, it doesn't further authorize war against AQAP.
It just doesn't address that and end it.
Is that correct?
So here's the thing.
Because you're—I mean, what you're saying is the AUMF already supposedly at least authorizes the war against AQAP.
It has since 2009, and that hasn't really been at issue.
What's at issue here is the other war, the one against the Houthis.
Some people, and that some people includes Rand Paul, and the ACLU, don't like the fact that the Sanders-Lee-Murphy bill and the Khanna-Massey bill in the House has something similar.
It has a carve-out for the war against al-Qaeda.
It says, you know, get out of the Saudi war in Yemen, but nothing in this bill affects the war against al-Qaeda.
I mean, that's really—that's exactly my question is.
It doesn't provide any new layers of authorization for the ongoing war under the AUMF of 2001.
It just doesn't— Absolutely it does not.
I'm sorry.
Yeah, absolutely it does not as a matter of letter.
There are people in the world who claim that if Congress says, you know, don't do X, but, you know, let me make clear that I'm not saying that you can't do Y, that implicitly Congress is saying Y is okay.
And that's exactly the ACLU argument.
Yeah.
I mean, that's an important point if that's going to be referred back to.
Why has there always got to be some horrible poison pill in a thing like this, you know?
Well, the thing is that the—there's no way that we could get 63 senators to vote for this bill if it didn't make clear that we're not talking about the war with al-Qaeda.
That's number one.
And number two, the—in order to force a vote in the Senate, you have to get past the Senate parliamentarian.
The Senate parliamentarian has to say, oh, yeah, this is privilege, and this will force a vote.
And so you're only allowed to do—you're not allowed to have, you know, whatever language you want if you want to be able to force a vote.
So when you take those two things together, the bill had to be written the way that it was.
And in the opinion of most people, this is not a poison pill.
After all, 63 senators just voted for it.
Well, because it's a poison pill, it's their flavor of poison, right?
But I mean, like, Rand Paul is going to vote for this.
This is what I'm telling you.
This is going to pass next week.
And I understand it is an emergency.
And also, the war against al-Qaeda down there is going to continue once they're all kicked out of the UAE's mercenary army down there again someday.
Then the war against them will continue until, as a matter of policy, later on Congress or the president, just foreign policy, gets a new petition going or whatever it is.
That's going to come another day anyway.
It does have to be a separate issue because it's the war against the rulers in the capital city that amount to the war of genocide against the civilian population of the country now.
Right.
And as Mike Lee said, and when they introduced, Senator Mike Lee said when he introduced the bill in February, we deal with these wars one at a time.
And right now we're dealing with this war, the Saudi war in Yemen.
And after all, I mean, you got to admit, as bad as the wars against al-Qaeda have been in Pakistan, in Yemen, et cetera, the wars for al-Qaeda are way worse.
Syria, Yemen, like this, it's just completely out of control.
Yes, they're worse.
Of course, in terms of the hypocrisy, it's intergalactic.
This war has nothing to do with defending Americans.
Quite the contrary, it's making Americans more unsafe.
But also the scale of the catastrophe is nothing like, I mean, the number of civilians killed by drone strikes in all theaters is in, by U.S. drone strikes in all theaters since 2001, is in the thousands.
More children have, Save the Children estimates some 85,000 children in Yemen have died just from starvation since the war started in Yemen because of the Saudi war on blockade.
So the scale, the scale of the human catastrophe, it's just completely off the charts.
And it's, you know, approximately 80,000 killed in violent attacks.
According to Andrea Carboni from, I forgot the name of his institution anymore, Ackled Data.
They had a study that came out, said 50, but he told Patrick Coburn at the Independent and told me on the show that the estimate really is as high as 80 now that they were updating it.
And that's directly killed by violent action by the Saudis.
That does not include people who've been deprived to death, the excess deaths and collateral damage from the war.
That's right.
Which, you know, we're going to find out at the end of this thing, Robert, that it's in the hundreds of thousands.
Iraq war two level catastrophe here, I think.
Yes, I think so, too.
You know, the health system is collapsed.
So how would you know people have died and there hasn't been access, international access to the north?
So that's why the U.N. stopped putting out new numbers.
They just had no basis for saying what they thought the number was.
Right.
In fact, I saw Chris Murphy in an otherwise good essay cite the last number that they gave, which was 10,000, which makes it sound like not a very bad genocide after all or something.
But that was a long time ago and it was low when they gave it then.
And as they admitted at the time, this is the best we can do.
We're not saying this is the ceiling on it.
That's why they stopped.
Yeah.
All right.
And so when people go to just foreign policy, then they need to click on what in order to really get involved here?
There there is a sign up for our action alert list at the top of the page.
And that's really the main thing that we're doing, as you said at the outset, is telling people what's going on and getting people to engage Congress.
And particularly right now, you know, we're pretty confident that we're going to win this vote in the Senate next week.
You know, more Senate support is always better.
But 51, we're pretty confident about having 51.
All the Democrats plus Mike Lee and Rand Paul.
What we're really concerned about is the House now.
And so the thing that I would encourage people to do now is call the Capitol switchboard.
2 0 2 2 2 5 3 1 2 1.
Ask for your representative and ask them.
Wait, wait.
Say that again slower.
Real quick.
Yep.
2 0 2.
The capital switchboard is 2 0 2 2 2 5 3 1 2 1.
Folks can call the FCNL toll free number 1 8 3 3.
Stop war.
But capital switchboard is 2 0 2 2 2 5 3 1 2 1.
And ask for your representative and ask your representative to co-sponsor H.
And ask them to oppose any rule that deprivileges the bill and in particular sign the the Tom Massey letter.
Tom Massey is circulating a letter to Republicans saying less, you know, please oppose any rule that deprivileges our bill.
All right.
Hold it right there.
Just one moment.
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And you know what, especially for you veterans out there, your voices count, you know, six times as much.
Everybody knows this true.
You call and you tell them, listen, I'm a veteran of these terror wars.
And I'm telling you, this isn't the war against Al-Qaeda.
This is the war for Al-Qaeda that we're talking about here.
And I demand that you support this thing and get out there and push hard as you can.
Because, you know, this is one of those, like Iraq War II and like a lot of things before that.
This is kind of, it's the level of criminality that it's so stark that it could come to really define the United States of America for a long time.
That this is what we are.
All that stuff about we're the heroes who saved France from the Nazis and whatever.
Null and void when we're the country responsible for a deliberate medieval siege, starvation campaign against the poorest country in the Middle East right now.
Inflicting a famine on them.
That's genocide when anybody else does it.
It's the same thing when it's us doing it.
This has to be stopped.
And you know what, I guess there have been a couple of good senators, but you can bear witness to the fact that it has been, because there's almost entirely a media blackout about this war.
Certainly about who's who and what it all means in the way that you understand it.
And this really has been grassroots pressure all along.
That's where all of this comes from in pushing to end this war.
Other than, you know, I guess Chris Murphy.
Somebody got to him early and a couple of others.
But is this not like 99% pressure from below here?
Yes, although I would say, I agree with everything you said.
At the beginning, it was all pressure from below.
But finally, I think especially, you know, there's an interplay between Congress and the mainstream media, right?
So once you get to a certain level, when members of Congress force the issue, this is another reason that the War Powers Resolution is so important.
It's because by forcing a vote, you force it to the top of the national agenda.
And then the media do report.
I mean, after all, you look, do a Google search, search online.
There was tremendous press coverage of the vote in the Senate last week.
It was the top headline in the New York Times.
And this was, this changes the game.
You know, then there wasn't a blockout.
So when the media looks to Congress for signals about what's an important issue, and when Congress shows that they care about something by having a vote on it, the media will report that.
And then not just the vote, but then they'll use that as an opportunity to report on the war.
And so a whole bunch of Americans just found out about the war last week when the Senate voted on it.
A whole bunch of other Americans found out about the war for the first time in March when the Senate voted about it.
Once it got to that level, then, you know, more people got involved and more people try to do stuff.
So then it's a virtuous circle before it's a vicious circle.
But once the media gets involved to a certain level, once Congress gets involved to a certain level, then, you know, people find out about it, then they call the members of Congress, then members go, oh, Americans do care about this, and so on.
So then it becomes a positive feedback loop.
And that's where we are now.
That's the half full.
And that's what we could do now in the House.
And remember what happened in August 2013 when there was a bipartisan grassroots revolt, which turned into a bipartisan congressional revolt against President Obama's threat to bomb Syria without congressional authorization.
We forced him to go to Congress, then we blocked the AUMF, his proposal, and then he had to do diplomacy instead.
So that possibility is always out there.
If we can force the debate outside the beltway into the town hall, the public square of the American people and in the media, then that's a completely different jury than Congress if there's no media attention, if there's no public attention, if it's just the inside interest groups in Washington.
That's the change that we're living through now with respect to the Senate.
That's the change that we have the opportunity to live through now with respect to the House.
Hey, you guys also have this thing, and we have hardly the time to address it, but just real quick, can you talk about this bill criminalizing free speech against settlements and Saudi Arabia, the top headline on your, this is the anti-BDS bill going through Congress, right?
Thanks for bringing that up.
Senator Cardin of Maryland has this bill supported by AIPAC to prohibit, it's misnamed, it's called the Israel Anti-Boycott Act.
But the fine print of the bill is that it attempts to criminalize advocating the boycott not just of Israel, but of Israeli settlements in the West Bank.
So we saw just in the last few weeks, Airbnb, after a long pressure campaign that included like Human Rights Watch, they finally agreed to stop listing Israeli settlement in the West Bank on their website as vacation rentals.
This is land stolen from Palestinians, right?
So finally Airbnb agreed to do that.
And that's exactly what Cardin and AIPAC are going after with their bill.
They're trying to prohibit American citizens from using their First Amendment rights to advocate for companies, American companies not to participate in the Israeli military occupation of the West Bank.
And it was just reported in the last several days that Cardin is trying to slip this into the end of year budget agreement.
This bill that's opposed by the ACLU on the grounds that it's an unconstitutional abridgment of our First Amendment free speech rights.
So this is something that's very important for people to be vigilant about, that there's the sneaky attempt to take away our First Amendment rights to advocate against illegal Israeli settlements in the West Bank.
And we need our representatives and senators to oppose this.
I mean the nerve of Foreign Lobby, I guess posing as a domestic one in a way, but we all know AIPAC and their allies behind this, that they would directly attack our First Amendment like this.
It seems like, I understand their short term gain that they're shooting for here, but it seems like an obvious long term public relations loss for them, that they would dare to try to push through a law like this.
And for me, I agree with the B and the D, but not the S.
But to tell me that I'm not allowed to discuss that with this, that, or the other person, or promote that, or act that way in the marketplace, withholding my dollars from people I don't want to patronize?
I mean, you've got to be kidding me.
This is, I mean, what kind of police state would we have to have to even enforce something like this?
You know?
No, it's clearly unconstitutional.
But Congress isn't, and I assume that eventually if they tried to enforce it, it could be overturned in court.
But Congress isn't supposed to pass unconstitutional laws.
And it's certainly not supposed to pass unconstitutional laws that chill speech.
Americans are supposed to, this is, you know, whatever you think of BDS.
And actually, you know, as your comment implied, like, many people have very different understandings of what BDS means.
Like some people, you know, like Americans for Peace Now, for example, which is a liberal Zionist organization that is the cousin of Peace Now in Israel, which is a major peace group in Israel.
Americans for Peace Now supports the boycott of Israeli settlements.
That's their official policy.
So, you know, according to the Cardin bill, that's BDS.
According to the Cardin bill language, this liberal Zionist organization, Americans for Peace Now, which is part of the conference of presidents of major American Jewish organizations, they would be run afoul, they're running afoul if the Cardin bill is law.
That shows how extreme this is.
They're defining, you know, they're defining BDS as any, include anything against the settlements, including, you know, there was a boycott of SodaStream, which was this company that produces this thing, you make carbonated water out of your own water, because SodaStream had a factory in an Israeli settlement in the West Bank.
So there was a campaign on that.
And eventually SodaStream agreed, OK, we're going to stop having a factory and a settlement in the West Bank.
So under the Cardin bill, you can't do that.
You can't have that campaign against SodaStream.
Even SodaStream agreed to go along with it.
Oxfam supported that campaign.
Oxfam demanded that Scarlett Johansson stop being a spokesperson for SodaStream, because SodaStream was participating in the occupation of the West Bank.
That shows how extreme the Cardin bill is, the AIPAC position is.
The Anti-Defamation League, EDL, is part of this gang of people that has this extreme view of protecting the Israeli settlements by saying that you can't boycott them.
This shows how extreme it is.
People are trying to take away the First Amendment right to advocate against Israeli settlements.
That is totally, totally wrong.
We need to stop that.
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Well, and you could see why they are in a panic, because as is clear, economically speaking, this doesn't do much damage to Israel overall.
It may not even do much damage to the settlements themselves.
I'm not sure.
Maybe on an individual level, it makes a difference.
But it's not like the state of Israel is at a want for investment capital when it comes down to it.
But what it is, is it's a public relations disaster, because it raises the obvious question in any regular person's mind, well, why would you boycott Israel?
And then the answer is, because it's like Mississippi in 1955 over there.
That's why.
It's a Jim Crow apartheid system where half the population have no rights.
That's why there's controversy.
That's why, as you said, member groups of major Jewish institutions in America are on this side of the argument.
Because what the Israeli government is doing is wrong, really wrong.
And so that's why all the controversy.
There's no question of whether any of this has anything to do with anti-Semitism or not.
If there's racism involved, of course, it's the anti-Arab racism or anti-Gentile racism that says if you're not Jewish, you don't have any rights, even though you are a subject of the government in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem.
Well, in particular, it's anti-Arab.
And this is something that's known to the U.S., well known to the U.S. government.
You know, we had there was this dispute in Congress over the visa reciprocity program.
Some members of Congress wanted Israel to be like the most favored nation for visa reciprocity, like countries in Western Europe are.
But it says in U.S. law that a country cannot be a most favored nation in visa reciprocity if they don't treat every U.S. citizen who enters their country without discrimination.
And that's just not true of Israel.
And it's just well known for decades that U.S. citizens of Arab descent are discriminated against and mistreated by the Israeli government when they try to visit Israel, including trying to visit the West Bank.
So like Palestinian American Christians who try to go to Bethlehem for Christmas can get blocked by Israeli security and not allowed to go just because they're Palestinian of Palestinian origin, U.S. citizens of Palestinian origin.
OK, that's not how allies of the United States, close allies of the United States are supposed to treat U.S. citizens.
You know, if we have a blue passport, we're all supposed to get treated by the same, the same by any government, which is close friends of the United States.
So this is just a fundamental contradiction.
It's exactly as you said.
It's a Jim Crow thing that's baked into the regime in Israel.
And this is this contradiction is unsustainable.
You know, Americans will not tolerate this indefinitely, that U.S. power is used to prop up and support and protect a regime of formal discrimination in Israel.
It's not the issue is not whether there is a country in the world called Israel.
The issue is whether U.S. power, U.S. tax dollars will be used to prop up and enable formal discrimination, including against U.S. citizens.
That's the status quo today.
And we already have a system of informal censorship here, you know, verging on the formal as we're talking about with this bill.
But we saw what happened with this MSNBC personality, Mark Lamont Hill, who I gather is a university professor somewhere.
And his extremely controversial statement was that in all the land between the river and the sea, which is Netanyahu's language for the land Israel will always control, the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean, between the river and the sea, all of Palestine shall be free.
In other words, equal rights for all subjects of the Israeli government.
The immediate reaction was freedom for the Palestinians, but that necessarily means an end to the current Israeli regime, which is based first and foremost not on democracy, but on Jewish supremacy.
And therefore, they accused him of being for genocide and for being an anti-Semite who wanted to destroy all of the Jews of Israel and I guess push them all into the sea.
Because just implicit in Zionism, according to the Zionist side of the argument here, is that freedom for the Palestinians means an end to their wonderful, essentially white supremacist government that they've built.
Just again, like we're talking about the old South before the Civil Rights Acts and so forth.
Yeah, I wouldn't have put it exactly the way that you put it.
But I don't completely disagree either.
I think it's complicated.
I wouldn't have made that river to the sea comment that he made.
I don't think he should have been fired.
I think that was wrong to summarily fire him.
What was even wrong with the comment?
What's wrong with the comment is that it did lend itself to the interpretation.
It did easily lend itself to the interpretation that his idea of the solution is that all the Israeli Jews are going to be expelled from Palestine.
That may not have been his intention.
I don't believe, I don't think that that was his intention.
But that is how a lot of people… Yeah, but that's the joke, right?
What I'm saying is that's just obviously their ridiculous guilty conscience talking.
He didn't say anything about removing Jews at all.
He just said equal rights.
That's like saying that if you want equal rights for blacks in Mississippi, what you're saying is you're an anti-white racist because you want to end their current white supremacist regime.
And so, therefore, that's like saying you want to force them all to move to Kansas or something.
But that's just your white supremacist point of view talking is all, right?
To make the analogy.
Because to say, you know, before 1948, there was a country called Palestine.
And it was from the river to the sea.
And the majority of people who lived in that country were Palestinian Arabs.
And some Palestinians and Arabs, historically, their vision was, like, that's the way that the world should be, the way that it was in 1947.
We should get, we should expel these colonists, the Israeli Jews that came from, now Israeli Jews that came from Europe and elsewhere.
We should send them back to where they came from and restore the situation where we have a majority Palestinian Arab state between the river and the sea.
And that vision, I don't think it's realistic.
I don't think it's a serious danger.
But you could see why – I could see why Israeli Jews and people who support the existence of some state of Israel somewhere in historic Palestine see that as a very hostile thing.
Just because he said – even though all he said was free, you're saying it's because he used the word Palestine instead of Israel.
Amounts to a threat of – I mean, lends itself to, I think, an obvious, ridiculous, willful misinterpretation.
Palestine would be free from the river to the sea lent itself to that interpretation.
And I think that – you know, I've been working on this particular issue, the issue of trying to change U.S. policy to be more even-handed between Israeli Jews and Palestinian Arabs since I was 19 years old, since 1984.
I lived in Palestine.
I was married to a Palestinian.
I was a student at Birzeit University.
I was there during the first Intifada.
Four of my fellow students at Birzeit were killed by the IDF while I was there.
I was in Israeli prison.
I was expelled from the country.
I was beaten by Israeli soldiers.
I took food into a Palestinian refugee camp when it was under curfew.
This is very close to my heart.
I think that we have a responsibility, those of us Americans who want to advocate for Palestinian rights in the United States, as we should, as we are morally obligated to do, to do so in a way that doesn't lend itself to supporting the narrative of the Israel right or wrong people.
And in that sense, I think that Marc Lamont Hill screwed up.
I don't think he should have been fired.
But I think that somebody who says, like, you know, he's not just like Joe, ordinary person.
He's like a college professor.
He's a CNN commentator.
He's giving a speech at the United Nations, which presumably he has prepared.
I mean, I totally hear what you're saying.
And believe me, I never question your motives.
I'm very impressed by your level of activism.
I didn't know that.
But, of course, you know, I definitely know where your heart is on all of this stuff.
But to me, that just sounds like maybe not the, but almost the most innocuous thing that you could say.
Freedom for all of the people who live there, wherever you call it.
I mean, if he called it Israel, then he'd be conceding that the West Bank is Israel, which is sort of — he doesn't want to have to do that, right?
They haven't annexed it yet, really, sort of.
His own words.
And he could have chose to use different words.
I mean, I hear you.
But isn't it also the case, though, that no matter what you do, if you're good on Palestine, they're going to call you an anti-Semite?
Because there is no good argument for the status quo or anything like it.
And so they have to always demonize the attacker.
I think it's — look, I've already said, and I'll say again, Mark Lamont Hill, I believe that overall his heart is in the right place.
He did, by the way, subsequently apologize.
Initially he didn't, but then subsequently he did.
I believe that he is not an anti-Semite in his heart.
I believe that he wants peace and justice in Israel and Palestine.
And there's no question about that in my mind.
All I'm saying is that — and I think it's an important point — is that Americans who are advocating in the public sphere for Palestinian rights have a responsibility to not say things that are counterproductive and to say things that put the injustice on the back foot, not the people who are advocating against the injustice.
That's all I'm saying.
And we, all of us, should — you know, and also this event was harmful.
You see, we don't want — it's not in our interest for Americans to think that you can't speak out about this or you'll get in trouble.
That is completely counterproductive.
We want Americans to think that we can speak out about this, like I'm doing right now.
See, look, I, Robert Naaman, I'm criticizing the Israeli government.
I'm criticizing Netanyahu.
And I walk the earth and nobody's firing me and I'm not in trouble.
You know, that's the way we want people to think about this.
You can criticize the Israeli government and be fine.
And more people should criticize the Israeli government.
And more people should criticize the U.S. government for supporting the Israeli government.
And more people — and particularly supporting the Israeli government in its unjust policies.
And more people should criticize members of Congress for supporting the Israeli government in its unjust policies.
And in particular, if we just enforced every single U.S. law, like, you know, the Arms Export and Control Act, the Foreign Assistance Act, the Leahy Law, with respect to U.S. military aid to Israel and U.S. economic aid to Israel, that would be a revolution in U.S. foreign policy.
If we just said, hey, you know, we're going to stop giving military aid to Israeli military units that violate human rights.
We're going to stop giving U.S. weapons to the Israeli government if they're going to use those weapons on civilians.
Just exactly the debate that we've just been having about Saudi Arabia.
We could be having exactly — and we can have soon — we can have exactly the same debate about the U.S. relationship with the Israeli government.
And we have a golden opportunity coming up with the 2020 Democratic presidential primary, because Bernie Sanders has been vocal on this.
He wasn't always vocal, but just in the last couple of years, he started getting vocal about, you know, Netanyahu and the nation-state law.
And, you know, why are we supporting the Israeli blockade of Gaza?
We have a historic opportunity now to force this thing into public debate.
Why are we helping the Israeli government violate the basic human rights of Palestinian civilians?
You know, the Saudi blockade of Yemen was preceded by the Israeli blockade of Gaza.
And to me, it's clear that the Israeli blockade of Gaza was like a template for the Saudis.
Of course, when the Saudis did it, they had to be a thousand times more sadistic.
But the basic idea was the same, that we're going to punish the civilian population for something that they didn't do.
We could challenge this, the same Americans that are now mobilized to say that helping Saudi Arabia do this, Yemen is wrong.
We could mobilize them to say helping the Israeli government do this as civilians in Gaza is wrong.
We could do that within the next year.
And the more that people are strategic and focused in their criticism, say, you know, we're talking about here is unjust abuses of the human rights of Palestinian civilians by the Israeli government.
The more people focus on that, the more we will advance.
Yeah, I'm with you.
I guess I just thought he was being true and fair because he didn't actually say anything that could possibly be anti-Semitic.
It was only if you get that, oh, this is a code word that means this other thing and this kind of thing.
If he had actually said, I suggest we start rounding up the Ashkenazi Jews and exporting them by rail at gunpoint, then that would have actually been worth discussing and criticizing him for or something.
You know, I don't think he should have been fired.
I think he should have.
If I had, you know, if you'd asked me, I think you should have walked back that specific comment and said, oh, you know, I didn't get how people would hear it.
And I apologize for that.
Of course, I stand firm in my support for the human rights of Palestinians.
I think if he'd done that, he might still have his job because it would have been easier for more people to rally behind him if he had done that.
You know, I'll give you an example.
And you're right.
You're right to say that some people, maybe I would say they're a bit overanxious, but people can hear whatever they want.
It's a secondary quality, you know, the meaning of things that you listen to.
And so the speaker always the burden is on you to do the best you can to say exactly what you mean.
It just seems to me like I don't even see the harm in what he said.
Here's a contrast.
You know, there's a there is a Democratic representative from Georgia named Hank Johnson from the Atlanta area who's been very vocal in the House on human rights issues, including Palestinians, but also Bahrain, Yemen, the Saudi cluster bombs in Yemen.
He's been Honduras.
He's been consistent on this across a number of issues that are not like the most prominent thing.
OK, but but in particular, he's spoken out about Palestinian right.
So one time he was giving a talk somewhere and he made this comment about the settlements where he said, like, the settlements are like, you know, termites undermining a house.
You know, the way that they're spreading in the West Bank and undermining the possibility of an independent Palestinian state in the West Bank, East Jerusalem, Gaza, which historically was the international diplomatic solution to states, Israel, Palestine, side by side.
And so Hank Johnson is saying, so the settlements are undermining this.
That was his point.
OK, so he used this colorful language to make his point of talking about termites.
So there was this got out and caused an explosion.
You know, Hank Johnson is saying that Jews are termites.
And he so he responded forcefully and he walked that back.
He said, I'm sorry, I used the word termites.
That was not trying to say that Jews are termites.
That's not my view at all.
That's the completely opposite of everything that I have ever done and said in my life.
I apologize.
And I'm never going to say that again.
However, let's be clear.
I'm not moving an inch of my support for Palestinian human rights.
And he was completely forthright.
And he did, you know, he talked to Jewish groups in the district.
He met with anybody.
He went with any media.
And he was completely forthright in those two things.
I apologize for my choice of words.
That was a terrible choice of words.
But I'm not moving an inch on the fact that I support Palestinian rights.
Hank Johnson is still in the United States House of Representatives.
And he's fine.
And he's still speaking up for Palestinian human rights and human rights all over the world.
So that shows that it's just not true that you can't criticize the Israeli government.
And even you could make a mistake in how you criticize.
And you can live to tell the tale if you are forthright and clear in where you stand.
Exactly like Hank Johnson was.
Yeah.
But have you seen the new four part documentary about the suppressed Al Jazeera documentary?
I haven't seen it.
I mean, it is an example.
And don't get me wrong.
We have a terrible problem with the suppression of speech for decades.
Believe me.
Tell me like I don't know about this.
As a student at the University of Illinois, our speakers were shouted in 1984.
Our speakers were shouted down.
Our posters were torn down.
Our events were disrupted.
Nobody has to give me lectures about this.
I lived it.
But it's also important at the same time that we not be an echo chamber for the intimidation tactics.
And we emphasize that even though there is a terrible attempt going on to suppress free speech and intimidate free speech about this.
As with the Cardin bill.
As with these other things.
It's important to emphasize that we do have free speech.
That we do have the First Amendment.
That people are criticizing the Israeli government.
And the settlements.
And these policies.
And living to tell the tale.
And that actually it's gotten much better.
There used to be this website.
I won't use the word because we're not allowed to use that word on the radio.
But it was a list of American Jews that criticized the Israeli government.
And I was on that list.
And it was like the traitors.
It was this right wing site.
Jewish site.
These are the traitor Jews that criticized the Israeli government.
After a while they stopped maintaining this website.
Because there's too many of us now.
There's no way they could list all of our names.
It just became too popular for American Jews to criticize the Israeli government for its treatment of the Palestinians.
We have J Street now.
We have Jewish Voice for Peace.
We have If Not Now.
It's just gotten so much better for criticizing the Israeli government.
For Jews.
For Palestinians.
For Muslims.
Come on in.
The water's fine.
Yeah.
No, I definitely hear you.
And I like the whole thing about don't let them intimidate you.
And make you think that you can't participate.
Because, hey, you're living proof that that just isn't so.
Very good.
Thank you very much.
Great to talk to you again, Robert.
My pleasure, Scott.
All right, you guys.
That's Robert Naaman.
He's at Just Foreign Policy.
Go there and figure out how you can help on the issue of protecting the right to boycott Israel for one thing.
And how you can help to end the genocidal war against the people of Yemen as well.
That's JustForeignPolicy.org.
All right, y'all.
Thanks.
You can find me at LibertarianInstitute.org.
At ScottHorton.org.
AntiWar.com.
And Reddit.com.
Slash Scott Horton Show.
Oh, yeah.
And read my book, Fool's Errand.
Timed and the War in Afghanistan.
At FoolsErrand.us.
