01/28/16 – David Kattenburg – The Scott Horton Show

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Alright y'all, welcome back.
I'm Scott Horton, it's my show, Scott Horton Show.
ScottHorton.org for the archives, sign up for the podcast feeds and all that stuff.
Alright, our guest today is David Kattenberg.
He is a Winnipeg-based radio web broadcaster and science educator.
It says here, and here he's written this kind of hilarious, kind of outrageous, kind of unbelievable article for Mondo Weiss, which I was joking with Phil about it yesterday.
He was glad I liked the title so much.
I about choked and got sick.
I was laughing so hard and Phil took credit for the title.
But you get credit for the piece here, great piece.
It's called, Dennis Ross says Clinton was the only president to stamp down anti-Israel forces inside the White House.
I'm sorry, I tried so hard to read that without laughing.
David, welcome to the show, how are you doing?
Hey Scott, very well, thank you.
Good, good, very happy to have you here.
And so this is a tale of one Sunday evening last November, as you begin here, you went and saw a talk given by Dennis Ross.
Now, many of the listeners will be familiar with Dennis Ross, but let's just make sure.
Can you, first of all, please describe who this guy is, why it's important that he came to give a speech in the first place?
Well, Dennis Ross, Scott, is a, you know, sort of in the world of American diplomacy, he's very eminent and distinguished diplomat and negotiator.
He's worked with various administrations in the United States since Jimmy Carter's.
He's been in the Pentagon, he's been in the State Department, he's worked out of the White House.
And he's the Middle East peace negotiator, par excellence.
You know, one of the original, very original negotiators in the Madrid and Oslo talks.
And he's, you know, he most recently served under Obama, right, trying to get the peace process going.
And so he's very well known in this regard.
And he kind of has the nickname, although it's not clear to me that this has been, it was probably him that Aaron David Miller, who's another one of these types, was referring to when he coined the term Israel lawyer.
Because Ross is, I mean, supposedly America is the arbiter between Israel and the Palestinians, right?
But the United States kind of is a friend of Israel.
And folks like David, like Dennis Ross are, you know, seen as being a friend of Israel.
He's a friend of Israel.
And so he came to Winnipeg, I thought, I got to hear this guy and try to interview him.
All right.
So, well, there's a few different things in this speech here, but you talk about, I guess, you know, most importantly, how he started to describe the current, you know, I guess, pseudo intifada thing, whatever you call it, that's going on now with the knife attacks.
And he said, oh, yeah, you had me on the edge of my seat.
I couldn't wait for his explanation of what all is going on here.
So what all is going on here, according to Dennis Ross?
Well, you know, I mean, what listeners have to understand is that, of course, he had come to Winnipeg to speak to a crowd of, you know, Jewish folks at the Jewish, big Jewish center in Winnipeg, and it's quite a Jewish community here.
And the median age must have been like 68 or 69 or 70.
Quite, quite a lot of older people there are very appreciative.
And he was kind of he was he was, you know, pitching to his audience.
He was really in his in his kind of realm there.
And he was, you know, like the Paris attacks had just taken place, which were awful.
And so, you know, this recent outbreak of violence in Palestine with the knife attacks, it kind of perhaps slipped to the back of people's minds.
But he started to talk about that.
And, I mean, I was really interested in hearing if he was going to talk about the occupation.
And his slant was that, of course, well, the Palestinians have no one to blame but themselves.
And most astonishingly, he said that knife attack like the knife attacks, these attacks on the part of Palestinians using knives or, you know, potato peelers, you know, and so on and so forth, were worse, worse, in a sense, more brutal, ugly terrorism than what Daesh had committed in Paris, because the Daesh attacks were just blind and kind of indiscriminate.
Whereas Palestinians knife attacks, it's very intimate.
And so it's dreadful, dreadful, worse than imaginable.
And his explanation was, of course, that no one's paying attention to them, in a nutshell.
No one's paying attention to the Palestinians.
No one cares about them.
So they're trying to get attention.
And it's social media, right?
It's this canard that it's social media that's driving all of it.
Well, and that really sounds like kind of a half-truth to the way he puts that.
It sounds like the rest of his thought is muted, but he's saying, you know, what?
They just want a pat on the head, or they want someone to pay attention to their complaints about what their problems are.
Oh, I see.
They're totally trivializing it.
So, like, the bottom line is that he didn't mention the occupation at all.
It wasn't 50 years of belligerent occupation.
You know, and the brutality that goes on day in, day out, never gets reported in the media.
The mass media doesn't report on what goes on every day and every night in occupied Palestine.
But that had night, he didn't mention that.
He does not at all.
I mean, I guess the closest he comes, as you put it in here, is when he says, oh, yeah, well, there are these fake rumors going around that we're going to seize the Temple Mount and all this.
And that's what they're fighting about are these rumors.
And that's what the media, that's what the mass media, as you're aware, Scott, I mean, that's what the mass media, you know, since late September when this new uprising started, all the media could talk about was this was a religious thing, right?
Fueled by fanatics, perhaps, and it had to do with the Temple Mount.
But nobody would talk about the occupation.
You'd never see the word occupation appearing in the media.
And thus, you know, Dennis Ross, who is indeed a dear friend of Israel, speaking to a very Zionist crowd, just laying it on.
Well, now, I'm sorry, because I don't mean to ask you necessarily to be a psychotherapist or anything like that.
But I wonder if you could gauge somehow qualitatively or quantitatively or however you like on a scale of one to a zillion.
How much kind of group think is there about like in the room, for example, of the denial of the occupation?
I mean, is it the case that this guy I mean, what's what what you quote him as saying to me just sounds like a damn lie, right?
It's when you go to court, you have to tell the whole truth because a half truth can be very, very misleading.
Right.
But so I guess I just wonder whether everyone really just kind of nods and agrees with this narrative so much that they really believe it.
Or I mean, come on, how can they escape the word occupation?
It's not like they don't know the word in English.
It's not like they don't know that.
Yeah, Israel won the war back in 67 and hadn't withdrawn since.
This is a very good question, Scott.
I mean, it's it's it's a very foundational question.
It's denial now, like I mean, I'm not sure quite sure who your listeners are, but they I'm sure they're aware of the fact that, well, in Winnipeg, they'll talk about Winnipeg, this crowd of folks at the Rady Jewish Center, extremely liberal.
They're very liberal folks.
They're very progressive folks in every way except on Palestine.
And as far as Israel goes, they're all very Zionist.
They're older.
It's an older generation.
They're pro-Israel, absolutely, positively 110 percent pro-Israel.
And they don't I mean, they're good people.
They're progressives.
But if you ask them about the Nakba, I mean, if they knew what that what it was, they deny it.
It's mythology.
It's Zionist mythology, as entrenched in this kind of an audience as it is in sort of mainstream kind of middle of the road, older kind of community of progressive Jewish people in the United States, Phil Weiss and Mondo Weiss report on.
Right.
It's the Zionist crowd.
All right.
Well, I'm sorry.
I'm sorry.
Progressive.
We need we need to give you time for a longer answer there.
But we're going to stop and take this break, David.
But hang tight right there.
And we'll be right back, everybody, with David Kattenberg.
He wrote this great piece at Mondo Weiss dot net.
Go read it.
Dennis Ross says Clinton, et cetera, et cetera.
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All right, you guys, welcome back.
I'm Scott Horton.
It's my show, Scott Horton Show.
Talking with David Kattenberg about this piece he wrote for Mondo Weiss, Mondo Weiss dot net.
Dennis Ross says Clinton was the only president to stamp down anti-Israel forces inside the White House.
So at the break, I'm sorry.
We got interrupted at the break, but you were answering about the level of group think and the level of denial and the common refrain that, oh, man, just everybody's an anti-Semite and refusal to acknowledge that the reason people are upset is because of the occupation.
And and and then, of course, you know, the real subtle point is, you know, how much of this is kind of and I guess it doesn't really matter.
I don't know how much of it is outright lies, how much of it is just denial.
And and, you know, who believes what on the issue?
I mean, it seems pretty a pretty blatant truth that the Israelis occupy the West Bank and that probably if you were from the West Bank, you wouldn't like that for something.
Right.
Like that's not that difficult of an idea to grasp.
Yeah.
And I mean, you know, Scott, for me, what what kind of blows my mind more than anything else somehow is how somebody like, you know, Dennis Ross, who's an intellectual, supposedly, who is smart, who knows history.
He's been there.
He's spoken with everybody.
Right.
No one no one has heard the Palestinian complaints, you know, more often over so many years than than Dennis Ross.
And yet he he says the things he says.
And so when asked the question, is it pure mendaciousness?
Like, is it really cynical?
Does he really understand but kind of play the game cynically or or is he somehow truly, you know, blind to certain ways of thinking?
And, you know, Noam Chomsky could go on about this, like the intellectuals and what what drives their thinking and where they're coming from exactly.
Like, how can a guy like Ross?
He he's been there.
He's seen it all.
How could he be such a.
Well, and the thing is, too, is he could just as easily say, I mean, yeah, there's an occupation, but it's not that bad.
And whatever spin and and be at least somewhat honest of the facts and spin those instead of just completely ignoring the facts of the matter.
I would say, you know, the question in my interview with him was, look, the occupation is illegal.
Why should there be negotiation?
This is the this is the big question.
Like, why should there be a peace process or negotiations?
Like everybody says, oh, there's there have to be negotiations.
Why are there occupations against the law?
The international community should just be telling Israel to get out.
And supporting it, helping it, making it happen, but saying it's got to end and it's going to end in, you know, six months or something like that.
And what do you say to that?
Oh, well, I, of course, didn't go on at such a length.
Well, you know, I said to him, I said to him, why, why negotiate?
And he said, oh, you know, we just kind of shrugged it off.
He said, because, you know, it's you know, because there have to be negotiations.
Yeah.
And now.
So and now in your interview with him, when you it's funny the way I guess we'll skip it.
Everybody read the article for the funny way the interview took place in the first place here.
Pretty good thing.
But so I guess listen to the sound cloud.
Of course, there's a sound.
Oh, yeah.
You know what?
I'm sorry.
I never did get around to doing that.
I meant to do that and even have a couple of clips ready, but I spaced it out.
But yeah, the first thing you did was ask him about the occupation.
And and when you said 70 years and he said, huh?
Yeah, well, I said, you know, I said 70 years of dispossession and occupation.
So the dispossession began in 1947, 48.
But yeah, but he said, yeah, he said, what do you mean, 70 years?
So I said, right.
And then he kind of, OK, you know, the NACPA, right.
Oh, sure.
I wasn't going to follow him up on that because I wasn't about to get into a conversation with the NACPA with Dennis Ross.
But yeah, yeah.
He denies that in a sense.
He really does deny it.
He's not sure it was dispossession, but it's been a lot worse for other people.
And then as you wrote here, you said, OK, fine.
Then since 67, that's still 50 years.
And then and then I just love this.
This is the part where I think I tweeted it like, hey, everybody, go look at this right now.
That the best he can do is say, oh, yeah.
Compared to living under the Islamic state.
Derp, derp, derp.
Really?
That's the best he's got.
Yeah, it's worse than Syria.
Right.
And of course, you know, in a conversation that if we had had 30 minutes or even 20 to go on, I would have said, yeah, well, but there's you know, you say it's a whole lot worse in Syria.
But we don't support Syria where U.S. isn't giving five, six billion dollars a year to Bashar al-Assad and defending Assad at the United Nations.
We're doing that with Israel.
Israel is our dearest friend.
So, you know, it's not something that the United States should be supporting.
In the chat room, JDA says at this point, I'd go for a deal where they can have this bank if the U.S. can have D.C. back.
Right.
That'll be the day.
Poor Palestinians.
Okay.
I'm sorry.
Go ahead.
No, no.
I was just going to say so.
But, you know, talking to this guy, it's it's it's depressing.
It's depressing to talk to a person who is intelligent and and and understands and has seen it all and has had it all explained to him.
But who somehow denies who denies the truth.
But this is the essence.
Maybe this is kind of I don't know.
It's kind of I don't know, kind of obvious.
You know, there are all sorts of people like that.
Yeah.
Well, and you even confront him with the fact that Netanyahu has said that Israel will never give up, you know, security, however he put it.
It's one state from the river to the sea.
And then he says, no.
I mean, because Netanyahu had just spoken at where had he been?
He had been in the United States and he had said, you know, reaffirmed, you know, he had repeated a mantra to states for two people.
And and that then it was like a quick burst of it.
The news, right.
Netanyahu has confirmed that he's prepared to see a two state solution.
But it's nonsense.
And he had told the truth in the election that I'll be damned if we're going to ever give up Judea and Samaria.
I think we can take that to the bank, not his pandering to the US.
Well, yes, the Netanyahu and Netanyahu and the members of his government have continually state that they're under no circumstances.
Will they allow a Palestinian state to be formed?
And they've been saying that for years, for years.
Netanyahu has been saying that.
So for people like Ross and everyone else who talk about negotiated settlement and the two state solution and the peace process, it's it's it's willful, willful ignorance.
Well, now, well, I want to ask you about the president's thing.
But first of all, and I think you kind of confront him with this, where he says, oh, come on, Jewish settlements are only two percent of the West Bank.
And you say, yeah, but Area C and this is Netanyahu caught on secret tape bragging about how he took advantage of Clinton with Ross's help, I guess, in saying, oh, yeah, we're going to need this little Area C, too.
But then it was huge.
And don't worry, the Americans are easily moved and all that.
That was the context of that secret tape and Netanyahu.
And but anyway, so you counter with that that, hey, that's 60 percent of the West Bank.
And so that gets to what Phil was saying on the show a day before yesterday, which is there's no two state solution ever.
I mean, it is just a done deal.
That two percent and Area C and whatever amounts to de facto annexation of the West Bank.
And I guess and they'll never call it that so that they can always pretend that someday, someday, someday there will be a Palestinian state, you know, until whatever, 75 years from now, they finish finally colonizing the whole damn thing or something.
And and so what about that?
I mean, that's really Ross's game here is to just he's he's doing that pretending that's his role in this is to put us off basically.
The simple fact of the matter is that Netanyahu and his government and indeed Israeli society at large polling has showed are not really they're not in favor of giving up East Jerusalem.
They're not in favor of removing the settlers.
And the Netanyahu government is completely entirely wedded.
It's founded its whole political raison d'etre is establishing greater Israel, you know, building, building up Israel and taking it all.
It's theirs.
The land belongs to them.
And there are all these people saying it.
It's astonishing.
Right.
You know, Danny Dan and at the United Nations, they're all saying it.
And yet people like Dennis Ross and, of course, you know, Barack Obama and and Samantha Power and all the rest of them.
Brilliant people, brilliant, intelligent and inside decent people, people, people of conscience in many ways, certainly within the domestic realm in the United States.
But as far as Israel goes, they are there.
They're willful deniers.
But about the presence, I mean, he really seemed to say that Bill Clinton, the one who had empowered him to pull off this same scam, right, of the pseudo two state solution that never quite comes to fruition, that he's the only president who ever really did right by Israel or really meant well when it came to Israel.
And the proof of that was that Clinton hired Ross to be Israel's lawyer.
And every other president has just been, you know, all but an enemy of the poor little plucky Israelis.
Yeah, well, I mean, we haven't talked about this, but I think that all this all this historical analysis about which presidents differed in terms of policy in this way or that way.
And this is the strategy and this is where they were coming from and what they were thinking.
And I think the audience kind of he he lost his audience or the audience lost Ross because it's just it's too it's like it's it's voodoo, right?
It's kind of historical voodoo and and through the looking glass.
And it's it's absurd.
It's all and it's all pseudo intellectual, pseudo analytical, pseudo quasi historiographical.
And it's nonsense.
I think largely I think, you know, Noam Chomsky could go to town on on this kind of analysis.
It's perfectly mundane and devoid of devoid of any content.
You know, it's like somebody getting up there and talking astrology.
Yeah, well, yeah.
And of course, I mean, and his definitions as he cites, I don't want to ruin the whole article for everybody, but he basically cites the slightest little quibbles.
Right.
George W. Bush, who, you know, I guess at a couple of points lifted his pinky finger on one hand to slightly attempt to restrain Israel and then not.
After all, that amounts to, you know, vicious antisemitism, I guess, or something.
Yeah.
And each each and every president, there has not been a president since the beginning.
I mean, since, you know, modern times, who hasn't been completely wedded to the notion of American supremacy in the world and the dictates of power and the rest of them.
So all these characters, however, one might want to spin their particular point of view vis-a-vis Israel and the Palestinians.
They've all seen Israel as a as a vital ally and, you know, a blood brother of the United States.
Yeah.
Especially since the 60s and 70s.
Right.
Where?
Oh, for sure.
Yeah.
Yeah.
You know, postwar, immediately postwar.
No one knew, of course, how things were going to evolve.
Yeah.
But yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
All right.
Well, listen, man, it's really been great to have you on the show, David.
Really great article.
And it really, as you put it, it's really a through the looking glass kind of experience.
I think people will have a little private riot as they read this thing.
Dennis Ross says Clinton was only was the only president to stamp down anti-Israel forces inside the White House.
That's the headline at Mondoweiss.net.
Thanks very much, David.
Thank you, Scott.
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