I'm the director of the Libertarian Institute, editorial director of Antiwar.com, author of the book Fool's Aaron, Time to End the War in Afghanistan, and the brand new Enough Already, Time to End the War on Terrorism, and I've recorded more than 5,500 interviews since 2003, almost all on foreign policy, and all available for you at scotthorton.org.
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All right, you guys, introducing Alan McLeod from mintpressnews.com.
Welcome back.
How you doing?
It's good to be with you.
Happy to have you here.
All right.
Listen, the big topic is, of course, Israel-Palestine and all that, and we're going to talk about the CIA woke ads and all that stuff later when we get to it, but first on the Israel-Palestine thing, I saw that you and like our old friend Adam Johnson, I guess both formerly of Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, are doing a great job keeping track of the way the American media characterizes the clashes, as they call them, in Palestine, in East Jerusalem, and then, of course, with the rockets from Hamas in the Gaza Strip, and the rest of that, and so I've had Phil Weiss to talk about the American politics, and Ramsey Baroud to talk about what's going on in East Jerusalem, and I'm going to have Max Blumenthal on to give the real lowdown on the entire who's whom and who all over the place since 48 and before and what have you, but with you, I want to focus specifically on this incredible, just in its own right, if you're like, take a totally sociopathic, dispassionate, George Karlinian take on the thing, it's amazing and impressive and hilarious and crazy, the public relations campaign around the Israeli government killing people, its own people, as our government would say if this was happening anywhere else in the world.
Oh, 100%.
It seems that pretty much all of the corporate media across the spectrum is going out to bat and play defense for Israel right now.
They're trying to defend the indefensible, in my opinion.
They're trying to complicate a situation, muddy, very clear waters, which is pretty clearly an unprovoked attack on a group of civilians worshipping at a holy site during Ramadan at the most sacred time of the year and turning that into a sort of both sides narrative where, you know, one side had machine guns and stun grenades, but the others had, you know, stones and prayer rugs.
So who's to say who's, you know, who's really at fault?
And that's what's really going on.
I mean, even in, uh, even in the reporting, it's like, uh, they say things like Israel and Hamas are trading blows as if these modified fireworks and bottle rockets that Hamas have got are somehow, um, comparable to the U.S. made, uh, missiles from Boeing and General Dynamics and Raytheon that Israel is firing into civilian populations.
The other thing they always, um, they never talk about Israel fighting Palestine.
They always talk about Israel versus Hamas because of course Hamas is this scary terrorist organization and it has to be separated from the people of Palestine as if the Palestinians haven't constantly voted in Hamas as their political party.
But apart from that, yeah, I mean, corporate media are going out to bat and whenever something like this happens, it's always interesting seeing a new generation of people being radicalized and really waking up and opening their eyes to just how deceitful and mischievous and misleading corporate media can be.
Yeah.
Just one detail there though.
The only time Hamas ever won an election was back in 2006.
And uh, I mean, don't get me wrong, it's pretty clear they're fighting on behalf of the Palestinians near them, but I don't know how much allegiance they really command.
My point there, it seems to me more like they're trustees in an Israeli prison.
And the real point is that in fact, as I've noticed, you know, and I know it cuts both ways all the time because it's all hypocrisy and, and, and spin anyway.
But a lot of the times that when there's violent conflict, especially they'll say, oh yeah, so it's, you know, the Palestinians are attacking us.
They never really say the state of Palestine.
But the implication is that what occupation?
Palestine is the country next door.
It'd be like if the Mexicans were attacking us, that's what they say.
What if the Mexicans were shooting rockets at us?
Instead where really an apt metaphor would be more like the prison riot at Attica in New Jersey, you know, against governor Rockefeller.
There's a, an entire different proportion and scale and framing of everything when you look at it that way, where, and they always do confuse this issue, even though someday we're going to have a two state solution.
Also sometimes Palestine is the country next door and they're using terrorism and these horrible indiscriminate rocket attacks in order to try to extort land out of Israel.
But why should the Israelis give into that kind of madness?
Yeah.
Thanks for the Hamas point.
And in fact, you, I'm sure we both remember in 2006 and before that Hamas was actually being kind of quietly pushed by the Israeli government as like a, a counterweight to the more secular Fatah.
That's right.
But yeah, I mean we talk about the occupied Palestinian territories a lot, but it's very rarely actually pointed out who is doing the occupying of who.
So most Americans when polled, it seems, seem to think that the Palestinians are occupying the Israeli land and not the other way around.
And that's the fundamental basis of which you really have to understand the conflict.
It's of one nation dispossessing another in order to fund a sort of settler colonial project and that is never really explained in the media.
And so therefore we have a situation where Western audiences, particularly American audiences, I find are just completely bereft of any kind of background information of what's going on and therefore they're unable to process how to understand this.
And so they have this completely absurd and different picture of what's going on there to the rest of the world.
Hey y'all, Scott here.
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So now, am I lucky enough, you happen to have your Twitter feed in front of us.
Can you take us through some examples of the kind of weird constructs?
I know some of these, it's pretty laughable the way they're bending over backwards to try to figure out a way to phrase these things right.
Much like as we always see when a cop kills someone, whether even possibly justified or couldn't possibly be, it's always an officer involved shooting where guns were discharged and you know, the man died after the gun discharged in the shooting that the officer was somehow involved in this kind of, and I know you have a whole bunch of them because I saw how you're tweeting about this the other day.
Yeah, I do have them.
I mean, first of all, the New York Post just completely reversed the situation and said that airstrikes from Hamas militants killed 20 in Israel, including nine kids, which is completely the opposite of what happened.
It was actually Israeli airstrikes in Palestine killing children.
Deutsche Welt, the German, big German state funded corporation, their media outlet said that, you know, Palestinian health officials in the Gaza Strip say 20 people, including nine children, have been killed in fighting with Israel.
And it kind of leads you to think, sorry, they're kind of assuming or suggesting that the children were fighting as if they were legitimate targets somehow.
You also see a ton of articles talking about unrest and strife and trading blows when in fact this is one onslaught, an onslaught from one group against another group.
Or what else do we see that Associated Press talking about how Palestinian rockets killed two Israelis, meanwhile, 26 die in Gaza as Israel hits Hamas.
So again, it's the use of this passive voice where 26 people just magically die somehow, but Hamas killed two Israelis.
And that's always the thing.
It's always the active voice whenever Hamas or a Palestinian does something wrong.
But it's always this very passive both sides.
Who even knows who's in the right and who's in the wrong when Israel is doing it to Palestine?
And yeah, we see that constantly going through whoever we want to see.
You know, we there's all sorts of examples of this 20 dead in Gaza as Israel responds to Hamas rocket fire.
Again, making it sound like Israel is just responding to an aggressive neighbor and that 20 people just magically die.
That headline really should be Israel kills 20 in Gaza.
But that's not what we see.
And it's all about trying to alleviate the blame from the United States, a good friend in the region, Israel, and to try to sort of muddy the waters so that people don't take a very obvious and clear moral stance against what's going on.
Yeah.
By the way, you know, somebody that I know said to me that, look, you know what?
Yeah, you're right.
But hey, they lost a war and they lost it fair and square.
And so the Israelis rule that territory now.
And that's just how these things go.
Which first of all, it's the international law, whether you agree with it or not.
And I'm pretty skeptical.
But whether you agree or not, it's the international law that America wrote that says that you can't do that.
And secondly, the 67 war was started by Israel against Egypt.
And then Jordan and Syria attacked.
But the Palestinians were absolutely helpless.
It was the Egyptians who ruled Gaza, not the Gazans, not the Palestinians, who were all a bunch of refugees there anyway, who weren't even from there, but 80 something percent of them refugees or more.
And then and in the West Bank, they were ruled by Jordan.
So in other words, you're supposed to believe that somehow Jordan had the right to lose the West Bank to Israel, right?
Or the Israelis had the right to pretend it's like Jefferson pretending to buy Louisiana from France when actually it already belonged to somebody else.
It's just absurd on the face of it, you know.
And I know people like the Louisiana Purchase, but you got to admit the absurdity of the argument there that this was Napoleon's to sell.
Come on.
Oh, absolutely.
And we never accept this for official enemy states.
We don't think we nobody says, well, you know, Russia invaded Crimea fair and square.
And so therefore, everybody should think Crimea is part of Russia, not Ukraine.
How many people in Washington are saying that?
Not many.
And going back to World War Two or or maybe a little bit later, you know, when the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan, nobody said, well, you know, fair play.
They've they've won that war.
They deserve to control it.
No, they were funding arms, sending all sorts of weapons to the Mujahideen for years, which incidentally, you know, sparked off a whole, you know, can of worms there.
But yeah, nobody accepts this idea that, well, we won the warfare and square.
So it's our territory.
And that's not how international law works.
And it's not how anything works when it's our enemies doing it either.
And then.
So it was about 10 years after the war, really 12, I guess, in 79, they did the Camp David Accords and people know that that was a peace deal with Egypt.
But people don't know that in there, they promised that they would give up the West Bank and Gaza Strip as a Palestinian state.
Oh, we're going to begin a peace process here.
And that was 40 years ago.
Right.
And that's what we were talking with Phil Weiss earlier on the show about how even everybody admits now it's too late for the two.
Well, everybody, but the Democratic Party politicians.
But more and more people are admitting that.
Look, I mean, that's just a red herring.
Maybe it always was that they're ever going to give up the West Bank.
Instead, they're devouring the whole thing.
And now it's so divided up by Israeli settlements.
There's just nothing.
It would cause a civil war within among Israeli Jews if they tried to close down all those settlements and give up what they call Judea and Samaria and allow the Palestinians to keep their measly 22 percent of historic Palestine to even have that.
And so.
But now what?
You know, too many people are having to admit they're calling it apartheid.
They're calling it ethnic cleansing.
When you look at what's going on in East Jerusalem, because that's what you call it.
That's exactly what it is.
And so it's pretty dire straits that they're in in terms of their public relations campaign.
You know, I'd hate to be a hasbaris now.
I see their best efforts on Twitter and they seem to fall pretty short.
As you were saying, oh, yeah, rockets fell on us.
But for anyone who wants to look clearly at that and and ask, well, what happened before that at all, then they can see who's the aggressor and who's the defender here.
Yeah, sure.
And I've been looking quite deeply into Israeli online efforts just now.
I'm part of a lot of WhatsApp and telegram groups, and I've got the ACT.
IL Israeli government funded app, which tells you what posts to like and where to go and what comments to leave.
But it's really not working very well right now.
This is a terrible PR disaster for Israel and it's not getting much better.
But fortunately for them, they've got a lot of willing allies in corporate media all around the West.
Yeah, of course.
That's certainly true.
But, you know, I don't know.
There's so much admitted ignorance.
I see that, too.
I mean that in the nicest way, too.
A lot of people are saying to me, hey, who's who and what the hell is going on over here anyway, where it's honest ignorance, no ill will and just a willingness to listen.
And so you start to notice pretty soon who's got to resort to absurdities, you know, in order to spin what their side is doing or the side of their supporting is doing.
And by the way, I'm sorry I didn't see that until just now.
At MintPressNews.com, in wake of HRW apartheid report, Israeli propagandists launch global PR offensive.
Talk more about that.
What is this Act.il app and the rest of this?
Yeah, it was started a few years ago by money from the Israeli government and by Sheldon Adelson, a very famous U.S. billionaire who supports all kind of far right Israeli projects.
Act.il is basically an app which you can download freely at the app store.
And it gives you all sorts of missions.
It's kind of basic.
It feels like you're playing a game, doing quests and missions and gaining points and moving up on the leaderboard.
But what the missions tend to be are reporting, reporting posts which are either anti-Semitic or anti-Israel, liking comments, leaving comments on things, trying to change the narrative online.
It's got over 19,000 downloads, but frankly, as far as I can tell right now, it's not really having a huge effect because just the power of the image is coming out of social media.
Nowadays, everybody's got a camera phone.
They can take their own.
They can take their own pictures and get them online.
And frankly, that's a lot more powerful than any kind of brokered, negotiated, highly PR-ized, think-tanked, worked out kind of propaganda because it just doesn't hit as hard as, you know, actual, truthful, first-hand accounts of what's going on right now.
So, yeah, Israel are trying to control the message by having a lot of good PR online.
But, you know, frankly, I don't think it's working on social media.
So right now I think they're trying to lean on their associations with big outlets.
We saw certain hashtags suppressed on Instagram, certain posts taken down off Facebook.
But ultimately, just the sheer weight of numbers of people complaining and decrying what they're doing right now is having a huge effect on them.
I think they're not going to live this down for a while.
Right.
Yeah.
You know, all of this social media, just like all the Internet, is a huge double-edged sword.
You know, as we learn from Snowden, which we already knew from Bamford, that they've been using all of this stuff against us all along.
But we get to use it back against them sometimes.
And Twitter and Facebook have been so powerful on really changing politics in a lot of good ways, too.
Radicalizing just regular people on issues of police abuse, for example, in the last decade, in a way that Rather, Jennings and Brokaw would have never let them see that there's a real problem here.
But on Facebook, you can't ignore it.
Your cousin Jimmy is like, man, did you see this one?
My God.
And then the same thing here with people going, this is what it's like to be in the in the Gaza Strip.
And then you look out the window and they're bombing an apartment building and then another one and another one and another one.
Well, we don't like it when people bomb our towers.
Really, do we?
I remember us kind of having a thing about that.
What the hell's going on over there anyway?
And then you see on the other side, essentially homemade rockets, which they're pretty damn good for homemade rockets.
But you're talking about essentially an open air prison with no open trade whatsoever.
These are not Iranian missiles.
These are rocket.
Not even the Hawks would dare call them missiles.
They're, you know, essentially made out of pipe that you'd use for coping on your ramp.
You know, give me a break.
And and then they say, oh, look, indiscriminate fire at civilians.
Yeah, well, we can all fly American F-16s with laser guided bombs like the other side has.
You know, I mean, what in the world?
How how long can people be expected to swallow that?
And the Americans and the Israelis, their side, they can kill whoever they want.
Oh, well, that's just collateral damage.
But shooting a rocket over your prison wall and and they have killed innocent civilians on the other side, that is true and condemnable.
But at the same time, what the hell are they supposed to do?
Just lay down and die?
Is that it?
They have no other option.
They try to protest.
They get sniped.
Yeah, I mean, I'm kind of tempted to suggest that maybe the Palestinians should ask the US for laser guided missiles to make sure that their rockets aren't so indiscriminate.
I wonder if those political commentators saying that would would be all for that.
That's actually a great idea.
Listen, guys, we pull all of our money together and we offer to buy a Patriot missile battery.
You think that could help get, you know, Boeing on the Palestinian side?
Yeah, I've got a feeling that Boeing and a lot of people in Washington probably aren't going to go for that idea.
Damn.
And worth floating the idea, I don't know.
Geez.
Yeah.
So.
And yeah, really, they bomb apartment buildings and then they go, well, we give them a warning first.
Oh, sure, but listen, you know, the Israeli government in the Israeli military, sometimes they're just so crazy that they don't even realise how bad they look, even when they're trying to look good.
So those images of those apartment buildings, even ones that house foreign press in Gaza that have been being destroyed by missiles and rockets, they seem to think that makes them look good, saying that, you know, we gave them a couple of hours warning before we destroyed their building.
But these things going down actually look highly reminiscent of 9-11 to my eyes, with the terrorists just imploding and, you know, going down on themselves in a pancake fashion.
And that's people's family photo albums in there, man, you know?
Yeah, as you said, like, you know, that sort of trauma of 9-11 started 20 years of permanent war in the US.
But, you know, in these Israeli videos, they're supposed to be like celebrated that they're doing that.
It's just sickening and disgusting in equal measure.
And people don't always get out in time.
I mean, they give them this warning knock where they drop what like a bomb with no warhead on it and let you know that you better get out.
You have a minute and a half to comply.
Grab your hard drive if you can.
We're going to level your entire apartment.
I mean, this is people's homes.
It's crazy.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And they always talk about, you know, Hamas using human shields.
But, you know, frankly, where are Hamas supposed to put their buildings and their fighters?
You know, Gaza is one of the most densely inhabited places in the world.
There really is no place in that city, in that strip that is away from civilians.
And so when the Israelis say that Gaza are using human shields, but they never seem to kind of push that on themselves and say, well, maybe we shouldn't be firing huge missiles into densely inhabited urban areas.
That never seems to come up.
So, yeah, there's a double standard there as well.
God, look at this, Alan.
The Israeli defense minister has threatened Gaza will burn.
And the Jerusalem Post announced earlier, hell, I should have led with this.
I'm sorry.
The Jerusalem Post was saying they're preparing a ground invasion now.
I have seen that, yes.
Well, Netanyahu has political problems, you understand.
Well, it's just so worrying when you read stuff like that, because they said, you know, Gaza will invade unless Gaza becomes completely quiet.
And, you know, what are you supposed to infer from that?
Completely quiet in a city that has over two million people living in it.
What does that mean?
Yeah.
And on the human shields thing, by the way, Sarah Lee Whitson, I think is her name, from Human Rights Watch or formerly from Human Rights Watch, had a series of tweets, you know, a thread that she put out explaining that Hamas should do everything they can to stay away from civilians.
And that is on them to do that, to the degree that that's under their control.
But that's not what a human shield is.
And then she goes through and explains about, you know, deliberately using civilians to hide behind in attacks and what all the precedents and definitions are for that.
And it's an entirely different thing than, well, we're fighting them and they're in a city.
Oh, sure.
Yeah.
I mean, and if you really want to talk about human shields, I think there have been more than one case of the Israeli military being accused of doing exactly the same thing.
So in pictures of a projection.
Yeah.
I'm sorry.
Yeah.
No pictures of it to Palestinians being tied to the front of Israeli jeeps and this kind of thing.
Little kids being made to walk ahead of them into apartments that they're raiding.
Yeah, exactly.
This is this is the the sort of the actions of an occupying state.
This is not, you know, a peace loving human rights supporting entity which Israel tries to present itself in the West.
We see a lot of talk about how it's like, you know, the gay capital of the world, a paradise for tolerance.
I'm a vegan, so I get a lot of targeted ads from the Israeli government telling me how wonderful Israel is for vegans and how little cruelty there is in their country.
But ultimately, I get kind of a sort of mixed message where I think, well, are you treating animals better than you treat your the human population under your control?
That's what that's what I kind of get from these ads.
Yeah, man.
All right, well, listen, I'm sorry I'm out of time here, but I'm going to read this whole article.
What's the date?
It's a few days old.
We may have already run this, man.
I'm behind on everything, but if we haven't already run it, I'll see if I can link to this great article of yours at Mint Press News on Antiwar.com and get some more eyeballs on that there.
In the wake of HRW Apartheid Report, which we discussed earlier in the day with Phil Weiss, by the way.
In wake of HRW Apartheid Report, Israeli propagandists launched global PR offensive and of course, ongoing here.
And that's at Mint Press News.
Alan McLeod, thank you, sir.
Appreciate it.
Good to speak with you.
The Scott Horton Show, Antiwar Radio, can be heard on KPFK 90.7 FM in L.A., APSRadio.com, Antiwar.com, ScottHorton.org, and LibertarianInstitute.org.
