5/5/17 Ramzy Baroud on Palestinian resistance to 70 years of Israeli occupation and domination

You hate government?
One of them libertarian types?
Maybe you just can't stand the president, gun grabbers, or warmongers.
Me too.
That's why I invented libertystickers.com.
Well, Rick owns it now and I didn't make up all of them, but still, if you're driving around and want to tell everyone else how wrong their politics are, there's only one place to go.
Libertystickers.com has got your bumper covered.
Left, right, libertarian, empire, police, state, founders, quote, central banking.
Yes, bumper stickers about central banking.
Lots of them.
And, well, everything that matters.
Libertystickers.com.
Everyone else's stickers suck.
All right, you guys, Scott Horton Show.
4,000, almost 4,500 interviews there at scotthorton.org slash interviews, questions and answer stuff at scotthorton.org slash show.
Check out the Libertarian Institute where I'm the managing director at libertarianinstitute.org.
And, of course, follow me on Twitter at scotthortonshow.
All right, check it out.
On the line, we got our friend Ramzi Baroud.
And Ramzi is, of course, the editor of Palestine Chronicle.
He's the author of the book, My Father Was a Freedom Fighter.
He's a Palestinian refugee and an American.
And you are, right now you're in Qatar, is that right?
That's correct.
I'm working on a project for Al Jazeera about Palestine.
Gotcha.
All right.
Good deal.
Well, thank you very much for joining us on the show.
I really appreciate you.
And now, so here's the thing, man.
There's this huge hunger strike.
I don't know how huge it is in American media.
I actually haven't been watching TV in a few months now.
But, you know, certainly I'm reading about it in foreign media somewhat.
But this audience needs to be brought up to date.
So can you give us, first of all, the overall, who are these men, these Palestinians in Israeli prison, and why are they hunger striking?
Okay.
So basically, you have about 6,500 Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails.
Hundreds of them are held with no due process and no trials in what they call administrative detention.
They include hundreds of children, about 300 plus child and many women as well.
The prisoners really is kind of one of these issues that usually unifies all Palestinians, regardless of their ideological or political backgrounds.
This particular hunger strike is led by Marwan Barghouti.
Marwan Barghouti is a very, very important Palestinian character.
And I think it, you know, we are going to be hearing his name for years to come.
He has been in an Israeli jail for his responsibility in organizing the uprising, the Intifada of 2000.
He has been there for about 12 years now, and he's sentenced to many more years.
He is the most popular Palestinian leader, far more popular than Mahmoud Abbas can ever be, and even more popular than the Hamas leaders as well.
And this is what makes this particular hunger strike very, very important.
Mahmoud Abbas met Donald Trump on May 3rd.
He was trying to kind of show him a side of the Palestinian leadership that is more cooperative and more compromising.
Mahmoud Abbas is keenly interested in funds and in the American-Israeli political validation.
Without U.S.-Israeli support, Mahmoud Abbas and his authority will not exist.
Marwan Barghouti, however, is much closer to the pulse of Palestinians in the street, even though he has been in prison for many years.
In fact, I think because he has been in prison for many years and the likes of Abbas, very wealthy, running all over the place, you know, live in fancy mansions and the sort.
So while this hunger strike, you know, is supposedly about making life easier for the prisoners and giving them more time with their parents and their families during visitation times and that sort of thing, in reality, it carries a more profound political meaning.
In my last article in anti-war.com, I explained that this is in fact a prisoner's rebellion against the status quo.
Not that we matter and we are here, but also we refuse the status quo, the idea that as long as the Palestinian authority is happy and content with its political validation and money and funds, everything is OK.
Now, we are still living under occupation.
In some in some ways, all Palestinians are prisoners.
If you live under Israeli military occupation, you are prisoners.
So it's it's really a prison within prison.
This is again, this is why the issue of the prisoner is very, very important for Palestinians everywhere, because they can relate to it personally, because, again, everyone feels to some extent a prisoner.
But another really, really important thing is that a few months ago, a Palestinian rights group called Ad Damir, which means the conscience, came with a report that said since 1967, since Israel occupied the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem, 800000 Palestinian male been to Israeli prison.
That is 40 percent of the entire the entire male population of all of occupied Palestine.
Just to give you an idea of how the issue of imprisonments and arbitrary sentencing and that sort of thing is something that is so widely common in Palestine.
I mean, that's just amazing.
Right.
Either it's sort of like when we talk about the numbers of Americans in prison, either Americans are the worst criminal barbarians in the world or our government is out of control.
Same thing here.
These Palestinians are either a bunch of lying, cheating thieves or they're being horribly persecuted by the occupying power.
I think I have a cue which is a clue which is which here.
And now and I want to bring up here real quick, because I think it's important.
I know this is a little bit outside of your expertise.
I'm sure you're familiar.
But Todd Pierce, who is a former defense lawyer, a former JAG, I should be specific about that, a former military defense lawyer, including assignments down at Guantanamo Bay Prison, has written a 10,000 word article explaining this and has come on the show to talk about the the name of the system of, quote unquote, law that the Palestinians of the West Bank are ruled under.
And I guess the Gaza Strip, too.
I'm not sure if there's really a difference in the the category of law there.
But what he's saying is that when we think when Americans think of being under martial law, like in Katrina just after Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans for a week or whatever it was, or or or worse when, you know, in the riots in the 1960s, the race riots where you had literal army, not just National Guard, but army come in and this kind of thing that that's martial law.
But that what the Palestinians live under is a whole other level.
It's occupation war law.
This is like the same rules that govern the Americans when they invaded and occupied Iraq and they were occupying Fallujah or occupying Baghdad.
It's this system of law is a whole other level of lawlessness, actually, than even martial law, which is light years beyond what Americans consider to be the rule of law.
I mean, when you say administrative detention, well, that's prison without trial.
I mean, we don't have that here.
Right.
Or maybe we do for some.
We might as well.
And we have a system of bullying people into plea bargains and stuff.
But but to just outright arrest people with no pretension of Article three court having the right of review or having the ability to give these people a chance to even say their own side of the story.
This is the kind of thing that to Americans is is completely alien and and oriental.
It sounds like something out of the Chinese tyranny under their Communist Politburo.
They're not something under a Western democracy like Israel.
That's correct.
I'm speaking of which, you know, I'm in the United States.
We have what we prior to 9-11.
We called it the secret evidence law.
And the funny thing is that I mean, it is essentially administrative detention law.
But the ones who were persecuted based on the secret evidence law were actually mostly Palestinians, because of their supposedly anti Israel activities in the United States.
I think that's just an interesting little addendum and that we are we don't learn lots of good things from Israel.
Even in Iraq in the Abu Grabe, they had, you know, their one of their tortures was we put them in the Palestinian chair.
Well, that doesn't mean because this is how Palestinians torture each other.
That's not what it means.
It means this is what the Israelis do to the Palestinians in their administrative detention.
And you mentioned earlier, you said, you know, the media, unfortunately, not just in American media, Scott, which is really quite typical and surprising that they don't talk about these issues.
And the issue of prisoners here is been kind of really covered or or pushed aside by the fact that the region itself is on fire.
Syria is in, you know, constant crisis, war in Yemen and so forth.
So it's like these prisoners are just pleading for attention from prison, not just for themselves, but for their own people as well.
And they are getting very, very little media coverage.
This is why we very much appreciate what you're doing on your show and what others are doing by trying to really trying to level out the playing field, even if just a little.
Yeah.
Well, I mean, it's just a simple matter of fairness.
You know, I thought about trying to come up with a skit where we do like, hey, you guys have been asking about the history of Israel, Palestine.
Let me see if I can explain and then just tell the whole story backwards about how the Arabs and the Palestinians kept winning all these battles.
And they've herded the Jews into these horrible ghettos in the Gaza Strip and in the West Bank.
And this is how they treat them.
This is how they torture them in the Palestinian chair.
And this is all these things.
People will be absolutely outraged.
No wonder everybody's so pro-Israel that they're under such Palestinian tyranny, you know, but then you just switch it around and tell them the truth about who's persecuting who.
You know, it's in fact, the way the real myth, the way they push it is that Israel is this tiny little, let's face it, this is the implication here, Ramsey, white led, Ashkenazi Jewish, European Jewish led, Western democracy, as they always put it, surrounded by these brown, Oriental Arab barbarians who are constantly threatening to push them into the sea and exterminate them all and all that.
When the reality is that that's the story of the people of the Gaza Strip who are completely surrounded and besieged by the Israelis and their allies in the tyranny in Egypt.
And in fact, Israel is friends with the Jordanians and the tyranny in Egypt.
And they're certainly not threatened by the Syrians or even Hezbollah in southern Lebanon.
No one's threatening to push them into the sea at all.
That's the story of what they're doing to the poor people of the Gaza Strip.
For one example, have them besieged and threatened and persecuted and bombed and droned and banned from even fishing on their own coast or developing their own resources or even having an airport for Christ's sake, even being able to travel elsewhere in the world.
It's absolutely crazy.
Sorry.
I know this is supposed to be an interview, but I just, you know, all they do is just turn the truth completely upside down so that people just don't know what to make of it anymore.
It's confusing because it's just a bunch of lies.
Anyway, so here's a question.
What do you make of all of that, Ramzi?
What do we do?
I don't know.
Oh, that's a tough question.
I think at this point, really, it's a question that we contend with all the time.
Now I am in the Middle East for a while.
I wrote an article recently called after dash, who is going to fill the intellectual vacuum in the Arab world.
And I the same question applies in Palestine.
I feel like in our capacity as journalists, as writers, intellectuals, really all that we can do at the moment is to really convey this painful truth that people need to hear.
You know, the situation is not changing because people don't really understand what the situation is.
And the moment we start, you know, the whole thing starts unraveling and we start deconstructing all of this.
And for people to understand who's the victim and who's the aggressor, you know, then there is the issue of moral accountability.
What do I do about it?
As Palestinians, we say, well, there's plenty you can do.
You can take a moral choice.
You can boycott Israel.
You can, you know, tell your Congress that I do not stand for this.
I don't support this.
So the media enough with this bias, enough telling a story that has been told over and over and over again for nearly 7070 years.
Yet the opposite of that story is actually being conveyed.
You know, we talk about freedom in our media and freedom of expression.
How could this so much freedom of expression convey such an erroneous version of history?
We need to challenge this.
All of these myths, I think, I think that's really the most we can do at this point.
Well, you know, that's your previous article here, too, is Palestinian and Jewish voices must challenge Israel's past together.
And, you know, a bit of this is about the discrepancy of views between American Jews and Israeli ones, where American Jews are actually good on this.
They're liberals.
They're civil rights types.
They don't support apartheid in Israel, South Africa or anywhere else.
So it seems like, you know, you shouldn't have to invoke them to show that you're right, but might as well.
It's you know, you do it well in this article.
The only reason that they're good on this is because they're right.
This is unfair.
Why would they support it?
It's unfair.
And since they're Americans, not Israelis, they're not really in on, well, I got some free land, I got to move into some guy's house that I stole or whatever.
They don't have any benefit of it.
And so they're just looking at it on the face of it, just like they were talking about any other groups of people anywhere in the world.
These people are treating those people unfairly.
Simple as that.
That's right.
So that's real progress, you know, I think.
Yes, my article is essentially saying is that, first of all, we can't be looking at the conflict as something that started in the 1967 war is absolutely fictional history.
The story started in 1948 when Israel was established on the ruins of 530 Palestinian towns and villages, and where nearly a million people were ethnically cleansed.
It just started then.
And for us as Palestinians, our narrative is constantly positioned on that particular date.
Israelis who are, you know, supposedly pro peace in the peace movement in Israel, constantly try to negate that, you know, kind of relocate that history and re situated somewhere entirely different.
This is about 1967.
And we'd say we can't do that.
You can't do that.
If you truly, truly seek peace and reconciliation and justice, you have got to try to understand history from our point of view as the this affected victims of it, especially that that that we can't possibly see a resolution without looking into the issue of the refugees and the issue of very few refugees goes back in 1948.
But what is worth reporting and positive here is that there are more and more voices in in among the Jewish community around the world, but even in Israel itself, that are kind of slowly moving towards that direction.
People like Yuri of Neri does not want to take responsibility for that history, but he acknowledges that that history is actually has actually taken place.
They denied that even there was such a thing as ethnic cleansing, such a thing as a destruction of a country called Palestine.
Now we are seeing more voices joining us.
And I think this is very, very important for the future of that region, especially if we want to envisage a future and we are all sharing that land and sharing the resources and building a shared common future together.
We can't do that without having a common narrative of what took place and how we can redeem the past.
Now, let me ask you this.
And, you know, we've talked about this before, you know, and it seems to me like, hey, if fair is fair, then, you know, I agree with you.
One man, one vote, one state.
And, you know, if the government's only job is protecting everybody's rights, then who cares who's the majority, right?
As long as fair is fair and property is property.
But so on the other hand, like just to play that counterfactual, the 48 versus 67 and all that.
Do you think that if after 67, the Israelis had not, you know, built a bunch of settlements and had just said, basically, all right, we keep winning and all of that, but you guys can have your rump of a state on your 22 percent and had gone ahead and let there be a Palestinian state ever since then, through the 70s and through today, and go ahead and let the Palestinian Christians and Muslims have independence on the West Bank and Gaza and in East Jerusalem.
And for the right of return, sorry, but at least you have a free and independent and prosperous West Bank that you can return to, which you're going to have to settle for kind of thing.
That clearly has been good enough for all the governments of the region.
I don't know whether that means it's good enough for anybody else.
I wonder if you think that if they had at least taken that tack that, you know, we're trying to be honest and fair is fair about it.
You can have your 22 percent, but really have it not this area C loopholes and security, you know, whatever nonsense.
Do you think that they could have gotten away with that?
I guess that's kind of been my argument is that now there's nothing but a one state solution available.
But it seems like they could have gotten away with that if they had been good sports about it, but they weren't.
I think that's a really, really interesting argument, Scott.
And I think a lot of people would agree with you.
They would have said, yes, I think that would have kind of more or less kind of arranged a future in which things would have been somewhat acceptable for Palestinians.
Get on, get on, maybe a famous Israeli journalist, one of the very, very few voices in mainstream media in Israel that actually says it as it is.
He argued in in a recent article in our it's called our neck, but he said that Israel won the war of 1967, but pretty much lost everything else.
And one of the things that they have lost is that they have lost the ability to actually make peace.
They were almost like their own power, their own military prowess, of course, that is funded and predicated almost entirely on American money and military hardware, almost turned against them.
They became their own worst enemies, in a sense, because they had enough power that they could reshape everything.
When they occupied the West Bank, Gaza and Israel, they also occupied the Golan Heights and parts of Jordan and the Sinai Desert.
They occupied what became three times the size of Israel over the course of one week.
And instead of really thinking in terms, you know, in terms of future vision, okay, now we can pretty much dictate the terms, they could have dictated a manageable settlement, because, you know, naturally, Palestinians are going to fight regardless of their the balances of power.
They didn't they exploded to the absolute maximum, the ethnic declines, another 300,000 Palestinians on top of the nearly million person in 1948, they start building settlements like crazy, and they try to rearrange the entire region once more in their image.
And that's what they got stuck with.
They have this Israel is a powerful country, but it's a country that is really entirely predicated on the secure on a strategy that is based on matter of military power and and security.
There is nothing else, right?
That's what the clean break is, right?
That's what the whole worms are Netanyahu doctrine is forget getting along with anybody, we'll just have a nuke to their head.
And they'll have to leave us alone.
That's right.
But But how long can you actually sustain that?
Yeah, you know, that's that's Gareth Porter's book about Vietnam.
It's called the perils of dominance, about how when you have too much power, then you go getting yourself into too much trouble.
That's right.
And they are in that situation now.
So So on one hand, you might say, well, Israel is really quite powerful.
Yes.
But the more power it has, the more it, you know, it, it gives itself the right to dictate the terms of living on Palestinians, even this, they are changing Arabic street names, they are changing, they are outlying people's commemoration of their history of their neck bus, it is actually illegal for you to commemorate as a Palestinian, but also as an Israeli who is in solidarity with Palestinians, to even commemorate 1948.
It's actually considered the act of treason.
And if you're an Israeli NGO, they take your funding away from you.
So they are now again, because they think that they can, they are interfering in the very discourse.
This is the greatest democracy in the Middle East or whatever, they are actually interfering in the very language in the very discourse.
And, you know, the defense minister in Israel, the other day, he said, the Israeli radio should not be referring to the West Bank, they should be calling it Yehuda and Samaria, the biblical names, they are actually going that far.
So they are in no mood to even talk about leaving the occupied territories, they want to rename them or take them back to the biblical terminology that Israel refers to the West Bank by.
Well, and of course, we saw in the last election, where Netanyahu said, more or less, never mind what I say on TV, sometimes, the real policy is we will never give up the control of the West Bank.
It's all Israel from the river to the sea forever, period.
And I guess that doesn't mean here comes the next trail of tears and the next knock button, we're going to push all the Palestinians out in one fell swoop.
But it just means that whatever, if it takes a couple 100 years, we're going to just squeeze them out one by one, you know, lock them in administrative detention, so they can't raise a family, or whatever it is, and just keep establishing these facts on the ground until one day, it just is Israel and the, I don't know what they really think.
I mean, they themselves call the demographic bomb, that Palestinians just keep having kids anyway, and more than the Israelis do.
And so I don't know how they really, I don't know if they have a long term plan.
Whenever I ask this, people always say, well, you know, Netanyahu never thinks beyond next week.
But it seems like somebody over there has got to be thinking, you know, like Ehud Barak, we hear him say, geez, we've, we've really painted ourselves into a corner here, guys, where we're turning into apartheid, South Africa, turning haha, but still.
And something's got to be done about it.
But seems like on the flip side of it, they don't seem to recognize the problem with the situation that they've created.
They seem to think that they could just get away with having outright apartheid, you know, indefinitely, but that doesn't seem very sustainable to me.
You know, when the whole world is against it, except Americans, because they don't understand it, but everybody else understands it, and opposes it.
It seems, you know, with BDS growing, and all of this stuff that it's, do you do you have an idea what they think their plan is?
First of all, I think it's unsustainable, whatever the plan is, Israeli Zionists, that the generation, the first and second generation of Zionists who lived through 1948, prior and after, many of them were Palestinian Jews before Israel was established, they were just simply Palestinian Jews.
And many of them actually came from Eastern Europe and other parts of the world.
That generation seemed to have a plan.
You know, the likes of Ariel Sharon and Shimon Peres, they had a plan from the very, very beginning.
And they worked very carefully and cautiously and, and they push the Palestinians, you know, they squeeze them out one by one, and at times in very large numbers, but they got exactly what they wanted.
And I think the biggest challenge to that Zionist ideal was in 1967.
Because not all Zionists really wanted to keep the West Bank, they felt that this is kind of really changing the nature of the relationship we have with the in the beginning, we managed to weasel out Israel and you know, push the Palestinians out and we got enough sympathy that we could sustain our country.
But now we are an occupying power.
And we can neither annex the West Bank entirely, nor we can sustain that without having to deal with an, you know, with the rebuke of the international community and with the, you know, a pushback.
Well, obviously, the ones who wanted to sustain the occupation prevailed, as they have for the last 50 years.
And now they are dealing with even a bigger problem, not just occupation, but also apartheid.
You you if you have the power, you could do anything.
And if you have the money, you can buy anything, but but you can't necessarily, you know, affect people's perceptions of you.
And increasingly, Israel is becoming in the minds of many people, many nations around the world, except the United States, of course, a pariah state.
It's a force of certainly not a force of good in the Middle East.
And, and they have to live with that branding.
And I don't know how long they can sustain it.
At times, we thought that apartheid South Africa could just survive forever.
They thought that he could, at one point, the whole thing just came tumbling down.
Other other countries, other apartheid regimes, other scenarios, you know, the French in Algeria, the Italian in Libya, Italians, Libya, you can do that.
And you can rewrite history.
I was reading this interesting book by France Fanon, the Richard of the Earth, France Fanon is the person who has affected the thinking of Malcolm X for many years.
And he was talking about the French perception of Algerians, Algerians are violent, Algerians are criminal, they are, you know, this and that I was reading it.
And I was thinking to myself, my goodness, if you take the French and the Algerians out, and replace it with the Israelis and the Palestinians is the exact same discourse.
They painted us the same way that every colonial power has painted their enemies.
And at the end, colonialism, one after the other, they just failed.
Yes, you have neocolonialism.
But at the end of the day, traditional military occupation style colonialism just does not work.
It ran out of steam in the mid 20th century.
Israel is trying to push this what to the mid 21st century?
How long can they sustain that?
I really don't think that they could.
The only reason that Israel is able to sustain this charade because of the unconditional American support.
Yep.
You know, but how long will this continue the US?
You know, again, I was absolutely shocked when I came back to the Middle East here after four years, the US when I was here 2013.
And when I was there the previous time, the US seemed to hold more, more keys and more status.
And, you know, people were very, very interested that what the president said or did not say.
Now, there are new players, the Russians and others.
And it seems that regional powers are really through their own dynamics are creating new power play.
The US is still effective and powerful, but really not as effective and powerful as they used to be.
And that deterioration American status and leadership in the Middle East is going to continue.
So if the US if Israel is putting all of its eggs in the American basket, I think a few years from now, they will realize that they really need to think of alternatives if they want to maintain their occupation and their oppression of the Palestinians.
Hey, I'm Scott Horton here to tell you about this great new book by Michael Swanson, The War State.
In The War State, Swanson examines how Presidents Truman, Eisenhower and Kennedy both expanded and fought to limit the rise of the new national security state after World War Two.
If this nation is ever to live up to its creed of liberty and prosperity for everyone, we are going to have to abolish the empire.
Know your enemy.
Get The War State by Michael Swanson.
It's available at your local bookstore or at amazon.com and Kindle or in paperback.
Just click the book in the right margin at scotthorton.org or thewarstate.com.
All right, now, I guess I'll go ahead and ask this foolish question.
What about Donald Trump?
I mean, I'll go ahead and say, for me to really believe that he would do something about this, I think he would have to really care.
And I don't think that that's possible at all.
I think maybe he could be made like, hypothetically, if James Mattis, the Secretary of Defense told him, it's the highest priority for American security that we get this occupation ended in a two-state solution in place here.
And maybe he would go for that.
But I don't think Mattis is telling him that.
And of course, all the other politics lean the other way.
But so Abbas was in DC yesterday, and Trump is now going on his first trip.
He's going to see Netanyahu and Sisi.
But I don't know, what do you make of it?
Politics?
You know, after all, he's just a real estate developer, game show host, casino tycoon, sort of a guy.
I mean, he doesn't have a history with all of this stuff that much, you know, so maybe maybe there's an opening here.
I don't know.
What do you think?
Yes, I agree with you.
I don't think anything serious is going to happen under Trump.
I mean, don't forget that when when Barack Obama came to power, the I think I think if I'm not mistaken, the first telephone call he made was actually to Abbas.
And one of the first, if not the first foreign visit, it was to the speak at the university, a university in Cairo to and one of the main messages that he sent to the Muslim world was Palestine, you know, the Palestinian people cannot and should not be treated this way.
And this has to end.
And indeed, there was a degree of pressure in the first few months to show Israel that we are very, very serious about this.
And we know what happened at the end, it was actually embarrassing what happened at the end, that he actually couldn't do any of these things.
And he was embattled in amongst his own Congress.
You know, when Benjamin Netanyahu came to speak, I honestly felt bad for Obama, not a big fan myself of the whole Obama euphoria.
But, you know, you have the President of the United States being defied in such a way by a foreign leader, Netanyahu comes speak to the Congress, the Congress, you know, one standing ovation after the other, deriding an American president, and the US president is not there.
And, and his vice president couldn't even, you know, say, I will not in solidarity with my president, I couldn't be there, he pretended that he had some sort of foreign business to conduct.
So it was a charade that the very end of the day, Obama comes, you know, in the last two weeks, and, and, and he abstained from the UN resolution that's condemning Jewish settlements in the West Bank, and then he kind of runs away, well, you can't, you can't touch me now.
You know, I'm no longer president.
I mean, and that's Obama, supposedly, the one who had principles.
Yeah, someone like Trump, I really doubt that there can ever be any sort of moral courage whatsoever to push Israel, he can't.
If anything, I think Trump is really is more invested in sustaining some sort of a status quo in which Israel knows that the US would never clash with it the way that the Obama administration clashed with it.
At times during the last eight years, I think that's going to be Trump's main policy.
As far as Palestine and Israel is concerned.
I don't think he wants to create a situation that he cannot contain.
I really doubt that he wanted to move to move the embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.
I think he just wants Israel to know that we are your best friends, we'd have absolutely no problem with you.
Business as usual doesn't want problems on that end whatsoever.
Yeah.
All right.
Well, listen, man, I gotta go.
I'm so late for my next interview.
But thank you so much for staying on with me here.
It's always great to talk with you, Ramzi.
Of course, Scott.
Take care.
All right, you too, man.
All right, you guys, that is Ramzi Baroud.
He writes at palestinechronicle.com.
He's the author of My Father Was a Freedom Fighter.
We reprint, I don't know, 99% of it or something, maybe all of it at original.antiwar.com slash Ramzi dash Baroud.
Just search for antiwar.com and Ramzi Baroud.
You can find it all there.
And he writes for Al Jazeera and other places too.
As he said, he's in Qatar now recording one for them.
All right.
That's the Scott Horton Show.
Check out the archives at scotthorton.org slash interviews.
The questions and answers stuff at slash show.
Follow me on Twitter at Scott Horton Show.
Thanks.
Oh, yeah.
Libertarian Institute.
I'm the boss of that, supposedly.
Hey, all Scott here for Ry Guys T-shirts.
Ry Guys.
That's wryguys.com.
Great, irreverent, thought-provoking T-shirts upholding a pro-freedom perspective.
Inspired by such classic humorous as Mark Twain, H.L. Mencken, and Oscar Wilde, they invoke the wit and wisdom of the past to satirize modern myths.
These high-quality shirts for men and women look good and feel good, and they make great gifts.
Use the coupon code Scott for 15% off.
Ry Guys T-shirts at ryguys.com.
That's wryguys.com.
Hey, all.
Scott Horton here.
It's always safe to say that one should keep at least some of your savings in precious metals as a hedge against inflation.
And if this economy ever does heat back up and the banks start expanding credit, rising prices could make metals a very profitable bet.
Since 1977, Roberts and Roberts Brokerage Inc. has been helping people buy and sell gold, silver, platinum, and palladium, and they do it well.
They're fast, reliable, and trusted for more than 35 years.
And they take Bitcoin.
Call Roberts and Roberts at 1-800-874-9760 or stop by rrbi.co.