Sorry, I'm late.
I had to stop by the Whites 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, bitch, 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 Benjamin Ladra.
He is an activist, a human rights activist from Sweden.
And you can find him on Facebook at Walk to Palestine.
That's exactly what he's done.
He's walked to Palestine.
Welcome to the show, Benjamin.
How are you doing?
I'm doing great.
Thank you for having me.
Very happy to have you here.
Well, at least there's not a giant Atlantic Ocean in the way.
So that makes it a little bit more understandable.
But I'm looking actually at a map of the world right now.
And I'm sure it's kind of sad because it's a flat map.
But it seems pretty far to walk from Sweden all the way down to Palestine.
Why would you do such a thing as that?
It was very far.
It was almost 5,000 kilometers through 13 countries to get there.
It was all about raising awareness about the human rights violations, the oppression of the Palestinian people.
Raising awareness to try and build a movement that can put the pressure to hopefully one day end all of that oppression.
All right, so when did you start this?
Two years ago, from August 5th, must have been 2017.
I left my apartment in Gothenburg and started walking south.
Wow, and how long did it take you to get there?
It took me pretty much exactly 11 months to reach the border between Jordan and Palestine.
But as you know, the whole place is occupied.
And the border is also occupied by the Israelis.
So there were soldiers there waiting for me.
And they weren't exactly happy to see me, we can say.
Yeah, I was going to say, can you get in from that way across the Jordan River?
Is there a bridge and a checkpoint there or anything?
Yeah, there is a bridge and there is a lot of checkpoints.
There's first the Jordanian checkpoint, then there is the Israeli checkpoint, and finally there is the Palestinian checkpoint.
So obviously the Palestinian one would have been a breeze, I would have been welcomed.
But the Israeli government is spending millions of dollars to counter human rights activism in regards to this cause, employing former intelligence people, countering BDS.
And I could tell during the interrogation, I was interrogated for six hours, that they had been doing their research and doing their reading.
They knew pretty much everything about who I was, what I was doing, why I was coming, all of that.
Alright, so I really want to give you an opportunity, we have plenty of time.
I want to give you an opportunity to talk all about what it is you want people to know about Palestine and the Palestinians and what's happening.
But on your journey, on that part of the topic here, I'm interested in what it was like during that 11 months, the different countries that you went through, the different people that you met, minds that you possibly changed or brought this situation of people's attention who might otherwise not have known about it, this kind of thing.
Yeah, well, I certainly hope I changed some minds, or rather just introduced the story to a few people that hadn't heard it before.
It was a long road, it was a desolate road.
Most of the time I spent by myself because there aren't many people around on the small roads between the cities sometimes.
But in all the cities, I would be very active, trying to contact the media, radio stations, TVs, newspapers, to try and tell them the story of Palestine and what I was doing, the initiative.
And also arranging talks and events at different community centres, churches, mosques, whoever would have me basically.
And through whatever friends and connections I managed to make.
So social media helped really a lot.
When I was reaching a place, I would always post about it, saying where I was and asking people if anyone knew anyone there that could help me out to arrange these things and find me a place to sleep.
Because most nights I was just sleeping outside in the tent, by the road, in the forest, in a field, somewhere desolate by myself.
But people were also generous, of course, whenever I would meet people and got a chance to speak to them.
A lot of people would invite me, I would stay at people's homes, and they would treat me to a hot meal, and I really appreciated it so much more when there's a lack of it.
Yeah, I bet.
Great.
In terms of the local media, as you were travelling through radio stations and local news stations and things like that, were they interested?
Did you get some good mileage out of that for all your mileage that you put into it?
Yeah, I think so.
I didn't have too big expectations, to be honest, once I started.
But it really blew up as I was walking.
And the media is a little political also.
You can tell that some countries that sympathize more with the occupation, like Austria, Germany, Czech Republic, they wouldn't cover it too much.
They weren't that interested in someone doing something for Palestine.
Whereas other countries, like Turkey, for example, or Jordan and Lebanon, obviously, the media would never...ask me, rather than I would ask them.
Sometimes I would get a phone call from someone that had heard about it and wanted to give an interview.
But it was more efficient than I thought.
I managed to get on the national TV in Bulgaria, in Serbia, do a lot of radio shows across different countries.
So overall, I think, especially if you count the views on social media, Al Jazeera made a video that got a couple of millions of views.
And that really surprised me.
So in that regard, I'm very happy with the outreach that I managed.
Yeah, that's great.
All right.
Well, so here's another media appearance that you got out of this thing.
So here's your chance.
Tell them everything you want them to know about Palestine.
Oh, man, where to start about Palestine?
One of the basic things, since I visited a lot of refugee camps in Lebanon, there are 12 camps, if I'm not mistaken.
And when I was walking, I visited 10 of them and met many people, and many old people that lived through the expulsion of Palestine.
And the basic thing that the Palestinian people want is to go back home.
Simple as that.
Just go back home and live on their land.
I met one old man that said that he was expelled from Palestine when he was eight years old.
The soldiers came and surrounded his village, the Israeli soldiers, and told them that they were going to shoot them and kill them all unless they left.
So they fled over to Lebanon, or to Jordan, I mean.
And he has lived his entire life in a camp.
The first tent that later became a shack.
And he's still there.
What he told me was that at this point, he just wants to die.
But he doesn't want to die in Jordan.
He just wants to die on his own land so he can die in peace.
The basics is that they just want to go back home, and they don't want to live under occupation.
They want to live in freedom like anybody else.
So in Palestine, in Hebron, for example, where the occupation is very extreme and aggressive, the city center is occupied.
Settlers have taken over Palestinian buildings, literally thrown Palestinians out of their own homes.
So Palestinians, they don't leave their homes.
In Hebron, they told me that if there's a family occasion, like a wedding, a funeral, something big, they don't leave half the family inside the building.
Because if they all leave the building to attend, then there's a big probability that the settlers will break the front door, go inside the house, and then when the Palestinians come back, the settlers will refuse to leave and say that this is their house now.
And the Israeli army will support the settlers.
And the Palestinians, they can't call the police because they're under occupation.
There's only the Israeli police there, and they're on the settler's side.
So they're getting their houses stolen from them.
And in Hebron, there are segregated streets where they have put up things in the middle of the street, segregating.
So one half for the settlers, one half for the Palestinians.
Palestinians aren't allowed to drive cars even inside their own city.
In Hebron, it's a city of, I think, around 300,000 Palestinians.
So it's a pretty big place, and only roughly 1,000 settlers.
It's very extreme.
Hundreds of children get imprisoned every year.
Reports of torture.
You can read the testimonies of the children getting out of jail.
Most of them reports having been physically and psychologically tortured by the army.
Children, there are no lower limits.
The legal limit that Israel puts to arrest children and throw them in jail is 12.
If you can imagine that.
They're not sticking to it, though, children as young as...
If you go on YouTube, you can see even babies being held by Israeli soldiers.
Like two-year-olds, three-year-olds.
And if you go to Palestine and talk to people and ask them how young the kids in jail are, if they have any relatives, there is no younger limit.
And that really breaks my heart.
You can't see children suffer like that.
And then you have Gaza.
Most of the people in Gaza are refugees from the expulsion in 1948.
Where close to a million people were driven from their homes 70 years ago.
And the Israeli army razed hundreds of Palestinian villages to the ground.
Planted landmines in the ruins to prevent them from returning.
A lot of people went to Gaza.
And today Gaza is the world's biggest open-air prison.
They can't leave Gaza.
It's very small.
It's only 40 kilometers long and a couple kilometers wide.
It's a lack of everything.
Lack of medical supplies.
Lack of food.
Lack of water.
It's been bombed to the ground so many times also by Israeli fighter jets.
And if you read the testimonies from the pilots, the Israeli pilots, some of them will say things like they feel like they are burning ants with magnifying glasses when they fly their planes and drop big bombs killing hundreds of children, of people in 2008, in 2012, in 2014.
So many invasions of one of the world's most densely populated areas.
And each time children get blown to bits, it's unimaginable.
It's just unimaginable.
And if you read the Israeli media, it's always about when's the next time we're going to bomb Gaza, invade Lebanon?
A lot of aggression.
So the journey I did was just to raise awareness about this.
And just the violations of the basic rights of an entire people that are being uprooted and driven from their homes on a daily basis who are being dispossessed, tortured, and all imaginable horrors are being wrought on them by the Israeli occupation.
And that has to stop.
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To get some one-of-a-kind books or for more information, visit LibertyUnderAttack.com Well, but so what are the Palestinian people like?
Because I saw on TV that they're all these Eastern fanatical barbarians who are intent on murdering and killing all of the Israeli Jews.
And so this is the only choice is to keep them penned up this way.
Well, that's a complete fiction.
The Palestinian people are one of the most hospitable people I've ever come across.
Extremely kind.
And whenever you meet someone, I hope you didn't eat because they will definitely give you a lot of food.
But there are people like any other people.
And of course there are some bad apples, but to focus on them is really absurd.
They're an incredibly kind and warm people.
And I have so many Palestinian friends.
People that say things like that usually haven't met the people that they're talking about.
And that's a real shame.
That's a thing I noticed during my walk as well, that people will have all sorts of opinions about each other.
You know, people in Serbia, for example, they would warn me about the people in Bulgaria, their neighbors, say that maybe I shouldn't walk there.
It's very dangerous and I should watch my back and make sure that nothing gets stolen I was treated very, very well by everyone I met there.
But the Bulgarians, they would warn me about Turkey instead, which was the next country I was going to, saying that I should really watch out for the Turkish people.
There are a lot of bad people, watch your stuff, don't get beaten up, don't sleep outside, all these things.
And when you come to Turkey, when you meet the people, they're amazing, they're so kind, they are so hospitable.
But they in turn would warn me about the Middle East, and so it goes.
Everybody has prejudices against their neighbors, unfortunately.
And I think one of the reasons for that is that we seldom meet each other.
And we're constantly being fed pictures by media just depicting violence, just depicting bombs exploding, and people shouting things that we don't understand.
That's not the reality.
If you actually sit down and meet people, have a cup of coffee, you will discover reality, you will discover what it's really like, who the people really are.
It's the same from town to town and state to state in the U.S. too.
The rivalry between Springfield and Shelbyville is eternal.
It's funny to hear you talk about experiencing that as you travel country by country by country, you hear an all-in-order of geography and everything like that.
That must have been kind of a pretty interesting learning experience.
Especially by the time you got to the fourth or fifth country where you're hearing this stuff, you're just shaking your head, right?
It becomes amusing after a while.
I think it's very sad that we harbor so many prejudices.
Of course, I'm not immune to prejudice either.
It's a thing we have to work with always.
But to say that...
I don't think anyone can say about any people that they are immune to prejudice.
I don't think anyone can say about any people, like an entire nation of people, that they're either good or bad or this or that.
They are diverse.
Every people are diverse.
But in general, most people are very kind and friendly because we're humans.
Most humans are good people.
That's just the way it is.
Most humans are good.
That, I think, was the biggest experience from the road as well.
Being by myself in 13 countries, meeting many people in many places from different walks of life, meeting rich people, meeting poor people.
I guess one general thing I can say is that poor people in general are a bit more generous than rich people.
I was treated very, very kindly and with a lot of hospitality by people who had almost nothing, which really makes you think a lot.
We can share if we want to.
We can be generous if we want to.
So, you're constantly buying things from Amazon.com.
Well, that makes sense.
They bring it right to your house.
So what you do, though, is click through from the link in the right-hand margin at ScottHorton.org and I'll get a little bit of a kickback from Amazon's end of the sale.
Won't cost you a thing.
Nice little way to help support the show.
Again, that's right there in the margin at ScottHorton.org.
Alright, so now back to what you're saying about living in Gaza and in the West Bank.
I guess we could sit here and complain about the totalitarian dictatorship in China.
It's just that America, I don't know about Sweden, but America doesn't support the totalitarian dictatorship in China.
The problems in Tibet are bad, but they're not really my responsibility in any way.
But what you describe in this totalitarian dictatorship that the Palestinians live under, not even martial law, but war law under a foreign military occupation here for now half a century and more, longer than the Soviets occupied Eastern Europe.
This is all on America's dime and with American diplomatic and military support, American F-16s and M-16s pointed at these people's heads.
And, of course, it's a major part of the reason that we have a terrorist blowback problem against the United States right now.
And, of course, it's just wrong.
And yet, the American people, they just really, I think you know this, I don't know how it is in Europe exactly with the media and this and that, but in America, people just don't ever get to hear this side of the story.
So, when you talk about, oh yeah, no, the military arrests and tortures children, that sounds probably like it couldn't be true, or else how come they didn't tell me that before?
I would have been interested in that.
So, can you describe a little more, just go on and elaborate whichever direction you want, about how these people are living there now.
Yeah, the first thing, just because we might not know about something doesn't mean that it might not be happening.
We shouldn't take our own knowledge as a bar of what reality must or mustn't be.
And the American media does, I won't even say poor job, they do a deliberate job of portraying only the Israeli narrative, that's what they're doing.
It's not that they're just accidentally not portraying the reality on the ground they're choosing not to.
And because the United States is the world's biggest supporter of Israel, it's simple as that.
And under Obama, the Memorandum of Understanding, which gives military support to Israel, was raised from $3 billion a year to $3.8 billion a year.
Now that translates into $10 million every single day.
And I've been to the United States.
There's a lot of problems there with student debt, with the healthcare is ridiculous.
In Sweden it's free, in Canada I think it's free.
There's no reason it shouldn't be free for everyone, but in the U.S. it's not.
And there's so many problems with homeless people and poor people.
But still, the state finds it within its coffers to give free of charge $10 million of the U.S. taxpayer's money to Israel every day.
And look it up if you don't believe me.
And there's a long history of U.S. support, even though Israel in 1967 blew up U.S. military warship, the USS Liberty, killing I don't remember how many people and wounding a lot more.
Still Israel got away with that.
And the level of friendship between the U.S. and Israel is on such a level that I don't think you could imagine the Russian president going into Congress unannounced and making a speech.
But that's exactly what Benjamin Netanyahu did, the Israeli prime minister, without notifying Obama, just going to the United States and making a speech about how they should quit the Iran nuclear deal.
To oppose it, yeah, to try to stop it.
Like imagine another foreign president going and trying to influence your foreign policy.
Would you like it if Xi Jinping of China went to your country trying to influence your foreign policy?
Of course, that's a ridiculous thought.
Or anyone else.
But the Israelis, they do it.
They can do it and they are doing it.
And they have a lot of influence on U.S. foreign policy.
A documentary I would recommend everyone to watch to understand more about how that looks like is Al Jazeera's The Lobby.
Just search The Lobby on YouTube, Al Jazeera, about how Israel funds a lot of Congress people.
American politics is unfortunately run by money, making it a very corrupt system in my view.
And Israel is a part of that.
And you can see a lot of how they're trying to influence and buy off people and influence their views in regards to the Middle East, of course, and to Palestine.
Definitely second that.
It's The Lobby USA.
Everyone, you can find it at electronicintifada.net and on YouTube, The Lobby USA.
In fact, The Lobby UK is also really incredible.
But of course, the American one is more important.
And of course, this is the one that was suppressed for, I think, a year or more before it was eventually leaked out and posted by the electronic intifada.
So huge.
It's unbelievable, this documentary.
And in fact, I'm sorry, I just have to say this.
I love this documentary so much because even if it was about any topic, if this was an investigation of any corporation or any group of lobbyists on any subject that I'm for or against or anything, this is some of the best undercover camera journalism that has ever been done in history.
I mean, it's just incredible the footage that this undercover reporter got infiltrating the Israel lobby in the United States.
It is unbelievable.
Four hours long, worth every second of it.
Sorry, go ahead.
No, definitely.
Everyone should watch it.
And it's not a strange thing that Israel has a lobby.
Every country has a lobby.
Every country tries to make other countries' policies towards their own country more positive and more favorable and more friendly by various means.
So nobody should be surprised that Israel is really trying to influence policy.
And the United States, unfortunately, is the most powerful country in the world by sheer brute force, spending so much money on the military and influencing world events.
So it shouldn't be a surprise either that Israel is trying its efforts on the United States because they know that if the U.S. would pressure them into stopping their occupation, they couldn't really say much if the U.S. would not be in favor and not friendly towards them.
But now it's the other way around.
That's why I think it's extremely important for Americans and people in the United States to educate themselves on what's happening in Palestine.
No one should take some guy's word for granted.
Do the research.
Read the human rights reports.
Read the scholars.
Listen to the people on the ground.
Listen even to the Israeli soldiers.
There's an organization called Breaking the Silence that will tell you exactly the same thing.
So soldiers that went through the military service and later, overwhelmed by their conscience, broke the silence on what they're doing under the occupation and tells you stories.
You can buy one of their books.
It's called Our Harsh Logic.
It contains about 300 testimonies.
And just read what they have to say.
Read the soldiers themselves.
And then you can check out all the UN resolutions.
It's not a coincidence that there's about two countries in the world always voting no.
And around 150 countries voting yes on the resolution that comes every year that Israel has to stop its illegal occupation of Palestine.
Every year there's a resolution.
Every year the two countries voting yes.
It's Israel and the United States.
And sometimes some Pacific island that the U.S. has a lot of influence over.
The whole world is in agreement.
All the human rights organizations are in agreement.
All the international legal scholars are in agreement.
All the human rights activists, Israeli soldiers, Israeli human rights organizations.
The occupation has to stop.
It's only maintained by brute force supported by the United States.
That's the only reason we have the situation we have right now.
Okay, so you say you're in Lebanon now, right?
No, I have another project that will make the walk look like a walk in park.
It's going to be a much tougher project over a longer period of time which will go through and will be extremely hard.
But due to the nature of these things, if I would have announced that I'm walking to Palestine before I visited Palestine and then wanted to visit Palestine, I would never be allowed in by the occupied army.
So unfortunately I cannot be very specific with where I'm going and what I'm doing.
But in a couple of months' time I will launch my next initiative that will make my long walk look like a piece of cake, I think.
Wow.
All right, well, I sure appreciate that spirit and hope you do stay with it.
Best of luck to you.
Thank you.
All right, you guys, that is Benjamin Ladra.
He's a Swedish peace activist and you can find him on Facebook at Walk to Palestine.
Thank you.
