06/01/15 – Philip Weiss – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, you guys, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
It's my show, The Scott Horton Show.
Only problem with interviewing Phil Weiss is I just don't even hardly know where to begin.
There's so much going on here.
Welcome back to my show, Phil.
Hey, Scott.
How are you?
I'm doing real good.
Appreciate you joining us again today.
Certainly.
Certainly.
Certainly.
So, well, I was going to say let's start with the New York Times, but no, let's start with this thing by Kate here.
New Israeli bill aims to put Palestinian stone throwers in jail for 10 to 20 years.
Now this is, this includes juveniles and we're talking about people in the occupied territories throwing stones at soldiers.
Yeah, that's my understanding.
I haven't, you know, Kate just does a digest of the latest news, but let's see.
I think that it's, well, it's up to 20 years and for offenses that in the past these kids have gotten three months for, you know, so, but I'm, you know, it's an Al Jazeera story.
I'd have to look it up online right now as we're talking and I would be, you know, not serving your listeners.
That's all right.
Well, let's go back to the New York Times then.
You got a chip on your shoulder about the New York Times, Jock Hughes.
Why don't you just leave those poor little guys alone?
Yeah.
You know, the thing is the Times is really emerging as the most important voice in favor of Israel in the United States and it's playing a very important role in that sense.
It has, it's sort of like explaining to liberals why they should continue to love Israel.
And when Israel is under attack everywhere, including, you know, that Al Jazeera account of them putting stone throwers in jail for 20 years or which we picked up and by our site, by a movement on campus, by all over Europe, by the BDS movement, the boycott, Israel is being isolated and delegitimized.
As Israeli leaders complained all weekend, they complained about this delegitimization and the New York Times is providing the leading sort of counterforce to that delegitimization.
They have, it seems consciously because there's just so many stories that are supportive of Israel inside the New York Times.
So as a website that is devoted to trying to tell the truth about what Israel is and trying to end the special relationship between the United States and Israel, it's very important for me and my co-writers to focus on what the New York Times is doing and expose it and criticize it and question it and, you know, I think debunk it.
I mean, for instance, the story we did today is just yesterday, the New York Times did an article saying, well, these Palestinians pose a demographic death sentence, a death warrant.
Palestinian refugees pose a demographic death warrant to Israel if they were to return.
And that is kind of shocking language.
What they're talking about are Palestinians who want to return to their homes or their parents' homes that they were forced out of in 1948 in Israel.
They just want their property back.
And this is called a demographic death warrant.
Can you imagine, just imagine in the United States saying that Jews are moving into this suburb and they pose a demographic death warrant to the Christian white character of the suburb or black people are doing that or Muslim people are doing that.
Anybody who made that kind of comment in the mainstream or even off the little off the mainstream in America, they'd lose their job.
But the New York Times is doing that in a favorable way about Israeli efforts.
Yeah, it sounds like 1953 or something.
Exactly.
And that's always the problem in this discussion, is that Israel and support for Israel restore Americans to this halcyon period in American history when it was fine to say the most racist things against black people or anti-Semitic things or anti-ethnic things.
And wait, we spent two generations ending that type of conversation, that bigotry in American life.
Hey, it's going on in Israel right now and you're allowed to say it in that context in the United States.
Yeah.
The Jewish state as the exemplar for white supremacists.
Hey, that's what that guy Breivik was about too, right?
Oh yeah, we love Israel.
They show how you get it done.
That's right.
You get somebody's back and you march them right out of where you don't want them no more.
That's right.
He admired Israel, didn't he?
Yeah, Pamela Geller and all them.
It's the same shtick.
They pal around with Zionists to demonize Muslims all the time here and in Europe.
And for Israel, just to try to confuse the issue by conflating all Muslims with all groups of fighting Muslims, whoever they are and whatever side they're on.
It's all just one big scary Muslim thing that must be confronted in this massive clash.
Right.
And you look at American history and that's a familiar process.
Almost everybody who came to this country after the Native Americans has been demonized in one fashion or another for being different and we're supposed to get over that kind of thing.
All right.
Now, one of the most important ways or most effective ways to lie is by omission.
And that's one of these headlines that you have here.
It's James North.
Yeah.
Oh, did I even say it's Mondoweiss.net where Phil Weiss and a hundred other great writers.
No, a dozen other really great writers write a lot of great stuff.
Half dozen?
I don't know.
Israeli propaganda dominates front page of New York Times today, he writes.
And it's all about how, boy, are the Israelis clever at desalinating seawater and at just being able to pipe in water from the West Bank where they half own it with the Palestinians.
And then that's it.
They don't even explain that they're trespassing on somebody else's aquifer and diverting water away from the people who own it.
A simple property rights violation.
And a shocking story, just a shocking story that really speaks to what I was saying about the New York Times importance in terms of promoting a kind of a happy vision of what Israel is and a very hopeful and positive vision.
So the top front page of the New York Times on Saturday, four columns, was this photograph of a swimming pool next to the desert.
And then this article was all about Israel has solved its drought problems by desalinating the sea.
And the whole article was essentially, Israel has made the desert bloom.
Now those are words that we've been hearing for, you know, nearly 70 years and from the likes of Ben-Gurion, et cetera.
And going back to the founding of Israel, we're going to make the desert bloom.
We're going to, you know, the early Zionists actually believed that the Palestinians would welcome them because they would bring such a modern standard of living.
And they would, you know, make the place, you know, cover it with flowers and agricultural produce.
Well, guess what?
The Palestinians didn't want a massive Zionist immigration for reasons anyone can well understand.
But these arguments persist.
And amazingly, the New York Times runs this piece about how Israel has solved its water woes.
And only in passing says that, by the way, they're taking this aquifer from the West Bank where the Palestinians live under illegal occupation, just as you said.
So on the Palestinians, they complained that, oh, well, we don't get enough of the water and it costs too much.
Like, really?
Yeah.
Won't they ever shut up?
Really?
And, and, and, and this stuff is not, you know, this is not in the margins.
This is a grievance of the Palestinians that they have an aquifer on the West Bank, 80% of which is taken by the Israelis.
So you have settlers with swimming pools, illegal settlers, colonists living next door to Palestinians who only get water a certain amount of time per day, or sometimes have their water pipes slashed and taken away from them as they're being ethnically cleansed to make way for more settlers.
It's just hideous.
And the fact that the New York Times lends itself to this process and even runs a photograph of Palestinians in one of their springs in the West Bank without saying that that spring has been illegally exploited by the Israeli government.
It's just shocking.
Instead of, I mean, there's a way to cover this story.
I mean, I think it is remarkable.
It strikes me from reading that piece as remarkable what Israel is doing to desalinate water.
And in fact, the Israeli government promptly tweeted this miracle of what we're doing with water.
I find that kind of interesting.
But you can't run that article in the United States.
You just cannot run it without explaining what the other ways that they are getting, they are solving their water issue.
And that's stealing the indigenous people's water as they are being ethnically cleansed and illegally occupied.
All right.
Hold it right there.
We'll be right back, everybody.
Sorry to go on like that.
Yeah.
No, I asked you to.
That's why I brought you on.
All right.
Hold it right there.
We'll be right back in just a second.
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All right, you guys, welcome back.
I'm Scott Horton.
I'm talking with Phil Weiss from Mondoweiss.net.
And well, we're talking about the occupations and how it goes and how the American media and particularly the New York Times covers it.
And you know, as we've discussed 100 times on this show, and I just always go back to this because I think it's so important when we talk about this subject, how, you know, I accuse the New York Times and all the rest of them and partially because of the New York Times, which is the heart of the agenda setting media when it comes to that.
They never explain the backstory.
They don't ever, ever, ever say, and you could absolutely do this in a New York Times story.
It's one column inch.
In 1967, there was a war and the Israelis occupied the West Bank and they didn't ethnically cleanse them.
And the Palestinians are still all there, but they've been under a foreign country's occupation of martial law for 50 years now.
And they really hate it or whatever.
You'd put a little something like that, but they don't ever say that they pretend again by omission.
They act as though the West Bank is Israel.
It's just another neighborhood in Israel or something.
It's from the and it always has been and something.
And if there are Palestinians there, well, I'm not sure why, but they better just get the hell out of the way of the progress.
We got some water pipes we're putting in here or whatever it is.
And so I think most Americans basically come at this from a completely kind of upside down angle where they don't.
If they hear much about a threat from the Palestinians at that point, they imagine kind of a foreign country of Palestinian Arabs next door that's always threatening Israel on their borders.
But they get it confused where the border is as far as the West Bank and all that.
And they never in The New York Times or on the whoever replaced Dan Rather or whatever, they don't never say, hey, look at a map, everybody.
Let me give you a little one on one on this.
They could do it in a lot less time than I just did.
That's for sure.
You know.
Right.
And I mean, part of that is just the degree to which the root causes of this conflict, which are burning, you know, for Palestinians and Israelis, the root causes are just not really talked about over here.
How can you talk about refugees destroying Israel, as the Times says today, without saying, guess what?
The reason they want to return peacefully is because they had their houses taken away from them.
It's their property that was taken from them to create Israel.
And they became refugees and they were denied their right to return.
Or why?
How can you talk about Palestinian violent resistance without talking about occupation?
And, you know, a sort of universal understanding that people are allowed to resist their occupiers by a lot of different means under international law.
So I'm not I think our whole image of Palestinian terrorism and Palestinian resistance and jihad generally is influenced by this conflict and the misunderstanding that we have of this conflict.
And we've got to correct that balance ultimately.
All right.
Now, you wrote this great thing about Max Blumenthal in The New York Times again and how they just I guess they refused to review his last four hundred and something page book about Israel.
Goliath.
Correct.
Right.
They just didn't even acknowledge its existence at all.
Right.
They did not.
I mean.
And now he's got a new one.
He's got a new book coming out about Gaza, the Gaza onslaught of last summer that killed over twenty one hundred Palestinians.
And his last book, Goliath, really documented the degree to which right wing Israeli right wing political culture was dominant in Israel.
The left is really at the margins.
Even liberals are at the margins.
And there are even fascistic trends inside that government.
Now, these were truths that I personally denied for a long time and that our media is denying.
And Max Blumenthal documented them in his book.
And, you know, even if you look at his account and say, well, he collected the worst parts of it, you know, gosh, that's what journalists do.
They look and they they compile, you know, all all the worst things and say this is what is characterizing the society.
And no one can refute his analysis.
And yet The New York Times denies it.
It does not want to believe that this is happening in Israel.
The chief of Jerusalem correspondent of The New York Times, Jody Rudorn, has said only a small strain of Israeli society wants the West Bank to itself.
That's a lie.
It's not a small strain.
And in fact, it's almost all the ministers of the new government want the West Bank.
So how can you that again, I get back to the it's the New York Times is importance in representing this reality.
And then to tie it into that question, I flubbed at the start of our conversation, Al Jazeera has a piece about those rock throwers that you brought up.
And I looked at it during the break.
It's this is what new Israeli government wants to impose 10 to 20 years on these Palestinian kids who are under occupation or throwing stones, 10 to 20 year sentences.
And we're talking about minors.
We're talking about minors in many cases who get, you know, who are getting three months and it's an outrage.
This is another way in which this Israeli society is really shutting down and displaying some of the very worst aspects of kind of what would tyrannical governmental behavior that we've seen in the last hundred years.
You know, Max told me on the show years ago, I guess he was writing Goliath at the time that, oh, man, I'm sorry, it's just it's too far gone.
How far to the right is Israel?
It's so far to the right, the political culture there that they can only keep making matters worse in a way that reinforces the right.
If we're going to have no peace at all, then we better have a totalitarian police state to keep them all down, which, you know, just and then they just keep moving further and further.
And basically, there's no coming back from here.
This is the slippery slope from hell and and the liberals can cry about it all they want, but they just don't.
Israeli ears just don't even hear them.
And that was years ago.
He was saying just forget about it.
Right.
Right.
It gets worse and worse.
And then people are shocked when, you know, you had the media, including myself, predicting that the sort of center left or the center was going to win in this latest Israeli election.
Herzog, they lost overwhelmingly.
And you have the most reactionary Israeli government ever in force.
When are, in those words, most reactionary are from Americans for Peace Now, a liberal Zionist group.
When are American and then Jay Street, another liberal Zionist group said Netanyahu must move immediately on forming his government to affirm his support for a two state solution.
No, since he's been in, he's formed his government almost overwhelmingly.
And his government has said we're against the two state solution.
So what are the liberal Zionists going to do about this?
Are they going to continue to deny this reality or are they actually going to try to punish Israel for this behavior in such a manner that it might actually change his behavior?
Wow.
Yeah.
Good question.
And now who's the new lady who Netanyahu had to compromise with one of his ministers and appoint this lady to be the head of the justice, something or other over there?
Mr. Ayelet Sheket.
Now, what does that mean?
Does that mean attorney general?
What does that mean?
I believe it's the equivalent of their attorney general.
Yes.
Oh, for crying out loud.
Really?
All right.
Well, so tell us about her because I read some things.
I almost didn't believe it.
Yeah.
Shock head.
She is.
She's the proponent of this law that would put Palestinian kids in prison for 10 to 20 years for throwing a rock.
She's the one who said that God gave us the land.
All the land is ours, meaning the entire West Bank.
She's the one who last summer when the violence began between Israel and Gaza, she's the one who posted on her website a statement from another right wing Zionist saying that it's not just the militants, it's the entire society that we're against.
And so we must destroy that entire society, essentially a call for genocide that she endorsed on her Facebook page.
So you have this person who's young, attractive, and just a lunatic.
And she's the new justice minister through a deal that Netanyahu made with Naftali Bennett and it doesn't get a lot of attention in the United States.
That's amazing.
You know, you can talk like that on the editorial page of The Wall Street Journal or The Washington Post or in The National Review, but you can't be the attorney general of the United States of America.
You can't be John Ashcroft or Mukasey and talk about Arabs like that.
Right.
No way.
Yeah, exactly.
I mean, I again, I say that and this is something that some of my left wing friends just do not accept.
But I think it's true is that the is this special relationship has really damaged American political culture.
We were better than this before we formed this relationship.
And they it's it's because of Israel's awful relationship with Palestinians and Arabs that that's in fact, that is contaminated the United States understanding of how to of the relationship with Arabs.
Yeah.
Well, and, you know, that's absolutely true.
And we already had an evil empire before, you know, the neocons gained such influence.
But on the other hand, if we if we could redo the 21st century without Crystal, I was thinking what if Irving Crystal and Norman Podhoretz and Leo Strauss and Albert Wollstetter had all died fighting for the Red Army, you know, for Leo Leon Trotsky.
And we just never had this neoconservative movement in America.
How different might the 21st century have been?
It doesn't mean that the U.S. would have been the best friend of the people of all the Arab lands by any stretch.
But would we have killed more than a million of them and, you know, radicalized and bankrupted and turn an entire society upside down and and, you know, turned an entire generation of millions and millions of people against us?
I don't think probably, you know.
No.
And but this is a really important question going forward.
When we look at the who is for war with Iran, only one group, the Israel lobby and the neoconservatives.
So it's not the 21st, it's the 21st century.
It's the future.
I'm worried about their continuing influence over our politics and our establishment government.
Yeah.
Well, it's very important work that you do shine a light on this.
And thanks a lot.
Well, listen, I say that because I know a lot of other people think so, too.
So that's the measure.
And you guys are having great success over there.
And thank you very much.
Keep it up.
Yeah.
The feeling's mutual.
That's a great film.
Thanks, guys.
He's at Mondoweiss.net.
And he's got a whole bunch of great writers over there, too.
Go check him out.
Mondoweiss.net.
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