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Welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
First up on the show today is Eric Margulies from EricMargulies.com, spelled like Margolis.
EricMargulies.com and, of course, also writes for LewRockwell.com.
He's the author of War at the Top of the World about Kashmir and all them crazy mountains over there.
And also American Raj, Liberation or Domination.
Welcome back to the show, Eric.
How are you doing?
I'm just happy to be back with you, Scott.
Well, good.
I'm very happy to have you here.
So Jay Christopher Stevens and three other embassy staff were killed in an attack on Benghazi, Libya, overnight, I guess.
In this riot, there's another riot in Egypt.
I don't know.
Last I heard, nobody was killed in that one, at least yet or whatever.
But it's all over this new movie that came out.
I saw a clip of it.
It's like the most ridiculous B movie I've ever seen.
But anyway, apparently, they say bad things about the Prophet Muhammad or something and got everybody all riled up.
Is that what's really going on here?
And who's behind the movie?
Do you know anything about that?
What the hell?
Well, I answered in part the if the movie is behind it, because we don't I think it was the Cairo storming of the American embassy.
But I'm not sure about the killing of the American ambassador to Libya.
That may have also been payback for the for the killing of Gaddafi, because it was a U.S. predator that strafed his convoy, shot up his car, left him injured and wounded and allowed him to be captured and then murdered.
So there's that possibility.
But certainly the Gaddafi riot in Benghazi or was it a riot or was it just some men raided the thing or what?
It may be just a group of the initial reports was that they were a group of Gaddafi supporters.
But things are so chaotic in Libya that it's really hard to know anything right now.
But it may have been that video.
And I saw a good chunk of that video.
It's amateurish.
It's disgusting.
It's vile.
It's the vilest possible propaganda.
It looks like it was made almost for children by some kind of southern preacher like that guy in Florida who keeps fulminating against Muslims.
Whatever it accuses the Prophet Muhammad of being homosexual, a bandit, a child molester, a rapist and so on, a sadist.
It's terrible stuff.
All you have to do is take the word Muslim out of that film and put Jew in it.
And you would have a firestorm in the United States with calls for the person who made it to be arrested and charged with hate crimes, etc.
To me, this disgusting movie was financed by a group of American Jewish businessmen produced by an Israeli who lives in Los Angeles.
To me, it seems what the Russians used to call a provocation.
And a film that just came coincidentally at a time when Israel was trying to push the Obama administration into attacking Iran.
And this is clearly designed, in my view, to whip up anti-Arab, anti-Muslim hatred in the U.S.
And maybe even help Romney.
That's quite right, because Romney shamefully jumped on this issue and accused Obama of being soft on terrorists.
And even though Obama denounced this disgusting piece of anti-Muslim propaganda, Obama denounced it.
And now Romney is accusing Obama of having been an apologist for it and having given in and being soft on it.
Yeah, you know, I read a thing about that.
Well, I hate to give him any credit for anything.
But it was Joshua Micah Marshall wrote a thing.
I saw him on Twitter about it.
Talking about how Obama had condemned the movie before the attacks.
And then the Republicans just pretended like once the attacks took place and this ambassador was killed, that all Obama could think of to do was condemn the movie rather than the killers.
You know, I don't really care about that stuff, but it just goes to show how much the right-wing leadership hates their own followers.
They just have such content.
They'll tell any lie.
They don't even care, you know?
Well, that's true.
I mean, all politicians lie, but this is particularly outrageous.
And it shows throughout this campaign that the Republican candidates for office, and I'm talking about the ones who were run before the convention, have a complete disregard for the well-being or interest of the United States abroad.
How they're speaking, the world is listening to what's going on in the United States, and they hear these Republican crackers who are making the most outrageous statements, sure to further inflame the Muslim world and make the U.S. look like a bunch of right-wing crazies.
Well, you know, unfortunately, because of this crisis going on right now, it seems that they're too busy and they're not able to do the show today, but there's this group called the Muslim Affairs Council.
I don't know if you're familiar with them.
No.
But they've got this new thing out, the top 25 pseudo-experts on Islam.
And it's, of course, about Frank Gaffney and Daniel Pipes and Pamela Geller and David Horowitz and the rest of these devils who have such an agenda, and they've been exposed.
I'll go ahead just for the audience and recommend two other good footnotes.
Max Blumenthal wrote an incredible thing for Tom Dispatch called The Great Fear.
Max Blumenthal, The Great Fear.
And then also at the Center for American Progress, actually, Eli Clifton, who used to work with Jim Lowe, maybe still does, but he's a great guy.
I've interviewed him a bunch of times in the past.
Eli Clifton, and just maybe do hate Muslims industry or something like that with Eli Clifton, and you'll find a great report that CPAC finally did on this, too, and it's a story.
It's just taken way too long for the pushback to come on this.
But you have people like David Horowitz who are hell-bent, and Daniel Pipes and Frank Gaffney, hell-bent with a pro-Israel agenda here who are clearly the ones.
It's not right-wing Christian pastors.
It's these guys are the ones who are behind the get Americans to hate all Muslims movement, and it's because they want Americans to conflate all of Israel's enemies with their own.
And it's as plain as day.
It's as simple as that.
Scott, that's quite absolutely right.
I should have added these propagandists onto my list.
They all speak with the same voice.
People like Pipes are extreme fanatics of the right-wing, almost certifiable.
As you say, their one agenda is the whip-up war against Israel, I mean against Iran or Israel's enemies.
There's this group of so-called experts, the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, which is on TV all the time, and they are the voice of Israel's far-right-wing party in the United States.
But there are also a lot of Christian evangelicals who we don't hear or see out in the Midwest and the South who are also part of this network, which is being funded by a lot of pro-Israeli businessmen, and it has been documented, to try and stir up hatred of Muslims.
Yeah, and you know, I can see why.
You know, I'm from Texas.
I can understand the mindset of, you know, okay, who's the next enemy for us to hate or whatever?
That's kind of how right-wingers think too, It seems like they would also buck a little bit under being manipulated by the likes of David Horowitz, who's the lowest scum of the earth, Frank Gaffney.
You're going to let Frank Gaffney tell you what to think?
I mean, talk about pathetic.
I mean, these people make Rush Limbaugh look like Eric Margulies.
But they're effective.
First of all, they appeal to ignorant people, people who don't know anything about the Middle East with glib propaganda.
Secondly, people like Horowitz have been after me a lot.
The minute I'm on a media program, they immediately go after the station and say, this man's an anti-Semite, don't have him on again.
And it intimidates the stations.
And this is a pack of people who want to end free speech in the United States.
Soviets used to do the same thing too.
They're hard at work and the efforts have intensified now with the effort to push the U.S. into war with Iran.
And you know what's funny about that, too, is they're the anti-Semites.
I mean, frankly, we're talking about almost entirely.
Well, no, I guess that's not fair.
But certainly in the case of David Horowitz, here's a guy who's actually not a Semite, right?
He's an Ashkenazi Jew whose ancestors come from Eastern Europe, whose conspiracy theory is about Semites, Arabs, enemies of Israel, and his conspiracy theory is almost carbon copy what Henry Ford used to say about Jews, right?
They all are in on it against us.
They all are together with themselves and separate from the rest of us, even though they're here in our society.
They can all hear each other think, and they are all hell-bent on one thing, subverting our way of life and all these kinds of things.
I mean, this guy is basically just a Nazi.
That's all he is.
He's an American Nazi.
They are Nazis.
I've called them that in the past.
And you're quite right.
For years I've been writing that Islamophobia, the rising crescendo of manufactured hatred for Islam, is our modern equivalent of 1930s anti-Semitism.
It uses the same vocabulary, the same techniques, the same brainwashing.
And what's so interesting is if you take this disgusting, this putrid movie that was made by this Israeli in California, it's going to cause a huge ruckus across the Muslim world.
It's just beginning now.
Wait until people see it.
It is designed to drive people into a rage.
But this movie looks like the poorest quality Nazi propaganda movie against Jews in the 1930s.
It's really incredible that they get away with it at all.
I mean, here we are.
It's been 11 years since that one big attack here.
It seems like the New York Times is finally asking, how much did the administration know before the attack?
Hey, maybe we can now begin to ask, is it really right that all Muslims are in on it?
Oh, and by the way, small footnote, just because I don't want to be accused of being any kind of bigot.
My crack, of course, was not against Ashkenazi Jews.
I've got Ashkenazi Jewish heritage myself.
My point was that here David Horowitz is really the anti-Semite, not the people he's accusing.
But anyway, I just don't like that kind of thing at all.
What he's doing is whipping up hatred for Jews.
Every time they attack Muslims, Jews are the first cousins of Muslims, and they're going to get it too.
And the same people who hated the Jews and lynched Jews and were in the Ku Klux Klan and all the anti-Semites, I've seen my share of them on the east coast of the U.S., are now hating Muslims.
But they can switch back tomorrow to hating Jews.
And then if the U.S. does go to war with Iran and gets involved in another huge mess, which I predict, then who's going to be blamed for it?
Well, a Jewish cabal, a Jewish conspiracy in the U.S., that's what all the anti-Semites are going to be saying.
Right, absolutely.
And of course, you and I will probably both get comments along those lines for this interview too.
There are people who, well, everybody, I think, really, they just want their own beliefs to be confirmed, and they'll take this however they want to.
And the thing about it is, it's the same thing with the Iraq war.
It's sort of true.
You just got to define your terms real carefully.
But you know what?
There were some Jews who were very hell-bent toward the right wing in Israel, people like David Wumser and Douglas Feith, for example, who Lawrence Wilkerson said, and he was Colin Powell's right-hand man, Lawrence Wilkerson, said they were Israeli agents in the government who lied us into war with Iraq, who pushed this agenda to get us into war with Iraq.
Now, that doesn't mean that every single neocon was actually outright working for Israel, but it does mean, and you know, they're not all Jewish, a lot of them are Catholic and whatever, but the point being that you're right.
When the neocons act this way, they are actually the greatest purveyors, the leading cause of anti-Semitism in this country, you know, people like David Horowitz especially.
Well, that's right, and they've been blinded by their rapture for Israel so much to the point that they've lost their critical capability and are now like running like loose cannons, and we're going to see more of it.
Every day brings new attacks in the press against Iran, against Obama, who's allegedly throwing Israel under a bus by refusing to send American soldiers into war against Iran and spend what money America doesn't have in waging war against Iran, and that'll threaten American interests across the entire Middle East for refusing to do this.
Obama is now the enemy of Israel, and I expect soon he'll be accused of being an anti-Semite.
Yeah, well, you know, it's funny because I was seeing, you know, Obama refuses to meet Netanyahu and this kind of thing, and I was thinking, I'm finally beginning to find something to like about this guy that Netanyahu doesn't like him.
That's the only thing I do like about him, I think.
Well, he'll probably cave in under pressure.
But, you know, as far as this unholy alliance between pro-Israel right-wing nationalists in America and people who are, you know, really anti-Semites, at least in waiting, you know, or, you know, people who don't share other values with American Jews at all, I'm reminded of, Jim Loeb told me this story, and I forgot maybe who's the other part of the argument, but somebody asked Norman Podhoretz back in the early 1980s about his alliance with Jerry Falwell.
He had gotten a bunch of Israeli donors to buy Jerry Falwell a jumbo jet for all his people to go flying around doing their evangelical thing.
And someone questioned, you know, American Jews, like 90-something percent, they're liberals, and they don't agree with the Jerry Falwell set on anything.
And Podhoretz's response was, hey, it's their theology, it's our Israel.
And as long as they're our ally on the Israel issue, whatever other consequences for this artificial inflation of the value of what Jerry Falwell thinks in America is just the price the American people are going to have to pay.
You know, here comes the Christian right.
Why?
Because that's what the neocons need for their agenda.
And they've inflated it vastly.
I've seen this process going on since the 1980s.
Look, just recently, a few days ago, Romney apparently was on the same stage with Pat Robertson, who had just been handing out more vile anti-Muslim information.
Robertson is a racist, he hates Muslims, used to hate Jews, or certainly speak ill of them.
And, you know, the allies of these neocons on the Christian far right, not one generation ago used to be lynching Jews or hated the Jews.
And I can't understand how the two people can be so narrow in their view.
New York liberals, as you say, I grew up in New York.
My father was a New York Park Avenue liberal.
And they have nothing in common with these fanatics of the far right.
Quite the contrary, but they've been gulled into a kind of a temporary alliance.
All right.
Now, can you talk to us about the latest revelations of Franklin Roosevelt's cover-up of the Katyn forest massacre?
Is that how you say it?
Katyn?
Katyn.
Katyn.
Well, what the hell do I know about anything?
The Katyn forest.
This was a massacre in Poland that took place when?
Well, you know, I don't have the date at my fingertips either.
It was in the 1940s.
Early 1940s.
Of course, in 1939 was when the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany invaded Poland at the same time and divided it in half.
That's right.
September of 1930.
October, November, the Soviets invaded Poland.
Right.
They came a couple months later.
As part of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, the infamous pact.
The secret police, I think it was called the NKVD in those days, went and specific orders to round up almost all the Polish officer class and all the Polish aristocrats who were in the military.
They took them to a forest in Katyn in Poland and they shot them.
Thousands of Polish officers.
It was like 20,000 people, right?
I think it was over 20,000, 22,000, 24,000 Polish officers were shot and buried in the forest.
Now, when the word of this crime got out, the Nazis, I'm sorry, the Soviets blamed it on the Nazis.
This was what was the orthodox belief until 1990 when Boris Yeltsin finally admitted and released some documents from KGB files that this massacre had been committed by the Soviet secret police directly on Stalin's orders.
This was one horrible crime, but a smaller but still stomach-turning crime is the fact that now the news has come out that the Roosevelt administration had ample documentation of the fact that it was committed, this crime was committed by the Soviets.
But it never said anything and so did Churchill and just kept their mouths shut.
So, now the big import here, well, first of all, do I really understand you right that this conventional wisdom hell that the Nazis had done it this whole time until the 1990s, it was just what, some kind of conspiracy theory that the Soviets had been behind it?
That's right.
It was like anybody who questions 9-11 was immediately denounced as a conspiracy theorist.
Well, same thing with Kotkin.
There were people in Poland, of course, and Germany who said, wait a minute, no, this was committed by the Soviets.
But by and large, the given orthodoxy on the matter, even in the States, was that it was a Soviet crime, but eventually the truth finally came out.
And then now, why does it matter so much that FDR covered it up back then?
Well, because, first of all, it exposes the lies of FDR was so pro-communist that he would hush up this major crime of World War II in favor of pursuing the war against Germany.
Churchill, I think, just went along with it.
But on a bigger scale, and I've written columns about this, the US and Britain were so inundated with World War II propaganda, it's hard to see the facts.
The US and Britain collide themselves with the biggest mass murderer in history, Joseph Stalin, who killed certainly well over 30 and some Soviet historians say 40 million people.
And most of these people were killed before World War II.
Six to seven million Ukrainians were killed in a massive genocide by the Soviets.
Well, now, and some people, I think, are familiar with the story of Walter Duranty at the New York Times, who said, oh, no, everything's fine.
But the reason that's important is because that was the common narrative.
That was, I guess, FDR's narrative, too, was that they were pretending that they didn't know what a monster Joseph Stalin was.
They were telling the American people he was Uncle Joe, a lot like us, only just from the East.
That's all.
That's quite right.
But the Ukrainian genocide, which happened in 1936, they call it the Holdomore, was completely suppressed, the story.
The people who committed it never faced crime, and yet the US and Britain, while they were fulminating against the Nazis for all kinds of crimes, knew that they were dealing with this bloodstained monster in Russia who had killed probably three times more people than Hitler did.
So I'm not excusing Hitler's crimes by saying it, but I'm just saying that we allied ourselves with a bigger devil to fight a smaller devil.
There was nothing honorable in this.
World War II was not necessarily a good war as it's looked back on now, particularly when we see who we were dealing with.
Yeah, the Hollywood movies make it seem like it was all just a bunch of sailors being heroes and whatever, but there's a lot more to it than that when you look at the bigger politics.
Especially when you read, you know, Gerrit Garett or Herbert Hoover or any of the people who were saying, hey, look, just let Hitler go East.
Let the Germans and the Russians fight, and when they're done, then maybe we'll think about intervening and seeing on whose side we want to bomb now.
But there's no reason to have a war in the West.
Let them go East.
How long can Hitler and Stalin share a border in Poland before it's just them in a war?
Why do we have to have an occupation of all of the Netherlands and France and Denmark and all the rest of it, the London Blitz and all of that?
Well, it's a very good historical question that will be answered.
I mean, they were saying that before we got in the war.
They were saying, let him go East.
Stay out of it.
That's right.
Well, this was an era, you know, when the single largest ethnic minority or a group of ethnic origin in the United States were Germans.
And when we went to war, it was our American Germans against the German Germans.
Think of Eisenhower, for example, General Spatz of the Army Air Force.
There were very good arguments to be made for having held off on the war, and that's what Stalin was always afraid of.
He was afraid that the capitalists were going to to wait until Germany and the Soviets had exhausted themselves.
Well, you know, I guess with the counterfactual, it's impossible, but to know for sure.
But it seems to me that at least there was a chance that the Nazis would have sacked Moscow.
But then they would have fallen apart trying to occupy the Soviet Union anyway.
As Napoleon, you can't do it.
That's the end of your empire anyway.
And so and because Nazism as ideology is so exclusive, it's just about the top leaders of the Gestapo at the expense of everybody else in the world.
Then it dies with them.
Whereas communism is almost like Christianity, where it's promising to save the lowest person out of the gutter and give them a life.
You know, and it went on to take over all of China and and kill another 40 million people.
That's right.
So it's it's a wonderful debate to be held.
You know, one of the reasons that Hitler invaded Russia, if you read his what he said to his associates, was that he needed to do it for food security.
This is something that's never talked about.
In World War One, the British Navy starved Germany and the central powers into submission.
The German army wasn't defeated in the in the field.
It's the population was starved, which is, by the way, a war crime.
And Austria-Hungary collapsed because of starvation.
Hitler was determined that this would not be done to Germany again.
They needed new farmland.
And the place they were going to find it was in the Ukraine, where the Germans were initially greeted as liberators when they came in and drove the Soviets out.
Oh, yeah.
And for people who are listening to this and saying, oh, my God, what do you know?
What am I hearing?
I can't believe this.
Well, you know what?
That's what Churchill said after the fact.
He said this is the unnecessary war.
Huh?
I guess we didn't really need to do that after all.
Oops.
Well, I wonder how much Churchill really wanted to be more political in this war and not allow the Soviets to gain to end up victorious.
Certainly he talked about it.
He considered it.
But he was pushed into the I mean, Britain really became an American colony by the mid 1940s and was occupied by American troops getting ready for the Normandy invasion.
One wonders if Churchill was just dragged along.
He certainly had many reservations, which he which he mentioned.
Huh.
Well, that's an interesting take on it.
But, yeah, that's where the name Airstrip One comes from in 1984.
Right.
I'm not familiar with that.
Oh, yeah.
England is called Airstrip One because it's just the forward air base of the U.S. Empire.
As Brzezinski said, it's the most important beginning of the stepping stones into Europe for the maintenance of American domination over the over the continents.
And sure, America entered this war as it did in World War One to try and expand its own power.
And it succeeded brilliantly in the sense that America ended up American.
Soviet ended up as the victors of World War Two.
Now, I wanted to mention one more thing about sourcing here.
Pat Buchanan wrote a great book and there's a lot of other stuff, Human Smoke and others.
But Pat Buchanan wrote this book, Churchill, Hitler and the Unnecessary War.
That's, again, that quote from Churchill that is the Unnecessary War.
And I believe if I remember right, you wrote a great article reviewing that book, correct?
I did.
And so I wanted to recommend that to people.
And I wanted to mention that Pat Buchanan and, you know, people, whatever, he's got a reputation and people don't like him and they like to say he's racist and whatever.
I don't really think so.
I think he's a nice guy.
But anyway, the point being that I'm trying to make is that I believe all of his sources are British historians.
He doesn't even he doesn't quote one German in the whole book because the whole he knows that you're going to try to call him anti-Semite, blah, blah, blah.
So he goes, hey, look, man, all I'm doing is quoting the English in real, you know, throughout saying, why are we doing this?
This seems stupid.
Oh, we're doing it now.
Oh, no, we're doing it wrong.
Oh, what's going to happen?
Geez, I guess we shouldn't have done that all the way through the damn war.
Well, Pat, Pat has always been very forthright in his views, and I don't always agree with him.
I often disagree with him, but at least he dares to have the courage of his convictions and say out loud what others only whisper.
Everybody, that's a great Eric Margulies, Eric Margulies dot com, spelt like Margolis, Eric Margulies dot com.
And you can find him at Lou Rockwell dot com and read his book, American Raj, Liberation or Domination.
Now hear this and I'll be right back with Anthony Gregory.
