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In this episode of the Scheer Intelligence podcast, host Robert Scheer and The Grayzone editor-in-chief Max Blumenthal contextualize the events of Oct. 7 and afterward in relation to the history of Israel and Palestine.
Blumenthal, the author of several books on Israel and Palestine including “The 51 Day War: Ruin and Resistance in Gaza,” and “Goliath: Life and Loathing in Greater Israel,” recalls his days reporting on the conflict over 10 years ago, highlighting the predictability of the evolution leading to the current war.
From the motivations of Zionism and the actualization of it since 1948, to the misunderstanding of Palestinian politics and the roles of Hamas and the Palestinian Authority, to the political chokehold Benjamin Netanyahu has on the U.S. government and his ability to carry out the current genocide of Gaza, the pair explore the convoluted history of the region that continues to be distorted today.
“The Israel lobby has sought to consolidate October 7th as something that towers even above Pearl Harbor, January 6th and 9/11 as a date that represents a new holocaust …They’ve done that in order to decontextualize the event and erase all the history that preceded it, which helps us understand why it took place,” Blumenthal tells Scheer.
Scheer and Blumenthal also detail how, through censorship, false reporting and other aspects of the information war, the stories of Palestinians continue to get lost and misrepresented, especially with the strength of Israeli propaganda.
“Zionism as applied in Palestine will always lead towards genocide. That’s the ultimate goal. They have to finish 1948. There’s no way to do it without genocide,” Blumenthal said.
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Robert Scheer: Hi, this is Robert Scheer with another edition of Scheer Intelligence, where the intelligence comes from my guest. In this case, Max Blumenthal, the editor, publisher of The Grayzone, and who’s done some of the really, I don’t want to say provocative, because that just gets people agitated, I want to say has done some of the best traditional, well, what should have been traditional journalism of the last decade and you know, whether it was Trump in office or now Biden and he puts it out there and he puts it out there in a way that withstands scrutiny and is what journalism is supposed to be about, you know? Comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable. So, this is Max Blumenthal, and I just want to mention three books. We’ve done podcasts before, but for our purposes, for our discussion today, two books on Israel. One, these are all obviously available, The 51 Day War, on Gaza and that’s in July 2014. And the reason that’s so important is this whole situation with Israel and the Palestinians, it doesn’t start on the first week in October of last year, no. There’s this whole tortured history and I have to remind people, if you take the most basic element of democratic freedom, one person, one vote, that has been denied to the people living in this occupied area ever since the Six Day War and the Palestinians did not wage war against Israel. It was a preemptive war that Israel started. But if you’re going to involve the Arab population, it’s Egypt, it’s Syria to a small degree, it’s Jordan. And of course, in the case of Jordan and Egypt, Israel quickly made peace, lie with them, they’re not threatening governments. And Israel is trying to get along with the real powerhouse in the Mideast, Saudi Arabia, the oil emirates, and so forth. Yet, this torture, really, of the Palestinian people has gone on all this time with absolutely no justification.
But that was the story of the re-entry into Gaza and the 51 day war in July 2014. More to the current case, and you said the word Goliath: Life and Loathing in Greater Israel, and this is one of the gutsiest bits of journalism, I remember reading, I think, because I was once the editor of Ramparts Magazine, which took on some pretty strong targets, but when we got into the Six Day War,, I went over there to cover it. My God, we went into bankruptcy so fast, you couldn’t even notice, and we had to somehow struggle to get back at all. And, and the use of the word Goliath, because Israel is trafficked in the David and Goliath image and always the defenseless poor Israel is threatened by these major powers. And of course, as we learned clearly in the Six Day War, Israel had been armed, outfitted by the United States with the latest technology. When I arrived at the Cairo airport, Israel had bombed all the real planes and not wasted on the dummy planes because their intelligence was that good. And Israel has never really been the David, it’s been the Goliath. So Goliath: Life and Loathing in Greater Israel, a powerful book. And then the Management of Savagery, which really goes into U.S. foreign policy and begins with the setting the Soviets up in Afghanistan and takes us all through what are described as misadventures but, in Max Blumenthal’s writing, emerged as a picture of a very dangerous empire.
So enough of me, I always promise myself I’ll have short introductions, I always fail. But Max, welcome and can we just begin with the reassertion from my money for the David Goliath image that the whole justification of what’s going on now in the brutal destruction of Gaza and really the forced displacement of people, ethnic cleansing, was all done over what happened with this Hamas attack. And you are someone who dared. challenge the narrative basically developed by Israel of what happened then, and that is used as a justification for, really, for this barbarism. I would like you to go into a little bit, your calling into question the revered traditional journal of distinction, the top dog in all this, the New York Times.
Max Blumenthal: Yeah well, should we focus on the idea that this all began on October 7th, or do you want to talk about the New York Times hoax that they’ve been caught in?
Scheer: Look, the luxury of this show is we can talk about anything we want to talk about at length. And as I said, the intelligence, Scheer intelligence, but it comes from you. So take it over. Take us to school.
Blumenthal: Okay, well, you know, October 7th has been exploited by the most, what is clearly the most, powerful political force in American society because it has made a live streamed, explicitly broadcast genocide possible. It’s rendered all U.S. leverage over its supposed closest ally, completely null and void. It’s neutralized it. We’re talking about the Israel lobby. The Israel lobby has sought to consolidate October 7th as something that towers even above, I don’t know, Pearl Harbor, January 6th and 9/11 as a date that represents a new holocaust and they’ve done that in order to decontextualize the event and erase all the history that preceded it, which helps us understand why it took place.
And then additionally, they have concocted and fabricated atrocities that did not take place in order to illustrate the image of Hamas that they want to project to the world, which is an irrational band of ISIS-like savages. When atrocities did take place on October 7th, but apparently wasn’t enough for Israel and it’s cutouts in the West, to illustrate the point they wanted to make in order to create the political space for genocide. I remember covering the 2014 war. You talked about my book, The 51 Day War, and just being shocked by the level of destruction I saw inside Gaza. And when a short ceasefire or pause ended, the bombing began, I remember being in my apartment in Gaza City and just being completely jarred and suffering shell shock from the amount of bombing that was taking place around me. Buildings adjacent to me weren’t being bombed, but I could feel the impact of gigantic bombs. And it started actually with a 2000 pound bomb in one neighborhood away while I was conducting an interview to assassinate the leader of the Al Qassam brigades, Mohammed Daif. They wound up killing his entire family and wounding him, but he’s still alive in a tunnel somewhere.
But the point is I was shocked by what Israel was doing. I walked through the rubble and met family after family who would tell me about losing 10 members, losing 20 members. I’d meet a child who didn’t know where their family was. You just see people walking around in the rubble like, practically like zombies. And this assault on Gaza has been completely forgotten. And it pales in comparison to what Israel has done now, because the building I was in, in Gaza city, is gone. Everything is gone. The entire city is gone. The entire North of Gaza has been brought to the ground. There’s still 300, 000 people there and they’re starving to death. The U.S. is doing nothing for them. And at the end of that war, in 2014, which began through a series of deceptions in which Netanyahu egged on at the end of that war. I went to something called the Russell Tribunal, which was like a people’s tribunal in Brussels with a jury featuring very prominent figures like Roger Waters, [indistinguishable], I think John Dugard, who is a weapons expert. These are people who are sympathetic to Palestine and they were to judge a sort of trial where we’re putting Israel on trial before an audience to consider whether Israel committed the crime of genocide. And I remember I presented my evidence of what I saw in the rubble. And at the end, they said, do you believe Israel has committed genocide?
And I said, well, I can’t actually come to that conclusion. I want to be really careful with that term. However, I believe Jewish Israeli society is poised to commit genocide in the future. And I made a documentary about that war with Dan Cohen called “Killing Gaza.” And at the end of the documentary, we dedicated it to the victims of the next war, those who will die in the next war, because it was clear there would be another war. Anyway, you talk to some of the young men who actually taken up arms to fight inside Gaza. Many of them are orphans or lost family members through hideous assaults and they’ll say we’re getting ready for the next war and this next war we know and our commanders tell us that it could last over a year, it could even last two years and we will be prepared. And so that’s what was taking place because this was a people under siege. This is a population that of refugees, 80 percent refugees. People who had been living. inside a panopticon that they could not leave since 2005. And then before that, were directly, intimately occupied by Israeli forces.The Gaza Strip has traditionally been a human warehouse and they are the ones who have borne the pain of the Nakba in 1948 more than any other part of Palestine. I mean, disproportionately, they were the people who are pushed out of Southern, what is now Southern Israel, in many cases, what Israel calls the Gaza envelope, by force in 1948, there was one of the largest population centers was called Majd al Asqalan that those Palestinians were taken in trucks at gunpoint and held in a barbed wire camp on the border of what is now Gaza for two years until the Israeli authorities figured out what to do with them. And then they just took them in trucks and dumped them inside Gaza and said, we’re done with you forever.
And so Gaza’s always, it has always experienced violent assaults from Israel. It has always hosted resistance, including armed resistance, because they’ve been dispossessed, they’re stateless, they’re refugees, they’re humiliated. And leading up to October 7th, you had a Biden administration which was continuing Trump’s policy of putting Palestinians in the historical icebox, of trying to cut a series of deals, a kind of peace between the rich. Between Israel and Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, the monarchs who are completely avaricious, who have little regard for the moral cause that has always been the engine of Arab unity, Until, I mean, it was the engine of Arab unity until like states like Egypt were through the Camp David Accord. States like Syria were, weakened through the dirty war that the U.S. waged on serious states, like Libya, were completely destroyed through the NATO assault on Libya. And so as the Arab, the true Arab states began to break that represented the ambitions of their population. Then what’s left is the, monarchic right wing retrograde regimes of the gulf states, and they were desperate to make peace with Israel for financial reasons to tap into vast of the West’s wealth, legitimize themselves.
And they, so they had to go over the heads of the Palestinians to do that. Once that takes place, the Palestinian cause will fade from, it will just fade. And in the West Bank, the Palestinian cause had been essentially, it hadn’t been defeated. But it was being suffocated by a Palestinian Authority that was accountable entirely to Israel in the United States. It was dependent on Israel in the United States for its own legitimacy. Israel was its tax collector. It was acting as an occupation subcontractor. The PA security forces only role is to arrest Palestinians in certain pot Palestinian populations centers. So Hamas is pretty much all that’s left in the cradle of resistance in Gaza at a time when you have Jake Sullivan going to the Aspen Ideas Conference or the Aspen Security Conference a week before October 7th and declaring that the Middle East has never been quieter than at any time in history, taking credit for suffocating the Palestinian cause. And this all happened also in…
Scheer: You should mention the matter of elections that in fact, the people living in Gaza rejected the Palestinian Authority, so we brand Hamas as nothing but a terrorist organization. But unfortunately, from that point of view, why do so many Palestinians reject the Palestinian Authority and vote for it and even in the West Bank, there’s a feeling that the Palestinian Authority is no longer an organization that speaks for the Palestinian resistance. It’s like we like certain elections, but we don’t like others, but it’s convenient narrative to American policy and you really bring up a basic point here: why did Hamas do what it did? And we should discuss Netanyahu’s strategy. And he wasn’t alone of building Hamas up as an alternative to the Palestinian Authority, but then not allowing them any progress in their direction towards having some real power over their area.
Blumenthal: Their area. Yeah. Well, first the Gaza Strip and West Bank, they don’t have separate elections. So in 2006, there were the Palestinian legislative council elections and actually Hamas triumphed in the West Bank, in cities like Qalqilya, where Israel had built this gigantic apartheid wall around the circumference of the city. The entire city was enclosed within a wall. It was, it had basically been turned into a concentration camp. That city went for Hamas in large numbers, not because they’re religious fanatics, but because Hamas was the only force that rejected the Oslo Accords that laid the basis for that wall.
Scheer: You should mention, by the way, because people have some very simple views of other people’s lives. And the fact is, the Palestinian Authority was basically a secular, PLO of Arafat and so forth, was basically a secular movement that was more attractive to people in the United States and so forth, is like us, and then the people appeal to a more religious sentiment, Muslim based was Hamas. But the real issue was the people living there and everyone I’ve interviewed is who’s going to sell out or who’s going to care about us. And Hamas established a reputation for not selling out and the remnants of the PLO was selling out all over the place.
Blumenthal: Yeah, it was really the Fatah party of Yasser Arafat, and who succeeded after he was apparently assassinated, was succeeded because he wasn’t compliant enough, was succeeded by Mahmoud Abbas, who was sort of one of the old figures from the PLO from Fatah, who was left after Israel had assassinated pretty much everyone around Arafat who had any serious diplomatic chops, who had radical tendencies, who was seen as too militant. Israel used assassination as a means of getting the leadership that wanted and Fatah was essentially defeated as a resistance force. And then the moment Arafat signed Oslo, it was all over because the peace process was just this gigantic ruse to allow Israel to deepen its settlement enterprise behind the guise of peace while telling the world that it wanted peace and maintaining its diplomatic legitimacy.
Scheer: But even that was too much for, I guess, the majority of Israelis. They killed Rabin. Everybody forgets that.
Blumenthal: Well, Netanyahu killed Rabin. It was a coup d’etat.
Scheer: You should explain that because I’m sorry, but even though I’m older than you from being a five day a week or something, people have no sense of this history. Where does it come from or what have you. And so now many people accept this narrative, Hamas are just these, as you say, ISIS, evil terrorists and so forth. The fact is, this is a group that Netanyahu supported it as an alternative to the PLO. Right?
Blumenthal: Okay, to understand this, we have to be a little bit theoretical and academic.
There’s a major contradiction. In Zionism as it applies to Israel, as soon as Zionism became a political project on the ground in historic Palestine, this contradiction emerged. As Ben Gurion himself acknowledged, It wouldn’t survive without the great powers supporting it. So it’s basically this, it says it’s this Jewish state that defends Jewish sovereignty, but it’s dependent entirely on its direct line to the gentile authority in Washington, for diplomatic support, funding, et cetera, military aid. So they need to appear legitimate. They need to appear democratic. And that means that they need to appear as though they’re going to make peace with the Palestinians. And the old labor wing, Yitzhak Rabin, who represented sort of one of the, he was one of the big four generals of the founding generation of Israel, who is the centrist general.
He emerges, declares that he will negotiate for a Palestinian state against his old foe. He played a major role, much more significant role in brutalizing Palestinians than Netanyahu or anyone from the Likud party ever had, which kind of gave him the legitimacy to make quote unquote peace. And actually, he was never intending to do that. He just needed to cut a deal in order to legitimize Israel in the post Cold War era with the only superpower. And this is what Washington was demanding. So in his final speech before the Knesset, Yitzhak Rabin actually assured the parliamentary body that he would give the Palestinians, in his words, less than a state. And he only had the votes that they needed in Knesset to actually pass the Oslo Accords because they were bribing people, for example, buying them like Suzuki Jeeps so that they would vote with them. And so there’s that. And then there’s the contradiction of what Zionism really is, which is what we see today.
With the government around Netanyahu. This is the most Israeli or most Zionist government in Israel’s history. Some people say it’s the most right wing or fanatical, but Zionism is fundamentally fanatical, fundamentally right wing, fundamentally genocidal when it’s applied to a territory where most of the people are not Jewish. So Israel in 1966 was in a state of extreme crisis. And I’m sorry to go back this far and be this academic, but it helps us understand what’s…
Scheer: You mean the original formation of Israel…
Blumenthal: This is a year before Israel became greater Israel. It was in a state of crisis. It had no internal legitimacy to mobilize the population according to the parameters of Zionism, because there really wasn’t a lot of connection to the history of Judaism in the Bible. There weren’t places where the soldiers could go and take their initiation rites that had that much significance. They used to send them to Masada in the desert, which is just…
Scheer: I’m sorry to interrupt, but again, because I spend so many hours each week talking to people who don’t know any of this, and it’s not their fault, it’s not dealt with in high school or college. Let’s pause and go through this history which is really significant and explain what you mean by greater Israel and what…
Blumenthal: I’m going to explain that. Yeah, yeah. So, 1967, Israel attacks Egypt, scores this lightning victory, it attacks Syria, and it takes East Jerusalem and the West Bank, and it takes what was known as the Wailing Wall, makes it the Western Wall. They gain access not only to those holy sites, which paved the way for possibly taking Boxer compound and rebuilding the third temple, which is the ultimate goal of the real ideologues in Netanyahu’s coalition. This is what will harken the coming of the Messiah. They also get access to places in Hebron in the Southern West Bank, the Palestinian West Bank, where Abraham and Sarah bathed like wells and the Ibrahimi mosque, this is also considered a Jewish holy site. So suddenly the state becomes activated and filled with fervor. And a lot of the internal crises start to fade away, where you had all these different population groups, Jews coming from around the world who really had nothing in common with each other, they could unite around this and this also filled them with anti-Palestinian Resentment because those were the people in the way of them connecting with the biblical tradition that would legitimize this state and the state gradually became more and more religious, more nationalistic, more extreme, more anti-Palestinian as the result of its move towards legitimizing itself within its own population.
So you have the contradictions come out when Rabin is… after he signs the Oslo Accords, shakes hands with Arafat, you have this whole swath of the Jewish Israeli populace who says, he’s going to give up the West Bank? He’s going to give that up? He was actually never going to, but that was the rhetoric. He has to die. So the, one of the major rabbis, in Hebron, in the extremist settlements. Dov Lior issues what could be called a fatwa. He called, he declared that Rabin is a “Din Rodef,” or a betrayer of the Jewish a snitch,[indistinguishable], these are the two worst things you can call someone. It was basically a death sentence and it was his disciple who actually, Yigal Amir, who actually killed Rabin, but it was Netanyahu who was running around as the Likud opposition leader, as this young figure who had come back from the United States, where he was building this reputation in the U S business community. And he just had, he came back to Israel to lead Likud and he started inciting against Rabin, declaring that he was going to sell Israel out to the Arabs and deny the legitimacy of the Jewish state. And so Rabin was killed at a rally. And Leah Rabin, his widow…
Scheer: You should mention by a Jewish assassin, that convenient truth is hardly, I have never heard it mentioned this was not, I mean, the whole image of the greatest terrorist act in Israel was committed by a Jewish assassin who was trying to stop what was a purported peace plan.
Blumenthal: Right. Yes. And it worked. And it’s what paved the path for Netanyahu to become prime minister. Now, first he was prime minister in ’96. It didn’t work out that well because he fell under, he surrendered to some pressure from the U.S. to pull out of part of Hebron, and that deprived him of legitimacy within Likud. So when he came back in 2009, he was just never going to ever surrender again to U.S. pressure. And he demonstrated that he could humiliate Barack Obama time and time again, come to Washington and basically accuse Obama of appeasement, of appeasing the Nazis. In Congress with the invite of the Republican opposition leader, John Vayner, and that Obama could do nothing. He wasn’t going to withhold arms to Israel. He did the Iran deal, but Netanyahu was working to sabotage that full-time and got that through his chief funder, Sheldon Adelson, who also was the top donor to the campaign of Donald Trump in 2016. So Netanyahu has just been demonstrating that he is the true Israeli leader who represents the true spirit of Zionism as Zionism consistently moves into a religious nationalist and messianic phase, the post ’67 phase, and that the contradictions that Netanyahu will actually be able to erase the contradiction by basically just declaring total dominance over the U.S. That Israel can be its true self and wipe out Palestinians, commit genocide, and that there’s nothing the U.S. can do and that’s what he’s doing right now with Joe Biden. And that’s why when you see that Netanyahu actually seems to lack a popularity inside Israel.
Like after October 7th, he gets a lot of the blame for that attack and that his approval rating is low at the same time. There’s no other figure in Jewish Israelis politics who could possibly succeed him, who has the same level of popularity within a part of the public or who can position themselves as the one who can dominate the U.S. Netanyahu’s openly said that the US is a thing that you can move easily. And he’s boasted more recently that he took the two state solution off the table. Something he’d never said so publicly because he feels so confident in the position he’s in now. And it’s the weakness of the Democratic Party and the administration in Washington, the weakness, not only of Joe Biden, but of Barack Obama, who has said nothing. This is a figure who sort of towers above the Democratic Party and he said nothing. And the power of the Israel lobby that Netanyahu has helped create in Washington that has made this possible. And it’s all leading towards the greatest atrocity that I’ve ever witnessed in my life.
So, I mean, to try to understand where I’m going with this long yarn, it’s that Zionism as applied in Palestine will always lead towards genocide. That’s the ultimate goal. They have to finish 1948. There’s no way to do it without genocide. And it will always lead towards a messianic right wing leadership and Netanyahu is sort of the perfect figure to lead it because he helps bridge all the competing factions and provides perfect cover for the bigger fanatics who could never serve as the front man. And it has eroded American national interests and American sovereignty to the point where the U.S. has absolutely no interest in seeing Gaza be ethnically cleansed, in seeing this genocide take place. And yet the U.S., the Biden administration is sending a floating dock to Gaza via, I guess, elements in the U.S. Navy and some corrupt contractors. And it’s not going to be to get aid in, it’s going to be to get Palestinians out to help Israel fulfill its goal.
Scheer: We should go on to that because people think, oh, no, something will be worked out. That’s what they’ve been saying for decades. And they also, a lot of people don’t like the use of “settler colonialism” to describe Israel. But there’s a lot of lessons to be learned historically from this phenomena of one people coming in, establishing a claim based on, what is generally based on religion, being modern and what they can do for others, including for the people who are indigenous and so forth. And then genocide, which is defined by the UN in basically the elimination of the vitality and agency of another people that are in your way of your plans, and you get rid of them one way or another, they could, they don’t all have to be killed in concentration camps, they could be put on reservations, you could have ethnic cleansing, they can be moved out, and so forth. That all fits under the definition of genocide. Some people get very angry if you use that word, but you’re basically talking about the destruction of a people as a people where they are. You know, they could end up being exiled and not killed. That would be fine to the settlers. And the alliance with the power that you brought up originally, that this is an agency of U.S. Western power. I don’t want to get distracted from what you’re saying, but that really was involved before the Six Day War. The big issue was, could Egypt control the Suez Canal? Could there be any kind of anti-imperialist vitality in the region, including Iran, where we were involved in overthrowing the secular leader Mossadegh and so forth.
And Israel, sided, obviously with England and the United States in these plans, so it became a partner, a junior partner. Maybe now, maybe it’s more of a senior partner, one doesn’t know. But the thing I want to mention to people, and that you’re really bringing up, It’s a very depressing reality that you can eliminate a people and, there’s actually now some little chatter I see, read it even on Haaretz and other places where, well, Gaza would make a great resort city after all…,
Blumenthal: Jared Kushner just said that.
Scheer: There you go. And so one can almost see because I remember when I was there, they lied to me when I was there at the end of the Six Day War. Well I talked to people like Alon and Dayan was running around and I was writing a script and they said the opposite, they said, you come back in 10 years and if we’re still occupying, we will not be a Jewish nation. This will involve, controlling people. This is a denial of what Israel and Zionism is all about. And we can’t stay permanently in occupation. But clearly I was being lied to. I believed it at the time, or at least thought they would make some attempt. But I don’t think, I agree with you, I don’t think there was ever a serious attempt. And so I just want to remind people the ethical issue in the future for people who say that they support a Jewish state or they support Israel. The state you’re going to… it’ll be a lot like walking over Native American ruins. Yes, and, we say, well actually the real name of Los Angeles is this, or the real name… but the fact is, we’ve destroyed these people. And you could see almost a Palestinian casino in Gaza and a great tourist attraction. And then people who have been totally broken in spirit and everything, but rewarded financially, kind of being like fake cigar store Indians that they used to have, the statue outside of and that is even more depressing, shouldn’t say more depressing than genocide, it is an extension of genocide that power can exert its own reality and justification.
And that’s going to get me because we’re going to run out of time. How much time do we have, by the way? We’ve been going for a long time. Are you still patient for continuing this? I think the good people don’t necessarily win. Truth doesn’t necessarily win. Justice doesn’t necessarily win. That is basically the assumption of most people who go along with power. Whether it’s the Democratic Party or the Republican Party. They just assume I’m supporting, maybe I don’t like all this, but I’m supporting the lesser evil. And I don’t want to end this discussion without discussing that, because in your talk to the Democratic women, whatever it’s called,
Blumenthal: Women’s National Democratic Council or something.
Scheer: I want to get into that because that’s going to be on people’s mind. To what degree are we locked in with the Democratic Party? And in my lifetime, I’m much older than you, the Democratic Party has not been the center of virtue. I’ve probably voted Democratic almost every time. I even ran as a candidate in ’66 in the Democratic Party in opposition to the Vietnam War. But the fact is the most aggressive pursuers of international violence have been the Democrats, and they’re much better at packaging it. And one point you made in your speech, which I found compelling, actually, was this Democratic Party that has destroyed the anti-war movement. And I actually find more consciousness among libertarians, at least, raising some issues, this publication AntiWar on the internet, which I actually go to every day. AntiWar, let me give them a plug. They’re at least exposing. So let’s talk about that a little bit.
Blumenthal: Well, I mean I spoke at the Women’s National Democratic Committee or Council, their membership has people who believe in peace, just like the Democratic Party sort of what I said in my speech was that my presence there and the fact that it was happening was part of a wider rebellion in the party of elements of the party grassroots against the party leadership, which has basically been bought off, sold out and given in to the neoconservatives, the arm and the arms industry, the new cold warriors and the Israel lobby, some of the most malign forces in human history. Almost like a fourth Reich that rules over the people and compels them.
Even John F. Kennedy would have been condemned and driven out of the party for his famous, or it should be more famous, American University speech towards the end of his life, where he urged Americans, and particularly young people, to put themselves in the shoes and the mindset of the Soviet Union as the U.S. was pointing Jupiter missiles at it from Turkey. This is something that’s forbidden to say in today’s Democratic Party, and I called out the genocide Democrats, Tony Blinken, who said he went to Israel as a Jew and not as a diplomat after October 7th, and gave them carte blanche to commit genocide, or Joe Biden, who bear hugged Netanyahu. All of them. Hakeem Jeffries, the first Black democratic, minority leader in Congress who is owned by AIPAC. This guy is a complete plant of the Israel lobby. Chuck Schumer, he’s given some speech criticizing Netanyahu, but his entire career was propelled by an Israel lobby. And he went on the National Mall to cheer on Israel as a committed genocide before finally realizing that Netanyahu wasn’t exactly answering to American interests.
All of these characters are just so despicable. How can you support them? And what I wanted to say, because there was a lot of grumbling in the audience. And then you could see if you watch the Q and A one question or another was about, well, is Trump any better? And yeah, of course Trump isn’t going to be better on Palestine, but how do you influence a party that is so far gone and so deeply amoral without actually withholding your vote and withholding your support and what they want us to do. This whole campaign is just going to be about the bad orange, four times indicted Hitler being so evil that we have to hold our nose and vote for a genocider in chief, and I’m not going to do it. And what I wanted to say to these women, who are liberal women, good hearted, liberal women is would you support Joe Biden who says, I kind of didn’t have time to make this point, Joe Biden says that he has grave issues with abortion. He’s a Catholic and he has serious doubts about whether abortion should be on demand. He said that. What if Joe Biden stated that he would support the Republicans on the Dobbs decision by the Supreme Court and actually move towards banning medical abortion, which is responsible for something like 70 percent of abortions now where you just take a series of pills. You would go and form another party.
You would leave the Democratic Party and you’d form the abortion party. I mean, they would do it. They’d be so outraged over this one issue. But when we say that we’re outraged over the issue genocide, of Zionism dominating this party, this fascistic ethno-supremacist ideology of the Democrats being pro war, wanting war with Russia, rejecting any peace on the Korean Peninsula. Trumping up a new Cold War with China, supporting AFRICOM in Africa, supporting coups and sanctions in Venezuela and Nicaragua that are creating a migration crisis, and then saying, Oh, let’s just, you know, welcome the migrants in that we created and make them slave labor. When we say that we’re outraged by that, they accuse us of playing purity politics. So really we just have to hold the line on that issue of war and peace and not be moved By their time tested scare mongering about Donald Trump. And at some point, they’re going to have to realize that they have an entire generation of people that actually cares more about humanity than their leadership does, and they’re going to have to answer to them, or they will continue to lose.
Scheer: Well, it’s interesting because I think Schumer’s speech, which I thought was significant, actually we posted it on our website, ScheerPost. And actually we posted the speech, but I think was only given because some 100, 000 people in the key election state abstained in the vote, right? I mean, there was a representation both in Michigan and I think in Wisconsin and so forth of people saying they’re horrified. And I think the situation in this particular episode of the Israeli-Palestinian war, it’s not a Hamas war, has gone too far. And, the pushback here is now maybe there are some things you can’t sell. Maybe there are some limits. However, I want to talk to you and we just have to take, if I could take a few more minutes. People like you, and I know I can speak out of personal experience, I’ve challenged some of these narratives, including about Israel.
We’re made to be non people, we’re pariahs, we’re pushed aside, and so forth. And I know you’ve been subjected to a lot of pressure. Yeah.
Blumenthal: Well, go ahead. But I don’t feel like a pariah right now. And you’re not either. You’re sort of like, considered kind of a legend. It’s just that we have no voice within any institution in this undemocratic society, that’s all it That’s the way I see it.
Scheer: Yeah, but they’re going to continue to try to marginalize anybody who objects, no matter their credentials, no matter what. But I wanna also hold out hope for people to become like It’s one reason I teach honestly, I think we need role models that I try to introduce people and I say, Hey, sometimes they come from the conservative side. And sometimes if we really believe in academic integrity, intellectual integrity did Trump do anything right? Or is there anything legitimate about the constituency? After all, if you take Hillary Clinton’s point of view, and they’re all deplorables, then we have no real issues in this country. My own view of Trump is that he’s a successful, very successful, unfortunately, right wing populist, who blames immigrants and working people for our problems. But the fact is we have problems, you know, and the whole reason why the naysayers, whether they come from the left or the right, are considered pariahs or labeled as smeared as such.
It is the people who created these problems like the banking situation and the income inequality and the loss of decent wages and needless, not only needless, genocidal wars don’t want dissent on this. So that’s the main thing and that’s multi party. But a reason I want to get to the personal is I’m trying to encourage people to do the kind of work that you do.I think it’s admirable and you’re not marginal. I mean, you reach a lot of people, obviously. So I wanted kind of get a little bit to what makes you tick. And there’s something that hasn’t come up in this discussion. Our views on Israel, I’m sharing a lot of your views and in some ways to even go further. How dare, and let me put it with some force here, I felt this when I went there, and I wrote for Ramparts and I even bought into a lot of the distortions that I heard from leftists at the very least and so forth, but how dare anyone tell somebody who is Jewish, which both of us are, technically, we’re Jewish, and I think, I don’t know, I read your stuff, you don’t deny, being Jewish and my own family, my my mother, it was where I get the Jewish part, my family was swiped out in Lithuania. And I know all the horrors and so forth, but the way this thing proceeds in bringing up AIPAC, the idea that you can disenfranchise, which is now an increasing number of Jewish people speaking out, that they have the right and that that’s not considered anti Semitic. I mean, the very idea that these quislings defenders of the world empire and everything else get the right to say that anyone who objects to their narrative is somehow no longer Jewish or self hating or anti Semitic is bizarre to the extreme. You wonder how people can say it with a straight face.
Blumenthal: Well, yeah, to try to address all the questions packaged there and quickly as possible. I think, what it comes down to, whether it’s being called a Jewish anti Semite or a self hating Jew, or being castigated in the media world, it’s when you ask what makes me tick, it’s really how do I come to peace with my position in this society.and within my own faith community, which I still participate in because I’m not going to stop saying Kaddish for my ancestors, there’s nothing you can do to stop me. It was, it’s actually funny, when I went to services on Yom Kippur at this… Georgetown University, they just have like free services. You can like walk in there pretty much randomly so it’s convenient. And the rabbi was going off and he was in a sermon about how Israel was controlled by fascists. This is well before October 7th because of the protests against Netanyahu. And he was afraid that Zionism would be destroyed by this band of fascists that was surrounding Netanyahu.
So, I mean, there’s a whole there was a basically a civil war brewing within American Judaism well before October 7th, and I’ve been a part of it. And in the media, I’ve just come to peace with the fact that I just hate the media. I think the media attracts some of the worst people in our society. The biggest narcissists and hypocrites and sociopaths and so what like what The Grayzone is is like an anti-media organization using jornalistic tactics and applying journalistic ethics. Like what we write has to be factual and true in order to break the stranglehold of a media that’s basically stenographers for power. And we’ve done, I think we’ve done it just by reaching a mass base of people through our live streams. My live stream two days ago, where I just chop it up with Aaron Mate, we had 14,000 viewers like consistently. And then these consistently get over six figures in views each week. So we’re reaching people. We’re breaking the media monopoly, where if you just look at any, pay attention to any corporate media, it’s all the same message on the Ukraine proxy war, on any major issue. And reaching people across partisan lines, so that kind of helps me be at peace with my position, just knowing that we’re reaching people just like you reach people, Bob, and within this, within the Jewish question here, where I’ve been branded one of the top 10 anti Semites two years running on the list of this race hustler organization called the Simon Wiesenthal Foundation. They’re always saying I hate Jews. I’m kind of at peace with that too, because I don’t see Zionists as part of something that I’m… I don’t feel any connection to them.
In fact, I feel like the strongest opposition to any force on the planet is towards them. I see them as actually members of a demonic cult, a satanic cult that hates humanity, that is completely comfortable with mass slaughter, which celebrates it if it doesn’t deny it outright. And they are basically the moral equal of Holocaust deniers, except they don’t even deny the Holocaust that’s taking place in front of our face in Gaza. They celebrate it. They enjoy it. They’re broadcasting their crimes from Gaza to the entire world. And they were carrying out genocide, destroying the Northern Gaza neighborhood of Shuja’iyya , for example. They erected a gigantic menorah to celebrate Hanukkah there. There’s video that soldiers put on TikTok from Gaza of them firing off a tank shell at Palestinian homes for each night of Hanukkah. This is what they are doing to Judaism while we are simply trying to apply it to humanity. And so why would I care what they say about me or want anything to do with them?
Why do I care if they see me as a fellow Jew when I don’t see them as a fellow human? They hate Muslims and want to destroy them. We see them destroying mosques across the Gaza Strip. They hate Christians. They destroyed some of the oldest Christian churches on the planet in Gaza. And they don’t actually care about Jewish life outside the territory that they control. In fact, they aim to extinguish it. They are fomenting anti Semitism and anti Judaism with their displays of Jewish fanaticism amidst genocide. And that’s always been the goal of Israel. David Ben Gurion wrote in his memoir about how the diaspora had to be collapsed and all Jews had to be freed settled within Israel or Zionism would fail. Without antisemitism, Israel loses its justification as a sanctuary for the world’s Jews. If we’re going to have this golden age of Judaism in the U.S., then Israel and Zionism loses. So I see them completely on the other side. They can say what they want about me. And I think many Jews in this country and across the west feel the same as I do.
Scheer: The point I’m getting at here. I think there is a loss if we let this… I still hesitate to say all Zionists are like Netanyahu. Okay. I mean, I know I’ll run into nine people in the next few hours who still consider themselves Zionists and are thoroughly decent and are speaking out.
Blumenthal: Liberal Zionists. It’s like, I’m a promiscuous virgin or I’m a tolerant racist.
Scheer: No, I’m not being disrespectful. I feel I will run into people today. who will define their Zionism as saying that some sort of home and some sort of security, they’ll modify, I agree with you, but they’ll speak out with very strong voice and have been, not just now, consistently condemning the racism of the dominant Zionism and so forth. But I want to be more positive here, because I think what we are, I’ll put myself in your camp here, I think what we are really talking about is defending a notion of Jewish virtue and Jewish excellence and Jewish social commitment and morality. That was actually the dominant view among Jews that I grew up among in the Bronx.
Bronx working class Jewish community, I would say the idealism that the number of people who volunteered to go fight fascism versus Spain and then directly against Hitler, we had a war memorial in our neighborhood. These people were mostly on the left. They were working class union people and I grew up with Zionism, which is before the, I’m much older than you, I was born in ’36. Zionism was a marginal, kind of almost odd movement. There were social Democrats, some were communists, some were liberal Democrats. Just about every Jew I ever ran into in the Bronx with some kind of leftist at least to the degree everybody loved overlooked, a number of his failings. But the fact is to be Jewish meant to be a progressive in some sense. And I think. Yes, that is the anti Semitism that we’re experiencing now is the attack on anyone who stands for those Jewish values that informed the civil rights movement, right? That was so prominent in union organizing and everything else.
And Sheldon Adelman, this sort of thing is bizarre, if you want, had anti-Semites somewhere in your government that wanted to destroy the meaning of being Jewish, they would find a Sheldon Adelman supporting a Donald Trump. That’s really what we’re talking about. That’s why I began by saying I hate being, or you being put on the defensive. I think this is what Jewish people should do, is criticize power, whoever is exercising it, that’s hurting ordinary people. It’s that simple. And that should come out of your diaspora experience of having to survive as a people who were hurt by power. End of story.
Blumenthal: Yep. I mean, and just how insincere our elites are about anti Semitism is so clear right now. A literal Nazi who participated in the Holocaust was honored in the Canadian parliament. Yaroslav Hunka, who served in the Galicia SS division of the German Wehrmacht. He was in the SS, he was a Ukrainian Nazi collaborator who participated in the Holocaust of Bullets. This is division of the SS that ethnically cleansed Lviv of Jews, they committed, they were responsible for one of the worst pogroms of the war was honored in Canadian Parliament by Justin Trudeau, Chrystia Freeland, all these people, all the leadership that’s supporting the Gaza genocide from the North, giving Israel full diplomatic consent for its assault, giving it diplomatic cover at the U.N. They honored a Nazi. They refuse to talk about it now. No one condemned them in U.S. leadership. The story was kind of buried in U.S. media. And Rashida Tlaib, a member of Congress, who’s the first, who’s not the first Palestinian, but, I think, the first Palestinian to sort of wear a keffiyeh on the House floor when she declared that from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free, everyone came together from across party lines to condemn and censor her as the worst anti Semite on the planet. And all we hear about is anti Semitism because young people who actually care about humanity are out in the streets, outraged about what’s happening in Gaza. They’re the anti Semites, the Nazi, the literal Nazi who participated in the Holocaust is a hero.
Why? Because number one, he’s a geopolitical card. You is a part of the Ukrainian diaspora, which is playing this role that they have traditionally played as an anti Russian bulwark to help weaken and erode Russian influence in Europe. And number two, those Nazis were brought to Canada as strike breakers because there was so much union organizing after the war in Canada.Socialism was on the march. So they brought in these thugs, Nazi thugs, to break the strikes, to get into the factories and disrupt things. And they came from Ukraine, Canada imported them. So we can see these dynamics play out day after day. And if you point them out, you’re called a Russian propagandist and an anti Semite. And those words are, they’re just not working anymore, especially among younger people. And Bob, you, said a few times people should be doing what I’m doing. Um, young people should be going beyond what I’m doing because they have more technical wherewithal. They’re more digitally savvy than I am.
I’m playing catch up constantly on all these digital tools. And now you have AI which is frightening, but also presents a lot of opportunities to journalists to, to compete with major media organizations, especially with where video is concerned. Young people have mastered TikTok. It’s a very powerful app. It’s also a very dangerous app that can screw your brain up. Like it can be like a drug, a narcotic, but young people have been like I’m talking about like Gen Z, like Max Stone’s generation. Wait, Max Jones, sorry. Maxwell Jones. Stone is a family name in my family. So I got confused, but your producer, I’m referring to, the producer on the video. Yeah, so basically. There’s a very powerful anti war community on TikTok and very powerful Palestine solidarity community there, and they’re producing some of the most brilliant videos right now on the hypocrisy of the U.S. Government, the Democratic Party and the horrors in Gaza. And there are actually a lot of influencers inside Gaza producing really powerful content. There’s a guy named Ahmed Nasir I’ve been following from Northern Gaza who’s just showing children staging these protests with pots and pans because they’re starving every day in the rubble of Northern Gaza.
This is the kind of stuff you’re seeing on TikTok. So guess what our government’s doing? Joe Biden is pushing a ban on TikTok. They’re laundering it behind anti-China hysteria, that China controls it and China’s hacking the brains of our youth. But like Ted Cruz openly came out and said when he was grilling the CEO of TikTok, that young people are exposed to what he called anti-Israel and anti Semitic propaganda. Jonathan Greenblatt of the Anti Defamation League in leaked audio of a phone call he had with fellow Israel lobbyists, warned of the rise of a TikTok generation that no longer supports Israel. And the Wall Street Journal reported that the lobbying push to ban TikTok Was basically dead on arrival until October 7th. I wonder why. So basically young people are already doing a lot, maybe more than I’m doing with the tools at their disposal. And the government is trying to ban them as part of this rapid de-democratization of our society and war, psychological war on youth who are our conscience right now. And so keep doing what you’re doing. You don’t have to model yourself after me. I would say however, that it’s good to learn how to write.that’s a powerful tool
Scheer: I could end on that note, but let me explain my compliment. I don’t know when I first met you, but I know your parents and I don’t want to get into all that. I did it in another podcast, but they were in the Clinton government. And you, I don’t forget to, but you went to the same school as Chelsea Clinton? I did not. Oh, was something like it to friends or…
It was like, it was not her school, but I met her, I met her like once or twice in my life.
Scheer: Okay. But what I mean as a role model, I’ll be, want to be very clear about this. I don’t mean everybody has to agree with everything you say, or I say, that’s not what I’m talking about. I’m talking about an environment in which as a teacher, I experienced this all the time is that basically we’re teaching selling out. We’re teaching go along to get along. We’re teaching, Hey, you may not like it. And there are a lot of young people who now know it’s not all working. Whoever thought you’d be talking about the survival of life on the earth, not with nuclear weapons, as a reminder that we still have them. But just the whole idea won’t be able to survive in this cherished space and so forth. And the persistence of problems that I mean, God, the prison population, we can go through the whole list. People know that now, they know that. However, they’re told, clean up your resumes cut out any reference to radical activity and go along to get along and because the only way you’re going to pay your rent, let alone buy a house and in every major city, it’s like life is unaffordable for most people.
So basically, a university education, it doesn’t really work for the community colleges and state colleges because they don’t have the entry into. The the elite, get into a good school, go into debt. I mean, by good school, I don’t mean good teaching, but prestige and get the right career, learn the right technology. And, , you’ll make out. And what I mean is by role model or people, and you’re not alone. I would put Chris Hedges there. I would put lots of people. I mean the people who made the civil rights movement, the women’s movement, that we continue. to do that on every level, not just writers and journalists. And, but the key ingredient that I want to make it clear here is not whether everybody agrees with you, is that you are actually following the methodology that we have celebrated of a scientific method, a documentation, critical thinking, right? And no one ever said you all come to the same conclusion, but what the whole argument about fake news and all this and the general attack on what the Internet was, we had this discussion once in the podcast, the vitality of the Wild West Internet at one point. That’s all out the window now. And you get organizations like NewsGuard, which we had talked about before, which condemned sites like ours and everything, yet they work for the Defense Department. They get money from the Defense Department. You could say they work for them. And from other organizations, they have CIA people on the board, and so forth.
They are denying the standards of traditional journalism or scientific inquiry or logical thought, they are the ones that saying evidence doesn’t matter. Facts don’t matter. Logic doesn’t matter. History doesn’t matter. And ironically, someone like yourself. Who is maligned continuously, you’re actually are committed to those standards. That’s the great irony here. And partially, I always said, Yeah, I want to have my facts, right, because otherwise they’ll really clean my clock. I’ll be smashed. Right? Because you’re kind of a target if you challenge the truth. dominant narrative. But the fact of the matter is, and I mean, Chris Hedges, for God’s sake, one of the most brilliant journalists we ever had. But even, I don’t know, you’ve had some disagreements with other people, you think of what Amy Goodman does on DemocracyNow! I know you’ve had some, I think you had some issues, I’m not sure. I can’t keep up with all this stuff. But the fact of the matter is, the commitment, yeah, I guess this could be a good way to end this.
And it goes back to what we began with, your argument with the New York Times and actually that, to pull their podcast. You called them out. You said, Hey, you guys are violating the most obvious standards. Let’s end with that little that episode. How did you hire somebody who was working for the Israeli government or had apologized … And then announced they’re a reporter? How did this story come about? Yet, it’s a good case study and when I say you should be a role model, it’s not that people have to agree specifically with all of your policy conclusions, but your methodology that’s what I want to get at here and you call them out. You took them to school on their betrayal of just the most common journalistic and scholarly standards.
Blumenthal: Well, that’s why a NewsGuard is trying to get rid of us or any of these other censorship mechanisms. It’s because we are telling uncomfortable truths that make it hard for state power to launder its narratives behind the guise of mainstream legacy or corporate media organizations like the New York Times. It’s we’re just unprofessional peddlers of disinformation who are pushing pizzagate and getting people riled up about things that aren’t true. It’s because I mean, the greatest propagators of disinformation are in our mainstream media. Everybody knows that. They have no credibility. But, there’s a certain class of people that still trust the New York Times and the Washington Post and NPR. They happen to be some of the most educated, credentialed people in America. I think they’re the most easily duped. And so this article that you’re talking about in the New York Times, was for them. And it was part of a broader narrative that relates directly to this conversation we’ve been having about October 7th, genocide in Gaza, where basically Israel was losing diplomatic and political support. It’s support within Joe Biden’s base and the Democratic Party had collapsed. Joe Biden’s base is progressive, feminist.
You know, they were the people who got most involved in the MeToo movement. So what could be more powerful for them or palatable than to be told that Jewish women were raped on a systematic basis by this ultra conservative Islamist force in Hamas on October 7th, we didn’t hear much about that in October we heard about, we heard the lies about the beheaded babies about women having fetuses cut out of them, whatever atrocity the Israeli government could concoct and a lot of it was retracted or denied. The damage had kind of been done. And then in December, the Israeli mission at the U.N. hosts this event featuring Hillary the arch militarist feminist and Sheryl Sandberg, the neoliberal to allege that Hamas had committed rape on a mass scale. And they had this vast propaganda apparatus behind them to shop stories to mainstream media in which various witnesses had been chosen by Israeli intelligence linked organizations who were going to make allegations about witnessing gang rapes and so forth. No survivors of rape on October 7th had been found. They still haven’t been found. And the line is they’re all either in mental institutions or they’re dead. You can’t talk to them. And so these shady witnesses were put forward and the New York Times being the leading legacy paper, the paper of record, was going to get the most access to them.
And so Jeffrey Gettleman, who’s the New York Times sort of storyteller, he’s told a lot of stories in Africa, had to retract some of them when he was caught fabricating quotes in Zimbabwe. He got these two young researchers who are like everything you don’t want to be as a journalist. One is an Israeli named Anat Schwartz, who actually described herself as a storyteller on her own Instagram bio, who’d never done journalism before, but she speaks Hebrew, and her job was to make the calls to all the Israelis that basically were being shopped, and she had this assistant, Adam Sella, who happened to be her nephew, so there’s some level of nepotism going on, and they spoke to these witnesses, and Gettleman wrote it up, and none of them vetted any of their stories, and it was easy to vet their stories, we were able to vet their stories because by that point, by the time that that piece came out in December, we had a record of every person who had been killed, where they had been killed, so which kibbutz they had been killed in, their age, and then if you look them up, there are media reports about them in English and in Hebrew about the circumstances of their death.
And so they would describe, for example, two teenage girls, one witness. Who we actually unmasked as a very shady character, but he was just going by the name G. That’s his only identification in the New York Times story. A paramedic named G found two teenage girls in a kibbutz covered in semen with their shorts ripped off, dead. And it was Kibbutz Be’eri. And so we looked at the record had any teenage girls been killed in Kibbutz Be’eri? And we found that the teens that he was describing matched a couple of girls with age 13 and 16, whose last name was Sharabi, and they had actually been found in a condition where they were burned so badly that their bodies could not have been identified. And they could have been burned badly by a tank shell because we know that Israel is firing tank shells into homes there to dislodge kidnappers from Hamas. That’s a separate point. There was no possibility that anyone could have found any teenage girl who was in the state that this paramedic described.
So we knew that was false. Then you have the main exhibit of an atrocity in this New York Times story named Gal Abdush. She’s a young woman who attended the Nova Electronic Music Festival, this desert rave on the other side of the Gaza prison camp. And she had driven away after the rave came under attack on October 7th to escape with her husband. And according to the New York Times, she was raped in her car by Hamas militants. However, they didn’t show the video, so we analyzed that and we had previously analyzed the video of her. It showed that her head was badly burned and her car was virtually melted, badly destroyed, which means that her car had either been hit by a Hellfire missile, fired by an Israeli helicopter, or a drone, or by an RPG by Hamas. It would’ve been hard for an RPG. or Hamas militant to reach her because she was North of a Kibbutz Hamas failed to infiltrate. So it was very unusual. And then we looked at Israeli. social media, and it was, I mean, this was something we weren’t alone in discovering. Members of her own family were protesting the New York Times portrayal of her death, including her own sister, Miral Alter, who was saying there was no possible way she could have been raped under these circumstances.
Her husband was with her at the time. The video doesn’t show anything like this, and the New York Times manipulated us, didn’t say anything about rape when they got us to talk about her. Her brother in law said the same exact thing. And so we had a huge scandal on our hands we realized. And every other testimony we demonstrated to be false, completely implausible. I mean, I could go on for the next hour about them. But the point is, it was easy once you. I mean, I’ll make one just for anyone interested in how we did this journalistically. There was another witness, Roz Cohen, who said that he witnessed a gang rape like in hideous detail to the New York Times at this music festival. But so we looked up what, what else did Roz Cohen say since October 7th? And we found all these other interviews with him immediately afterward. He never even mentioned rape or seeing anything like that. And his testimony changing over time. And also him participating apparently for profit in an October 7th themed fashion show in Tel Aviv, which seemed very unusual.The point is these witnesses were not credible and working with people who, researchers who speak Hebrew, you find a lot in Israeli media. We push, we presented this to the New York times and a series of questions. I sent it to all their editors. confronted them. There is no direct response from them to us.
But then we learned through The Intercept that they had pulled their podcast that was to have hyped up this story. And the crisis just deepened there from the day our reporting had caused an internal crisis in the New York Times, where staffers were reading what we were saying, and they were kind of disgusted that their paper had run such a shoddy story, and yet they haven’t retracted it yet. A. B. Sulzberger touted that story in his recent speech for the Thompson Reuters Foundation is one of their proudest pieces this year. So it’s really Times leadership versus like a lot of the Times staffers on this one who know that the stories they complete fraud. It’s a hoax and it’s a pro genocide hoax because it’s designed to justify what Israel continues to do in the Gaza strip that, Oh, they faced these Nazi like rapists, gang rapists and animals. And the only way to dislodge them is to do what’s necessary in Gaza. And they’re doing it now. And how can we question them? And the New York times has blood on its hands.
Scheer: That’s depressing, but, unfortunately, in terms of this story, seems to be accurate. I haven’t seen any… Actually, they haven’t felt the need even to do some kind of skin back?
They pulled a podcast though right?
Blumenthal: Well, Jeffrey Gettleman did a response, but it was of such an insidious, sleazy response where instead of responding directly to our points, he went back to some of the sources and supposed witnesses and asked them what about you changing your testimony? So the one guy I mentioned, Roz Cohen, who had changed his testimony many times, he went back to him. He refused to speak to the New York Times on the grounds that he was too traumatized. Then, Gettleman tried to pressure the sister of Gal Abdush, the woman he falsely said had been raped into kind of recanting. And she did not, but that to me was so sleazy. And there has been, as far as I know, no internal investigation into whether this piece was false or not. It’s a lot like Judith Miller and WMD, but they’re not going to take it seriously at the same level because I think it would just be so embarrassing for them to cave to a bunch of independent media gadflies at this point. So they’re holding the line and what they’re trying to do is like deploy this fake UN report where Pramila Patten, who is the UN commissioner on like gender based violence, went to Israel under Israel lobby pressure. And issued this really bizarre report without any investigative mandate at the U.N. Declaring that there was reason to suspect that rape may have occurred on October 7th. She produced no evidence and spoke to no survivors. And actually, the report is filled, it mostly corroborates what we’ve been saying. But the New York Times and they’ve been pushing that to try to Defend themselves as the rest of the media has.
I mean, this scandal isn’t limited to the New York Times. It’s the entire media. I mean, we’ve found areas where The Guardian actually plagiarized the New York Times because they were relying on the same Israeli intelligence sources and basically failed to make it, change the language enough. So every media organization has gotten in on this hoax. And now they’re all circling the wagons and protecting one another from scrutiny, which is coming from independent media. We got it. I mean, Brett Stevens from the New York Times got deployed to attack those questioning this story. Their Israel lobbyists, their in house Israel lobbyists, Brett Stevens.
So that’s how desperate the Times is getting.
Scheer: Well, it’s critically important because if we convince people that Pravda is the truth or is Vesta, as was done for some people in the old Soviet Union you basically are brainwashing the population. But there’s this whole emphasis now, look at the source, look at the source. The source has to be a big money operation, maybe owned by a billionaire like the LA Times or the Washington Post, check your sources. That’s what’s taught in high schools now, colleges all over the country. They have to be legend sources. Even if the legend went out of business 30 years ago and somebody else bought them, I don’t know who owns Newsweek or Time anymore. I mean, these are sort of relics of another era. But this whole notion of what is legitimate instead of saying, let’s look at the facts. Who’s correcting the facts? What are you challenging? Do critical thinking. The great thing about the internet. Let me just tell anybody listening to this at this far into our discussion.Maybe we’ll have to break it in half or something, but the fact of the matter is, the Internet provides, I remember when I was a kid growing up in the Bronx, I would read the New York Times because in school they said you can’t write a term paper unless you quoted the New York Times or the Herald Tribune or something.
And I found errors, and of course nobody at the New York Times answered or anything, but that whole mystique. They’re the paper of record and in fact, as a matter of they got a lot of things wrong in their history. We can, I don’t want to go through a whole thing about it, but we’ve had these scandals before, but the great thing about the Internet in those days, at least I lived in New York, I could go to the 42nd Street library, I could look up the congressional record. I was a kid, but I could do that, but it took a lot of effort. Nowadays, on the internet, and I implore people, anything we’ve said in this show so far, anything, take the, it won’t take you more than 20 minutes to check a specific search.
Blumenthal: It actually will because Google blacklists searches, and you’ll be unable, you’ll have a hard time even searching for gray zone articles on Google because Google itself has been brought under the control of the censorship industrial complex, which is essentially run by U.S. intelligence, and I would encourage everyone to do that. I don’t know when this is going to come out or watching follow the Supreme Court decision on the Missouri case on Internet censorship. The judges are offering some of the most absurd rationales for the state to be able to censor these private media platforms that stand in for our digital commons. We have no public place, we have no commons, like a speaker’s corner in Hyde Park anymore. We have platforms controlled by billionaires that the state censors and they can manipulate the billionaires like Elon Musk easily because he relies so much on state funding on government contracts for his various tech ventures. And so it is increasingly difficult to know if we’re getting the truth when we do these searches, there are alternative search mechanisms. Yeah. I mean, you kind of have to go down the rabbit hole sometimes, and you also might have to go to the library, but, what we’re doing at The Grayzone, I think is we’ve been there for years. We’ve providing people with an archive about us, foreign policy and imperial deceptions where I think you can get the alternative story. And I think it’s the true story that for many people on the receiving end. On the other side of [indistinguishable]ring true and I think that’s another, in assessing vetting media. That’s a question you should ask yourself is this, does this ring true to me? Does this really represent my experience and what I see in the world?
Scheer: Yes. But let me. Let me object here.
Blumenthal: And I got to go soon.
Scheer: I know, but I can’t let you go on that one. There’s enough room left in society to get at the truth, including the internet.
In fact, very much. For instance, Grayzone is on the internet. Okay. I’m not going to promote my own site ScheerPost, there’s no end of good sites. It’s still there. There’s traffic controlled. We discussed this in another podcast. It’s important. I don’t want to exaggerate the amount of freedom. The fact of the matter is that what helps in the work that we do is that facts have a way of catching up with lies. I was going to, we’re not even going to have time to get it, but the destruction of the Nord Stream pipelines off Germany. Here you have, to my mind as a journalist, the classic. Here are some of the most sophisticated democracy pretending governments in the world with the highest level of technology, watching a patch of the ocean and under constant surveillance. And you wrote an article recently. So people go to Grayzone and check all this out, but they can go elsewhere.
And you wrote an article, very good, pointing out that I think it was a Swedish engineer you were citing that Sweden, which was once a standard bearer for neutrality and freedom and independence, now a NATO nation, they are calling off the investigation. How in the world could they claim not to know who blew up the pipelines? What would that say about National security, controlling nuclear war, controlling weapons, that all of these nations have their sights on this. And you called them out. All I’m saying, I don’t want to romanticize the internet or anything else. I’m saying there’s enough room now. And the facts, the uncomfortable facts have a way of coming out. Coming out, we’re not winning in Ukraine and, Putin may have rigged this election, but there’s got a hell of a lot of people in the old Russian Federation there that think this guy is speaking for them, and you get into a lot of room to argue, and that’s why Schumer had to go in and even our vice president speaking in Selma had to say, we got to stop this in Gaza, because they would have booted off the stage. So I think what keeps folks like us going is we think we’re going to turn out to be right. And if not, we’ll admit we were wrong. But the fact of the matter is it’s difficult. Not impossible, but you know, Gulf of Tonkin phony attack that justified Vietnam took 20 years before some of the key documents could be released or were released.
So I’m not saying lies can’t be perpetuated, but I do want to say, and this is by closing tribute to you, you have certainly shown that with a, and yes, you’re not as technically, that’s right, you’re younger people are even better at this. You can dig it out. You can dig it out. And it doesn’t come from revering traditional sources, which unfortunately are lying to us with abandon. It means getting a lot of different views and then saying what shows up as truth. The fact of the matter is no one’s denying there are a hell of a lot of people, but 30,000, maybe now 35,000, mostly innocent civilians, women and children and so forth, non combatants of any sort, people who had no agency who have been killed. Largely justified by what happened in this one week that we were lied to about that one week. Anybody who lies about, about raping and killing and distorting and uses it for political advantage, that’s the ultimate obscenity and evil. And you, I’m going to end with a compliment, you are one not overly resourced person in terms of finance and everything that we’re able. whether they admit it now or they admit it five years from now, you were able to take the New York Times to school. You were able to show them. And let me end on that because otherwise we’ll go on all day. But that’s what I meant by what you do is what we young people, old people, anybody should do. There’s enough room in this country to dig up the truth, to get facts and to challenge the powerful. Okay. You will accept that at least?
I accept it. And that’s what makes me tick. And you are a journalistic model for me coming up. So it’s inspiring that you’re…
Scheer: Oh, I don’t have to keep doing this. I’m going to be 88 in a couple of weeks.
Blumenthal: Well, we have someone who has much less mental capacity than you running the country. Who’s younger, so, all right.
Scheer: Okay, it’s great doing it and hopefully we’ll catch up and there’ll be more signs of sanity. I want to thank Laura Kondoradjian. I want to thank Christopher Ho at KCRW and even though we’ve taken some shots at NPR here, the station in Santa Monica that does post these shows. I want to thank Joshua Scheer, who is our executive producer and has been doing this for six years. Diego Ramos, who writes the introduction. Max Jones, who’s referred to, who does the video. And I want to thank the J. K. W. Foundation. In memory of Jean Stein that has given me some funding to do this. And I particularly wanted to bring it up today because Jean Stein, who was part of a very famous Jewish family in the show business universal and so forth and got early on to what was happening to the was very close to Edward Said, a great writer on the subject and stuck her neck out It was one of the first prominent Jewish people to speak out on what was being done to the Palestinian people. So I always ended the show by thanking, bringing up the memory of Jean Stein, but this is a particular occasion to do that. Thank you and see everyone in another week with another edition of Scheer Intelligence.
By Zehra Imam / Mondoweiss
As Palestinians are slaughtered by the thousands in Gaza and violently attacked during night prayers in the al-Aqsa Mosque by Israel, the West Bank endures massacres that at times go unnoticed during this holy month. I have spent my Ramadan in conversation with a friend from Jenin.
Much has changed since I visited Aseel (not her real name) in August 2023. There are things I saw in Jenin that no longer exist. One of them is my friend’s smile and her spark.
Usually, they say Jenin is a small Gaza. During Ramadan, because the attacks generally happen at night, people are an easy target because they are on the streets late at night. In the past, it was rare for the IOF to enter during the day. Now, they attack during the day; their special forces enter, and after people discover them, their soldiers come within minutes.
Every 2-3 days, there is a new attack in Jenin. In our minds, there is a constant ringing that the IOF may come. We don’t know at what time we will be targeted or when they will enter. There is no stability in our lives.
Even when we plan for something, we hedge it with our inshallahs and laugh. There are a lot of ifs. If they don’t enter the camp. If there are no martyrs. If there is no strike.
On the second day of Ramadan, they attacked my neighborhood again. We thought it was a bombing because it started with an explosion, but the house was shaking. We were praying fajr, and everyone was screaming outside. The sound of the drone was in our ears. “No, these are missiles,” we realized.
There was panic in the streets. Women fainted. People had been walking back from praying at the mosque, and some were still in the street. Alhamdulillah, no one was hurt, we say.
The balcony to the room at my uncle’s house where we slept had fallen. It no longer had any glass, and a bullet entered my uncle’s bedroom and reached the kitchen. The drone hit the trees in front of our house. The missiles destroyed the ceiling, and the rockets reached my neighbor’s house on the first floor, exactly in front of our house.
Since October 7, Jenin has become a target. There is a clear escalation in the camp and the city. The IOF has used many different weapons to kill us here. They have even been aggressive toward the infrastructure, as though every inch of our city was resisting them.
They destroyed much of the camp, and there is no entrance now. The arch is gone, and there is no sign reminding us that Jenin refugee camp is a temporary place. There is no horse. Only the street is left. You have the photographs. You were lucky. They changed the shape of the camp, and everything has been destroyed.”Aseel
The first time Aseel and I met in person was in Nablus at the Martyrs Roundabout. As we caught up, we ate a delicious concoction of ice cream, milk, nuts, and fresh fruit that was a perfect balm to the heat. She took me to some of her favorite places nestled within the old city of Nablus. A 150-year-old barber’s shop that felt like you had entered an antique store where plants reached the ceiling and where the barber was a massive fan of Angelina Jolie. A centuries-old house now called Tree House Cafe looked like a hobbit home from Lord of the Rings, where we hid away as she sipped her coffee and I drank a mint lemonade. We visited one of the oldest soap factories in the world with ingredients such as goat’s milk and olive oil, jasmine and pomegranates, even dates and Dead Sea mud.
We happened to chance upon a Sufi zawiya as we walked through a beautiful archway decorated with lanterns, light bulbs, and an assortment of potted plants, after which we saw a cobalt blue door on our left and an azul blue door with symmetrical red designs, and Quranic ayat like incantations on our right as doors upon doors greeted us.
The air was welcoming yet mingled with the memory of martyrs whose memorials took over the landscape, sometimes in the form of larger-than-life portraits surrounded by complex four-leafed magenta-white flowers; posters above a water spout next to a heart-shaped leaf; a melted motorcycle that, too, was targeted in the neighborhood that hosted the Lions’ Den. We stopped to pray at a masjid, quiet and carpeted.
After a bus ride from Nablus to Jenin, on our walk before entering Jenin camp, Aseel showed me the hospital right outside the camp. She pointed out the barricades created to keep the occupation forces from entering specific streets. This is the same hospital that the occupation forces blocked during the July 2023 attack, which now seems like a lifetime ago.
What caught my eyes again and again were the two Keys of Return on top of the entrance of Jenin Camp that symbolized so much for Palestinians.
“This is a temporary station,” Aseel read out loud to me. “That’s what it says. We are supposed to return to our homes.”
“Netanyahu said he is planning another big attack, so the resistance fighters are preparing because it can happen any day,” she had told me that evening as we shared Jenin-style knafeh, baked to perfection. Then she stopped, looked at the sky, and said humorously, “Ya Allah, hopefully not today!” And we both laughed because of its potential reality.
Dinner on the terrace at her uncle’s home was a delicious spread of hummus, laban, fries, cucumbers pickled by her aunt, and arayes — fried bread stuffed with meat. Then we moved the furniture to sleep on mattresses in a room that extended to the rooftop terrace with a breeze, overlooking Jenin Camp and the rest of Jenin City. We could hear gunshots in the distance. The drones were commonplace, and the heat did not relent. Temperatures soared, and the electricity was out when we woke up at 5 a.m. I heard her pray, and later, as we sipped on coffee and had wafters in the early morning at her home, my eyes went to a piece of tatreez, or embroidery, of a bird in flight framed on the wall. Her eyes followed mine and when I said I loved it.
“It used to be my grandfather’s,” she told me. “Of course it’s beautiful — the bird is free.”
Unexpectedly, Aseel’s mother gifted me a Sprite bottle full of olive oil beholding the sweet hues of its intact health, which I would later ship secretly from Bethlehem all the way to Boston. And then Aseel came to me with a gift, too: a necklace that spoke succinctly about the right to return and live on this earth. Mahmoud Darwish’s poetry was held together with intricate calligraphy carved in the shape of Palestine’s landscape, and I was completely overwhelmed.
“You are in Palestine, my dear,” she had smiled. “And you are now my family. This is your country, this is your second home, really.”
When I ask her about what brings her hope these days, Aseel tells me about her eight-year-old nephew.
He wanted to eat two meals. I told him that in Gaza they don’t have food. He was complaining about the food, and I told him, they don’t have water. And he heard me because he said, “today, we will only have one meal.”
I’m amazed at how mature he is. He even said, “We won’t make a special cake on Eid because of the Gazans.” For me, this is a lesson to be learned. He is only eight years old, but he knows.
We have lost a lot of people in Gaza, but here in the West Bank, we are succeeding because our new generation knows a lot. Ben Gurion would not be happy. He said of Palestinians, “the old will die and the young will forget.” No, the young ask even more questions. The new generation brings us hope. Hope is the new generation.
/sp
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