I joined host Richard Grove on the Grand Theft World podcast to discuss my work on US foreign policy and particularly the Israel-Palestine conflict. My interview starts at about the 2:13:30 mark in the video below and runs for about an hour and eleven minutes.
We’d originally intended to also discuss my work on COVID‑19-related issues including the mRNA vaccines, but we got so involved in foreign affairs that we ended up discussing that for the whole allotted time!
Everything I talked about is documented in my book Obstacle to Peace: The US Role in the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, which I highly encourage you to read if you’d like to understand the true reasons for the conflict and why it persists.
I particularly enjoyed the discussion we had in the last part of the interview about my aim to not just share information but to help my readers acquire critical thinking skills and why it is so important to the make time for self-education about critically important issues.
Whether or not you are interested in foreign policy matters, I encourage you to watch that part of the interview because I think you will find it motivational. That part of the discussion starts at about 3:07:40 and runs to the end.
Here are some of the topics we discussed:
- How the New York Times brazenly lies to demonize Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. for legitimately criticizing public vaccine policy.
- How I came to focus my research and writing heavily on the Israel-Palestine conflict after starting out down the path that led me to doing journalism in the wake of the events of September 11, 2002.
- How I got started in the wake of 9/11 by exposing how the government was lying to start an illegal war of aggression against Iraq on the false pretexts that it possessed weapons of mass destruction (WMD) and operative ties to Al Qaeda.
- How the neocons saw regime change in Iraq as beneficial to Israel while also having their own geostrategic motives for lying the US into war.
- How my short e-book Benny Morris’s Untenable Denial of the Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine shows how the Israeli historian’s attempt to deny that Israel was established through ethnic cleansing is belied by his own research.
- How most of what people think they know about the Israel-Palestine conflict just isn’t true, such as the pervasive myth that Israel was created by the UN.
- How the purpose of Great Britain’s prolonged occupation of Palestine after World War I was to facilitate the colonization of the land by Jews by preventing the Arab Palestinians from exercising their right to self-determination.
- How the Zionists initially tried to acquire land through purchase, including by exploiting feudalistic Ottoman land laws to deny the property rights of the land’s Arab inhabitants.
- How by the end of the League of Nation’s Palestine Mandate in May 1948, Jews had only managed to acquire about 7 percent of the land in Palestine.
- How Jews and Arabs generally lived peacefully as neighbors until the Zionist movement aimed to recreate Palestine as a Jewish state.
- How the UN “partition plan” violated the UN Charter.
- How the UN ensured perpetual conflict by recognizing Israel and admitting it as a “peace-loving” member state despite not having legally recognized borders and despite its refusal to allow Palestinian refugees who were ethnically cleansed to return to their homes as required under international law.
- How the “two-state solution” had its foundations in UN Security Council Resolution 242, which required Israel to immediately and completely withdraw its forces from the territories it occupied during the 1967 “Six Day War” (which were the Syrian Golan Heights, the Egyptian Sinai Peninsula, and the Palestinian territories of the West Bank and Gaza Strip).
- How the goal of the US-led so-called “peace process” was always to block implementation of the two-state solution.
- How the US mainstream media fundamentally misrepresent the nature of the conflict, such as by referring to East Jerusalem as “disputed” territory or referring to Israel ultimatums that Palestinians must accept less than their full rights as “concessions” by Israel.
- How implementation two-state solution itself would represent a major concession by the Palestinians.
- How the letter from Lord Arthur Balfour to Lord Lionel Walter Rothschild promising British support for the Zionist project (the “Balfour Declaration”) was a quid pro quo for Jewish support for the British war effort.
- How I learned to closely examine primary source materials to construct my own understanding of the history of the conflict rather than relying on the interpretations and characterizations of source materials by others.
- How the accusation of “anti-Semitism” is used to silence legitimate criticism of Israeli government policies.
- How I don’t aim with my writings to tell people what to think but to provide an exercise how to think critically about important issues, do their own analyses and draw their own conclusions, and avoid being duped by political propaganda.
- How I also aim to anticipate objections to my arguments and preempt them so that my conclusions are rock solid.
- How it is impossible to gain any kind of real understanding of any important issue just by consuming mainstream media, and why getting your information from as wide a variety of sources as possible and putting the time into self-education is both necessary and worthwhile.
Thank you. Great interview
Thanks! Glad you enjoyed it.
Interesting read. I’d like to suggest a good book for you that gives the whole history of anti-semitism. It’s always helpful to get the total perspective. It’s “Constantine’s Sword” by James Carroll(who btw is Catholic as he points out) While I disagree often with the leaders of Israel as well as the U.S.(I had always hoped it would become one state with both sides living togethr in peace), it’s still best to understand that anti-semitism has been around a lot longer than Hitler or even the early leaders in the beginning of the 1900’s. Anti-semitism is still alive and well. The discrimination has affected all of my family members at sometime in history. That does not mean that Israeli/US policies are often terribly wrong.
Certainly, I understand that anti-Semitism is alive and well. The point I was making is that the label “anti-Semite” is routinely used to defame and to try to silence people for expressing legitimate criticisms of Israel. I am speaking from experience. That label has been stupidly thrown at me countless times. My book Obstacle to Peace happens to include an Introduction by Richard Falk, who is a Jew, and a Foreword by Gene Epstein, who is also a Jew and who wrote it specifically to ward off reflexively anti-intellectual accusations that my book is anti-Semitic.
I would venture that one of the most occupied territories is the U.S. congress.
Then you might appreciate this popular article by L. Michael Hager that I published at Foreign Policy Journal (which I ceased publishing in early 2020 to focus 100% of my efforts on fighting the authoritarian lockdown regimes and their coerced mass vaccination endgame):
Dual Citizens in Congress? We Need to Know
https://www.foreignpolicyjournal.com/2018/12/10/dual-citizens-in-congress-we-need-to-know/