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Press TV interviews Kevin Barrett and Tim Anderson, April 10 2024
Joining us on this edition of the News Review, we have political analyst Kevin Barrett joining us from Saidia. And Director of Center for Counterhegemonic Studies, Mr. Tim Anderson, is joining us from Sydney. Gentlemen, welcome to the program. Let's start off with Mr. Barrett. Sir, I want to get your overall perspective about how this continued genocide is ongoing, unabated. How frustrating is it to see so many innocent women and children and elderly being killed as the international community sits idly by.
Kevin Barrett: Yes, it's not just frustrating, but it's it's maddening. And the the world's understated response to this, even among people who are saying something, is part of the outrage. This should be a situation where the whole world agrees that something absolutely has to be done and that all actions aimed at stopping this genocide are appropriate up to and including the very strongest forms of military action against the genocidal Zionist entity. Instead, most of the world leaders just making noises with very ineffectual sounds and cluckings of the tongue.
And then we have the one country that could stop this overnight, the United States of America, led by an administration that's completely complicit in the genocide, and that for political reasons has been hypocritically wailing and gnashing their teeth without actually doing anything to stop the genocide. All it would take would would be one phone call: “Stop now or the U.S. will do a U-turn. We will support Palestine rather than Israel tomorrow morning if you don't stop this genocide.” That's all it would take.
And what's even more outrageous is that the Zionist domination of Western media has been contributing to the situation in which the genocide could continue. All of the owners and major operators of the entire western mainstream media ought to be tried for war crimes and if convicted, executed. Their coverage has created this genocide, and they are censoring alternative voices who are actually talking about this and telling the truth. I just had my Youtube channel taken down. They called it hate speech. Well, I hate genocide, and I'm not afraid to say it. But you're not allowed to say that on YouTube anymore. You have to be pro-genocide, or you're not allowed to be on YouTube.
The Google company that owns YouTube, which they used to have a slogan, Don't Be Evil, is now evil. They're on the side of the genocide. They're tweaking their algorithms to try to coerce public opinion to be pro-genocide. All of these people need to be tried, convicted, and executed.
Tim Anderson, the United Nations Deputy Secretary General, in addition to expressing deep concern over the humanitarian situation in Gaza, has made some comments with regards to the situation there in a U.N. press conference. Amina Mohammed said that the international community has lost its, quote, moral compass on the issue of Gaza. Do you see it in that light as well?
Tim Anderson: On the other hand, the only people effectively fighting this genocide, trying to prevent this genocide, are the resistance in Palestine, the resistance in Lebanon, in Iraq, in Yemen. And I think a lot of hopes are still placed on and waiting to see what sort of punishment that Iran will do for the crime committed against its own people, its own embassy in Damascus, and hoping that that may in some way cripple the capacity of this genocidal regime.
Let's remember when the false accusations were being made against the Libyan leader, Mahmoud Gaddafi, there was talk of a no-fly zone to try and protect civilians. Of course, that was all a pretext. We know that that was a terrible lies that were made to destroy the little nation of Libya. But where are the calls for a no-fly zone now? What about the Israeli Air Force at the Israeli airports? I believe the Iraqi resistance and the Yemenis are the only ones that have been seriously carrying out some strikes against this capacity of the genocidal regime.
Kevin Barrett, let's talk a little bit about the issue of the aid trucks that are being blocked by the Israeli regime. Under what pretext, what logic, is there to justify that combating, in the Israelis' own version of the situation there, combating Hamas justifies whether a three-year-old in Gaza can eat or not?
Kevin Barrett: Yes, well, of course, they're not only blocking the aid trucks, but they're sometimes actually murdering the aid workers and blowing up the aid trucks, as they did recently. Their excuse, what we hear from Netanyahu, is he says that Hamas eats food too. So we have to starve everybody to try to starve Hamas. Of course, those are words that can and should, inshallah, will be used against him in his genocide trial in the future, assuming we all have the misfortune of him living that long.
This blocking of food aid and murdering the people bringing food to Gaza in order to try to starve the Gazans, because then they can starve Hamas—this goes along with their doctrine of using artificial intelligence to target people in Gaza. We've learned that they were using some kind of computer program that would spit out the names of supposedly Hamas-linked people, and then it would kill them, preferably when they were at home in a very crowded apartment building. The acceptable level, quote-unquote, of the innocent civilian casualties that they would try to create in order to kill one supposed Hamas person was, they said, at least 20 to 1. That is, they're willing to kill 20 little children to kill one Hamas member. And then they're having these computer programs selecting their targets that actually are not even really going after Hamas members. Of course, the Hamas fighters are mostly in tunnels and fortifications.
So this has been a war on the civilian population of Gaza. And what it reveals to the world is that the Zionist project has always been genocidal. They're doing what they always do. They're just doing more of it in a shorter period of time. But ever since the Zionists came to Palestine, they have not even really been that coy about the fact that their entire project requires murdering and expelling the people of Palestine.
The earliest zionist leaders did say that occasionally. And they certainly knew that, and that's why there was a widespread agreement to stage the Nakba, the first Palestinian Holocaust, in 1948, because they knew that they had to massacre thousands and thousands of Palestinians and try to terrorize the rest into leaving if they were going to steal their land. Which is what Zionism is all about: stealing that land. Now that they've created a second Nakba covered live and broadcast to the whole world, in the face of the whole world, nobody can deny it anymore. Nobody can really avoid it. They've announced their genocidal nature. And so from now on, the so-called state of Israel is going to be known as the genocidal Zionist entity. And it's got that label forever.
Of course, it may not last forever. It may not last very long at all. And I certainly agree with Tim Anderson‘s evaluation of the Iranian response to this attack on its sovereign territory, and the rest of the Axis of Resistance is there to back them up.
It's indeed possible that at this point, the Americans would rather let Netanyahu eat the fruit of his evil ways, which even the Americans now are admitting are grossly mistaken. This may be a turning point, and the Zionists may lose this al-Aqsa storm battle even more blatantly than they have thus far.
Tim Anderson, your view is on the same issue as well with regards to the blocking of humanitarian aid and food trucks into Gaza, which is a war crime. It is collective punishment. Does this show that the Israeli war on Gaza is not just against Hamas, but it's against all of Gaza's inhabitants?
Tim Anderson: Yes, look, I don't think we should waste too much time on torturing the pretext they bring up there, that they're trying to eliminate the Palestinian resistance. Remember, of course, there are half a dozen other resistance groups that are coordinating with Hamas there. So it's not, I don't, even though Hamas is used as a slogan many, many times, I don't think the Israelis are that concerned about it. We've heard from their own lips that they want to make Gaza uninhabitable. They want to raise it to the ground. They wanted to destroy everyone, saying that there are no innocent people there. There have been plenty of genocidal regimes in the past, but they have rarely expressed it this clearly So let's let's not pretend that any of these side arguments that somehow they're doing things and incidentally, they're killing civilians. I don't think we should take that seriously any more.
There is this openly stated plan to destroy or expel the population. They've talked about using U.S. warships to take Palestinians out of Gaza, to put them in other parts of the world. This is what they tried initially, and Gaza was effectively a refugee camp to prevent Palestinians from being expelled to Egypt. So we know what they're trying. Let's not torture the arguments about targeting Hamas too much. It's really very overdone, I think.
And certainly the aid is another element, as Kevin said, another element that's being used in the ICJ case against the Israelis. In fact, it was a recent order from the ICJ to do with aid specifically. And of course, by blocking aid, they've been strengthening the South African case in the ICJ, while some other countries have come on board and added some additional arguments there.
So that's for the legal accounting down the track. But I think in terms of preventing the genocide, it comes back to the resistance. What is the resistance doing? How can the world help the resistance to prevent this genocide?
Thanks a lot, gentlemen.
Political analyst Kevin Barrett joining us from Saidia. And also thanks to Tim Anderson, director of Center for Counterhegemonic Studies, speaking to us from Sydney.
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All It Would Take to Stop the Genocide Is One Phone Call