MUST-LISTEN: Tom Woods and Scott Horton on the Role of Hamas in the Palestine vs. Israel War

Osama Bin Laden knew good and well that the Soviets had killed a million Afghans.  They make Bush and Obama look like angels . . . well, not really, they killed hundreds of thousands.  

If you disagree with Ben Shapiro you probably hate Jews. That's not much of an exaggeration of what he's been saying. The conservative movement is in a degraded state if it's still listening to this guy. Here's another perspective https://t.co/1DrIcdspbJ @scotthortonshow

— Tom Woods (@ThomasEWoods) October 18, 2023

 

So what's just happened with this attack by Hamas and the Israeli counter-attack.

2:04. Why would Hamas do this?  What is the endgame for them when they obviously know the overwhelming firepower that Israel has and its friendship with the US?  Why would it do this?  It has to know that the counterattack is going to be overwhelming, what are you thinking here?  And I noticed on Anti-war.com that you recently wrote up something very similar to what you said to me in the car.  So can we start there: why would you do this knowing what is sure to happen?

2:35. The whole purpose was the reaction you got it right quite literally they had to have known Hamas had to have known that they were bringing on a massive campaign by the Israeli government in retaliation for this horrendous slaughter which they perpetrated.  They killed hundreds of people.  I'm not exactly sure about the number of civilians versus the Israeli military that were killed.  I know it's right around a thousand that were killed.  After all, the Israeli military is mostly conscripts, you know, drafted so I have to presume that none of them want to be there; maybe some of them do, it's a gray area.  But if you're a conscript, that's not exactly the same as being a volunteer.  They murdered hundreds of non-combatants two men women and children slaughtered them okay that's what they did they did that in order to "make" Netanyahu launch the giant attack that he has launched and has slaughtered already hundreds and hundreds of civilians in the Gaza Strip . . . the last I checked they have not launched a ground invasion yet but were preparing a massive ground invasion with the stated intention of completely obliterating Hamas off the face of the earth which seems an impossible task to do with the civilian population of Gaza stuck in the middle there.  So then the purpose of that is to get their people killed, the Palestinian civilians, off the Gaza Strip.  That's why Hamas murdered the Israeli civilians to force the Israeli government to launch this giant campaign that they know will kill civilians in the Gaza Strip, Palestinian civilians, men, women, and children, too, in order, then, to provoke the counter-reaction to that.  This is what Saul Alinsky says in his Rules for Radicals, that the action is in the reaction of the opposition.  I learned that from William Norman Grigg, the Bircher, "I'm not a communist," thank you very much. And he wasn't a communist either; he just knows his enemy.  The point is Hamas has no power.  Israel has all the power.  It's it's zero versus 1,000% power relationship there.  These guys have AK-47s and shoes.  The other side has essentially first-world military technology to the nth degree.  So Hamas can't defeat Israel in any kind of pitched battle.  They certainly can't invade Israel.  They can fend them off as we saw in 2014. The point is to provoke that reaction and then to provoke the counter-reactions, so now Hassan Nasrallah who is the leader of Hezbollah in southern Lebanon has to take a position of what he's going to do.  Apparently, he's been firing off some rockets, although I don't know if all those have been directly attributed to Hezbollah or not.  Exchanges of fire at the border could blow up into a real war with Hezbollah at the northern border of Israel.  At that point, you have the government of Syria, the Alawite government but very close to the Shiites, sort of a break-off group of the Shiites and very close to the Shiites allied to Hezbollah and allied to Iran.  Now these are the Shiites.  The Hamas are Sunnis and the Palestinians are Sunnis and yet they have supported the Palestinian cause for a very long time the Iranians have for their own political purposes, of course, not out of the goodness of their heart, but for their own political reasons they intervene.  And in this way, remember, Tom, that George W. Bush when he launched Iraq War II, all he did, by stupidly listening to the stupid Neoconservatives, was the exact opposite of what they had hoped to accomplish.  In other words, they put Iran's best friends in power in Baghdad, which is why we have hardly any influence there whatsoever right now. Also, the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia, Crown Prince bin Solomon, or Crown Prince Bone Saw as I call him, the murderer, got on the phone with the president of Iran. It was the first time they ever spoke, and they said Yeah, you know, we got to do something about this Palestinian thing.  So all the governments around the region, every armed group around the region, all the different little Sunni and Shiite militias in Iraq and Syria, and God knows where everybody has to take a position and politics gets radicalized.  Everybody's attention was diverted from the Middle East to the germ and then to Ukraine, and while your attention was diverted right back to their cause again.  I think the correct way to put this is, as Madeline Albright would say, they think the price is worth it to cause that to happen in order to get the end result that they want.  And quite frankly, as I detail in both of my books, 

Osama Bin Laden was exactly the same way. This is how he felt about the situation in Afghanistan. Afghanistan was Osama bin Laden's Gaza Strip.  He was a Saudi squatting, by the way, him and his Egyptian friends.  But their idea was [they] wanted to replicate the Soviet Union's war in the 1980s with America in the role of the USSR, bog them down in a war of attrition in Afghanistan, bleed them to bankruptcy, and force them out the hard way.  Well, Osama Bin Laden knew good and well that the Soviets had killed a million Afghans.  They make Bush and Obama look like angels . . . well, not really, they killed hundreds of thousands.  What the Soviets did in Afghanistan was just absolute bloody murder.  Osama bin Laden didn't care about that.  His idea was "Well, whatever, they'll all go to paradise, right?  Let God sort them out.  If they're good Muslims, it'll be fine.  If they're not, then damn them anyway."  If that means that America has to do all this because, in the end, we'll get what we want.  That's how a terrorist thinks, that's how a terrorist acts. "  This is the same thing that Hamas did here.  Is the price worth it?  Why?  Because quite frankly, they are, as Max Blumenthal said on my show the other day, and he is a first-hand witness to this, a real journalist over there, not a radio host like me staying home writing books.  He's been over there a lot, wrote a whole book about it, two books about it over there.  He said these are the most oppressed people in the world, or at least among them, right up there with the North Koreans or something.  

They live in what essentially Pat Buchanan, our friend, said on MSNBC back 10 years ago, "It's quite literally a concentration camp."  And I'd forgotten who the host of the show was, but the host said, 

Come on, Pat, I mean that sounds like you're talking about the Holocaust.  You can't do that.

And Pat goes, 

No, no, no.  Now that's a death camp.  That's different.  I'm not saying that, but it is a concentration camp. 

And then he brought up examples from history.  He said the British in Myanmar or Burma, something like that, the Spanish in Cuba have these concentration camps where they enslaved everybody and brought them together in this camp.  He could have mentioned Kennedy in South Vietnam maybe.  Anyway, strategic hamlets.  That's where they are they're in a concentration camp, Buchanan said.  And he's not a hippie; he's Ronald Reagan's guy.  He says, look man, that's the reality of this thing.

11:30. Each people have their own country Palestinians live in Palestine the Israelis live in Israel.  It sounds like there's some equal station in the world, right?  If we're talking about the United States versus Mexico, obviously the US has much more military power.  The Palestinians are Indians. They've already been conquered and licked, beaten and their land taken.  It's just that they're still stuck on it. They don't have control over it.  There is no Palestine.

What does the two-state solution mean?  It means that the fence there in Gaza is not a border, it's a prison wall. 

13:00. In provoking Israel in this way, Hamas was hoping to accomplish a particular outcome?  One of the things that it does as you say is it forces the regimes in the area to take a side.  So they either side with the US because of the relationship they have with the US, or they can side with the opinions of 100% of their people that force them into a corner they prefer not to be in.  Once all the political maneuvering is complete, how does this advance the cause of Hamas? Is it that it provokes an overreaction that leads to condemnation of two other powers getting involved?  What's the end game?